Invisible reality : storytellers, storytakers, and the supernatural world of the blackfeet / Rosalyn R. LaPier.

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Winner of the 2018 John C. Ewers Book Award

Winner of the 2018 Donald Fixico Book Award



Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of the Blackfeet people's relationship and mode of interaction with the "invisible reality" of the supernatural world. Religious beliefs provided the Blackfeet with continuity through privations and changing times. The stories they passed to new generations and outsiders reveal the fundamental philosophy of Blackfeet existence, namely, the belief that they could alter, change, or control nature to suit their needs and that they were able to do so with the assistance of supernatural allies. The Blackfeet did not believe they had to adapt to nature. They made nature adapt. Their relationship with the supernatural provided the Blackfeet with stability and made predictable the seeming unpredictability of the natural world in which they lived.



In Invisible Reality LaPier presents an unconventional, creative, and innovative history that blends extensive archival research, vignettes of family stories, and traditional knowledge learned from elders along with personal reflections on her own journey learning Blackfeet stories. The result is a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.

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CHOICE Review

LaPier, herself a Montana Blackfeet (Amskapi Piikuni, or Piegan), tells her people's history by focusing on her family, particularly during the early reservation period when the Blackfeet adapted from a seasonal round of camps harvesting bison, elk, and plants to enforced sedentism without economic resources. Her grandparents taught that reality encompassed non-human forces that could and should be prayed to, vouchsafed in a dream, a vision through fasting, or a power transferred through gifts to a medicine bundle caretaker. Rather than feeling overpowered by US government agents and missionaries, these Blackfeet felt themselves able to manage their lives by enlisting manifested powers. Blackfeet intimate knowledge of environment, plants, animals, and weather made even the very circumscribed reservation a large universe. LaPier recounts Blackfeet life in its two seasons, winter and summer, basing this on both family and ethnographers' accounts. One chapter lists the series of ethnographers to the Blackfeet, from early reservation (1870s-1912) to mid-20th century. Her book refreshingly is tied to her extended family, especially its women, instead of the generalized "Blackfoot" of most outside ethnographers. Readable in style, it conveys the self-respect and confidence that paternalist governance and poverty could not defeat. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Alice B. Kehoe, Marquette University