Evidence in the surroundings shows that Palliser was correct, for a time. Patchy remnant shelterbelts of hardy caragana and feral crabapple trees and the unpainted, wind-tilted shacks and timber-gutted barns of old farms mark like gravesites the long-ghostly hopes of early-century dryland homesteaders, their dreams long-since blown away like dust by bad farming practice and countless chinooks.

But today, where the broken dreams and mostly unbroken prairie had been, there are now leafy greens, ochred seedheads and shiny golden stubble of a dozen kinds of cash crops. Leggy-wheeled, spray-fuzzed irrigation pivots spread in all directions like aluminum-and-rubber centipedes, each nearly half a kilometre long. And near and far, clutches of shiny galvanized steel bins rise—tonnes of grain in each.

Those early, failed homesteaders might be mystified at the prosperity of this remote corner of the province today. John Palliser would be stunned. The first answers to this mysterious reversal are in the landscape itself. The useless land Palliser referred to was actually an area of mixed sandy loam soils, well suited for growing high-value crops such as vegetables, but too porous to hold water. And whereas the great plains to the east are flat and largely featureless, the land here slopes in great ocean swells gently down toward the hidden valley of the South Saskatchewan River. After the dustbowls of extreme drought in the 1930s drove most farmers off this land, the province invested heavily in the 1950s in industrial-scale irrigation systems that brought water from the South Saskatchewan up onto the shortgrass prairie.

Adding water to sandy loam in a region that receives the highest number of sunshine hours per year in Canada wouldn’t have been enough for such a transformation, though. The other critical ingredient that would make this land flourish is here, in the din of a potato harvest operation run like a military campaign, with pop-up factories, fleets of trucks, and dawn-to-dusk frenzy: an army of temporary labourers as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

In the main farmyard where the potato factory is set up, the driver of a full spud truck performs a lumbering yet precise manoeuvre, slipping around an emptied outgoing truck and pirouetting into a waiting position. He looks for the signal to reverse from the backer, a Cree man of slight build, 64-year-old Elmer Crookedneck. Elmer is dressed in safety gear and giving signals like an aircraft marshal on a flight deck. When the truck is in position at the factory’s receiving conveyor under Elmer’s guidance, the driver—another Cree man, stocky, in jeans, rodeo buckle and cowboy boots, 58-year-old Dwayne Ernest—jumps from the high step of the truck to scoot back and help Elmer with the controls of the tipper bed. The two men shout to each other over the din while they work buttons and levers, and another five tonnes of large, dirt-clad golden potatoes begins to roll out of the tipper chute in a steady stream onto the conveyor.

Dwayne spends a few minutes helping Elmer with “grading,” the primary job at a potato harvesting factory. The two scan the stream of spuds rolling up the conveyor towards the first giant holding bin, and reach over the clattering belt to grab and throw into smaller loader bins behind them whatever they can of the rocks, damaged spuds, potato vines and lumps of clay the size of footballs: anything that is not a good potato.

The tipper empties, and Elmer directs the change-out of Dwayne’s truck for the next in under a minute. The river of potatoes rumbles up to the belt past two Mennonite boys working brooms under the conveyor and passes by the watchful eyes and quick hands of six Mennonite women in the wooden grading shack built over the conveyor behind the second holding bin. The stream of spuds will spill onto another conveyor and travel 80 feet or more past five more Mennonite women graders, then climb past two Mennonite men working at another conveyor that angles high into the mouth of the nearest of the two giant storage bins. The fully graded stream of potatoes will finally pile out where two more Mennonite women are moving high and deep in the shadows of the bin, directing the unloading end of the conveyor.

None of these workers nor most of the dozens of truck and tractor drivers and other workers are permanent employees of this farm. They are what economists call “reserve armies of labour,” underemployed populations available and ready to show up for a few weeks at harvest time when suddenly thousands of drivers and backers and graders and pilers and sweepers are needed on farms across southern Alberta, to work like mad until the fields are empty and the bins are full. And people like Elmer and Dwayne and a handful of others represent the last of the forgotten army of thousands of Cree workers—mostly from northern Saskatchewan—who for crucial decades were critical to farming operations like these and instrumental in building this corner of the province into the vast, wealthy agricultural empire it is today.

An army of temporary labourers is as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

Few Canadians know the legacy of Cree people from Saskatchewan working on southern Alberta farms. The Potato Growers of Alberta’s 50 Years of Working Together commemorative book at the old irrigation museum in Taber does not contain a single photo or word about Cree workers in any of its 400-plus pages. Even the Dutch-Canadian farmer I met a few kilometres from here didn’t seem to know much about Cree workers. “I used to use Dutch exchange students,” he says with a shrug. “Now I only use Mexican Mennonite workers.”

Yet many untold thousands of Cree people have worked on southern Alberta’s farms in the last half century, especially in sugar beet and potato production. Ron Laliberté—a Métis man and retired professor of sociology and indigenous studies—spent months interviewing Cree workers and beet farmers in southern Alberta in the early 1990s. He says the Canadian government began recruiting Cree labourers for sugar beet farmers after the latter lost easy access to labour by Japanese-Canadians “evacuated” from BC during the Second World War. The first buses in 1953 brought 120 Cree workers. By the 1980s the number had climbed to 3,000 Cree workers and at least 2,000 Metis and non-status Indians per year—the largest employment of First Nations people in Canada since the days of the fur trade. By the 1990s Cree workers made up 85 per cent of the labour force on sugar beet farms. During some seasons, up to 95 per cent of the men of some reserves in northern Saskatchewan were working on farms in southern Alberta.

Laliberté says that for those not willing to come of their own accord, the sugar beet industry pushed the government to cut social benefits during the months the Cree workers were needed down south. He says the Cree workers, always using humour to cope, started calling themselves “Grab-a-hoe Indians.”

The work at the factory pushes on under floodlights until nearly 9:00 p.m. The Mennonite boys and young women head straight for their family homes in the surrounding hamlets and farms. Elmer, Dwayne and two more Cree men—Dwayne’s brother Clem Ernest, 47, and their nephew, Jeremy Crookedneck, 27—make a quick supper in the shop kitchen, the same as they had for lunch: ham sandwiches with Velveeta slices and cans of Coca Cola. They take turns in the single shower and climb the stairs up to a storage room above the kitchen where they have four cots, a small living area for boots and gear carved out of a jumble of racks, boxes, desks and old computers. When I arrive, Dwayne is seated on a cot at the back of the room, pulling off his boots. “It’s his birthday today,” he says, pointing with his lips, Cree-fashion, toward the bed across from him, where Elmer is already asleep.

Left to right: Clem Ernest, Elmer Crookedneck, Dwayne Ernest and Jeremy Crookedneck.

I have known these men’s families since I was a boy and my preacher dad would take our family to the Little Island Lake reserve at Ministikwan, Saskatchewan, for camp meetings. Dwayne’s crews used to meet me at the racetrack in Lethbridge on a Sunday afternoon every harvest. After the races, we would have a kind of Thanksgiving dinner together at my house. Ten years ago my dining and living room would be full of Cree men and women around the table and at TV trays. Last visit, there were only five Cree men at our table, no women. This season Dwayne told me there would be only four in the crew, and they didn’t have gas money to make it to Lethbridge on the Sunday. I asked to come out to the farm at Bow Island to witness what might be one of the last crews, before their people’s legacy of work here fades away, unremembered.

Elmer wakes up, turns and sits on the edge of his cot. His T-shirt has the picture of a rodeo bronc rider and the words “Bucking Cancer!” on the front. He has been at the work for nearly a week already. He looks weary. He speaks to Dwayne in Cree for a few moments before turning to speak with me.

Elmer Crookedneck.

“One of my first memories is coming down here by bus from Meadow Lake,” he says. “We stayed at a house in Vauxhall, my whole family. I started hoeing sugar beets when I was 10 years old. A few years later, we started working potatoes, and have ever since. One of my sons was born here during a harvest 24 years ago.”

Elmer says this is his first job since he was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago. After surgery, the cancer was still there, so he had to do radiation therapy. He tried to work driving heavy equipment after the radiation but couldn’t last more than a few hours a day. He says he took this job because he has family to support, kids and grandkids, one living with him. “And I would rather work than get money for free.”

The next day I tag along with Dwayne in his spud truck to a harvest “circle” about 20 km from this farm, one of a conglomerate of five farms called Quattro Ventures Inc. Irrigation farmers use the term “circle” to mean the 130 acres that an irrigation pivot can cover out of the 160 acres of a typical quarter section. This conglomerate farms 162 circles, or about 23,000 acres, with 40 per cent of them dry, 60 per cent irrigated. The company agronomist, Emily Ford, says that because potato crops must be rotated to prevent scab and other diseases, they follow a “one-in-six” rule, only planting a circle with potatoes once every six years. So, to be a potato grower, you need access to a lot of land. In the off years the company will plant other high-value crops such as peppermint, beans, peas, seed canola and hemp. But potatoes remain king. (Estimated value in southern Alberta: $3-billion per year.) Ford says because of increasing water scarcity, the irrigation district allocates only 10 inches of water per year per acre for potatoes. She says a good crop requires 18 inches of water, about 1,800 cubic metres (nearly half a million gallons) per acre. Farmers cover any deficit by borrowing water allocations from their other, less water-intensive crops such as wheat.

Neighbouring farmer Tony Varekamp delivers meals to Corny Neufeld and other Mennonite workers.

Dwayne, like Elmer, has been working on southern Alberta farms since he was a boy and has spent the last 22 years working for this one. He says he can make more money in three days here than in three weeks of driving school bus back on the reserve. He also drives truck for the farm during spring planting and other harvests. In total, he works here about three months of the year. He says he keeps coming back because of his friendship with the farm owner, Lloyd Ypma. Each season, he tries to recruit other people from the reserve to come work with him. Fewer come each year.

At the field, Dwayne steers his large “tipper” truck into position at the end of a furrow and waits for the call to tag-in when the harvester has filled the truck ahead. The harvester pauses only moments for Dwayne’s truck to line up under the unloading spout, then the machine and truck move in tandem at pace, both harvesting and transferring the fresh spuds simultaneously. The moving transfer takes only five minutes. The harvester waves off the filled truck and calls in the next. Dwayne drives back to the main farm in the blinding dust of other trucks, artfully dodging trucks from other farms at gravelled intersections, no thought of slowing down.

The reason for the hurry is in the grey sky to the north. Farmers grow potatoes as late into the season as they can for maximum yields, but if they don’t get the crop off before the first freeze, an operation like this can lose millions of dollars in a single night. Drivers like Dwayne wake at 4:30 a.m. to be out to the circles by 5:15. The factory crew starts at 5:30 when the first loaded trucks are coming in, and everybody works until the last trucks come into the factory well after dark, unless the weather is too hot. Operations shut down for heat, not out of concern for the crews but because putting hot potatoes into cool storage bins could cause the whole lot to rot.

Because of the frenzied pace of the work and the exhaustion of the men at day’s end, it is hard to interview some of them during the week. But as most of the potato farms around Bow Island are owned by church-going Dutch Calvinists, the crews get Sundays off and sometimes a Saturday evening like this one. I find the Ministikwan crew sitting in camp chairs in the dark around the tailgate of Dwayne’s pickup parked in the farm shop—now eerily quiet—sharing a pack of Bud Lite.

The men tell me Elmer has already gone to bed. They call him “mushum,” the Cree word for “grandfather.” Dwayne and his brother Clem have been visiting quietly, nursing their beers, while nephew Jeremy plays a game on his phone, coping. When I take out my camera, Dwayne and Clem hide their beers. Even though it’s only a few hard-earned drinks at the end of a long week, they know the stigma about Native people and alcohol.

Jeremy puts his phone away for a few moments to tell me this is his first harvest and first real job. He says he wishes he had weighed himself before he came. He had trouble staying on his feet the first few days, backing trucks and chipping soil from the inner sides of their tipper beds, but has adapted and feels like he is getting into shape. He wants to get a permanent job when he gets home to the reserve. His uncles tell him they’re proud of him.

Clem is quiet, serious, a deep thinker with a strong jaw. Tonight is the first time he speaks to me. He asks if I know how many Native people have lived on these lands, how many languages they speak, how many thousands of years they have been here. And how many Cree people used to work on these farms.

He tells me about seeing old photos of his grandparents and parents hoeing sugar beets, thinning and weeding in the blazing heat, sometimes three times per field per season, through spring and long summer days. “It looked like the cotton fields down South,” he says. “The pay was something like that, too.”

Clem and Dwayne confirm what Laliberté says he heard when talking with Cree workers in the early 1990s. Cree people started to lose their place in the sugar beet fields in the 1970s when farmers started bringing in dual-nationality Mennonites from colonies in Mexico, who would work for less money, sometimes bidding for fields at half the rate that Cree people were paid. When farmers started using newly invented herbicides to get rid of weeds in the 1980s and 1990s, the “Grab-a-hoe” jobs disappeared altogether.

By the 1980s, 3,000 status Cree and at least 2,000 Métis harvested sugar beets in southern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Cree men and women had started working potato harvests in the late 1960s. Sugar beet farmers needed large amounts of labour during the growing months but just a few drivers at harvest. Potatoes needed little work in the growing season but massive reserve labour for harvest, especially for grading. The Cree first worked for the same Japanese-Canadians who had come as involuntary labour from BC for sugar beet farms in Alberta during the war. Many of those Japanese families had had market gardens in BC, and by the 1950s started to buy small plots to grow vegetables for market in southern Alberta. When the Japanese introduced methods of flood irrigation using now available water from the South Saskatchewan, they showed that money could be made in growing potatoes. And when they bought more land, and their machines could harvest four or eight or sixteen rows instead of two, and farms became too big to run with family labour, these early Japanese farmers had access to an army of reserve labour already available: the Cree workers from the sugar beet fields.

Japanese-Canadian farmer Mas Nishima, 88, of Taber, tells me that without the Cree workers, many farmers would have had to plow their crops under. “They saved my farm and a lot of other farms in southern Alberta,” he says.

With all the elements for success—the know-how, the sun, the soil, the water and the cheap, available temporary labour—the potato sector exploded. New processing plants followed. Then came Dutch-Canadian farmers from Ontario with money to buy land and equipment and go bigger. Many of them had no history working with Cree people, no memory of them, no special ties like friendship.

Clem explains that in the early days, there were only Cree people working sugar beets and potato harvests, on every farm. “What you see here today, the Mennonites, that was all us back in the day, men and women,” he says. “Then we got pushed out. The Mexican Mennonites worked cheaper.”

In the pre-dawn chill, Mennonite women grade potatoes on the conveyor

Just as importantly, according to Laliberté, after those Mennonite families settled permanently in southern Alberta, they became more immediately available than the Cree from northern Saskatchewan. Cree families would come back the next season and go farm-to-farm looking for work, only to find their old jobs had already been given away. And some farmers, and Cree people themselves, would say that Mennonite workers did not have the same problems with alcohol that made some Cree workers—most of them survivors of residential schools—“unreliable,” especially after a few weeks of hard labour, long hours, no rest and bad living quarters, often just abandoned chicken coops or cow sheds. Mark Miyanaga, co-owner of Triple M Farms near Taber, later tells me that despite any problems a small number of Cree workers did have with alcohol at times, they were as a whole as reliable and hard-working as anyone.

Laliberté says that remarkably, however, he never heard of any conflict between the Cree and the Mennonites or other people who replaced them. Clem confirms this: “Our people are good to get along with,” he says. “Whatever happens, happens.”

Elmer and Dwayne know of only two more crews of Cree men in the area. Cousin Emil is working on one nearer to Bow Island, and cousin Brian is working on a Japanese-owned farm near Taber. “Brian says that farm is going to be hiring ‘Mexican Mexicans,’ next year,” Dwayne says, using air-quotes. “Real Mexicans.”

“So, this might be the last year they hire any Cree people,” he says.

“Yeah, but we’ll still be around,” Clem says, jutting his jaw a little more. “Just maybe not here.”

