Indigenous Alberta

Alberta's innovation story has usually been told from one side. The labs and oil fields where institutions made their bets. In our last episode, we followed that story through energy, research, and politics, and then by asking who was in that frame and who had been left at its edges. This time we begin on Treaty 7 territory with Kainai Elder Calvin Williams, also known as Pretty Shields, whose stories carry innovation across generations. He shows us innovation and the oldest tools of life here. Shelters, collective problem solving rooted in ceremony and story. From there we turn to Mary Weasel Thad diving around woman and Red Crow College, to historian Keith Regular and to Troy Patenode and Heather Devine tracing innovation in education, in reserve economies, and in art and humour. Some might assume that innovation is a settler theme, while Indigenous histories are filed under traditional, as they belonged only to the past. Yet the adoption of the horse, the fur, and the buffalo robe trades, and later Indigenous agriculture entrepreneurship all involved intense innovation within and between Indigenous community and their non-Indigenous neighbours. This episode is not about discovering Indigenous innovation. It asks how Alberta's story changes when we recognize what Indigenous communities here have been doing all along, and bring those innovations from the edge of the frame to the centre. We begin with Kaina elder, Calum Williams, aka Pretty Shields, whose stories about the real people and the real language show storytelling as a living technology of survival. My Name is Pretty Shields. I'm here to help out my brother. Reloads his rifle. The origin of Ni Tse Tapi, the real people, Ni Tse Tapi, the real

People, is what we call ourselves. And the stories that, you know, have been passed down from generation to generation were told in Blackfoot, in the Blackfoot language. Ni Tse Pukhsin. Ni Tse Pukhsin is the real language. It has a spirit. Our stories go back to when we first started as humans. What Creator gave us was to be innovative, to use nature, creation in our survival, and to use relationships to help us succeed in the past and to the present and moving into the future. Our ancestors have always been concerned about the future. Creator gave us tools to survive. All humans are given tools to survive. One of them being their mind. Our ancestors, when they began, there was an evolution of shelters. The first, our ancestors used any abandoned den or home of the animals. We observed the animals, how they lived, how they survived, and we followed that. The second shelter that they used was the lean-to. They became more intelligent and they started to use lean-to's to survive. The third shelter that we used was the first teepee, given to a young man in a vision where he was lying in a carcass of a buffalo. And he had to crawl into the buffalo to escape the extreme cold. If he had not done that, he would have froze. So while he was laying in that carcass, he had a dream. A man told him, "I'm going to give you my lodge." And in his dream, he seen that teepee image, how it looked. So when the storm passed, he went home and he told the older people what had happened. The old people delegated the women to make a lodge from that dream, how he described it. And at first, they used three poles. The women were able to come up with a tanning solution, using the brain of the buffalo to soften rock-hard buffalo hide. And to cut and shape it into a cone-shaped structure. This is how intelligent the women were. They were able to come up with the first teepee. And they placed rocks on the bottom to weigh the hide down so that the wind doesn't blow it around. This was good in sheltered areas, Riverbond. But when they moved out into the open prairie, the teepee kept blowing over. So they asked the women to make improvements. The women came up with a four pole system that we still use today. And also they put loops at the bottom of the hide to to insert pegs to keep the teepee held firmly to the ground. Then they built an inner wall to regulate the smoke to the top of the teepee. These were the innovations that the women had. And today we still used the teepee for ceremonial use. And we still have all the transfers that we acquired with the teepee. The designs that are drawn on the teepee is a ceremony. So this is the evolution of the four shelters. And it came, you know, from that experience where that young man was laying in the carcass of the buff. For years,

Stories like Calvin Williams have been ignored. The dominant narrative in books and classrooms treated reserves as places where innovation stopped, static, poor, and stuck on the margins of Alberta's modern story. Historians often wrote as if Indigenous peoples were acted upon, not agents of historical change. However, there is a different, more powerful story. In the 20th century, modern Indigenous activism in Alberta took organized shape in the Indian Association of Alberta, which split from the League of Indians of Western Canada in 1939 and became a more explicitly treaty-based voice. In 1960, representing a broad base of treaty interests and working with allies like Calgary lawyer Ruth Gorman and teacher John Laurie, Johnny Sampson and Harold Beebe, representing the IAA helped secure a federal vote that no longer forced statist Indians to give up treaty rights and leave their reserves simply to cast a ballot. The Association also protested the federal government's 1969 white paper on Indian affairs and answered it with Harold Cardinal's red paper, an alternative rooted in Alberta's disenchantment. Quiet protests sustained organizing and strategic use of Canadian law all point to Indigenous communities actively inventing political tools to defend their futures. Historian Keith

