Transcript: We Have Always Been Here

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future?

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy.

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: We Have Always Been Here.

Kent Ayoungman [00:00:52] I always say, no matter where you go where it’s uncultivated or natural areas, you’re going to find evidence of our people there. And that’s where the importance of learning our stories, our origin stories, working with archaeologists, it kind of helped give an idea of how old our stories, our songs, and our ceremonies are.

Kim Thúy [00:01:21] In the southwest corner of Alberta, there’s a special place called Wally’s Beach.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:28] Oh, look at that. That’s a really interesting one.

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:32] Another one.

Kim Thúy [00:01:35] It’s a breathtaking spot, nestled where the prairies and the Rocky Mountains meet … in the heartland of the Blackfoot nations — the Siksika, Kainai and Piikani.

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:48] It’s a nice windy day.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:50] A nice, windy day.

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:54] Temperature about 26, 27 degrees.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:58] It’s a beautiful day for September.

Kim Thúy [00:02:02] The beach is former farmland, just across the St. Mary’s Reservoir from the reserve of the Kainai Nation. Seventy years ago, the St. Mary River was dammed, flooding farmland and reserve land alike. Now, periods of low water leave parts of the reservoir bed exposed to wind and waves. Erosion has revealed the footprints of woolly mammoths that once crossed mudflats here at the end of the last Ice Age. And other species too — like extinct forms of musk ox, camel, horse and bison — have all been identified from their bones.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:02:47] We found 5- 6,000-year-old jackrabbit bones embedded in the caliche crust in places, so this here, good spot to look, because this should contain old material.

Kent Ayoungman [00:03:00] And those square units that they excavate. Yep. This is what they kind of look at.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:03:06] Exactly.

Kim Thúy [00:03:08] This area was once the Ice-Free Corridor, which emerged as continental ice sheets over the Rocky Mountains and prairies began to melt. Stone tools scattered across the surface of Wally’s Beach tell a remarkable story from ancestral Blackfoot contact with Europeans a few short centuries ago, and butchered horse and camel bones that are more than 13,000 years old. The role of the Ice-Free Corridor in the human history of the Americas has long been debated by Western scientists. But for the Blackfoot Peoples of southern Alberta and Montana, there is no doubt: their stories, songs, and ceremonies teach that they have always been here. It was once rare for archaeologists to give equal consideration to Indigenous interpretations when piecing together the past…

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:08] It’s September 11th, 2022. I’m out at Wally’s Beach today…

Kim Thúy [00:04:15] But that’s all changing.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:16] …and the reservoir level is about four meters higher than it needs to be for me to get out to the exposed parts of Wally’s Beach on the St. Mary Reservoir…

Kim Thúy [00:04:29] Gabriel Yanicki is the curator of Western Archaeology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:36] …but today, the water level is covering pretty much the entire site, except for an island that stayed clear of the level of the reservoir this whole time, since the dam was built in the 1950s.

Kim Thúy [00:04:51] Yanicki has been reaching out to Blackfoot Elders — recognizing that their philosophies and stories are essential to understanding the history of the land and its people. After all, the Blackfoot Peoples have inhabited the Northern plains — an area that includes parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana — since time immemorial.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:05:17] You can see it’s, uh, quartzite, um, a quite dense rock that doesn’t explode when it’s heated up.

Jerry Potts [00:05:23] It’s the same kind of rocks we use in our sweats still, eh?

Gabriel Yanicki [00:05:27] Exactly. Yeah.

Kim Thúy [00:05:29] That’s Piikani Elder Jerry Potts. He, along with his wife Velma Crowshoe and Siksika traditional knowledge expert Kent Ayoungman, recently met up with Yanicki at Wally’s Beach. They talked about the importance of this area from both an archaeological perspective and a traditional Blackfoot one.

Jerry Potts [00:05:52] This is probably one of so many sites that haven’t even been discovered that all represent timelines, but yet it still goes back to the original inhabitants of the area like we were … we’re the host of the feast with the story that’s being told.

