Alberta Culture & Language

Alberta's culture is First Nations, settler and oil in three layers. The Blackfoot Confederacy -- Siksika, Kainai and Piikani -- with the Tsuut'ina, Stoney Nakoda and the Cree of the north and centre, hold the treaties, the reserves and the sacred sites, and the province has the third-largest First Nations population and one of the largest Métis populations in the country; the buffalo jumps, Blackfoot Crossing and Writing-on-Stone carry a history that runs back ten thousand years. The settler province is the most European-mixed of the prairies: British and German ancestry, the 332,000-strong Ukrainian community that built the onion-domed churches and the pysanka east of Edmonton, Scandinavians, the communal Hutterite colonies of the south, and Canada's first mosque, raised in Edmonton in 1938. Four in five Albertans live in the two big cities, but the self-image is rural.

That self-image is the cowboy and the roughneck. Ranching came with the open range of the 1880s, and the Calgary Stampede -- "the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth" since 1912 -- turns the city Western every July for chuckwagon races, rodeo, midway and pancake breakfasts, the biggest event of the year; Ian Tyson wrote "Four Strong Winds" from a ranch near Longview, and the province produced k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, Nickelback and Tegan and Sara. Oil is the other identity, from the Leduc strike of 1947 and the Athabasca sands: it made Calgary a head-office city with the most millionaires per capita for years, gave Alberta the lowest taxes in Canada and its boom-and-bust rhythm, and fuels a durable Western alienation and a one-party political habit -- Social Credit for 36 years, the Progressive Conservatives for 44.

The institutions are the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, the largest in western Canada, the Glenbow and the two cities' symphonies, and the film country of the foothills, where Brokeback Mountain, Unforgiven, Legends of the Fall and The Revenant were shot. The everyday culture is hockey -- the Flames and the Oilers and their bitter Battle of Alberta -- the mountains on the weekend, Alberta beef on the grill, ginger beef from a Calgary Chinese kitchen, saskatoon-berry pie, and the Caesar, the clam-and-vodka cocktail invented at the Calgary Inn in 1969 and now Canada's drink.

English is the language: 76 per cent of Albertans speak it as a first language, under 2 per cent French, and the rest a wide mix -- Tagalog, Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin, German, Ukrainian and the Cree and Blackfoot of the First Nations. There is no French-service expectation as in the east; road signs and services are English. The vocabulary to know is Western Canadian: a Chinook is the warm winter wind, not just a salmon; the Stampede is the July rodeo and the verb for going to it; a Caesar is the clam-and-vodka cocktail; "the mountains" means the Rockies and "the city" means whichever of Calgary or Edmonton you are nearer; a bunnyhug is a hooded sweatshirt (borrowed from Saskatchewan); and "out east" means Ontario and beyond. Distances are in kilometres, temperatures in Celsius, and a "two-four" is a case of twenty-four beers.