Regular's work on the Kainai Reserve sits inside this larger shift in understanding. It opened my eyes because it changed for me a perception that I was taught in university about poverty-stricken reserves where resources disappeared in and nothing came out. So I was glad having my mind and my eyes open for a difference. And even though I only studied the Kainai Reserve, there is no reason to believe that if you studied differing reserves in differing circumstances, you might find very much of the same. That is an engagement and an advancement and a modernizing of outlook and not just a marginalization of a poverty-stricken people. Across

Alberta, Indigenous People were among the first in Canada to seize control of their post-secondary future. Blue Quills near St. Paul became the first Indigenous-controlled college. And On the Kainai Reserve, Red Crow College was amongst the first in Southern Alberta. It was imagined as a hope for the future, not a remedial institution. That hope was nearly shattered in 2015 when the college's building, an old residential school, burned. In 2015,

The college burnt. I was kind of upset because we just finished cataloging the whole collection and just went up and smoked. Oh no! And so I asked my mother, "Geez, what should I do? I don't even feel like going back because of all that word, just burnt. Tough pay." She said, "Well, you just have to go back and start again." I said, "Do I have to? Yeah." Yeah. So then we moved to the old St. Boye School, and it's an elementary school, but we had to operate out of there. And at that time, that's when the president, Roy Weasel, that's my brother, he ended up being able to secure all the funds needed to develop the college. And then it opened in 2022, State of the Art College, and it had a lot of things that the St. Boye School and the Owl Residential School didn't have, like a gymnasium, exercise room, daycare, cafeteria, and it had a large atrium, and that's where they put the Red Crow teepee up to. And it had a lot of artwork from Blackfoot artists, and each one tells a story, and they have a picture of the artist and what the piece is all about. The artwork is something that is unique about it, and also the signage, the elders named all the areas in Blackfoot. So they have them in Blackfoot and then English subtitles, I would say. Yeah, it's a nice building, yeah, inside and out, yeah. Red Crow

College is a physical statement about how the community wants to participate in post-secondary education and modern professional life, while keeping language, ceremony, and relationship at its core. If you follow that design principle backward across the 20th century, Keith Regler finds it at work in a different way.

The central argument of the book is that the Kainai people were not isolated and marginalized by the modern economy that was going on around them. In fact, they participated, but they also designed their participation. So they weren't just conscripted and then left to deal with it. They actually moderated and designed how they were going to be involved. And it wasn't just on a one-item involvement. Their whole lives and their reserve were taken into account when they decided to integrate themselves into the southern Alberta economy and become part of what was happening around them. That stood out for me when I started to study this and to look at it in detail. And I was taken at just how much they designed what they did to make sure that they were not marginalized by the modern economy.

Indigenous innovation also shows up in the ways communities work to repair cultural transmission after residential schools and other policies tried to break it. At Red Crow College, the college is helping students rebuild knowledge that many of their parents were prevented from receiving. One of

The things that Red Crow College is known for is having Blackfoot language and culture. And some of our students, well, they don't speak Blackfoot, but they really enjoy the elders when they go into the classroom. And they speak about the culture and they teach them about their identity. Who they are is Nitsitabihe, Blackfoot people. We ask the students if they have a Blackfoot name, do they know which clan they come from? And some of them don't because their parents don't know. And that's from the residential school system, because they kind of forbid that type of cultural transmission. The elders will ask them who their people are and then they tell them, well, this is the clan you come from. They'll gather all the students that want one and they'll have a Blackfoot name in ceremony. And it's usually a Blackfoot name that's handed down from one of their relatives or parents, aunt, uncle, things of that nature. So they get a name. This sort

Of disruption is nothing new. For generations, changes in agricultural Markets, federal regulations, pressures on land and movement threatened to overwhelm Makini, just as fires in residential schools threatened their educational institutions later. It