I check in with Elmer throughout the following week. He never slacks off in the work. But on the next Thursday night, after nearly two weeks of standing on his feet backing trucks in, 15 hours a day, his ankles swell to the size of his knees. The pain keeps him awake all night. On the Friday morning, the swelling is too much for him to put his boots on. “I wanted to stay until the end,” he tells me. He will drive the 700 kilometres home alone that day, bringing the number of the last crew down to three.

Virgil Grandfield is grateful to Lloyd Ypma for letting him camp at his farm and document the work of Dwayne’s crew.

Text and photos by Virgil Grandfield

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Singer near some aohtoksooki, or common yarrow.

Singer and his dog Zorro beside raised beds where he is growing native plants to preserve seeds and eventually fight back leafy spurge.

Ninaika’ksimii, or Louisiana sagewort, grows in Singer’s yard.

Leafy spurge, an invasive plant, grows in the prairie that Singer is working to restore.

Singer shows a goldenrod plant on the Kainai Blood Tribe reserve. Goldenrod is a native plant, but its Blackfoot name has been lost to colonization.

Api’soomaahka, or William Singer, is converting his cultivated land back to native grasslands. His father began growing crops on their land when Singer was a child. Cultivation introduced non-native species such as Kentucky Bluegrass, brome grasses and invasive spurge, which harm native medicine plants such as sage and sweetgrass. Singer watched these traditional plants disappear. Twelve years ago he began to restore the land to its former state, a project now called Naapi’s Garden. He uses controlled burns, goats and hand weeding to remove the yellow-flowered spurge, but its roots can extend nine metres deep. To protect traditional native plants, Singer grows sage, sweetgrass, mint and turnips in raised garden beds, collecting their seeds and reintroducing them to the land.

Photography by Amber Bracken

With information originally published in The Narwhal, July 31, 2020.

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I’m too hungry to give up. I unbutton my shirt, get my arms out, fling the make-believe net over one surprised fish.

“Aha. You’re one who didn’t get away.”

Beanie laughs, the first I’ve heard from her. She has a knife she stole from the dining room. Not very sharp, but I manage to slit the tender belly open below the gill like I watched my mother do before the School. I scrape the insides into the river.

“Yuck. That’s good enough.” We have to build a fire, keep it small. I climb along the riverbank and stumble on a small circle of ashes in the wall of rocks at the end of the bridge. Someone here before us.

“Beanie, look. Another runaway, you think?”

“Shush. Hush.”

I’m making too much noise. She is nervous, afraid of getting caught. She hasn’t told me what happened before she was returned to the School. She hasn’t talked about Mr. B, either. I don’t push it.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school.

About once an hour a car rumbles over the bridge. I wait for silence after one passes, light the mini collection of dry leaves and sticks I’ve piled in the fire pit. The tiny flame catches. I thread the fish onto a stick and prop it over the fire on the rocks. Perfect, I breathe, quiet, waiting for Beanie’s approval.

Crackle, snap, splat. The stick burns through, dumping the fish into the fire. “Oh, shit.” It feels so good to swear. I scrape the fish clean on a rock, rebuild the fire.

This time the stick holds. Smoke flares, then dies. Only a little daytime exposure.

“Jeannie Squirt, you’re a genius.”

Beanie gawks at the smoky, fat slab of pink fish spread on green nettle leaves. The colours are majestic, almost like not real. Our miracle food is eaten in seconds, once we get over the shock. Beanie has called me my kid’s name—from back when.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school. Outlaws, horses and cowboys chasing. The bad guys getting caught—or killed.

Geese are on the move. Honk, honk, honk. They fly in Vs over the bridge, one group swooping at the river, the next following. It’s that time of year. I watch their direction. South by southwest, my father always said; that’s where they go. Are we near home Somehow I feel home is very far away.

“Beanie?” She’s asleep in the middle of the day.

Resting up for tonight. I lie down next to her on the tarp. She doesn’t know I’m here until I squirm, move my legs. She pokes me in the ribs. Sleep, sleep. I’m back at the School, watching for Mr. B. He is the worst of the teachers, the most dreaded. Beanie won’t talk about him, what happens when he twists her arm and takes her away during the night. I hunch over my sketchbook, draw the dorm beds in endless rows. Miss Crosbie has taught me to use long strokes for distance and short ones for close up.

I dream about fat red pieces of fish sizzling on racks over a fire my mom is poking to stir up the heat. I want to catch another fish in the river, but Beanie is stuffing our packs, ready to leave. My shirt is crispy dry from the sun.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways. We walk from one farm road to the next, occasional dots of light in scattered buildings down a gravel track. Beanie says we have to get to a city before there’s a place to sleep proper. I don’t know how she knows this. Is it wishful thinking I’m too hungry to protest. Our fish feast was a long time ago.

“Shush. Listen. I think it’s a train.” Our village was on a train line. That’s how they took us to the School. Off to the right in the direction of the train sound, a light flickers low, between rows of corn. We crouch in the ditch by the road seconds before a pick-up careens past, belching black exhaust in our faces. No letup. No discovery of two runaways frozen in headlights.

We walk without making a sound towards the flickering glow on the ground, make out a smaller flame nearby. A train whooshes through, passenger cars, moving fast.

A deep voice comes from the bigger fire. “We’ll wait for the next one. It may slow for the switch coming up. If it does, put out your fire and run for the car with the open door.”

“I ain’t puttin’ out ’til I know,” says an answer from the almost invisible fire on the edge of the trampled grass where three men are squatting, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Put it out before you run,” the deep voice says. “I’ll give you a couple of matches to restart if you need them.”

“You ain’t got all the answers, big man,” says the little-fire voice. In the distance a train whistles at a level crossing, slows. I feel familiar vibrations in the ground. It’s a long freight approaching.

The three tramps douse their fires, roll their belongings in seconds and take off for the tracks. We follow just out of sight. Beanie shows no sign of fear. I haven’t discovered her bravery, where she gets it or if she cares.

There’s an open space in a boxcar, directly in front of us. I give Beanie a leg up and she pulls me in beside her. The three tramps are as stunned as we are when we discover each other in the same place at the same time. Are we all runaways from school I want to ask, but my English isn’t up to it. The deep voice holds out a bag of peanuts in their shells. Beanie and I cup our hands to receive this gift from Manito.

“Thank you,” I say in Cree.

“You’re welcome,” the big voice answers in English. “Gotta cut the Indian crap. Gives you away, and you don’t want anyone to know you’re a runaway.”

“How did you know?” I blurt out with the peanut shells.

“Where do you think we all come from?” the voice in the corner mutters. “Here, have a drink of water. Don’t mind my used canteen. Only one I grabbed on my way out. Sure good to have. G’night.” I watch him slide into his bedroll, snug and warm.

Beanie and I scoot into the opposite corner and wrap our tarp around our shoulders. Big Voice slips into the shadows away from the sliding door. There is another figure, the third one at the camp It’s a boy, maybe younger than us. I think he’s asleep already. The empty boxcar sways, jerks, stops, rolls forward. Where are we going Does anyone know?

He says no Indian. English words, yes, but not my mother’s way of talking, so much of which I can’t remember. The School has done good.

The train motion puts everyone to sleep. I dream we are going home. Slowly, more slowly, then movement stops. Brakes screech. A wall of the boxcar slides open.

“Yep, they’re in here,” a man yells.

“Up, you guys. Better hurry.” He tells us what to do as if he’s a conductor.

We jump out of the boxcar onto the ground. I feel my ankle crunch and try to rise to run.

Beanie grabs my arm; the other three are already gone. The boxcar rolls back, erasing our escape.

There’s a maze of tracks in front, on the sides, in back. I test my ankle; decide it isn’t too bad.

Beanie pulls me over rows of steel rods. Finally, a grassy field.

We walk to a road. The lights of a town. A city Beanie and I have never seen either.

We rest in a ditch. My ankle is twice its normal size. Beanie moves it around a bit.

“Don’t. That hurts.” I’m careful not to scream with pain.

“Just trying to see if it’s broken,” Beanie says. We both agree it’s probably only sprained. Sunrise outlines a jagged collection of tall buildings with lower squares spreading from the centre like blocks of wood. We walk, hobble, into a new day.

A car slows behind us. Stops. A woman’s voice asks if we have a place to walk to.

Beanie tries to sound grownup, independent. “We’re going over there.” She points to the buildings in the distance. “My sister has sprained her ankle,” she adds.

“Please let me give you a ride. I’ll take you to the Catholic church. They have a shelter. Even a guest house if you have a little money.”

“No, thank you,” Beanie says. “We’re not Catholic.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic to go there. They will be serving breakfast to everyone by the time we arrive.” The lady moves toward her car, opens the rear door for us.

At the thought of breakfast, we get in.

It’s a nice place. We use the washroom, clean our filthy hands. Sit next to three other new arrivals. I recognize Deep Voice when he reminds me, “No Indian.”

“Promise,” I answer. Someone comes over my shoulder with more pancakes. It’s the lady with the car. How can I be so lucky I was in that damn school for 10 years. I’ve been out for less than 10 days and I’m eating pancakes in a Catholic church, the same thing that kept me in the School. Then I can’t swallow. Will they take me back?

“Whatsa matter?” Big Voice asks me.

“Back. Will they take us back?”

“Nah. Too much trouble. Besides, we’ve come a long way. At least I have. Prob’ly you too. We’ll need their shelter for a while, ’til we get jobs ’n’ everything.” Beanie is listening from my other side. She’s on her fourth pancake.

“My English. Not so good,” I sputter.

“You’ll get it. Just no Indian.” He sounds so sure, so old.

I watch the brown-skin girl across the table. She looks new too. I mutter under my breath thank you in Cree and she smiles.

When we finish breakfast, the lady with the car takes us down a hallway to a dorm room with 12 cots, six on each side facing each other. “This is where you can sleep,” she says in her cheery voice. Beanie and I look at each other and turn to leave, but my ankle stops me. It’s too sore to let me go on.

“Just for tonight,” I tell Beanie. “Until the pain is better.”

“Just one night,” Beanie says. “Too much like the School.” She shivers, tightens her sweater around her arms.

“I’ll get you some ice,” the car lady offers and goes back towards the kitchen. I don’t know what she means. Ice for what?

I sit on the cot, swing my swollen ankle up to rest. The car lady appears with ice wrapped in a towel and puts it around my ankle. It’s cold but feels good.

“My name’s Claire,” she smiles in my face, pinning me in my place on the cot. I look away, over at Beanie, who is lying on her back staring at the ceiling. “Lunch is at 12; supper at 5:00.”

My sister and I sleep. Sister Jolene chases a rat around the dorm beds; a giant toad jumps out and trips her. I wake up laughing. A bell rings. Lunch time. My ankle is way better after the magic ice.

Jeanne Louise. I print my name on the name tag by my plate. Beanie writes Minnie Mouse. She looks up, past my matted hair.

“Tomorrow we go.” It’s a statement, no maybe. There’s a fresh towel on my cot when I return and I don’t know when a hot shower has felt so good, especially as most of our showers at the School were cold. Beanie’s long hair is shining black after her shampoo. Beau Noir, the girls at the School called her. She has brushed it every night since I can remember.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways.

We leave after breakfast. My pants and shirt and underwear I rinsed in the shower are sticky dry, good enough, like my ankle that’s still swollen and sore.

A car stops on the road, offers a ride and Beanie accepts.

“Where to, pretty ladies?” a harsh voice asks.

“Downtown,” Beanie answers. Are we really pretty ladies?

The car moves forward, swerves around a tight corner, throws Beanie against the driver.

“Stop. This is our place.” She has seen an Indian sign for tobacco at a house near the road.

“Ain’t downtown yet.” He doesn’t stop.

At a red light, Beanie leans across me and flips the door handle. Good thing I’m holding on or I would have fallen out before Beanie pushes me. In a flash we are free.

“Gotta be careful of these guys,” she mutters.

How does she know I wonder again. What has she seen with Mr. B or when she ran away?

We walk on a sidewalk along a busy street. Stores, people, mostly white faces. Almost unconsciously we follow someone that looks like Big Man from the train and church. He turns a corner, away from the busy street, disappears behind a blank wall. We walk past the building, duck into an alley with a beaten path that leads to an open doorway. We know we need a shelter. We’ve heard stories about runaways at the School. So here’s a place to sleep at night, sort of.

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I see brown faces lying on pieces of mattress or tarps like we have. Someone is cooking and I feel faint from the thought of food. Beanie discards her pack on top of our tarp, eases mine off my shoulders, guides me to the soup line on the back wall of the huge open space. I can only think Cree, Manito. No Indian out loud. I remember.

I pick up litter around a school yard and someone—a teacher?—plants some dollars in my hand. Beanie goes out at night and returns with enough money to rent a room of our own. Two flights up, two beds, dirty toilet on the landing, a wisp of heat. Beans from a can, stale bread dumped behind the corner store. No Sisters with whips, no Mr. Bs. I figure the new ones pay. Beanie brushes her hair every night before she goes out.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a river park where walkers, mostly brown-skinned, gather, drink from paper bags. I watch as pills and needles are passed around, hidden in the bushes. There’s a tension, everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

Alize, the Indian girl from the Catholic church sleeps—passed out—on a bench. No one pays attention. I draw the river curving around a bend, park benches, low buildings in the distance. By some miracle I still have my runaway bag and my exercise book of drawings I’ve kept since I was kidnapped from my home in Grade 1. I keep the bag in hiding, even from Beanie. I don’t want her to see herself on my pages. She might tear them up. Everything’s a bigger secret with my sister.

Whoop whoop. Lights flashing. Police swarming the park, behind the bushes. I am pushed into the back of what looks like the boxcar on the train.

I end up at what they tell me is an old prison; another school, I think, only no nuns, no Father LeBlanc. I am in a room with a metal bed and blanket, no mattress. Where is Beanie?

Someone leaves a bucket of water, a pile of rags. “If you do some work, you can eat. The washrooms are all yours. Get them clean the first time. Or you’ll have to do them again.”

They aren’t too bad. It actually feels good to do some work.

Beanie doesn’t come.

They let me stay three nights, four… hoping Beanie will show up A worker—someone like Claire—tells me to get a job.

I try at 7-Eleven; they say come back the next day. I return three times, three days in a row. “Come in clean clothes and you can sweep the grounds.”

I can’t find Beanie. I check the room we rented and there’s a drunk man sprzawled on my bed. I recognize him from the river park where I got arrested for doing nothing.

“She ain’t here. Go fuck yourself. Halfbreed.”

At the jail, Alize is lying on a cot next to mine when I return from my search for Beanie. “Where you from?” she whispers in Michif.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a tension. Everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

“Don’t know,” I answer in English. “Beanie says she knows, but she’s missing. Can’t find her nowhere—anywhere.” I’m trying to speak good. I’m learning, but I need Beanie.

A V of geese invades the horizon. Honk, honk. I follow their formation, try to draw them, like I remember from close-up at home. Flying south, free.

I have four coloured pencils left. I make miniatures. Pale sky, pillow clouds, ripples for a river—in a three-inch square free as air. A tiny Beanie, two inches tall walking a cornfield, pack on her back. The train boxcar with three sets of tracks going nowhere in another corner of the paper. I’m saving the pencils, paper too.

I’ll keep the drawings for Beanie. The pictures will talk to her, get past her secrets. I have hope.

It’s a dark night. Something jars my shoulder. Maybe a rat I jump out of bed, stare into Beanie’s eyes.

“Get your stuff. Let’s go.” Where now I grab my pack, shove the pencils and exercise book in first.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Janice Kenyon emigrated to Victoria, BC, where she worked as a nurse. She moved to High River in the early 2000s to be near her daughter and grandchildren in Calgary. As a 66-year-old she took an epic cycling trip, which inspired Bike Ride with a Twist: 8,321 km Across Canada (Kachina Press/Sandhill, 2006). Janice’s other books include the biography Any Damn Thing (Gomer Press). Her fiction won honourable mention in the WGA 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest. Janice passed away July 29, 2023. On the day before she died, she joked this would be the year she won Alberta Views’ fiction contest. She was prescient.

