Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation

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By B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster

November 25, 2025

In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published by High Country News. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

You’re Good

“A few, for sure.”
“About four times, actually. And my family’s rather small.”
“Suicide has impacted my old friend group quite a bit.”
“I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family.”
“My older brother.”
“My sister’s youngest.”
“I never thought I’d have that many people.”
“Alcohol and depression, it comes hand-in-hand.”
“One day the smiles stopped.”
“I don’t mind talking about it.”
“You guys are actually talking to the right person.”

I’m interviewing fellow Indigenous metalheads at a heavy music festival on the Blackfeet Nation, with Russel Daniels (Diné and Ho-Chunk descent), a photographer who’s not into metal.

“Plenty of times.”
“I had attempted two times.”
“Growing up here, you could feel very isolated.”
“The truth is I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.”
“Everywhere I went I just didn’t feel like I had enough of me in me.”
“It’s a battle, for sure. Sometimes it’s a little voice in the back of your ear.”
“I’ve looked at a full prescription of pills I had, and I’m just like, ‘just this, and it can all just be …’”
“But I never went through with it, cause I’m still here!”

Some of them are young. High schoolers, even. 

Piikunii high school students Alissa and Alison Skunkcap, Jasmine Bechel and James Trombley paint each other’s faces. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

“The idea came close here and there, but I had my own outlets to manage my emotions.”
“Music. Going to shows. Keeping my hands busy.”
“After those two times, it really was music.”
“My son, really. There’s a lot of love around me.”
“I didn’t want my mom to lose another kid.”
“I don’t want my niece or my nephew, or even my mother, walking in and finding me there.”
“Seeing how other people push on. Being one of the people that other people see pushing on.”
“Skateboarding, when I was younger, which is kind of why I got into heavy metal. Listening to my uncle’s Metallica CDs.”
“I just get over it by listening to metal.”
“Throw on some metal and you’re good.”

Buffalo Hide Academy

The school year was almost past, and a hot May afternoon lorded over Browning, Montana, capital of the Blackfeet Nation. Grinning rez dogs with patchy coats rested in the sidewalk shade outside an alternative public high school called Buffalo Hide Academy, where lunch was ending. Students ambled into a warehouse-sized classroom with a podium and some tables at the far end, and musical instruments in a corner by the teacher’s office. Student artwork and a Blackfeet Nation flag bedecked the walls alongside a mural of a buffalo skull and the school’s name in dripping red letters. The kids didn’t sit in rows or take out homework; nobody checked whether they were on time. They shuffled around in grubby Converse, joking with each other at full volume. Some picked up instruments and started jamming with their teacher, Robert Hall (Piikunii), who was already messing around on the drum kit. It got loud, fast.

“I would describe Browning as metal,” Hall told me, seated at the drums in a luau shirt and bushy black ponytail, his ferocious brown eyes the size of jawbreakers. “We don’t turn away from the darkness,” he said. “We don’t hide our own ugliness, the way that people in big cities could hide.” The town is rough, even by rez standards. “There’s buildings that have been standing just in a void. No humans, no life running through these buildings for years,” Hall explained. “But there’s immense beauty here, too — extreme beauty. Our murals, our family networks, our ancient history, our language, the things that are binding us together for thousands of generations.”

Another teacher, Charlie Speicher, warmed up the mic. “Who likes chaotic mathcore?” he tried, referring to a rhythmically unpredictable subgenre of hardcore punk that he describes as “bonkers” and “all over the place.” Two hands went up. One was mine. “That makes three of us,” said Speicher as he pulled up a YouTube video.

Buffalo Hide Academy director, Charlie Speicher after his heavy music symposium. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country NewsThe students were finishing the inaugural year of Buffalo Hide Academy’s semester-long, two-hour heavy music symposium dedicated to the study of metal and hardcore. Speicher, who’s non-Native, is a clinical counselor and also Buffalo Hide Academy’s director. The symposium was his brainchild. He and other teachers hand-picked students who looked like they might be isolated, or might be into darker, more aggressive art and music — kids who might be potential metalheads. More than fifty students initially enrolled. By the end of the first semester, kids were sneaking out of other classes to join.

