For the westward traveler in northern Montana, the great plains seem to stretch out forever.

Until the Rockies suddenly jet up into the sky.

Blackfeet live in both places and they're going back to their ancient roots, reviving their bison herds... To be amongst the buffalo here, there is like a spiritual uplifting... And their ties with the land that go back for millennia.

Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

In northern Montana, the great plains meet the Rockies.

It's the home of Glacier National Park, it's also been the home of the Blackfeet people for at least a thousand years.

In this part of the country, Canada is never far away.

The Blackfeet are an international people.

The park is also international.

Glacier National Park shares a border with the Canadian counterpart, Waterton-Glacier National Park.

Glacier National Park is at the heart of what we call the crown continent, that region of the Rocky Mountain range in southern Canada and the northern U.S., that represents the headwaters of much of what goes on in this part of the continent.

We have rivers here that begin in Glacier that go to Hudson Bay, some of our rivers will go to the Gulf of Mexico, and others will go to the Pacific Ocean.

So, you know, we are the water towers for much of the continent.

It's a million acres in size.

We have over 700 miles of hiking trails in the park, you know, we have intact populations of many of the large carnivores, many of the large ungulates.

We didn't have to introduce wolves, or, our, our grizzly bear population aren't really endangered here.

So we do sorta represent, you know, some of the most intact ecosystems in, in, in the United States, in the lower 48.

Glacier was really named for the landscape that was created by those ice age glaciers that we had here 15,000 years ago, and so really even though those remnants of those glaciers may be gone by 2030, the reality is that the evidence that they were here, the landscape that they carved, the scenery is still going to be here.

The Blackfeet people have been living inside and outside the boundaries of Glacier National Park for a long time.

Archaeologist Maria Neves Zedeño has been studying their history for nearly two decades.

...that is across the river from town.

The Blackfoot were bison hunting specialists.

Now that does not mean that they did not hunt other animals opportunistically.

Cause we're looking down here at an elk habitat, there would be more elk.

Right, there's elk habitat here, but back in the day, in the dog days, which is before the arrival of the horse, in the dog days, elk was a plains animal, it was not a mountain animal.

Elk and bison actually shared the same ecosystem, the same environment.

They sought the sheltered wooded areas of this particular area.

Right along the rocky mountain front, that was the bison's wintering area.

In the dog days, it was much more difficult for hunters on foot to actually go far into the prairie.

Therefore, this was the area where they would hunt, and sometimes dry meat for the rest of the winter, the early spring, and to carry them into the early summer sometimes.

And as the early summer came, there were these little yellow bean plants that are called the buffalo beans by the Blackfoot.

As soon as those flowers came up they knew it was time to start moving and chasing the bison into the prairie.

Now one of the most significant parts of bison hunting specialization was that they managed the prairie and might have also managed the herds.

They used extensive and systematic fire to actually promote early spring growth that would keep the pregnant cows from moving away into the open prairie and calving away from these hunting grounds.

Beaver had a really significant part in maintaining water on the surface of the prairie, between drainages.

So for example, when bison were moving from one drainage to another, in between those drainages there was some surface water, and whenever there was an opportunity for a beaver to come and form a colony they would actually add water retainers and that was one of the most important interactions of bison and beaver.

Traditionally, the Blackfoot hunted bison, and, to a lesser extent, other game.

Bison was considered the real meat.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the vast herds of buffalo, numbering in the many millions, had been virtually exterminated from the Great Plains.

Part of it by policy of the United States government, but by the early 1900s, a few conservationists gathered together some of the remaining animals and kept them as breeding pairs.

And from those few isolated animals come this small herd on the Blackfoot Indian reservation that has now become one of the basis for not only not only their economy but also the symbolic recreation and regeneration of a great tribe.

The goal of the tribe in this ranch is to gain about 500-600 animals which will then provide a sustainable basis for the perpetuation of the importance of the bison for the Blackfoot people.

We're trying to keep these ones here as a wild format out of a herd.

So we let them free roam, make sure that they stay within the boundaries of the buffalo field that is here.

And how cold have you seen it get here in the winter time?

Anywhere, you know, 3 below.

So they're pretty well adapted to taking very cold weather.

Yeah, and they more like, like a family oriented type thing where they stay banded together, where more cows will branch out.

One of my cousins' boys come out here, and he was just a teenager at the time and he took down a buffalo and we did a, a ceremonial type thing, we blessed everything and when we came out here we stayed traditional with it and it was really wonderful to be here to see that and now today for me to be amongst the buffalo here.

Um and watching them and learning about them.

There is, is kinda like a more spiritual uplifting feeling that you get with them, and being out around them like this.

Most of the administration of the Blackfeet Indian reservation, including the schools, takes place in the town of Browning.

What did they use this ribcage for?

Archaeologists and educators have combined to provide a curriculum at Browning middle school.

Browning is the largest town in the Blackfeet Indian reservation.