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When Arthur Penn acquired the screenplay rights to the novel Little Big Man from Marlon Brando in the late 1960s, he also acquired the near impossibility of making it into a movie. The book, written by Thomas Berger and published in 1964, presented a big problem for Americans by muddying their glorified saga of Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 with the violence and senseless massacre of innocent Native Americans, many of them women and children.

Told through the eyes of Jack Crabb, the oldest living white survivor of the massacre, who had been raised by the Cheyenne, the story meanders between the two very different cultures and reveals the unchronicled hypocrisy and cruelty of western settlement from a Native American perspective. Crabb conveys admiration for the Cheyenne languages, their spiritual beliefs and their gentle, dying way of life, rooted in the relationship between all living things and depicted as much more honourable than white-centric myths of their own nobility in the classic Western.

A prolific and genre-breaking director, Penn saw his star rise steadily through the 1960s. He was part of a tsunami of young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Donner, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who ushered in New Hollywood with films made on location and heavily reliant upon realism. These films addressed shifting social values and the unprecedented political upheaval of the times, using the directors’ own opinions as an agent of change.

Penn’s 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, the iconic saga of a pair of glamourized criminals and their adventures on the lam during the Depression, changed Hollywood forever. The film condemns the horrific atrocities carried out by Americans during the Vietnam War by introducing graphic and gratuitous violence to movie-making with what The New Yorker called a “frightening power.”

His 1969 movie Alice’s Restaurant highlighted the absurd attempts to persecute and prosecute a group of hippies during their communal Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Penn received Best Director nominations from the Academy Awards for both movies.

In Little Big Man Penn saw an opportunity to make a movie that revised the typical Western narrative and its glorified white heroes. To examine the history of racism in North America. “American cinema has continually parodied and ridiculed native Indians, depicting them as savage beasts in order to justify the fact that we wiped them out,” Penn said in a 1971 interview. “A mythic and heroic account of the settling of the West might ease some people’s consciences, but I’m having none of it.”

Penn could have made any film he wanted. But every time he found a studio executive willing to greenlight the movie, Little Big Man was sabotaged by unrealistic “false” budgets that would doom the project before production even started. When he finally asked why, he was told: “You can’t treat Indians this way. They gotta be the bad guys.”

Indians weren’t always the bad guys. In the first Westerns, they were most often portrayed as noble savages, primitive people of the Old West wilderness uncorrupted by the trappings of civilization. When legendary filmmaker Thomas Ince, today known as “the father of the Western,” started making motion pictures in 1909, his dramas, comedies, farces and “social problem” movies explored the stories of his times, from cosmopolitan foppery to the merciless march to conquer the wilderness. Ince was obsessed with realism, the radical art of reflecting the world back to movie audiences using natural landscapes to convey settings and characters that embodied the truth of the human condition.

Most of his one- and two-reelers chronicled cagey varmints who bastardize tiny white outposts with their unsavoury ways, lurking along rough-hewn train tracks splayed across the prairies, ready to snatch supplies destined for the hardy pioneers. Occasionally they encounter mystical savages who inhabit the land they’ve come to take, who sometimes help catch the varmints.

A small number of Ince’s films strayed from the noble savage trope to examine the inherent violence of colonization, such as Blazing the Trail (1912), a gory saga of the attacking of a wagon train moving west by “treacherous Indians.” In what has become a standard Western plot device, a young white girl is captured and whisked back to their camp, where she is tortured “by the squaws.”

As Ince flourished, he moved away from directing and began producing, attracting talented young directors (most in their late teens or early twenties and most of them now acclaimed film pioneers) such as Frank Borzage, Reginald Barker, Lynn Reynolds, John Ford and Burton George.

The Western didn’t really become the Western we know today until Ince teamed up with writer/director and all-around authentic man of the West William S. Hart, whose lone-nomad movie persona “flourished on the border, when the six-shooter was the final arbiter of all disputes between man and man,” and who single-handedly and with burlesque-like flair eradicated any hostiles who got in his way.

Their simplistic plots were increasingly coloured with the racism infecting American society, both through government attitudes, agendas and treatment of Native Americans and in the powerful potboiler literature that romanticized and lionized white settlement of the West. In what became the dominant, white-reconstructed narrative of Westerns, noble settlers were brutalized and murdered by hostile and savage Indians as they fought to take and civilize the land for the good and glory of all.

As studios began making their money by churning out formulaic movies en masse, filmmaking was caught in a struggle between artistry and profit. Realism was viewed as too expensive to be feasible, and not necessary.

Ince’s disillusionment with the Western genre became more racist, and he flew against convention by creating Triangle Films with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith. He and his stable of young comers made feature-length dramas, Westerns—and an Alberta-specific genre of the Western known as NorWesters (short for Northwest melodramas), which were lavish, artistic, technically masterful and rooted in realism.

Like Westerns, NorWesters were survival dramas set in the last wilderness frontier on the continent at the time—Alberta, which was being heavily promoted as such in government settlement and tourism campaigns. As American landscapes became increasingly depleted by industrialization, Alberta became the embodiment of a mythical God’s country, a Great North Woods, where man and beast lived in beautiful harmony amid the natural powers and wonders of the vast wilderness.

Most early NorWesters were shot against California landscapes around Los Angeles that replicated the Canadian Rockies. But in 1917, in his “search for the natural,” one of Triangle’s youngest directors, Frank Borzage, headed to the Stoney Nakoda reserve at Morley, just west of Calgary, to shoot several authentic scenes of the real northwest for a “tragedy of the land of snows,” Until They Get Me.

The Stoney Nakoda are the only Indigenous people in North America who have a lasting cinematic record of their traditional way of life and culture as it changed over the last century. They have worked with some of the biggest directors of all time, including Penn and Borzage, but also Kevin Costner, Robert Altman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Edward Zwick, Raoul Walsh and Walt Disney.

Many movies filmed in Alberta feature Stoney Nakoda involvement as film professionals—actors, musicians, crew members, cultural consultants, mountain guides, location scouts and horse wranglers. These people often speak their own language in the films, a rare indication of the unique relationships and underlying respect from filmmakers coming to this small reserve at the foot of the Canadian Rockies.

Morley lies on a tract of barren, beautiful land between the plains and mountains, with long, sweeping expanses of grassland that rise through foothills to the majestic mountains on the western horizon, perfect for long shots and super-saturated with the cinematic realism Ince and his filmmaker were so obsessed with. The luminescent quality and drama of the natural light on the reserve is particularly exquisite.

Two very different stories of white settlement exist in North America: the sunny, bloody history in the US, and the less violent though just as oppressive confiscation of Indigenous lands
in Canada.

Most movies filmed in Alberta over the next 40 years were variations of the second, marking a return to the noble savage trope, with Indians as heroes or helpful cohorts of white heroes as they struggled to tame the unforgiving wilderness. In Frank Borzage’s 1922 film The Valley of the Silent Men, the Nakoda are filmed in their own clothes and tipis, helping a Mountie find a varmint in the wilderness. The Blood tribes of southern Alberta, once the fearsome, powerful Blackfoot Confederacy, rescue a train being robbed by varmints in Cameron of the Royal Mounted (1921), despite being vilified and accused of the robbery.

As the decades passed, however, Westerns became more racist and many clichés about Indigenous peoples became embedded in American culture with a force that remains almost unmovable. Movies such as Canadian Pacific (1949), filmed on the Morley reserve with Randolph Scott, and the extravagant remake of the Mountie classic Rose Marie, filmed in Jasper in 1953, have appalling displays of gonzo racism and the objectification and sexualization of Indigenous women, leaving horrific ramifications of murder, genocide, rape and disposability to white men for Indigenous cultures that continue today.

But the summer of 1953 also marked change in Hollywood, a very slow shifting from old to new. Westerns in particular were conservative, formulaic, racist and problematic, unappealing to the young hipsters and beatniks bursting out of the suburbs and redefining normal. Two movies shot in Alberta in 1953—Saskatchewan, by director Raoul Walsh, and The Far Country, by Anthony Mann—both a blend of Western and NorWester, helped take the genre from an undeviating glorification of the Old West to a genre that revealed the racism and psychological conflict and trauma inherent in that narrative.

John Ford’s The Searchers, filmed in part at Elk Island National Park in the cold March of 1955, created an even more powerful, unsentimental look back. It gives disturbing insight into the permanent, personal and psychological scarring that resulted from the gruesome struggle to settle the American west and expropriate the lands of a people who had lived and flourished there for thousands of years. In The Searchers there is no single hero but two: a white man, played by John Wayne, and a Comanche chief, each battling with horrifying resolve to preserve their people.

As the 1960s ended, Arthur Penn, like Ince before him, was searching for realism. He wanted to film Little Big Man, the first and most important revisionist, or post-classical, Western in authentic settings with authentic people. Production finally began in July in southern Montana, with battle scenes shot on the Crow reservation beside the Little Bighorn River. Scenes were also shot in Billings, Montana, where the city’s merchants celebrated the filming with “Little Big Man sidewalk sales.”

Penn again used his movie to denounce the horrific violence of the Vietnam war and drew parallels between the massacre of innocent civilians in Mỹ Lai in 1968 and the slaughter of American natives by Custer and his troops at the battle of Little Bighorn.

At some point he decided to shoot on the Morley reserve and with Nakoda actors, because he wanted the superabundance of the naturalism in Alberta landscapes that had attracted so many major directors here. Production of Little Big Man moved to Alberta in the bitterly cold early days of January 1970. Parts of the horrific massacre were shot at “The Bend in the River” on the banks of the Bow in Morley, a location Hollywood has now been using for a century.

In 2015 and 2016 I undertook a communal project with 15 Nakoda Elders, the Stoney Film Project, to capture the community’s largely uncredited history in film and its importance to the industry. When we watched Little Big Man, Elders Clarice Kootenay and Kathleen Poucette said they felt traumatized by the massacre scene.

Their then-15-year-old sister Cecelia Kootenay had played one of Dustin Hoffman’s young wives, who “copulated” with Crabb in a tipi before the massacre (both actors wore nude body suits). Kootenay and Poucette recall how Cecelia (who is no longer living) was always dancing and singing around the living room of their tiny house on the reserve. Their mother had taken Cecelia to Hollywood to film the scene; she remembers being impressed with the respect shown them both at the studio.

Great Chief Old Lodge Skins, the hero in Little Big Man, is played by Salish Chief Dan George. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review that the Chief’s gentle and frequent use of the simple phrase “human beings” evoked a rare empathy and reflection in audiences. “Most movie Indians have had to express themselves with an ‘um’ at the end of every other word: ‘Swap-um wampum plenty soon’ etc. The Indians in Little Big Man have dialogue reflecting the idiomatic richness of Indian tongues; when Old Lodge Skins simply refers to Cheyennes as ‘the Human Beings,’ the phrase is literal and meaningful and we don’t laugh.”

Little Big Man, which Time called “a new western to begin all westerns,” left a powerful legacy. Major filmmakers, many the vanguard of the American New Wave, soon followed Penn to Alberta, as others had followed Borzage in the 1920s, many to make their own films that reconstructed the Western.

Robert Altman came to the Morley reserve in 1976 to film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson entirely at the rodeo grounds, with a Nakoda cast, saying he wanted to “stay close to truth and far from myth.” Paul Newman, as Buffalo Bill, is an unhinged egomaniac, driven mad by his quest for power and money. He is constantly upstaged by the stoic, intelligent and artful Sitting Bull, played by Nakoda Chief Frank Kaquitts.

An even more damning examination of western settlement and white self-glorification than Little Big Man, Buffalo Bill was not well received. White viewers were not ready to see themselves this way, to have their heroes appear so openly deranged and ignoble—damagers, not the damaged. “I hope everyone left their grenades at the door,” Newman remarked to reporters in New York after the movie’s cold reception at its first screening. He added: “I don’t think there’s an audience for any kind of pain in this country.”

In 1978 Terrence Malick shot Days of Heaven in southern Alberta, using glorious fields of wheat to elevate the old NorWester into a poetic, beauty-filled homage to the early directors who filmed in the province. In the movie, realism and naturalism come alive in a mystical other-realm. Even the magic hour—the mythical, uber-cinematic light that cracks through the Alberta sky for brief moments at dawn and dusk—is a character in the movie, a flash of time when nature is most enchanting and people more bewitching and alive. Like many of the earliest NorWesters by Borzage and Reginald Barker, Days of Heaven is a story of survival in an increasingly industrialized world, the plot secondary to the visuals.

Perhaps the most brutal version of the NorWesters shot in Alberta is the 2015 survival/revenge film The Revenant, made by Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, an undying fur trapper who endures against the power of the natural world and the odious realm of men. Like Crabb in Little Big Man, Glass moves between white and Indigenous worlds. Crabb takes an Indigenous wife, who with their baby is massacred by Custer and his men. Glass has a Pawnee wife who is massacred by Metis fur trappers, his surviving son murdered by a repulsive trapper whom Glass had saved in a Pawnee attack. The Alberta scenes were again filmed at “The Bend in the River” at Morley, now known to Hollywood as “Revenant Flats.”

Realism dominates the action, moods, visual magnificence and movement in the movie. It is almost a masterpiece. During the Stoney Film Project, one Nakoda Elder told me Iñárritu had insisted that Nakoda extras be smeared with a foul-smelling mixture of dirt and mud. When the Elder protested, saying his people were not a dirty people, the director replied: “History says you were.”

Mary Graham is the author of A Stunning Backdrop: Alberta in the Movies, 1917–1960 (University Calgary Press, 2022).

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Smith’s remarks epitomize a troubling trend in the province she hails from: an attempt to ignore Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history. Never mind whether any Indigenous people would characterize their homelands the way Alberta’s premier does—as “unforgiving frontiers” needing to be tamed—Smith’s vision of Canadian history doesn’t include space for them to have any perspectives at all. Never mind what failed Treaty promises, residential schools and decades of successive iterations of the Indian Act did to undermine Indigenous governments, lands, families and societies. First Nations are simply subsumed by Smith as willing participants in building a capitalist democratic nation state. It is a triumphalist vision. It’s also emphatically bad history.

Smith’s party has a track record of making Canadian history a contentious issue. Her predecessor, Jason Kenney, announced a rewrite of the entire K–6 curriculum in summer 2020, stating that his government particularly hoped to remove the “ideology” they contended was in the unreleased NDP draft curriculum, and reinsert the “history.” Our heroes—like John A. Macdonald, like our war dead on Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach—have been crushed under a mass of liberal biases, opined Kenney. What was unfurled in the spring of 2021 was a social studies curriculum so hurriedly prepped that many people saw it as an attack on the public education system itself.

Content heavy, even in the youngest grades, the UCP’s draft social studies curriculum promised to require that students memorize a heap more and think a whole lot less. The Grade 2 draft curriculum read like an outline of two semesters’ worth of a university-level western civilization course (minus, of course, the critical analysis), with topics such as the essential wisdom of Plato and Socrates, the major tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and the leading theories behind the fall of the Roman Empire all to be covered in the portion of the day that 7-year-olds devote to social studies (as at least one teacher satirized, perhaps between morning snack and recess). So many members of the public were appalled by the assertion in the Grade 2 materials that “most” Albertans are Christians, and “newcomers” bring other religious traditions and may “struggle to find acceptance,” that the Ministry of Education hurriedly yanked the line from the drafts on its public consultation websites.

That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West is acknowledged openly now.

Situating Indigenous cultures squarely in a hazy, mysterious past, reassuring us that they made some positive “contributions” to modern (white, Christian) Canadian society, the social studies draft makes a brief detour to New France in Grade 3 before landing, in Grade 4, in the western “untamed wilderness” evoked by Danielle Smith. Here, after a cursory mention of how Plains Indigenous people used “all” the parts of the buffalo, we are treated to a throwback to the Eurocentric way of interpreting the settlement of the Canadian West, where, in essence, Treaties and the North-West Mounted Police peaceably cleared the way for white settlers, their ranching, their farming and their civilization. Roundly criticized for their advisers’ assertions that residential school history was “too sad” for K–6 and should wait until junior high, the UCP curriculum team deigned to mention it in Grade 5.

