NATIVE YELLOWSTONE

Wisdom in the Circle of Creation

May 23 – 29, 2020
 

The Place of the Yellow Rock Water. Tribal people called it home over 10,000 years before the Pilgrims anchored at Cape Cod and sought to find their own. Since the days of Bridger and Moran, through Yellowstone becoming the first and now oldest national park in the world, the absence of a tribal presence in Yellowstone has been explained by the myth that Indians feared this vast, pine-robed plateau that is punctuated by thermal wonders from lakeshore to river course. Supposedly, the geysers engendered such apprehension among tribal people that they would do all they could to avoid this bountiful landscape. It was, like so much in the reinvention of The West, false.
 

The fantasy was created by Yellowstone National Park’s second superintendent, Philetus Norris, to portray Yellowstone as “Indian free,” a policy reflected in the present with the abject lack of tribal interpretation in the Park. The geysers and hot springs are, in reality, shrines - sacred sites for prayer and quest. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Nez Perce, and the most recent arrivals, the Crow, are among the twenty-seven tribes with cultural ties to Yellowstone that each know a different story. Within these archives from ancestral memory is found a common theme – the sacred nature of the land named for the Yellow Rock Water and the connection to place, an ancient compact between the two-legged and four and the earth that sustains but is, as yet, still unmade.
 

From the earliest experience it was gleaned that the earth in the Place of Yellow Rock Water was uneasy with itself, and that there, creation was neither finished nor content. To be close to creation is to touch the sacred. There was not fear but respect and intuition, the 600-square mile Yellowstone caldera is far from resting easy. At Yellowstone Lake, the largest mountain lake on the continent, you will literally stand on the edge of creation and hear the narrative of the Ancient One, the making of the earth and the Human Beings.
 

By Act of Congress on March 1, 1872, Yellowstone National Park was “dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
 

Tribal people had been benefiting from one of the earth’s many gifts there for millennia. Some 10,000 years before Yellowstone became a national park, Native people were gathering obsidian here, and by the time the Egyptians had begun construction on the pyramids, trade routes carried Yellowstone obsidian beyond Greater Yellowstone to tribal societies farther afield. The Hopewellians, the so-called “Mound Builders,” residing 1,500 miles to the east, were utilizing Yellowstone obsidian by 500 B.C. The answers to how and why can be found in Cheyenne explanations for the creation of Obsidian Cliff and the dispersion and interrelation of people to points north and south, from present-day Saskatchewan to Oklahoma, and west to Washington.
 

The Cheyenne tell of an event in the Ancient Time, when, while harvesting berries past the height of summer, a grizzly bear surprised a group of Cheyenne women and as bears are wont to do, the grizzly beguiled one woman with his power and took her to be his wife. At the bear’s home the Cheyenne woman realized what her purpose was to be, to raise the son of the grizzly, a cub who had no mother. At Obsidian Cliff, where wisdom sits in place, the rest of the story will be shared.

It is from that moment in the Ancient Time that the Cheyenne, then distinct from the Ancestral Tribe, trace their connection to Yellowstone. From obsidian we move to another precious reserve and discover where and how the Cheyenne gathered the source of the sacred blue paint, and discuss how it was made and the sacred process from earth to paint to designs that imbue body and object alike with power on the spiritual matrix. When a body or object is painted, the painted designs animate them, so the body or object becomes infused with the sacred and connected to all of the higher powers. In the Cheyenne perception, the gradation from zenith to nadir moves from the masculine to feminine, the masculine being spirit and the feminine matter, the origin of the fundamental balance that is essential to retain. The Piikani, Siksika, Bloods and Ampskapi Piikani of the Blackfoot Confederacy journeyed to Yellowstone to harvest sacred paints, and in the process named many of the region’s most prominent features.
 

It is from that moment in the Ancient Time that the Cheyenne, then distinct from the Ancestral Tribe, trace their connection to Yellowstone. From obsidian we move to another precious reserve and discover where and how the Cheyenne gathered the source of the sacred blue paint and discuss how it was made and the sacred process from earth to paint to designs that imbue body and object alike with power on the spiritual matrix. When a body or object is painted, the painted designs animate them, so the body or object becomes infused with the sacred and connected to all of the higher powers. In the Cheyenne perception, the gradation from zenith to nadir moves from the masculine to feminine, the masculine being spirit and the feminine matter, the origin of the fundamental balance that is essential to retain. The Piikani, Siksika, Bloods and Ampskapi Piikani of the Blackfoot Confederacy journeyed to Yellowstone to harvest sacred paints, and in the process named many of the region’s most prominent features.

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