The Blackfeet Nation and Indian Days

Browning sits on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park's cultural shadow, at the foot of the Rocky Mountain Front where the plains begin abruptly and the mountains rise without foothills. It is the tribal headquarters of the Blackfeet Nation, which occupies a reservation of approximately one and a half million acres between the Continental Divide and the Hi-Line corridor, one of the larger Indian reservations in the United States.

The Blackfeet, whose traditional name for themselves is Niitsitapi, meaning the Real People, with the Montana band known specifically as Piikani or Pikuni, have occupied this region for centuries. Their traditional territory stretched from the North Saskatchewan River in Canada to the Yellowstone in Montana, and from the Continental Divide east to the confluence of the Missouri and the Milk. The reservation that remains is a fraction of that range, but it includes the terrain that the Blackfeet regard as their cultural and spiritual heartland, the mountain front where the plains and the peaks meet.

The Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning is a federal institution, administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, holding one of the most significant collections of Northern Plains art and material culture in the country. Its collections represent nations across the northern plains, not the Blackfeet alone, and its interpretive approach is collaborative.

Indian Days, held annually in July in Browning, has drawn Blackfeet members and visitors since the early twentieth century. It is one of the longest-running powwows in the region and the largest annual gathering of the Blackfeet people. The Blackfeet Nation has approximately seventeen thousand enrolled members. The powwow is not a tourist performance. It is a continuing cultural event in a community that has maintained its ceremonial practices through considerable external pressure.