“To be native to a place, we must learn to speaks its language.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
The land where I now live was known as River Lot 20 in fur trade and settlement times. But of the layers (the people and their stories) “before contact,” I know almost nothing.
To show these layers on a page, this screen, I would need reams of blank space. A great silence. Not because there was nothing there but because so much was erased with colonization. So much forgotten. Or buried. In the earth but also buried in our psyche. Do I even begin to feel the loss? The land holds billions of years of story, most of it in pieces.
Just metres below the surface of this city, according to the archeologists. Within walking distance of my home, on both the north and south sides of the river at Queen Elizabeth Park, Walterdale Flats, Rossdale Flats, Victoria Flats, Groat Road and more. What they’ve found.
We know this: How these First Peoples cooked (from the ash and charcoal hearths left behind). How they processed their food (from the fire-broken rocks). How they hunted (from spear and knife points). We know some of what they ate; kin we can still recognize: seeds of kinnikinnick, bunchberry, pin cherry, and choke cherry. Bones of bison and ungulates (deer, elk and moose). Used for medicines, for food.
We know some of what they traded with the first Europeans who came to this part of North America: lynx and beaver pelts for glass beads and clay pipes. We know where some of their bones lie, the Papachase Cree and the Métis, alongside the Irish, English, French and Scottish traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. But even this sanctioned graveyard, until it was uncovered by a utilities expansion, hadn’t survived the collective memory.
There is so much we do not know.
Yet there is a longer history to this land. Buried for centuries within Indigenous communities where language has been kept alive. Visions, ceremonies, sacred societies, and stories have been passed on, searched out, and sometimes shared. For myself I have learned from the work of so many Indigenous authors: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, Joy Harjo, Thomas King, Louise Erdich, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tommy Orange, Augie Merasty, Eden Robinson, Billy-Rae Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, Patty Krawec. I can’t name them all.
One project where I live has been gathering stories of the North Saskatchewan River, many of them told by Indigenous elders. The North Saskatchewan had many names before the Europeans arrived: the Kisiskâciwanisîpiy (Cree for the swiftly flowing river) and omaka-ty (the big river to the Blackfoot), to name just two. As we approach National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, Indigenous people have events planned everywhere across this land.
They have prepared a feast for us. They are inviting us to the table.
When we sit down to the first meal of this Summer Solstice, we too gather around food and story. Maybe we make kinnikinnick tea or have last year’s pincherry or chokecherry syrup on our pancakes. Perhaps we are gathering like the ancestors of this land, to give thanks for the greening of things and for the land that feeds us body and spirit. For what we know.
