Becoming | Prologue

Consider this an extended warm up for season three of Headwaters. This episode includes two interviews about time, landscape, and history, that set the stage for the next nine to come.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

Consider this an extended warm up for season three of Headwaters. This episode includes two interviews about time, landscape, and history, that set the stage for the next nine to come.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headquarters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Daniel Lombardi: You're listening to Headwaters. [a drumbeat plays briefly in the background] My name is Daniel, and we're about to release our third season. We're calling it Becoming. You're going to hear important, unknown and often misunderstood stories from Glacier's past. This is not a complete history, but a look at how the park became what it is today. These episodes will take you into the field and weave together conversations with dozens and dozens of experts. Each episode is framed by the theme music and the show's cover art, which is a beautiful mosaic of all of the stories we set out to share.

[drumbeat plays again]

Daniel: This is episode zero. I'm thinking of it as a bonus episode that sets up the rest of the show. Or you know what? If you want, you could skip this episode for now and come back to it at the end. I think it works either way. But this episode is two interviews that illustrate the philosophy and the approach we took to making this season of the show. The first interview is with the native hip hop artist Frank Waln, and the second interview is with the illustrator and archeologist Eric Carlson. Frank and Eric helped us set the tone for season three, so I sat down with them to talk about some of the themes and philosophies, the deeper ideas that went into making the show. Season three is all about history and looking at our past from different viewpoints. Talking with Frank, he encouraged us to think about history with a less rigid understanding of time. [flute music begins to play] All of the music you'll hear in Season three of Headwaters was made by Frank Waln. But personally, I think I'm probably most excited about the theme song.

[Headwaters season three theme continues to play—drums, mandolin, and other instruments layer in]

Daniel: So hey, Frank, will you introduce yourself?

Frank Waln: I'll introduce myself in my language first. [Speaking in Lakota] Hello, relatives. I just introduced myself in my language, Lakota. I said my Lakota name is [Lakota Name], which translates to Walks with the Young Nation, or Walks with the New Nation. And I said that I welcome you all with an open heart and an open handshake. I'm also—I also go by Frank Waln, I'm a Lakota music artist, music producer, audio engineer, curator from the Rosebud Reservation in South Central South Dakota.

Daniel: Tell me about where you grew up. The Rosebud Reservation.

Frank: Actually grew up on a ranch ran by Lakota women. So I had a very close connection with not only the land but animals. And so the landscape on the reservation I come from, it's out on the Great Plains. So it's it's—if you stand almost anywhere on a reservation and look out, your eyes will see as far as the horizon goes, like it's not flat in a lot of places. You know, the skies are big, the sunsets are great. The sunrises will bring a tear to your eye. And it's very rural, too. It's very rural. And then, you know, outside of the land, sure, the reservation deals with a lot of issues like poverty and just a lot of the aftermath of colonialism, having, you know, our homelands colonized.

Daniel: Yeah like how do you—because I think we're going to come back to this as a concept, so just how do you define colonialism?

Frank: Well, I think as an indigenous person, I define colonialism from the lens of the experience my people had with colonialism. So it is the displacement of an indigenous population in order to colonize or resettle the land for various reasons. But, you know, it could even happen with animals and plants. So it's not just a human thing. It also happens in nature in many ways.

Daniel: Yeah. So it's like a violent displacement of people, as well as plants and animals from home.

[flute music from the theme song plays briefly, marking a transition]

Daniel: A complete shift: so did you like growing up on a ranch? I didn't really like it as a kid, but I really appreciate it now.

Frank: You know, I kind of feel the same way because I think, you know, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do music and be a creative person. And a lot of my family, all my family still ranches or rodeos. But I think I still also didn't completely despise it because I love being outside. With me and my mom it was always a struggle because I wanted to be inside, like playing an instrument, writing a song, and she'd be like, “No, we need to go—we need to go work cause we need to go do ranch stuff right now.” So it was always a back and forth between me and my mom.

Daniel: You're living this, uh, rural ranch life, and you, you somehow stumbled upon playing the piano. Is that right?

