“What if Charles came back in 2027?” I ask.
“Oh, [there’d be] a way different energy,” he replies with a grin. “We’d be able to explain ourselves as a people way more efficiently.” Back then, he adds, people didn’t really learn about the Blackfoot from the Blackfoot.
Next, I start driving south toward the US-Canada border, where a uniformed guard sits inside a booth next to a heavy gate. As I hand over my documents, I look up at square-shaped Ninaistako (Chief Mountain) looming above, which somehow lends a sense of softness to the tightly controlled space. Driving into the US, I’m greeted to Montana by a herd of buffalo.
The border “plays a major role in disconnecting communities,” Derek DesRosier, the general manager of Sun Tours, tells me at his East Glacier office after my hike with Upham. The movement of the Blackfoot between their ancestral land in the US and Canada, once fluid and frequent, is now restrained by paperwork and the limited operating hours of the more rural checkpoints along the border.
Sun Tours, now in its 31st year, is the only company to offer Blackfeet-led tours of Glacier National Park. In the 1990s, DesRosier’s father, Ed, was ticketed by the National Park Service for running tours on what, he points out, is traditional Blackfeet territory. Ed fought and won the right to operate; today, his son continues to show visitors the park through the lens of the Blackfeet, whose reservation borders its entire eastern side. Now DesRosier wants to add a new route to Sun Tours’ catalogue, connecting Glacier to Waterton Lakes National Park, just over the border in Alberta. “We haven’t done a lot of collaboration with our Blackfoot relatives [in the US], but, as the corridor expands, I think there’s going to be more of that happening,” he says.
