The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

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The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)


	Chief Mountain, early handiwork of Napi, the Creator. (Keith Carter)

ON I DROVE, through the Cheyenne and Crow reservations in southeastern Montana, past houses clustered around sweat lodges—not the traditional low lodges framed with bent saplings, but plywood structures you could stand up in, sort of the reservation equivalent of the backyard swimming pool. I stopped for gas on the Cheyenne Reservation and fell in love with a skinny Indian girl working the cash register, who looked at me as if she were looking at mud. On the Crow Reservation I stopped at the Custer battlefield to check out the colonel's headstone. While standing there I remembered the old joke they like to tell on the reservations: What were Custer's last words? Jesus Christ, look at all the fucking Indians!

By the next day I was deep inside the Blackfeet country of central Montana, where bands of Paleo-Indians lived among herds of bison that turned the savannas black with their numbers.

At Ulm Pishkun State Park, where the plains rise to meet the Rockies, native hunters would drive the animals to their death over sandstone cliffs carved by the Missouri River. I tried to picture the high drama of a day that ended well, the joy and thanksgiving that would follow, the drumming and singing, good fortune celebrated with raucous sex and heartfelt prayers that could come only from a culture in which daily life and the life of the spirit are bound together seamlessly.

I headed north to Browning, Montana, the blustery tribal seat of the Blackfeet Reservation. School had just let out and the joint was jumping with shrieking kids, high schoolers gunning their engines, younger ones loping their horses bareback down the sidewalks and into the streets. There were herds of riders and clattering horses surrounded by packs of yelping dogs, the through-town traffic stalled while the village children took control. I stopped a boy with a mop of black hair who was riding a sorrel mare and dragging a scruffy colt on a halter.

"You ride around like this every day?" I asked him.

"No, faster. She's got a stone bruise," he yelled, speeding off.

I got into a long line at one of the two big quick stops in town, the only white face in sight, and ate a personal pan pizza in the park outside the tribal offices while two guys in full Fancy Dance regalia practiced their moves for some upcoming ceremony, the bells on their outfits clanging.

I had decided that my last stops on this trip would be Chief Mountain in nearby Glacier National Park and the Sweet Grass Hills 100 miles to the east, special places to the Blackfeet in part because they were the first things made by Napi, the Creator. I made a stop at the Museum of the Plains Indian and handed over $4 for another braid of sweetgrass to get me through this last leg of the journey.

Every sightline at the far end of Glacier is dominated by the 9,000-foot fortress that in the Blackfeet language is called Minnow Stahkoo, an isolated, eroded monolith made from the remnants of massive stone plates. As I drove around the quarter-circle of highway that rings Chief Mountain, I tried to make out the image on its face of a woman holding a child in her arms, the grief-crazed widow in the old story who threw the child and then herself from the peak after her war-chief husband was killed in battle. His body was brought here, and the family was buried in the rocks at the base of the mountain, which towers like a tombstone over their graves. I passed a wind-warped pine whose trunk was tied with orange and red prayer cloths. I backed up to a turnout on the two-lane for a better look. There were other trees as well, festooned with strips of white, blue, and yellow. Indians come here for vision quests and prayers; it is said there are secret paths to the summit.

"These places have always demonstrated power to us," says Curly Bear Wagner, a 57-year-old Blackfeet elder and cultural adviser who lives on the Blackfeet Reservation. "We still use them today because our culture is very much alive. Everybody knows that the power lives up on top of Chief Mountain, and these spirits always want to be honored."

After walking three miles into the woods along the Lee Ridge Trail, eager to get as close to Chief Mountain as possible, I realized I was in the middle of grizzly country, without pepper spray and without a tree I could climb fast enough to save myself from becoming the other white meat. I decided I was as close to this holy peak as I needed to be. Although Narcisse Blood and others believe that bears never attack Indians, a fat lot of good that was going to do me. I turned around and retreated to the truck.

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