Pembina

Pembina belongs to the northern interior of western Canada, a country of wooded valleys and waterways. The Pembina River in Alberta rises in the foothills of the Rockies and flows towards the Athabasca River. Its name comes from a Cree word for a berry-bearing shrub, a reminder of the Indigenous names carried by the region's waterways.

Across the wider northern interior, Indigenous communities moved between productive places as seasons changed. Hunting, fishing and gathering formed part of diverse livelihoods, and networks of exchange linked communities across long distances. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fur trading routes increasingly joined the interior to distant markets; Indigenous people and Métis communities contributed knowledge, transport and provisions to that trade.