What’s in a Name: The Story Behind Talking Rock Tours, Askiy-Geo, and La Tayr-Geo
Names carry intention. They tell people who you are before you ever open your mouth. The name Talking Rock Tours did not come to be right away. It came the way most real things do: through time, through humility, and through someone else saying the thing you did not yet have the courage to say yourself.
Take a Hike
When I first imagined what this tour company might be, I initially thought of “Take a Hike Geo-adventures,” to pay homage to my U of L Geography Club days. It was practical and sassy. It told you what we were doing: going outside, hiking, looking at geologic wonders. I thought that initial concept name was enough.
Then one day, my friend Julian looked at me and said, simply: “Keith, you are the Rock Talker. Save yourself some marketing dollars and call yourself what you are.”
“Keith, you are the Rock Talker. Save yourself some marketing dollars and call yourself what you are.”
Rock Talker evolved into “Talking Rock Tours.” That’s exactly what it should be called and no surprise it still holds true today.
Not because rocks literally talk, but they have a spirit and share stories of the land and someone has to speak for them, which I proudly do. Someone must also stand on this land and say: this place has a story that goes back further than any written record, further than any school curriculum, and further than anything you will ever find on the internet or generated by AI. The rock record and the associated cultural layers of extensive histories and stories belong to all of us!
A Voice for the Land and People
To talk about rocks is to talk about the land. And to talk about the land in Alberta is to talk about the First Peoples who have lived on it, cared for it, and built their entire ways of knowing around it since time immemorial. The First Nations, the Inuit, the Métis. Those important voices were silenced for countless generations. They were removed off the very land they had always belonged to, as well as pushed out of history books and school curriculums.
Talking Rock Tours exist, in part, to help change that. Every discovery tour is a small act of reconciliation-in-action. Not the kind that lives only in legislation or policy, but the kind that happens when a person holds a piece of Precambrian rock in their hand for the first time and understands, maybe for the first time, that someone else’s relationship with that rock is older, deeper, and richer than anything they were ever taught in school.
Indigenous Peoples are still here. They remember and so does the land remember. And on every discovery tour, so do we.
That is what Talking Rock Tours means to me. It is a voice. For the land and for my Indigenous cousins whose connection to it was never broken, only suppressed until recently. For the extensive knowledge that has always been here, hiding in plain sight, waiting for the public who are willing to stop, look down, listen, and learn.
Askiy-Geo
In nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, the word “Askiy” means “Earth.” “Geo” comes from the Greek root word also meaning “Earth,” and it forms the foundation of geology, the study of the Earth itself. I combined these two key words into “Askiy-Geo,” a nod to Mother Earth-related knowledge shared through culture and science.
Askiy-Geo places Indigenous traditional knowledge first and then scientific knowledge side by side, as equals. Not one explaining the other. Not one standing above the other. Two ways of knowing the same Mother Earth, brought together on the same ground, shared with the same open minds, hearts, and hands. That is the intention behind every Askiy-Geo Discovery Tour.
Two words, both meaning Earth. Two ways of knowing, both worthy of being equally heard.
La Tayr-Geo
La Tayr comes from French Michif, a traditional Michif dialect of the Métis people. A living blend of anishinaabe/Ojibwe and nêhiyawêwin/Cree verbs mixed with French nouns creates two other dialects depending on which geographical region. Michif carries the full story of who the Métis are, the children of the fur trade, spanning across the Great Plains of what we know today as western Canada. “La Tayr” means “Earth.” The same Earth as Askiy. The same Earth as Geo. Three words from three distinct cultural backgrounds, all speaking about the same ground beneath our feet.
As a proud Métis, I carry more than one language and more than one way of knowing the world. Today, I actually consider myself a double-breed as my Métis superpower, not a half-breed that the government labelled us as being less of a colonial person in status. La-Tayr honours that. It says that the land was known, named, and held sacred in Michif long before any survey line was staked across it. And it says that the Métis relationship with Mother Earth is its own living tradition, worthy of being spoken out loud, and shared for future generations.
Askiy-Geo. La Tayr-Geo. Both are brand new words built from older and younger knowledge diction. Both mean Mother Earth. And together, they reflect exactly what Talking Rock Tours has always been: a place where traditional cultural knowledge and scientific knowledge are welcomed as equals, and where Mother Earth herself is understood to be the greatest teacher of all.
The land was known and named long before any survey line was staked across it.
Connections Written in the Landscape
When I started Talking Rock Tours, I was still learning how to become an Indigenous tour operator as there is definitely no manual available for running one-of-a-kind Indigenous geo-experiences that also reflects a brand new sector of geo-tourism. For the first two or three years, I held that title carefully, not sure I had fully earned it. What I did know, even then, is that the combined cultural and scientific knowledge I was sharing was not the kind you could find with a Google search or AI. The hidden natural wonders of Alberta. The spiritual connections written into and still exposed on the landscape. The stories carved into rock faces, rocks and stones carried in ceremony, and passed from generation to generation long before books and the internet were invented.
Everything on a discovery tour is inter-connected like us with all our relations. For example, the rocks beneath you in Edmonton connects to the historic river valley, which connects to the people who lived on or near it for tens of thousands of years, which connects to you standing there today holding one in your hand while watching the current of the mighty North Saskatchewan River flow by that was once the highway of the fur trade. That connection is not an abstract idea. You feel it when the fresh air hits your lungs and the sounds of nature ring in your ears. You feel it when a stranger becomes a friend on the trail. You feel it when you get home and cannot wait to tell someone what you experienced and learnt.
A Community on the Land
The people who join a Talking Rock Tour are not guests or tourists. They are cultural explorers, history buffs, outdoor enthusiasts, and curious minds, people who want to breathe in fresh air and feel something real beneath their feet. They arrive as participants or Geo-Explorers and leave as something much more – It’s transformative! They carry what they have learned home with them, and they share it with their spouses/partners, children, and friends. That is how meaningful knowledge for positive change moves forward with oral storytelling of local holistic history. That is also how traditional knowledge continues to survive and thrive since time immemorial.
My goal has always been for that to grow. Not just by one discovery tour at a time by a local Indigenous tour company, but a positive movement of reconciliation-in-action with geo-experiences in many forms. A reminder that the most important things we can know about this world are already written in the ground we walk on every single day, if we are willing to look, listen, learn, and share.
Recharge your spirit on the land. Start as strangers, leave as friends. Take some important traditional and scientific knowledge home and share it with loved ones.
That is what “Askiy-Geo” means. That is what “La Tayr-Geo” means. That is what Talking Rock Tours has meant from the very first day someone told me to call myself what I already was, a “Rock Talker.”
Are you ready to hear what the land has to say? Book your discovery tour at www.talkingrocktours.com. We are now booking our summer, fall, and winter 2026 discovery tours.
I would like to proudly acknowledge and welcome you to the ancestral homelands of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis: the peoples of Treaty 6, 7, and 8 territories, whose relationship with this land stretches back since time immemorial.
As a proud Métis, I am grateful every day to learn not only from my own culture, history, and language, but from the many Indigenous Peoples whose knowledge and traditions continue to enrich and shape our diverse Canadian communities. That knowledge and wisdom are gifts that I proudly carry and share more each year on every discovery tour.
Welcome to our sacred land. May we walk together with curiosity, respect, and gratitude.
May the LAND be with you!