To the people of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, the Bow Valley is their everything. "(It) forms the centre of our culture, our economy, our families, and our way of living off the land," Nakoda elder and artist Roland Rollinmud and Ian A.L. Getty, Stoney Nakoda Nation research director, write in the foreword of Spirits of the Rockies: Reasserting an Indigenous Presence in Banff National Park by Courtney W. Mason.
To the people of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, the Bow Valley is their everything.
“(It) forms the centre of our culture, our economy, our families, and our way of living off the land,” Nakoda elder and artist Roland Rollinmud and Ian A.L. Getty, Stoney Nakoda Nation research director, write in the foreword of Spirits of the Rockies: Reasserting an Indigenous Presence in Banff National Park by Courtney W. Mason.
And yet, the 1877 signing of Treaty 7 and the birth of Canada's national parks forced the Nakoda from the Bow Valley while confining them to a reserve at Morley as the needs and interests of the Nakoda were seen as counter to the interests of the Canadian government, parks managers and tourism operators.
For many years, despite restrictions on their culture and their freedom to travel, the Nakoda found ways to continue to access and use their traditional lands in the Banff-Bow Valley region by participating in both the tourism industry and in Banff Indian Days.
It is this story of ingenuity, enterprise and determination that Mason, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Indigenous Health Research Group at the University of Ottawa, shares following a six-year examination of how and why the Nakoda were excluded from the Bow Valley region and their response to those measures.
But rather than simply present his research and discuss the Nakoda as an abstraction, a large part of Mason's work and this book itself forms around the words of the Nakoda themselves.
Along with analyzing archival records, including the Banff Crag and Canyon, and undertaking extensive ethnographic research, Mason also interviewed Nakoda elders. Spirits of the Rockies is, as a result, a combination of memoir, a regional history and a scholarly work; it does tend to lean most strongly towards academia – Mason is an academic after all – but that proves to be an important aspect of this project as it gives Mason the tools he needs to look at the history critically and provide a clear understanding of how the Nakoda were able to make the most of a bad situation.
Rollinmud and Getty point out that the academic nature of this book is important as it sets the Nakoda into a larger context wherever colonial powers have attempted to subjugate native peoples, whether that is in Canada or further afield.
“... this approach adds an intellectual dimension which demonstrates that the colonial experiences of the Nakoda were a common experience within colonial power relations and its objectives to assimilate, conform, and repress Indigenous rights and cultural practices,” they write.
And as Mason turns his academic lens on Nakoda history, he is able to avoid the pitfalls of the ethnographic researcher staring down at his subject from up on high. Instead, Mason's feet are firmly planted on the ground with the Nakoda, which ensures that the Nakoda have their say in all aspects of the history he shares. This provides a context and perspective often missing from both scholarly and general histories about Aboriginal people.
Including the voices of Nakoda elders as part of the story, along with Mason's own personal journey of discovery, makes Spirits of the Rockies much more than a scholarly work. The personal touch infused throughout this book opens it to a general audience and at the same time reinforces the idea that the Bow Valley has been a known and sacred landscape to the Nakoda for millennia.
Spirits of the Rockies is a welcome addition to the long list of books written about the Bow Valley region. It also stands as an example of how the history of the Indigenous people of the Rocky Mountains must be told, with their inclusion and with an eye towards giving something back in exchange. In Mason's case it was evaluating his own subjectivity.
“While always critically aware of how my own subjectivity impacted my research, whether it was in how I behaved or how my behaviour was evaluated when working in communities, I was reassured by affirmations that my research mattered to community members, that it served community interests and that it was generally welcomed by leaders and elders,” he writes.
Mason also provided a history of the communities that comprise the Nakoda nations and of Banff Indian Days with the Stoney Nakoda Nations archives.
It is no longer good enough to tell the story of the Nakoda and other Indigenous people from a distance or as an abstraction; instead, with Mason's excellent example of how work of this nature needs to be done, researchers, writers and historians need to go a step further. And again going by Mason's example, the Bow Valley and all of its diverse communities will be better for it.
Spirits of the Rockies: Reasserting an Indigenous Presence in Banff National Park, published by the University of Toronto Press, sells for $27.95.