Would be very easy when you see what was going on during this period from the 1880s until 1939, that they could have been economically overwhelmed. They could have been marginalized to a great degree. And it didn't happen. The only reason I think that that was avoided was because they were so astute, and they were so deliberate, and they were so thoughtful about how they wish to engage with people outside of the reserve and an economy that they could not resist. They could not change, but they could control the way that they integrated themselves with the new culture and the new economy. They could choose what it was they did to some degree. And I think that made all the difference for them. When

We listen to elders and read blood history, the question is not whether there was control, but how the bloods answered it. What strategies they used, how they pushed agriculture forward, and how they kept asserting their own understanding of treaty, land, and freedom inside those constraints. Calvin Williams' next story takes us directly into that tension. The

First car that came to our people was really amazing to our ancestors. They couldn't understand what made that vehicle move. So the first car, they call it Existumatumaka. Existumatumaka. Moving on its own power. They didn't realize that you put gas into that vehicle to make the motor move. That part they didn't see. What they seen was an object that was moving. Moving on its own power. So they were able to drive vehicles later on. They were able to operate farm equipment. They understood how to use the old plows. And those were all manual. But they used prayer again to ask Creator, "Please make this seed grow so that we can use it for our benefit." So they're able to understand how to use farm equipment. And they were really good. They put a lot of dedication into their work. And the government was really amazed with, you know, the crops that they were growing. But the government did not want to see our ancestors succeed. They always wanted to keep them under their control. So they came up with different ways to try and make our ancestors fail, not succeed in farming. They took away those implements. They took away the livestock needed. So that they, you know, will go to the government and ask for help. That was something that the government never, never wanted. Even today, today we still have the Indian Act where we're not human yet. We always have to ask for permission. And yet we have all this land that we can farm and become successful, self-sustained. The government doesn't want to see. They always want to maintain control. And when they made treaties, the thought was, we're going to live, coexist on these lands. We don't interfere with each other's lives. We support each other. We didn't know that we were going to be placed in reservations. And that was a lot of trauma that happened when we were closed in, in a very small area of land. We were so used to going out, exploring our traditional territory. So those kind of concepts of being controlled, you know, eventually we accepted that. And today we don't try to live that freedom that we lived before, that we experienced before. So all these, you know, we adapted to, we adapted to living in a closed area from, you know, the freedom that we had before. We knew about all of our territory, all of our territory was named in Blackfoot, the different rivers, the hills, the trees, plants. All those were given names in Blackfoot. So we knew our territory. But today being confined in a reserve, we've lost all that information. We used to use our traditional medicines and we knew all the plants and their purpose. From the beginning, our ancestors moved through life, discovering new things that they could use. We lost a lot of that information.

The Métis found themselves in similar circumstances, caught between settler and First Nations worlds. Holding a central place in the Western economy, they had adapted Hudson's Bay Company and Northwest Company corporate structures to their own purposes and culture. And for a time occupied a dominant position, not only in the fur trade, but in Western Canada as a whole. Across these stories, you see communities commodifying resources, time and labour on their own terms and building structures to manage relationships with powerful outsiders. The umbrella

Term that I could use to talk about the initiatives was that they commodified their resources and their time and their labour. And what really struck me and what I found very interesting was their involvement in the Raymond area sugar beet fields. Now, normally, labourers contract themselves, they're offered a wage, and then the employer basically determines how they work, how they get involved, what they do. They set the time that's committed. And it's hard to imagine that many, let's say, white labourers would take birthdays off or decide, "I don't feel like doing this today," and not going. But the Bloods, they went at this very deliberately. They wanted the work, and they did the work, and they worked very, very hard. Labour in sugar beet is not very nice stuff, as they say. It's very demanding work. But they said, "We will do this, but under our terms." That was very, very interesting, because it showed that they would not be conscripted to do labour that they did not feel like doing. They refused to be browbeaten and told when and how they were going to do this. They moderated their involvement, deliberately moderated their involvement. The same

Resolve that shaped sugar beet labour contracts and grazing leases also shows up in places that don't look like politics at first glance, in how buildings were laid out, how classrooms are organised, how images enter galleries and public collections. In a recent book by architect Vivian Manask, non-Indigenous architects describe how working with Indigenous clients changed their practice, how they organised their firms, approached land and thought about what a building should do. In the art world, we can see a similar influence. In Troy Patnoe's 2014 University of Calgary dissertation, he argues that Indigenous art has profoundly affected many of its largely settler buyers. There's real important innovation through

