Bridges cover: Ernie Walker leads an eclectic, industrious life

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Dr. Ernie Walker has lived more lives than most.

There’s no one else in his line of work in Saskatchewan. That’s because the famed archaeologist and forensic anthropologist goes from digging up fossils one minute, to basking in the sunshine at his cacti farm on campus, or to a crime scene.

The University of Saskatchewan archaeology professor is inspiring the next generation to follow in his industrious footsteps, and he’s leading by example.

It was Walker who discovered scores of artifacts in a then-farmer’s field north of Saskatoon. It was also Walker who had the vision to urge a community to preserve the land (and to partner with Indigenous groups while doing it), leading to the creation of Wanuskewin Heritage Park.

He’s now part of a multi-million dollar renewal campaign to make the park Canada’s première cultural destination. Part of the campaign involves an ambitious application to UNESCO to have the park designated a World Heritage Site. If granted, it will be a first for Saskatchewan.

DIGGING UP BONES

Walker has been an archaeology professor for 38 years. When he’s not in the classroom, he’s in the archaeology and anthropology building’s basement, working with students and his massive bone collection. He’s got everything from microscopic chickadees to polar bear skulls down there.

But in the warmer months, he’s out on digs, like at Wanuskewin — home to Canada’s longest running archaeological dig.

Walker excavated the famous Gowen sites at the Saskatoon landfill in 1977 and 1980. The sites (named for the city’s heavy equipment operator, Charlie Gowen, who discovered them), sat along a sandy shelf on the South Saskatchewan River. There, Walker found a multi-purpose camp site, including a bison processing area, dating back thousands of years.

“It was a phenomenal site,” he remembers with pride in his voice.

He says all of Saskatoon’s Riversdale neighbourhood — which sits on sand deposits, so you don’t have to dig deep — has potentially massive archaeological sites. It’s not the only one in the city, either.

“I know Holiday Park Golf Course is loaded with sites. I’d love to dig (there) but it isn’t going to happen,” Walker laughs.

North of the Sutherland neighbourhood, workers at a gravel company uncovered fossil deposits from a woolly mammoth, extinct 12,000 years ago. A crew building a storm drain system north of Adilman Drive found a fossilized muskox skull 20 metres down. Walker estimates it’s 130,000 years old.

“We don’t have dinosaurs here, but we’ve got a lot of other neat stuff,” he says.

“It’s not the artifact itself, it’s the science you can get out of it.”

In the early 1990s, Les Norby called Walker after finding bones while digging a basement.

“So we dug up his yard and all of his neighbours’ yards and there was a 6,000-year-old bison kill underneath the 900 block of Avenue M South,” Walker recalls.

He found bones from more than 60 bison at the site, but he thinks he could have found many more if sidewalks and garages hadn’t got in the way.

“It’s not the artifact itself, it’s the science you can get out of it,” he explains.

Walker is known for his voracious reading habits, his love of the West, his cacti collection, and his quick wit (and speedy walk to match). His office and home are lined with books — so many that his wife, artist and educator Bobbi Clackson, has forbidden him from buying more.

“But I smuggle them in,” he says with a sly grin.

Rob Norris, senior strategist at the U of S, has known him for 15 years.

“He’s self-deprecating in his humour, selfless when assisting others and he’s super smart when it comes to comprehending, and explaining in clear terms, the significance of the geography and archaeology of our northern plains.”

Walker is unabashedly a Westerner. He cut his teeth on archaeology digs in the American Southwest as a PhD student in Texas. Six pairs of cowboy boots sit in his office, worn out from long days in the dirt. An armadillo skeleton sits on his desk.

Arizona is his favourite vacation spot. His cacti collection, housed in a U of S greenhouse, provides respite from the rigours of his multiple lines of work and remind him of the desert.

THE LAW ENFORCEMENT SIDE

Walker, a consultant with the Office of the Chief Coroner, was made an RCMP special constable in 2000.

His law enforcement role is complex, involving finding and recovering human remains. Once remains are found, he conducts a post-mortem autopsy to determine the deceased’s identity.

Walker’s help is only needed if a deceased person is unrecognizable (think any scenario where a body is highly degraded) or cannot be found. His vast knowledge has helped solve decades-old missing person cases.

He helped coordinate a two-year search effort of Robert Pickton’s farmyard in B.C. to find remains the serial killer had buried. Many of Walker’s U of S archaeology students took part in that search.

He estimates he’s identified human remains in 600 to 700 cases, along with 80 homicide cases.