Kim Thúy [00:06:15] Before, during and after a dig, archaeologists like Yanicki seek opportunities for collaboration with Indigenous Peoples. It’s part of an ongoing effort to decolonize the very process of archaeology itself. Elder Jerry Potts explains how this has helped reaffirm ancestral Blackfoot ties to the land, as established in oral histories…

Jerry Potts [00:06:44] I think we’re at, at a time right now where, you know, archaeology has become so effective — like, even in BC, because it’s unceded land — and they’re, they’ve been very right on how they’ve used archaeology to determine their sites in Montana, the same thing, you know, these different tribes that have claimed areas. They’ve brought in archaeology and done archaeological digs that have proven they are Blackfoot sites. It’s just endless, what, where the mind can go with what’s there that hasn’t been discovered.

Kim Thúy [00:07:24] Kent Ayoungman speaks about bringing the two knowledge traditions together.

Kent Ayoungman [00:07:30] And that’s where the importance of learning our stories, our origin stories, right? Working with archaeologists to kind of help give an idea of how old our stories, our songs, and our ceremonies are.

Kim Thúy [00:07:48] He explains their creation stories were not just passed down orally. They were depicted in detail on teepees and in Blackfoot art.

Kent Ayoungman [00:07:59] That relationship, that kinship that our people have with animals, the birds, with all of creation, you know? Like our homes, we look at our homes. All the different drawings on our homes are teepee designs. They’re right from the climate, the stars, animals, people, earth, water, everything are on our homes. And right there, that just shows our connection to this vast place.

Kim Thúy [00:08:28] That connection remained unbroken in spite of the fatal disruption by residential schools when entire generations were removed from this crucial storytelling chain.

Kent Ayoungman [00:08:42] My mom, when she was a kid, before she got taken to residential school, her grandmother, [speaking in Blackfoot] her name was Mary Water Chief. In the wintertime they moved down to North Camp. I come from the west end of the reserve, and that’s where my grandfather, that’s where he farmed, the ranch. Wintertime, the people congregated down to a place called North Camp, and they lived with the old lady. She had a house down there, and my mom would say, “We always used to fight to sleep with the old lady because she would tell … [speaking in Blackfoot] she would tell the stories from the ancient times, that’s what the interpretation I’ll use, our, our stories, our ancient stories. And she always said, I remember her talk about two stories, [speaking in Blackfoot] and [speaking in Blackfoot]. [speaking in Blackfoot] is that Scarface story.

[00:09:42] And then [speaking in Blackfoot] it’s a story about when these big animals brought these kids across a big water. How the old lady described it, was a woolly mammoth, it was a big, like, elephant, it had a trunk and tusks, and those kids got left and their people were on the other side of this big water. And they’re on the back of that, that animal, and they were picking the bugs off the fur, and that animal told them, “Well, for relieving me of those, those bugs were bothering me for a long time, I’ll do what you guys want want me to do.” “Well, we want to go to our, to our family on that side,” so that animal brought those kids across the water to their people. You know, it’s a big long story, but my mom grew up, before she was taken to the residential school, all that stuff was severed. But, you know, talking about this area and the relationship with the woolly mammoth and such, you know, it solidifies our stories, our ceremonies, our songs, our language. That’s what I was talking about.

[00:10:42] That’s why I appreciate the relationships that I’ve built with archaeologists, anthropologists. It’s a neat relationship with the ceremonial people of the Blackfoot, eh? It’s neat to hear these stories from a lot of different people. Some will talk about it this way and then another person will talk about it. And there’s something that may have been missed by these people. When you put them all together, it’s the same story.

Kim Thúy [00:11:13] It is the same story repeated time and time again by the Blackfoot Peoples and their ancestors, and that’s increasingly apparent to archaeologists. As for when this history began, that’s a question that preoccupies many Western scientists. But in Blackfoot storytelling and its worldview, the very concept of time is reckoned with differently.

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:11:43] Very interesting, to talk about notions of time, because time is such an important referent in Western thought…

Kim Thúy [00:11:57] This is Dr. Leroy Little Bear, the Vice Provost at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He is also a renowned Kainai legal scholar and philosopher … and an expert at understanding the concept of time in Blackfoot culture.

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:12:16] …this is not to say that time is not important in Blackfoot, but a very different approach. The Western notion of time is really human created, when in reality there’s really no such thing. But, nevertheless, the notion in Western thought about time is a fairly linear notion, where you go from A to B to C to D on down the line.

