 Well, today there's another rock. I know. Maybe you know it too. It's in the Royal Alberta Museum. It also has a long story. It was a gift from the sky this rock, and you should know that both the Blackfoot and the Cree, who are the people I'm most familiar with, they refer to themselves as sky people, because their stories come, they come from the sky to Earth. So this rock came from the sky, and it was also a site of pilgrimage. You can see on this map, it's marked where the spot, close to Hardesty. The story is this rock fell from the sky, and people saw it. Right? It went across the sky. It was a fiery ball, and it hit the Earth. It made an impact, and then it burnt the whole area around it. So people went there to go have a look at it. So the rock and the place both became significant, and this lasted for a long time. No one knows when that happened. But in 1866, this guy, John McDougall, who's a Methodist missionary, who had a mission house there at Fort Saskatchewan, he was invited by the Cree to go to a thirst dance ceremony out there close to where that rock was, and while he was there, he was shown this rock. So he got an idea. He thought that if he could get the rock to his mission house, then all the Indians would go there. So what he does, he sent out some men with a cart and some horses, and they hoisted this rock onto it, and they took it back to Fort Saskatchewan. Well, it didn't work, right? People didn't go there. But what did happen is that there were prophecies made about this act. This is 1866. Now for the Cree, the important number is four. So with this prophecy, they said four things will happen to us as a result of this rock being removed. They said, we're going to suffer, we're going to starve. We're going to be intense hunger. We're going to be killed by disease. There's going to be more warfare. We're going to suffer, and we're going to be locked down. There's this idea of being locked down. And you know, a lot of people I know believe that those all came true, right? Because four years later in 1870, about half the people who lived in Alberta died of smallpox, the First Nations people, in 1870. The buffalo weren't seen around these parts much anymore. People suffered a lot because of that. In 1870, there was a battle at Fort Woopup, right? And the Cree were basically massacred by the Blackfoot, and then the whole reserve process began. Right? This rock is the one that was removed and it ended up at the Mission House, as I said. Now when, I think when McDougal realized that it wasn't getting a lot of attention, that people weren't going there, he shipped it to Toronto, actually. And it went to Victoria College, which is on the U of T campus, and I went there a couple of years ago, because it sat in the chapel between the two doors of the chapel. The rock, they put it on a pedestal there, and I guess Pete's students used to touch it as they went in to pray. And then after a while, it was sent to the Royal Ontario Museum, and there, they kind of took a more scientific approach to it. And what I've learned is that they actually took samples out of the rock and they sent it to places around the world, different museums around the world, like London, and I think some of it went to Vienna, New York City, because they're interested in it. It's a meteorite. So ironically, instead of making offerings to it, offerings are being made from it. So again, I mean I'm back to this idea, so the story of this rock isn't, it's not just Christianizing and Civilizing, it's also reimagining the land, right? So the rock is removed as a way to change the way people think about the land. Well, this rock is now over there at the Royal Alberta Museum, right? And it's on display there. That's where I took this photo. It's there. You can go and see it. But of course, a lot of people aren't very happy about that, especially in Saddle Lake First Nation. There's a lot of people who have been lobbying, along with some other allies from other First Nations, to the Alberta government to say this rock needs to go back where it's supposed to be. And a lot of people strongly believe that things will only get better for First Nations people when that happens, when it's put back where it came from. Because there's this idea of balance, right? Making amends, those kinds of things. So I guess the question that I ask myself is, you know, in order to tell this story, in order to to have it make a claim on people, you know, how do we talk about this to each other? How do we listen? What are the prejudices and assumptions that inform how we talk to each other, how we listen? And I use that not necessarily in a... I don't think prejudices are necessarily negative, right? They're ways that we make sense of what we hear or what we see. So I'm interested in what are the terms that we can speak to each other about these kinds of things? Right? And as I've said, one of the things that I think needs to happen is this idea of facing up to this shared history.