Elders visit historic Indigenous site in Sask. for the first time

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ROWAN’S RAVINE, Sask. — Standing firm on top of a hill in a sharp Saskatchewan wind, grass swaying around his calves, Elder Arnold Tobacco held a pouch of his namesake and offered good words for the day.

To his left and right, a group of fellow elders from the four nations that comprise Touchwood Agency Tribal Council sat or stood over the valley below — eyes closed, heads bowed.

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The Kawacatoose First Nation man would be the only one to trek down the slope into the ravine and back up later that morning, emerging from the steep incline with a smile framed by the rich orange, yellow and red hues of September trees behind him.

“I was looking for signs,” Tobacco said once seated back on the rise. “I didn’t find any.”

Oft-used sites sometimes have signs, he explained, like stone formations or installations in the shape of certain symbols that help to mark the land’s bounty — a turtle to signify water nearby, for example.

There’s a long history on this sharp hill, which is known as kā-kī-māmawēpihk (or Lake Midden) and located near Rowan’s Ravine in south-central Saskatchewan.

Dated as a place of Indigenous occupation from the 1500s until the late 1790s, this particular valley carved into the prairie was a village where many would camp during the winter months.

It’s one of the oldest archeological excavation sites in the province, having been first dug in the 1930s. Tens of thousands of artifacts have been found over the years and disseminated across Canada, largely unanalyzed until recently.

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Touchwood elders from George Gordon, Muskowekwan, Day Star and Kawacatoose First Nations visited the site for the first time on Friday, Tobacco among them.

Kawacatoose Elder Bill Strongarm, a senator with the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), wandered some himself but mostly spent his time gazing out over the valley’s drop. It was a buffalo jump once, he told a small group during Friday’s visit.

“I’m happy that we’re invited,” he said. “I want to thank the landowner for giving us that opportunity to view the site our ancestors lived years ago. To come here is to feel connected to the land.”

The visit was part of an ongoing project by Robert Losey, a professor of archeology from the University of Alberta, and Dr. Tatiana Nomokonova from the University of Saskatchewan. They have been working with Touchwood since 2021, trying to expand on what is known about kā-kī-māmawēpihk.

Their intention is to marry the archeological record with Plains Cree and Saulteaux oral traditions, in partnership with those who know them best.

The name kā-kī-māmawēpihk is freshly returned — it means “where they used to gather” — and re-emerged when Losey asked Touchwood elders what they knew about Lake Midden.

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It is a name for the site that has been used in stories for years.

“It was a place that was important, that people lived in, people thrived in, for generations,” said Losey. “They were cultivating themselves here, trading with their neighbours.”

Kā-kī-māmawēpihk hosted people from all over North America, as evidenced by the materials that have been discovered there. Stone flake from North Dakota and obsidian from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming have been found alongside pottery, bones, tools, arrowheads and more.

More than 400 game pieces called “ice gliders” have come from the site, suggesting that a great many people at kā-kī-māmawēpihk played huta nacute, or the “feathered bone” game.

The gliders (made from a slice of bone, usually a rib section, with feathers attached) would be thrown by players down the ice or packed snow. The objective was to slide your glider further down the track than other competitors.

“It’s curling, before it was invented,” Strongarm said with a chuckle as Losey described the game.

“Maybe in the future we can get kids together and restart the game out here,” answered Losey, prompting smiles from the group.

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Though not on purpose, Friday’s visit occurred just days before National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a federal holiday declared in 2020 to recognize the intergenerational affects of the residential school system and to honour survivors and their families.

The timing carried weight, said Strongarm.

Southern Saskatchewan was home to many Indigenous groups — Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, to name a few — and a place with its own politics and communities long before European colonists arrived, he said.

“I think educating our Indigenous people about us, where we lived for the last 100 to 100,000 years, has purpose,” Strongarm said. “It goes to show that First Nations, at one time, got along together.”

Losey’s work builds upon a project that Indigenous studies professor Andrew Miller from the First Nations University of Canada has been working on with Touchwood elders since 2019 — a catalogue of known sites in the Touchwood Hills area.

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Strongarm is one of those consultants and wrote the preface for a related book.

“Archeology can have a reputation of being grave diggers and pot hunters, but I think Robert is a really good example of (someone) trying to find a different relationship with First Nations, because it’s their history,” he said.

“This place we all call home is more than we really consider. The fact that we can see it with new eyes when we look at it together is what that really means. That reconciliation notion is that … it’s something we can share.”

For Strongarm, the day’s visit and the storytelling it cultivated was reconciliation — of history, of culture, of the past with the future.

At the same time, he said reconciliation can’t just be walking through the prairie grass in places like kā-kī-māmawēpihk and talking about what happened 200 years ago. It also requires action to address social and economic disparity, continued stigma against Indigenous people and issues like climate change.

Many will point to money included in federal budgets earmarked for Indigenous communities as checking those boxes, but Strongarm said there’s more to it.

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“Realistically, … seven per cent of that money is decentralized. Ninety-three per cent goes to salaries and offices,” he said. “We have to educate the public because (the government is) using money to kind of sweep it away.”

It’s also essential to follow through on all of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, emphasized Strongarm.

“At the rate we’re going, sorry, but we have a long ways to go.”

lkurz@postmedia.com

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