[00:12:58] Now, in Blackfoot thought, it’s really that notion of repetition and these things occurring, reoccurring and so on. So you start to have notions about circles and so on, because the repetition can easily complement the notion of rotation, et cetera.

[00:13:25] And that is in Blackfoot we say [speaking in Blackfoot], meaning “now.” It’s the now. And then you can work forward and say, [speaking in Blackfoot], and that’s “tomorrow.” And then you can move from there and say [speaking in Blackfoot], which is “day after tomorrow.” And, if you want to put it that way, you can say [speaking in Blackfoot], “yesterday,” [speaking in Blackfoot], which is “the day before yesterday.” But then we don’t go beyond that at that level. We don’t go beyond that.

[00:14:13] In very general terms, we might talk about [speaking in Blackfoot], in other words, “what’s going to be coming?” In other words, [inaudible] call it future [speaking in Blackfoot]. And we might talk about the past as — but that’s in very general terms — [speaking in Blackfoot], means “what has passed,” [speaking in Blackfoot]. And those words actually imply that there’s something still and you are going up and down the timeline, so to speak, rather than you being still and time going past you, in a Western notion, it implies that time is still and you’re going back and forth on the timeline. So [speaking in Blackfoot] is kind of going back and [speaking in Blackfoot] means kind of going forward.

[00:15:18] And when I say that we don’t go past the two days, two days forward or backwards. What it’s really doing is saying and combining all the notions of past, present and future in Western thought is just past the two-day period. It’s combined, and that’s what we would refer to as “just is.” It just is.

[00:15:55] Beyond the two-day notion is everything. Past, present and future are amalgamated to be just is. One of the ramifications of it is that hey, that’s how I remember what my ancestors told me. See, in other words, their stories are never more than two days old.

[00:16:26] They’re always two days fresh in my mind. And so it’s hard to think about it, especially for a judge in a court case trying to determine, you know, when did this happen? Five hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? And their question is usually, “How can you remember what happened 1,000 years ago, let alone 20,000 years ago?” Well, that’s because my ancestors are just two days away. Their stories are two days fresh in my mind, see?

Gabriel Yanicki [00:17:08] So one question I have then is, is there a statute of limitations on how far back this repetition and the reckoning of time and the memory of events can go?

Kim Thúy [00:17:22] Gabriel Yanicki again.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:17:25] When we talk about sites like Wally’s Beach as an archaeologist, are Blackfoot stories potentially encapsulating that time period and further back?

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:17:35] Well, the thing is, those are basically I would say reference points that we use in human thought, okay? So how do we go back? Well, we go back and we say, well, there was a time when there was just all those animals and then in the cosmic phasing, things did change and we appeared, but then we were just like little kids. New kids on the block with all these others, and we had to start seeing what kind of relational setups we could have with them, see? So that’s the reason why we have great respect for life and so on, you know?

[00:18:32] And so, we start to appear on the scene. So talking about Wally’s Beach, hey, yeah … we would just say [speaking in Blackfoot] long time ago, which is in that realm of just is, see? And any stories that arise from there are part of the repetitive storytelling that occurs, and so on. So the buffalo as an example was a being, was a water being. We’d call it water buffalo, [speaking in Blackfoot] was water buffalo. It used to come out of the water and it would hunt anything it sees, including humans. And eventually in those stories was the humans and the buffalos finally decided to, uh … talk and have an agreement. “Hey … we don’t want you chasing and eating our people” and so on, and the buffalos agreed, “Okay. But if we’re going to do that, then the agreement … well then you give us half of your people and we’ll give you half of our people.” See? So they agreed to that. And so, that’s what has produced the buffalo out on the land, which was originally water, they were water beings.

[00:20:11] And in our case, the humans kind of thought about it a little bit and they were a little bit reluctant about letting half of their people to go into the water, to give them to the buffalo. But, it so happened they were moving camp and going across a big river or lake or so, and they were going across. And it was during the winter and the water, the ice, broke, and half of them went into the water. And so de facto, the quid pro quo did occur.

[00:20:56] So it’s part of that flux, part of that flux way of thinking, as opposed to more stagnant notion of … so … that’s how that notion, which might be going back to Wally’s Beach, hey, 20,000 years ago or so. Well, that’s how we remember it, because of the repetition of the stories and how we came into being, how buffalos came into being, and so on.

