This History of Education Society Presidential Address considers Blackfoot education and how psychologist Abraham Maslow attempted to make sense of it after his six-week stay at the Siksika reserve in 1938. Maslow encountered an educated, secure people at Siksika, who had a fully formed system of education grounded in reverence for children, stories, ceremonies, songs, language, humor, land, and connection, all of which had been tested over millennia. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him, and can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. As Maslow learned, Blackfoot history is an education history, which Blackfoot Elders sought to document and keep for generations not yet born.

In this paper we explore differences in prosodic rhythm between two English speech communities in rural Southern Alberta, Canada: speakers of Blackfoot First Nation descent and those of settler descent. Using the Variability Index (VI), we show that there are statistically significant differences between English speakers of settler descent and those of Blackfoot descent, where those of Blackfoot descent have a higher VI, that is, they are further along the stress-timing continuum than those of settler descent. We hypothesize that these differences are due to language transfer effects stemming from the community's original Blackfoot phonology which were present in their L2 English when the community norm shifted primarily to English, and that the historical, social, and geographical isolation of Blackfoot people in Southern Alberta has contributed to the development of a new local Blackfoot English norm.

Blackfoot verbs are marked with nominal agreement morphology in relative clauses, in place of verbal inflection. These relative clauses have previously been analyzed as nominalizations. The present study shows that a nominalization analysis makes incorrect predictions about the morphological composition of relative clauses, as well as the availability of non-agentive and possessive constructions, and adjectival modification. This study demonstrates that relative clauses can relativize subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects. Based on observations about obviation, recursion, long-distance extraction, inflection, and word order, I propose that relative clauses are participles: clausal entities with a nominal superstructure. This accounts for their mixed clausal and nominal properties, and provides an analysis of Blackfoot relative clauses similar to those proposed for related Algonquian languages.