High on a ridge overlooking northern Montana’s Great Plains, the ancestral land of the Blackfeet Nation spreads out toward Glacier National Park and the Rocky Mountain Front. The Blackfoot call this area Miistákis, the “backbone of the world,” Lailani Upham, a member of the Blackfeet Nation and guide for Iron Shield Creative, tells me. Today, that backbone is cut by an international border.
Upham leads cultural hikes that weave Blackfeet storytelling into outdoor exploration. She asks visitors to imagine the millions of buffalo that once roamed this land—animals the Blackfoot regard as spiritual relatives and central to life. The tribe’s connection to buffalo is reflected in their place and people names: Nititawahsi, “the land where the iinii (buffalo) live,” and Niitawahsin-nanni, “the people of the land where the iinii live.” In recent years, cross-border collaboration among the Blackfoot Confederacy has helped reintroduce buffalo to land near Browning, Montana, a restoration that makes the area “really feel like our home,” Upham says.
The Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksikaitsitapi) now includes some 40,000 members across four nations on both sides of the border: the Kainai (Blood) and Siksika in Alberta; the Piikani in Alberta; and the Aamskapi (Southern) Pikuni in Montana (federally recognized in the U.S. as the Blackfeet Nation). Each nation maintains sovereign government, yet families and cultural ties cross the boundary that was imposed in the 19th century.
That boundary, sometimes called the medicine line, acquired a different meaning for Plains peoples. Originally a colonial-imposed division, it became a place of refuge because 19th-century U.S. troops were less likely to pursue people across into Canada, and vice versa. Today, Blackfoot leaders are treating the international border as secondary to shared land and culture.
In 2018 the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Council created a coordinating body to build Blackfoot-led networks across the border, including tourism. The resulting Destination Blackfoot initiative is developing a transnational tourism corridor that treats the border as if it weren’t there—promoting what Kimmy Shade, CEO of the Tribal Council, calls “not looking at the border as a barrier [but] looking at it as ‘this is our land.’” Destination Blackfoot has mapped eight self-guided routes and highlights more than 100 operators from all four nations, from Montana guides like Upham to Alberta accommodations run by Piikani entrepreneurs. Travelers who cross still must follow border procedures and present documentation at crossings such as Del Bonita or Piegan–Carway.
I traveled the Blackfoot Immersion Route, a five-day loop from Calgary to Glacier National Park and back. In Calgary I visited Melrene Saloy’s studio, where Native Diva Creations brings Blackfoot designs to international runways. Under her guidance I beaded a traditional Blackfoot geometric pattern onto a deerskin medicine bag. Driving north, the landscape opens from foothills to prairie; in the Siksika Nation I stopped at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, where a tipi-shaped museum interprets Blackfoot history. Grant Many Heads, a senior interpreter there, showed me a map of the tribe’s traditional territory that once stretched across what is now Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana. Treaty 7, signed in 1877 between three Blackfoot nations and Canada, emerged from a period of crisis—declining buffalo populations, addiction tied to the whiskey trade, and social upheaval. Many Heads stresses that the tribe agreed to peace terms, not land surrender, and he notes the irony of a 1977 commemorative re-enactment of the treaty, when Prince Charles smoked a pipe now displayed at the museum. As the treaty’s 150th anniversary approaches in 2027, Blackfoot Crossing is expanding with new exhibits and performance space; Many Heads says they will commemorate, not celebrate, the treaty.
Crossing south into the U.S., a uniformed guard sits in a booth beneath the looming face of Ninaistako (Chief Mountain). Driving into Montana I was greeted by a herd of buffalo—an emblem of cultural revival. But the border constrains movement and daily life. Derek DesRosier, general manager of Sun Tours in East Glacier, told me the boundary “plays a major role in disconnecting communities.” Where movement once was fluid, it is now limited by paperwork and the operating hours of rural checkpoints.
Sun Tours, in business for more than three decades, is the only company offering Blackfeet-led tours of Glacier National Park. The firm’s founder, Ed DesRosier, fought park authorities in the 1990s over the right to operate on traditional Blackfeet territory; he won, and today his son Derek continues to share the park through a Blackfeet lens. Derek hopes to expand routes to connect Glacier with Waterton Lakes National Park across the border, deepening collaboration with Canadian Blackfoot relatives as the corridor grows.
In Waterton Lakes I met Marjie Crop Eared Wolf, an artist and cultural liaison between the Kainai Nation and the park. As a youth she saw little of her identity reflected in park interpretation; now, through collaborative work, Blackfoot language and culture appear in the new visitor center, trailhead signage, and programming. She oversees the Paahtómahksikimi Cultural Centre, which sells Blackfoot-made arts and hosts cultural events—from storytelling to traditional games. “My priority is us being seen back in that space that we occupied,” she says.
Destination Blackfoot and related efforts highlight a broader truth: many national parks and public lands sit on Indigenous territories. By restoring buffalo and reasserting their presence in parks and cultural sites, the Blackfoot are reclaiming identity and visibility across a landscape split by an international line. Their tourism corridor asks visitors to think differently about crossing borders—not simply as travel between two nation-states, but as journeys from Blackfoot nation to Blackfoot nation. By centering Indigenous sovereignty, storytelling, and stewardship, the Confederacy aims to make cross-border travel a way to recognize and reconnect with a shared homeland rather than reinforce division.