Maybe it still comforts some, but this is not how Canadian history is taught in graduate schools nor in undergraduate classrooms. It is not how it is explored in academic books or analyzed in our country’s courts and tribunals. We have moved past the smug assumption that the Canadian West was the “mild” frontier (compared to the US and its Wild West, with its violent Indian wars). That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West, whether on reserves, through the pass and permit systems, in residential schools, in the child welfare and the criminal justice and the healthcare systems—that they were excluded from participating fully in Canadian life, and not treated as equal partners or even as neighbours in some project of developing Canada, as Smith’s casual revisionism would have it—these things are acknowledged and taught openly now. And we’ve started to become the better for it.

The UCP would have Indigenous perspectives and the more difficult aspects of Canadian history scrubbed from the K–6 curriculum. But they were unprepared for the protest from teachers, school boards, parents and the public at large that followed the release of the draft curriculum. Backlash came from people concerned about the whitewashing of history, about the normalizing of white, Christian viewpoints in the social studies curriculum, but also from experts in how children learn, seemingly none of whom were consulted by the UCP.

As a parent of a fourth grader at the time of the draft curriculum’s release, I kept visualizing the effortless way I had watched my son’s (white) kindergarten teacher introduce the Blackfoot name of the ubiquitous Alberta wild rose bushes, kiníí, on a ridge near our home in the foothills a few years before, and also their rosehips (“itchy bum berry”). Like my son’s kindergarten teacher, maybe first let’s look around the neighbourhood and only then tackle the UCP’s “short version of Western civilization from Mesopotamia to the present”—although I hope my children aren’t required to. With the uproar surrounding particularly the disastrous social studies draft, most of the UCP curriculum was shelved for “revisions.”

As a parent but also a professional historian, I’m concerned about the UCP’s attempts to rewrite the social studies curriculum in the past two and a half years, and the threat this still poses should the NDP not form the next provincial government. The existing curriculum, while ready for the update the NDP was preparing, at least emphasized how to ask good questions. The UCP sought to replace that with nothing but prepackaged answers, in the guise of endless dates and names and facts.

As a professional historian, I’m prompted to ask, “Whose version of history is being presented here?” and “For what purpose?” Danielle Smith putting her blithe Eurocentrism on display during a stroll in Ottawa—the talk that began with fanciful notions about Canada being founded in a shared quest for turning untamed wildernesses into prosperity and ended with a pro-oil-sands screed against carbon taxes—makes it abundantly clear what ignoring Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history enables us to likewise brush under the rug. To name just a few: Indigenous dispossession. Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous rights to be consulted about the lands and resources that have disproportionately enriched white Albertans. The prosperity that Smith refers to is under threat, she argues, by a federal government that unjustly taxes Albertans. And it is on that “victimization” that the UCP would like the Albertan public and Canadians at large to remain foused.

Earlier in the same week as Smith’s remarks in front of the Parliament buildings, former professor Frances Widdowson took a flamboyant stand for removing Indigenous perspectives from the highest levels of education in Alberta. Widdowson—a political scientist, not a historian—has insisted, especially since her termination from Mount Royal University in Calgary at the end of 2021, that she is fighting “fascism” in the postsecondary system. Widdowson believes a poorly defined boogeyman called “postmodernism” has ruined the university and is stripping professors of their academic freedom. Those who labour in the academic vineyards, according to her, have been forced to replace the spirit of open inquiry and any notion of free speech with a doctrine of “wokeism”—which, for those unfamiliar with the term, is meant to conjure up spectres of identity politics and victim Olympics.

Widdowson has claimed that she herself is victimized, hindered by woke policies such as the University of Lethbridge’s Indigenization initiative from expressing her opinions that residential schools and the assimilation policy writ large in Canada were not genocide. Her plans to deliver a public lecture at the U of L on February 1, 2023, were thwarted by hundreds of protesters. Widdowson was forced to give that talk (“How ‘Woke-ism’ Threatens Academic Freedom”) on Zoom, but she did deliver a two-part, in-person lecture as planned to a U of L philosophy professor’s classroom that same week. Titling her lecture “Should universities ‘foster respect’ for Indigenous ‘ways of knowing’?,” Widdowson—predictably—answered “no.”

Widdowson begins her lecture with a sweeping proclamation that she is opposed to the relativism that has permeated historical thinking since the 1960s (a.k.a. what she calls “postmodernism”). No, instead, universities should be citadels of Enlightenment principles, zealous guardians of the Enlightenment’s pursuit of Universal Truth. Much of Widdowson’s belief that Indigenous ways of knowing should not be respected by academic institutions centres on her preoccupation with the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous societies. Indigenous ways of knowing (at least in Widdowson’s view) are heavily based on the pronouncements of “knowledge keepers,” who may in turn be basing their knowledge on “revelations,” which cannot be scientifically tested, and are heavily dependent as well on “oral histories,” which Widdowson summarizes are “often inaccurate” since Indigenous people didn’t have any “writing to pin down those observations.”

It is worth noting here that in Widdowson’s body of work, the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous peoples is key to the “cultural gap” or “developmental gap” that she claims still exists between European civilizations and Indigenous societies. As she wrote in her 2008 book (coauthored with her husband, Albert Howard), Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, “never has the cultural gap between two sets of peoples at the time of contact been wider… [Indigenous peoples] were in an earlier stage of cultural development in comparison to Europeans, who were making the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Developing a system of writing, in Widdowson’s view, was a necessary precursor not only to economic development but also to a culture’s achievement of logic, science, philosophy and history, for only writing can be properly analyzed. And “postmodernists” have tried to “disguise this gap in development” between Indigenous people and Europeans by recasting “aboriginal recollections as ‘oral literature.’ ”

Widdowson’s facile brushing aside (as “relativism” and “postmodernism”) of all the contributions made since the 1960s by scholars of women’s history, Black history, Chicano history, Indigenous history, LGBTQ history and social movements at large deserves scrutiny. It is doubly weird that Widdowson, who has described herself as a “historical materialist” (i.e., a Marxist) downplays to such degree any utility in oral histories, given that labour historians were among the first in the academy to use them to uncover details about working people’s lives and pursuits of equity—since, historically, working-class people scarcely had the time to write things down, if they were even literate enough to do so. Was the (white) working class also suffering from a “development gap,” one wonders?

Widdowson’s consecration of the written word ignores the fact that written sources require as much “interrogation” as she believes oral histories do. Anyone who has taken an undergraduate-level history course in the past half-century could help Widdowson with how to interrogate a (written) primary source, how to ask questions like: Who authored this What was their perspective What were their motivations Their biases Whose perspectives are being left out here And why might that be so As someone who deals with government records about Indigenous people all the time, I would argue that understanding the biases of government officials is exceedingly important to interpreting the document trail they left behind.

The most telling part of Widdowson’s lecture (which she encouraged to be recorded and shared) was when she stated that U of L’s Indigenous policies and especially its initiative of “fostering respect” for Indigenous ways of knowing has had “serious consequences” for her own career. Widdowson claims her academic freedom was trampled. I think what really happened was that she was criticized for her poor ability to think historically. What largely brought the protesters to the atrium at U of L, again, were Widdowson’s views on residential schools, which are neatly encapsulated in a paper she delivered to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in 2017. This paper, titled “The Political Economy of Truth and Reconciliation: Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy,” draws on zero historical sources in order to make broad assertions about the residential school experience in Canada: no archival documents, no oral histories. Her arguments in this paper cannot be “tested” in the manner in which she lectured Lethbridge philosophy students that real forms of knowledge must be tested. Meanwhile she details why Indigenous ways of knowing fall so short of Western scientific methods and modes of inquiry.

Widdowson asserts that residential schools, for all their faults, provided a preliterate society the opportunity to acquire the “knowledge, skills, values and disciplines needed to participate in a modern society.” She also suggests that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission incentivized Indigenous Elders to stretch the truth about physical and sexual abuses in order to gain larger payouts. Many of the testimonies of residential school survivors, writes Widdowson, have “an air of improbability about them.” She muses, “it is hard to believe that so many intensely religious people would have collectively taken part in brazen actions regarded as mortal sins.” Whether Widdowson personally believes or not that “intensely religious people” had it in them to commit mortal sins doesn’t feel like a tested, learned, academically sound theory at all. It just sounds like her opinion.

One should draw on a plethora of actual historical evidence—archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion.

Historical academic standards generally suggest that one should draw on a plethora of actual evidence—including archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion. Widdowson’s views on residential schools do not hold up to these standards. Likewise, her opinion on the “development gap” that she asserts holds Indigenous cultures back is difficult to square with any actual scholarly study of Indigenous peoples. I think, just to draw one example from recent projects I’ve worked on, of the Indigenous leaders who negotiated the treaties on the Canadian prairies. They were described (by government officials) as men who spoke several Indigenous languages, had long histories of interacting with British officials and fur trade economies, and often understood English to boot. They bargained hard for concessions that the federal government was loath to promise them, such as agricultural implements, work animals and instruction in how to farm. They protested when the government failed to fulfil these treaty promises, and they protested government policies that deliberately kept them from scaling their farming operations or selling their crops. Government repression is in full view in these historical sources, like the section of the Indian Act that until 1951 forbade Indigenous people and band governments from retaining lawyers. But the supposed “gap in development” that Widdowson insists has held Indigenous people back from equally participating in Canadian society It is not apparent.

To the Lethbridge students, Widdowson decried the inclusion of “knowledge keepers” within the academy. Letting Elders within the ivory tower, Widdowson reasoned, threatens to “lower standards” for the entire university because the directive from on high to respect Indigenous ways of knowing precludes any scrutiny of their traditional teachings. In her several books, Widdowson has argued that First Nations, given the developmental gap, were not ready to participate in industrial capitalism, and (as she writes in Disrobing) universities or other institutions adopting “low standards hides the fact that most native people have not developed the skills, knowledge or values to survive in the modern world.” As she continues in the 2017 paper, “aboriginal cultural development will require intensive educational methods. Real education for aboriginal people will mean actual attempts to improve literacy and scientific education in communities where books are rare, animistic beliefs still hold traction, and ill-informed ‘wisdom-keepers’ are deferred to. How this developmental gap can be bridged will not be easy.”

One wonders, though: If Widdowson is so secure in the Western scientific method and the ongoing gifts that the “Enlightenment” holds for modern academia, why is she so worried about Indigenous Elders being invited inside academic institutions What threat do their perspectives pose to such an overwhelmingly superior, and dominant, culture?

I think, much like for Danielle Smith and the UCP’s K–6 curriculum writers, that the real issue is that they don’t want Indigenous perspectives included in Canadian history at all. For anyone curious about the wordy second half of Widdowson’s 2017 paper title—“Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy”—she defines “neotribal rentierism” as processes that “are oriented towards extracting ‘rent’ so as to incorporate aboriginal groups into late capitalism.” In other words, not being equipped (developmentally) to participate in capitalist endeavours on their own terms, in Widdowson’s view, Indigenous people instead demand compensation, “a form of circulation that is becoming increasingly common in addressing the conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state.”

And there we come to the crux of the matter, full circle to the underlying issue with Premier Smith’s smooth omission of Indigenous points of view about the great national project she describes, the one where Indigenous and settler Canadians supposedly united in order to transform “untamed wilderness” into prosperity. Prosperity for whom For if Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history aren’t sidelined, if Indigenous viewpoints are allowed space, and if—most dangerously of all!—they hold any validity for the public, perhaps, then, the rent comes due.

Smith subsumes First Nations as willing participantsin building a capitalist, democratic nation state. It’s emphatically bad history.

Widdowson was turned back from giving a public lecture in Lethbridge by the drumming and shouting of hundreds. The UCP social studies curriculum was shelved, for now. And Premier Smith now faces backlash for her revisionist stab at historical storytelling. It is worth mentioning too that in the very same week as the Widdowson / U of L drama and Smith’s controversial remarks, the Law Society of Alberta was forced to deal with a measure that sought to remove Indigenous cultural competency training as a mandatory course. Its members did vote down that measure, resoundingly, to the tune of three to one, and the training remains. A great many Albertans apparently don’t buy into the notion that the pursuit of history involves the slow uncovering of a universal truth—with only one valid viewpoint—the inexorable march of progress, the metaphorical hallways in which we can showcase our hagiography of heroes. Inconveniently for Premier Smith, Widdowson and the architects of the UCP’s K–6 social studies draft curriculum, scholarly assessments of historical events in Canada do not tend to support an overarching narrative of white victimhood.

It would seem that a majority of Albertans see through these narcissistic (one might even say “colonial”) traits: of doing exactly what one is accusing someone else of doing—crafting a totalitarian, doctrinal view of history, and dumbing history down to boot—of blaming the victim (preliterate societies were inferior, after all, and if residential schools were insensitive, they were only trying to help bridge that developmental gap), and of accusing the victim of being the aggressor (“they” took away my academic freedom, the narrative of history that made me feel good, my heroes, and now they are fleecing Canadians with their demands for compensation!).

In my work, which deals largely with Indigenous legal claims, when I have brought scraps of documentary evidence that illuminate conditions on reserves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries out of the archives and back to communities, people have often cried. The letter from the farm instructor to the Indian commissioner, describing how he narrowly avoided a fist fight with the Indigenous farmers to whom he had denied a permit to sell their products (1920s, Saskatchewan). The journal of the Oblate priest who baptized the dying baby, fed only with fish broth while government officials “scaled back” the rations (1880s, Alberta). The perfunctory, one-paragraph letter to the parents in the north, telling them their toddler had died in a distant southern sanatorium (1950s, Manitoba).

People react emotionally to these scraps of evidence, I presume, not because they didn’t know what happened. It was, indeed, their own lived experience, or that of their parents and their grandparents. I think they’ve cried because the voices of those who denied it ever happened have been so very, very loud.

The truths about Canadian history are by no means finished being told, and (in the manner of Widdowson’s “open inquiry”) perhaps this is a project that never ends. The outpouring of grief that can accompany telling historical truths isn’t finished either. The Canada I dream of my children becoming adults in—the reconciled Canada—will be hard won, not with glib assertions like Premier Smith’s about mystical partnerships and neighbourliness but with education, with time, with truths and with tears. Children in our K–6 schools and young adults in our universities are more than capable of being exposed to different perspectives, difficult past events and ongoing injustices. As the TRC’s final report insisted, changing the undeniable inequities in Canadian society will only happen if first there is listening. The majority of Albertans consistently show that we are ready to do just that. A minority keeps trying to take away our opportunities to do so.

Gretchen Albers is a historian who works principally with Indigenous communities in the prairies on land claims and treaty rights issues being heard by Canadian tribunals and courts.

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The post Whitewashing History appeared first on Alberta Views.

Two-thirds of the 32 officers with the Blood Tribe Police Service (BTPS) identify as Indigenous. Three of them, including Melting Tallow, started to grow their hair at the outset of 2020. Long hair, in Blackfoot culture, is considered a symbol of strength. The police chief talked about the value of using his platform to showcase his identity and express pride in his heritage. He gave the example of Norman Manyfingers, a former Calgary officer who grew braids in the early 1990s. The three BTPS officers are joining in that tradition of challenging the status quo of what it means to be a police officer in Canada. “I wanted to keep that going so it’s not lost,” he said. 

Melting Tallow is 48 and has spent his career—24 years and counting—working for First Nation police services. The BTPS is one of three self-administered First Nation police services in Alberta. The other two are the Tsuut’ina Nation Police, which covers the reserve that borders southwest Calgary, and the Lakeshore Regional Police, which serves five First Nations in northern Alberta near Lesser Slave Lake.

These services are similar to others in Canada in that they’re overseen by a civilian commission and abide by laws and standards set out by legislation. But there are also important differences. One is related to funding. The federal and provincial governments jointly fund 36 such services across Canada through the First Nations Policing Program (FNPP). Federal funding comprises 52 per cent of each service budget and the province or territory covers the rest. Other differences are more philosophical. The program was created in 1991 to provide a more culturally responsive and community-focused type of policing. It was intended to address many of the same criticisms of systemic racism that are levelled against police today. The key strategy for realizing this vision was to train Indigenous people to police their own communities.

