INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

Parks Canada, which handles all of the nation’s national parks, is an international leader in working with aboriginal peoples, but that wasn’t always the case. Go back far enough in Canada’s history, and you’ll find that Native peoples were excluded from some national parks. When Canada’s first national park, Banff (now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southwest Alberta), was established in 1885, the Stoney Indians, who had traveled and hunted in the area for centuries, were kept out.