Rayjay Strikeswithagun has been found safe.
The 25-year-old from Siksika Nation hadn’t been seen since Oct. 28. On Monday, Gleichen RCMP asked the public for help, saying he has a medical condition and they were worried about him. On Wednesday, police said he’d been located safely.
“Thank you for helping by sharing the message,” Alberta RCMP wrote on X.
A lot of people had shared it. Not all of them for the reason police intended.
The missing person post
Gleichen RCMP issued the appeal on Monday, Nov. 2. Rayjay Strikeswithagun was last seen on Siksika Nation, about 100 km east of Calgary, on Oct. 28.
Police described him as 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a black hooded sweater, blue jeans and Nike runners. Police said he has a medical condition and asked anyone who’d seen him to call the detachment or Crime Stoppers.
It was a standard missing person notice, the kind Alberta RCMP posts several times a week. Most get a few hundred shares and disappear once the person turns up.
Then it went everywhere
This one drew thousands of replies and reactions from well outside Alberta, most of them about his surname.
Some people asked if the account was a parody. Some made jokes. And a lot of others pushed back, pointing out that Strikes With A Gun is a real Blackfoot name with real history, and that a missing man with a medical condition isn’t a punchline.
By the time the “found safe” update went out, the replies had turned into a running argument about Indigenous names, who gets to find them funny, and why so many Canadians had never seen one.
Where the name comes from
Siksika Nation is one of the four nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, with the Kainai, the Piikani and the Amskapi Piikuni in Montana. Blackfoot names traditionally weren’t inherited the way English surnames are. They were given, and often earned, and they described something: a deed, an event, a quality, a vision.
Look at the names that signed Treaty 7 at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, a few kilometres from where Rayjay Strikeswithagun was last seen. Crowfoot. Old Sun. Running Rabbit, who was called “young chief” as a teenager because of his success as a warrior. Many Swans. Duck Chief.
When the federal government started keeping treaty pay lists and registering families, those names were written down in English and frozen in place as surnames. That’s why Siksika, Kainai and Piikani communities today are full of names like Running Rabbit, Many Guns, Yellow Old Woman, Weasel Head, Crowchief, Bear Chief and Strikes With A Gun. Some families kept the spaces. Some, like Rayjay’s, ran the words together.
The name isn’t rare in Blackfoot country. Gayle Strikes-With-A-Gun, raised on Piikani Nation, was elected the nation’s first female chief in 2011 after 25 years as a teacher, principal and superintendent. There’s no known family connection to Rayjay. The point is the name was on a chief’s door long before this week.
Found safe
RCMP confirmed Wednesday, Nov. 4, that he’d been located. Police haven’t said where he was found or anything about the circumstances, and they don’t need to.
RCMP posts have gone viral before for reasons that had nothing to do with the search. Last year a man featured in Alberta RCMP’s Wanted Wednesday replied to his own post.
Read more: Alberta Man Wanted by RCMP Replies to His Own Wanted Wednesday Post on Facebook
This one’s different. The man at the centre of it didn’t do anything except go missing. The attention landed on his name, not his actions.
For anyone who learned this week that Strikes With A Gun is a real name: it is, it’s older than Alberta, and the people who carry it are still here.
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