Feather Woman Wailing

Feather Woman Wailing is both a personal reification of grief and madness, as well as a response to a passage in the novel Fools Crow by Blackfeet author James Welch. As the smallpox epidemic of the late 1860s ravages his camp, Pikuni warrior Fools Crow embarks on a vision quest to try and save his people and their way of life. On his journey, he finds himself in the presence of Soatsaki, or Feather Woman, the mortal wife of a tribal deity who is banished from the Sky Country to a liminal realm in which she eternally mourns the loss of her husband and son, Morning Star and Star Boy. Fools Crow, now immersed in a multidimensional world defined by Feather Woman’s sorrow as well as his own, becomes consumed by the deranged energy of wailing geese:

He awoke to the blue light of false dawn…The woman was gone. He looked down at the small orange glow of the fire pit and felt a quiet sorrow spread through his body, and he couldn’t account for it. It seemed to enter him from outside, as though the lodge itself were filled with sorrow.

Once, as a child in the big-wind moon, he had crouched on the brow of a hill and watched the geese coming and going, and he was blinded by their flashing wings in the gray sun. The large, shallow lake was covered with the flashing wings, and the commotion excited and frightened him. But it was the noise, the thousands of voices yelping shrilly in his ears, that caused him to fear for himself. For many sleeps after that he heard those voices, and they echoed and echoed deep within him until he thought he had become crazy and would die.

Now the winter geese were even closer, their cries entering Fools Crow’s ears and plunging into his heart…Fools Crow quit the woman’s lodge and began to walk toward the alder grove. The flashing wings and cries were all around him now and he knew that his power was gone, but he walked ahead as a man does who is dreaming. And like the dreaming man, he did not see the geese, for they were all within him and they consumed his power, and he walked among the gray trunks of the alders in the false dawn.

Feather Woman Wailing represents the cries of both the individual and the community in times of suffering and strife. The geese, disturbed and disoriented, thrash their bodies and scream blindly in a state of helplessness. Deep within the furor of the flock, however, is a drive toward formation. There is a longing for lovesong, and a hope for finding refuge somewhere in uncertain times ahead.