Where Spirits Talk, Blackfeet Listen

Thunder lives up there in those mountains. Wind-Maker, too, and Cold-Maker and Snow-Shrinker.

Spirits talk to people up there, and sing.

For the Blackfeet who follow the traditional ways, the mountains of the Badger-Two Medicine have been their refuge since the U.S. Indian Service made the old ways a crime in the 1880s.

The Blackfeet kept their ways secret then, and much remains secret now.

They go there still on vision quests, to fast, sometimes to build sweat lodges, sometimes to build a Medicine Lodge. The special red clay they need for paint for the Sun Dance is there--the Creator specified it--and the special sticks they use to prepare the paint.

Many of the plants there provide medicine or food. The rivers and streams bring life from the mountains.

Most of their rituals are solitary, but the most sacred of all, the four-day gathering for a Medicine Lodge, can draw from a handful of people to a thousand. The lodge is erected on the final day, when the Sun Dance is performed, and the center pole, always forked at the top, will remain forever.

Believers bring offerings, pleas for help, to hang on the center pole long after the ceremony.

Another person usually escorts the searcher on a vision quest until he finds the place he needs, and returns to bring him out of the mountains. The searcher may fast, may build a dream bed, but may simply meditate in solitude. He awaits guidance, which comes in no set time or predictable form.

Men, but not women, may build a sweat lodge to purify the body and enhance meditation. A sweat lodge, essentially a small sauna, is always built close to a stream or pond or lake, for quick washing and cooling.

A dream bed is little more than a shallow depression with a horseshoe-shaped enclosure of rocks to shelter the head, open to the east. Archeologists have found remains that may be hundreds of years old.

Mountains are an important aspect of the old ways. Historian Percy Bullchild, himself a Blackfeet, wrote that the Creator took Mudman, the first man, to the highest peak to teach him how to pray.

“A Native climbs the high place to get nearer to our Creator Sun and still be standing on Mother Earth, so the prayers could be heard more distinctly by the two Creators,” Bullchild said. “It took them both to create men--the mud clay from Mother Earth and the breath from Creator Sun.”

Sometimes the encounters with the spirits are not planned. Joe Wild Gun, a baptized Christian who did not follow the old ways, received a gift on a hunting trip when he was a boy. He told researchers about it 1992, when he was 72.

It was a warm day, and Wild Gun fell asleep.

“That’s when I heard this old guy singing,” Wild Gun recalled. “It’s right under where my head was, under the rocks. He was singing, and I was just listenin’ to him.”

The ‘old guy’ told Wild Gun where he would find two deer, and they were there. When Wild Gun shot one, the other did not run, and he shot it too.

“And that song, I, you know, gee, it’s a pretty song. This old guy was singing. He said, ‘I give you this song.’ ”