Speicher teaches in his “battle vest,” a staple of metal fashion that’s usually denim hand-studded with metal pyramids or spikes, and stitched with patches showing band logos in barbed, rootlike scripts impossible for the uninitiated to decipher. In addition to providing a feeling of physical protection, battle vests are threshold guardians that intimidate normies while signalling to dedicated fans who recognize the glyphs. If you know, you know — and you’re family. If not, fuck off. But Speicher is here to welcome kids into the fold, where a community of music fans understands their suffering. Or, as he put it later, “to create more safety and protection specifically from suicidal distress,” which he said has impacted every family in Browning.

Some in Browning think he’s doing the devil’s work, but Speicher is as warm and approachable as a cool youth pastor, speaking gently and smiling easily through a handsome swath of stubble. His vest is emblazoned with the gaunt face from Converge’s 2001 album Jane Doe. He showed the kids the music video to “Farewell, Mona Lisa” by mathcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan. It sometimes sounds like Dick Van Dyke’s fancy footwork flawlessly executing a trip and stumble. “Goes hard, huh? What’d you see? What’d you hear?”

It’s precise and complicated, students said. The guitars and drums are in conversation, mirroring each other. The drumming starts like black metal blast beats but switches into a groove. Rough vocals alternate with intelligible singing. Guitars are in standard tuning, not drop-tuning like most metal. The fashion is different from metal too – less theatrical. One student noted the singer’s contorted body language: “He’s feeling his emotions while he’s letting the art out of him.”

“Mmm, beautiful,” Speicher said. Later, students looked at landscape photos and guessed which heavy genre or subgenre they represented: a frozen forest for black metal; a crumbling alley for doom; an urban protest for hardcore; an alligator swamp for death metal. They discussed “geographic determinism,” the theory that music is shaped partly by its place of origin.

“But there’s immense beauty here, too — extreme beauty. Our murals, our family networks, our ancient history, our language, the things that are binding us together for thousands of generations.”

But Speicher wasn’t just there to nerd out. He shifted seamlessly into an overview of heavy music’s therapeutic benefits: catharsis, community and coping skills. “Heavy music teaches us things such as we’re not alone; when life is dark, we do something about it. We’re not just a prisoner to that darkness. But also that our risk fluctuates, that our misery isn’t gonna last forever. There are ways through it.” Students doodled in notebooks, idly plucked at an unplugged bass guitar, or held hands under the table. 

A history lesson from another teacher on the ’80s and ’90s Scandinavian origins of black metal — including its problematic elements, like murder and Nazism among some bands — served as a caution to consume media critically. While hardcore is overtly political and tends hard left, the morality of metal is murkier, oriented primarily around pushing extremes and attacking social norms. Results can be chaotic. This segued into a high-level, student-led conversation about whether and when to separate art from artist. In another lesson, Speicher said, they’d studied the Vietnam War through the lens of Black Sabbath, whose 1970 staple “War Pigs” critiqued American involvement.

“Your homework tonight, and I’ll remind you of this later, go listen to the song ‘43% Burnt.’” Speicher told students to pay special attention to an influential breakdown at the end. They broke off to paint each other’s faces in “corpse paint,” and take album cover-style photos with animal skulls and hides. Emily Edwards (Piikunii), an almost-15-year-old, schooled me on Swedish rock. “You don’t know Ghost?” she said. Inspired by the class, Edwards and some friends had started their own band, Crimson Harmony. Edwards was one of many students who signed up for a paid internship at an upcoming metal festival called Fire in the Mountains coming to Blackfeet Nation later that summer. Festival internships were part of why teachers started the symposium. 

Nicholas Rink (Piikunii), who teaches Blackfeet studies and language, pulled me aside, brimming with excitement. He was painting the skull of a buffalo the students helped process. Across its brow he’d painted overlapping bear paws, mother and cub, in flame colors. He dotted them with pinprick white stars — Ursa Major and Minor, which he said both Piikunii and European traditions recognize as bears. The skull was a gift for Norwegian festival headliners Wardruna, whose latest album, Birna, was named in honor of the bear. Rink had aligned the painted stars to match the position the real stars would take when Wardruna performed beneath them in Blackfeet Nation.

