“Walk lightly in the spring. Mother Earth
is pregnant.” This is a proverb derived from Indigenous wisdom. Isn’t it
beautiful! June is National Indigenous History Month, and that gives us the
opportunity to reflect more deeply on some of our actions and how they speak
about our beliefs. The Indigenous peoples of the prairies walked very lightly
on the landscape. That’s why we see little material evidence of their millennia
of living and loving here. Instead, they imprinted knowledge and history on the
landscape by carrying out rituals on special locations to mark key moments
through time. The landscape becomes the memory, without physical modification.
Another Indigenous philosophy is encoded in the (unattributed) quotation: “Walk
softly upon the Earth. She is our Mother.” When my grandparents arrived on the
prairies, fleeing poverty and starvation in Europe, they brought with them a
different approach, and carried forward the expectation that the landscape had
to be modified to provide for them. They were ignorant of the knowledge and
history already imprinted on the landscape.
Only recently have there been attempts to
recognize the subtlety and importance of the cultures that already thrived
here. Land Acknowledgment statements are one of those initiatives. This is an
important first corrective step to the oblivion of the dominant society in
Alberta and Canada to the Indigenous peoples and cultures that were displaced
but still form an essential part of our communities. Every time the Land
Acknowledgement is recited, we have the chance to think about the diversity of
Indigenous cultures around us: The Siksika Nation, the Piikani Nation, the
Kainai Nation, the Stoney Nakoda Nation, the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Goodstoney
bands, and the Tsuut’ina Nation. These are rich, contemporary cultures!
Once I had the honour and pleasure to meet
the late Narcisse Blood, who was a wise and remarkable gentleman from the Blood
Reserve near Lethbridge. He came to my class and told stories to communicate
his thoughts and philosophy. They were profound and we were deeply touched and
changed. Through them, he illustrated his perspective that there is no
returning to any past, the future that he saw envisioned a Canada that held
high respect for the First Nations people, we are a single people, together
constructing a single future, without recriminations, regrets, or feelings of
guilt. I have heard this gentle and wise approach expressed by many Indigenous
elders since then. We learned. It was a tragic loss when he died in on a
wintery highway in Saskatchewan on his way to share again his important
stories.
Narcisse Blood had just completed a
documentary called “If the landscape could speak, and we would listen” in which
we visited sites of historical and spiritual importance to the Blood people,
who tread so lightly. I wished I could listen better, because that landscape is
real! Here in Montgomery, we are not treading softly at all. Maybe we should
try a bit harder. (If you wish, visit the website treadlightly.org for some
good ideas to start with.) According to the City of Calgary census, 5% of the
population of Montgomery is First Nations. Let’s look around us and meet our
neighbours! No better time that this month of June, when are encouraged to
pause to contemplate and celebrate Indigenous History!
Denise Brown
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