Frank: I found the piano when I was in elementary school. My mom was a teacher, and so she had to be at a high school super early. So the elementary school I went to, she would drop me off and I was always one of the first kids at my school. And there was an old piano in our classroom, out of tune, everything. And I ended up just messing around and I loved it. I love the way just pressing, pressing a button and hearing, you know, hearing some music made me feel. And I just started teaching myself to play piano and haven't stopped since. Now I play, you know, a handful of instruments and produce and, and I've actually written music that has been performed by an entire orchestra. I still can't read written music entirely. I got my own way of reading and writing and figuring out music.

[sparse, but joyful music begins to play]

Daniel: Wow. And so you you'd go into the classroom and there was a piano there. And you just taught yourself.

Frank: Yes. Yes. I learned by ear and by sight. And I remember I was really stubborn and I wanted to learn something very difficult first. So I one of the first, like four pieces I learned was Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. And I remember I, like, found my own way of transcribing it. I don't even remember how I did. It was it was probably all over the place and wild. But I wrote out the whole song so I could read it and I memorized it and I can still play it now. But yeah, I learned by, by sight and sound.

Daniel: Mmm yeah, that's cool. But then, so tell me, how did you go from that to rapping?

Frank: [laughing] Yes, actually, you know, it was for me anyway, at the time, it felt like a very natural progression because, you know, when I started to get into to middle school, I was actually interested in like getting my own CDs and stuff, my reservation is so rural that we had to drive at least 2 hours to, you know, find a—to get to a CD store to even buy music. And so a lot of the music that I consumed was from my family. A lot of my cousins, my older cousins who I looked up to, a lot of them were listening to hip hop. And so I was exposed to a lot of different hip hop, and I just resonated with the music. And so a lot of what hip hop was in the beginning and the source of it, to me, has a lot of Indigeneity. And I'll give you some examples. An element of hip hop is called the cipher. It's like where everyone circles up and it's really dope, if you're a dancer, you're beatboxer, you have an instrument, everyone kind of starts vibing and someone lays down a beat, and then you go around the circle, and whether you sing a rap or even dance or play an instrument, everyone takes turns and kind of does a little performance over the music everyone's creating together, and that is Native. [a beat begins, with flutes and other instruments layering in] Whether it would make you look at power or you look at our ceremonies, that's what we do. We circle up and through song and dance, we share our energy together. [music continues to play] At the time, I was I was struggling a lot with a lot of mental health issues. A lot of people in my family and people where I’m from struggle with a lot of things like addiction and mental health issues and just a lot of violence and stuff like that. So music was my escape too. So it was like a, it was a way for me to get away from all of that and kind of be in my own bubble.

[Frank rapping in a song] Let me try to paint a scene of chasing lonely rez kid dreams, with nights banging out beats on that laptop screen. With nothing but your heart telling you you’re right, I spent years in the dark just to find my light. Shout out my mother and my aunties cuz they raised us all in a setter colonial state that called them s*****. I'm from the Rez. That means I've bled to shed all the things I saw. So I ain't one to judge when loved ones doing time and everyone on drugs. We used to run around the rez now we pray and smudge. Now I understand why ancestors prayed for us. In the beginning the reservation...

[music fades out]

Daniel: You were seeing people struggle in your community, and I read then that that kind of made you want to go into medicine. Is that right?

Frank: Yes. Yeah. So I actually thought I wanted to be a doctor for a couple of years, starting when I was 18. So I didn't even tell anyone about my music. I actually kept it a secret from for most of my teen years, it was just something that I did because it made me feel good and helped me cope. And, you know, I never thought, ever, ever I would be able to make a career out of it or, you know, be able to do anything substantial with it. And so I thought the only way I could help the world and help people heal and help my home community and the people I loved heal was being a doctor.

Daniel: I'm curious how that might influence your music even now or if it if you think it does.

