Pulling Weeds in Crow, Montana

By Marie Noelle Duquette

In 1994, I watched A River Runs Through It while I was nine months pregnant. It was filmed in Montana. As the credits rolled, I thought, “That is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.” I named the baby I was carrying, Chase Montana.

He wrote an essay in college that began: “My mother named me after a place she had never been. She said I would go there someday.” In 2017, Chase and I both went to Montana, on separate trips. I accompanied four youth from our church and their two young adult leaders. We stayed on the reservation with seventy high school youth, their chaperones, and Crow leaders who acted as hosts. What follows are excerpts from my journal during that time.

July 9, 2017 “I am the oldest one here. This is new to me. I will need to remember my role if I am to survive this heat. I am the one who captures stories and weaves them together for the telling—I couldn’t force myself to work harder than I was able and pass out or get heat stroke. Earlier this evening, we gathered with other church groups in a small classroom in the elementary school where we are staying to engage in The Blanket Exercise, a participatory history lesson developed in collaboration with Indigenous Elders and educators. Its purpose is to foster truth, understanding, respect, and reconciliation among Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

First, we were instructed to stand somewhere on one of the old blankets that covered the floor. The blankets represented land. Once assembled, community elders read as voices of the Native Americans; leaders from Youthworks, the group who had organized the trip, read the parts written for the U.S. Government. The Native American voices spoke far less. As these narrators moved us through the story, they picked up blankets so that we had to move closer and closer to one another to share the small amount of “land” that was left. A leader randomly walked through the middle, giving out colored index cards. I was handed a yellow card which meant I was killed by smallpox. I felt indignant when they handed me the card; I had only just begun to play the game. How could I die so soon from a disease for which we now have vaccines?

When the game was over, a Lakota elder lead a discussion about the experience. He began by quoting a character in the book, The Wolf at Twilight. 

“I’m not saying any of this is your fault or even that your grandparents did any of it. I’m saying it happened, and it happened on your people’s watch. You’re the one who benefited from it. It doesn’t matter that you’re way downstream from the actual events. You’re still drinking the water. I don’t care if you feel guilty. I just care that you take some responsibility. Responsibility is about what you do now, not about feeling bad about what happened in the past. You can’t erase the footprints that have already been made. What you’ve got to do is take a close look at those footprints and make sure you’re more careful where you walk in the future.” 

It was hard not to feel ashamed of our history; it was hard to look directly at him or at one another. “So,” the elder said. “Let’s talk about what it means to be careful about where we walk in the future.”

July 10, 2017. Chase, the part of the Crow reservation on which we are staying is exactly what you prepared me for—abject poverty. Our base camp is an elementary school which many communities we are accustomed to living in would likely demolish without so much as a vote. I think of the well-coiffed communities of our country with  typical incremental increases in taxes for things like new turf on the football field or new technology in the library—how they are often disputed, but nearly always passed. This school needs paint, new toilets, and a mirror in the bathroom would be nice. On the doors of the main entrance is a black bumper sticker with block white letters spelling out: METH IS DEATH / NOT EVEN ONCE. 

Johnny is the security guard on hand. He is all Crow: skin that looks like weathered leather with a thick head of hair three inches tall. I got locked out of the building last night and Johnny was the one to open the steel door after my muted knocks. I thanked him. His reply, “I saw you go to your car to get your water bottle.”

I didn’t see him see me.

July 11, 2017. Yesterday we went to the home of Jackie Whisperstep to help clear about a quarter acre of the land surrounding her house. It is filled with tightly packed Amazon weeds, each one 10’ tall. Their stalks are like hard bamboo, about 3” in diameter. It is 103 degrees. I drag bundles of these weeds out of the area all day, taking long breaks for water and lunch. The youth work endlessly with few breaks, by choice.

The skin on my hands looks like that of a Native American elder. I look at them and think, “these are getting to be the kinds of hands I would want to photograph for the stories they hold. But now that they are my own, I don’t want to photograph them.”

I spend quite a bit of time talking with Jackie. She brings me a cup of hot coffee when she sees me panting, my face ablaze from the heat. “Drink it, she said,” it will cool you off.