Kim Thúy [00:21:31] So whether we’re talking about 20,000 years or two days ago, what has remained are the stories.

[00:21:42] Near Fort Macleod, Alberta, there’s a place called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It was named after the practice of driving herds of buffalo over a cliff to their deaths — a communal hunting technique perfected over millennia by Blackfoot ancestors. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There, Gabriel Yanicki and the Blackfoot Elders continued their conversation about the often-difficult relationship between researchers and Indigenous Peoples.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:22:19] Thanks everyone. So the first question that I set aside here to go over is whether you all think that archaeologists have historically done a good job of seeking input from Blackfoot Peoples on research into their ancestral heritage.

Jerry Potts [00:22:34] Well, I think archaeology — this is Jerry Potts — I know archaeology has been, I think, with … probably more recently, there’s been more outreach to Blackfeet people within their territory. We’re now in a position, we’re starting to understand and express who we are and, I think, archaeology’s given a good opportunity to put our cards on the table that represent who we are.

Velma Crowshoe [00:23:07] I realize the importance of archaeology with listening to some of our Elders…

Kim Thúy [00:23:16] This is Piikani Elder, Velma Crowshoe.

Velma Crowshoe [00:23:18] …like my dad, for instance, the late Johnny [inaudible], and the stories that he used to tell and the songs that he used to sing, and how they relate to the land. And so I think it’s really important that we listen to our traditional knowledge. And we hear their stories and how we can put the archaeology to better our lives for the young people so they understand that we’ve been here for a long, long time. And the language too, the language is so important because there’s a lot of words in our language that you can’t even translate into English, you know? And I think it’s really important that we learn our creation stories so the young people can understand and to appreciate who we are and where we live.

Kent Ayoungman [00:24:18] I don’t think archaeologists have historically done a good job on the work that goes behind the science of archaeology…

Kim Thúy [00:24:29] This is Kent Ayoungman again.

Kent Ayoungman [00:24:32] …My involvement was working with archaeologists, they based everything off theories. And what I get a kick out of is sometimes these theories get debunked and they all come together and start to try to figure something out on somebody else’s research going way back. I think within the last few decades, archaeologists have finally been reaching out to Indian people and the studies that they do. And this land bridge is a good example of that.

Kim Thúy [00:25:05] The “land bridge” theory — which we mentioned earlier — is the idea that the first Ice Age humans arrived in North America from Asia by walking across a frozen path over the Bering Strait. Indigenous people have been widely skeptical about this theory, because they have no stories of living in such a place.

Kent Ayoungman [00:25:29] I think archaeology, you know, it’s fairly new in North America. It’s been going on for a long time outside of North America. So they came into this place trying to figure out these people. And the way I look at it, you know, our people were once considered a dying race. And, you know, with all the different adverse impacts that our people have endured, our people lived in this place for a long time. And then that’s always explained through our stories. And I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is our connection to this place and how the government really tried to sever … and they did a good job. They did a good job. I know in my community where I come from, Siksika, they did a good job on disconnecting our people to our ways of knowing and our ways of knowing ties us to this place. Everything, how things came to be, is explained, to how the old people told their stories to the grandchildren. And then as the grandchildren lived through their life, they start to learn more to these stories, which leads into our spiritual ways and that spiritual connection. Historically, I don’t, I didn’t think they were doing a good job, but the last few decades it’s been going a lot better than how it used to be done.

Jacob Potts [00:27:02] I think that this whole thing with the archaeological thing is going to take these people’s modern-day thinking and take it out of that time frame and put it to another time frame instead of thinking this way back. You know, it’ll change that thinking…

Kim Thúy [00:27:16] This is Jacob Potts, a Piikani ceremonialist.

Jacob Potts [00:27:21] …Because a lot of modern-day people think, “Oh yeah, when we crossed over the land bridge” and all this other thing. And a lot of people come and say, “Look, that’s where we came from, Asia or Africa. on that side of the world.” And I think this ties us to us being here and like everyone else said here, it connects us to this land and all of our creation stories stemming from here. And a lot of people, especially in this day and age, have that thinking, “Oh yeah, well you guys were never always here, right?” And that’s what people are saying but they have almost no backing of that. And now this is just kind of reinforcing us always being here, coming from this land and us coming from here rather than, you know, coming from some other part of the world and, um, coming from north to south where, to my knowledge is … we, we were always here.

