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06 February 2009

Blackfeet Troubadour Sings Traditions

Montana-based Jack Gladstone incorporates American Indian stories into his poetry and songs.

By Lea Terhune

You felt the buffalo go
You heard the stagecoach roll …
You rode your pony upon
Moccasin Flat at century’s dawn
The trails became roads
And the roads became old ...
We listened to the stories that you told.
     — From “Speak to Me Grandma” by Jack Gladstone

Jack Gladstone, Montana-based songwriter and storyteller of the Blackfeet nation of the northern Great Plains, carries on his tribe’s tradition in poetry. Gladstone learned stories at the feet of his grandmother, whom he celebrates in his song “Speak to Me Grandma.” He references Blackfeet stories in the songs he writes, in performances, and in lectures.

“The purpose of the storytelling tradition is to reaffirm identity,” Gladstone says, and he sees parallel devices in other cultures, such as Australian aboriginal Dreamtime stories: “Blackfeet refer to it as the ‘long-ago time’ — or once upon a time.”

“But when we enter into the tapestry of this tradition, it’s important that we put aside the idea of these stories being logical or rational or factual as such. The truths they convey may not be historical truths but something of the perennial wisdom,” Stories show “shadow and light, trickster and hero,” Gladstone says. “The trickster thinks that he is the center of the universe and the center of attention…and the hero recognizes that he is simply a part of something far larger and he is servicing the higher power.” They are “personifications of energy,” says Gladstone; “we call them gods … the expressions of that great mysterious feeling.” The “great mysterious” is how Blackfeet characterize things beyond common understanding -- “two adjectives. After we get to that, we run out of words,” he says.

“One of the tragedies that I see unfold around, and to a degree inside me and my own family, is stories that once were passed on are no longer passed on to the degree that they were,” Gladstone says, attributing it to the many distractions of modern technology. He senses an increased divide between the material and the spiritual. “In my grandmother’s mind there was a fluid movement between the two,” he says. He tries to pass on old wisdom through legends, instructional stories, and “parables of my own life.” His songs evoke the power of nature, the spirit, and ordinary life experiences. “Instead of trying to keep my audience back in time, … I’m trying to place an emotional spell on my listeners to try to bring that time to the present, right now … to place that timeless lesson in the present.”

America is a nation “learning from each other as we go,” says Gladstone:

A nation born of many people’s dreams.
We’re the stewards of the stories of those who came before;
The keepers of the mountains and the streams.
     — From “America…Pass It On”

Oral traditions can survive when ephemeral media are destroyed, he says: “The only thing that we can really rely on in the long run is oral tradition. Not only are knowledge and values and identity reidentified and reaffirmed in the telling, but there is also that concept of becoming. We continue to become human beings. Without our stories, we can no longer become human beings.”