Indian Fall: First Nations Leaders
Those who lead rarely can choose their time in office, their challenges, or their adversaries.
Therefore, leadership is always a test of character, and this was certainly true for Piapot, Big Bear,
Crowfoot, and Poundmaker. These men and their peoples faced an adversary more menacing than any invading
army or competing economic system. They confronted a civilization that was alien and incomprehensible,
that threatened all that they knew and loved: a way of life that allowed them to draw strength from the
elements, knowledge from the land and wisdom from their dreams; a way of life that, according to frontier
journal keepers, kept them healthy, happy and robust; a culture based on motion and mobility, homes that
were light, portable and comfortable, villages that flowed with the season and the herds of buffalo,
nations of the spoken rather than the written word, communities where names were fluid rather than fixed.
Piapot, Big Bear, Crowfoot and Poundmaker fought to preserve what they could of their communities and
their cultures, their freedom and their independence, their pride and their dignity, their way of living,
thinking and being. They led their peoples during a time of crisis and national catastrophe. To understand
the challenge they faced, think of Moses being called upon to lead his people from slavery into freedom,
and think of these men being forced to lead their people from freedom into subservience.
Leadership brought them challenges they could not surmount and a cultural conflict they could not win.
They were up against a civilization that strove for permanence, that erected fences and fixed structures,
that built roads and railways, that adhered to clocks and calendars. It was a world where things were
nailed down, driven into the ground, built to last.
The times denied these men the rousing victories and personal glory that leaders so often crave. The
times tested them in ways that few other leaders in our peaceful, orderly Dominion have ever been tested.
They drew upon their unshakeable courage and integrity to deal with the circumstances that fate had
dealt them, and they displayed an adamantine resolve to do what was best for their nations. They were
heroes to their people, and justly so, for they were remarkable leaders. They were noble to the end, and
fearless even as they faced death, qualities that found expression in Crowfoot's dying words, delivered
to his grief-stricken family and friends as he lay in his lodge that overlooked the swift, shallow Bow
River and the Blackfoot Crossing. “A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot
tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is as the flash of a firefly in the
night. It is as the breath of the buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs
across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”