I sometimes wonder how my ancestors had such a strong memory. The landscape — a map of stars, prairiescapes, and mountain oases. The plants — for hundreds of medicines, food, ceremonies, and the making of beautiful objects. The deities — Sun, Moon, Morning Star, Scarface, and dozens of others. Not to mention the stories. Stories that shaped our world and taught us who we are. Where bison come from. Why we have tobacco. How orphan boys became Pleiades.
Then we started telling new stories. The Baker Massacre, 1870. Women and children targeted, even though we had a peace treaty with the U.S. Starvation winter, 1883. Nearly a quarter of us died. World War II. My great-grandma’s brother a prisoner of war; my family doing a sun dance for his safe return. June 8, 1964. A devastating flood, destroying hundreds of homes and killing dozens. I was born on June 8, thirty years later, but some elders called me a “flood baby.” The date embossed on their minds.
My family bears the marks of these acts of violence and survivance.
Storytelling is a major part of Indigenous cultures and has been a major part of my life. I come from a family of storytellers. In my early childhood, when my family visited the reservation from our college town a few hours south, we had a routine: On Friday we’d drive north, Saturday we’d spend with my grandma or going for drives in the country, and Sunday we’d “make the rounds” and visit family members and friends in their cozy homes before heading back over the mountains.
My great aunt Theresa, one of my grandma’s older sisters, was a great storyteller. She lived in a small house on the reservation. It had a big front room, with the kitchen on the far left wall. There was often an open bookshelf filled with nicknacks — of pigs, in particular — sometimes set as a wall between the living room and the kitchen. A wood stove sat on the right by the door. A police scanner crackled in the other room as she spoke. She’d tell us stories of family members, what her kids and grandkids were up to; rumors and gossip from the reservation — she especially liked stories of alien sightings; and stories from her childhood.
How will I continue my family's tradition of storytelling?
The colonial English government, and later, the colonial U.S. government, wanted Indigenous peoples and nations to cease to exist so they could have easy access to our land and resources. When this wasn’t possible, they wanted us to forget who we were. Many colonial policies were directly aimed at destroying and criminalizing Indigenous knowledge and memory.
A key example is residential schools. Residential schools emerged in the U.S. in the early 1800s and there were soon over 500 schools for Native children across the U.S. and several hundred more in Canada. Children were frequently sent to schools far from home and integrated with children from other tribes, so they didn’t have languages or cultures in common. My grandma, for example, went to Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon – more than 750 miles from her home in northern Montana. Children at these schools were frequently victims of unimaginable physical and sexual abuse, lye poisoning from having soap forced in their mouths, outbreaks of communicable diseases, and even scientific experimentation like starvation studies. Removing children from their families, communities, and nations was a way to separate them from their languages, cultures, religions, and community knowledge. It was an attempt for us to forget who we were and assimilate as a subservient Christian working class. In 1990, the Native American Languages Act was passed after decades of advocacy from tribes, which sought to not only legalize but promote Indigenous language use in schools. The use of Native languages in schools had been illegal for over 100 years — since 1887.
In the same decade that Native language use became illegal, the U.S. Department of the Interior created the Indian Religious Crimes Code, banning practice of Native religions. Perhaps the most violent moment of suppression of Native religions was the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, in which hundreds of Lakota were shot and killed by the U.S. military in an attempt to suppress the Ghost Dance, a religious movement that swept the American West in the late 1800s with the goal of bringing about environmental renewal. For the U.S. government, it was viewed as a massive failure of assimilation. Secretary of the Interior Collier reversed the Indian Religious Crimes Code in 1934, but there still remained major restrictions on Native religious practice. It wasn’t until 1978 with the passage of the Native American Religious Freedom Act that all restrictions were lifted (though barriers still remain — particularly in accessing sacred sites and religious practice in prisons).
While this violence reverberates in my family, so does our ancestral knowledge. Remembering is a form of resistance.
Even when tribal religions were illegal, Natives continued to practice. Many of my grandma's stories of her dad are of his dutiful religious practice. He was raised by Aims Back and Hollering in the Air, renowned religious leaders. My grandma has told me stories about her dads daily prayers at sunrise and sunset. His dad, Aims Back, taught him Blackfeet religious songs so that he could accompany him to any ceremony and serve as a singer. My grandma's mom — my great-grandmother Annie, who passed away when I was in high school — frequently served as an assistant at religious ceremonies for her mother-in-law Hollering in the Air. Blackfeet religion remained part of their every day lives, despite the governments attempts at assimilation and criminalization.
My great-grandmother also had profound ecological knowledge that federal policies sought to eliminate. The Blackfeet historically used over 200 plants for medicine, food, and material culture, a knowledge maintained by women and passed down from generation to generation. Even when my mom was a kid in the 1970s, the family would constantly gather plants. There were places they would regularly go to to gather (many of which we continue to use), but her grandparents would also just gather wherever they happened to be. This summer, my sister, mom and I stopped at what seemed to be a random rest area in rural Montana, and my mom told us her grandparents stopped here to gather. Whenever they saw a riverbed, lush with plants on the plains, they would stop to pick. My great-grandma used plant medicine on a daily basis until she passed away in her mid 90s.
My family continues to use plant medicine, but less than our grandparents. Alum root, blue root, huckleberry leaves, arnica, mint. Multiple times per year, my family gathers and processes plants. Gathering plants is not just about family stories; it keeps our cultures and nations alive. My family’s memories, and the memories of other Indigenous families, have not naturally faded because of time — they were robbed from us. Were made illegal. Were beaten out of us by nuns. What were once everyday practices in Indigenous communities are now, too often, stories elders tell around the kitchen table.
Memory is an active practice. Remembering is a form of resistance.
I was taught that though the Blackfeet language has tenses like English, when someone tells a story in the language, they don’t speak in the past tense: they experience the story as they tell it. Our stories continue to happen, over and over and over again. They are not in the past, or the future, but now. Remembering is a form of resistance.
About the title: I was taught that we needed to wait for the first snow to tell Blackfeet stories. In Montana, this often occurred in the fall. Reserving storytelling for winter is common in other tribal communities as well.