Medicine River

The Blackfoot people are several linguistically related groups who together form the Blackfoot Confederacy. Originally nomadic peoples who hunted bison on the northern Great Plains, they were forced to move westward in the 1880s by the increasing encroachment of European settlers and the European genocide of bison. Settling in areas east of the Rockies, in what is now Montana and Alberta, Canada, they were soon forced to move onto reserves (as reservations are called in Canada), where they could no longer live in their customary ways.

Ironically, growing up on a reservation became a point of pride, as the novel shows: Having contact with non-Indigenous people was shameful, and in the case of Rose in the novel, her marriage to a white Canadian led to her banishment from the reservation. By then, there were already fewer “fully Indigenous” Blackfeet, as is also the case in Medicine River.      

Although Thomas King sets his novel in a very specific cultural milieu, he also connects it to a broader Indigenous identity and history. Harlen, for one, takes an expansive view of Indigenous identity, which is not tied to a specific Indigenous nation. Thus, he wants to visit Little Big Horn and the Custer Monument not because the Blackfeet were involved, but because, as he tells Will, “It’s part of our history” (86).