The Blackfeet Flood
Fifty years after a devastating flood that left him an orphan, a Blackfeet man returns to his reservation to face the ghosts of his past.
In 1964, a devastating flood tore through Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation — uprooting homes, killing 31 people, and signaling the end of a way of life for many traditional families. Fifty years after the worst natural disaster in the state’s history, a Blackfeet man named Butch returns home to confront the tragedy that left him an orphan at 14, and to try to remember “what it means to be Blackfeet.” Blackfeet Flood follows Butch for four years as he faces the ghosts of his past and the challenges of life in one of the reservation’s most isolated reaches. As he reconnects with childhood friends Smokey and Buzz, who lost their stepfather in the flood but remained on their family’s ranch, their story runs in counterpoint to his. Butch sees in them the life that he could have lived, had the flood not intervened, while Smokey and Buzz wonder about the world he’s returned from, and what might have happened had they left.