Guide helps the Blackfeet

Glacier Adventure Guides owner Greg Fortin recently showed some kindness to the Blackfeet Tribe.

Fortin, whose been a guiding in Glacier Park and the Flathead and Kootenai Forests for years, last month found out that families on the Reservation were running out of food from a Blackfeet friend, Jimmy St. Goddard.

So Fortin began making calls to food banks in the Flathead and posted to social media about the problem.

In late January, he hauled more than a ton of food in his van to help needy families in Heart Butte and Seville Colony, which are both outlying towns on the reservation.

Fortin said most of the food was potatoes, bread and granola bars.

He said the trip was a bit hairy — there was snowstorm on the west side of the divide on the way over Marias Pass, though it cleared up on the east side.

Heart Butte is also no fun to get to in the winter.

Divvied up, the food amounted to 10 to 15 potatoes per person spread out over 100 families, plus the bread and granola. Still, folks were really grateful.

He said overall, he hopes the effort raised awareness that when the weather is bad on the reservation, sometimes food doesn’t get distributed to the more remote areas.

It was also nice to return a favor, he noted. Earlier last year, Fortin asked the Blackfeet for their blessing to guide in Glacier and they gave it to him.

Fortin offers ski and snowshoe tours in the winter months at Marias Pass and Two Medicine. The east side of the park once was Blackfeet land until the Blackfeet sold it to the federal government in the ceded strip treaty of 1896 — a treaty that’s still disputed by many Blackfeet leaders today as being invalid.

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I thought I’d seen it all until I started working on last week’s Yesterday’s column. In 1958 Columbia Falls leaders, including Hungry Horse News editor Mel Ruder, supported a missile base in the North Fork. The stories don’t implicitly state that the missiles would be nuclear, but in 1958 the Cold War was in full swing. Today it would be tough to imagine nukes in the North Fork. But times were different back then and there were a lot fewer people in the Flathead. Nukes also meant jobs, not just death. The missiles didn’t end up that far away — looks like the closest ones are near Valier. If we’re ever in a big old nuclear war, Montana will certainly be on the forefront.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.