On a recent evening, I had to stop just off Highway 3 to shoot the full moon peeking over the ridge southwest of Brocket. The southeastern horizon was awash in golden-orange, framing a wind turbine. “Mother Moon,” was Edwin Small Legs instant response the next morning when I related my experience over a coffee at Rahn’s Bakery in Fort Macleod. Actually, Edwin was drinking tea as he told me a story about the “star people.” A young boy named Scarface was determined to get rid of the scar so he would be more appealing to the girl he wanted to marry. He found Father Sun and Mother Moon, who adopted him. Father Sun removed the scar in a four-day “sweat,” waving an eagle feather over him, then sent him back to Earth to teach arrow and spear-making. But, back on Earth, Scarface grew lonely for Father Sun and Mother Moon and returned to the skies, forsaking the girl he had yearned for. Now, when First Nations people see the full moon rising, they also see two stars following it – Scarface, and Morning Star, the adopted brother Mother Moon mistook the scar-less Scarface for. Wind farms silhouetted against the moon exemplify a clash between First Nations culture and spiritual foundations and a changing Southern Alberta environment. Edwin regularly explains the cultural and spiritual significance of the area to a citizen’s committee looking at protection for the Castle wilderness area. He talks of sacred places that since “long before the Europeans” were vision quest and sweat lodge sites, where men went to be purified before going to war or on a hunt. Citizen’s committee has discussed the merits of creating an ecological reserve that contains rare Big Sagebrush along the South Castle River on the lower slope of Mt. Windsor. “We burn herbs like sweet grass and sagebrush in the sweat lodge,” says Edwin. He explains men need the sweat lodges, because they don’t have the natural purification process of women each month in their menstrual cycle, coincidentally connected with the moon’s cycles. Women have their own ceremonies: “They dance for a good life, worshipping plants, food like berries, and just appreciating the Mother Earth,” says Edwin. He talks fondly of his great grandmother, Hazel Small Legs, who was “one of the four ladies in 1940 who last picked the paint.” The paint comes from a rock dug near the fork of the Castle and Carbondale Rivers. The rock is cracked open to reveal a red dust, then mixed with buffalo fat. “We use the red paint as a purification, a blessing, and a sun screen. That’s why the Europeans called us redskins.” Edwin hopes the area can be protected and its name restored to Crow Eagle. In a vision quest up a mountain last summer, Edwin awoke to the sight of a bear a couple of hundred feet away. “I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened my eyes, he was going the other way. He pitied me. In my heart, I know he came to reassure me I was on the right track. “I have pity and respect for everything – even the ants.”
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