Rockies Exploration with the Howl Experience
Six Days, the Mountains and a Whole Lot of Circles
I left Edmonton for Calgary without knowing exactly what the next six days would look like. I knew it was a Howl Experience program, six days of land-based learning in Canmore and the surrounding Treaty 7 region, Îyârhe Nakoda, Niitsitapi, Tsuut’ina, and Métis Nation of Alberta territory, and I knew it was going to ask something of me. I did not know it would start with our group getting stuck at a bus stop, but the mountains have a way of teaching you patience before you even see them <3
The plan was to meet the group at Crowfoot LRT. While we waited, a handful of us who’d arrived early ended up grabbing food together, which turned out to be the first real conversation of the trip. The bus itself was doing pickups from the airport before it got to us, and by the time it rolled up, the folks already on board had apparently circled the city more than once trying to find everyone. We gave them a hard time about it for the rest of the week, and honestly, that shared delay ended up being a better icebreaker than anything planned. Nothing bonds a group faster than an inside joke.
From there the week actually began.
We got to Barrier Lake in the evening, the kind of golden hour that makes even a tired travel day feel cinematic, and after dinner we went straight into an opening circle with Terry Rider, an Elder, smudging, and introductions: name, pronouns, project, home.
That night, in our shared room, my roommates and I stayed up way later than planned, just talking. That kind of late-night talking where you laugh until it hurts because you are tired and unguarded and everyone in the room is a stranger who suddenly is not.
I remember thinking, somewhere around hour three, that I had known these people for less than a day and already felt like I owed them nothing and everything.
If day one was about arriving, day two was about putting hands to work.
It opened with a question, what does community mean to you, and then put us straight to work answering it. We spent the day volunteering at the Îyârhe Nakoda Food Bank on the reserve. We started in circle again, sharing a food memory or piece of food wisdom, then split into groups: hampers, greenhouse, planting, and the BBQ we set up so people picking up their food had something warm to eat while they waited.
The food bank had its own community garden, which stuck with me, rows of vegetables growing right next to where people came to receive them, no separation between giving and growing. After the hampers were done, a group of us walked to the berry patch everyone had been talking about all day, right next to a playground, and I understood the hype the second I tasted one. We closed with another circle before heading back, sun-tired but buzzing with the energy of having spent an entire day in such a impactful and productive way.
Then came the day that stayed with me longest:
Day three opened with a blunt question “who would be proud of you”.
We spent part of the day encouraged to just disconnect, no phones, barefoot in the grass, taking in the mountains without trying to document any of it.
It is genuinely rare to be given permission to slow down like that, and harder than it sounds when your thumb keeps twitching toward a phone that is not there.
Later we made bannock, starting with a conversation about the history and relationship people have to the food before actually making it together, flour on our hands and on each other’s shoulders by the end. Then we went into Banff for the afternoon, with time to walk around and learn more about the land and its history, tourists and mountains doing their strange dance around us.
The pace picked back up on day four, which took us to Canmore for a session on the grass at Lake Louise, then to Bow Valley, where we spread tobacco. That night we did karaoke, and one person’s performance was good enough that we spent the next twenty minutes convinced Mariah Carey herself had joined the group.
By day five, the timing lined up with something bigger than our own group. It landed on Indigenous Peoples Day, and we spent it with the YMCA, helping raise a tipi and taking part in their pipe ceremony, smudging, and flag raising, the poles going up against a sky that seemed to know the occasion.
By the last morning, packing up felt strange in the way it always does when a short trip has done a lot of work on you.
Six days is not long on paper, but this one gave me a much fuller sense of what Etuaptmunk, Two-Eyed Seeing, actually asks of a person when you are not just reading about it but practicing it: listening to the land, to Elders, to the people around you, and honestly, to yourself.
I am so incredibly thankful to HOWL for making such an experience a reality.
Written by An̄urika (Rika) Onyenso (she/her), Founder, ECHOFORM
Written from Treaty 6 territory, with thanks for time spent in Treaty 7 territory, the traditional lands of the Îyârhe Nakoda Nations, the Niitsitapi Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Rocky View Métis District.