The Snow on the Sweetgrass

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Outside Magazine October 2002

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The Snow on the Sweetgrass
For newcomers—meaning most of us—they are merely picturesque. But for Native Americans, the sacred places of the Great Plains and Northern Rockies are alive with centuries of memory and meaning—and something much, much bigger.

By Bill Vaughn


	On the Blackfeet Reservation, in full regalia. (Keith Carter)

A BULLET IN THE MOUTH, and a bullet in each eye. Say what you will about the depravity of the act, the assassin's aim was true. Instead of merely obliterating the potent and spiritually charged humanoid etched into the cliff above us, the shooter had reduced it to a mere cartoon. This eerie four-foot being, framing its ancient face with outstretched hands, now resembled Casper the Ghost, or that lost soul in Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.

"They shouldn't have done that," the man beside me said, without heat. Paul Revere was a sixtyish Arapaho who happened to be visiting the remote petroglyphs of Dinwoody Canyon, in western Wyoming, the same shiny autumn day that I was. While I was just a common tourist, he was here with his priest, the Reverend Harold EagleBull, a Lakota in his fifties who served as pastor for Our Father's House, the Episcopal church down the road in the Wind River Reservation town of Ethete.

"What these figures represent is significant," EagleBull said. "To Western culture, to the missionaries, history is in the Bible. But for Native Americans our history is here, in nature. Nature is our Bible."



	Bear Lodge, controversially known as Devils Tower. (Keith Carter)

Luckily, most of the two dozen beings portrayed in this high panel of carvings had not been damaged by vandals. Created at least 1,000 years ago, and perhaps as long ago as 7,000 years, they were formed by artisans pecking into the weathered red veneer to reveal the pale sandstone underneath. Some archaeologists believe that those responsible for the petroglyphs may have been distant relatives of the Eastern Shoshone, who were forced by the U.S. government in 1877 to share the Wind River Reservation with the Northern Arapaho, much more recent arrivals to the region. Before the Plains tribes were shattered by the Indian Wars—which ended in 1890 with the U.S. Army's massacre of a band of Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota—hunter-gatherer clans had set up summer camps in these canyons.

"I can imagine the people here," Revere said. "I can hear the drums."

"Do you think these pictures are self-portraits?" I asked.

"No. My grandfather told me they used to see these silver things flying in this area. Ones with wings on them. They used to see them out here a long, long time ago."

My hair felt like it was full of static electricity.

"You mean UFOs?"

Revere nodded. "They shined. They were spacemen. My grandpa's grandfather told him, and he got it from his grandpa. They were here before the people. I think the people worshiped them, praised them, because they could fly."

After Revere and EagleBull drove off in their pickup, I climbed the high mound of boulders and rubble at the base of the cliffs. I couldn't get next to the wall because tribal authorities had erected a steel fence around it, useless against bullets but a deterrent to less lethal forms of desecration, such as graffiti.

While making a closer study of these portraits I noticed a humming, or a vibration, a sensation registering somewhere between the aural and the tactile, like the chatter of locusts. I felt light-headed. Dehydration, I figured.

I sat down on a cube of rock and dabbed at the sweat on my face. As I waited to see what might happen next, the sound stopped. Then it started again. Suddenly, this place had my full attention.

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