"People want us to be a place that shines a light on the truth of history."Jennifer Thompson, President of the former Fort Calgary, now known as The Confluence.Erasing a chunk of history does not shine a light on the truth of it. This is what “The Confluence” has done with their erasure of the name “Fort Calgary,” the name Colonel Macleod chose for us, in memory of his Scottish birthplace. Would it not have been simple to have called it “Fort Calgary at The Confluence”?Can we deny the Scottish roots of Canada? A country where every province and territory has a tartan? Where dozens of historic figures who were Scotsmen, whose vision and hard work led to the establishment of modern day Canada — for instance, Sir John A. Macdonald and Colonel Macleod?While many Canadians today are enraged at the thought of Canada being forced into becoming the fifty-first state, had it not been for Sir John A. Macdonald forming the scarlet-coated North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in response to the massacre of the Assiniboine tribe by the US Benton Gang, undoubtedly all of Western Canada and perhaps the Canadian north and BC would have become part of the USA a hundred and fifty years ago. That was the original Canadian “elbows up.” Look how effective it was.The Americans waged Indian wars from 1644 to 1924. Aside from the blue-coated ‘long knives’ Cavalry, at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the US had a one million man standing army.The Canadian story, by contrast, is one of peaceful trade between the Hudson Bay Company and indigenous people. And only 300 Mounties marched west..The illicit fur trade of American whisky traders was decimating the Blackfoot Nation in Southern Alberta. They brought cheap, adulterated whiskey to intentionally get the Indians drunk and then take brutal advantage of them in trade of furs, horses, and women.From JP Turner’s official history of the NWMP, recounting days in 1875 as the location of Fort Calgary was being chosen, “Proof of outrage stared hideously from unhidden spots. Near the police camp on the Elbow River, a buffalo-skin “death lodge” bore dumb witness to a fight with whiskey desperadoes the previous summer. Remains of several Indians, mutilated and dismembered by wolves, lay scattered in and about their gruesome resting place. Up the Elbow, the charred timbers of a small trading shack spoke of the retaliation by outraged Blackfoot who had driven off the traders’ horses, attacked the inmates, and seized the stores. One white man had been killed, and others wounded; and again the wolves had feasted. Gruesome mementos were a common wayside spectacle. Human skulls, scattered about the whiskey locations, counted for little more than those of buffalo.”Without the fortitude, leadership, and integrity of Colonel Macleod, his genuine concern for indigenous people who were facing a real genocide at the hands of ruthless American whiskey traders who had infiltrated Southern Alberta, the Blackfoot Nation would have been completely decimated. The Mounties drove the rabid whiskey traders out and befriended the tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Macleod, dubbed “Stamix Otokan” (Bull’s Head) in Blackfoot, was respected by Isapwó Muksika (Chief Crowfoot).In addition to “The Confluence” messing with Calgary’s history, the City of Calgary also plans a contrivance — that being the $1 million Indian Residential School memorial (IRSM). In it, they plan to enshrine the unproven claims that 215 children’s bodies were found in the orchard of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The “215” teddy bears and shoes on the steps of city hall are planned to be part of the installation, described as: “The IRSM is an important project that advances The City of Calgary’s commitment to Truth and Reconciliation, specifically Call to Action #82.”Of course, the shoes make a mockery of the real exhibit of shoes in Auschwitz, where an actual genocide took place of real Jews, and in addition, there were mass murders of dissidents, Roma, gays, and “useless eaters” — people who once wore the shoes, that are now all that remains of them. Further, the Calgary ‘215’ shoes were probably made by Uighur slaves in China, a people who are experiencing a genocide themselves! And to top off this contrived effort at reconciliation, teddy bears were created to honor US President Theodore Roosevelt’s big game sporting ethics. He was unwilling to shoot a bear tethered to a tree. However, he did advocate for the death of Indians. He detested them..According to the History Channel: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian,” he said in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”Ghastly. Is that really what the City of Calgary wants to enshrine in memory of the phantom no-name Indian Residential School genocide? It seems that we are well down the track to “wreck-a-silly-nation” by rewriting our history to try and accommodate the 94 Calls to Action that no one ever voted to adopt, which advocates 23 times for the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP legislation in the spring of 2021 was contested by six premiers and several First Nations for months. The gut-wrenching claim made by the Kamloops Band, that the bodies of 215 murdered children had been found in the orchard, shocked the nation. That false pretext is what finally pushed UNDRIP through the House of Commons and Senate in less than a month. The 94 Calls to Action were published on June 2, 2015. In September of 2015, the Kamloops Band filed a civil suit for aboriginal title over the entire City of Kamloops, Sun Peaks Resort, and surrounding territory. Had you known of that claim on May 26, 2021, would you have fallen for the claim of 215 children murdered by priests and nuns made on May 27, 2021, by the Kamloops Band?.Give us back our history. Give us back the name Fort Calgary.That’s what I want for Christmas. I also want the repeal of UNDRIP, adopted due to a false pretext, and the rejection of the 94 calls to action, which wreck but do not reconcile.The first Christmas in the West of the NWMP was celebrated at Fort Macleod in 1874, as Fort Calgary did not yet exist. The Mounties enjoyed a bounteous repast brought up from Fort Benton, following which came the dance. “Fiddles, harmonicas, and voices joined in light-hearted celebration. Nature’s debutantes vied for indulgence; high boots and beaded moccasins swept the hard earth floors, and in reel and jig, the extremes of life were forgotten amid an unburdening of frontier mirth. Draped in decorations above the mess room roof, hung a prophetic motto, a portrayal of simple faith – “The Pioneers of a Glorious Future.”
