Pamella Hays

Circling Pamella Hays

In faraway Montana, tucked between the ragged peaks of Glacier National Park to the west and the vast prairie to the east, lies the seat of the Blackfeet Indian Nation. Here a man and wife and their two children of mixed heritage struggle to find their identities in the two worlds they inhabit, trying to reconcile modernity with its allure of materialism and power with the countervailing reality of the ancient beliefs and rituals of Native American culture. Their story weaves together mythology and everyday life into a complex emotional pattern of love, anger, loss, and redemption, as this troubled, fractured family threatens to implode. They are ultimately aided by the universal wisdom of a traditional culture that flows like an underground river beneath them, and the family members gradually awaken to their own potential for becoming whole. Anyone who has ever felt the tug of wilderness, the fascination of a venerable tribal culture living in our very midst, the inner conflict between the world that we think we see and the presence of another reality that we ignore at our peril, will feel at home within this story.