I had driven to Standoff to learn more about this independent and parallel system of law enforcement at a time of active debate across Canada about how to rethink and reform the police.

This past June, a few weeks after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Blood Tribe Chief Roy Fox issued a statement about systemic racism. He shared the story of an unprovoked attack by two RCMP officers outside his home in the late 1980s and drew a direct connection between the creation of BTPS in 1991 and discriminatory conduct by the Mounties. “Blood Tribe members have had their share of encounters with systemic racism in all areas, including the criminal justice system,” the statement reads.

The statistics are stark. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, released a report in 2020 that showed more than 30 per cent of inmates serving a federal sentence in this country identify as Indigenous. They account for less than 5 per cent of the general Canadian population. A CBC database tracking people killed by police in Canada shows that from 2000 to June 22, 2020, 555 people lost their lives to police. Eighty-nine, or 16 per cent, were Indigenous.

Rick Ruddell, a professor of justice studies at the University of Regina, explained that the FNPP was created after government task forces and inquiries concluded that Indigenous people were getting substandard policing. First Nations started taking matters into their own hands, creating their own police without input or direction from the government. “In the 1980s… a lot of these independent police services started emerging throughout the country, Manitoba, Quebec, a little bit in Ontario,” Ruddell said. The FNPP was created to professionalize these services and provide a way to fund them. He explained how the program was well intentioned, even revolutionary. Canada is the only country in the world with a national program for funding standalone police in Indigenous communities. “The problem, though, was that they were chronically underfunded,” Ruddell said.

Today these services are seen as the second-class police service, said Erick Laming. A member of the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation in Ontario who’s working on his Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Toronto, Laming agrees that First Nations police have been underfunded from day one. “They’re not taken seriously to do a job even though their jobs are more complex and more difficult than a lot of other police services,” he said. Some reserves and First Nations communities have high levels of crime and poverty. These issues, Laming explained, have their roots in colonial policies such as residential schools. In 2019 the Blood Reserve, for example, had a crime severity rating five times higher than the provincial average and a violent crime severity rating six times higher. These indicators take into account both the volume and the seriousness of incidents reported to police. (The Blood Reserve is the largest reserve by area in Canada and home to about 9,000 residents.)

Trying to do more with less has undermined the FNPP’s potential. Twenty-two of the original 58 self-administered services have disbanded. Officer retention is a challenge and the proportion of Indigenous officers is falling. Dwayne Zacharie, the chief of a self-administered service from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory south of Montreal, stepped down as the president of the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association at the end of October after serving three terms. He estimated 1,300 Indigenous officers worked under the FNPP when he joined the Kahnawake Peacekeepers in 1996. Today it’s more like 800. “So we’re going in the wrong direction,” Zacharie said.

Despite the headwinds, Blood police have achieved a remarkable feat: No BTPS officer, over the past 30 years, has fired their gun at another human. “We have never had anybody that we shot, or shot at,” Melting Tallow said.

This is especially remarkable given the long-standing distrust of police among many Indigenous people. It was the RCMP that carried out many of the Canadian government’s racist policies against Indigenous people, such as catching and returning children who tried to escape from residential schools. Indeed, Melting Tallow felt a change in how he was treated by the community when he started out as a fresh-faced constable with the Siksika Nation Police Service (since disbanded) at the age of 25. He grew up on the reserve, which is about an hour’s drive southeast of Calgary. “My circle of friends went really small,” he said. “Nobody sent me Christmas gifts and stuff, because I was transitioning into something. I had some authority. I had the power to remove someone’s rights from being a free person to being in jail.”

He admits to being a little overzealous after graduating from RCMP training in Regina. He saw the world in black and white. You did wrong, you got a ticket. You did wrong, you went to jail. Melting Tallow thought he was doing a good job. “There was no complaint about my conduct to the chief of police. The complaints came through my dad. Everybody was talking to my dad.” Casey Melting Tallow was also an officer with Siksika Police, and one day he took his son aside.

“Use your ears,” he told the young officer. “That’s what they’re there for. You only got one mouth, but you got two ears.” The advice stuck. Kyle began supplementing his by-the-book RCMP training with on-the-ground teaching from the community. “Those lessons came all the way up until even now and we’re still learning,” he said.

Melting Tallow became acting police chief of the Blood Tribe in 2016 and took the role permanently in 2018. “There’s never been anybody who has grown up in the system, so to speak, who’s taken over the lead,” he said.

The BTPS record, or lack thereof, on deadly use of force is noteworthy even for a small and rural service, Laming said. “It just highlights the cohesiveness of the relationship between police officers and the community.” He’s researching use of force by Canadian police and the experiences of Indigenous and Black community members when interacting with officers. His own database has found that over two years, 2018–2019, police in Alberta shot at people in 39 separate incidents, killing 14.

“Look at the roots of First Nation policing—you wanted people from the community, right?” Melting Tallow said. “So when you know somebody, even if they’re pointing a gun back at you, you might be poised to [shoot], but you give that second thought.” Several recent initiatives were designed to further embed Blood police in the community. Starting in 2017, new BTPS recruits are trained at Lethbridge College instead of the RCMP academy in Regina. Local elders teach cadets about Blackfoot history and culture, colonialism and the legacy of the residential school system. “When [cadets] become police officers there’s a connection already there,” Melting Tallow said. “They seek out those elders for more information. The learning is always continuous.”

At the end of 2017 Melting Tallow rented rooms at a conference centre in Lethbridge and invited his staff, police commissioners, elders, band councillors and other community leaders for a week-long brainstorm session about the future of the reserve’s police service. The discussions focused on the Declaration of Elders, the Kainayssini, which is the Blood Tribe’s constitution and provides a set of guiding principles for the Kainai people. Three values were singled out for the police: Iiyika’kimat, which means try hard or persevere; Ainnakowa, the Blackfoot term for respect; and Kimmapiiyipitsinni, compassion.

“Compassion,” Melting Tallow explains. “You’ve got to have that. We’re not just going to fill our cells and put everybody in jail. It’s not going to work, because it hasn’t worked for 100 years.” The new values are displayed on a plaque in his office. They’ve also been painted on the side of every marked police vehicle.

William Singer III  is an artist and activist who has spent most of his 56 years living on the Blood Reserve. He belongs to a variety of advocacy groups, including Idle No More, Community in Unity, the American Indian Movement and the Oldman Watershed Council. He also organizes his own o’tapi’sin aohkanooyaawa, or people’s gatherings. He held one on the reserve this past Canada Day in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

I asked Singer if he saw the video of Allan Adam, chief of the Fort Chipewyan First Nation, getting tackled and punched by an RCMP officer outside a casino in Fort McMurray in March of 2020. “When I see that, I always think, ‘Well, that could be me,’” he said.

Singer summed up his relationship with the RCMP by describing an illustration by Everett Soop, an Indigenous cartoonist and essayist whose work appeared in the Kainai News in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Me and My Shadow” was one of Soop’s first published cartoons and depicts a caricature of an Indigenous man whose shadow is in the unmistakable silhouette of a Mountie in uniform.

Singer spent seven years in residential schools and was forced to keep a closely cropped brush cut. “I didn’t like that. I felt like I was a different person,” he said. “Every family member had long hair, really long hair. So for me that was a tradition that I wanted to keep going.” His father warned him that long hair would make him a target for police.

“When I was 16, I started having run-ins with the RCMP here on the reserve, either in Fort Macleod, Cardston or Lethbridge.” It got worse when he started driving. “I would get followed. I would get hassled.” And when he was in his early 20s, his cousin, Chester Heavy Runner Jr., was shot and killed by a Lethbridge police officer.

Singer said his interactions with the RCMP have improved recently. Officers from the Cardston detachment support him when he organizes an event. “But it’s just that understanding that they’re on the other side of the road in a different place. And I’m on this side. It’s a completely different world.”

He’s not talking about a metaphorical road. The Blood Reserve is bordered by three rivers: the Oldman to the north, the Belly to the west and the St. Mary to the east. The south border runs horizontally along the line of Highway 5. On a map, the reserve looks like someone spilled a glass of water that flowed freely across the paper on three sides, but encountered a hard and fast barrier at the bottom. Step north across Highway 5 and you’re in Moses Lake, a small community where many struggle with homelessness, poverty and addiction. Step south and you’re in prosperous, teetotalling Cardston.

An Aboriginal Peoples Television Network documentary from 2019 chronicled the ways Indigenous people experience racism in Cardston. “Whether or not we’re in the right, we’re always in the wrong—no matter what the situation is,” Singer said, adding he’s grateful the Blood Tribe has its own dedicated police service. “Not only are they here on the reserve and they’re some of our community members, but there’s an understanding of the climate that we live under.”

Every once in awhile a BTPS officer stops by to visit Singer and his wife on their property about 13 km north of Moses Lake. The last time was in early 2020 at the outset of the pandemic. “They just came by to see how I was doing—if I had food, if I was okay, if I was depressed,” he said. The officer mentioned community resources that were available if he needed help dealing with grief or just needed someone to talk to. “They take their time to talk to you because this is their community,” he said.

As the director of the Kainai Wellness Centre, Terri-Lynn Fox oversees a variety of community and counselling services on the Blood Reserve. “They need to be more visible,” she said of BTPS police. They’re always invited to participate in the centre’s events but rarely come. “Family violence has to do with policing,” Fox said. “Missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls has to do with policing. Residential schools and all the effects have to do with policing.” But even though she’s frustrated by the lack of engagement, Fox understands that the BTPS are stretched thin. “They do the best they can given the resources they have.”

In 2014 the Auditor General of Canada issued a detailed analysis of the FNPP that revealed a fundamental disconnect between theory and practice. The federal government never intended for the FNPP to fully fund police services in First Nations communities. The goal was to enhance existing police with Indigenous officers, who would provide community-oriented services. But five of the 10 self-administered services surveyed for the AG’s report said they had totally replaced the provincial police in their communities.

Public Safety Canada responded to the AG report by updating the terms and conditions of the FNPP to better reflect the reality on the ground.

The most recent update, in 2018, defines self-administered First Nation services as providing “day-to-day, local police services.” The program doesn’t fund specialized units, such as investigative teams or forensic services. For anything beyond a frontline response, First Nation police are supposed to reach out to the agency outlined in the Provincial Police Services Agreement—the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police or the Sûreté du Québec.

“We would be calling [the RCMP] more if we knew that they would come,” said Dale Cox, chief of the Lakeshore Regional Police Service (LRPS). “We don’t call because we know they’re not able to—they don’t have the capacity either. So we do the best we can.” Cox has been an officer for 43 years, including three decades with the RCMP.

With a homicide, Cox said the RCMP will do the investigation without question. “After that it starts to get very unclear and it falls to the discretion of the RCMP if they will attend, or if they have the resources to attend,” he said. When I talked to Cox in late October, his officers were working on a fatal hit and run as well as conducting longer-term drug investigations with possible connections to organized crime. “All that translates into more officer time spent doing the files, which keeps snowballing—you keep getting further and further behind, because while you’re doing that, calls are still coming in,” Cox said. Other police services in Canada are funded for specialized units that take over an investigation so frontline officers can focus on the next call.

Melting Tallow described a similar dynamic on the Blood reserve. Some investigations inevitably get shelved because officers can’t follow up in a timely manner, which leads to an erosion of trust in the community. The BTPS was recently funded for an additional five officers, bringing the total to 37. Instead of adding to the front line, Melting Tallow is creating an investigative unit. He plans to have the five-officer team operational by April 2021.

Dwayne Zacharie has done something similar with the Kahnawake Peacekeepers, which have a three-member investigative unit. But he said First Nations services make sacrifices to fund these necessary resources, such as paying officers across the service a lower salary, because the FNPP doesn’t recognize specialty units as a legitimate expense.

Tsuut’ina police are in a unique situation—they have a close working relationship with the Calgary Police Service and the RCMP. Tsuut’ina’s band government also supplements their budget; the FNPP funds 10 officers and the nation another 16. The service has grown, said police chief Keith Blake, in anticipation of an influx of visitors expected with a $4.5-billion project that will include 1,200 acres of retail, office and tourist amenities along the ring road in southwest Calgary.

The FNPP was created to encourage Indigenous officers to work and live in the same community over their career. This would allow officers to build relationships and trust. But demanding workloads, lower pay, fewer benefits and a dearth of opportunities for career advancement have led to burnout and high turnover. Six of the Lakeshore Police’s 13 officers left in 2019. That was an unusually bad year, but officer retention is a struggle for First Nation services across Canada. An officer with BTPS told me he recently crunched some numbers and discovered that 80 per cent of their new hires leave after three years.

Cox is proud of the relationship that LRPS officers have cultivated with the community, but he added: “It’s hard to put on fire prevention talks when you’re always putting out fires.”

First Nations police services are funded through agreements between the band, province and federal government. All three chiefs of Alberta’s self-administered First Nations services said the three levels of government rarely make it to the table for meaningful negotiations. This means the terms of old agreements limp forward year after year with last-minute, one-year extensions. It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t know if you can keep the lights on next year. 

On the same day I talked to Melting Tallow in his office, which is in one of two mobile trailers added to the station in 2016, Governor General Julie Payette was in the Senate chamber in Ottawa delivering the throne speech to open the second session of the 43rd Parliament. Under the heading “Addressing Systemic Racism,” Payette pledged that the federal government would “accelerate work to co-develop a legislative framework for First Nations policing as an essential service.”

The report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, released in June 2019, called for a similar reform.

Weeks after the throne speech, Alberta introduced Bill 38, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act 2020, which Justice Minister Kaycee Madu said would formally recognize First Nations police services in legislation.

Tsuut’ina police say the province is acknowledging their worth. “We have the same training that’s required, we have the same qualifications and recertifications, our standards and audits occur every two to three years like every other police service,” chief Blake told media. “Now we’re actually being recognized, and that means a great deal to our officers and the community.”

A BTPS statement outlined how Bill 38 would provide more stability and security. It also noted that existing systemic inequities make it difficult to offer the community the service it deserves or provide employees with the support they require. “We have not had access to the same resources or opportunities as our policing partners,” the statement read. 

If First Nations police are classified as an essential service, funding could improve. Melting Tallow said the current model feels like a lottery. “Is it census Is it crime rate?” He has no idea what criteria Public Safety Canada uses to decide which service gets what sum of money. A PSC spokesperson seemed to confirm this assessment in an email. “Introducing legislation that makes Indigenous policing an essential service would require the government to develop an adequate, sustained and consistent funding framework for these services, rather than making them rely on discretionary funding.”

After I spoke with Melting Tallow, Sergeant Jim Bennett took me for a tour of the reserve in an unmarked pickup truck. It was his first day in uniform after a four-month hiatus. “I’ve actually been off on injury, a back injury, and I’m on a graduated return to work,” he told me as we headed south out of Standoff on Highway 2. The warm weather so late into September had translated into bumper crops and a busy harvest for farms on the reserve. We passed several immense combines out in the fields.

Bennett is in his early 40s, bald, with a sturdy brown beard. The gregarious officer started his career with the RCMP in Whitecourt, but wanted to be closer to his son and family so applied for a job with the BTPS in 2009. He grew up in Raymond, a 45-minute drive east of Standoff. Bennett told me he’d been in four fights as a police officer over the past 11 years. The last one happened at the end of May on a nightshift in a cell at the station.

“It took three of us to control somebody,” he said. “They had overdosed on fentanyl and were hiding stuff.” After a paramedic treated the person with an IV of Naloxone, officers tried to find the drugs. They confiscated three hunks of purple fentanyl, but Bennett slipped a disc and pinched a nerve in his back during the struggle. “I’ll never be pain free—I’m tolerable,” he said.

We pulled off the highway onto a winding residential street. Almost all the bungalows had the same rectangular shape. Some were well maintained and looked new. Others were boarded up or had an array of vehicles parked haphazardly out front. Dogs wandered the street, but we didn’t see any people. “Down here our standard calls are intoxication, overdoses, domestics, assaults.” Bennett estimated that about half of his calls for service are from Moses Lake.

