Indigenous Vision, Executive Director, Souta Calling Last had the honor of taking young members of a Blackfeet Society – the Kanuksumiitaks out to see the pictographs at Bear Gulch. The young men graciously helped with the heavy-duty manual labor of gathering the rocks for the cairn and fasting shelter exhibit that will be featured outside the Bear Gulch Visitor Center.
The educational cairn and fasting shelter are built in Blackfoot style and in likeness to the thousands of cairns and fasting shelters located throughout the Rocky Mountains and foothills of Montana, Alberta, and Wyoming, and throughout the Rocky Mountains.
These helped the heavy shield warriors depicted in pictograph and petroglyph art find their way along trails and find shelter while they were gone for years at a time, trading, visiting, and traveling to assist in their various business-like knowing where the herds of the american prairie were at. The Leave No Trace campaign has extremist hikers and mountaineers (supported by parks and hiking/mountaineering social media platforms) kicking the cairns used by Blackfoot ancestors, rather than the cairns that ruin aquatic habitat. The destruction of cairns is under the guise that there should be “no trace” and that these don’t have any value to modern people, sometimes even misleading hikers into dangerous conditions.
The benefits of cairns include climate and animal management data spanning 20,000+ years, older than the pyramids and the community – the Blackfoot people still hold stories tied to land far beyond the reservation borders.
If you’d like to schedule a tour of the Bear Gulch Pictograph Visitor Center this summer, visit BearGulch.net – don’t forget to stop inside the visitor center where you’ll see first hand the history of that land from a Blackfoot perspective.
Thank you to everyone who came out to help get the Bear Gulch Pictograph Visitor Center ready for the year, we’re excited for all the upgrades and are grateful to Macie & Ray who have been working hard.
A special thank you to Joe Wagner, Colin McNeely, Maggie Johnston, Melissa Spence, the Brave Dogs, and Sierra for helping set up the exhibits, cairn, and mural for the season.
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