The emerald of a Montana spring
magicked across the land
This week I traveled to Blackfeet country for a few days to learn how my work with Indigenous languages can assist in the efforts the schools are making to integrate more Blackfoot language1 into their classrooms. After nearly 30 years in Montana and knowing countless Blackfeet people, this was my first time visiting their land and community. I spent several hours in a professional development for Blackfoot language teachers in the public schools and in the process learned some Blackfoot myself! It makes me intensely happy to learn new languages, even just bits and pieces. Every nuance of linguistics fascinates me, like when we learn about infixes that change parts of speech or the difference between color words for animate and inanimate objects. I nerd all the way out with it. I also had the chance to see a swath of the reservation.
The land there, lodged between the spires of what is now Glacier National Park and the infinity of the Great Plains, is astonishingly beautiful. From the Backbone2 to the Rocky Mountain Front, the sheer topography lends to road meanderings and pleasant, at times surprising, land formations. I was researching “Rocky Mountain Front” to be sure I wouldn’t confuse anyone with that term, since there is an actual Front Range in Colorado, and I found this very helpful aerial photo of the Lewis Overthrust, about 90 miles southish of the central Blackfeet community. Just look at those angled upthrusts of rock, so clearly layered on top of each other!
My East Glacier motel nestled among tall pines with yellow rumped warblers and ruby-crowned kinglets kicking up a ruckus at all times. One night after dinner I rolled west to what I knew lay at the end of the road: Two Medicine Lake. I have kayaked on this lake, and I also know it as the location of the broken moose curse. I thought I’d catch it at sunset, but of course the towering peaks blot the sun much sooner than at other locales. Instead, I slid in at dusk, a cool moment of muted hues and absolute stillness.3
One evening, my host Lea took me on a lengthy tour of the reservation, stopping for photos of important locations. The road swooped along rivers and creeks, and beside a cutbank on the wide “Two Med,” as she taught me to call it. We crossed Badger Creek and stopped at Ghost Ridge. We eyed the buffalo jumps and rubble pile that once served as the boys’ Catholic dormitory near the church. We turned inward toward Heart Butte, which touched me because I have known so many people from HB and I finally had the opportunity to see their community. Blackfeet are horse people and ponies dotted the plains everywhere, even appearing in metalworks at the tops of flagpoles and on the murals at Heart Butte.
All along the drive home, rolling prairies swept gracefully into points and ledges laced with rocky edging. They dipped into swales filled with tall, lush grasses. At times a shiny ribbon of bright water wound through a draw. Everywhere, the emerald of a Montana spring magicked across the land in thick green blankets. These greens vary in hue across the prairie, too: blue-greens patch through washes of Irish green, and at times the deep green of a burgeoning crop kept me company as I dipped and soared along the two-lane. These expanses were livened by a splash of color from blue flax, pink sainfoin and yellow wildflowers along the ditches.4
Finally, south of the cutoff to Wolf Creek I begin to re-enter the woodland that characterizes my side of the state. Scrubby trees pop up in fields, the rocks become outcrops and then cliffs, and suddenly pine forest closes behind me. I cross the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass and I feel I am nearly home.
As happens after a visit to a place in Montana that’s new to me, I begin to consider the lives of those whose home isn’t a protected valley with clear rushing mountain waters, as is mine. They live out on the high plains, in the winter wind and blowing snows, alongside spring expanses of jewel-colored rolling prairie. In late summer they’ll witness deadened grasses and, later, the shocking gold of cottonwoods turning in the river bottoms. Summers, they’ll savor a wide thunderstorm and watch the weather sweep across the plains, as far as the eye can see.
In the US, the people are Blackfeet. The language is Blackfoot.
Rocky Mountains
unless you count the mosquitoes, which swarmed big as pterodactyls and prevented a longer visit
Here’s a tell that I’m not originally a Montanan: they’d use ‘barrow pit’ here, sometimes also spelled ‘borrow’ pit.
Nice story. Thanks for informing me on the correct word for the language of the Blackfeet people. I've mostly seen or heard it as Blackfeet.
Literally one of my favorite areas in the world, much less Montana. It’s great you got a guided tour!
Do you get to learn the languages you work with? Having worked as a copy editor in textbook publishing for so long, I find this work you’re doing endlessly interesting.