The Firekeepers

AS COVID ARRIVED IN 2020, a string of suicides ripped through the Blackfeet Nation, claiming multiple kids per year, some as young as 11. Speicher said it hit the entire community “like a sledgehammer.” He called up a fourth grade teacher in Rathdrum, Idaho, named Steve Von Till, whom metalheads might recognize as a doomy poet-troubadour and the former Neurosis guitarist. Speicher, Hall, Rink, Von Till and a few others banded together to help their students stay alive, as if building a protective fire to shelter them in the darkness. They called themselves the Firekeeper Alliance.

A few years earlier, the crunchy-pagan festival Fire in the Mountains was priced out of gentrifying Jackson, Wyoming. Speicher spoke to its owners about bringing the festival to the rez. He planned to build internships into his class to connect kids with career pathways in an industry of like-minded people. It sounded perfect. But first they needed buy-in from tribal council.

The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council has long supported youth through athletics, especially running and basketball. Dipping into the arts, specifically music — to say nothing of metal — would be new territory. But Councilman Everett Armstrong told me that because it was for the kids, they considered it. “Let’s try to go a different route to give our youth something that they can open our minds to, open our hearts to, find themselves,” he said.

It could help the nation economically, too, Armstrong said. The reservation lies along the imaginary line splitting Piikunii homelands into the colonial annex called Glacier National Park. The park is an over-half-billion-dollar industry. But many Piikunii people, Armstrong said, live in poverty. It’s one of the factors contributing to the widespread suicidal distress that disproportionately harms Native communities. When I told folks I was going to Blackfeet Nation, most didn’t know where that was, until I mentioned Glacier. The monied Glacier Park Lodge had a gift shop peddling Glacier mementos — but, despite being on the reservation, offered nothing I could take home that says “Blackfeet Nation.” “We need to try to tap into that and try to get some revenue back into the Blackfeet Reservation,” Armstrong said. 

For the festival to work, they needed bands big enough to draw fans to the rez. So in August 2024, the Firekeepers flew to Boulder, Colorado, to court pagan folk band Wardruna, whose world tour was starting at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Speicher and the gang wanted to meet in person and convince them to play Blackfeet Nation. It’s for the children, they would say. Norwegian and Piikunii cultures share traditions of animism. The Firekeepers brought sweet pine ties, used for smudging, as gifts, and met Wardruna at the C.U. Boulder library. They didn’t know the band was already sold on the idea. Singer Einar Selvik had spoken to Speicher on the phone, and they were ready to say yes.

“A chance to stand with (the) Indigenous in a constructive, powerful way, and a chance to visit a beautiful place and to do something that is more than just a festival, more than just a concert,” Selvik told me, “all the pieces just fit so well together.” It was a major get for the festival. Rink said they stayed up all night talking about it. Their vision and the Nordic stars had aligned. 

 Steve Von Till (left) and Wardruna lead singer Einar Selvik (right) during the festival. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

Dance Intertribal

LATE JULY: AMTRAK UNLOADED A GAGGLE OF BLACK DENIM and bandanna-clad metalheads onto the small, sunny platform at East Glacier Park, Montana, a tiny seasonal town 15 minutes outside Browning. Two days earlier, Ozzy Osbourne, the grandfather of metal and lead singer of Black Sabbath, had died.

Because it was the festival’s first time on a reservation, nobody knew what to expect. Festivals, after all, can go very badly, and no one wanted to remember this as “Fyre” in the Mountains. But good omens greeted us. Our Lord and Savior Ozzy must have parted the week’s rainy spell for a few days of perfect festival weather: high 70s, partly cloudy, cool after sunset. 

The Firekeeper Alliance distributed tickets to the local community, and invited Blackfoot attendees from Canada. Others road tripped in, or flew into Kalispell, around 2,400 fans — a third of them Natives, Speicher and Rink estimated — converging from across the continent for three days and 23 bands.

On the festival grounds, the party opened not with a land acknowledgement but a welcome from the land’s actual Indigenous people. In proper Native fashion, they held a grand entry, and true to form, it started late. “We’re runnin’ on Indian time!”  shouted Hall through a megaphone, war-whooping and half-dangling from the back of a motorcycle that Speicher peeled across the rugged ground.

As the crew finished setting up a stage in the distance, hundreds of metalheads sat watching in a circle while Piikunii locals in regalia danced fancy, traditional, chicken, jingle and grass. Young Grey Horse hammered the drum and Hall let his rowdy demeanor emcee, throwing out Charlie Hill jokes to keep the mood light. For many, it was a transformative moment. Some fans had never been to a powwow and were encountering Indigenous culture for the first time.

