The shady past of Parks Canada: Forced out, Indigenous people are forging a comeback – Vancouver Sun
Banff National Park is celebrated as a Canadian treasure, “home to imposing 3,000-metre peaks, alpine meadows rich with colourful wildflowers, brilliant blue glacier-fed lakes,” as Parks Canada describes it.
What you will not find within Canada’s oldest national park – leaving aside the questionably named Stoney Squaw Mountain — is much trace of the Indigenous people whose ancestors resided and hunted there.
When the park was created in 1887, authorities viewed the Stoney as “stragglers,” best confined to the neighbouring reserves. Park superintendent George Stewart wrote in his first annual report that Indians had to be excluded from the park. “Their destruction of the game and depredations among the ornamental trees make their too frequent visits to the Park a matter of great concern,” he wrote, as quoted by aboriginal historians Theodore Binnema and Melanie Niemi in a 2006 article.
When the Stoney were invited back in, it was for the annual Banff Indian Days, an event that ran into the 1970s. Tourists were entertained by dancing, drumming, “war whoops” and archery performed by “Chiefs and Braves and squaws in full regalia,” as a 1929 advertisement put it.
