A sign of forgotten times?

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Alberta places little value on time before settlers

Residents of Alberta's capital city celebrate Klondike Days every summer, fondly remembering the early days of the city's history by dressing in frontier-era costumes for a wide variety of events.

But the earlier history of the region, the time before widespread European colonization, appears to be seen as unimportant.

That's the charge raised by two Aboriginal activists who have been working to prevent the desecration of Metis and Native cemeteries dating back to the mid to late 18th century.

Phillip Coutu and Duane Good Striker have played an effective role in the successful fight to prevent expansion of the Epcor power generating plant that is located on the Rossdale Flats in Edmonton's scenic river valley. The plant sits on the site of the first Fort Edmonton, but has proven to be rich in archeological treasures from the earliest days of human settlement.

The discovery of human remains at the site raised a number of issues concerning the value placed on pre-contact civilization. Good Striker and Coutu believe the laws that govern the treatment of Native burial grounds and the artifacts found there are Euro-centric and based on attitudes that do not respect the rights of Aboriginal people.

Coutu, a Metis man, is a psychologist who was retained by the Metis Nation of Alberta to do research into who is buried where in the area. Good Striker is of the Blackfoot Nation, an activist who ran unsuccessfully for the New Democratic Party in Alberta's last provincial election.

The two men worked in concert with several community groups that also opposed the Epcor expansion. As Rossdale community members worried that the expansion might affect their neighborhood in unforeseen ways, exploratory digging in preparation for the expansion uncovered the human remains.

Good Striker read of the discovery in the local newspaper and decided to act, and he has raised several important issues that could change the shape of future provincial legislation.

It was not the first time bodies have been unearthed in the area. Records show that 68 people were buried in a cemetery that was in use between 1814 and 1870. Estimates of additional graves bring that number up to 200 or more. When a part of the Epcor site was excavated to construct a pipeline in 1967, one worker reported that human remains were found then, but the claim has not been verified. Coutu said as many as 25 bodies have been removed from the site and need to be reburied. Seven of those bodies are being held by the University of Alberta's department of anthropology.

Coutu has researched the Hudson Bay Company archives and found reference to 100 burial records for the site. That's only the start, he said. The Northwest Company, the French fur trading entity, operated in modern day Edmonton prior to 1763 when the English defeated the French and assumed control of French possessions in North America, Coutu said. He argues that the early fur traders were his people?Metis people-and said the Catholic priests would not have allowed non-Catholic Aboriginal people to be buried in registered graveyards. Edmonton's location on the edge of the boreal forest would have made it an attractive place for the Cree and Blackfoot people who are indigenous to the region to spend the harsh Prairie winters.

Coutu is a direct descendant of Jean Baptiste Lagimodiere and Marie Anne Gaboury. They were the first non-Native couple to live in Fort Edmonton, as it was called in 1808. They were also Louis Riel's grandparents. He argues there must be several unregistered and as yet undiscovered gravesites in the Rossdale area. Bodies have been found inside the fence on the Epcor grounds.

Coutu thinks the grave areas should be protected and respected. He and Good Striker say provincial, city and company officials are not as interested in preserving and respecting those contact and pre-contact era graves as they are in development or in maintaiing the status quo.

"If this was a white persons' cemetery, there's no way they'd be pushing this," Coutu said.

Good Striker has erected white crosses around the area where bodies have been found in and near the Epcor plant. Political pressure and legal uncertainty have prevented the authorities from removing the crosses, even though there is no justification for them being there under Canadian law.

Good Striker basically dares the city or the company to remove the crosses.

"If I was to go into a graveyard and kick over a tombstone, that would be a federal offense," he told Windspeaker. "So the city knows that and they won't remove the crosses. They have asked me to take them down, though."

Both men accuse the city, provincial and company officials of hiding behind the law to avoid spending the money it would take to pay proper respect to the gravesites. And it could get expensive. Good Striker has called on the city to re-route a main road that presently passes over top of known or suspected burial sites.

He also thinks a park-like area should be established to commemorate the burial site and to properly recognize the earliest history of the area.

He thinks the company should re-arrange its plant so that bodies underneath it are not treated disrespectfully. Both men have suggested the area be declared a national and provincial historic site.

"Sadly, the Cemetery Act protects only white burials. It does not provide protection for unregistered cemeteries or Native burial grounds," said Coutu. "The city and Epcor have very aggressively taken advantage of these prejudicial laws in full knowledge that an unregistered cemetery and Native burial ground existed."

Archeologists in the employ of the province and Epcor have repeatedly minimized the number of graves at the site and have had to revise their numbers with each new discovery. Catherine Bell, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, believes this conflict has shown the province's legislatrs that Alberta law is inadequate in this area.

Elizabeth Furniss, a professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary, believes this situation is part of a slow process where Canadian legislators and policy makers are forced to come to grips with an unpleasant Canadian reality.

Author of The Burden of History-colonialism and the frontier myth in a rural Canadian community, Furniss believes the telling of Canadian history intentionally excludes Indigenous peoples. She calls it the "frontier myth," a very selective and incomplete version of history-one that emphasizes the importance of the colonizers while minimizing the importance of the Indigenous peoples-that is taught in Canadian schools and seen as the real history by most Canadians. She agreed that the frontier myth appears to be illustrated by the situation at Rossdale.

The frontier myth gives birth to, and is kept alive by, what Furniss calls "common sense racism."

"It's a set of taken-for-granted, common sense beliefs that most Canadians operate under. That's why we can defend ourselves and say we're not a racist society because racist assumptions permeate all levels of activity in Canadian society and they do so in ways that have seduced us into believing that this is just everyday life, this is normal practice," she explained. "The issue isn't to blame people for being racist or not. It's to get people to think about what they're really doing when they say that Native remains are archeological relics. What are the assumptions underneath that? That Native people aren't part of Canadian society? That they have no sense of affiliation or connection with the remains of the past? That's what we have to change."

Furniss said the frontier myth and common sense racism lead to the clash of cultures that occurs in situations like Rossdale.

"Sometimes it recognizes the existence of Native people in the past but usually in only a token way and then the story proceeds of settlers arrival and conquest and Natve people are just erased from the scene. It supports this idea that any kind of burial remains of Native people that are found have no connection with the present," she said. "I think the problem is that as a society we haven't figured out how to relate to Native peoples and what place they're to take as members in Canadian society. Part of that, it seems to me, is to recognize that they are present and they have a long history in Canada and that they have a sense of connection with the kind of archeological remains that are being found.

"If people are having difficulty that a cemetery site needs to be protected, it has to be recognized that there's a whole over-arching system of ideas that is in place that supports that particular attitude. The idea that Native remains are just relics from the past is supported by popular history, supported by common sense racism. What has to be done is a process of public education and particularly the education of public officials."

Professor Bell thinks Canadian law is evolving to a point where destructive attitudes that were antagonistic towards Indigenous peoples are being slowly squeezed out of the Canadian consciousness.

"My view is not so much that the legislation is racist, because it's not intentionally designed to protect one particular group of people to the disadvantage of another," she said. "But what the problem is . . . well there's a couple of them. One of them is, certainly the legislation in Alberta fails to adequately address the special cultural connections that Indigenous peoples have with burial sites and human remains. It also fails to take into account what legal rights may have emerged as a result of Aboriginal rights jurisprudence. The legislation is dated and it has gaps."

Bell has recently received a $205,000 research grant from the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council to "look at every piece of legislation in Canada that impacts on cultural property with a view to reform."

She is heading