Finally, Hall called for an intertribal — an all-inclusive dance. The metalheads hesitated, but after a few courageous outliers broke onto the grass, others followed, bouncing a circle in their battle vests and black jeans, like a respectful, slow-motion mosh pit, as they awkwardly tried to two-step like the pros. A showboating school-aged fancy dancer twirled past them in her shawl, rapid-fire footwork leaving them in the dust. But the dance was a welcome, not a competition. Hearts were opening. People cheered, Natives and non-Natives together.

For Selvik, the powwow was a powerful way “to set the tone, to open the circle.” This festival required some vulnerability of attendees, some deference. We were guests on Piikunii lands. There would be no alcohol — a marked adjustment for metal culture. It would be, as Hall declared, “a cultural exchange between the Piikunii and metalheads.”

Fringe Culture

“ON MY RESERVATION, PEOPLE ONLY LISTEN TO TWO THINGS: rap or hip-hop,” joked Logan Mason (Colville), who traveled from Spokane and volunteered with the camping crew in exchange for festival admission. Mason lost his brother and nephew to suicide, and metal helped him work through depression in his late teens and early 20s. “Growing up, I did not know anybody else that listened to black metal or death metal.” 

On other reservations, it’s different. The Navajo Nation, for example, has a genre-defining “rez metal” scene. Some folks joke that you’re either a hip-hop Native or a metal Native. If anything, Natives seem over-represented in the metal community. “A lot of it is land-based,” said Meg Skyum (Oji-Cree), who’d come to the festival from Ontario to see the Native black metal outfit Blackbraid and get a sneak preview of their third album. Atmospheric black metal in particular is “about the fucking trees and shit,” which Natives appreciate. Plus, Natives and metalheads, Skyum added, both live in the margins of ordinary society. “We’re fringe, they’re fringe.”

“A chance to stand with (the) Indigenous in a constructive, powerful way, and a chance to visit a beautiful place and to do something that is more than just a festival, more than just a concert.”

“The metal tribe itself seems to attract a lot of people that go through different types of struggle,” said Tomas Falomir (Ojibwe, Hopi and Zuni Pueblo descent) from Parker, Colorado, noting that the music is healing, the community welcoming. “Any type of person could be included.”

There’s also something about the sound, Falomir added. “It almost goes with the loudness, and even down to the beat of it.” Other fans agreed. The thundering drums and powerful vocals resemble a modernized version of Native music, one said. Pomona-based Indigenous death/doom project Tzompantli would later exemplify this, shaking the festival grounds with stomping downtempos from a battalion of traditional and contemporary drums. And European bands like Wardruna, fans noted, are really, really into their cultures, especially pre-Christian traditions, just like Natives.

“A lot of people are into metal because of how much trauma that we go through in our daily lives. And not only in our own daily lives, but our historical trauma,” said Damien Jones Jr. (Diné), who traveled with family from Lukachukai in Navajo Nation, and brought one of the festival’s most-photographed battle vests, decked out with turquoise geometrics and a “Frybread Power” backpatch. Jones plays saxophone — classical and jazz. “That’s what I do as well, throw all my feelings and emotions into music.”

Buffalo Hide Academy students in Browning, Montana, pose in corpse paint for an art project as part of the school’s heavy music symposium. Tailyr Irvine/High Country News

Dark Horse, Ride

“WELCOME TO THE BACKBONE OF THE WORLD,” read the sign at Red Eagle Campground, where the Rockies arched like the knobby vertebrae of a sleeping Elder God half-buried in sediment. Across glassy Two Medicine Lake an amphitheater of pines presided like a chorus between the water line and a low timberline. On the near bank, a footpath wound along the edge of the lake, opening to beach access here and there with pop-up canopies and scatterings of hay-bale seats for workshops and panels on Indigenous sovereignty, ethnobotany, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people, and the therapeutic effects of heavy music.