Frank: Yeah, definitely. I didn't realize that, you know, healing can, can mean more than just Western medicine at the time. When I started going into music, I had a conversation with an elder back home that I never forget. And I was, I was in a gas station on my reservation. I was, I was gassing up and getting some things and this, this elder I know, he was behind me in line and he started talking to me. And so he always would ask me when he'd see me, “What are you up to now? You know, you're going off to college?” And so I told him that I wasn't going to do medicine anymore. I didn't want to be a doctor. I really want to pursue music. And when I told him that, he kind of he stopped and he shook his head. And, you know, I didn't really expect too much. But then he said something really, really profound to me. He said, “you know, sometimes music is the best medicine.” And I think it kind of set something off in my brain and just kind of widened my perspective of what medicine can be. You know, it can also be creative, it can be spiritual, it can be emotional medicine. And I think that's what music is for me. I did it to help myself heal. So very naturally, you know, using my music to help myself heal, I would write songs about things that I needed to heal from. And once I started putting my music on the internet and putting myself out there as an artist, I realized a lot of other people, especially Native people, felt the same way and, you know, started resonating with my music and sharing it and listening to it. Creating music that helped me heal, helped me set the foundation for my career. And it even led to doing things like I did a residency for seven months at a children's hospital in Delaware, a place called Nemours Children's Hospital. I did music therapy there for seven months and I helped patients create a song from the ground up. And so, you know, just doing things like that, I know I wouldn't even be in a position or in a mindstate to use music in that way if I wasn't coming from that background of studying pre-med.

Daniel: Music is, it has been healing for me and it sounds like it was getting into hip-hop was itself a healing experience for you. And like, what wounds do you think you're trying to heal with your music?

Frank: Whenever I present and perform, I talk a lot about healing, and I talk about healing as multi-generational and also timeless because I don't think time exists linearly, at least Native People, Lakota People don't look at time in a linear fashion. We look at time right now, we carry the past, the present and the future with us at all times. Our ancestors are always with us. And so the wounds that I'm healing are the wounds of colonialism. And so I'm healing the wounds of genocide. And I 100% believe, and I tell this to Native communities when I present, perform for them, that whenever we heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors because we are connected to that history. And when you heal yourselves, you also heal future generations.

Daniel: Wow, Frank, that's really powerful. You have a lot of themes of history, and so now that kind of makes sense to me why you're like approaching music from outside the traditional Western understanding of time.

Frank: Yes. Exactly. You nailed that right on the head. And that's another way that I also create music and do what I do from an Indigenous perspective, because, you know, some of my songs are rooted in and some of our oldest stories, you know. So just carrying that history in our art is a very Native thing as well.

Daniel: Okay, so then let's dig into some of the music for our podcast, for Headwaters. This year we're working with you to use a track you wrote called Wild West as our theme song. Do you remember writing that, because you didn't originally write it for us? It was something that you wrote for you, right?

Frank: Yes, for sure. So the theme song for this season actually started out as a song idea that I had called Wild West. I created the beat using a lot of different flute samples that I created. I laid down the drums. It's a really powerful track. And at the time I was really—I think this was around like 2016, 2017. I was really struggling with the pain, the anger, and the frustration I was feeling as I was learning about the specific details of the atrocities, the horrible things and the genocide that happened to my ancestors and also to me. You know, like one of the things that was just weighing heavy on me when I wrote this song was, I was reading this book about different policies, IHS (Indian Health Services), which is the branch of the US government that gives Native communities health care. And one of the chapters, they talked about how the US government tested vaccines on babies without the mothers’ knowledge at the IHS on my reservation the exact two years when I was first born and going in to get my vaccines as a baby. You know, so realizing that the government tested vaccines on me without my mom's consent or knowledge, and then learning that when you're in your twenties, just, you know, just like what that does to you as a human. And so I was I was feeling a lot of heaviness, and I ended up putting it in those lyrics, Wild West. And the concept was like, you know, kind of flipping that old Wild West concept on its head that cowboys and Indians and just being like, this is what the contemporary Wild West is.

Daniel: That's a powerful story. The name of the track, Wild West, it's a big concept. It's a big idea. You and I both grew up in the American West, and it's interesting to think about what that term is supposed to evoke and what it does evoke. The idea, I think in the, the Hollywood Western is the place where a rugged individual can do whatever they want.

[flute music from the Headwaters theme plays briefly, marking a transition]

Frank: One of the things I like to do with my music is taking these concepts that are like kind of the colonial lens of looking at Native People or where we come from and then flipping it on its head to show that to show my perspective or the Native perspective on all of that.

Daniel: It opens with this really cool flute. You play the flute, you have at least one whole album of flute songs. Then there's also a stringed instrument in there, right?

Frank: Yeah. So that one is another instrument. So I play a native flute. Another instrument, which is one of my favorites, is actually the acoustic bass guitar. And I kind of play bass differently, especially the acoustic. I've had a lot—I've actually had more than one guitarist tell me I play bass like it's a guitar.

