To Do a Vision Quest, Go to a High Place
“Vision Quest” is a Blackfeet ritual that catches many imaginations. A person goes to a very high place along the foothills of the Rockies or on one of the volcanically formed refuge hills along the Canadian border. He marks out a place to lie down, building a little parapet of stones the size of himself in an outline that might prevent wind or might remind him where he is, to stay there. Those who can still find these places know where to look for them but are reluctant to tell.
Women didn’t do this. If a young person did, an older caretaker checked on him now and then. It was part of the search by people who had neither drugs nor alcohol for a way to go “out of body,” to a changed consciousness. Thirst, hunger, pain, isolation, thin air, were keys to another world. Vision quests were part of the same system as Sun Lodge flesh-tethered dances while staring at the sun.
Some people who study Blackfeet will study books, esp. if they have no hope of coming here, and they record and re-record the same factoids: that the dreamers are adolescents hoping for a spirit animal to visit them, that there is a old story about a man who was supposed to be monitoring his son but left him too long so that when he went to look for the boy there was only a small bird nearby, a transformation. Someone indigenous told these things to an anthro many decades ago.
Other people either go to that high place or are already nearby, and walk the land to find traces and re-experience what it was like. In the Sweetgrass Hills, the day will be scented by balsam fir.
Lethbridge, Alberta, is a major city a little over a hundred miles north of Valier, MT, where I am. Between there and here is a row of small volcanic mountains, aligned along the border and called the Sweetgrass Hills. That’s a misnomer: sweetgrass likes low swampy burned over places — it is sweet pine or balsam fir that is meant. Today’s scientist would say it was the smell of coumarin, used to thin blood.
Aside from being a good place to look for natural incense, the Sweetgrass Hills (if you don’t call them by that name you won’t be able to google them) were a favorite place among the Blackfeet for “getting a vision.” One can still find the “vision beds” where they lay down to sing and fast until their consciousness touched something sacred. Some want to de-sacralize the land, so they say, “Show us the structures that prove anyone ever worshipped here!” They are shocked to see photos of vision beds taken by Dr. Dormaar or possibly his friend Arlo Skari. It takes a lot of walking to find them, but they exist.
Hills on plains are always holy, special locations where the spirit is intensified, but these particular hills are also “refugia,” meaning that they provided refuge for many species of plants and animals — they say even earthworms — that were otherwise scoured away by the repeated walls of ice called glaciers that came down from the north. Even now they are refuges in summer when the prairie simmers in heat. They are water-sheds that re-charge the ground so that the wells of the ranchers fill up.
Since I belong to a number of academic listservs that study both environmental science and the philosophy about it, I’m aware of a huge body of literature of “place,” wherein people look at how land and people shape each other over time. Nomadism is not aimless wandering but a pattern-cycle of return. The ideas themselves can become a bit unmoored if they are not anchored by real experience on the land. This Dr. Dormaar knew. He walked the land, he got down on his knees in curiosity and gratitude.
The world was his vision, but he regarded it from Lethbridge, specifically the University of Lethbridge, a “campus” built across the mouth of a coulee with a space at the bottom to keep it from becoming a dam. Some say it was inspired by a long trestle bridge across another coulee near Lethbridge, a marvel of early engineering. The school has a concentration in the study of the people called in Canada Blackfoot rather than Blackfeet.
I was sad to hear of this death. I was looking forward to meeting him some day. He’s one of the extraordinary people who often live close to us and make major contributions to human thought, but so quietly that we don’t know about it. I couldn’t go to the memorial service because of the border, since my passport had expired. Recently the world has become a more suspicious and narrow place. I hope the cycle moves on through all this and back to an open border again. In the meantime, I can offer these thoughts in a borderless way. I smudge a bit of sweetgrass as I write.
Blackfeet life was always dependent on near-cosmic forces of wind, sun and land. They wasted no energy on resistance but rather adapted to what happened, even when it was unaccountable and destructive. Ritual was a part of this, a virtual outline of the body of the group so that they knew where they were. The major Pipe Bundle ceremonies, the Horn Society, and the Sun Lodge were all part of an annual cycle that kept life in order. That’s what everyone all over the world does. Sedentary did not suit economics dependent on roving buffalo, but nomadism was no less patterned than located practices with dedicated structures like churches.
Because life was dependent on movement across the land to follow sources, the idea was natural that there were other places a person could go if they knew how. Many of the Blackfeet stories were about going up into the sky. Maybe this is related to sea voyages or “Easy Rider” setting off across the continent.
Because these people were constantly observant and spent long hours watching animals, they did not divide humans from the other animals, but saw them as sharing consciousness. Therefore, to meet and talk to a coyote or elk seemed natural. To dance and sing them in re-enactment was meaningful. In ceremonies I saw their accurate evocation of bears or beavers. The old people I knew in the 1960’s were born in the 1880’s. Their like will not come back, but those who stay close the land will continue in their own way.
This seamless life was smashed by the invasion from Europe and the viruses they carried. Now we know about this firsthand, living it. The saving remnant of the indigenous people was fortunate to remain in Blackfeet lands though the reservation shrank from being the whole top half of Montana territory to a rough square the size of the Serengeti but stripped of herds. They were also fortunate to be in two countries, the US and Canada, which meant two ways of dealing with the indigenous people with a “Medicine Line” in between them that complicated efforts at control. People study “borderlands” as having special qualities.
Once again in our confused times we look for high places where we can lie under the sky, listening to the wind, turning inwards to see what resources we find from up there where we can see the vast land to which we belong. We wonder who will come to check on us, but we are willing to risk death.