A cluster of interconnected meadows transformed into parking lots, a village of glamping yurts, a small bazaar of vendor tents, and the “stage bowl”: a shallow glen with two stages set up between tipis serving as green rooms. Curtains of savory smoke stoked saliva as Montana “off-grid catering” team Region Sauvage barbecued ducks and student-processed buffalo. High school interns decorated the stages with skulls, antlers, driftwood, witchy-Indigenous pieces of the forest. Edwards worked the merch tent, hawking Firekeeper Alliance shirts that showed a malevolent spirit of suicide haunting a tipi where Native kids sheltered around a fire. Proceeds supported suicide prevention. Shirts sold out the first day. Parking attendants and security all seemed suspiciously chill. It was intentional, they explained. Natives are used to being followed and scrutinized. Nobody wanted that atmosphere here.

First on stage was Sage Bond (Diné and Nde), an up-and-coming acoustic metal singer-songwriter from Tonalea in Navajo Nation, who’d previously toured in support of suicide prevention efforts on her reservation. Bond matched the mountain sunshine with a low snarl a la Eddie Vedder, before breaking into a roar the size of 10 mountain lions — what she called “the Cookie Monster vocals.” Bond expected a sparse crowd drifting in and out, but her performance captivated hundreds. It was a big moment — her first time playing a festival that size, which she jokingly called a “black metal Coachella” (though the only feather headdresses were on tribal council members). “How the heck did they even find me?”

Turns out Bond was recommended by Chicago black metal artists Pan-Amerikan Native Front. During their set, they invited students onstage to headbang alongside the singer, Kurator of War, in black-and-white face paint and crossed bullet sashes. Other students held up a Blackfeet Nation flag  and tossed their long hair next to barrel-chested guitarist Necroboar (Purépecha), who looked mean as hell in spiked leather cuffs, but later, backstage, was beaming. “A lot of people are thanking us for being here with the kids,” Necroboar said, “but it’s like you don’t understand what this means to us to be here and to see them.” He told me he and his bandmates saw themselves in the teenagers. Misty-eyed fans agreed, knowing they would remember this moment forever. The band had rehearsed their set that morning at Buffalo Hide Academy with the kids. They’d always wanted to play a rez. Being here was a dream come true. “I’m still shaking from it,” Necroboar said.

Sage Bond (left) and Liłith singer and guitarist Heather Jordan (right) perform during the festival. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

Musicians didn’t quarantine themselves. Many hung out with fans — riding horses, paddleboarding, doing yoga by the lake, attending workshops and panel discussions, or headbanging in the crowds. By the food stands selling frybread with huckleberry butter, metalheads set up a little table as an altar to Ozzy. It gathered river rocks, feathers, cigarettes, and trinkets. “Long Live the Prince of Darkness,” read a sign at the feet of a grinning Ozzy bobblehead and some candles.

Twenty-four weeks pregnant, Heather Jordan (Diné) delivered a scorching set in the sunshine with her masked drummer pummeling the kit behind her. Jordan is the singer and guitarist for Navajo Nation blackened doomgaze duo Liłith. She’d wanted to play Fire in the Mountains because favorites like Wolves in the Throne Room preceded her. And it helped that this year’s festival focused on “the Native side of things.” Jordan works a day job at a restaurant serving tourists on her own rez, which is also dry. “It’s like the hardest thing for them to understand,” she said. When Fire in the Mountains invited Liłith, their answer was “Hell, yes.”

The festival’s spirituality attracted Jon Krieger of Blackbraid, a solo recording project that blew up overnight when his first single, “Barefoot Ghost Dance on Blood Soaked Soil,” got traction on YouTube in 2022. “All the black metal that’s the best in the world in my opinion comes from the heart,” Krieger said. Blackbraid was one of around five Native bands playing the festival, though Krieger, who was adopted, doesn’t know his tribal affiliation. Black metal is a spiritual genre, he said, and while it’s dominated by “Scandinavian dudes talking about old Norse religion and culture,” the values align. “Anti-Christianity is something that we share with them.”

“A lot of people are into metal because of how much trauma that we go through in our daily lives. And not only in our own daily lives, but our historical trauma.”

On stage later, beneath an array of a dozen stag skulls, Krieger was slinking around like a ghostly Indigenous Jim Morrison, windmilling his waist-length hair, blasting life force through a cedar flute and leaning over the crowd to shriek upward-arcing shards — whose strength never flagged during his entire blistering set — as his guitarist crowned his howls with constellations of tremolo picking. In the mosh pit, one fan hoisted a buffalo rib the size of a baseball bat, presumably from the barbecue, like some feral invocation. Blackbraid’s performance may have converted Daniels, the photographer, to solid metal fandom. But after Converge, he stood by me and said, “Now I get it.”

