I am nothing like an authority on Blackfoot knowledge ways, although I do have interest and some fortunate exposure to them through the auspices of my dear friend Ryan HeavyHead. Through him, I learned a version of the story of Scarface, a disfigured hero who, in his quest to marry a beautiful young woman who was betrothed to the sun, went on a complex quest to the sun’s lodge, where he befriended the child of the sun and moon— the morning star— and bravely slew a creche of monster birds that had destroyed their other children.

Scarface is associated with the false morning star (which I call the companion star), Jupiter. Like some other heroes, after completing his terrestrial quest, he rose into the sky to join the celestial family. While it is impossible to understand such matters with a literal or objective mind (for this is not the aspect of awareness in which they have meaningful presence), it is nonetheless interesting that the planet associated with Scarface has, indeed, ‘a giant scar on its face’, something that could not be known by ancient peoples… according to how we generally ascertain what it ‘was possible’ for them to know.

This story (which moderns would probably classify as a fable or myth, but I would classify quite differently) contains many important gifts of perspective, awareness and origin. One of the many things I have learned through being exposed to Blackfoot origins stories is that our modern ways of knowing have inadvertently amputated some of our most precious assets, assets that would otherwise grant us senses and abilities in which ‘we do not believe’. These are not precisely religious, per se, for this classification is also a modern derivation of something very few of us have direct experience of. Rather, it is evidence that the ways of knowing to which we are subjected by modern colonial cultures are woefully incomplete at best, and catastrophically misinformed about matters relating to nature, origin, intelligence, sensing… and the great mysteries of birth, life and death.