The curriculum is very specifically oriented toward the study of bison, both its present and its past, and these students are picking up a lot of things that even college students wouldn't know.

Well, it's kinda at the point in my life where I'm exactly, where I'm at that age to wanna know, to find who I really am.

And having my culture, being a part of that, it's kinda a big deal.

The sacrum is right on top here.

The goal of the curriculum is to educate students on why bison are important to native communities as well as non-native communities, and it covers the 10, 000 year significance of bison, so it's looking at the sociocultural significance, and the native significance of bison in the past to lead the students up to the present and why bison are significant now, and then educate why bison are significant into the future.

Yeah, I'd say it's really fun!

Learning more about bison, [a good experience with bones] and seeing more bones.

It seems like it would be a tailbone almost.

[Almost looks like it] We're piecing together the bison skeleton.

With these bones right here we're trying to connect them all together and make sure to see what this one bone is.

So what do you think happened to it?

We are a Blackfeet nation, and so our ancestors hunted the bison for survival, so I guess it would be religious and important to learn why we hunted them and why they're so important to us.

The buffalo studies are not just for the classroom.

The students seem proud to go outside to recreate and choreograph the buffalo hunt.

They line in a funnel formation and chase the frightened buffalo over a cliff, or well, through the goal post of a football field.

They picked the people, they don't have kids, people who were the fastest runners, people who could think, you know in a split second, you know, there was a process to it, so they hand selected you and your family, your family.

That's why everything that you do, everything reflects on your family.

You always want to make your family proud of everything that you do.

As Native Americans, we pass on everything orally, from our traditions, our culture, our history, the language.

We actually sing teepee rings, where all of the teepees were, where they probably killed the bison, where they went to the river, how close the river was, to where they, you know, cleaned them and prepared the meat.

They're small but really today, they're still large to us, but in those days to imagine how, you know, they were prehistoric, they were like dinosaur size.

They were like, like, almost like a supermarket for us.

Like cause we could grab meat, make stuff out of it, make our own stuff.

I grew up around a traditional family where we went to Blackfoot ceremonies.

Getting older, now I'm able to understand the importance of it more.

There was more put into it than just taking the meat, taking the meat and using them.

The buffalo jump is not just an idea.

About 20 miles from Browning, an actual jump shows us the magnitude and complexity of the operation.

Buffalo jumps are communal hunting technology, and they consist of a bluff.

Bison tend to follow fences.

So the rock piles actually mark places where hunters would stand or they would hold brush, what is called 'dead man' forming a fence that goes from the milling area, or the from the gathering basin toward the jump.

Archaeologists, working with Blackfoot people have determined that this was a jump, a ramp where bison ran in a stampede and jumped off the edge.

How do they know that?

Well, below they have found enormous quantities of buffalo bones, and traces of camps where the bones, and entire animals, were processed.

If we look here we can see the groove that thousands of thousands of the hooves of the bison made, the Blackfoot people would line this area, waving blankets, scaring the bison into this little funnel, and a Blackfoot would wear a headdress that looked like a buffalo to lead them down in here, thinking that, the buffalos would think that they were safe, the leader of the Blackfoot would hide and the rest would just follow after the stampede, reach the edge, and jump off to their death.

It happens near water, as for example here in the Two Medicine River, in an area that has sufficient floodplain for a processing camp to be built.

Bison provided meat, both fresh meat, and dried meat.

Bison provided shelter.

About 8 bison hides were needed for one large teepee.

Bison provided robes in the winter.

He provided horn.

He provided brains to tan the hides.

It was a walking factory or, perhaps, a walking supermarket.

That is how the Blackfoot like to see the bison nowadays.

A walking supermarket that provided everything and in addition to that it provided a lot of spiritual power to the people who hunted them and used them in the proper way.

This area and other valleys were most intensely colonized and utilized by Blackfoot ancestors during the little ice age, approximately 600 to 200 years ago.

Hunting bison and hunting, the act itself, was not just a subsistence economy.

It was a way of life, it was a way of thinking, and it was also part of the cosmology.

This is one of your archaeological sites.

Yes, we are just going through the threshold into the interior of what used to be a teepee lodge.

That's what those rocks are.

Yeah, the rocks were placed to hold the teepee in place, secure it, and keep it from blowing away in the wind.

How many of these teepee sites have you found here?

Just for the complex, we have 2 camp, campsites.

Three on either side of the bison kill site.

The lower complex has 421 single teepees.

Walter McClintock took one of the earliest, and most detailed and complete photographs of Blackfoot camps, and other, other areas of Blackfoot life in the 1880s, and there are also paintings.

There are other series of photographs taken in the 1920s, some of them are staged for the purpose of advertising the railroad, but nonetheless they were the original teepee lodges that the Blackfoot used at the time.

These teepees held all of the features and all of the objects necessary to make a home.

I'm trying to imagine, it went up there, 4 meters, 15 feet maybe?

Uh, perhaps.

You know, it's good they had the teepee to keep out of the wind, the wind is always here.