We stopped in front of the Moses Lake Shelter, a squat blue building next to an abandoned church. For the first time since Bennett had begun working for the BTPS, the shelter was open in September. The organization received emergency funding to maintain services during the pandemic. Normally the facility is closed April 1–October 1, which is partly why a few years ago a tent city sprang up on the east side of Highway 2.

Bennett is not a typical officer for the BTPS, or probably for any police service for that matter. He has learned to speak Blackfoot and has been adopted into over a dozen families on the reserve. In 2012 he was presented with a feathered headdress by the Kainai Warrior Society, which he described as a kind of veterans association for the Blood Tribe. “Besides my marriage, obviously my wedding day and the births of my children, the next-greatest experience I’ve had is the day I received my headdress,” he said.

The sergeant has undertaken an array of volunteer projects in the community. The most recent included raising $40,000 to build five tiny homes so people have somewhere safe to sleep when the shelter closes every spring. Bennett earned the Officer of the Year award in 2014 from the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association. Two years later, in February of 2016, he was sitting at his desk at the station struggling to type a single sentence. “I tried for half an hour to type one word and I was just so bombed out,” he said. “I can’t even describe it. It’s just a terrible, terrible thing to go through.”

Bennett was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and compassion fatigue. “I have two sons now and two daughters, and to go in some of these homes and see this poverty and see the things that officers see, especially out here, it’s difficult,” he said. “It took a toll on me, so I needed a year off.” He burned through his mental health benefits within a month and after only three sessions with a psychologist. Bennett eventually found a program through Canada Mental Health. “So here I am, a serving police officer in Canada with PTSD now having to seek out a free service,” he said. “And that’s how I got better.” The BTPS has since allocated more resources to these kind of benefits, Bennett said, so another officer doesn’t have that same experience. But that decision meant sacrifices to other parts of the budget. “That’s partly why people quit, because we’re underfunded. We do way more with less,” he said.

We crossed Highway 5 out of Moses Lake and took a brief drive through Cardston. Bennett pointed out a group of five men from the reserve standing on a corner in front of an historic brick building. He knew them all by name. “I’ve probably arrested these people 100 times each,” he said.

I asked if it’s ever frustrating, apprehending the same person for the same offence time and time again. Bennett took a deep breath. I got the sense the question annoyed him. “It’s not—because we’ll never know what they’ve been through, why they are the way they are,” he said. People with addictions always have a backstory. The Blood Tribe sergeant was not here to judge. He was here to help.

The post Ask Questions First, Shoot Never appeared first on Alberta Views.

“News like that will get you out of bed fast,” said Yellow Old Woman. He was aware that the vote was coming, but had not held out much hope that the dozen personal items that once belonged to the revered Blackfoot leader would ever make it back home. Half an hour later Tony Eccles, the curator of ethnography at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter, the place where Crowfoot’s regalia has been for the last 142 years, also called to share the news.

That vote marked a pivotal step in a journey that had begun in a storeroom at the RAMM in November of 2013. The sad thing, Yellow Old Woman explained, was that some of the people he set out with on the journey have since died. “The ceremonial men and women who attended the negotiating of that time, more than half have passed away. So that’s how long it’s been.”

In the fall of 2013 Yellow Old Woman, a ceremonial elder and the head of repatriation for Siksika, travelled to England as part of an eight-person delegation from the four First Nations in Alberta and Montana—Kainai, Siksika, Piikani and South Peigan—that comprise the Blackfoot Confederacy. The group was part of a research project called The Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums Network, which also included academics and staff from the University of Aberdeen, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at Cambridge and the RAMM. The idea for the trip was inspired by another project, where five Blackfoot buckskin shirts from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University had been loaned for exhibitions at the Glenbow and Galt museums in Alberta. The exhibitions included opportunities for First Nations people to handle and try on the shirts in what were much more intimate experiences than your typical everything-behind-glass visit to a museum.

The goal of these collaborations between First Nations and museums was twofold. Blackfoot elders and ceremonialists provided cultural information about the artifacts that dramatically improved how they were curated, described and cared for by the museums. And Indigenous people got access to invaluable cultural material that had long since vanished from their communities. The projects were an attempt to bridge disparate worldviews of the purpose, nature and provenance of the same set of historic objects.

Museums legally own their collections or, as in the case of the RAMM, steward them on behalf of governments. These institutions have extensive expertise and resources to preserve and protect the integrity of artifacts in perpetuity. And museums such as the MAA, RAMM and Pitt Rivers welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors every year with a mandate to showcase the world.

For First Nations peoples, however, many of the artifacts in question are not inanimate objects. Some are sacred and essential for carrying out spiritual ceremonies. They have immense potential for revitalizing cultural practices that strengthen identity and empower communities. Also, many of these artifacts were stolen or sold under extreme duress. They’re the spoils of colonialism. Some of the oldest artifacts from North American Indigenous nations are in museums overseas. Items from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were sent far away to wealthy patrons and private collections that then ended up in museums. Laura Peers, an anthropologist who co-created the Blackfoot Shirts Project with Alison Brown, estimates that thousands of Blackfoot artifacts live in English and European museums.

“If you think about the history of museum-collecting practices and what museums try to do, there’s been this idea of museums as places where knowledge is created and to a degree… controlled, with cataloging and classification and all those kinds of things,” said Brown. “But when you take that away and confront people with items that are related to their heritage, particularly if they’ve experienced colonial forces… these things can become triggers for all kinds of stories in history and memory, and reminders of what’s not been passed on as well as what could still be.”

The vote by Exeter councillors in early April to return Crowfoot’s regalia occurred at a time of active debate across England and Europe about whether and how museums should decolonize their collections. Arts Council England had commissioned the Institute of Art and Law in February to develop new guidance for UK museums on repatriation. The report is scheduled for release in the fall of 2020 and will outline the ethical and legal considerations, as well as best-practice examples, involved in making decisions on how and when to return objects to their originating communities. The report follows on the heels of new policies in France, Germany and Holland that guide the repatriation of colonial-era artifacts.

Yellow Old Woman remembers the exact moment back in 2013 in the RAMM’s storage room when the conservation-grade cabinet drawer slid open to reveal the regalia. “It was really emotional,” he said. The group sang a ceremonial song to honour Chief Crowfoot and smoked a pipe. “The songs that we sing to honour chiefs all of a sudden became very powerful and brought tears to our elders.”

The artifacts include a buckskin shirt with scalp hair, leggings with red feathers and fringes, beaded pouches, a steel hunting knife lashed with the front part of a bear’s jaw, a bundle of feathers and a deer-hide necklace strung with grizzly bear claws, beads, animal teeth and brass studs. Chief Crowfoot’s bow is in the RAMM’s permanent gallery as part of the Americas display, but the rest of the regalia is in storage. The museum undertook a major conservation project in the late 1990s to restore and protect the artifacts. The shirt and leggings were last displayed in 2012 as part of an exhibition called “Warriors of the Plains” that was created and toured by the British Museum.

Yellow Old Woman said Chief Crowfoot could have worn many of the items when he signed Treaty 7 on behalf of the Siksika Nation in September of 1877.

He described how the Blackfoot elders quickly realized that some of the material had been misidentified. But they decided against revealing some of that information to museum staff. “We were reluctant to share too much,” Yellow Old Woman said. “Some stuff we [didn’t] expose because of the sacredness. It has ties to the land, to the spirit of the animal, and we believe those are living things and they give us power.”

Given the spiritual importance of the regalia, Yellow Old Woman wonders why Chief Crowfoot would have given it to Cecil Denny, an officer with the North West Mounted Police who befriended the chief and was staying in his camp during the time of the signing of the treaty. Denny’s sister loaned the artifacts to the RAMM in 1878 and the museum purchased them in 1904 for £10. The Blackfoot have a strong tradition of hospitality and giving gifts, which Yellow Old Woman said probably played a role in the exchange. Also, Crowfoot had lost many of his children to disease and often took others under his wing. “He adopted a lot, and that’s basically what he did with this individual,” Yellow Old Woman said.

The day after the visit to the RAMM storage room in November 2013, the Blackfoot delegation met with museum and city officials for a public panel discussion. “They all agreed that the material they had should be returned to the Blackfoot,” Yellow Old Woman said. But museum staff also cautioned that it would take time and further discussions before Crowfoot’s regalia could be repatriated.

Many Guns explained that Crowfoot earned the respect and leadership of his people because of his remarkable physical courage (he once killed a grizzly bear with a spear) and his keen instincts for diplomacy and peacemaking. He was the primary negotiator for the Blackfoot Confederacy when establishing the terms of Treaty 7 with the representatives of the British Crown. The chief of each of the five participating First Nations—Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Nakoda and Tsuut’ina—all signed the treaty, but it was Crowfoot who laid the groundwork for the consensus.

“He was able to understand the bigger, really bigger, long-term picture,” Many Guns said. “We ended up with even more constraints and more difficulties, but I believe if he had taken another way, there’s a good possibility we wouldn’t even exist today.”

Above and beyond his prowess in battle and proclivity for peacemaking, Crowfoot is a significant figure for the Blackfoot because he exemplified an important cultural value. Many Guns explained that the wavy line in Blackfoot imagery symbolizes how change is an ineluctable part of life. Learning to navigate change is considered an invaluable skill. “Let’s say you get diagnosed with diabetes; it’s being able to pick up that disease and walk with it with pride,” she said. “Let’s say you were going through changes, you’ve lost your family; it’s picking up that disaster and walking with pride so that you can show your children how to deal with change.”

Crowfoot was born in 1830 and grew up when the Blackfoot tribes controlled a vast area of the northwestern plains from the Rocky Mountains in the west into what is now east-central Saskatchewan to the east, the North Saskatchewan River to the north and the Yellowstone River in the south. He emerged as an influential leader as European settlers brought catastrophe—smallpox epidemics, the whisky trade and the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo—undermining a way of life that had flourished for thousands of years.

“Everything in their world was gone or missing or no longer existed,” Many Guns said of the circumstances for the Blackfoot leading up to the Treaty 7 negotiations. She described how the Kainai and their chief, Red Crow, were late getting to the negotiations at Blackfoot Crossing in the fall of 1877. The tribe had gone south into the US to try and find a herd of buffalo to hunt. They ended up having to kill their horses and eat them, so they walked into camp.

“That’s when they knew there was no future, the buffalo were gone,” she said. “Crowfoot brought us through one of the most horrific periods in our history, and every part of his memory is really important. It reminds us of our resilience. It reminds us of our ability to change and adapt.”

In July 2014, as part of the Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums Project, Alison Brown, Tony Eccles and Anita Herle, a curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, visited Alberta and Montana. They spent two days at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, which is on the Siksika reserve an hour east of Calgary. The museum itself is built into a ridge overlooking the river valley where the treaty was signed. The building took 20 years and $30-million to construct. The architect, Ron Goodfellow, worked closely with Blackfoot elders to incorporate 17 cultural symbols into every facet of the design. Many Guns described Blackfoot Crossing as a story woven into the shape of a building. The architectural approach reflected the way Blackfoot stories and culture are imbricated with the landscape.

Jack Royal is the chief executive officer of the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Council, but was the president and general manager of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park from when it opened in 2007 until the fall of 2017. He was there in the summer of 2014 and helped tour the guests from England. They explored the museum, its displays, on-site storage and research facilities. They also walked to Cannon Hill, where the treaty was signed, and visited Chief Crowfoot’s last tipi site and grave, which are all connected by a network of trails through the river valley.

It seemed like everything was in place after the visit, but then Royal started to get a series of emails from Eccles at RAMM. Questions about storage capacity, insurance and environmental controls. “We would send him an email and he wouldn’t respond for two or three months at a time,” Royal said. And when Royal would finally get a response it would include another question that would start the cycle again. Blackfoot Crossing submitted a formal repatriation request in 2015 and secured a grant from the Alberta government to fund the costs of safely transporting the artifacts. But as months turned into years, Royal said he encountered what felt like one arbitrary roadblock after another. When he left the organization in 2017, he was doubtful the regalia would ever return. “Obviously I am happy these things are finally coming home,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Camilla Hampshire, the museum manager at the RAMM, explained in an email that all those questions were part of their standard due diligence for all repatriation requests. Organizations are asked to provide information about governance, financial position, business plans and what they intend to do with the repatriated material. “It helps us compile a report and make a recommendation to councillors,” Hampshire wrote. “Blackfoot Crossing provided RAMM with a business plan for 2015–16 that suggested it was in an uncertain financial position, but none of the other documentation requested.”

Daryl Betenia, director of collections for the Glenbow, has been helping out behind the scenes since 2014. She provided advice to Blackfoot Crossing about various professional museum standards and technical details such as the right environmental conditions for exhibit cases. Betenia and Joanne Schmidt, the Indigenous Studies curator at the Glenbow, had a meeting at Blackfoot Crossing in May of 2019 to see where they were planning to display Crowfoot’s regalia.

“We were all incredibly impressed by what they had done. I think they could probably sell that model to other museums,” Betenia said. “Within a larger gallery, they created a separate space, which they were able to seal off and engineer so it’s able to maintain the appropriate humidity and they can control light levels.”

She too has been in contact with staff from the RAMM about the repatriation. “There appeared to be a great deal of concern on the part of the museum and Exeter about Blackfoot Crossing,” she said, particularly about appropriate museum standards and a lack of accreditation. “They were very focused on ensuring that if they do repatriate something, it goes to another museum and it gets appropriate museum care.”

Robert Janes, the director of the Glenbow at the time, and Gerald Conaty, the curator of Indigenous Studies, worked closely with Blackfoot leaders for over a decade before the release of that material. It was a decisive and ground-breaking decision that precipitated the creation of Alberta’s First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Act in 2000, which is still the only Canadian law on the books that deals with repatriation. The Blackfoot First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Regulation followed in 2004 as the means for applying the legislation.

Betenia said that at first she worried how the release of all those artifacts would affect the future and mission of the Glenbow. The museum was founded in 1966 by Eric Harvie, an oilman and philanthropist, who wanted to present the world to Alberta. “He was building these collections, and particularly international collections, as a way to offer an opportunity to Albertans to see things they would not otherwise see.” Releasing items out of the museum, and perhaps initiating a chain reaction that would hollow out the collection, could contradict that vision. But 20 years later no flood of repatriation requests has ever materialized. Betenia estimates they receive six requests every year and said they’ve proven to be a thoughtful and respectful experience for everyone involved. However, the regulation only covers Blackfoot items and has yet to be expanded to include First Nations from other parts of Alberta and Canada.

Betenia’s experience with repatriation trans-formed her perception of the role of museums and their relationship to the communities they serve. “We are stewards of a lot of this material rather than owners,” Betenia said. “These pieces are seen as living things that need to go home. I don’t think it’s our place to argue with that.”

I met Chief Ouray Crowfoot at the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Office in southeast Calgary at the end of May. He had just wrapped up a biweekly meeting with his counterparts from the Kainai, Piikani and South Peigan nations. We settled into chairs on opposite sides of a large boardroom on the third floor. Bottles of hand sanitizer were spaced evenly around the horseshoe-shaped arrangement of tables.

“It’s been a whirlwind,” Ouray said. “I’ve only been chief six months, and three of that’s COVID months.” His father is from the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; Ouray speaks with a strong southern accent, as though each sentence is gently easing back in a recliner chair until it finds the position of maximum comfort. His mother was Amelia Crowfoot Clark. Her father was Cecil Crowfoot. Cecil’s father was Joe Crowfoot. Joe’s father was Bear Ghost. Bear Ghost’s father was Chief Crowfoot.

“Actually, [his name] is Isapo-Muxika, which means Crow Indian’s Big Foot,” said Ouray. He explained that his great-great-great grandfather’s name was truncated during the treaty signing by an official who decreed it too long and cumbersome. The same goes for many of his forebears, who were given biblical names because the Indian agent couldn’t be bothered to learn or translate their original Blackfoot names.

Ouray, who turned 45 the day after our interview, was wearing a pink dress shirt. He looked the part of an energetic young politician. He has an MBA and a master’s degree in accounting and has spent most of his career in the financial industry, working for global corporations such as Ernst&Young and KPMG. “Five years ago, four years ago even, I had no desire, no plans to move to Canada or no plans or desires to be chief.” Ouray returned to Siksika to help his mom after she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in October of 2019, a month before the nomination day for the election of the new chief and council.

