1 Natural landscapes are appropriated, organized, and named by people, whose activities are localized to places and are thus transformed into cultural landscapes.1 Material culture comprises the continuum in the artifact–feature–site–landscape complex that has so often been viewed as mere residuals of human behaviour. But artifacts possess symbolic content and contexts that can be studied from a semiotic perspective as media of communication, as stimulants and reinforcements of cultural values and behaviour, and as signs of ethnicity.2 Further, a taphonomic perspective studies the temporal trajectories of past material culture: the past context within which an artifact, structure, site, or landscape was created; the contexts within which it functioned and was modified or edited; and the neocultural context within which it functions today.3Thus, past landscapes may be reconstructed and interpreted as "heritage landscapes" in which each occupant group has left a definable "heritage footprint" advertising their distinctive presence and identity. These footprints overlap and interact, resulting in a virtual palimpsest of overlapping presences in the landscape.4

2 Until recently, there had been few detailed studies of the cultural landscapes generated by hunting-and-gathering groups such as those of the North American Plains. In part, this is because archaeologists and anthropologists have been obsessed with specific sites as opposed to their "environment," which has been treated as being external to culture. For their part, geographers have been slow to acknowledge the role of aboriginal populations in establishing extensive cultural landscapes. They have been portrayed as inhabiting culturally modified "islands" within a wilderness "sea" or, worse still, as inconsequential actors in the long-term structuring of those landscapes.5 This has been complicated by the fact that, so often, the humanly built structures in hunter-gatherer landscapes are of limited extent and tend to reflect the natural setting rather than being strongly differentiated from it.

3 Indeed, the modern use of the term "wilderness" continues to elide the actions of aboriginal peoples, minimizes their heritage footprints in their actively created landscapes, and renders wilderness as a realm separate from culture.6 The European rendering of wilderness (wild-tier-ness, or "wild beast place") still carries the implication of the absence of any human presence, as if it were the natural state before their arrival.7 Accordingly, Euro–Canadian accounts often portrayed the land as effectively "empty" prior to the arrival of Europeans, and the aboriginal groups as transient, animal-like occupants.8 Father P. J. de Smet’s somewhat contemptuous judgement was that, "The Indian has the gift of being everywhere without being anywhere."9 Similarly, George Grant travelled across the Plains in the 1880s and lamented that many whites believed that the Indian "has made no improvement on the land, has no title-deeds, [and] can have no right to it that a civilized being is bound to recognize."10 The dismissal is reflected widely in Euro–Canadian iconography, as in the oeuvre of the Group of Seven, though countered somewhat by A. Y. Jackson’s Arctic observations and Emily Carr’s capture of West Coast aboriginal communities.11 Equation of aboriginal lifeways with those of animals was no more strongly evident than in the words of Chief Justice Allan McEachern in his 1991 decision regarding the British Columbia land claims case, Delgamuukw v. Regina. Borrowing the words of Thomas Hobbes, he stated that "aboriginal life in the territory was, at best, ‘nasty, brutish and short’" and dismissed the words of native elders about their use of the land as romantic fantasies.12 It took six years for the Supreme Court to counter the view. A contextual understanding of the aboriginal placement of monuments in their lived-in landscape is an important step toward reversing this attitude.

4 But if the recent rise in landscape studies in archaeology and anthropology has been largely issue-driven by land claims, it has also been reinforced by cross-disciplinary linkages.13 The post-processual movement in archaeology, like its postmodern counterparts in geography and history, applies a range of strategies in efforts to interpret material culture context and meaning.14 American historian Thomas Schlereth defined material culture to encompass "the entire natural and man-made environment with which researchers can interpret the past," and the basis for symbols of meaning. Schlereth saw landscape as "an amazing historical document…which…rightly seen…reveals as much of a society’s culture as does a novel, a newspaper, or a Fourth of July oration."15 People actively use the enduring past to validate present actions and attitudes, so the landscape becomes an important residence of information and tradition, encoding the collective memory of its users. Its forms can be described, but as symbols they can also stand for something else. This is particularly true for groups who do not rely on written records and who, therefore, perpetuate their values through performed co-memorizing in formalized re-enactments of oral tradition, using recognized associations to cement memories. Memories can be encoded in non-verbal communications such as gesture, adornment, and other symbolic media, as well as the cultural landscape. It is through association of landscape features with meanings that they are transformed from material signifiers to retrospective devices in which symbol-sets have a reflexive instructional function in ensuring the persistence of memory: they become lieux de mémoire, memoryscapes, landmarks.16

5 It is important to emphasize that there may be many possible iterations of the same message-set. Further, while much of the cultural landscape is constructed, advertising cultural patterns by the character, placement, and distribution of human-made structures, natural landforms can also be taken as signs for interpretation. Thus, places are avoided if they are perceived as dangerous, thereby helping others to "see" those places as well, even though there may not be any humanly imposed signs.17 Similarly, a cultural landscape element regularly revisited by nomadic peoples can come to be viewed by its users as "natural," the product of the Creator rather than of people. In this way, monuments of nomadic peoples tend to become increasingly synonymous with place as their construc tion was intended to express or extend the meaning of place rather than to appropriate it. As such, they should not be distinguished from the lived-in locale with which they are associated. Further, any interpretation that attempts to do so, be it of a complex monumental cosmogram or of an apparently simple tipi ring, is an analytical imposition upon an essentially symbolic continuum.