He also gets identification requests via electronic images from all over the country. It’s become a second job.

After nearly four decades identifying human remains, Walker has developed a necessary level of detachment. He’s been to horrific crime scenes with unimaginable sights, straight from a horror movie.

“I don’t even think about it. It never really enters my mind — it’s a job (I) have to do. It’s not the nicest one,” he says.

Due to socioeconomic factors, many of the cases involve people from an Indigenous background, he notes.

“I’ve seen the ugly side (of humanity). I think Saskatoon is a better community than what I see in the ugliness.”

MAGNIFICENT WANUSKEWIN

The contrast to that darkness is light — and for Walker, the light is Wanuskewin. His eyes beam as he talks about “his baby.”

Walker’s ties to the park go back to 1978, when he was a U of S archaeology student. He was working for Mike Vitkowski, a rancher whose family had owned the land since 1934. Out working the land, Walker began finding ancient artifacts left by Great Plains First Nations groups more than 6,000 years ago.

Vitkowski retired in 1980 and wanted to sell the land to someone who would look after it.

“The next thing you know, I’m lobbying city council that this is really important that the community at large save this place,” Walker says.

A few years later, a modest ($14 million) fundraising campaign, spearheaded by prominent Saskatonians, was launched to purchase the land and construct the building.

“At the same time, I realized that this is about First Nations culture and First Nations history. First Nations need to be involved in this,” he says. “Truth and reconciliation is a big thing today, but … nobody was working with First Nations at that time.”

Partnerships Walker helped found with community elders continue today, making Wanuskewin and its location on Treaty Six land a truly special place for people who want to understand the past and connect with the future.

Andrew McDonald, Wanuskewin’s sales and marketing manager, says people from around the world have done tours of the park with Walker. His passion is contagious.

“The way in which he explains things, you can just tell: this is someone who’s living and breathing this incredible story and this incredible place. He’s so adept at being able to share that passion with everybody else,” McDonald says.

THUNDERING AHEAD

Wanuskewin opened to great fanfare in 1992.

“It was too small the day we opened, but we knew that. That was the money we had available,” Walker says candidly.

In 1987, Queen Elizabeth II visited and declared the park a National Historic Site.

The bold $40 million Thundering Ahead campaign was launched last year and includes funds to lease 374 acres of adjacent farmland for a bison herd. The renewal vision is a four-part strategy designed to attract visitors from all over the world to share in honouring pre-contact Indigenous life on the Great Plains.

Walker is convinced Wanuskewin’s unique diversity of heritage resources more than qualifies the park to receive UNESCO status.

Tara Janzen, the fundraising lead on the Thundering Ahead campaign, is also one of Walker’s grad students. She’s helping him with a massive undertaking: the application to UNESCO.

It involves supplementary research, comparative analysis of other sites around the world and putting together key pieces from the last 35 years of research at Wanuskewin to prove the park’s universal value to all of humanity.

“(UNESCO) insists that you demonstrate how you are unique in all of the world,” Janzen says.

The park contains 19 pre-contact archaeological sites that demonstrate habitation, hunting and gathering, and spirituality between people of the Great Northern Plains dating back 6,400 years to the present day. The sites include bison jumps, campsites, evidence of hunting and gathering societies, and with ceremonial features, like the medicine wheel (the most northerly one ever found).

For ancient Indigenous people, the cliffs above Opamihaw Creek provided an ideal place to run bison. The valley provided water, flat spaces and shelter for setting up camp.

“When people start spending more time in an area like that, then you start to see things like the medicine wheel — more of a spiritual-type site,” Walker explains.

Janzen says there are other places in the world with a bison jump or a medicine wheel. Most were commonly used by just one group.

“But nowhere else do these things exist within one space. Additionally, Wanuskewin was used by every single cultural group that was Indigenous to the Great Plains area,” Janzen notes.

“It worked like a magnet,” Walker says. “People were funnelling into this one spot for 6,000 years.”

McDonald says that pull to the valley still exists today.

“Many people report, unprompted, that there really is a special feeling about being on the grounds … they feel a certain serenity and peace here. It’s hard to name it — it’s a feeling.”

As Walker makes plans to retire after his 40th year of teaching, he says he will never leave the work at his legacy, Wanuskewin.

“Someday, the story of Wanuskewin is going to become much better known across the country. The government didn’t build it, the community built it. We built it — First Nations and non-First Nations together, at a time when that wasn’t even considered. What a great story for our community.”

To learn more about the Thundering Ahead campaign, visit: www.thunderingahead.ca

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