Summer once felt like a languid stretch of blurred days, sharp at the edges but with a soft, sweet center like Italian ices left to melt on a sunny patio. When I was a full-time teacher, I needed those ten weeks to recompose myself. Now, I look forward to this season as one thrilling occasion after another, road trips for work, cultural events, visits to friends and family, and the endless pull of the garden and hiking trails.
The summer travel kicked off last month with a few days in Browning to attend a language instruction training. Spending time there, talking and listening and laughing with Blackfeet teachers is a seasonal highlight. Plus, my favorite motel enclave in East Glacier provides easy access to Two Medicine where toothy mountains poke out of a watery horizon and moose wade about looking for plants. This visit, I spotted a moose mama with nursing twins at the water’s edge. Too far for a good photo, but thrilling through the binoculars.
This week I embark on a lengthy Montana road trip for work. Much like the epic 2023 loop with my sister, I’ll be visiting multiple reservations with Fort Peck at the apex of the mileage. In fact I’m staying two nights in Culbertson, which is about as far from Missoula as you can drive without leaving the state.1 Culbertson is basically West Dakota.
In an attempt to cut the drive into two segments, I’ll stay a night at the American Prairie cabins I’ve come to adore. I first stayed in one four years ago to the day, and experienced a thunderstorm like no other I’ve ever witnessed. I’m hoping for more of the same, even if they terrify me. Plus, burrowing owls live there.
I’ll head northeast to Poplar and spend a few days with my language partners there. We’re recording and discussing how to complete and improve what we’ve started for language resources. Did you know that non-Indian families who adopt Native kids are required to provide cultural education appropriate to the child’s background? Online resources are crucial for those children to sustain a connection to their heritage culture.
Midweek I’ll drive straight west on the HiLine and stop in Fort Belknap to chat with my language partners there. Since last fall I’ve been creating practice exercises for the language department’s Facebook live classes in Nakoda language and I like to check in with them whenever I’m in the neighborhood.
The next two nights it’s the Havre Guest Ranch (room 216 of the Best Western on the Hill) while I work with one of my language partners at Rocky Boy to improve our Cree class. This was the first full-length language course I developed, and it’s wonderful in so many ways, but could be improved with some attention to grammatical features and more conversation. So that’s our task.
Over the next few weeks, other cultural events like Crow Fair and IndigiPalooza as well as a trip to visit my mom stack my calendar. I won’t slow down again until mid-fall, when the air cools and snowflakes prickle the skin and melt on my windshield. Only then will it be time to hunker down and hibernate.
Those summers of waking as late as my kids and dogs will allow, moving like water from house to deck to nap and back in a long daze of heat and the whirring of grasshoppers in the yard shimmer like memories from a past life.
I suppose I could drive to Plentywood. That would be farther.
This is lovely! Thank you for sharing ❤️
Language is the power to connect people and to share the stories which define who we are. Always, so beautiful.