The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

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The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)


	A totem of the Sweet Grass Hiils. (Keith Carter)

CATHOLICS HAVE CHARTRES, Jews have the Wailing Wall, Buddhists have Bodh Gaya, and Muslims have Mecca. The Native Americans have their own sacred places as well, largely unknown to the rest of the world, spoken about on the reservations in hushed tones. Most of these holy sites are features of the landscape—Wyoming's Devils Tower, the mountains of Montana's Glacier National Park, the Black Hills in South Dakota, Rainbow Bridge in Utah, Mount Graham in Arizona, plus hundreds of rivers, waterfalls, peaks, trees, caves, and stones from one side of the continent to the other.

Like most old religions, the faiths of the 35 tribes and bands of the northern Plains revolve around communion with that mysterious, omniscient energy, without beginning or end, that is believed to have shaped the universe, and continues to rule it. Just as in Christianity, thanksgiving, sacrifice, offerings, and petition to this single power are at the core of Native American devotional rituals. But because traditional Indians believe that the Creator and lesser spirits are always present—like water in the world of a fish—faith isn't about some guy in the sky or hedging your bets. Prayer and the quest for accord with these forces are regarded as critical, as natural to moment-to-moment living as taking your next breath.



	An offering at the medicine wheel. (Keith Carter)

In Shoshone cosmology, for example, there are air people such as birds, earth people such as bears, and underground people like the badger, an important player in the lower world. Travel between the realms is a central part of the religious experience, sought in vision quests at places that have proven over the centuries to be rich with energy and that connect the faithful to spirits that are sources of knowledge and strength.

But understanding the forms of Indian spirituality is not the same as feeling it—something a white cynic reared in a European culture still alien to the sacred landscapes of this country can probably never experience. As Narcisse Blood, a spiritual leader of the Kainai tribe in Alberta, Canada, the northern band of the Blackfeet Confederacy, told me and a group of others last winter in Missoula, Montana, a true understanding of Blackfeet religious practice is possible only when carried out by Blackfeet people thinking and speaking in the tribe's "sinewy, complex, and subtle" language. "Still, I have a lot to learn," Blood said. "I'm going to go to my grave not knowing everything."

Like a lot of people, I was thinking about exactly this—death and religion—on September 12 last year. I was sitting in a church, a rare event that was coincidental with what had just happened. But this humble chapel, St. Peter's, is important to me. Barely a thousand square feet, with a simple pine altar and whitewashed walls of rough-squared logs, it was built in 1878 by Jesuit missionaries with the aid of Thomas Moran, one of Montana Territory's first Catholics and my great-grandfather. It sits in a high pasture on a cattle ranch 20 miles from the Missouri River town of Cascade, under a ring of stone-topped buttes carved into antic shapes by the elements. My grandfather was born here, and so was my mother. Although St. Peter's is 70 miles from the Blackfeet Reservation, it was built at the heart of their traditional homeland. In some ways it's a symbol of the tribe's loss. And for better or worse it represents my family's long association with Indians.

After a while, the lifeless air that infests most churches finally drove me out. I walked up Boot Hill to the cemetery and wandered among the gravestones. I was trying to imagine my mother as a child playing on these grassy slopes, but couldn't get out of my head a picture of those Blackfeet boys and girls snatched by Jesuits and Ursuline nuns from their broken clans in order to bleach the paganism from their blighted souls, confused children put up in the two boarding schools whose ruins litter this abandoned place.

I've always lived around Indians, and grew up across the creek from a Blackfeet family. But it occurred to me, standing in that graveyard, that I was no better educated than many of those urban sightseers who will mark the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's journey by packing the kids into the Winnebago and heading off into Indian country to trace their route. So I decided to look at this land with fresh eyes, to try to appreciate it for new reasons. It wasn't as if I had been looking for God in all the wrong places, because I wasn't looking for him at all. I wanted to see if a skeptic like me could extract something of the mystery and wonder tied up in the places that Indians hold sacred. And I wanted for once in my life to experience that aboriginal perception of time that's measured by the eating of a meal or the hike from one spot to another, time sensed as a procession of seasons endlessly repeated across an eternal landscape. I yearned to escape the unrelenting ticktock of America.

I changed the oil in my ageless Bronco, loaded a cooler, and drew a route across a map of the northern Plains, starting from my place in western Montana, floodplain that was once Salish land. Just before I headed forth I tied a fragrant braid of sweetgrass to my rearview mirror.

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