Converge was another get, one of Speicher’s favorites. Bassist Nate Newton had Zoomed into Speicher’s classroom to chat music with students. So had Ivar Bjørnson from Enslaved — A-listers, donating their time to Browning rez kids.

Before Converge played, Speicher and the other Firekeepers presented them with a buffalo skull painted with the iconic Jane Doe face. And they gifted the buffalo’s tongue, the most prized part of the animal, to tribal council.

A mosh pit opened in the center of the crowd as soon as Converge blasted forth, the biggest and most fearsome pit yet. The chaos of bodies in conflict summoned a dust devil from the Earth into the sky. It might not look like it, but there’s a shared ethic at work, what Hall called “consensual fucking violence, man.” If you get a bloody nose, you can be proud. If you fall, fans pick you back up. We aren’t fighting. By bracing and colliding, we’re helping each other. The rush is purifying. The release, stabilizing. Jumping in, you might want to die, but when the pit spits you out, you’ll be beaming like Necroboar — happy to have survived the maelstrom.

Partway through Converge’s set, skinny, sleeve-tatted frontman Jacob Bannon passed the mic to a Piikunii youth, who seamlessly took over the chorus of “Dark Horse.”

We’ll show the demons
For what they are
Dark!
Horse!
Ride!
Towards the light!

The mosh pit during Converge’s performance. Russel Albert Daniels / High Country News

He knew every shout and scream by heart, absolutely commanding the stage. The crowd was living for it.

Musicians understood the assignment and turned it up to 11, new blood and seasoned pros alike. As dusk settled, staff closed the lakeside trails, mindful of everyone’s safety, while Finnish folk metal band Hexvessel sang about people disappearing into the forests. After dark, fans gathered around a bonfire to ward off the chill. Wardruna took the stage and spread their haunting ambience to the woods’ inky edges. Someone dressed like a wizard slipped through the crowds as a human figure with antlers danced silhouetted before a glowing tipi. High above a membrane of diffuse gray, the bear stars slowly turned.

A Strange Road to Joy

A FULL MAP OF METAL’S SPRAWLING SUBGENRES is hard to pin down. But for what it’s worth, Wikipedia lists 34 subgenres and 16 sub-subgenres of metal, rivalled primarily by much broader genres like pop, rock, and opera, the latter which has 120 subgenres. Encyclopaedia Metallum lists 16 main subgenres, but sub-subgenres and combinations seem unlimited.

Like opera, much of metal prioritizes the voice — though as an aesthetic inversion. Similar to Inuit throat singing, vocalizations are guttural and challenging to master. Like wine, metal adheres to a pedigree whose sense experience reflects a place of origin: Cascadian black metal, for instance, is hazy as the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest. And like European classical music, or jazz, metal ranges in style from ambient drone to bombastic spectacle to precise and unpredictable arrangements astonishing to perform.

“We’ve all had periods of hurt. And this music was the medicine we didn’t know we needed until we’re in it.”

But something deeper draws metalheads together, perhaps a willingness to inquire on levels the establishment forbids. What most clearly sets it apart from other genres is that it’s so rooted in anger and sadness — or their common ancestors: terror, lack, isolation and despair. Metal, one fan told me, is “a strange road to joy.”

“We’ve all had periods of hurt,” Kurator of War said, seated on a folding chair next to Von Till with singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, Newton and Bjørnson. No makeup, no bullets. Behind them, morning clouds rippled like flags on the glacier-crisp pebble beds of Two Medicine Lake. “And this music was the medicine we didn’t know we needed until we’re in it.” A crowd of metalheads sat cross-legged on the grass, or perched on hay bales in the partial pine shade, listening to the panel. “I think we’re all curious. I think we’re all empathetic. I think we want to get to that other side of connection and knowledge.”

Einar Selvik, the lead singer of Norwegian band Wardruna, participates in a morning workshop at Fire in the Mountains. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

Speicher lobbed questions that prompted an intimate conversation about the healing power of heavy music, which at times drew tears — from fans and musicians. Von Till said heavy music is a way of “getting rid of the sickness,” which helps him become more sensitive and vulnerable. He also noted the importance of catharsis. “How many times has that moment of release prevented that one moment in a kid that can’t be retaken?”

