As a boy during the Korean War, Samuel Simon would ride his horse through buffalo grass here to a prairie bluff, where he watched Canadian war jets fly out of Calgary, scream overhead and then unleash ground-shaking rockets on a bombing range built on tribal land.
"We would watch the planes flying over and shooting rockets," Mr. Simon, who is now 58 years old, said recently. "They used old cars as targets. But sometimes, we would see two rockets and then just one explosion."
Standing on the same bluff almost half a century later, Mr. Simon surveyed a different view. To the east, the suburbs of Calgary have swallowed the old air base and now lap at the edges of the Indian reserve. To the west, with the snow-covered Rockies as a backdrop, teams of Tsuu T'ina Indians trained as ordnance-disposal workers methodically probed the prairie with metal detectors. A military ambulance was parked on a hill, its red cross prominent in the dun-colored landscape.
It is a little known footnote to the military history of North America that when wars loomed in the 20th century, military planners in Canada and the United States repeatedly turned to the native peoples of the West and took control, through leases or outright expropriation, of large swaths of land for bombing ranges.
In the United States, at least 16 tribes have land contaminated with the litter of bombs, or with a more dangerous kind of pollution: unexploded bombs lying buried in the ground.
The list includes buried ammunition in two native areas in Alaska, an old gunnery range at the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, a target range on Timbisha Shoshone land in Death Valley, Calif., a bomb-testing range on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, a weapons testing range on Paiute land in Nevada, old ranges on the lands of three New Mexico pueblos, and four bombing ranges in South Dakota including the 54-square-mile Badlands Bombing Range on Lakota Sioux land in Pine Ridge.
In Canada, the pattern was similar, with old bombing ranges on half a dozen Indian reserves from British Columbia to Ontario. Brian Lloyd, a former British Army bomb-disposal expert who directs cleanup operations here, said: "In Canada, the military acted like a giant, using Indian land like stepping stones across the country. You find an Indian nation, and you find range contamination."
Agreement on that comes easily on this reservation of 1,200 people, linguistic cousins of the Navajos and Apaches of the American Southwest.
"They figured, 'It's Indian land, and what the heck, if we use bombs and explosives and the Indians come and blow themselves up, what's the loss?' " Mr. Simon said bitterly.
One early spring morning in 1953, when he was 11, Mr. Simon was out on the range, picking up casings to sell to a Calgary scrap metal dealer. He recalls retrieving from the brush a shell without a top. After moving it, he continued, "I saw heat waves. I thought, 'This thing is going to blow up.' "
He tried to throw it, but the ice-covered casing slipped in his hands. The ensuing explosion threw him 150 feet. "My grandmother, my brother and my auntie were all blown flat," he said, all wounded in the blast. Today, he carries 11 pieces of shrapnel in his body.
But now, things are changing.
On March 31, the 90-year military lease on Tsuu T'ina land expired, ending military control over 12,000 acres -- one-sixth of the reservation -- that had started in 1910. As other Canadian and American tribes study cleaning up old bombing ranges on their lands, this one plans to hold in July what it describes as North America's first native conference on military cleanup.
For this tribe, which operates a business park and golf courses, there is profit in explosives disposal. In 1986, after the Canadian military did a halfhearted cleanup job here, the tribe formed the Wolf's Flat Ordnance Disposal Corporation, the only such native-owned and operated company in North America. Working on government contracts, this company, with 136 full- and part-time employees, has also cleared mines in Kosovo, Panama and Nicaragua.
The recent protests against the use of part of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico as a live-fire training site for the American Navy have fostered hopes for eventual cleanup contracts there. Right now, however, Tsuu T'ina leaders complain that the American ordnance-disposal market is closed to Canadians because of Pentagon rules requiring technicians certified in the United States.
Canada's government, which promotes land-mine clearance worldwide, has paid the tribal company to clean up the range here, believing that the natives had more incentive to clean up their land than the soldiers did.
"In 1981, the military had 1,000 soldiers in here for 16 days," Mr. Lloyd said. They certified the land free and clear of explosives, and then dumped it back on the nation. Since the military declared the land cleared, we have pulled out one million items of ordnance, expended rounds, live rounds."
With the oldest pieces dating to 1896, the range here was littered with weaponry from Canada's participation in the Boer War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. There were high-explosive mortar shells, 60-pound shrapnel-filled howitzer rounds, .50-caliber machine-gun bullets, air-to-ground rockets, land mines, flares, riot control projectiles and even two rusting rifles, apparently lost by absent-minded soldiers.
"The rule was, 'If you sign it out, don't bring it back,' " said Roy Whitney, the tribal chief. "We found boxes of grenades from the Second World War that were just buried in the ground because they didn't want to take them back."
For cleanup crews, one of the biggest dangers has been buried phosphorous shells. On contact with air, they can resume burning even after a 50-year hiatus.
With about 90 percent of the 12,000 acres cleaned up, entirely without accident, tribal leaders are now debating development plans for Indian land along the edge of the reserve already disturbed by military construction: 45 holes of golf, shopping centers, a casino, residential developments on 75-year leases, even a freeway with electronic toll collection to the sprawling southern and western suburbs of Calgary, a city expected to hit one million in population by 2010.
On the spiritual side, tribal elders are planning to hold a land renewal ceremony this summer. Joe Big Plume, an 82-year-old retired professional pool player, said he plans a spiritual cleansing ceremony that will include traditional prayers, feasting and dances.
"We thought we did the army a favor, leasing our land to them, letting them train on it," Mr. Big Plume said. "We did not know they would abuse the land. You still can't just go and plow anyplace; you are going to hit a live bomb."
GRAPHIC: Photos: Tsuu T'ina Indians are clearing explosives from an old test site on their land. Heather Meguinis uses a metal detector as Garvin Otter digs. Joe Big Plume, below left, surveys the range with a nephew, Samuel Simon. (Photographs by Ian Jackson for The New York Times)
Map of Canada highlighting the Tsuu T'ina Indian Reservation in Alberta: Tsuu T'ina Indians are clearing out bombs, some of them still live.