THE OLDMAN RIVER AND THE SACRED: A MEDITATION UPON APUTOSI PII'KANI TRADITION AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Abstract / Resume Impacted by a water storage dam during the late eighties, the Old Man River, in present-day Alberta, has from time immemorial been the sacred center of the Aputosi Pii'kani people's homelands. Using an organic approach to oral tradition, the essay explores the religious significance of a Pii'kani sacred geography centered on the Old Man River. Considering environmental ethics, special attention is given to the Pii'kani worldview and tradition. Ayant subi les incidences d'un barrage reservoir vers la fin des annees 1980, la riviere Old Man, situee en Alberta, est depuis un temps immemorial le centre sacre des terres ancestrales du peuple Aputosi Piikani (Nation des Peigans). En utilisant une approche organique de la tradition orale, l'article explore la signification religieuse de la geographie sacree de la nation Piikani qui est centree sur la riviere Old Man. En tenant compte de l'ethique environnementale, l'article porte une attention particuliere a la vision du monde et a la tradition des Piikani. In the late eighties a water storage dam was completed on Alberta's Oldman River. The dam-project generated considerable controversy when conflicting reports were manifest in the Canadian federal government's predictions of negative environmental consequences and the Alberta provincial government's forecast for a beneficial environmental impact. These assessments haunted the project with an unresolved ambiguity. The project was further complicated by a high degree of political intrigue and despite considerable opposition to the dam, construction continued throughout the protests thereby biasing the project's outcome with a capital commitment. This strategy of increasing a project's incentive via continued investment threatens rational environmental policy, planning, and impact analysis while compromising faith in government and the rule of law.1 In his recent assessment of the project, historian Jack Glenn has called it a shameful process that has disgraced the governments involved.2 In the haste to proceed with project construction, cultural and moral values were largely overlooked and undervalued. Particularly omitted were those values held by the Aputosi Pii'kani or North Peigan peoples. Located twelve kilometers below the dam, the Peigan Indian Reserve hosts a community with significant cultural and moral values that were at stake in the matter. This Native community, nonetheless, was itself significantly divided between conflicts of immediate physical and economic survival in needs driven by extreme poverty and the moral requirements stemming from their traditional religious ethos and cultural identity. As a result, the Pii'kani physical existence as a community was pitted against their traditional religion creating a moral conundrum. Given that this conundrum of community survival versus the continuation of the traditional cultural and religious ethos is a factor of postConquest events, it is necessary to consider worldview transformations imposed upon the Pii'kani. In seeking to address Native cultures, contemporary scholars are divided in following an orthodoxy of structural modernism versus post-structural postmodernism. In this paper, it is my position that one cannot rely solely upon either of these intellectual paradigms and that we must seek to re-think our discourse analysis along the lines of the experiential and embracing an organicism. So considered, it has been my experience to note that post-Conquest Native communities tend, in general, to be divided between an element embracing Modernism as defined by the advent of literacy and progressive abstraction amid universal absolute truth claims versus an element of traditionals who retain a commitment to ancestral values and organic participation and reciprocity with the natural world. In this context, the Modernist Natives are often Christian and economically progressive espousing to a large extent Western values. …

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