Summer Solstice 2025: What We Know
“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.
22 Comments
Jo-Ann Symonds
June 19, 2025So good to hear from you! Glad to continue on your message list!
Always enjoy your wisdom and thoughts.
Audrey
June 20, 2025I’m glad we’re still connected too! Thanks for your faithfulness.
Anita Jenkins
June 20, 2025My grandparents also had arrowheads collected from the fields. And buffalo horns and robes. Granny and Grandad loved to tell the stories of coming from Ontario to claim homesteads in the prairies at the turn of the century – struggling, working extremely hard and meeting with undreamed-of success. I was fascinated by those memories, which nurtured in me a keen interest in Western Canadian history. In hindsight though, I realize that not a word was said about who lived here before the settlers. It was as if the land was completely empty – despite the presences of the arrowheads and buffalo robes.
Audrey
June 20, 2025It’s true. That was the prevailing myth. I will say this though, we lived two miles north of the Alexander reserve and had a lot of interaction with our neighbours. So we knew they were there before we were. One of our father’s friends from youth lived there: Mark Bruno. They had worked together hauling freight up north. My father told me Indigenous peoples had a different way of looking at life, an approach he respected. When I re-read that article now, I see I did note that Mr. Bruno spent most of his childhood at “the convent” in St. Albert, most likely the St. Albert Youville residential school but none of us knew the implications of that at the time. Mr. Bruno also told me that the northern strip of the reserve was sold to white settlers earlier in the century. That sale was subject to a successful land claim in 1998. Again, I had no idea of the implications. I was 17 at the time.
Mary
June 20, 2025Audrey – I so enjoy your ponderings on ‘Soltice Times’ throughout the years.
It is good to reflect on these during our time on Earth.
I wish you a Happy Summer.
take care…
Mary
Audrey
June 20, 2025Thank you, Mary, for that. I was thinking of you this week.
Mary Leah de Zwart
June 20, 2025My comment is about looking for arrowheads and scrapers at the blow out north of Coronado. Before my time and before Lost Point Lake dried up, trains from the city would bring people out. One of my brothers was excellent at finding items used by First Nations. I found a pink arrowhead when I was about 11 and my mother found a piece of amethyst. Someone else found a little piece of obsidian they took to the museum. I took the pieces to school and they vanished.
This is not exactly how the timeless items touched me, but rather how I got to touch them myself.
Audrey
June 20, 2025Wonderful, Mary Leah! Yes, some of those items would have travelled a very long way. Thanks for sharing.
jano thibodeau
June 20, 2025happy summer days in Nanaimo – my CLAY ART is in ‘ALLEY-GALLERY – installed in back alley of Milton street on side of the garage by Darren – enjoy all the creation in clay fired to stones at 2,200 F.
Audrey
June 20, 2025What a great way to spend the Summer Solstice!
Faith Fernalld
June 21, 2025Audrey, thank you for this. In eastern North America my cousins and their kids continue to find arrowheads, and settlers from other countries have been there much longer than they’ve been here. I guess that means there are millions of artifacts beneath us all across the continent.
I love how you mark what Ivan calls “the quarters of the year.”
Audrey
June 22, 2025Yes, it’s been a long road, the human journey. And it continues. We hope. Thank you, Faith.
Ivan Whitson
June 22, 2025Audrey spoke of the arrow heads from our farm. I’ve got them in a box. They were dated by an archaeologist. We have one that is 10,600 years old, an atlatl dart point that is 8,000 years old, an Oxbow point that is between 3,000 and 4,500 years old, a Scottsbluff point that is 9,000 years old, and an Agate basin point also 9,000 years old. There are some younger ones, including a Hanna point that is about 3,500 years old.
Agriculture only reached western and northern europe about 5,000 years ago, so our european ancestors would have been using stone tools as well in the millennia before that.
Audrey
June 22, 2025Thanks, Ivan, for sharing that history. I had forgotten how old some of them were. I do remember though the archeologist asking if we would consider donating them. I can see why now.
Carolyn Pogue
June 23, 2025Thank you, Audrey, for these wonderful excavations. May we remember that, as Elder Lorraine Sinclair once told me, “It’s all ‘holy land.'”
Audrey
June 23, 2025Indeed. Thank you, Carolyn.
Kate Henderson
June 24, 2025Lovely piece, Audrey. I love this line because I think it reflects the intentions of the indigenous culture towards ours:
They have prepared a feast for us. They are inviting us to the table.
And all we have to do is accept the invitation to learn.
Audrey
July 6, 2025Thanks for your reflection, Kate.
Henny Flinterman Vroege
July 2, 2025Thank you, Audrey, for continuing to educate us. Sending love.
Audrey
July 6, 2025Thanks, Henny 🙂
Linda Bumstead
July 2, 2025Your interest in, and deep respect, for Indigenous peoples is inspiring. In an often overwhelming world it’s easy to overlook how much Indigenous people have to teach us about living together on this amazing shared land.
Audrey
July 6, 2025Yes, it’s an amazing land. I remember the first time I flew into the Northwest Territories. The Dene on the plane kept saying as we flew over the vast waters, trees and tundra below, “We have a beautiful land.” And it is true.