
Back in the 1980s, when I first met him near Paddle Prairie, Alberta, about 500 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, Elmer Ghostkeeper had just moved onto land he’d inherited from his father. The 350-acre lot of bush and farmland was then one of eight Metis Federation Settlements of Alberta. And as precious as that place had been to his family for generations, his inheritance was never about ownership.
“The land doesn’t belong to me,” Ghostkeeper told me in an interview in 1981. “What’s more,” as he pointed out in his 1996 book Spirit Giving, “Canadians have to shift from living off the land to living with it.” (more…)