Almost hidden in the organized clutter, it sits between the rump of a fake horse and a photo of a bunch of crazy skeleton bones. With a metal clasp between its nose and lip, the Manitou Stone, just one of its names, is actually disappointingly small. It’s certainly a nice rock, though — iron hurtled down from the sky on a day no living creature’s grandfather can recall. Today, you can walk right up to this space invader and trace your fingers on the its surface, and it does look like a wizened face from beyond, one of many interesting coincidences surrounding it.

The meteor is one of the prizes of our Royal Alberta Museum — a tad more genuine than the fake dinosaurs across the foyer, much as I love them. Fissured shallowly like a drowned brain, the Manitou isn’t as compellingly interactive as that fat rock in the natural history section with all those pores to poke, but it’s still quite a score.

The problem is, the Manitou Stone — or papâmihâw asiniy (the flying rock), as the Cree and Blackfoot know it — has been passed around so many times that its original symbolism as a drop-in deity has been entirely washed out. Like a lot of things in good museums, which you can ask the Rosetta Stone all about, it started out as stolen goods.

But let’s pause for a second and clear the air.

Now, as you may or may not believe, religion and science are generally incompatible when you get right down to it. Oh, sure, spiritual hipsters constantly try to lure in younger generations by adjusting their mythology to fit highly scrutinized facts. But let’s face it: that actually kind of screws with the entire idea of faith. So, in defence of the pious, the thing that bothers me about the wave of well-reasoned and very readable atheist authors topping the bestseller lists these days is that they don’t usually spend enough time scientifically investigating the positive effects of believing in something you can’t ever, ever prove. Magic, in other words.

Almost all of us certainly have our tiny superstitions: I lift my feet over railroad tracks, others hate Mondays. Still more of you do strange things with salt shakers if you knock them over. These little beliefs and rituals, though entirely pointless, are interesting social curios, and sometimes even calm our nerves or help us unconsciously focus. But another thing they do is connect us to a common culture, which isn’t always a bad thing, persecution of black cats aside. So, though unreal, magic is useful.

Which brings us back to papâmihâw asiniy, the Iron Creek meteor. Like a tooth, native Albertan Mecca was pulled. When it was originally yanked from its pilgrimage site, a combination of foresight and coincidence led elders to believe the shit was about to not just hit the fan, but wipe fans off the face of the plains.

As the museum’s description says, omitting by name George McDougall, our famous missionary, and its own symbolic part in the story: “In the spring of 1866, Methodist missionaries loaded the Manitou Stone onto a cart and took it to their mission at Victoria Settlement. Aboriginal spiritual leaders prophesized that war, plague and famine would follow. In 1886, warfare broke out between the Plains Cree and Blackfoot. Before it was over, more than 400 people had died. The following year, smallpox swept the countryside. It claimed over 3,500 lives. Hundreds more died of starvation that winter when the buffalo failed to come north. The terrible prophecy had been fulfilled.”

Well, things only got worse, and the symbolism of defeat began to play a major role we’re all aware of to this day. In its capsule description, the RAM leaves out the humiliating effects of the European invasion — waning-buffalo mass slaughter notwithstanding. By the time Big Bear signed Treaty 6 and, after the 1885 rebellion, served jail time for failing to control his wild youth, the Manitou Stone was well on its way to being ferried across the country. It went east to Toronto first, and after half a century, the Alberta government barked, and it was brought back here in 1973, “on loan.”

Of course, it wasn’t moving the stone that actually caused the natives’ troubles; it was the well-aimed gears of Sir John A.’s colonization. But that doesn’t mean papâmihâw asiniy shouldn’t be returned — right now — on a principle of, at the very least, “goodwill.” A convincing replica cast could easily fill in for it in Edmonton, and whatever eventually sprung up around it near Sedgewick, where it landed, would not only make small-town Alberta tourism more interesting, it’d also strengthen our communities in general.

Clamped on a pedestal here in our fine museum, the original really does nothing but keep a low heat on resentment. But return it home, and you’d honestly be able to feel at least a little magic and, barring that, actual joy.