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Also on the boat with Thair was a videographer, filming the dive for a documentary Thair hopes to have made.

“I think the telling of the story is important, the sharing of what the rock means to our people – not meant, but means,” Tootoosis said. “It’s pointless to ponder on what could have been done. It was done. It’s too late now. But going forward, what can be done is to ensure this doesn’t happen to any of our other sites.”

Mistaseni was a gathering place for seven distinct plains Cree groups, according to Barry Ahenakew, an elder on Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation.

“They’d all gather there, all the Crees in the spring, that was the gathering spot. There was six to seven miles of teepees when they all gathered in that valley and on top of the valley on each side,” he said.

Ahenakew said he welcomes Thair’s diving project and plans for a documentary about the rock, which Ahenakew calls Buffalo Child Stone, in reference to the history that he keeps alive through oral tradition. Even though the pieces of rock are under the water, the spirit of the Buffalo Child is still there, he said.

“It’s bringing awareness to the Buffalo Child Stone and it’s bringing awareness to that location,” Ahenakew said. “It’s something great to be bringing it back to light, that this place is a sacred place.”

The documentary Thair wants to see made won’t just be about what was lost when Mistaseni was blown up.

“Here’s the motivation for me: There’s often so much, I don’t know if I’d call it negativity, or disappointment, whether it’s white or aboriginal, about how slowly things are going. But if you look at where we are now, I don’t think what happened would happen again,” Thair said.

“I don’t think any government would blow the rock up if the circumstances were what they are today, and I don’t think the aboriginal community would stand for it. We’re sure not finished, but we’ve made progress.”

BUFFALO CHILD STONE What follows is the story of Buffalo Child Stone, as told by Barry Ahenakew to Star-Phoenix reporter Hannah Spray, about the big rock shaped like a buffalo that sat in the Qu’Appelle Valley before it was blown up in 1966. There are many longer, more detailed versions, Ahenakew said, but this is the heart of the story: “For us, even though it’s underwater and parts of it are underwater, the spirit of it is still there, the spirit of the buffalo child, the buffalo child that was brought up by buffalo, raised by buffalo, as a child that was lost on the Prairies a long time ago as a group of people travelled. He thought he was a buffalo. He didn’t realize until he got bigger and he seen a reflection of himself as they were drinking water, that he looked a lot different than the buffalo. Using buffalo talk, he asked his father how come he looked so different. His father told him that he was actually a human being they had raised from the young, from being a young child, they raised him as a buffalo, they had found him and raised him as a buffalo. With that discontent he had, his father told him you’re free to go if you want to look for your human being relatives, go ahead. That’s what he did. He left and he journeyed out and he found people. He couldn’t talk Plains Cree, though, so he had a hard time adapting to learning the language, but everybody spoke it so it didn’t take him too long to learn Plains Cree. He wasn’t very happy a lot of times, seeing all the buffalo hides and the buffalo meat. He’d never eat the buffalo, his brothers and sisters, his relatives. After a while, he did have a family with the people, he had children and offspring, but he decided to leave and join the buffalo again. That’s when, later on, he turned into a buffalo, an actual buffalo. And he turned after that into a stone of the sitting buffalo, and that’s the stone that was there. That’s a sacred story of the Cree. It goes a long time into the past.”