Heavy music festival returns to Blackfeet Reservation

The four-day event, which boasted the “backbone of the world” as its backdrop, featured bands from across the country and abroad, as well as thousands of their fans for performances and panel discussions about Indigenous culture and contemporary issues; mental health and art; and different types of metal.

To Charlie Speicher of the local Firekeeper Alliance, a suicide prevention advocacy group, the first installment was a resoundingly loud success.

“Everybody who showed up was so invested in the mission and really embraced what we were trying to do,” he said.

Unique among music festivals around the country, Fire in the Mountains was a dry event, with no alcohol allowed and none of the crowd issues that accompany large concerts. 

“It works,” he said. “That was just really affirming.”

If you go

Fire in the Mountains will return this week, July 23-26, at Red Eagle Campground. For ticket information or to see the full lineup, head to fitmfest.com. To learn more about the Firekeeper Alliance, go to firekeeperalliance.org.

The laid-back and respectful atmosphere was visible everywhere, from the tidy and litter-free festival grounds to the open-eared attendees during the talks, which often delved into deeply held, personal stories about mental health and loss.

“We want this to be a space, an event, where we can honor and remember and more formally integrate these painful losses in our lives that makes them less destabilizing,” Speicher said.

There was an Honor Lodge, which will return this year, with personal tributes to individuals’ lost loved ones. They plan to take the works from last year to make a permanent art installation.

While the festival planners had to dive into a lot of local outreach, they made their case that the end result helps break taboos about discussing mental health and instead take the issues head-on through art and open discussion.

“We don’t have any choice but to talk about it and go right at the core of these issues,” he said. “It’s really the first step to being able to overcome them.”

The festival’s new concept and location were courtesy of Speicher, a lead teacher and counselor at Buffalo Hide Academy, an alternative school in Browning. He’d attended the festival in Wyoming and, with collaborators, started an entire class on the reservation where students could learn about different strands of metal. He took a long shot and reached out to the festival organizers after they were looking for a new location.

The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council approved the event, and Chairman Rodney “Minnow” Gervais attended. The students from Browning, including the Heavy Music Symposium class, helped work as interns. This year, around 50 will be on hand, working and distributing copies of a zine they made.

According to organizers, attendance last year was 3,000, drawing fans from abroad as well as around the U.S., since it had built a following in Wyoming already.

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The Firekeeper Alliance has helped curate the festival, including a number of major acts. For his part, Speicher said he’s personally drawn to the extreme, aggressive and caustic styles.

“The visceral aggression and rawness you find in those styles, the explosive and cathartic nature, reinforces that theme of ‘let’s get it out.’ We’re angry, we’re upset, we’re broken.’ This art is a way to process that in a really volatile way,” he said.

The headliners include Neurosis, a Bay Area act with roots in metal, punk and experimental music that’s widely influential.

One of the band’s original members, Steve Von Till, has been active with the Browning “metal classes” since before the festival. Based in Idaho, Von Till works as a teacher himself and releases poetry along with solo albums that verge on spoken word, with the influence of ambient music and minimalist classical.

Earlier this year, the group released its first album in seven years, “An Undying Love for a Burning World,” with guitarist-vocalist Aaron Turner of Isis and Sumac. The record received positive reviews in publications like Pitchfork. Taylor’s band, Old Man Gloom, is playing the festival as well.

The other Firekeeper picks are Yob, an Oregon doom metal band, and Full of Hell, an American grindcore act.

Raven Chacon, Diné from the Navajo Nation in Arizona, is the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in music. In 2022, he accepted the award for his piece, “Voiceless Mass.” Chacon, who works in a variety of styles, will perform a duo set with drummer Iggor Cavalera of the Brazilian metal band Sepultura.