Storytellers: The Blackfeet Nation and Charles M. Russel

Artworks hold histories, memories, and relationships passed down through generations. This exhibition celebrates these ongoing legacies in ancestral artworks by the Nitsitapii (“Real People,” Blackfoot Confederacy) and their dialogue with paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926).

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Russell moved to Montana as a teenager and spent the rest of his life there, on the ancestral lands of the Nitsitapii. Russell primarily interacted with the Amskaapii Pikanii and regularly traversed the Blackfeet Indian Reservation during travels from his home in Great Falls to Glacier National Park and Canada.

There is no word for “art” in nitsii’powahsin (the Blackfoot language). What we might call artworks are, to the Nitsitapii, living things intricately connected to community that represent ongoing histories and connections that are individual, collective, and spiritual. Here, we honor these objects as storytellers, just as we recognize Russell’s skill as a visual storyteller.

For the first time, this project honors the reciprocity between Russell and the Nitsitapii people on whose land he lived and worked and who remain grounded in the place they have never left.

Within the Blackfoot Confederacy, four distinct nations share language and history: the Amskaapii Pikanii (South Peigan or Blackfeet Nation) in Montana and the Kainai (Blood Tribe), Ahpahtsii Piikanii (North Peigan), and Siksikaa (Blackfoot) in Canada.