“We’re going to do a lot of great things with Siksika, and I can say one of the big things already is bringing this shirt back home,” he said. I asked him if he thought the letters that Premier Jason Kenney sent to various British officials, including the mayor of Exeter and the director of Arts Council England, in late 2019 and on behalf of Blackfoot Crossing had tipped the balance for the vote to repatriate the regalia. “Jason Kenney more or less pissed them off,” Ouray said. “I think he might have hurt it more than helped it.”

In early 2020 Ouray started having regular phone conversations with Camilla Hampshire, the manager of the RAMM. He often received calls from Hampshire first thing in the morning because of the seven-hour time difference. “Every question she had, every concern she had, I addressed it.” The chief and the museum manager first developed a rapport and then a solution. The RAMM would repatriate the regalia to the Siksika Nation, which would then release it to Blackfoot Crossing. “I think [it helped] that I was a chief and a Crowfoot descendant and gave them the rationale and let them know who I am,” he said. “I want it to be mutually beneficial. So when we go over there, we’re going to take a big crew. We’re going to have a big delegation. We’ll give them a gift.”

Ouray mentioned he had his eye on another personal item that belonged to his great-great-great grandfather. But it’s not at the RAMM. Most pictures of Crowfoot show a knot of some kind tied into his hair at the top of his head. It’s an owl’s head, and Ouray’s uncle, Strater Crowfoot, has it. “My uncle Strater was chief when they started doing those repatriations through the Glenbow and he got that,” he said.

The historian Hugh Dempsey wrote a biography of Crowfoot that includes a description of the owl’s head. Three Suns, Crowfoot’s predecessor as chief, gave it to him when he was a young warrior. Three Suns told him it would be his protection and he would become a great leader if he always carried it. After Crowfoot died in April of 1890 at Blackfoot Crossing, people sang mourning songs to the owl’s head in the hope it could bring him back to life. And then somehow, at some point, it ended up behind glass or in a drawer in a storage room at a museum.

Ouray hasn’t asked his uncle yet for Chief Crowfoot’s owl’s head. He’s waiting for the right moment. “I want to be able to feel like I earned it,” he said. “Respect is a gift earned, not given.” 

Doug Horner is a Calgary-based writer and editor. He won the 2019 Alberta Magazine Award for best essay.

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I met Chief Adam for an interview in Edmonton in late August 2019. Elected ACFN chief for the first time in 2007, he’s won four band elections and consistently raised concerns, sometimes in court, about the negative impacts of oil sands development on treaty rights, climate change and public health—including allegations of a cancer cluster in Fort Chipewyan. That fight made him one of the most recognizable people in Alberta. When Hollywood film director James Cameron visited the province in 2010, worried about the speed of bitumen extraction in northern Alberta, he met with the chief. Jane Fonda did the same. So did Leonardo DiCaprio and Neil Young. In 2014 Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the oil sands “the world’s dirtiest oil,” and then later sat with Chief Adam at a press conference in Fort McMurray in which the South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate told Albertans that “only those who want to be blind can’t see that we are sitting on a powder keg” in the oil sands.

At a restaurant in Edmonton, Chief Adam, now in his early 50s, looked much the same as in the news photos with celebrities. His long salt-and-pepper hair was tied back in a ponytail. He wore blue jeans and black sneakers. A long scar marks his right cheek and he speaks softly and calmly, with an intense, direct stare when making a point he wants you to hear.

“I’m not an environmentalist,” he says, right off the top. “Environmentalists take the view of ‘The view is beautiful, the view shouldn’t be touched.’ I’m a hunter-gatherer. So I like the land a lot, sure, the beauty of the land. Will I destroy the land No. But I hunt and gather food and I do that to provide for my family and to continue and carry on what I’ve been taught as a kid—and I love it; I love the way wild food tastes. But the fish is contaminated. The birds are contaminated. The moose is contaminated. The beavers, the rats [muskrats], the bears—every wild food we eat is contaminated. But we still eat it. That’s why we had to adapt and try to make wise decisions.” 

Viewed from the outside, Chief Adam’s journey is ironic—a poster boy for oil and gas protest becomes an advocate for industry. That outside perception—that he’s either on one side or the other—has brought him a barrage of criticism. In 2014, after Adam stood on a stage in Toronto with Neil Young, on a trip for which the ACFN received $55,000 from Tides Canada, Ezra Levant and other staff at Rebel Media called the chief a “prop,” and worse, for environmental groups. Four years later Chief Adam told CBC, “I am tired of fighting…. Let’s move on and let’s start building a pipeline and start moving the oil.” In response, Eriel Deranger, an ACFN member who once worked for the band and is now executive director of Indigenous Climate Action—an NGO opposed to TMX—said Chief Adam and other pro-TMX First Nation leaders did “sell out.” She added, though, that the real “betrayal” is from “a system that puts the rights of companies and industry above the rights of Indigenous peoples.”

Chief Adam says his underlying values haven’t changed. Downstream from the oil sands in Treaty 8, he says, “We see our food being contaminated. So we have to advocate, and say [to governments and industry], ‘You’re f**king up our food source here. What the hell’s wrong with you?’” The Canadian constitution legally requires governments to respect Aboriginal and treaty rights, he notes, so: “If we have to fight in the courts, well, we’re doing it for a reason.” At the same time, he says, “I’m not a radical…. I want to feed my family, like everybody else.” The ACFN would prefer to “work together” with government and industry, he says, to strengthen environmental protections and grow the economy. It’s for this reason that the ACFN supported the federal Liberal government’s Bill C-69—which mandates broader environmental impact assessments—despite opposition from NDP and UCP governments in Alberta. “If we get this right, and I know it’s the right approach,” he says, “it’s to the benefit of all Albertans. And Canadians will reap the benefits.”

The financial side of that approach has attracted attention since Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government announced it would buy TMX in May 2018. Three competing Indigenous-led bids to invest in the pipeline quickly emerged. The Iron Coalition, co-founded by Chief Adam, wants to purchase TMX and is offering First Nations and Métis communities in Alberta an “ownership interest” that would deliver profits back to the investing groups. Project Reconciliation wants to obtain a syndicated bond—a loan—of $7.6-billion to buy 51 per cent of the pipeline project and use the eventual profits to create a sovereign wealth fund for Indigenous communities in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Farther west, the Western Indigenous Pipeline Group also wants to buy a majority stake for 55 bands along the pipeline route, mostly in BC.

The scale of these proposals is unusual, as is the idea of Indigenous ownership of Canadian oil and gas infrastructure. For most of oil sands history that was unheard of. The first large-scale commercial oil sands plant—Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd.—opened in 1967 north of Fort McMurray. Through corporate merger it became Suncor in 1979, one year after the second behemoth oil sands plant, Syncrude, opened nearby. Today there are over 120 operating oil sands projects in northern Alberta. To date those projects have disturbed 895 km² of land, including 220 km² dedicated to toxic tailings ponds—an area about one-third the size of Edmonton. But the oil sands have also generated a bonanza of wealth, some of which has trickled to Indigenous communities in jobs and cash. As Sheila Innes, a Suncor executive responsible for aboriginal relations, said in a public talk in November 2019, “traditionally” the model for Indigenous involvement in the industry was through “long-term [impact] benefit agreements,” and hiring “Indigenous employees [and] we would procure from their businesses.”

That model produced various outcomes for Indigenous communities in the region. South of Fort McMurray, the primarily Métis community of Conklin is adjacent to Christina Lake, an oil sands project designed to produce 210,000 barrels of oil per day for Cenovus. Despite the proximity to wealth, Conklin’s unemployment rate is four times higher than the broader Wood Buffalo region—a 2018 report found that roughly one-third of residents contend with “unstable living conditions.”

Comparatively, the ACFN—a band government with about 1,200 members and eight reserves north of Fort McMurray by Lake Athabasca—have prospered financially. While they’ve brought international attention to downstream pollution and potential health impacts from oil sands development, the ACFN have also started businesses—integrated within their corporation, Acden—that provide everything from work camp catering to environmental consulting to engineering services for oil sands operators. Only a small portion of the profits comes to the band. But the ACFN have also signed IBAs—agreements outlining the financial benefits and, in some cases, environmental protections a First Nation will receive in exchange for their support of a development—with some oil sands operators. With that money they’ve started a trust, and Chief Adam says the ACFN now “have the capacity for self-government”—understood as financial self-sufficiency.

“We’ve thrived from the oil sands,” he says. “We’ve thrived from the destruction. Our trust fund is well over $60-million now. Our companies are doing well in the oil sands.”

“We as First Nations have to either stand with Canada or stand against them.”

They aren’t the only ones. In November 2017, in what industry news sites hailed as a “ground-breaking” deal, the Fort McKay First Nation and the Mikisew Cree Nation paid $503-million to purchase a 49 per cent interest in Suncor’s East Tank Farm, a bitumen and diluent storage, blending and cooling facility for the Fort Hills mine. Suncor’s Sheila Innes said that with the energy industry downturn, the First Nations were “looking for a long-term, stable revenue source,” and the company was open to jointly owning the project with First Nations with whom they had a relationship. Because of Suncor’s involvement, the bond market gave the First Nations low interest rates on the loan, said Fort McKay Chief Jim Boucher. He called it “a sweet deal.”

That “sweet deal” established the viability of an economic model where Indigenous people are owners, not just service providers in the energy industry. Politicians took notice. In November 2019 Alberta’s Minister of Energy, Sonya Savage, and Minister of Indigenous Relations, Rick Wilson, both spoke at the National Coalition of Chiefs Energy and Natural Resources Summit at the Grey Eagle Casino near Calgary. Chief Adam did not attend. But other speakers included researcher Vivian Krause on “anti-Canadian energy activism,” financier W. Brett Wilson promoting the “entrepreneurial mindset,” and Boucher, who told the gathered business and community leaders: “If you rely on government to pay your people, you will not be successful.”

In his speech, minister Wilson praised that message, touting the government’s Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC), a promise by the UCP to provide up to $1-billion in loans and loan guarantees for Indigenous communities “to invest in natural resource projects and related infrastructure.” The minister did not mention that the UCP’s first budget cut Indigenous services by over 18 per cent, cut “climate change initiatives” from $53-million to $0, allocated only an initial $6-million for the AIOC, and cut “science and monitoring” programs across Alberta by over 10 per cent. But he did say, “Indigenous peoples want to be involved in responsible resource development, which helps to dispel the dirty oil myth…. We need you at the table more than ever now.”

“You’ve got to give it to Trudeau,” said Chief Adam, in our interview in Edmonton in 2019. “Albertans say Trudeau doesn’t care about Alberta. But he does. The guy is smart. He did what nobody else would do—he went and bought the pipeline. And he saved Alberta. Why Because now the pipeline is state-owned—Canada’s going to build it.”

 “First Nations [opposed to TMX] are going to send a big lawsuit,” he said. “It’s going to be overturned, and Canada’s going to move ahead with this pipeline. And we as First Nations have to either stand with Canada or stand against them.”

“I choose not to fight with the government at this time,” he said. “Instead of sitting on the outside, now we have an opportunity that we never had before.”

I asked—given that there are three different Indigenous-led bids to buy TMX—what he thought would happen: Would the ACFN stay with the Iron Coalition Would the bids merge

He smiled. The evening before we spoke, Chief Adam was at an ACFN annual general meeting. “There are so many opportunities out there now,” he told me. “The ACFN are not going to invest in TMX. I got that last night from our members. It doesn’t make sense to us. We have too much going on in our own region—there’s more than enough already. So, we’re going to be pulling out of the Iron Coalition. But we will still give our support…. Other First Nations need TMX more than I do.”

I asked why they would aban-don what is potentially a long-term, stable source of revenue.

“Because I’m working on a deal for a refinery,” he said, citing plans and potential investment partners for a new refinery near Edmonton. “The closer to the oil sands, the less environmental footprint it’ll have,” he said. “We don’t want our people to be living in poverty anymore.”

As Chief Adam suggested, I went to Fort Chipewyan to see the ACFN’s new store. Flying north from Fort McMurray, the nine-passenger Cessna 208 Grand Caravan soared above mines built near the Athabasca River—Syncrude’s Mildred Lake project; Shell’s Jackpine; Suncor’s Fort Hills—a mining district of enormous dark fields with smokestacks and tailings ponds in the wracked earth.

Mildred Lake is among the oil sands projects closest to Fort McMurray. In 2018 Syncrude applied to the Alberta Energy Regulator to expand the open pit mine onto land where Mikisew Cree, Fort McKay First Nation and ACFN band members hunt and harvest, exercising their treaty rights. All three bands agreed to speak against the expansion at the regulatory hearing, but only the ACFN showed up—the other two bands signed last-minute agreements with Syncrude. The AER then approved the expansion in July 2019, ruling that “potential impacts on Athabasca Chipewyan are not enough to outweigh the economic benefits… to Alberta.”

From Chief Adam’s perspective, those “potential impacts” include an elevated risk of cancer. Oil compounds seeping into the river, or rising in the air from smokestacks and sifting down in rain and snow—“a continuous oil spill,” as he puts it—were linked in a 2014 University of Manitoba study to “unusually high concentrations of contaminants [in] fish and animals consumed as part of a traditional diet” in Fort Chipewyan. But not all studies have found the same results. And citizen concern has not historically been enough to stop new oil sands approvals.

Teck’s proposed Frontier project, for instance, was decreed “in the public interest” by a joint federal and provincial environmental review panel. The open pit mine was slated to produce 260,000 barrels of oil per day and disturb 292 km², which would have made it the largest oil sands mine—and the closest to Fort Chipewyan. The panel’s report, released in July 2019, found that impacts on “the asserted rights, use of lands and resources, and culture of Indigenous groups” would be “adverse and significant,” “long term” and “irreversible.” Despite this, 14 Indigenous communities, including the ACFN, signed IBAs with Teck.

“We could have fought with Teck,” said Chief Adam when I asked why he signed. “We could have gone all the way through the hearing. But everybody else had an agreement with them. It looks very bleak going into a hearing when you have no support from other [First Nations]. We had to make a decision on what we’re going to do—are we going to spend a million dollars and get nothing back Because that’s what a hearing costs us—a million dollars, legal fees and everything. And we were geared up for Teck. We were going to give it to them. But we had to weigh our options. I had to go back to the members, the elders first, and get consent to negotiate. And once they’d given the consent to go ahead, there was a lot of animosity, bad feelings. Some of our people didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to fight. But when you’re in a leadership role and you’re given a mandate, you have to follow through on the mandate regardless of your own personal opinion. And that’s what I did. I put aside my personal opinion and… we agreed to do it. It hurt some of my elders. I hurt my people by agreeing to this. But I’m just as hurt as they are. Those documents have my signature…. Do I want to sign something that’s going to mess it all up No. But I’ll put my signature on something that gives hope. And when I say ‘hope,’ I mean we put stipulations in [the IBA] that protect the environment.”

A tenuous trust is easily shaken. The IBA model—Indigenous support of a project, in principle, in exchange for financial benefits and environmental guarantees—works only if federal and provincial governments fulfill regulatory and monitoring obligations. To that end, in December 2019 Chief Adam was in Ottawa, listening to Premier Jason Kenney urge the federal government to give final approval of the Teck Frontier mine—a project that would have emitted between 4 and 6 megatonnes of CO₂ a year, making it much tougher for the Liberal government to meet new federal targets of net-zero emissions by 2050. After Kenney’s speech, Chief Adam talked to CBC journalist David Thurton, who reported “Adam said the Alberta government needs to satisfy fears about the loss of fish, bison and caribou habitat before the federal cabinet makes its decision on the mine at the end of February. Adam has threatened to take legal action if Alberta doesn’t address those concerns.”

On February 23 the UCP government announced an agreement with the ACFN on those environmental issues. But later that same day Teck withdrew its application, citing the lack of a coherent regulatory framework that “reconciles resource development and climate change” in Alberta and Canada.