Indigenous art. I think of Gerald Tailfeathers. And although he was working in a style that if you were to just look at it in a superficial kind of a way, it doesn't look necessarily that innovative. It looks like a very representational piece that we've been seeing in a European tradition for centuries. And on one level, it's very non-innovative. But what is innovative about it is he's bringing into this, this type of Western, this type, this European language, language of art and world where, you know, artists are connected to schools, to collectors, to art dealers. And so therefore having To kind of speak a language that they would also be able to understand. Gerald Tailfeathers puts in front of us in this accessible art, art language, something new, you know, indigenous ways of life, cultural traditions, you know, ceremonial people in these sacred societies walking out of out of a lodge after, you know, having engaged in a ceremony during the Sundance. You know, he's putting these things right in front of you, which had never been put in front of people before. It's indigenous ways of life happening right now in the present day. These aren't these things disappearing from the past. This isn't a way of life that is, that is, that is gone or That just happened along the way. It's happening right now in the 1950s, right around us. There's people that are going to the Sundance. There's people that are, you know, they're still a part of these sacred Societies walking out of the lodges with these staves and elements of the bundles that they've been carrying for millennia. Yeah. And Gerald Tailfeathers puts that into this style that, that is, that is accessible to people who are non-indigenous, non-Blackfoot. And in a way that's a real significant Political intervention. Like, hey, you know, the Blackfoot, you know, we didn't go away. We're here. We're still doing all these things, no matter how hard you've tried to get us to go away. This, this is it, right? We're here and this is all still happening. And so that is like a real important innovation. Tailfeathers subverts the dominant art language to insist that Blackfoot and other Indigenous practices belong in these spaces. He is not the only Indigenous artist to innovate within a system that was designed to suppress just that. I also think about Alex Janbeer in this way. Same thing. It's abstract art, but it's abstract art with a twist. Like again, we've never seen abstract art quite like this before. And you can name countless numbers of artists who do abstract art in ways that have never done before. I Mean, in some ways, that's kind of the point of modern art is trying to do in a way that's never been done before. But this, you know, what Alex Janbeer is doing is it's abstract. But I can't think of any other way to put this except in a way that it's also not abstract at the same time. It's like when we're telling a story, when we're sharing things in a conversation, it can go anywhere. It's unpredictable. It can go anywhere. But also there's like this core element to this to the story and how we're sharing in this everyday way of talking and speaking to each Other. That's not locked down in writing. I'm speaking like, you know, oral sharing. That there's like an abstractness to that, but there's also a real reality to it that is like very concrete. There's a concrete core to it and a truth to it. And I feel like that's with Alex Janbeer's art. It's putting something that is in this fluidity of language and oral speaking and stories into this more or less concrete. Because after it's down on this canvas, it's kind of locked into that kind of those shapes and those flows and the nodes in his artwork. They'll never change in that particular way Before. But also they kind of do. They move. That's it. It's like it's a great way of like capturing the fluidity, the unpredictability of language, The abstractness of how sometimes oral talking can be out in the world. While also capturing this real core, non-abstract connectedness between, you know, that flows through this core, this core truth, this core thing that doesn't change, you know, at the same time. Artists like Tail Feathers and Jean Vier are innovating in gallery spaces, while

Others have carried that work into newspapers and cartoons. One is Kainai cartoonist and journalist Everett Soup, often called the pit bull of native journalism. Soup used finely honed humor to analyze indigenous oppression. What I found interesting about Everett Everett Soop is that he had, his life was almost bifurcated. As a young person, he was a cartoonist, a political cartoonist for the Kainai News, which is one of the best, greatest Aboriginal newspapers, newspapers, period, you will ever read. It was a great newspaper. It had all the sections. It was interesting to read. It was very well written. It was really great. And Everett was the cartoonist and he drew editorial cartoons. They were very hard hitting. And he quite often went after council. He'd go after the government later on. You know, they weren't necessarily seeing those things. The community saw the cartoons. And he was threatened, somebody threatened to push him down the stairs one time. And the artistic side was probably always there, but he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. And so his art changed. He wasn't concentrating so much on editorial things related to Indigenous politics. He was looking at the issues that disabled people face. And there's one cartoon that just sort of summed it up. He was going to the University of Lethbridge and their washrooms were not structured for disabled people to be able to get in and out. He had a wheelchair and he couldn't get in. And it shows, he drew a picture of wrestling with a toilet stall. And normally something like that would not be the subject of a cartoon. You know, they're not perfect. But they are statements and they do what art is supposed to do. They communicate ideas and the reader or the person who is viewing that piece of art is going to get something out of it. That's what art does. It gives you an emotional rush when you interact with it. And his drawings and things did

