Updated January 30, 2004

Geography

"The creative spirits had sent water... There was no more land anywhere, and all nature was drowned. On a raft lived the old man Napi-Ika and his elderly wife Kaapi-Taakii... It was Napi-Ika who gave orders to create the floating island on which we live." [Translation] It is in this way that the country of Siksikas was formed—at least according to the Aboriginal people of Southern Alberta, who told their story to Bernard Assiniwi, the well-known writer and Aboriginal ethologist who died in the fall of 2000.

In the marvels that it displays, nature sometimes surpasses legend. The formation of the Canadian land mass is itself a magnificent epic, in which the forces of wind, water and ice are just as fertile as the creative spirits of the Siksikas. Let us travel back into the mists of time to some 200 million years ago, when a single continent and a single ocean occupied the surface of the planet. That single continent split into several plates, which were gradually driven apart by forces emanating from the depths of the earth. It was in this way that the North American continent assumed its present place on the planet, a place that can never be final since those same forces are constantly at work.