I am hoping many of you caught the TV program last night Into the West, interwining the lives First Nations medicine-man/seer Loved by the Buffalo and "mountain-man" Jacob Wheeler.
The juxtaposing of the Lakota's sacred circle (medicine wheel) and the wooden wheels of the white man's civilization is cool.
I was reminded of the book Canada's Stonehenge, Astounding Archaeological Discoveries in Canada, England and Wales by Edmonton professor Gordon R. Freeman, in which he proves that the Stonehenge and other archaeological remains in the United Kingdom and Sun Temple, sacred circles "sun cairn rings" of the Northern Prairies of Canada are similarly arrayed to the equinoital days and the solstices, as if part of a "one-world" civilization.
He examines a sacred circle near Edmonton (30 km east of the almost-abandoned small hamlet of Majorville) and preceives that it was built 5000 years ago as a solar calendar (and is still revered by the local Siksika).
In the show, we also see some of the creation of part of the Metis race, the offspring of white male adventurers and Native women, prominent still in Canada (but less well-known in the U.S.). Metis are a "invisible minority" as their coloration, to speak racially, is not distinguishable from the founding races.
One of the best-known mixed-blood Albertan, Peter Lougheed, did not make a big thing of his Native-hood, for example. (A recent book covers the relationahi p between Peter and his Native grandmother, The Premier and his Grandmother, Peter Lougheed, Lady Belle and the Legacy of Metis Identity, by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon.)
The Metis's survival in Canada has been recently affirmed by a court ruling that the Canadian government did not abide by its obligations that it had made when it acquired rule over the North-West. The British government that controlled the Hudson's Bay Company that had economic monopoly over the region forced the Canadian government to negotiate and make a bargain with the inhabitants of Manitoba, the metis who had rights of occupancy there. The govnment promised more than 1 M acres for the children of the metis there, but never followed through and delivered. The court found this was not a dead issue (despite the 150 year lapse) as the Metis still existed, and the Canada government still existed so the bargain was still enforceable.
Laurent Garneau, a Metis belonging to a line of ancestors dating back to 1700s Quebec, fought alongside Riel in his 1870 rebellion. When the bargain was not upheld, and rampant anti-Metis racism made his family's life in Manitoba unbearable, he and many others fled Manitoba and moved to the Saskatchewan River country in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Garneau settling in what is now southside Edmonton.
Edmonton was already an important centre of Metis in the western Prairies. Although not so many lived at any one time around Fort Edmonton, it is said that almost every Metis family on the western Prairies lived near the fort at one time or another.
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(this is a re-issue of one of my "Old Alberta" blogs of 2013.)
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