Unknown Blackfoot Warrior ‘lived with nature’ says Elder involved with recent skull burial

By Laura Balanko-Dickson SOUTHERN ALBERTA NEWSPAPERS on August 12, 2021.

RCMP Submitted photo - Elders, members of the Kainai First Nation and RCMP officers take part in a burial ceremony of the skull of an "unknown Blackfoot Warrior" earlier this summer.

While you might have heard about the discovery of a prehistoric – and therefore Indigenous skull – close to Fort Macleod, as well as the recent burial that happened June 26 on the Kainai Nation, but you probably don’t know what the elder who dug the grave himself (along with the help of his grandson) had to say about the burial.
According to Blackfoot elder Joe Eagle Tail Feathers or Iitsooahp’potah (Attacks in the Water) of the Kainai Nation, he was contacted by his friend Sherri Day Chief to bless a feather after she beaded it for Sgt. Bryan W. Mucha of the Fort Macleod RCMP. At first, Eagle Tail Feathers thought Mucha was talking about a buffalo skull. However, Eagle Tail Feathers quickly realized that was not the case and consulted other elders about the skull’s re-burial.
“He was waiting for whoever to get back to him and that’s when he reached out to me,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “I was telling him, ‘Yeah. We use buffalo skull in a couple of our ceremonies,’ and he kind of looked surprised and he said, ‘No. This is a human skull.'” Eagle Tail Feathers said, “and my eyes look like, ‘a human skull?’I thought he was going for a buffalo skull or something,” adding, “that’s how it all started.”
“So, I told him, let me look into this,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “I talked to the other elders and we agreed he has to be re-buried, but we can’t put him back in the same place.”
“The day before me and my grandson went out to dig the hole, the grave hole and get it ready,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “As we brought the skull to the gravesite, Sgt. Bryan carried it to the gravesite.”
“We came together in June,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “I didn’t think it was going to turn out as well as it did. I didn’t know there would be such a turnout and such an uplifting experience. Kind of emotional.”
“We stood there, smudged it, and started praying,” said Eagle Tail Feathers, adding he couldn’t help but wonder “all this time leading up to that point, this man that walked this Earth hundreds of years ago is our ancestor. Any one of us could be a descendant from him.”
“The other thing is, how much change has happened from his time to our time?” Eagle Tail Feathers says the land where the skull was found – the traditional territory of the Blackfoot – used to be a “garden of Eden.” Eagle Tail Feathers says there is “no comparison” between the Earth the unknown Blackfoot Warrior walked and the Earth we walk today. He suggests the man the skull belonged to “lived with nature,” rather than apart from it.
“Everything a human needed to live was right there,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “There was no sickness then, not like the kind we have now. The sicknesses we have today – diabetes, cancer, asthma – the list goes on and on. In his day, there wasn’t any of that sort of sickness.”
Eagle Tail Feathers treated this as a time for grieving the state of the planet.
“If you compare his life to how it’s like today, it’s just sad,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “Killing the Earth, killing the ground.”
“In Native beliefs, nature is the greatest.”
“Back in those days, nature would reveal their secrets to humans and that’s how our ceremonies evolved. Because everything we do, it comes from nature.”
“It’s not a man-made written down thing, it’s from nature. Nature will show a person their secrets to an individual and they share it with their people. That’s how our spiritual beliefs have evolved. These historical sites we have here, we have medicine wheels, sundials, some of those sites pre-date the pyramids. Being involved with this skull and having such a close connection, emotional feeling to it, we’ve been here for who knows how long. You know scientists say we came over the Bering Strait. Scientists are trying to prove where we came from, and from our oral history, we’ve always been here.”
“Europeans didn’t come from elsewhere, to be where they are today. So, why is it so hard for them to believe we’ve always been here?” “You go to the river some places and there’s white foam building up on the shoreline, imagine the creatures that live in the water. And then us here on the ground, there’s pollution, there’s wildfires – we’re just totally messing with nature,” said Eagle Tail Feathers. “I feel like the pandemic was the Earth trying to punch itself.”
“They did fire prevention for how many years, and fire is a part of nature. If you let all this deadfall build up, it’s going to catch on fire. The more you let it build up, the worse it’s going to get. It’s the Earth punching itself. After, the ash and stuff adds a lot of nutrients to the soil. The islands that have volcanoes on them, they’re one of the richest soils in the world. For years, they were preventing fires – when they should have let the fires happen. That’s why they’re so bad now.”
“A lot of our elders and our people have been talking about this for years, but now with everything that’s happening around us and the skull, it hits home.”
Eagle Tail Feathers also recalls similar events in his youth.
“When I was a kid,” said Eagle Tail Feathers, “the old people heard they’re going to go to the moon. The old people were just shocked, and in our language to go to the moon means you’re going to shoot the moon. ‘Once they go to the moon’they said, ‘everything is going to change.’Since then, to this day, the weather has changed. The old people used to be able to predict the weather. The day-to-day weather and the long-term. Like what kind of summers we’re going to have by studying the atmosphere and nature and the stars. They were able to predict things. Since that happened, the old people point up to the sky and say, ‘they’ve gone crazy too.'” “With the skull burial, and just trying to imagine what this world must have been like when this man walked the earth compared to what it’s like today – I don’t know.”