ABSTRACT
The Crow/Apsaalooke People of the Northern Missouri River Plains and Wolf Mountain Highlands
This discussion of knowing in relation to nature, space and the sacred focuses on a particular ceremonial, the Ashkisshe or ‘Sundance’, of the Crow/Apsaalooke. The Crow are an American Indian people who hold a reservation in the United States, north of the Big Horn Mountains and south of the Missouri River, in the state of Montana.1 Named by the early French explorers from a sign language gesture of a bird flying, the Crow call themselves Apsaalooke or Absaroke, after a mythical ‘large-beaked’ bird. An ancient clan system has endured among the Crow and is considered a major factor in explaining their resurgence as a people.2 Though allies of the advancing United States, after the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century the Crow population diminished through disease and despair to less than 2,000 individuals in the early twentieth century. Their current population is now well over 9,000.3 Through these challenging transitional years of the twentieth century, the Crow people continued to transmit their traditional ways of embodied knowing even as their ritual life changed. One ceremonial that provides insight into Crow religious views of space, nature, and the sacred is the Crow-Shoshone Sundance.
