We Begin To Build!

Today we began the next stage of our great adventure – building the bunkhouse!  Last night Br Paul, the President of De La Salle Blackfeet, presented all of us with personalized tool belts – we definitely looked the part when we lined up to start work.

Charlie our builder is an amazing and patient teacher, and has no hesitation asking any of us to take on any task, and after a few words of instruction, stands back and lets us go!

Brandi and Donna started with the cordless drill this morning, removing screws to allow us to pull off the timber formwork around the foundations.  Melissa cut the wires binding the blocks together, and a group of us set to hammering and levering the boards apart.

The rest of the group started unloading timber and building supplies from the trailer, then Charlie set them to measuring and cutting the timber bases for the walls.  Audra, Donna and Brandi became experts with the table saw, and Melissa and Jeanie mastered the power drill boring holes for the cut boards to fit over the J bolts.

Deb found her forte – swinging a sledgehammer like a pro softballer to break up excess concrete and hammer away the formwork left in the basement.

By lunchtime we had all the formwork removed, the trailer unloaded, and most of the timber cut for the bases of the walls.  Lunch with Charlie was a special experience.  Charlie’s great grandfather was Two Guns White Calf, the last traditional Chief of the Blackfeet people before they moved to a Council and Chairman system.  His image was featured on the Indian head nickel.

Charlie talked to us about the Blackfeet’s traditional beliefs, and how they are integrated with their Christian religion today.  Charlie said both faiths were much the same – just different forms.  The Blackfeet used pipes and smudges to send their prayers to the creators with the smoke, and the Catholics used incense in their prayers.  Every day the traditional Blackfeet would pray to the Creator to give thanks for the sun rising, for the food they would eat, and the blessings of the day.  He said that many people who encountered the Blackfeet misunderstood their traditional ways and much of what was written in the past was wrong.  We could have stayed and listened to him all day, but the building was waiting!

Our afternoon project was measuring and cutting timber to build a wall to hold up the middle of the floor of the building.  Deb and Melissa went around the perimeter bolting down the base boards, while another group measured the boards to be cut and called those measurements out to Donna, Brandi and Audra on the powersaw.  To finish off, Cheryl, Jeannie, Melissa and Megan hammered the cut timber together to start making the wall.

At 3.00 pm we finished work to make time to travel into Browning to visit the Indian Heritage Centre.  The Centre has an incredible range of contemporary and traditional Blackfeet artwork.  After a power shopping stop there and at the Blackfeet Trading Post, we headed back to Two Medicine for dinner and our guest speaker, Carol Murray, who is a Blackfeet historian and instructor at the local Community College.

Once again we had a group of local Blackfeet to share our meal, before Carol began to tell us stories of the Blackfeet traditional beliefs.  It is impossible in the blog to relate all that she told us but it was an unforgettable experience.  The Blackfeet tradition is such a wholistic approach to life and the universe and faith.  Everything is interconnected. 

It was fascinating to hear that for the Blackfeet, the stories of the gospel and Christianity were almost the same as their own stories of the Creator, and they simply integrated them into their existing beliefs and traditions.  The Blackfeet tell of the Creator who sent his sons down to teach the people, and Jesus was one of those teachers.

She also told us of the past impact of Catholic missions on the Blackfeet, and the past times when children were taken from their parents and sent to Catholic boarding schools on the Reservation where they were prevented from speaking in Blackfeet and practicing their traditional beliefs.  Many families were separated and children sometimes were unable to regain contact with their brothers and sisters and larger family.

Those hard years inspired Carol and Patti and other Blackfeet leaders to work to help their community now, and has also generated a rebirth in Blackfeet culture.  Here at Two Medicine our campsite is next door to the ruins of a Jesuit Boarding School - one of the places where children were sent at the turn of the last century.  Audra commented how things had now come full circle because here at the very place a Catholic Boarding School had taken children from their culture, we were building a Blackfeet cultural studies centre for the children at a Catholic School to give that tradition back to them.