Daniel: Oh, that's yeah, that's interesting. Then what about the, the drums? I know in a lot of your music, you use traditional Native drums.

Frank: Yeah. Yeah. It's layered in there. Almost every track I do. Another reason, you know, one of the reasons I do that, like I said, hip hop, you know, it's built around the drums. A lot of native music is built around the drums, especially for Lakota people. You know, we were actually famous, like people said they would hear our—if they went to war with us, they would hear our drums before they seen us because our drums were that loud and that powerful, our songs were that powerful. And so the drums in that song are just multiple layers of samples sampled, kick and clap, and also natural. My mom got me a Buffalo hide big like Lakota style drum when I was in fifth grade. And so I use that same drum and some other drums, even like a gourd rattle I got from the Southwest. So just a lot of different instruments I've been given as gifts, Native instruments, Native percussive instruments always get layered into almost every song I do.

Daniel: Oh, yeah, that's cool. So for people listening to season three of Headwaters, that intro theme song they hear is called Wild West.

Frank: And I'm glad, I'm glad we found a home for it.

Daniel: Frank, thank you so much for taking the time and for making music for us. It's been wonderful.

Frank: Yes. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for, you know, collaborating with me and asking me to collaborate. And we had some some really great and meaningful discussions.

[Frank rapping] These are dark times, hard times, [rapping in Lakota] if you gotta know, I got a heavy heart, every part and valve weighed down with a heavy scar. And I got them in the place I'm from. Some call it reservation, some call it concentration. Concentrating the trauma of genocide up in a nation. This system murders us, call it premeditation. Tragic death becomes a circumstance. They outlawed our songs and wouldn't let us dance and now it gives me the blues. They say we're red, to them we're dead. My People set up to lose.

[music starts to fade out as Daniel speaks]

Daniel: That was my conversation with Frank Waln. Next, you will hear an interview with the artist, Eric Carlson.

[final lyrics of Frank’s song, then the music fades out] The fire's in our youth, ancestors return soon.

Daniel: Eric does a few different kinds of art, but my favorite is his Unstuck in Time series. In this series, he makes these detailed, complex, beautiful scenes of familiar places, but with all of their history and characters unfolding and living at once. The cover art that Eric made for this season, which you can see in its full size, if you click on the link in the episode description, it reminds me of kind of a Where's Waldo painting. Each character that we talk about in the show is stuck frozen together in the ice of a glacier, challenging the viewer to expand their view of time in history.

Eric Carlson: Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for having me here. It's nice to be back up in the park. My name's Eric Carlson. I'm a archeological illustrator and archeologist.

Daniel: What came first? Art or archeology? Or have they always kind of been together?

Eric: Yeah, they they kind of co-occur. Art is a, it's a big part of, of archeology in a lot of the ways that that we document the past. Often depicting things visually works better than than writing things down.

Daniel: I hadn't thought of that. Art or illustration—this isn't just your approach. Like that has always been part of archeology.

Eric: It's always been a huge part. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Daniel: That's cool.

Eric: Yeah. You look through any archeological textbook, everything is heavily illustrated.

Daniel: What about for you personally, though? How did it come about? Was it were you always growing up, drawing or were you always, like digging in the dirt or both?

Eric: No, it was I guess it was art first.

Daniel: Okay.

Eric: For sure, as a child. And I studied art in college a little bit. And it wasn't until the last year of college that I got into anthropology and have been working as a archeologist ever since, over 30 years.

Daniel: Wow. Can you list off some places and cool projects you've got to be a part of then?

Eric: Yeah. I mean, I've worked a lot of time in Oregon, probably eight years I spent working as an archeologist and, and then also in the Four Corners, I probably spent seven or eight years working.

Daniel: Wow.

Eric: Through illustrating, I've been able to, to, to do archeology overseas quite a bit as well. So I've worked in really early Neolithic sites in southern Jordan on the Dead Sea Plain, worked on sites that had basically some of the first farming villages on Earth, you know, in addition to do in the archeology out there with the crew, I was the onsite illustrator. None of the artifacts from those excavations could leave the country of Jordan. So everything had to be documented at the end of the day after it was excavated. So I spent long nights illustrating, I don't know, arrow points.

Daniel: And so it's all day digging, and uncovering things, and then all night illustrating them.

Eric: That's right.

Daniel: Wow.

Eric: Yeah.