6 The First Nations of the Northwestern Plains at the time of European Contact exhibited considerable linguistic diversity but they shared several multicultural linkages and economic practices as well as ritual activities and mythology. The Blackfoot (Siksiká, Káínaa, and Piikáni), Tsuu t’ina, Crow, Atsina, Assiniboin, Dakota, Arapaho, Plains Cree, and Plains Ojibwa possessed a constellation of shared traits: an emphasis on bison hunting; dog and (in the Historic period) horse transport with use of travois; the tipi and camp circle; sophisticated sign language; use of circular shields of buffalo skin; ceremonial organization centred upon the sun dance (relating the Creator, buffalo worship, medicine bundles, and military organization); well-developed skin-working; painting of decorative art on rawhide; use of quill and bead embroidery; and stylistic emphasis on rectangular or triangular modules to make complex artistic forms.18

7 Furthermore, distinctive monuments and other structures were created from such varied materials as stone, earth, sod, wood, bone, and even buffalo "chips." The more durable of these have survived to the present, despite weathering and vandalism, but many have been lost. The structures expressed cosmology by transformational use of the same fundamental symbols through the varied media. The linked concepts of circle and power axis reflected underlying views of the cosmos as a hierarchy of nested (concentric) circles with an axis reaching to the worlds above and below. As represented in Big Plume’s camp site (Fig. 1), the people, the tipi, and sunshade express the integrated circle-vertical cosmogram. Such structures were a constant acknowledgment of native groups’ role as a part of that cosmos, their identity within it, and their responsibility to maintain it.

8 This was effected by routine observances in daily life as well as by the rigours of the vision quest and the strictures of military ventures and the hunt. The circle was directly portrayed on the land through constructed circles of stones, piles of stones and antlers, the special shapes of certain hills, and in the horizon circle. The vertical, or power, axis was reflected in use of central poles, piling of materials, placement of sites on hilltops, veneration of certain trees or mountains, and even the standing human figure itself as "centre" in ritual acts.19 Further, the transformation of the circle-and-axis motif into other media is eloquently captured in Michel Wahlberg’s discussion of the "geography" rendered in Plains painted buffalo hides:

9 In return, Eldon Yellowhorn explained how his own Blackfoot people used mnemonic association to remember their landmarks:

10 These elements and observances continue to the present day and have linkages beyond the Great Plains. Indeed, the use of the past tense here is merely intended to denote a time before extensive European influence affected aboriginal values and ideologies. It must not be taken as a faux-evolutionary perspective. Rather, it attempts to underscore the essential dichotomy throughout the following discussion: a proper model of the aboriginal world view that renders people as inseparable from their landscape, as opposed to perspectives that have separated them from it.

24 Clearly, many elements of the aboriginal landscape of the Northwestern Plains were shared cross-culturally. However, it is also clear that specific uses of particular areas by different Plains groups were not simply synonymous. Thus, sequent occupancy studies are of key importance as they reveal both continuity and change in the use and symbolic significance of land forms and structures: a blueprint for historical, archaeological, and geographical studies on the Plains.41 The long-noted degree of uniformity reinforces the hope that any observable differences in landscape use could assist in reconstruction of past ethnicity on the Plains, just as is the case with other elements of material culture.42 As such, this region evokes the same principles of "diversity-within-unity" recognized elsewhere in Canada, principles which are reflected in patterns of landscape use and the construction of markers on the land that integrate time and space.43

25 To this end, a transformational matrix of the structures and symbols of the Northwestern Plains cultural landscape (Fig. 6) has to accommodate diverse forms: stone circles or tipi rings; piled-rock cairns (usually circular); dream beds (vision-quest sites); carved or incised ribstones with patterns resembling bison ribs; petroglyph boulders and medicine rocks; medicine wheels; effigies or body forms outlined in stone; and rock art in the form of pictographs and petroglyphs.44