Early in Bjørnson’s life, he realized people had to be athletic or good looking for acceptance in some groups. “With the metal gang, the qualification was being into metal,” he said.

“It’s not like this kind of stuff attracts normal people. Like we all — you’re weird. You’re all weird,” Newton said to ripples of laughter and cheers. “And it’s beautiful. We could be completely different but we have this one thing that we both understand: why we’re into it.”

“It’s them that are weird,” Von Till parried. “We’re the normal ones, right? Fuck that.” More cheers.

Oh, Lord, Yeah

ON THE THIRD DAY, THE SKY RENT IN TWO. Just as the evening drained of color, the power went out — halfway through a set by Virginia headbangers Inter Arma. They didn’t stop. Only the drum kit was audible without amps and mics, but the drummer kept spirits rolling as the minutes wore on, stage hands scrambling to patch the glitch.

Answers
Sage Bond

The Dying Breath of a Sacred Stag
Blackbraid

Dark Horse
Converge

Michikiniqua’s Triumph
Pan-Amerikan Native Front

Tlaloc Icuic
Tzompantli

The Millennium King
Old Man’s Child

Feral Love
Chelsea Wolfe

War Pigs
Black Sabbath

Takeahnase
Neurosis

The Watcher
Enslaved

Farewell, Mona Lisa
The Dillinger Escape Plan

Forest Service Road Blues
Inter Arma

Hell is a Mirror
The Keening

Birna
Warduna

Calling Down the Darkness
Steve Von Till

Rainbow in the Dark
Dio

>> Listen on Spotify

Sparse raindrops descended upon the crowd, but nobody seemed to care. Then the familiar tick of a tempo rose from the drummer’s high hat cymbals. The crowd started laughing, cheering, singing. It was “War Pigs” — Sabbath. Colorful stage lights fired back up. When the metalheads sang “Oh, Lord, yeah!” the sneer of Ozzy’s voice carried like mist across the many, a phantom formed by hundreds of mouths in unison. Re-amped guitars picked up the lick to complete the collective homage. Piikunii highschoolers sieged the stage again, drumming powwow style alongside the band.

Nigh had the crowd caught its breath when lightning flashed like a Catholic schoolteacher flicking the lights. Thunder murmured from the belly of the Rockies beyond a ridgeline that blurred into rolling gray. Another flash. Closer, noted Daniels, the photographer; maybe two second’s delay. Sparse droplets swelled to a downpour. The lightless heavens opened, the Prince of Darkness summoned.

“This is metal,” a festival staff member in a Day-Glo vest shouted to fans gathered under the merch tent. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. The tent’s frame could draw lightning. “Shelter in your cars or tents!” he ordered. “Go, now! Now!” Metalheads scrambled for cover, evacuating in slick mud.

Daniels and I found ourselves with some new friends, ducking into the yurt of one of the musicians, Rebecca Vernon, founder of Salt Lake City doom-sludge band SubRosa, who now performs a solo piano project called The Keening. She invited us in, offered us snacks, made sure we were all safe and hydrated. We laughed together, Natives and non-Natives, prisoners of the darkness, speculating about whether Inter Arma had summoned the spirit of Grandfather Ozzy and he was messing with us from — wherever he was. We worried the next set might be canceled. It was one of the headliners, Old Man’s Child, a fan favorite that helped define the Norwegian black metal sound in the early days. In over 30 years, Old Man’s Child had never played in the United States. But they’d agreed to play Blackfeet Nation.

“Debuting in a setting like this adds depth to the moment,” singer Galder told the website Knotfest before the festival. “There’s something about the rawness and unpredictability of the natural world that mirrors what I try to capture in Old Man’s Child. The beauty in the darkness, the stillness before the storm, the feeling of something ancient just beneath the surface.” That ancient unpredictability may have just gotten the better of his grand North American debut.

Native black metal band, Blackbraid, performs on the main stage during the festival. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

A scream rang through the night. Or a shout? It was hard to understand, like metal vocals. I unzipped the door flap. The rain had stopped. The shouts rang clearer a second time: “Show’s back on!” We jammed our feet back into soggy shoes and boots.

It was fully nighttime when the storm’s misery passed. A string of fans with phone flashlights and headlamps meandered back down the muddy path and over a little footbridge, across a babbling brook to the clearing where the bonfire flared bright and warm between the stages, belching embers upward like some inverted underworld rain. From a distance, the returning metalheads looked like a serpent of stars.

