Rocks & Stones: The Foundation of Mother Earth

When I was a little boy, I started collecting rocks.

Not because anyone told me to. Not because I understood what I was holding. But because something in me recognized that these hand-sized, heavy, ordinary-looking things were anything but ordinary. I didn’t have the words for it then. Now, after years of walking on Mother Earth as a professional geoscientist and a Métis tour guide, I understand more, but there is still more to them than meets the eye.

A rock is not something that collects dust. A rock is a shared journey to understand ourselves and our interconnections to all things, each other, which is fundamentally rooted to the land since time immemorial.

A rock is not something that collects dust. A rock is a shared journey to understand ourselves and our interconnections to all things, each other, which is fundamentally rooted to the land since time immemorial.

A Rock and Stone Are Not the Same Thing

Some use the words rock and stone interchangeably. Perhaps even you do!
But there is a distinction worth holding onto. All stones are derived from rocks, but not all rocks become stones. A rock comes directly from Mother Earth. Untouched, unaltered, exactly as it was formed. A stone has been shaped by human hands in some way. Carved, knapped, polished, or placed with intention. For example, you might think of a stone arrowhead that’s been flint knapped for the purpose of hunting, or a tombstone with their name and personal details engraved in it to honour a loved one.

That difference matters. It means that long before the first written word, before recorded history, people were already in a relationship with Mother Earth beneath them. They were listening to it. Learning from it. Transforming it into tools for daily survival activities and for ceremony. That relationship is something that we have held on to for our entire human history, and we are lucky to hold it within our hands.

You Could be Holding Billions of Years in Your Hand

Pick up the next rock that strikes something within you. It might be sitting on your windowsill right now, or waiting in the garden, or half-buried in a trail you’ve walked a hundred times.

Look at it. Consider it from each side. Notice the colours, matrix, and other unique details.

With many sedimentary rocks, the layers you see represent rock record sequences, and they are exactly what they sound like. Each strata of varying grain size, colour or texture, is a chapter. An inland sea that once covered this land. A volcanic eruption. A glacier receding away. An extinction. A new beginning. A record of its entire journey.

Geologists read these layers the way others read books. And the story they tell stretches back not hundreds, not thousands, but billions of years.

We talk about human history as though it is ancient. An ancient gathering place we know today as Edmonton for over 11,000 years since the last ice age to present day. First complex human writing was 5,500 years ago. The oldest Egyptian pyramid at 4,700 years old. But the rock in your hand predates all of it by a distance so vast it is almost impossible to feel. Almost. Feel that rock in your hand. The weight in your palm? That is time you are holding. That is Mother Earth handing you proof that she has always been here, enduring, adapting through everything, and will continue to do so.

Rocks have so many stories to tell. Are you listening?

Rocks Have A Spirit

In Indigenous ways of knowing, rocks are not passive inanimate objects. They are alive with energy — kinetic, spiritual, and fully present with us. They hold memories. They are witnesses to everything, past and present.

Modern physics tells us that all matter is energy. That nothing is truly still. The rock sitting silent on your desk or windowsill is vibrating at a molecular level, connected to everything around it through forces we are still learning to fully understand and measure.

Indigenous Peoples understood this long before the laboratory confirmed it. The land is not a backdrop to human life. It is an active participant in it, and all our blessings in life are from Mother Earth, not from an online store.

When I stand on exposed bedrock within a river valley, the badlands, or the mountains, I am not standing on scenery. I am standing in the presence of something that has seen more of this world’s story than any living creature ever will. This is one of the main reasons why I started Talking Rock Tours, to share knowledge of the natural and cultural history of the geologic wonders of Alberta through an Indigenous lens. In other words, I proudly share the local holistic history hiding in plain sight that we did not learn in school, so it can be passed on to the next generations as a form of meaningful reconciliation-in-action.

The Circle of Life Is Written in Rock

There is a reason circles are sacred in so many Indigenous beliefs, traditions, and worldviews. Life does not move in a straight line. It moves in cycles. Birth, growth, death, rebirth. Over and over, in every living thing.

Rocks live that cycle too.

When an oceanic tectonic plate is pushed underneath a continental plate, that rock begins to melt at deep depth that eventually feeds an erupting volcano, and then the lava solidifies into rock on the earth’s surface. This scenario represents one of the continuous starting points of the rock cycle. Furthermore, erosion breaks down lava rock and mountains into sediment, sediments are compressed into new sedimentary rock, and when there is enough thick sedimentary rock being buried, it eventually becomes metamorphic rock via heat and pressure. Tectonic plates will eventually carry it downward, where it melts, and is born again. Geologists call this the rock cycle: a conveyor belt of time turning endlessly beneath our feet.

It is the same story we tell about ourselves. A similar burial story is told in ceremony and church. We come from Mother Earth, and we return to it – earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We have always known, somewhere deep in us, that the rock record is our shared foundation and helps us stay grounded.

You Won’t Find These Lessons On Google

Rocks are not just for geologists. They carry culture, memory, and identity.

Before metal, there were rocks knapped into spearpoints, arrowheads, scrapers, and other hunting tools that fed families for generations. Before GPS, there were stone cairns leading travelers safely across the land. Before written language, there were petroglyphs: messages carved or pecked onto a rock surface by people who wanted to be remembered, who wanted to say: we were here and still are.

I think about that often. The people who came before us on this land, the countless Indigenous Nations who have lived in relationship with it for tens of thousands of years, left their stories in stone because stone lasts. Because they knew something we are only beginning to re-remember: Mother Earth is the most honest record keeper there is.

At Talking Rock Tours, I talk about the land because someone has to. Because the rocks beneath us are speaking, and for a long time, the voices that understood that language — the elders, knowledge keepers, knowledge holders, the people whose relationship with this land goes back to the very beginning — were silenced.

I have become a professional geoscientist and naval warfare officer. But I am also on a life-long journey to be an advocate for the land, a voice for those that have been silenced, and a storyteller for the combined layers of rock, stone, and Indigenous culture it carries.

Want to hear the land speak for yourself? Join a Talking Rock Tour this spring, summer, fall, winter, and come walk with us in Alberta’s most remarkable landscapes with a Métis tour guide who has spent a lifetime of learning, listening, and sharing.

Book your tour at www.talkingrocktours.com

I would like to respectfully 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!