An Unbroken Circle

Here’s a Blackft joke for you: Why do no Blackft children ever have to stand in corners? Because their lodges HAVE no corners. They are round inside.

They say that when the old Blackft ladies were brought to live in cabins or even a room of a larger building, their first instinct was to try to make the room round by hanging lines across the corner and pinning blankets to them. They put their trunks and bundles around the room in a circle unless there was a need for space -- then they would store things in the corners behind the blankets.

The ordering principle of a lodge is that the door must be to the east. In the center of the lodge is the main fire, and directly behind it is the most sacred place in the lodge, where any Bundles or other sacred objects are kept, sometimes on tripods and sometimes hung from lines tied across from one tipi pole to another. You must not walk between the fire and the holy place, but always return around past the door to get to the other side.

If the man of the “house” is there, he will sit next to his holy objects and the most important wife will sit on the other side of them. She is called the “Sits Beside” wife. On formal occasions, women will range themselves in order of importance next to the “Sits Beside,” until the least important woman there will be the “Sits by the Door,” the one who has to go get more firewood or to go out to see why the dogs are making a fuss or the one who is sent on an errand. If there is no “least wife” to sit there, kids will be there to take care of these small but important duties. If they aren’t paying attention, the man may say, “I think I smell a skunk in here!” If they still don’t wake up, he might throw something at them. Men sit in order on the other side.

Even informally, the inside of the lodge is always arranged the same way from one camp to another so that if you had been away while the camp was moved and came back late at night, you would know where your bed was. The women could always find their supplies, clothing, and equipment without searching. Likewise, if the camp were in an open spot, the lodges of the band were likely to be in a circle so that you could find a specific person’s lodge, and this would almost certainly be the way of gathering for a major event, like the annual camp for ceremonial and social doin’s that we might call a pow-wow today.

If I knew how to post a diagram, I would insert here the sketch I have of where the Amskapi Pikuni usually put their lodges in relation to each other. If one were new or from another group, the natural thing to do would be to camp near friends.

If the camp were along a creek or in trees, then the circle would be replaced by scattered sites, which I expect would become habitual places just as people tend to gravitate to a favored parking place or seat in church.

More than these circles, the lives of the Blackft went round and round through the cycles of the seasons, repeating the trips to beds of camas or likely hunting spots. This would be a good place for winter, near trees; and that would be a good place for the blustery spring when high winds would blow. As they traveled they watched for landmarks, distinctive peaks in particular. An old time Indian would be always watching for high points where a lookout might spot game or enemies or weather or -- indeed -- friends. But also they would often be dropping down to low points because that’s where water collects. At some seasons of the year, they would look for high elevations, maybe following the later blooming of plants or, in fall, seeking places where light snow would making tracking of game possible. In winter it would be wise to be close enough to the Rockies to benefit from the katabatic warming winds, the “Chinook,” but not close enough to be caught in high altitude deep snow.

The human life cycle and cycles of plants and animals and the great circle of the domed sky and grassy earth -- none of these passed unnoticed. The Blackft sacred number is FOUR, the four points of the compass circle. (The European sacred number is THREE because of the influence of Christian doctrine.)

A book I recommend is “Akak’stiman: A Blackfoot Framework for Decision-Making and Mediation Processes,” by Reg Crowshoe and Sybille Manneschmidt. On the front of the soft book are a photo of a circle of a lodges and a diagram of the inside of a lodge. You can get this book from the University of Calgary Press (2500 University Press, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AL, Canada, T2n 1N4. Website: www.uofcpress.com ISBN 1-55238-044-0 Copyright 2002 (second edition) 1997 (first edition).

You could not beat this book for a compact interpretation of order-making in the Blackfoot world. There is a history, an account of social structures, a description of Sacred Bundles and their functions, an account of transfer rites, some words about health and healing, and fascinating appendixes of relevant myths and histories. There are photos, maps and graphs and a good bibliography -- all in less than one hundred pages.

Most unexpected but crucial to the purpose of the book, are directions for converting these round physical relationships and their implications into practical layouts and priorities for the resolution of health and welfare issues. These dictate who is in charge, who else has priority, who is a resource, and so on. The message to those deliberating is quite clear and emphasizes that this is an indigenous, long-standing approach. May the circle be unbroken.