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). David Plume is also caught up in a broader Indigenous history, which is at the same time narrower than Harlen’s: David is politically driven, and in the case of the latter, whom he considers to be worthy of respect depends on their politics and whether or not they actively resist and protest against the marginalization of Indigenous peoples by the US and Canadian governments, as he had during the occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973.

This historical event was actually the “Second Wounded Knee.” The first was a massacre of nearly 300 Lakota people by the US Cavalry in 1890. The second was an occupation deliberately initiated on the site of the massacre by members of the American Indian Movement, who were protesting the US government’s failure to honor treaty obligations. The activists controlled the town for 71 days, in defiance of government forces, until several of them were killed and they were finally overpowered. Widely covered by the media, the occupation galvanized many Native Americans throughout North America and Canada, who traveled to Wounded Knee to join the protesters as David had.

Whether the past will continue to shape the present in Medicine River is a question posed by the novel, as is the question of which past will help the Indigenous people in the present and moving forward. The questions of how Indigenous identity is shaped, who is included, why, and how the broader shared history of Indigenous identity impacts the present are central concerns of the novel.