By Troy Hunter
I’m excited to provide this first edition of ʔa·qaǂpaǂniʔnam, which is a short column to talk about our old time stories, Ktunaxa History, Technology, etc. from our ancestral past.
The year was 1792 when a man named Peter Fidler was heading south from up around Buckingham House, a Hudson Bay Company trading post east of what is now Edmonton.
On his way towards the Crowsnest Pass area, he noticed in November and December that there were large swaths of burnt grass and in places, fires were still burning.
He was told from his Indigenous guides that the fires in the winter time are from the Ktunaxa people.
It must have been New Year’s Day on 1793, some 230 years ago, when Fidler met a Ktunaxa Nasuʔkin (Chief) at a very special place to the Ktunaxa on the Oldman River.
The Nasuʔkin greeted Fidler with a kiss. Maybe he learned that from Spaniards years before but little is known on that story, maybe I will save that for another edition.
The place of meeting Fidler was at The Gap, it is where the Ktunaxa played a gambling game by rolling a hoop and shooting arrows through it.
It’s also known as the Old Man’s Playing Grounds. That game is still played by the Ktunaxa.
pi¢ak (Ktunaxa spoon)
ʔa¢u (Ktunaxa bowl)
The Playing Grounds area was investigated to see what archaeological stories it held and there were items such as fishnet sinkers and Top of the World Chert.
Top of the World Chert was also present at the Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump.
The Blackfoot did not eat fish and those items were distinctly Ktunaxa artifacts.
They are connected with the pik̓akmanam or old trails that go over to Waterton Lakes, the Crowsnest, Round Prairie, Top of the World, and beyond to the various Ktunaxa communities in the Rocky Mountain Trench.
Fidler saw the Ktunaxa using waterproof, woven vessels to boil food in and he also saw utensils made of an inner bark of some kind of tree.
The Ktunaxa make things like ʔa¢u (bowl) and pi¢ak (spoon) from the gum of trees such as cedar or spruce and the roots are split and woven into baskets as well.
This technology is similar with other Plateau First Nations downstream on the Columbia River.
These items, and the technology used indicate that the Ktunaxa were travelling back and forth between places like Kettle Falls, or Nakusp and then back again to the Buffalo hunting grounds to gamble again.
kanmukumuǂ (Ktunaxa cooking pot)
