R osalyn R. L aPier . Invisible Reality

Rosalyn R. LaPier writes as an associate professor at the University of Montana and a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History. She also writes from her Blackfeet heritage, well aware of her ancestral lineages, and as an enrolled tribal member. Thus, she has amassed her evidence through copious reading of archival and published work; she has also heard stories from relatives, both informally and by a process of consultation, payment, and clarification. The result is a careful, personally meaningful portrait of Blackfeet religious life—beliefs about and relationships with supernatural beings—from the 1800s to the present. For a reader like myself, accustomed to religious studies terminology that aims for sophistication, sometimes at the expense of clarity and common sense, I found LaPier’s approach refreshingly unpretentious and vividly evocative of American Indian traditions. LaPier’s portrayal focuses on the “buffalo Indians” (xxi), those who remembered life before the 1880s, when white invaders eradicated the bison and then penned the Blackfeet on reservations. “Storytakers” (xxii) in the late 1800s and early 1900s—ethnographers such as James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, Walter McClintock, Clark David Wissler, and Truman Michelson—relied on these “old-time Indians” (137) to recount tales of the past, from their own experiences back to ancient times. The word “traditional” (xxvii) may be degraded these days; however, it describes accurately the knowledge passed down proudly by the “buffalo Indians” to their offspring and “storytakers” alike.

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