Cree community leader
Also known as Chief Johnny Bob Smallboy
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9 identifiers linking Robert Smallboy across the web's reference databases
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Chief Robert (Bobtail) Smallboy, Cree name Keskayo Apitchitchiw, was a community leader who brought national attention to problems faced by urban and reserve Indians when he "returned to the land" with followers from troubled Canadian Indian reservations. He was born while his parents were "in transit" through the Peigan Nation, southwest of Fort Macleod, Alberta, on 7 November 1898, en route to his father's home in what was to become the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana, named after Bobtail's paternal grandfather. Bobtail spent his formative years there, long enough to speak Cree with a noticeable Chippewa accent. During the first world war, the Smallboys were among the last to settle on their allotted reserve at Hobbema in central Alberta, now named Maskwacis, a Treaty 6 nation now known for its rich oil and gas reserves. Smallboy became a hunter, trapper, farmer, and eventually chief of the Ermineskin Band from 1959 to 1969. In 1968, to escape deteriorating social and political conditions on the reserve, he moved to a bush camp on the Kootenay Plains. He attributed the alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide that he saw in his community to an attempt to live a modern lifestyle on the reserve rather than "The Indian Way". Accompanied by approximately 125 people and with help from other elders, he moved his community. Despite factional splits, the return of many residents to Hobbema, and the group's failure to obtain permanent land tenure, this community, "Smallboy Camp", persisted into the 21st Century as a working community used as a retreat by Plains and Woodlands Indians from western Canada and the US.
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