I had been sitting in a coffee shop in Reykjavik, Iceland, cycling through my photographs of the aurora borealis from the night before in Njardvik, when a man at the next table struck up a conversation. Recognizing his familial ties to the location in my photographs, he began to share stories that his grandfather told him as a child regarding the often-seen, but still mysterious, northern lights. The story I was told that day, and stories shared with me while visiting northern and remote Indigenous communities in Canada, inspired me to write this paper.