Sacred ribstones return to Siksika Nation after more than a century in an Ottawa museum
The items are now on display at the Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park
After being held in a museum in Ottawa for more than a century, two sacred cultural artifacts recently returned to Siksika Nation.
Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park (BCHP), a museum on the Siksika First Nation, celebrated the repatriation of a pair of sacred ribstones, which hold deep significance to the Blackfoot people. The stones were used for meditation and prayer by previous generations, explained the historical park's CEO Shannon Bear Chief.
The ribstones' return marked a homecoming of great spiritual and cultural importance, Bear Chief said.
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"Just like everything else — language, culture — that was stripped from the Blackfoot people, [removing the ribstones] was also just another act to remove the meditation and the prayer," said Bear Chief.
"Bringing home our objects is also a significant historical event because our spirits are coming home. And then we'll become whole as a Siksika Nation."
The ribstones, which are centuries old, were originally removed from Blackfoot territory in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Earlier this year, a Blackfoot delegation travelled to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa to identify the items and confirm that they belonged to the Siksika people, and to ensure their return.
The repatriation was marked on Friday with traditional ceremony, storytelling, performances from local artists and community gathering at the BCHP's outdoor amphitheatre.
BCHP board of directors chair Strater Crowfoot said in previous generations, people would go to the ribstones, make offerings and wait for buffalo to arrive. He said their return is significant as a way to establish a connection between current and future Blackfoot generations, and their ancestors.
"We can tell our future generations what they were used for, and how they were helpful [to] maintain our life and exist on the prairies by being able to hunt the buffalo and live off the buffalo and live off the land," said Crowfoot.
"For us to bring these home and recount the significance of them to our people and to our future, it's important that we have them here to be able to tell that story."
Martin Heavy Head, a Kainai Nation elder who was part of the group that travelled to Ottawa to identify where the stones came from, notes the ribstones are just two of many items that were taken from the Blackfoot people or destroyed.
He underlined the significance of continuing efforts to return artifacts like the ribstone to their origin.
"Repatriation is a lot of things. It's not just repatriating objects, it's also repatriating knowledge, territory. It's repatriating our lives that have been taken away," Heavy Head said.
The stones were returned as part of an ongoing program focused on preserving, reclaiming and sharing sacred Blackfoot artifacts. The Blackfoot First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Regulation was introduced in 2023, which set out a process to repatriate sacred ceremonial objects to the Siksika Nation, Blood Tribe and Piikani Nation.
Several other important artifacts have been repatriated through this process in recent years.
A different sacred rock was returned to Siksika Nation in 2023 to be displayed at BCHP, after it sat in a farmer's field in central Alberta since the early 1900s. And a year earlier, the regalia of a former Blackfoot chief was returned from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, England.
Crowfoot said they're looking at repatriating more items from museums around North America and Europe.
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With files from Terri Trembath