Our most recent feature highlights a grounded conversation between me, Lindsey, the OCC staff who has the great pleasure of writing these features, and Keith Diakiw, a Métis business owner who is involved in a variety of OCC initiatives. Our conversation explores Keith’s winding path to being a tourism owner-operator, how he centres his outdoor tours in an intersection of both western and Indigenous knowledge, and the importance of outdoor tourism remaining centered around people and their relationship to Mother Earth.
This is a feel-good read. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed chatting with Keith.
Keith Diakiw and Talking Rock Tours
I first met Keith when we hosted a consultation for Project Elevation, where he joined from Edmonton, Alberta. Keith added a lot of industry level expertise alongside a steady encouragement to ensure our work at the OCC had strong rooted relationships with the people we engage with.
Keith Diakiw is a warm, energetic storyteller who instantly makes you feel grounded in a conversation. He has a great knack of slowing things down, and bringing sensory images to the fore-front, even just on a phone call.
Keith is originally from Saskatchewan, but grew up in Hinton, Alberta, in the shadow of the Rockies. His path into guiding started not as a career move but as a series of joyful, almost compulsive acts of sharing. From planning Death Valley reading week trips for the University of Lethbridge Geography Club and then later bringing international students to Jasper for Thanksgiving weekends while attending the University of Alberta, watching their eyes go extra wide when they woke up surrounded by mountains, they hadn’t been able to see in the dark the night before was extra special.
Keith holds a Bachelor of Science with a specialization in Geology and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology/Archaeology. Through both degrees, he organized and facilitated outdoor field trips, centering a strong connection to nature through his studies. When asked why the outdoors are so critical for education, Keith told me:
“Well, when you think of an outdoor environment, it’s not just a classroom without four walls. It’s a place for transformation. To just be in the moment, enjoy each other’s company, and just take it all in, right? Create some vitamin D by being in the sunshine, hearing the birds sing, and feeling the wind on your face. There’s no greater feeling when you take people on these transformative experiences and everyone is fully, completely in the moment with each other.”
After his degrees, Keith found himself in a similar spot as so many others: with no clear path to working in the outdoor industry. He had the degrees and needed to find a serious full-time job and the ability to provide for himself and his family.
“When I was doing those field trips, both my first year as a participant, and then the following years planning and executing trips to Death Valley and Jasper, I was just having so much fun – having the enjoyment of bringing joy to other people. But I just didn’t see it as a career at that time.”
Like we’ve highlighted before, the career paths in the outdoor sector are lacking, resulting in the loss of highly educated and deeply connected people like Keith. In his case, Keith worked as a geologist in the mining, oil and gas, and oil sands industry sectors for many years, but eventually, found himself searching for more. This search brought him back to the outdoor community.
Talking Rock Tours has been successful from Keith’s weaving of earth science, his Indigenous cultural lens, and his enjoyment of sharing transformative experiences with others. He created his business plan during the summer of 2017, led his first tour to Elk Island National Park in May 2018, and has fully embraced his title as the “Rock Talker”. He credits both the name of his business and the inspiration to pursue it to a good friend who encouraged him along the way during the start up phase.
“It all comes back down to that ecosystem’s approach of seeing our worlds and our relationships with each other just like in nature. No one part of nature is functioning alone or independently. We love to say when we become an adult that ‘I’m so independent,’ but really, we’re in an ecosystem. We rely on each other. We support each other. We benefit from being around each other.”
Keith holds many intersections together with his Métis identity, advocating for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis cousins, and his ongoing commitment to Indigenous tourism by learning and sharing more knowledge every year with the public. Every discovery tour begins with an opening circle where a talking rock or talking stick is past around, so that strangers can arrive as equals before they walk anywhere together and end as friends. He incorporates a tobacco offering and smudging if time permits where appropriate during his discovery tours. He adjusts every geo-experience to the people in front of him. He’s also paving the way for future outdoor professionals to see themselves as business owners, knowledge sharers, and outdoor leaders.
Almost 10 years later in 2026, Keith’s still a proud Indigenous business owner. He’s on an advisory committee for the OCC, helping us advance efforts to establish better career paths for the future generation of outdoor enthusiasts.
It takes a person
Regarding the state of outdoor tourism, I asked Keith how we can ensure to steward and protect the richness of real, authentic outdoor experiences. One thing Keith said stayed with me:
“A corporation can’t replicate what a local, knowledgeable, Indigenous guide brings to their experience. You can’t clone it. You can’t standardize it without losing the personal stories and knowledge that makes it truly meaningful and memorable.”
Tourism, like resource extraction, can become extractive: people moving through landscapes for a quick selfie, a check off their bucket list for seeing that natural wonder or animal, no deeper connection made. What Keith is doing is the opposite. He’s building deeply rooted relationships with the land by reintroducing people to Mother Earth, between strangers, between cultures. That’s what reconciliation looks like on the ground, in practice, on a Tuesday afternoon in Edmonton’s river valley or Elk Island National Park.
First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples across Turtle Island have stewarded and shared these landscapes for countless generations, enabling continued access to profound natural spaces in every corner of Canada. Keith carries that forward, not as a performance, but as a way of being with deep gratitude to the land, all our relations, and each other.
On the summer solstice
As we mark the 30th anniversary of National Indigenous Peoples Day this June 21st, we at the OCC are grateful for guides like Keith who remind us that going outside is a relationship of stewardship. And like all relationships, it’s sustained by people who show up, slow down, and share and do what they know and what needs to be done for the betterment of future generations.
If you’re in Edmonton and want to feel what that looks like in practice, I hope you can spend some quality time with Keith on a Talking Rock Tours’ discovery tour: https://www.talkingrocktours.com/
