Montana’s Native Nation

My father told us when we were growing up that we had some Native American ancestry in our family tree. We didn’t believe him all that much and kind of just blew it off, so through our life we didn’t give it much more thought.

I mean heck, we sure didn’t look like it or anything. I probably did more than my brothers or sisters. My dad kind of did.

He liked his cowboy look though. He wore the whole thing the hat, dark styled clothes, and rattlesnake proof lineman booths, living in the snake area part of our state and being outside every chance we could get. We had to take precautions.

Sure I have black hair and got dark at the beginning of summer without trying very hard, then been confused as having some kind of Spanish decent and then jokingly blurt out it’s just the Indian part coming out.

Well my dad died in the mid nineties and the point is, that we started poking around in our genealogy more than before after he died. Gathering tons of information along with old photos.

Some of us were noticing who were these people that appeared to be dark skinned and looked to be native Indian as our past relatives? Maybe our dad wasn’t “bull shitting” us after all. Some of the tree rooted out of Canada and northwest Montana he did say we had Blackfoot in us.

I’ve seemed to feel those tugs throughout my life especially while I’m in my meditative or in my creative cycles and phases, which were fairly regular. I’ve always felt a high in the spiritual senses when it came to a communal life that I lived in a long time ago and then with the experiences with earth teachings of wildlife, nature, gardening, herbal medicines, art and now writing. I felt my soul purpose was to express my self through these mediums.

I use to joke with my family of life-long avid hunters and yes mostly with the bow! That the way I hunt is with the camera.

I still have my catch years later and I didn’t have to take the spirit of the animal that deserved to be there. Besides I had no problem with the store gods providing me with the provisions needed to raise my family no matter how much I disliked it, buying stuff I didn’t grow or to make myself.

I’d remembered when we used to go fossil, plant and rock hunting throughout the northwest of the U.S. and up into Canada, even as a kid. That when I would take something from the forest or mountains I would secretly make an offering in the form of a ritualized prayer and asking for the permission for what the earth allowed me to possess, I would reassure the earth spirits that it would only to be use for the purpose of good never greed or evil.

No one ever told me this at the age of ten and twelve about this sort of thing, I felt it in my heart that it was necessary and I should be grateful for what the earth allowed me to have.

But then we’d had also traced some of our ancestry to Germany, England and to cork county Ireland.

We had pretty much at the ends of what we’d had been able to search and left it at that several years ago.

I just can’t help but feel that there is a spirit guide, giving me that nudge now and then.

Some already know how much I believe in angles. I know I have both…




Native Blood

Eyes wander off to a distant skyline
Just below the full moon’s glow
Lone wolf calls to the gathering hills
As my native spirit grows

Sensing Montana’s blood
That circulates within me
Ancestral lines and veins
The Indian mortality

Soul, lends to winds
Easing into a spiritual birth
Nature surrounds me
Trees
Rocks
And earth

Native heritage speaks through the stars
Algonquians words, fills the sky
Soul rides on the mighty bird
Transcends my awareness of sight