By firelight we danced with a Piikunii grandmother in a silk bandanna to Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark,” euphoria setting in from the topsy-turvy snafu and the might of nature, which had banished all traces of late-festival fatigue. Then finally, riding in on the heels of the thunderstorm, Old Man’s Child took the stage. Galder, in corpse paint, dispatched legions of fog wraiths, strobe spectres galloping across a sea of electrified faces. A beautiful hell broke loose, exorcising our collective and personal demons. The festival — the ceremony — was complete.

‘Our ancestors held ceremony together’

ON SOCIAL MEDIA, FANS WERE STUPID WITH ENTHUSIASM about the weekend: “Pure magic,” “transformational,” “profound,” “life changing.” They posted reports of unexpected tears and healing. One Instagram comment called it the “the most incredible metal festival I’ve been to, and it was my 3rd one this summer.” Others called it the best music festival they’d been to of any genre. Daniels, newly baptized, joined the chorus: “I have joined the cvlt.”

And it wasn’t just the music. The consensus seemed to be that the lack of alcohol actually enhanced the experience. Frank Godla, co-founder of digital publication Metal Injection, said he learned more about Native people at this festival than he ever had from books or documentaries. Wardruna echoed the many in posting humble thanks to the Blackfeet Nation: “There are so many people out there in the world who deeply sympathize and stand with you and your ancestors in all your struggles. I am one of those people,” Salnik captioned a picture of himself on stage, proudly holding aloft the hand-painted buffalo skull. “It was like our ancestors held ceremony together and their meeting is rippling as we speak.”

And the learning was two-way: Tribal Chairman Rodney “Minnow” Gervais took the stage to remark on how kind and diverse the metalheads were, how clean they kept the grounds. “Be proud of yourselves,” he said. “What you see here is proof that music transcends religion, color, whatever you want. It brings us all together.”

“They look scary,” Councilman Armstrong told me about the metalheads, “but they’re some of the nicest people. They’re so welcoming.” People I spoke to in East Glacier agreed. Armstrong said tribal council is now considering branching into music events of other genres, too.

“It’s heartwarming to have a full circle moment for me,” Mason, the fan from Spokane, said, seeing Native culture come together with the music he loves, in support of a cause close to his heart. “I was like damn, was this festival calling me?” After interning at the merch tent, Edwards said she might pick a different long-term job, but does see herself working in the music industry. And she wants to keep playing in a band when she is older, Crimson Harmony or otherwise.

As stray metalheads sat around the grand foyer of Glacier Park Lodge, leaning on their backpacks or napping on the sofas, waiting for the evening train, a classical guitarist plucked out a polished-up version of the Led Zeppelin classic “Stairway to Heaven.” On the train back to the West Coast, the metalheads hung out as new friends. In the observation car, they shared weekend highlights, Natives and non-Natives together.

A week later, I saw Von Till and Vernon again, this time in Portland, the last stop on Von Till’s summer tour before the new school year. We were still thinking about the festival. We tried to pin down what it was about Fire in the Mountains that still had us sobbing intermittently a week out. Von Till nailed it: “It made me dare to hope.”

Concert attendees enjoy Fire in the Mountains. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

Can You Imagine

“If there’s a world where we don’t have to worry about suicide, that’s a world where we don’t have to worry about bullying, that’s a world where we don’t have to worry about violence, about war.”Pan-Amerikan Native Front lead singer, Kurator of War. Russel Albert Daniels/High Country News

“I feel like that world wouldn’t work.”

“You could try to picture it, but it never really fully comes into view.”

“I feel like it needs to be talked about.”

“I like to daydream about that a lot.” 

“These are things I think about too much and I don’t have too many spaces to set them out of my mind.”

“There’d probably be a lot more people at the reservations, and more family and connection.”

“Those little subtle moments that we all share, of sitting next to the fireplace, or sharing a new book, making a new friend, all of that would still keep expanding in mysterious ways of goodness.”

“Everyone just being creative.”

“It looks probably a little bit like heaven.”  

If you’re considering suicide, please call or text 988, or chat online at 988lifeline.org, for a free, confidential conversation with a trained crisis counselor. Any time, day or night.

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This article appeared in the November 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Precious Metalheads.”