26 Piled cairns and medicine wheels clearly expressed the circle-and-axis motif, as would a tipi in place and outlined by a stone circle. Similar struc tures could be piled or laid out in wood, sod, bones, or buffalo chips. Sod circles, for example, were abun dant at the time of first European contact but were quickly lost to the elements (Fig. 7).45 Effigies were in some cases cut out of the sod. Medicine lodges were dance structures, elaborations of the household/cosmos pattern within which people could conduct ritual performances. There were circles of buffalo and/or human skulls and piles of antlers or bones.46 There were scaffold or platform burials (Fig. 8) whose elevated position, intended to facilitate the escape of the soul, ensured that they attracted the attention of incoming settlers and missionaries. Deemed offensive by the newcomers, they were all destroyed or vandalised, and a sequence of cultural compromises ensued.47 Rock art sites included both painted and incised panels and many appear to have had narrative or commemorative functions.48 Thus, the Custer, Montana, petroglyph (Fig. 9) depicts a village (tipi at lower left), muskets, a horse-mounted warrior with typical large circular Plains shield, and other mounted and lance-carrying warriors (barely visible near top). Such art reflected efforts to link history to place and probably had narrative, commemorative, and mnemonic functions. Such sites are frequently defaced with modern graffiti and pockmarks from bullets: a veritable palimpsest in the landscape of shifting cultural patterns.

27 It is evident, therefore, that not only were there varied structures in the land, but they also had distinctive and informative spatial and temporal connotations. These are only beginning to be appreciated by non-aboriginal people. The "death lodge" type of medicine wheel (Fig. 5) appears to map out the core of early Blackfoot territory and, thus, may well be a marker of ethnicity and power.49 Similarly, antler-piles are localized in "hot spots" of wapiti (elk) abundance and may have been ritual efforts by multiple groups to signify the meanings of those places (Fig. 3).50 They map out an "elk landscape" much as the "dance lodge" medicine wheels may be associated with a "buffalo landscape." As incremental structures, they were the sites of performance and served as loci for maintenance of the cosmos through animal ceremonialism.

28 The elegance and apparent simplicity of the circle and axis motif understated the complexity of the underlying meanings and was taken as evidence of the "primitive" character of Plains groups. Stone circles marking former tent locations were, in their circularity, embodiments of the horizon, together with the tipi expressing the circle-and-axis motif. Thus was the cosmos itself written upon the land, year upon year, millennium upon millennium, in features that are not normally viewed as "monuments." It has been calculated from surveys and excavations that as many as one million stone circles must have once existed in southern Alberta before the prairie sod was broken for Euro–Canadian grain farming, with others being buried by wind- and water-laid sediments.51 The surviving sites clearly offer much information in terms of demography, social structure, and use of landscape.52

29 Indeed, early European travellers soon realized that such structures were signals of a form of prior domain, whether or not they had been intended as such by their creators. Certainly, there were other reasons why many newcomers desecrated these sym bols: missionaries destroyed the evidence of "pagan ritual"; sacred artifacts were appropriated for institutional and private collections; souvenir hunters and bone collectors plundered burials;53 antler-piles were dismantled and shipped for production of knife handles.54 Further, to the colonizing imagination, these markers could be interpreted as claims of prior ownership. While this may be disputed, what is clear is that these "transient" peoples left a cumulative imprint and a pattern upon the land: a consciously produced set of mnemonic forms charged with meanings similar to those which the incoming European peoples were to build to consolidate their identification with a new Canada.

30 The essential point is, therefore, that landscape use by Northwestern Plains First Nations reflected more than ten millennia of interaction between people and their environment. Though they were nomadic, their ties to landscape were as intense as those of settled people, even though conceptions of territorial exclusivity may have differed. The term "nomadic" does not simply mean "transient," for knowledge of the land was extensive and landscape elements served, by association, as residences of memory — of history. Through direct effort and "benign neglect" these cumu lative aboriginal landscapes were edited by incoming European settlers almost to the point of deletion. Fragments of these landscapes, including surviving monuments, were often interpreted from a European "settled" perspective, leading to contextual confusion. As was the case with the "Mound Builders" of the American Midwest, the desire among the settlers to erase or transform the imprint of local aboriginal populations was strong enough to lead to fantastic claims that the monuments had actually been built by a lost race of "superior" people who had been somehow killed off. The persistent damage caused by such views can be countered by contextual studies of aboriginal landscapes from a semiotic perspective, informed by ethnographic studies of ideology, animal ceremonialism, and material culture use. These efforts will benefit from a stronger integration of views from geography, anthropology, history and First Nations studies.

31 As has happened in many other areas of the world, the structures and their patterns of inter-relationships were replaced in both Canada and the United States by new cultural landscapes of Western origin. J. B. Jackson called this new imposition the last great "Classical political landscape," in which the square, not the circle, was inherently beautiful and the symbol of orderly behaviour.55 Indeed, it allowed the efficient subdivision of bounded territory and was the very embodiment of a "new world order" still overtly expressed throughout American culture. A grid of squares grew and spread westward across this land, and the landscape of circles began to be obscured: a palimpsest of ethnic footprints upon an already patterned natural landscape. Tipis faded to grain elevators, axes still reaching skyward, but importing new meanings to this land. And now the grain elevators, in turn, are fading: transient symbols in an ever-evolving landscape where, despite all, the horizon-circle outlines the ever-dominant dome of what Wallace Stegner so aptly termed the "bell-jar sky."56