Back in autumn 2019, a lack of trust was also palpable in Fort Chipewyan, where I got a boat ride on Lake Athabasca with Robert Grandjambe Sr.—a Mikisew Cree tourism operator, trapper and research assistant for scientists doing environmental monitoring and other studies. We caught whitefish and pike for his dog team. “My wife and I eat the fish and ducks,” he said, when I asked. “Maybe we shouldn’t. But we are anyway. It’s a very foggy thing: Is the water safe to drink Are the fish safe to eat We don’t know.”

Founded in 1788 as a fur-trading post in the Peace–Athabasca delta, Fort Chipewyan is notable today for an abundance of ATVs, pickups and new buildings. In the community of 918 primarily ACFN, Mikisew Cree and Métis people, a big aquatic centre opened in 2017, next to a hockey arena that opened in 2009. A 7,500-panel, 2.6-MW solar project is under construction, funded by government grants including $3.3-million from Alberta’s carbon tax fund. While I was there, a government delegation—including Minister of Trans-portation Ric McIver, local UCP MLA Tany Yao, and Don Scott, mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort Chipewyan—flew in for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on a completed $37-million expansion of the water treatment plant. Few locals attended, and three hours after the delegation arrived, they lifted off back to Fort McMurray.

“Companies and government give a lot of what you call ‘shut up money’ around here,” said Grandjambe, when I asked why locals didn’t attend. Staying away “is how people feel. It’s not a united community.”

 Michelle Voyageur, a former ACFN band council member, was less scathing, but agreed with the sense of a complicated distrust. For instance, the ACFN “have had a really shitty relationship with Suncor,” she said, as we walked to the band’s new store. “There was a tank farm proposal that came across our table a couple years ago, and we said ‘Heck no.’ Other nations jumped into bed and joined and we were still ‘No, no, no.’ ”

“It’s so hard,” she said. “I mean, the projects are going to get pushed through no matter what. That’s the sad part.”

From the street, K’ai Tailé Market resembles a large blue warehouse, with “Our Community Grocery” written prominently over the front doors. Inside, as it says, it’s a grocery store, with fresh produce, a fresh-meat section, aisles of goods and a whole wall of freezer space. Colourful signage is written in Dene, Cree and English. Compared to the other store in the hamlet, the Northern, which sells cheaply made clothing and canned food at eye-popping prices, the K’ai Tailé Market is generously stocked, even a touch upscale in product choice, but generally less expensive.

I asked Voyageur if it was true the ACFN started the store because of community fears about local fish and meat contamination.

“It’s true,” she said. “A lot of people are fearful—they barely eat the fish anymore. Here at the store we have whole frozen fish brought in and they’re flying off the shelf. People are buying more meat because they don’t want to consume the wild animals.”

Asked what could be done to get certainty about contamination levels, she said: “Well, there’s been over 100 reports that don’t show this and that. But we weren’t involved. We asked—it’s one of the 88 recommendations from the Jackpine hearing—we wanted a health study here in Fort Chip. Unfortunately it never happened. I don’t know if it will. It’s like it falls on deaf ears.” 

Tadzio Richards is Alberta Views’ associate editor. Send feedback to letters@albertaviews.ca.

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“I don’t know if I could live that long,” she says.

The Kohkom (Cree for “grandmother”), a member of Peace Country’s Lubicon Cree Nation, has already outlived one granddaughter. Dani died four years ago when she was six weeks old, 24 days after having been seized from her mother by provincial officials and placed in a foster home. The foster parents had brought the baby into bed with them in the early morning hours. Shortly thereafter they discovered she was no longer breathing. Alberta’s chief medical examiner ruled the cause of Dani’s death “undetermined.”

Kathy’s account of the day Dani was born in an Edmonton hospital in 2013 is heart-wrenching. The grandmother was drumming in the birthing room with her daughter and son-in-law. Her younger daughter was also there. For 24 hours the family cowered every time the door opened, terrified a child welfare worker would walk in and “kidnap” the baby. Kathy likens the atmosphere in the hospital room to the time when an old boyfriend held her captive, put a gun to her head and played Russian roulette.

At the time of Dani’s birth, her two older sisters had been in government care for two years—apprehended due to a misspoken word on the playground, says Kathy. A child intervention assessor told the family that with Kathy’s support, Dani could stay with her parents, who were in the process of getting their two older girls back (they eventually succeeded). But before any of that could happen, Dani was taken “without explanation,” says Kathy, and placed in a foster home. Kathy’s younger daughter applied for kinship care in a process that was “very invasive and degrading”; the assessor was “surprised when he couldn’t find anything wrong” with the home.

Dani’s aunt received approval—a month after Dani died. Formal child intervention and criminal record checks are a slow process. “We found out later a lot of foster parents get children before they get complete clearance,” says Kathy. “It’s a roll of the dice.”

Kathy doesn’t blame the foster parents for Dani’s death. She holds the system liable.

Kohkom Kathy’s granddaughter is one of 225 children, youth or young adults to have died in the provincial child welfare system since 2008. They died after having been taken away from their parents, ostensibly to protect them from harm. Of these children, youth and young adults, 131 were Indigenous. Only 10 per cent of Alberta children are Indigenous, but they make up 69 per cent of the child welfare system. Indigenous children come into care more often, stay in care longer and are less likely to be returned to their families than their non-Indigenous peers.

Deaths of children in provincial care have been the focus of two Alberta governments, spurred on by separate investigations by local journalists. In late 2013 the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald co-published their “Fatal Care” series, which revealed that the Progressive Conservative government had underreported the number of deaths. The investigation found that 145 foster children had died between 1999 and June 8, 2013, but government reports accounted only for 56 deaths. The discrepancy “highlight[s] the failure of a… system blighted by secrecy, disorganization [and] weak oversight,” the series began. “An exhaustive analysis revealed alarming trends the government has never identified: A third of children who die in care are babies, another third are teenagers and the vast majority are Aboriginal.”

Then, late in 2016, Journal columnist Paula Simons, working from a report delivered by the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate (OCYA), dug up information outlining the horrific conditions surrounding the death of a First Nations girl. That Serenity had died in kinship care complicated the picture. The review “revealed that the relatives with whom the girl had been placed had been poorly trained and that the home study of their family had been cursory,” Simons wrote. “The review also found Serenity and her two older half-siblings had been left in the guardianship of this couple despite complaints and tips about abuse. No workers had checked on the three children in the 11 months before Serenity died.” Simons was also able to access information unavailable to Child and Youth Advocate Del Graff and unearthed the full circumstances of the girl’s death, including a stalled police investigation because of a lack of follow-up reports.

PC and NDP governments alike have responded the same way: by convening political bodies to review child deaths, and by not including Indigenous representation.

In 2014 the Child Intervention Roundtable, called by Human Services Minister Manmeet Bhullar, delivered recommendations to improve the system and its account-ability. But party leadership volatility, cabinet shuffling, a provincial election and a subsequent change in government stifled action.

Some 225 young Albertans have died in foster care since 2008.
Of these, 131 were Indigenous.

When Premier Rachel Notley announced her first cabinet in 2015, Bhullar’s roundtable’s recommendations—which included more power to the Office of the Medical Examiner to access government information in order to investigate deaths of children in care—remained buried within the sprawling Human Services ministry. In July 2016 Graff and Auditor General Merwan Saher simultaneously released reports indicating that the government could not make the systemic changes necessary to reduce the number of Indigenous kids in care as long as Children’s Services remained under the large umbrella of Human Services.

It took the release of OCYA’s November 2016 investigative review on 4-year-old Serenity (then known as “Marie”)—and Simons’s report—for the NDP government to respond. In January 2017 Notley announced the creation of an all-party panel to investigate the child intervention system and named Danielle Larivee as minister of a new, standalone Children’s Services.

From the very beginning, Indigenous leaders were critical of the creation of yet another panel. That money would be better spent supporting families and children on the ground than on talking about the issue again, says Donald Langford, executive director with Metis Child and Family Services. He points to a bookshelf in his office full of reports with recommendations commissioned by various PC governments and later abandoned. “I’ve been involved in so many working groups and committees that I just quit going to them,” he says. “I’ve seen no progress.”

Langford says the new panel’s first recommendations, released in April 2017, have already been presented in some form or another through other panels or studies: increased authority for the OCYA, greater accountability for preventable deaths, timely completion of reviews, better supports for families, greater cultural sensitivity and improved information sharing.

Worse than retreaded recommendations, he says, is yet another panel lacking Indigenous representation. Patti Laboucane-Benson, a Metis woman with Native Counselling Services of Alberta, was included only as an expert witness as the panel considered the death review process. In May, when the panel moved into its second phase—to look more broadly at the child intervention system—Larivee responded to criticism from the Indigenous community by appointing Siksika Health CEO Tyler White.

But two Indigenous people on the panel doesn’t satisfy Langford. “We still have a residential school environment being run by an Indian agent mentality,” he said. “Unless you’ve got Aboriginal eyes, you’re not going to look at it through an Aboriginal lens.”

That “Aboriginal lens” means engaging with families in a holistic manner—placing children in kinship care (i.e., with family, in their own culture) whenever possible. It means providing foster families with supports and checking in with them regularly. It means building respectful relationships between Indigenous families and government service pro-viders. But forming those relationships is difficult considering the high turnover of frontline government staff, their lack of knowledge of Indigenous culture, and the lack of Indigenous caseworkers. Couple that with limited resources both for organizations working with Indigenous children in cities and for designated First Nation authorities on reserves.

He points to a bookshelf of reports with recommendations by various PC governments and later abandoned.

Liberal MLA and panel member Dr. David Swann believes more Indigenous representation—on the panel and throughout child intervention services—would help the government better understand the problems it’s dealing with. “If you don’t have staff that come from that community, I think it’s somewhat disingenuous for us to say that we’re going to have a First Nations cultural lens,” Swann told media in April. ​“How do we get more First Nations people trained and into the child services programs?” He also wants bands to be more involved with the death review process.

Frieda Alook-Gambler with the Bigstone Nation Council presented to the panel in May 2017. “If you guys want to make decisions and really impact the number of cases that are happening on our First Nations, talk to us and ask us how we can help our kids,” she told the panel. “We want as First Nations to provide the services we need for our kids because we understand and we know where these kids are coming from and living.”

Langford has been involved with child and family services for 32 years and doesn’t believe that any government—this one included—understands the concept of true engagement. “To engage our community, you form a relationship, and that relationship moves forward built on respect, consideration and optimism,” he says. “Work with the families, get to know them.”

Working with families means pursuing a cultural connection, says Child and Youth Advocate Del Graff. “A young Indigenous person who has a sense of identity, knows who they are, knows where they belong, knows what their value base is, that has people around them who both support them and challenge them to continue to develop their sense of identity and strength—those are factors of resilience that help the young person when they face difficulties.”

“Voices for Change,” the July 2016 report from Graff’s office, was nearly two years in the making, with information gathered from government, social workers, children, youth and caregivers. Previous reports were reviewed and the OCYA’s experience considered. Eight recommendations were made, including “increasing the use of kinship care for Aboriginal children by improving support for kinship caregivers.” The report notes the “onerous” approval process and that kinship families are assessed on their past, not “for who they are today.”

Indeed, many Indigenous families have a past relationship with Child Intervention Services, including Kohkom Kathy. Her children were once wards of the government, and she says that reason was given for why she didn’t qualify to care for her granddaughters—including baby Dani—when they were apprehended.

She admits no care model is flawless. The treatment leading to Serenity’s death occurred while the little girl was in kinship care. Kathy and other critics say a culturally appropriate placement with family is still the best option in most cases and that all options need to be diligently monitored by caseworkers.

Graff’s report into Serenity’s case identified two systemic issues: risk assessment and case planning. Along with better support for kinship caregivers, his recommendations include a culturally relevant home study specific to kinship care and its unique challenges; mandatory kinship care orientation training; and that caseworkers be just as diligent when a child comes out of kinship care as when a child goes into care. This report was the third by Graff that included recommendations on kinship care.

Echoing Langford, “Voices for Change” also called for the province to establish a new relationship with Indigenous peoples, outlining the need for “establishing full and equal partnership between governments and Aboriginal communities in the development of authorities, resources, practices and outcomes.”

Graff says that new relationship shouldn’t get hung up in jurisdictional battles. “You have like-minded people who want to make a change—federal, provincial, First Nations, political groups. If they all want change, how can jurisdiction possibly be a barrier It’s just a problem to solve.”

Seventeen designated First Nation authorities operate within Alberta’s 46 First Nations, handling child welfare services legislated by the province’s Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act while being federally funded. Debbie LaRiviere, director with the Lesser Slave Lake Indian Regional Council, told the panel in May that provincial programming “doesn’t seem to fit some of our families we work with on the First Nation.” Unique factors include isolated communities, three or four households in a single home, extreme poverty, and a lack of services such as psychologists and child intervention workers. Yvonne Johnson, director with Bigstone Cree Social Services Society, adds that caseloads are too heavy—her local authority has two caseworkers handling 56 cases. “It’s straight crisis management,” she says. “No real meaningful work can really happen with that.”

Lack of federal funding is also an issue. In 2016 the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Canada discriminates against families on reserves by providing child welfare funding at a much lower rate than provinces’ off-reserve funding. The CHRT also upheld Jordan’s Principle, which says First Nations children must receive the health and social services they require before different levels of government wrangle over who covers the costs. But despite a Trudeau government statement in February that it is “working swiftly” to implement Jordan’s Principle, the gap remains.

Most past OCYA recommendations haven’t been imple-mented—despite the province ostensibly having accepted them. New legislation, including the Child Protection and Accountability Act, passed in June 2017 following the panel’s first phase of recommendations, does not guarantee implementation of anything brought forward by the OCYA. It does, however, increase the OCYA’s mandate to review every death of a child under 20 who was receiving government services or had received services within two years prior to their death. “I would have liked to have seen the government be held to stronger account for the recommendations we make,” says Graff.

That view was also expressed by Saher last October. The Auditor General proposed a legislative standing committee that would help ensure the implementation of the OCYA’s recommendations.

But giving such power to the OCYA doesn’t sit well with the Children’s Services Minister. “Independent legislative officers are there to provide information, advice and guidance to the government—but nowhere are these actually directives,” minister Danielle Larivee says. “That would actually take away the power of the government and [its] independence to be able to fulfill its role.” The Standing Committee on Legislative Offices, an all-party body, agrees with Larivee. None of the nine recommendations it brought forward on June 21 upon completing its year-long review of the Child and Youth Advocate Act gives more strength to Graff’s office. The standing committee recommends only that a member of the OCYA be present, along with relevant department officials, when an OCYA report is being considered by a committee of the assembly.

Larivee points out that Graff delivers his reports publicly and as such the public can hold the government responsible. To her critics, she’d say: “Just please engage in good faith. Please know we are committed to this. Give us the opportunity and I’ll show you when we’re done and we’ll take action.”

Graff, however, doesn’t believe the situation is high on the public’s priority list, and therefore isn’t high on the government’s. “Politicians pay attention to what’s being demanded by constituents,” he says. “If constituents care about an issue, they elevate it and politicians respond. When I speak about apathy—at a community level we’re not hearing concern for vulnerable Indigenous children and their families. We’re not hearing enough volume to create a demand for change that politicians need to act on.”

As Indigenous people account for 6 per cent of the province’s population, change won’t occur until the non-Indigenous population speaks out, contends Graff.

Larivee says she’s proud of the legislation her government has passed, saying it strengthens recommendations made by the panel. She also points to what she calls a “culture shift” towards openness within public organizations that now must share relevant information with the OCYA in its investigations.

She says her government should be judged on the work it’s undertaking now, which includes building relationships and capacity with Indigenous communities. “I’m not going to say I’m going to turn it around overnight,” says Larivee. “It’s a complex issue rooted in very complex problems that have existed for a very long time. We will just continue taking steps forward.”

But those are stuttering steps, Graff says. “The government isn’t responding fast enough and in a complete enough way…. [it’s] certainly nowhere near where it has to be to actually change the tide in child welfare.”

Edmonton’s Shari Narine has spent the past decade covering Indigenous issues for provincial and national publications.

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