Indigenous Culture

The Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) from Siksika Nation, an hour east of Calgary, recently settled a 100-plus-year-old land claim, granting them compensation and rights to economic development in Banff [...]

“So,” says Pat Buffalo, “are you going to report what everybody else reports on—the shooting and the violence and all the stuff the media jumps on as soon as they hear it’s going on? Or are [...]

For well over a decade I’ve talked to Canadians about the issues Indigenous peoples face. I’ve challenged stereotypes and tried to build relationships that will get us beyond stubborn [...]

This is just a wisp of a memory, of the Native man at the back door of our 1950s bungalow north of Alberta Avenue, in early January, carrying a pail full of frozen whitefish. He knew his [...]

It is the late 1980s and my daughter, smart from primary school, wants to see what many visitors to Banff National Park ask of guides in the mountain playground—to point out Tunnel Mountain’s [...]

February. Cold Lake is frozen and silent. An ample sky mirrors the terrain below. But landscapes are inhabited even when they’re empty.  I’m here to visit the painter Alex Janvier at his gallery [...]

In May 2007, a teenaged employee at a Lethbridge Tim Horton’s posted a sign near the drive-thru window that read “No Drunk Natives.” Tim Horton’s took the sign down and issued a statement [...]

It is a brilliant way to learn. Students of Socrates used to gather around the great man and exchange heady ideas that arose out of provocative questions—what we know now as the Socratic dialogue [...]

The first thing John Blackbird learned when he was growing up on the Canadian prairies was that his people were no good. Indians were history’s losers: dethroned, displaced, rounded up and [...]

Blackfoot Crossing, on the Bow River east of Calgary, is a site of great significance for the Siksika Nation. Here, in a broad and lush valley carved out of the soft prairie landscape, the [...]