Although generally thought as timeless, oral traditions often derive from witnessing massive processes of environmental change. An analysis of Blackfoot "Old Man Napi" stories demonstrates that native histories  relate sequences of events the ancestors experienced on the rapidly changing landscape during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene along the Rocky Mountain Front, where some of the oldest Pre-Clovis and Clovis sites have been excavated, and where the Blackfoot ancestors made their first home. Napi creation stories and more recent traditions further show how, through the humanization of environmental processes, the Blackfoot retain deep-time memories of the ancestors and the homeland. This analysis has profound implications for the contemporary Blackfoot who, as of today, continue to fight for land rights in Canadian and US courts. 

María Nieves Zedeño

María Nieves Zedeño (PhD, 1991 Southern Methodist University) is the Director of the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and Professor of North American Archaeology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona in Tucson. Her areas of expertise include northern Plains archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography and her research focus is on hunter-gatherers, landscape and place theory, and social history in archaeology. Zedeño is an applied archaeologist who has worked collaboratively with manyNative American tribes across the US and especially with Canadian and American Blackfoot.