Mohkínstsis is the Blackfoot word for “elbow.” Wincheesh-pah is the Stoney word for “elbow.” Kootsisáw is the Tsuut’ina word for “elbow.” While the place where the Elbow River meets the Bow is today commonly known as Calgary, it’s had many other names throughout its history, which expands for thousands of years in all directions. The rivers’ confluence has been a perennial location of importance. Sprung from a small lake on the western lip of the Rocky Mountains, the Elbow River snakes its way through the foothills in between the mountains and the city, enriched by the mineral-saturated terrain through which it travels. The Bow River also runs from the Rockies through the foothills and into the Prairie. Both rivers have always been veins of life. Today, they provide direction, power, fresh drinking water, and a home for millions of kinds of life. The Bow is fiercer, and has historically only had two crossings; one, where the Elbow meets it, and the second, Blackfoot Crossing: the place where Treaty 7 was signed in 1877. Today, the Bow and the Elbow continue to provide for all of us who call this place home. We are required, in return, to care for the rivers in collaboration with their traditional custodians who have always, and will continue to, care for this land; the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai Blackfoot First Nations who have called this land home for many millennia; the Tsuut’ina First Nation, whose ᑕᓀᖚ (Dane-zaa) ancestors migrated here from the northern Peace River before Europeans settled in this region; and the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley Stoney Nakoda First Nations, who care for the rivers where they begin.