Back to the beginning of time

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This article was published 12/08/2007 (6876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Turtle Mountain area is the oldest human habitation in what is now Manitoba. Here, courtesy of Canupawapka (Pipestone) elder Frank Brown, is the Sioux creation myth. Myths, like the more familiar Greek and Norse tales, are allegories — pre-history masked in the form of a story, often a fantastic one.

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“I’ll go back to the beginning of time, before the Ice Age. The Creator gave us a choice, whether we wanted to remain in spirit form in the earth. Or do we want to be human beings. Some of us agreed to become human beings. The others remained in the earth… You don’t see them….

“When we agreed to be human, God gave us a territory and a language and with the territory and the language, he gave us an animal, to provide us with food, with clothing, with tools and even a home. That home we see today is the teepee.

“When God said, “Your territory is where the buffalo roams,” that’s the natural law.”

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The buffalo were indeed the sustenance of many nations in the vast area between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The Great Plains were a sea of grass and Turtle Mountain was an island near its north shore.

In historical times, the separate oyate (the word for nation in Dakota) were called by names we know from history books: Mandan, Hadaza, Aricara, Assiniboine, Dakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Paiute, Shoshone, Winnibago.

Before Europeans arrived, before epidemics like smallpox and countless wars devastated aboriginal nations, they had bigger populations than scientists and historians once thought. Some estimates put the population at 16 million at its height.

<span class="subhead"TURTLE MOUNTAIN

By the 18th and 19th centuries, historian James Ritchie writes, Turtle Mountain sat at the centre of intertribal rivalries, with many aboriginal nations jockeying with each other and the Europeans for diminishing resources.

For the sake of trade, it was important to maintain peace among the rivals. Warriors called Rattlers kept the trade routes safe from bandits. Ambassadors called Sitting Eagles worked the diplomatic channels among the confederacy.

At the centre sat the Turtle.

Mandan and Hidatsa traders ran the routes along the Mandan line that bisects the Turtle north to south.

The Medicine Line, a well-used commercial route, ran east-west along heights of land, on or close to the 49th parallel. The Medicine Line would later be adopted as the Canada-United States border.

How an age-old aboriginal boundary became the international border, said Ritchie, is a story that weaves oral tradition with historical fact.

“The traditional view is the Medicine Line was a boundary to keep the violence contained to the south, the worst of it anyway,” Ritchie said.

“Sitting Bull, for instance, would be telling his warriors they can’t do any fighting north of the Medicine Line,” Ritchie said.

They listened. For them, the Medicine Line embodied a spiritual reality that literally kept them in line.

The Medicine Line extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific as a kind of universally recognized boundary among aboriginal people before Europeans arrived.

From aboriginal guides to courier du bois, word of it crept into official documents as colonial powers opened up the continent.

“The first time I recognized the Medicine Line was being talked about in the literature is up around the Great Lakes area. As the line that ran down the middle. That was about 1780,” Ritchie said.

“That line anchored at the Whiteshell. It comes out at the Lake of the Woods, right? Early French, English and Spanish (territorial) claims all talk about extending that line west to the Rockies, to the headwaters of the Missouri River.”

There were other reasons the Medicine Line worked as a concept for an international border on the plains.

“The 49th parallel worked best because it ran between the heights of the land, between Turtle Mountain, the heights on the back of the Turtle, west to the Cypress Hills, to the Sweet Grass Hills, which are south of the U.S. border to Head-Smashed-In near Calgary and to the mountain heights at the Crowsnest Pass,” Ritchie pointed out.

In 1818, under the Treaty of Ghent, the Medicine Line worked its way into European history. The U.S., Britain and Spain agreed to use the line as a border, and they agreed to extend the border across the continent at the 49th parallel.

“It was as if they figured, ‘We’ve got this line. Let’s run it all the way to the Pacific,’ ” Ritchie said.

By the 1870s and on into the 1890s, British colonial powers north of the border came into close contact with various member nations of the Buffalo People, including the Yankton Sioux, whose most famous leader was Sitting Bull.

Sitting Bull travelled back and forth across the Medicine Line all his life, even taking refuge west of Calgary for three years after the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Sitting Bull respected the protocol that flowed from the Medicine Line and what he saw near Head-Smashed-In in Alberta led him to believe the Northwest Mounted Police shared his respect.

The leader had fond memories of Queen Victoria’s Canada, the “Grandmother’s Land,” as long as he lived.

The first Mounties would have been familiar with the concept of the Medicine Line as a boundary between warfare and truce.

Some of the Mounties had served on the U.S.-British boundary commission of the 1870s that helped established the permanent border.

“The fact is the protocol around this line, the way it was accepted, was remarkable. This was the Wild West. Yet people accepted the fact that they should stop shooting each other north of the line,” Ritchie said.

The Medicine Line also worked into the establishment of the International Peace Garden at Turtle Mountain in 1932.

The provincial park, established in 1961, encompasses 184 square kilometres of forests, marshes and shallow lakes.

Central to the story of how aboriginal hallowed ground came to become an international place of peace is a man named Udall.

“Enter a character named William Udall,” James Ritchie said. “He was the editor of the Boissevain Recorder from about 1910 to the 1940s or 1950.”

An immigrant from Manx, a Celtic island off the coast of Great Britain, Udall was insatiably curious and he was a horticulturist.

