Roberta Joan Anderson spent her formative baby years right here in Alberta. So why should Saskatoon steal the props for raising our girl?

It's not as if Fort Macleod has nothing else going for it, after all, the town, located 165 kilometres south of Calgary, is home to the grand old Empress Theatre, it's the future site of the Alberta police college and it's generally one of the cutest gosh-darned towns this side of Didsbury. Still, why Fort Macleod's 3,000 townfolk let Saskatoon take cred for rearing its most famous daughter is a mystery to me.

Yup, 63 years ago Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta. Not, for the record, in Maidstone or North Battleford - the Saskatchewan towns she inhabited as a toddler - and certainly not in Saskatoon which she didn't move to until age nine. Sure, Joni bought her first guitar in the 'Toon but, as she told Billboard magazine in 1995, the first memory she can recall took place in Fort Mac: Dust bunnies floating in a stream of sunlight above her crib.

Mitchell has described her first home, an apartment located above a drugstore, as "humble," and the street she lived on (Main) as "derelict." But Fort Macleod is where her mom Myrtle "Mickey" Marguerite McKee, a teacher, and her dad, Bill Anderson, a grocer, got their start as a young couple. Had the Anderson family tried to make a go of it elsewhere in the early '40s - in, say, Regina where they were both from, or Medicine Hat where they got married - who knows what manner of uninspired early memories might have imprinted wee Joni? A legislative building in Wascana Park? A coulee outside of the 'Hat? Indeed, were her babyhood recollections not informed by the sunshine of Fort Macleod, Joni simply wouldn't be Joni. She'd be Joan for starters.

Still, despite Mayor Shawn Patience's claim that "if you ask anyone who our most famous resident was, they'd say Joni Mitchell," I've found no evidence of shrine, plaque or ice-cream flavor commemorating the woman in her birthtown. When I attempted to locate the house she was born in, Mayor Patience led me three miles north of town, where I spoke to a dairy farmer who agreed to help me discover if a young Mitchell had once inhabited his family's farmhouse. While the farmer was extremely keen, and questioned "old-timers" in the area on my behalf, he came back regretfully empty-handed and, at one point, interrupted my questions with a hesitant "And Joni Mitchel is?"

Likewise, the local realtor he later led me to with hopes she could help with land-rights research had no idea if Mitchell had lived in Fort Macleod proper or on the outskirts. In any case, she seemed more eager to pass me on to someone she knew in Saskatoon. At a local café, Java Spot, where the filiming of a scene from Brokeback Mountain is commemorated with posters on the walls, owner Victor Patel has done nothing in tribute to Joni because, he says, "She only lived here for a few years!" What's that to to do with anything? I think. I tell Patal that the movie star Fay Wray only lived in Cardston until she was two, and they've got a 10-foot billboard in her honour.

When I questioned the mayor about the above photo - featured in Voices, The Work of Joni Mitchell, produced by the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon - I began to wonder if perhaps it was me, not Fort Macleoders, who didn't understand the significance of Joni being a native. Mitchell, Patience patienly told me, took this portrait of herself and layered it over another image she'd taken on the side of a bookstore in town. The "Macleods" sign, it turns out, was actually made by none other than the mayor - the photo of the man on the ladder is his own self-portrait. "I know exactly when that sign was there," he says. "Joni would had to have taken that photo in the early '90s. Nobody even knew she'd come to town; there was no fanfare. That's how she wants it." He went on to sum up Mitchell's music and artwork as "simplicity and complexity, care and respect all in one. She sees the world from a unique point of view, she appreciates what many take for granted, she sees that light."

These traits, Patience says, are "shared by many in Fort Macleod - they're what make us unique. I suspect if Joni moved back she would find it just like putting on her favourite pair of slippers and wonder why she hadn't come back sooner."