Oh yeah, it is, it is part of being in the northern plains.

The buffalo jumps and the operation center were never out of site of the great mountains to the west.

When you're driving in northwestern Montana, you reach the end of the Great Plains very suddenly and there are the Rockies.

Boom, just like that.

If it's clear, you can see the mountains from, probably, 50 miles away, if it's cloudy, you don't even know and boom all of the sudden you're going up.

The Blackfeet made a very good choice, not only is it gorgeous country, but it has a combination of environmental conditions that make for a very rich habitat, at least in the warm weather.

It can get very cold, 30 below zero in the winter is not unusual.

It's the bison that really flourished and in the early times there were bison by the millions.

The Blackfeet were people of the bison, but they were also people of the horse.

Horses were the mainstay of young men, middle-aged men, and old men.

Blackfeet, that name come from the federal government, we were all plains Indians, we were Pikuni out to the river.

The Indians were plains Indians, and the Indians traded horses back and forth, and say you was foot and I was horseback, and we got in a fight, who would win.

Huh?

The horses was the most important thing in the Indians world.

Everything from fighting wars against other tribes, gathering wood, hunting game, chasing buffalo.

Without the horse was pretty handicapped.

The way I was taught to look at life was a good example.

Right here, what is this?

That looks like grass to me.

That's life, live grass.

You feed, put life in that horse, that life in that horse will fuel the trail ride, so it all starts with life.

So what Jesus Christ was to the white man, life was to the American Indian.

That's what my grandmother on my Native American side taught me how to look at life.

I was riding horses before I can remember, What did you do to get put into the cowboy hall of fame?

[Laughs] Well how many years had you ridden horses by the time they had put you into the hall of fame?

The Rockies were not just a majestic backdrop for the Blackfeet, long before the horse days were the dog days, the time when dogs were the beasts of burden.

Then the lakes and rivers and peaks were a source of material and spiritual resources.

So you've done archaeological work here?

Yes, people have been in St. Mary, this area, since the end of the last glaciation approximately 12,500 years ago.

And we, for the past two years, we have been excavating at the St. Mary river ridge site to assess, not only the antiquity and significance of this site for archaeological purposes, but also the degree to which it has been impacted by climate change, any natural process, or you know, just visitor use.

The hills that surround upper St. Mary Lake, and also lower St. Mary Lake are the ground the bison walked on, sacred ground, to come from the mountains onto the prairie.

And then St. Mary is also the area where the beaver bundle emerged from.

The underwater people believed in upper St. Mary Lake, the beaver gifted this bundle to the Blackfoot people.

From an archaeological perspective, a bundle is a collection of objects.

Of artifacts.

Or of ecofacts.

All contained in a cloth, a hide, a bag or any other kind of container, yet for the Blackfoot people a bundle is a living thing.

And every object inside that bundle, rocks, fossils, incense, paint, and the representatives of every animal in the Blackfoot universe, they area society of animal things that work together in the pursuit of a common goal of the common good.

Bundles can be as small as having only one object.

It could be just having a buffalo stone inside a bag.

Or they can have up to a hundred, three hundred objects.

The animals are in the bundle, different animals, and birds, plants and seeds, tobacco seeds.

It's cared for like a child, a very special child.

Special being, special spirit.

And the thing that I've noticed is there is a relationship of the water beings, the earth beings, and the sky beings.

It's a balance that we have.

That's always in my mind when we're involved in the beaver ceremony, is where the balance is going on here.

So like when I look at the beavers, they have to be one of the ancient animals, the dog has to be an ancient animal, the bison have to be an ancient animal, and particular birds like the owl, the loon.

Those have to be ancient animals, like extremely ancient, but they all had a universal way of getting along with each other.

There is so much knowledge in that particular ceremony about our entire universal understanding that manty people need to have those bundles in order for all that knowledge to come about.

If you look at the peaks, at the mountain peaks that are around St. Mary Lake, there are sacred sites on those peaks.

They correspond to both ancient and contemporary vision questing activities by the Blackfoot people and perhaps people from other tribes.

Vision quests are the ultimate sources of knowledge and power and, although they can appear, they can occur to people in any context, they normally occur in mountains like these.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, bison were nearly exterminated.

The Rockies were open to exploitation, and the Blackfeet people were dwindling.

...gave them 320 acres of their own land.

In the twenty-first century, bison numbers are on a rapid increase, we have Glacier National Park, and the Blackfeet people are responding to the challenge.

Join us next time In the Americas with David Yetman What are the two most important bays in the United States?

If you answered San Francisco in the west and Chesapeake Bay in the east, you're correct.

Chesapeake is more important to our history, it is also the more threatened.

But its future is bright, thanks in no small part to our shellfish friends, oysters and clams.

One of the new after-school activities for the Browning children is for the skate park.

The skate part was donated by one member from Pearl Jam.

Really?

Yes, he came and supervised the construction.

Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In The Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.