 I'm very interested in maps. So I'm just going to continue on with the terrain here a little bit. My hope is to maybe give you some ideas for your own teaching by sharing some of these things that I know. Very interested in maps. And this kind of occurred to me when my son started elementary school and he created his own map. He put the capitals and the provinces on and the territories and colored it. Did all that stuff. It's a ritual, right? It's a ritual. Put it at the front of his book, right? And the teacher said, well, you know, keep that there. You're going to need it for the rest of the course, right? And they do this every year. Every year they do this, right? So again, I'm interested. Okay, so how did this become the practice? Like, what is it that we're celebrating? You know, I would say that mapping is the first act of colonialism. Because what colonialism has to do is it has to remake the land in its own image. It has to take that significance that was once there and remove it and replace it with something else. That's why we have a place called Edmonton, which apparently there's a place in England called Edmonton, right? Which was the place where the chief factor was from. So it's this reinscribing, this renaming that's a key there, right? So I guess tonight, to share with you, you know, this challenge then to say, okay, so how can we think about this differently? Not to dismiss that political map and its significance. And that's not my intention to say that's worthless, because it's not. But what else is there? How can we think about this in other ways? How can we sort of recognize that this land could be understood in different ways, right? And so that topography is there. And this is a very interesting example, I would say, of the kind of thing I'm talking about. And this idea of nation and nationality, yeah, and I realize you probably can't see this very well. But this is a map that is world famous, actually. It's a map that changed European cartography. It was created in 1801 by a man named Akomoki. He was a Blackfoot chief, they called him. Akomoki, what happened is in the fall of 1801, him and a band of his followers, I was going to say, guys he was with, his buddies, they left southern Alberta, well, around Red Deer. And they went into the States, and they were gone for a long time. They came back about a month later, and there was a Hudson's Bay Factor named Peter Fiddler, who was working at a place called Chesterfield House. Now if you can picture your map of Alberta, Chesterfield House would be where the South Saskatchewan and the Red Deer River come together. It's right there at the confluence of those. So that's where they were. So when Akomoki came back, Peter Fiddler said through a translator, hey, where were you guys? And he said, well, I'll draw you a map, I'll show you. So we don't know, Fiddler doesn't say how he drew the map, like if Akomoki took actually a pencil and drew this, or if it was done in the snow, or how it was done, but what we do know is that Fiddler copied Akomoki's map, and through a translator, he recorded all the Blackfoot names for all the different places that are there. This map is remarkable for a lot of reasons, but one of the first ones, I would say, is its insight into a specific form of literacy that the Blackfoot people had back then. Now this is 1801. There were no Europeans in this part of the world to speak of. So the influence was very minimal. The first thing that you need to notice about this map is that west is actually the top of the map. So the top of the map is the Pacific Ocean. Now I've asked elders, why is that? And they said, duh, why do you think? You go to southern Alberta, the most prominent thing on the horizon on the west are the mountains. So that's the reference point. Not north, west. So this is the Pacific Ocean. This is the Columbia River, the Snake River. Now these two lines going down here, those are the Rocky Mountains, as you would see them from the prairies. So that's the line. This line here is the Missouri River. So here we have this, the 49th parallel hadn't been invented yet. So they don't really care about that. So this was Blackfoot territory from about Red Deer down into central Montana. So the 49th parallel today would be about here on this map. Another thing that's interesting about this map, well first of all these little circles here and everything, these are the caps that these guys noticed as they traveled the months they were gone. So in the translations you'll see these are the flatheads. This is where they are. Down here are the crows, enemies or allies. There's notes here about resources. You'll find wood here. The water is good over here. We saw some buffalo over here. So this is the Missouri River and of course these are all the tributaries of the Missouri River. So if you're traveling by land, this is something pretty critical that you need to know. Blackfoot never traveled by water. Another thing that's interesting is this is the Milk River Ridge here and then this is Chesterfield House right here. It's very clear to me that they understood quite well that this was a different river system from this. The Missouri goes to the Gulf of Mexico. This one goes to Hudson Bay. And Acomoki showed that very clearly. So it's a detailed map. This is about 200,000 square miles of territory that had never been mapped before. So Peter Fiddler, being the good employee he was, he rolled it up, put it on a canoe, sent it to Hudson's Bay, went to London. There's a guy named Aaron Aerosmith working for the Hudson's Bay Company in London. He took Acomoki's map and the notes that Fiddler made and he plugged this map into the jigsaw of North America that they had at that time. So this is Aerosmith using European cartographic conventions translating Acomoki's map and plugging it in. So this is what he created. Let's see. There's a slave lake up here, so Edmonton would be around here. So this is the territory that Acomoki mapped right in this area. Now, the story gets a little more interesting because a guy named Thomas Jefferson heard about Aaron Aerosmith's map and he bought it from the Hudson's Bay Company and he gave it to a couple of guys named Lewis and Clark. He said, take this map and go find out what we just bought from Napoleon, right? So that's what they did. It's interesting when you look at the notes of Lewis and Clark as I've done, you can see that they complained quite a bit about the map. It's not accurate, right? And it's often blamed on the Blackfoot, Acomoki, right? But one of the things they didn't realize was that the conventions that the Blackfoot used were a bit different, right? And Acomoki used the map or created the map for Fiddler because he thought he would want to travel down there where they had just been. So it had a practical kind of purpose to it. The idea is that the Aaron Aerosmith assumed that the line of mountains on Acomoki's map was a continental divide, but it wasn't. It was just the prominent peaks that they would see. The continental divide was... Well, sometimes it was up to, you know, 50 or 100 miles further west, right? So Lewis and Clark kept getting lost, right? Especially when they got closer to the mountains. But that difference in translation is the problem. So I guess my interest here in telling you this story is, you know, so what could this teach us today? What could this map mean for us today? What kind of doors could it open? Well, I think, first of all, we need to recognize that there's a specific form of literacy, as I said. A specific way that people understand the land that's different from the way we sort of conventionally have been taught, and they have the ability to express it in different ways, right? And again, I'm not interested in one replacing the other, but what would happen if we kind of held those in tension for a while, right? What could be created out of that for our students, right, for ourselves in terms of citizenship? So that today, you know, if we look at maps like this, this maps the treaty areas of Alberta. Treaty 8 in green, Treaty 6 in beige, Treaty 7 in blue, in terms of nation and nationality, what kind of a claim does that map make on us as citizens? I'm always remembering that, you know, the Supreme Court justice, I can't remember his name in the Royal Commission, but he declared publicly that he was a treaty person, and he sort of went on to explain how his family were immigrants, he grew up in Saskatchewan, and he realized, explained that his family's prosperity was based on the fact that that land was available to them because of the treaty. We call themself a treaty person, which is a very strange thing to do, right? A lot of people didn't know how to interpret that. Another map, right? This maps the languages, different communities and languages in Alberta. Blackfoot, Cree, Machiff, Ojibwe, Nakoda, Dene, different types of Dene language, Tsutina. One thing I'm interested in as well is place names, where they come from. Medicine hat, I guess is a good example. There's a story about why that place is called Medicine Hat. Panoka, a lot of people don't realize that's a Blackfoot word. It means elk. All kinds of different examples there. The language has connections to place.