On Friday March 27, 2026, Mount Royal University, along with “The Confluence” (a.k.a. Fort Calgary), will be engaged in “Ani to Pisi Human Spiderweb Enactment”. Not content to indoctrinate students on its campus, MRU is taking the “Enactment” show on the road.
Frances Widdowson has been following the “Human Spiderweb” idea at MRU since 2020. This was when the “Health, Community and Education Faculty” said that its “strategic plan 2019-24 is based on Ani to pisi – the spider web (Blackfoot)”. This would include having “Elder Roy Bear Chief…share his wisdom and perspective” in “creating a world that respects all”. It was Widdowson’s criticisms of such initiatives that stoked the ire of Gabrielle Lindstrom (who now goes by her maiden name Gabrielle Weasel Head), resulting in Lindstrom’s efforts to push Widdowson out of MRU (which was accomplished in December 2021).
Roy Bear Chief was also involved in the poisoning of Widdowson’s work environment. He participated in a discussion on an email list involving 15 professors and administrators, where one professor was arguing that tenure should not protect Widdowson at Mount Royal University (email from June 2021 released in arbitration, Exhibit U-177).
On August 1, 2020, Widdowson further raised the ire of her colleagues when she mocked the “spider web vibrations” idea when responding to the mobbing the was underway.
On June 4, 2021, President Tim Rahilly acknowledged “the heartbreaking discovery of 215 children buried in unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Residential School”. He urged people to “double down on the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” and “stop and think and focus on the tragedy and support those people in our communities who are most grieving”. To this day, this statement remains on the Mount Royal University website and there has been no retraction.
After Widdowson was fired, in 2022, Roy Bear Chief participated in a “knowledge transfer” ceremony that involved the Spiderweb.
In 2023, MRU started to really accelerate its use of the “Human Spiderweb”.
This resulted in the first “Enactment” in 2023.
In November 2023, MRU created a video on “ani to pisi: The Spiderweb”
In 2024, the Human Spiderweb Renactment was performed again.
In September 27, 2024, Widdowson interviewed Kathy Drake who told her about the extent to which the dogma of “The Spiderweb” was being imposed on students in the classroom.
The “longitude and latitude” aspect of “The Spiderweb” is discussed by Roy Bear Chief here.
In 2025, Frances Widdowson and Morrigan Johnson attended the Human Spiderweb Enactment at MRU
This was covered by the media.
In 2026, Morrigan Johnson interviewed Frances Widdowson about the “Human Spiderweb Enactment”. She argued that we “shouldn’t have anything that is contrary to reason” in universities and that the “Human Spiderweb Enactment” is infantilizing.
Widdowson also argues that the focus should be addressing aboriginal education deficits, rather than maintaining the poor educational levels by subjecting aboriginal people to the “teachings” of Roy Bear Chief.
