Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier (review)

Invisible Reality is an unusual book in which the author, a historian and Blackfeet tribal member, brings the early reservation period history to life with embedded family stories and her own reflections, and at the same time manages to ground Blackfeet religious beliefs within the context of their everyday reality. Through stories shared by her elders and those she encountered through her research, LaPier followed one strong thread, that of reliance on supernatural allies to manage the negotiations of life with other people and particularly with nature; in her words, "to make the unpredictable predictable."

Readers familiar with the writings of Schultz, Grinnell, McClintock, Wissler and Duvall, among others, will find that LaPier covers some familiar topics, with accounts of the symbolism of painted lodges and the origins and transfer of the Beaver Bundle and Thunder Pipe, but significantly, she grounds them in her own family's stories of Blackfeet life. For example, her discussion of the relationship between Thunder and the people in the context of the northwestern Plains' harsh climate realities makes explicit the need for supernatural assistance of Thunder to ensure rains feed the grasslands, which in turn support the bison that feed, clothe, and equip the people.

The author draws the reader into a grounded reality through her interpretation of ethnographic records regarding settlement and seasonality, painting a picture of hundreds of lodges camped in band clusters along the Marias River throughout the winter until "the ponies shed," contrasted with images of the active summer season when individual bands would follow prescribed routes to particular destinations year after year, coming together each summer for the O'kan, the Blackfeet Medicine Lodge, when the berries were ripe. Place names hold this reality together.

LaPier's intertwined narrative takes the reader into the realities of twentieth-century life at Heart Butte, more through government records and photographs than through family stories. Her elders didn't focus on their struggles with assimilation but rather on what was essential to a prosperous life—stories of encounters with the invisible realm. Through-out these accounts, surprisingly, the author uses past tense to describe what the Blackfeet believed and understood about the nature of reality. In the epilogue, she anticipates the question of cultural continuity. Rather than address the subject head-on, she concludes the book with her own story of an encounter with the supernatural that occurred along the edge of the Backbone of the World, where the invisible is still real.