His wife was the daughter of a shopkeeper named Broudegest who settled west of Boissevain during the time the boundary commission was at work in the 1870s. Broudegest spoke seven languages, including German, French, English, Cree and Dakota.

It seems likely he transmitted all his Dakota lore to his son-in-law.

By the time Canada and the United States were ready to celebrate their close ties, it was the height of the Depression. The Peace Garden was a make-work project and Udall got himself appointed to the horticultural committee that was selected to choose a site for gardens.

The place was intended to be a pleasant park where citizens of both countries could meet without crossing a border or bothering with customs. Udall knew Turtle Mountain had been that kind of hub from time immemorial.

“Even the Dakota language gives hints to the sacred nature of the place,” said Frank Brown. “It was called Mani Toba. You know what Manitoba means? Mani means walk. Toba, four, the four directions. Turtle Mountain was the centre of it.”

Brown said that the area attracted people from all over the plains for sacred religious rites that served to preserve the ties among various nations of the Buffalo People and the Algonkian-speaking people, including the Anishinabe (Ojibway) and the Cree.

With Udall pushing the Peace Garden site, the ancient Turtle found a new place in the new political reality of the northern plains but it was still same role the mountain had always played. She was just under new management.

The mountain still is a refuge, but only for wildlife.

The Turtle had been the winter home for aboriginal people from all over the area, including Anishinabe (Ojibway) and in historical times, the Métis.

When the last of them were displaced, descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Turtle retreated to their summer homes on the plains. They become the First Nations of Sioux Valley, Canupawakpa and other Dakota nations.

Anishinabe descendants went farther west to their summer grounds, now loosely linked to the First Nations scattered across the western part of the province.

ICE AGE

Frank Brown recounts this story of the Buffalo People. If it describes the coming of the last Ice Age, as it appears to do, the oral tradition may date back 40,000 years.

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“The star people know what’s coming ,what kind of winter it will be, what kind of fall, what kind of spring. Just by looking at the stars, (like) we can look at the kind of day it’s going to be by looking at the sunset.

“I’m talking about our technology, natural technology. I’m talking about our weathermen. Our scientists.

“With the stars we knew we weren’t going to have spring or summer, just winter for awhile.

“So the people prepared for that. There was hunting, berry-picking, medicine, skunks, like morphine, Everything was extra They picked everything extra because they knew it was going to be winter for awhile, and it was dark. All the way. We all had to go to our winter homes for that time. The hot springs kept us alive, otherwise we wouldn’t survive.”

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Scientists say Turtle Mountain, along with all the northern part of the continent, was buried deep beneath the glacier during the last Ice Age, starting about 40,000 years ago and ending about 10,000 years ago. But oral tradition insists, and historian Ritchie is persuaded, that the top of the Turtle’s back remained ice-free. Perhaps it was warmed geothermally, by heat working up though the limestone from the gap in the bedrock far below.

Bill Brisbin, professor emeritus of geology at the University of Manitoba, says Turtle Mountain was buried in ice. But the retreating edge of the ice cap passed over Turtle Mountain about 16,000 years ago and, because of its height, the mountain would have stood out as an early place of refuge in the last years of the Ice Age, perhaps as an island in Lake Agassiz.

The Turtle as an ancient refuge is still commemorated in ceremonies.

“On the east side of the hills, there is fasting to this day, to talk to the Turtle.” (Brown)

It’s generally agreed that this is where humankind first showed up in what is now Manitoba after the ice receded about 10,000 years ago.

Brown says a fasting ceremony, carried out on the east side of the hills until this day “to talk to the Turtle,” commemorates its role as an ancient refuge.

BUFFALO ROCK

Look to the east of the Lorna Smith Nature Centre overlooking the Boissevain reservoir for the buffalo rock.

The boulder glows, the effect of natural quartz veins that line the rock. Flint knappers long ago flaked off pieces of the crystalline stone to make the shapes stand out. When they catch the last rays of the setting sun, they reveal a pair of buffalo heads. The heads are in profile, looking off to the east.

To this day, the stone starts to light up two hours prior to sunset after the summer solstice. It is most intense in the last few minutes before sunset.

The hills here are ancient earthen mounds. The boulder still shows faint traces of red ochre petroglyphs. There are two medicine wheels on the slopes, aligned to the solstice.

This place was a buffalo run, where the herd was lured and trapped for annual kills in late summer by Buffalo People.

The wind over the mound still blows like a hot dryer. Meat strips laid out on racks on the mound will dry in an afternoon.

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Here’s Frank Brown’s description of the buffalo-hunting days:

“The way they roamed with the buffalo, they had their own herd without a fence.

“If you see a herd without a camp, out there, that’s a hunt. You can claim those buffalo. You can’t claim somebody else’s herd.

“There is a certain time close to fall when a buffalo kill is made. That’s the time they relaxed. They’re not as dangerous. You don’t hunt them just anytime. They’re dangerous and they’re fast, faster than horses. All these things were given to my people.

“At that time, when we hunted these buffalo, that animal was never cooked. It was made into dry meat. The time of the kill, the weather is a lot warmer and you can’t keep that meat. They dried everything. Even the stomach part. They were containers for water.

“Every part of the buffalo was used for something, for a purpose.”