Discover the Blackfoot Culture

Despite decades of harsh government policies designed to destroy their languages and institutions, Canada’s indigenous people are managing to preserve some of what makes them unique – their words.

When a language disappears, so do pieces of the collective memory of the culture that speaks it, as with environmental knowledge produced over hundreds or even thousands of years.

The Innu language of the arctic, for example, has many more concepts for ‘snow’ than you find in English. It’s not hard to understand that for people who spent more than half their lives on snow and ice without motorized transport, understanding variations in “snow” would be important. Making your igloo out of collapsible snow could be detrimental to one’s health.

Members of Alberta and Montana’s Blackfoot Confederacy also believe their languages contain knowledge and content crucial to their thriving as a people, and so efforts are being undertaken to preserve and restore their language – from the classroom to the library, the coffee shop to the world’s highest tech science facilities. And, while these efforts are piecemeal and often struggle to find funding, there are many determined people involved whose work is having a cumulative effect.

Today, for example, it is not uncommon to hear Blackfoot being spoken at coffee shops, and the City of Lethbridge has adopted the Blackfoot hello ‘Oki’ as its official civic greeting.

A high school teacher in Strathmore produced a Blackfoot play after learning the stories contained in the art at ‘Writing On Stone’ park could no longer be read with authority, because for so long the government refused to allow natives to access the site, and the visual language knowledge was lost.

One of the earliest promoters of restoring the many dialects of Blackfoot, Daryl Kipp, noted that the names for many plants in the region had been lost, and with it the knowledge of what that plant might be good for, from food to medicine. Kipp started the Piegan Institute in Montana when they were

Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly Courtesy National Public Radio / Russell Barber

down to very few native speakers, and it continues to grow. He’s passed on now, but others have taken up the cause, and today southern Alberta’s libraries are doing their part.

Linda Weasel Head, an indigenous liaison at the Lethbridge public library, offered Blackfoot learning opportunities using ‘native’ puppets created on the Siksika reserve. During weekly puppet shows to teach ‘100 Words of Blackfoot,’ she smiles when she says “kids pay more attention to the puppets than to me as a teacher. To them, the puppets are as real as you are.”

Representation that looks and speaks like your people can have a profound impact, and the Siksika puppets are so popular that creator Laura Asham has made a business out of producing them for many eager parents, daycares, and schools.

In Calgary, the new main library has opened an Indigenous Languages Centre, featuring books in many languages, including Blackfoot. Author Latasha Calf Robe’s book “My Braids” was written for her young son to be proud of his traditional hairstyle. Blackfoot was also featured at the highest echelons of global science! This happened when Corey Gray, who is a scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory facility, signed up his mother, Sharon Yellowfly, to translate into the Siksika language the momentous announcement that the project had, in fact, discovered gravitational waves.

Since the 2016 announcement was of global importance, its media release was being translated into over 20 languages, and Gray thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we could get this in an Indigenous language?’ Which is where his mom came in. Despite years of residential school efforts to kill the language in her, Sharon remains a proficient Blackfoot speaker. Still, the task meant days of effort coming up with new terms and concepts, like “Abuduuxbiisii o?bigimskAAsts” or “they stick together waves” to describe gravitational waves.

It seems Blackfoot languages are not merely surviving, but evolving, as all living languages do.

By: Allen R. Gibson.

About the Book: Siipisaahkomaapi (Night Boy) is a traditional Blackfoot boy. In this story, he shares his world with his family, and the meaning and gifts of his three braids. About the Author:Latasha Calf Robe is from the Kainaiwa First Nation and a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Latasha is the proud daughter of Marvin and Teena Calf Robe. Latasha is a mother of three beautiful Blackfoot children who she raises with her partner Adam Solway. With the support and teaching from her family, Latasha is thrilled to share Niitsippooktsistaanitsi with you. Find the book in the Calgary Public Library catalogue.