BLACKFOOT SNOW TIPI: Part 2

Welcome back to my family’s tipi. Now I will tell you the rest of the story about the Snow Tipi just as Old Grandfather told it to me. So wrap a warm robe around you, have a bowl of this delicious buffalo stew, and put your feet near the fire.

As you recall the Blackfeet hunter, Na-toia-mon, fell asleep during a blizzard. He had a dream about a beautiful tipi. As he approached it, a voice invited him to enter.

Inside the tipi was a man, but he was not just an ordinary warrior. This man was large and handsome and was smoking a black stone pipe. He had white hair and wore a long white robe. He was seated behind an altar of fresh earth which had juniper laid on top of it. The man said he was the maker of cold weather and that this tipi was his. He called it the Snow Tipi or the Yellow Paint Lodge.

The man told Na-toia-mon that he had come to help him escape the storm and to give him the Snow Tipi with its decorations and medicines, which including a mink-skin tobacco pouch and the pipe he was smoking. He would also give him his supernatural power but when Na-toia-mon returned to camp he was to make a tipi just like the Snow Tipi.

Na-toia-mon listened very carefully as the man instructed him in how to paint the tipi. Then he learned the songs and the ceremonial to be used in transferring the tipi to anyone who might make the vow. There were many important instructions he had to learn and remember because they had to be done exactly the way the man told them to Na-toia-mon.

When Na-toia-mon returned to camp he built the Snow Tipi just as he had been told. The very next winter was a very hard one. While he and some others were out hunting they were, again, caught in a very great storm. Na-toia-mon did not want to use the powers that had been given to him to hold back the storm because he would only be able to do it one time and no more. But his friends urged him to use them, saying that if he did not they would all die.

Knowing that he could only hold back the storm for a short time, Na-toia-mon sent all the others on ahead towards camp. Then he began the ceremonial to hold the storm back, being very careful to do everything just as he had been instructed. He smoked the pipe he had been given; blowing the smoke first to the northeast which was the direction the storm had come from. Then he prayed to the Maker of Storms to have pity on them and hold the storm back. At last the sun shone through the dark clouds and Na-toia-mon hurried after his friends towards camp. The storm began again before they reached camp but they were nearly there and all were saved.

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