For years I’ve been on the Humanities Montana “Conversations” roster, a speaker’s bureau arrangement that sends many of us around the state on various adventures. This past Monday, for example, I spent two hours at Skyview High School in Billings working with seniors who had written research papers and were in the process of turning them into poems for the oral presentation part of their assignment.
This fall, the current poet laureate, Lowell Jaeger and I, spend a day with teachers in the far eastern side of the state talking about how to work poetry into their curriculum. We've both visited many schools, along with ghost towns like Virginia City, county fairs, book festivals, libraries, and other events from one end of the state to the other. The Poet Laureate role means somewhere around 10,000 miles of travel, and though my term ended in 2015, I’ve continued to provide poetry-related presentations.
Last spring, Humanities Montana asked a few of us—Lowell Jaeger, Caroline Patterson, Dave Caserio and yours truly—to come up with proposals for state park events that would deepen people’s experiences in these areas by introducing writing, art, poetry and discussion. We were all excited about this prospect. In years past I had partnered with a local land institute to offer poetry workshops on the prairie. I’ve also created hiking / creative writing classes for my students. We hiked locally and explored a favorite trail in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, stopping to read poetry, write, and share our work along the way. This new opportunity sounded like great fun, and I said yes when the ranger at First People’s Buffalo Jump State Park contacted me to arrange a September event.
First Nations Buffalo Jump was heavily used from 900 to 1500 BCE, before the introduction of horses dramatically changed the culture of the plains. At this site, fourteen different tribes from around the Northwest would gather periodically to herd buffalo over a cliff and in this way provide sustenance for a season or two.
Some might consider the site desolate. The prairie can strike people that way because it’s so arid, and by September, there isn’t much green left in the panoramic view. Up close, wild flowers, juniper, or sage offer a splash of color in contrast to the sandy soil and straw-colored grasses of late summer. From the prairie below, the ridge above looks modest. It’s hard to see the steep drop off.
This site is a bit out-of-the-way on the road between Great Falls and Helena, a few miles from a small town called Ulm. Three people joined me at the buffalo jump, a former student who drove four hours from Roundup, composer and pianist Philip Aaberg and his friend who were en route from Chester to Helena.
We started with a historic overview of the buffalo hunt. The ranger told us how a 13-16-year-old boy was chosen to be the buffalo runner. He would wear a buffalo calf robe, and he, in turn, would choose two friends to wear wolf hides. The three would go out to the herd, the wolf boys wandering near the back and the buffalo runner in the front, crying like a calf until the lead cow would respond and come towards him. In this way they would lure the herd up the gradual incline at the back of the hill. Meanwhile everyone else prepared by praying for a successful hunt, setting up drive lines—low rock walls that would contain and manage the bison at the top of the hill—and gathering hides and branches to swing about as they chased the bison over the cliff. Below, people prepared to butcher, to cook, and to work on the hides.
After a few days, the herd would arrive at the top of the hill, and then the buffalo runner would cast off his bison robe. Oral history indicates that once the lead cow saw she had been fooled, she would be enraged and the stampede would begin. The buffalo runner, brave soul, would lead the bison forward and jump off the cliff at a predetermined spot where he could cling to some piece of rock or overhang while the herd went sailing off the edge.
We listened to the park ranger recount the process as we sat in the visitor center facing out toward the jump. Wooden benches were strewn with wolf and buffalo skins, and more exhibits filled the adjoining room, where we could move deeper into the history of the place if we chose. Rangers created the exhibits in consultation with the people whose ancestors had traveled here, whose methods were well documented in the oral histories of the tribes.
After leaving the visitors center, we meandered up the hill, talking, speculating, reading placards. We also talked about writing and composing. Much of Phil’s work is inspired by landscape and the natural world, so I asked him how that process happened for him. He shared an experience about a commission he had to write a piece based on a particular ecosystem. He began walking in the area, thinking, trying to find a way in, when a bird flew up. And that was the way in. “Nature is interruption,” he said.
I see what he means. Walking in a wild ecosystem creates an adjustment in the mind. When we are removed from dailiness and busyness, a different rhythm takes over. Interruptions of color, light, creature or movement, can mark a beginning of some sort, or a focal point. I’m speaking mostly from experience. Having grown up in the prairie, I was always attracted to the treasures—the bright colors of flowers, the possibility of agates, bones of small animals in a sea of short grass or a snake crossing my path. Quite of few of us from the northern Montana prairie have cited the expanse and the openness as part of what feeds the imagination and conditions us to respond through art, music, or writing.
We lingered in one place and another on the way up, imagining what it must have been like to witness one of these hunts. In an area called the pishkun, where blood was cooked into pudding, bone chips appeared like confetti against the soil. When we arrived at the top, we didn’t hike to the prairie dog town, in part, because we had all seen prairie dog towns elsewhere. As we rested for our descent, we read poetry, particularly Lois Red Elk’s “This Awareness,” in which she explains her traditional Lakota worldview that includes both nature and spirits. “Everything that existed was my friend and teacher,” she says. Some of our group took time to write, some scanned the horizon. From where we stood, it looked like an easy slope down to the prairie and we understood how the bison could be fooled. It’s not until you get closer that you see the fatal drop off.
On the way down, two hawks circled, a grouse flew up to surprise us, and as we came a little closer to the visitor center, we stopped at the Sun Dance Lodge, then commented on the teepees, much smaller than what is customary now. Teepees this size would have been used when this jump was in its heyday, the Dog Days when things had to be smaller because there were no horses to carry the long poles and heavy skins of a larger home.
What a treat to spend three hours hiking and musing with friends. Though our group was small, this collaboration between Humanities Montana and the State Parks is bound to grow.
At the end of the day, Phil and I revisited an idea we've had before. We’d like to try a music / poetry workshop, maybe in a place that will allow people to see far into the distance and walk for miles if they want to. Now for the planning.
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