There’s a story Lily Gladstone likes to tell about a Blackfeet man and a flower.
“He pulled it from the ground and shook the dirt off. He exposed the root system,” she says. “And he said, ‘This is like a story. If this flower is a story, then all of these roots are the different versions. They twist around each other; they go off in opposite directions. But that’s what gives it its strength. That’s what makes it hard to uproot. That’s what keeps the story going.”
The man was speaking to 20th-century historian James Willard Schultz, who was struggling to make sense of the varying ways Blackfeet people had told him the same stories. In an oral tradition, Gladstone emphasizes, there’s no one way of seeing things; each person’s narrative is the truth.
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