Native people left their mark on land that is now Canmore
by Rob Alexander
Go back 117 years and you'll see the town of Canmore in its infancy. Go back 11,000 years, if not longer, and you'll see nomadic peoples belonging to the First Nations moving through the Bow Valley in search of big game. Their passing is marked by the remnants of hunting camps, stone spear points and the bones of big horn sheep, located along Vermillion Lakes west of the Banff town site.
In the east end of the Bow Valley, around Canmore and Exshaw, pictographs and petroglyphs can be found on the smooth walls of Grotto Canyon and in the hidden recesses near Grassi Lakes - the site of the most accessible and endangered pictographs. In a tight part of the steep walled canyon above the two blue-green lakes sits a large boulder. On this boulder are the pictographs of a figure holding either a hoop or a drum and a hunting scene of two hunters attacking a large ungulate, possibly an elk. The figures were painted onto the rock with red ochre possibly collected from the Paint Pots, a large deposit or reddish brown iron oxide, in Kootenay National Park. It is best not to touch the pictographs as the oils from our skin erodes the ochre.
Members of the Stoney tribe display their traditional dress by a tipi at a ceremony in Morley, the Native reserve 20 minutes east of Canmore.
In more recent times, but still well before Europeans ever set foot in North America, or "Turtle Island" as the Native people call the continent, the Bow Valley served as hunting grounds and religious purposes for the Plains tribes - the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Blackfoot, Blood and Peigan), the Stoney and the Sarcee First Nations.
The Kootenay and the Shuswap also traveled through the Bow Valley to hunt and to trade. Of all the groups, the Kootenay were the only true people of the mountains. At least eight circular depressions belonging to Shuswap pit houses have been found in Banff National Park, indicating the Shuswap at least spent some time in the Bow Valley. Most of the pit houses date between 2,800 years and 440 years old. Pit house sites have also been found along the upper reaches of the Bow River.
As the first explorers began to arrive in the Rocky Mountains in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, they began to arbitrarily rename most of the significant landmarks in the Rocky Mountain region.
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Ancient signs of Native habitation can be found in centuries old pictographs, such as this one of a hoop dancer, found in Cougar Canyon near Canmore.
Others, like the Bow River, were directly translated into English. The banks of the Bow River - Ijathibe Wapta in Stoney - were where the Stoneys often went to cut Saskatoon saplings for their bows. Today, the Stoneys call the river Mini thni Wapta, or Cold River. The Bow River flows from Bow Summit high in the north-end of Banff National Park.
The site of the Town of Canmore, just west of a traditional Stoney campground was known as Chuwapchipchiyan Kude Bi - or "the place where a hunter shot at what he thought was an animal, but which actually turned out to be a stand of willows".
A more recent connection is marked by the adoption of the name - Ehagay Nakoda or the 'Last Nakoda' - for one of the mountains overlooking Canmore.
For people of the Stoney-Nakoda nation, originally part of the Dakota Sioux of the Upper Missouri River in what is now the U.S., the Bow River area became home when they migrated west during the late 1600s to escape the smallpox and strife within the Sioux Nation. The Stoney people, known for their method of cooking with fire-heated rocks, still speak the Nakoda dialect of the Sioux language.
Aside from the footsteps of a few explorers, Europeans had little impact on the Stoneys until the mid-1800s with the arrival of Methodist missionaries. In 1877, with the signing of Treaty 7 with the fledgling Canadian government, the Blackfoot, Peigan, Blood, Sarcee and Stoney Nations gave up their rights to their traditional lands. In exchange, Native people were allocated reserves and promised food and money.
Today more than 3,400 Native people live on three reserves set aside for the three different bands - the Wesley, the Chiniki and the Bearspaw - which make up the Stoney Nation. The largest reserve, centered around the community of Morley, is about a 20-minute drive east of Canmore, where the Chiniki band operates the Chief Chiniki Restaurant and Handicraft Centre. Overlooking the north-bank of the Bow River is the Stoney Indian Park, which offers camping, fishing and interpretive trails. A captive herd of bison can be seen from the park as well.
A Note on Native Names
While some Native people may still refer to themselves as "Indians" or as "Indian people", aboriginal, Native or First Nations has become more accepted.
The many Native groups in the Rocky Mountain region also prefer to use their own names for themselves
- Stoney (Nakoda)
- Sarcee (Tsuu T'ina)
- Blackfoot (Siksika)
- Peigan (Piikani)
- Blood (Kainaiwa)
- Kootenay (Kuntenai)
- Shuswap (Kinbasket)
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