Stan Knowlton [00:28:10] Well, as an archaeologist, that part of my life journey, I could say, has been very adversarial…

Kim Thúy [00:28:19] Stan Knowlton, also from the Piikani Nation, studied at the University of Lethbridge. He is a traditional knowledge expert. As a student he was taught by largely white professors what they thought was the history of his people.

Stan Knowlton [00:28:38] …You know, professors had a hard time realizing that I was even in their class. They just couldn’t figure out how this Stone Age person, you know, still existed in the modern world. And then, you know, from that point to where we are now, I could see that we’ve come a long way. Some people, you know, just by getting up there and maintaining their stories and their culture and history, you know, have broken the ice for the future generations and they’ve opened up doors. And it’s up to the younger people now to be able to make use of those doors that have opened and to take those next steps that are necessary into making archaeology more compatible with traditional knowledge.

Kim Thúy [00:29:31] And that change is happening, incorporating traditional knowledge into archaeological studies and practices. Kent Ayoungman experienced it himself with the University of Calgary field school.

Kent Ayoungman [00:29:46] One year we started field season and one of the folks from U of C got up to talk as we were doing orientation and mentioned, you know, sometimes we forget as archaeologists the history that we’re digging, that we’re finding. We don’t realize that there’s people still living here. I like his comment when you were in your classes. Your professors couldn’t understand that there’s a Stone Age person sitting in there…

Jerry Potts [00:30:18] It’s always been convenient to go and get people to say what you want them to say without consulting other groups, other knowledge holders…

Kim Thúy [00:30:30] This is Elder Jerry Potts again.

Jerry Potts [00:30:32] …and a lot of times we’ve been subjected to one person’s opinion. But archaeology overall has been, you know, there’s been a lot of systemic racism by government and local groups not giving any respect to the people that have always been here. Our stories of creation go back to always being in this territory, and we were never transplanted or brought here. And I think through science and archaeology and the folks that know to get the missing answers are now reaching out to knowledge holders and that kind of thing to get a better understanding of the past and, you know, of who we are. And our stories have never changed. They’re still the same…

Kim Thúy [00:31:29] Especially when it comes to creation stories. Every culture seems to have one.

Jerry Potts [00:31:35] …With Blackfoot, with our belief system, every being, every thing represents a life. Our stories of creation are connected to the sun and the moon. The earth is a living being, but it’s not Mother Earth. And this Turtle Island bullshit, too … it’s not Turtle Island, it’s Blackfoot territory, you know? And that’s how it is. And you get all these academics, “Oh, Turtle Island.” And they get their dream voice on, and that just…

Gabriel Yanicki [00:32:10] That’s going to be my favourite part of the podcast.

Jerry Potts [00:32:12] …And I’ll stand by it.

Kent Ayoungman [00:32:18] I’ll second that.

Jerry Potts [00:32:20] I’ll take the shit for it. But, but I think that’s the point. The point with that is every nation across this country, their belief system is tied to the geography and their territory that they’re from. You know, everything we have comes from the landscape around us. That’s our marker. And that’s who makes the Blackfeet who they are. It’s the territory, you know, our ceremonies, the songs that go with those ceremonies all come from animals. They come from when dogs could talk. When we were shown how to live with things. That’s where all this stuff comes and it’s all here.

Kim Thúy [00:33:09] We’re back at Wally’s Beach, which took its name from a nearby recreational area, though exactly who it was named after is unclear. But like so many places, it bears the stamp of settler history without giving much thought to who has always been here.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:33:28] And it’s one of the things I’m hoping to get underway with this. Bringing everyone together is like, what should the name of the site be? It’s not my place to name it, but I think it’s overdue for a better name.

Kim Thúy [00:33:48] A better name, to match a better way of working together … where the stories about a place, and the people who live there, tell us as much as science ever can. So what comes next at sites like Wally’s Beach? Plans are taking shape to visit the site again — and to collaborate on a new dig — continuing the work of interpreting its history through multiple voices and different perspectives.

CREDITS:

Kim Thúy: Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.

The interviews with the Blackfoot Elders were conducted by Gabriel Yanicki, Curator, Western Archaeology.

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum.

For more information about Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump and Indigenous creation stories, check out the links in our show notes.