The first peoples of North America were certainly aware of the curious stony object that we call fossils. The evidence is sparse, but the conclusion inescapable -- native peoples were the first fossil collectors in western Canada

A Peigan buffalo-skin medicine pouch with iniskim of Upper Cretaceous ammonite fragments and bivalves. Royal Ontario Museum Collections. (Photo from Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum (c).)

The Peigan lived a nomadic existence shadowing the great buffalo herds on the plains between the Rocky Mountains and the valley of the South Saskatchewan in what is now southern Alberta. Upper Cretaceous fossil-bearing strata is exposed throughout this territory and the Peigan were aware of fossils and attached spiritual significance to certain fossils for the buffalo hunt.

The Canadien Jean L'Heureux, who lived with the Peigan as translator and advisor in the mid-1800s, wrote about a visit to a tributary of the Red Deer River where his Peigan hosts showed him some fossil bones eroding out of the bank. " ... among the blocks of erratic boulders are found many fossils of dorsal vertebrae of a powerful animal. These enormous vertebrae measure up to twenty inches in circumference. The natives say that the grandfather of the buffalo is buried here. They honor these remains by offering presents as a means of making the spirit which gave them life, to help them in their hunt." The locality must be in the badlands now included in Dinosaur Provincial Park and the fossils could only have been dinosaur bones. The scientific discovery of dinosaurs in the Canadian West were made in the 1870s, but the Peigan were already familiar with dinosaur bones as the remains of "the grandfather of the buffalo".

In 1965 Loris Russell, paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, purchased a buffalo hide medicine pouch with nine buffalo stones that originally had been the property of Charlie Crow Eagle of the Peigan. The buffalo stones, iniskim in Blackfoot, are all fragments of fossils and, with the exception of a single Carboniferous horn coral, are all ammonites and bivalves from Upper Cretaceous shales widely exposed in southern Alberta. Seven iniskim are fragments of the ammonites Placenticeras, Baculites and Acanthoscaphites. With a bit of imagination, the head of a buffalo with hump and horns can be seen in one fragment; a human figure complete with legs in another. All the iniskim and the outside of the pouch are coated with ochre (red iron oxide) which was a favourite pigment of the plans peoples. The iniskim were used in ceremonies to summon the buffalo herd and, after the buffalo disappeared from the plains in 1880, they were valued as mystical objects with general powers.

Dinosaur bones weathering out of sandstone at Dinosaur Provincial Park. (Photo by BDEC (c).)

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