 I did, so as not to offend. I instantly felt revived. “What kind of magic coffee is this?” I asked.

“Dunkin Donuts,” she said. “With some Hazelnut Coffeemate in it.”

Jackie Whisperstep has her master’s in social work from Walla-Walla University in Washington. She is retired, slightly younger than me. Her husband died last year; his hat remains on the table next to his worn leather recliner. Her dog and cat, Milo and Otis, wander reluctantly outside as we work, moving to stay in the ever-moving shade. I asked her what she planned to do with the land once it was cleared. She told me we were not clearing the land to build or plant; the fires that come in the late summer will ignite her house if they are not removed.

We sip our coffee in silence, watching the youth make their way in and out of the Amazon weeds, work gloves covering strong hands that carry bundle after heavy bundle to the truck bed so we can drive them to a far corner of the reservation. “I prayed every day that God would send people to help clear the weeds,” she said. “Thank you.”

Later that afternoon, we gathered to hear Wrex, an elder, explain the process of a Sweat Ceremony. He introduced himself, “W-R-E-X, the W is silent.” He chuckled, clearly pleased with his joke. We were sitting in a large circle facing his sweat lodge. We were outdoors, but inside a fence-wall that was constructed of long birch branches, upon which thick blankets, animal hides, and bundles of sage and chokecherry leaves hung. The effect was to be enclosed in an open-air fortress, hidden in plain sight. We had passed by this sweat lodge many times during the week while clearing Jackie’s land. We had looked at it from a treeline above when we carried truckloads of weeds to a dump. We never saw it. The lodge itself, like the fence-wall surrounding it, was made of long sturdy branches that were bent to form the skeleton of a tent shaped like an eagle. Wrex reached down and grabbed the corner of an animal pelt, flipping it up on to the top of the lodge to show the doorway. A twin doorway was on the other side so that one could have crawled into and through the lodge, right out the back door. Just inside to the right of the doorway was a pit about three feet deep and three feet wide, filled with pieces of fist-sized sandstone. Sage and sweetgrass were scattered on the limbs to form the roof. Wrex said, “During the ceremony, participants take turns pouring ladles of water onto these rocks, adding steam to the heat of the lodge.”

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On the night of each new moon and each full moon, Wrex and nine to eleven other men in his tribe enter the lodge to pray and experience the cleansing of impurities from their bodies. Wrex explained that this detoxifying process gives the men clarity of vision and insight.

“In this way,” he said, “We pray in community and as individuals. And we pray simultaneously with our bodies, our minds, and our spirit. If you do not pray in this way,” he cautioned, “you will not live in balance.”

Wrex said that the sweat lodge ceremony is not to be taken lightly. “It is transformative,” he said. “Those who arrive angry, find calm. Those who are lazy, become energized. Those who are without direction, may be given guidance. Those who are weak, gain strength. The wisdom we receive in the Sweat Ceremony, comes from the words we say to one another. That is why even those who do not receive a specific answer must still come; it may be that they will be the one who receives the words to speak to another in need.” 

We left the beaten path that others in our group followed, winding our way through the mountains at dusk, listening to playlists the youth took turns offering. During “The Dark Side of The Moon,” we happened on a lake so calm it commanded us to be still.

I was viscerally aware, that the United States of America, with the help of the Supreme Court, has broken every single treaty it signed with our indigenous siblings. The Supreme Court recently has upended environmental law. Fire season in the dry, western states has begun. I think about Jackie Whisperstep and the fragility of her house given the heartiness of the weeds that grow too near it. And I long to go back, to stand with those to whom we made promises we did not keep.

The definition of faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of things we cannot see. When I apply this definition, I realize my faith remains because I hope for a world bigger than I can see or understand; a world where justice is proactive. And I am certain that we were gifted by the stories we experienced in the Crow community, which invite us to consider more carefully where we walk. And why. 

Learn more about The Blanket exercise here at kairosblanketexercise.org.
Marie Duquette is beginning her seventh year as pastor at King of Kings Lutheran Church on Packard Road in Ann Arbor.