That. Everett Soop's career makes it harder to see Indigenous people as simply absorbing whatever the world throws at them. Humor and art become tools for managing conflict in the community and pushing back Against institutions that do not fit. It's wrong to

Assume that if there is negative, it's all negative. The Kainai people took the negative, but they also looked at what was negative and said, "Well, here's what we can change." And that deliberation is what makes the difference oftentimes so that you can take even disadvantages and moderate the disadvantages by looking for what you can achieve to your advantage. But again, I return to this thing, the adaptation is that they did not neglect the calling of their culture. When tradition or interest demanded something different, then they defaulted to culture and tradition.

The adaptation here is not just new tools or institutions. It is the practice of deliberation itself, taking harm and pressure seriously, but refusing to let them define every outcome. The deepest imposed systems has been schooling. In the last generation, Indigenous leaders have pushed back by insisting that education, too, must be redesigned. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard from thousands of residential school survivors and issued 94 calls to action in 2015, made education a central focus.

The curriculum that is being taught today to young people did not have any First Nation input. And going back again to the treaties, when the two groups of people met, they were supposed to agree, collaborate. We should be teaching young people that we're going to be growing in this new country. We didn't have that. And I think that was very important, where we collaborate and we make recommendations. What's going to be good for our young people? I think if we had worked together from the start, I think Canada would have been a lot better. The assimilation process really destroyed a lot of lives. It really caused a lot of trauma to those people that were assimilated. And that wasn't supposed to happen either. So I think we compromise, you know, that needs to happen. And now we're having First Nation people sitting on school boards, which is good. And also working together at college university level. That's going to be really important for the future. Today with the TRC, my brother, Roy Wieselfatt, has been very instrumental in creating awareness, creating partnerships, networking with the outside universities. And sharing his knowledge, you know, what's going to make that university a better place to study at. To be able to become more human. And the ultimate goal our people want to achieve is to be Nita-pi-tapi. Nita-pi-tapi is a real person. I think that's something that all the poor races have to try and achieve that goal of being human. And when you do that, you know, things are going to be a lot better for the present world and also the future.

Calvin illustrates how institutions have treated Indigenous people as less than human and what it takes to undo that. His phrase "real person" carries the weight of that history. It points to a future in which Indigenous peoples are not managed or assimilated, but recognized as full partners in shaping schools, universities and public life in this country. As something of listeners, a willingness to truly hear these stories.

Our ancestors were very strong people. They had disruptions in their lives. Very tragic. But they were able to move forward because of their spirituality. Their belief that something good is going to happen in the future. But we still carry that on forward today. And we're trying to share that with anybody. We never, never turn anybody away who wants to learn about us, about our ways. We invite them and we share our knowledge to help them succeed. Today, I've got many, many friends throughout the world that I pray with, that I enjoy ceremony with. And they enjoy that also. Being, you know, being able to enjoy a ceremony that started here. Anybody is my friend and if they want to learn, I teach them. Yeah.

Kelvin's closing words remind us that Indigenous innovation is not only about policies, economies or institution. It lives in ongoing ceremonies, in friendships that now span the world, and in a standing invitation to anyone willing to learn. These are not stories kept behind museum glass. They are offers to enter into a different way of thinking about relationships, responsibility and change on this land. In this episode, we've shifted the frame on innovation in Alberta. Through Kelvin Williams, we've seen how Blackfoot stories and ceremonies carry ways of solving problems that long predate the province. Through Mary Weaselfatt and Red Crow College, we've watched a community rebuild an institution on its own terms. Through Keith Regular's work, we've revisited the kind I reserve as a place of deliberate economic and political choice. And with Troy Patnoad and Heather Devine, we've seen how art and humour become tools for saying, "We're still here," in spaces that once tried to be a part of the world. That once tried to ignore Indigenous presence. Together, these stories show innovation in Alberta, shaped by elders, activities, artists and students who insisted on setting their own terms. In our next episode, we turn the lens on the province's formal political partnerships and premiers movements and people who built them. We'll ask how Albertan politicians have been innovative, misunderstood or simply maverick and what their experiments have meant. Have meant.