 
Introduction
Astronomy has been part of Canadian life for hundreds if not thousands of years. Among the Ojibwa of northwestern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, some spiritual leaders had special knowledge of the stars and the planets that was used to guide the day-to-day affairs of their communities. Further west in Alberta, the Blackfoot left evidence of their probable use of stars and the Sun as signposts in the form of medicine wheels. These stone features, on an otherwise featureless prairie landscape, have spokes that appear to line up with particular stars or groups of stars. These spokes may have provided a means to direct aboriginal travellers.
Seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European navigators also had to rely upon the Sun, Moon and stars to find their way across the Atlantic to and within North America. With the aid of astronomical knowledge, they began to map the land and rivers to aid travel, note natural hazards on the travelled routes, promote land settlement and, ultimately, assert ownership over the land, a concept unfamiliar to the indigenous peoples of North America. Navigation, surveying and mapping relied critically on astronomy and continued to do so until recent years.
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