A 10,000-Year Journey in an Afternoon

ALEXANDRA PAUL

On June 23, Manitoba treaty commissioner Dennis White Bird and Free Press reporter Alexandra Paul drove to Boissevain to tour sites at Turtle Mountain dating back 12,000 years and hear oral stories from Sioux elders and historians.

IT was dead calm, overcast and partly sunny that Saturday. Tornadoes had torn through Elie the night before, leaving a swath of destruction.

Canupawapka Dakota Nation elders Hilda Sutherland and Andrew Crow, traditional clan leader Frank Brown, band councillor Wilson Brown and community member Raymond Brown were waiting in Boissevain with their historian and our host, James A.M. Ritchie.

Among them they carried a wealth of knowledge on aboriginal history, earth sciences and oral traditions in this heartland, a place where myth and magic mingle with a rolling landscape and a rumbling sky.

"We drove around for three or four hours," Manitoba treaty commissioner Dennis White Bird said later, "And we went back 10,000 years in time. Wow."

Older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids, the physical evidence of human occupation here stretches back to the last Ice Age. The oral traditions start there, too.

The Turtle was the first to emerge from the glacial gri...

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