Daniel: And of course, you worked, uh, as an archeologist here in Glacier, too.

Eric: And not too long ago, it was, I guess, 2018 and 2019.

Daniel: How do you how do you think of the relationship between archeology and history? Are they kind of just branches of the same tree or…

Eric: Archeology is basically establishing a history of, of deep time, of, you know, time before written documentation. But it's a lot more than that too. Archeology is a really good tool in being able to give voices to people that are often left out of history, out of written history. History is often written by those in power. There's a lot of biases and prejudices and stuff that get written into those histories that remain there.

Daniel: This is a really interesting point that you're making. Like in some ways, archeology is, is a kind of history, But what's different is it's not so dependent on the written texts or traditional historical sources that we use in history. It also allows you to look at—tell the history and tell the story of people who had less power.

Eric: Yeah, and you look at the history books here in Montana and often, you know, they talk about the Copper Kings and, you know, some of these people that ended up becoming very powerful. And in archeology, often the sites that we uncover, the things we find in the ground are the—are what families leave. So we're studying just everyday, a family group that was passing through West Glacier, for example, on their way up and over the mountains to, to the east side for a hunt bison or something. But it's so important—is more important than, you know, studying a king or queen. It's like how everyday people lived and experienced and related to this landscape and related to the world around them.

Daniel: Archeology is a, a tool or a process that allows us to tell the stories or tell the histories of people who didn't have their lives immediately biographied or their portraits painted, they were everyday people.

Eric: Yeah.

Daniel: That's really cool.

Eric: Yeah.

Daniel: Okay, Eric, before we go deeper into kind of anything else, let's talk about your art. I think at one point we were talking in the past few months and you were telling me you were looking at a lot of like animal muscular anatomy and skeletal diagrams and stuff because you had to illustrate the way a culture was butchering and processing animals.

Eric: Yeah, I think that was for the uh, I did some illustrations of Viking era sites for University of Oslo. And they, they wanted a illustration of a, of a boat burial, the burial of a chieftain within a boat that was being buried. Anyway, they had a room designated inside of this boat with a bunch of grave goods and animal sacrifices, including dogs and horses and chickens and things like that. So. Yeah. So I had to research.

Daniel: You gotta make sure that animals look right. [both chuckling]

Eric: The anatomy of a horse like crammed—of a dead horse, crammed into a tiny little compartment in a Viking boat.

Daniel: Tell me about the Unstuck in Time series and that theme of art that you have. Where does that where does that fall?

Eric: Yeah. You asked about where that originated, and I think—and I was thinking about that, and I think it was back in Juneau, back where I grew up. Juneau is an old gold mining town. There's a, basically the ruins of two giant huge gold mines that encircle the, the city of Juneau. Now, they're—the mines have been abandoned for about a hundred years and basically been reclaimed by the rainforest. And as kids, we would go especially into this one mine called the Treadwell Mine and explore those old buildings and the, the buildings as they decay and collapse. You know, they, they get grown over by moss and other vegetation of the forest there extremely quickly.

Daniel: And so then you start illustrating it. Yeah.

Eric: So that's why I've taken that idea with me now. Everywhere I live, everywhere I go, I'm always imagining what a place will look like in the future if humans just walk away from it.

Daniel: But you Unstuck in Time series, I think it has a whole—there's a whole other layer beyond that. And that is this layer of it's almost like the, the spirit and the, the people and the characters and the animals from this place, from whatever place it is, whether it's Juneau or Missoula or Glacier, it's you, you bring to life all these elements from this places past and put them all in one scene.

Eric: I think it has to do with, with engagement, with being there and learning and living in those places intimately, meeting people, knowing people, learning the history and the pre-history of these places.

Daniel: You couldn't show up somewhere and paint one of these unstuck in time pieces the first week.

Eric: Yeah, not at all.

Daniel: No. It's about—you have to know that place.

Eric: Yeah. In fact, it's almost like a way—those nstuck in time drawings are almost a way of honoring a place, giving back to that place.

Daniel: This unstuck in time work that you do has been so inspiring for me and it is a big part of what inspired the way we're approaching season three of Headwaters this year.

Eric: Okay.

Daniel: Yeah, it's been really cool.

Eric: Well, how has it inspired you?

Daniel: I think you are looking at the land, looking at Glacier, this park, in a way I hadn't looked at it before. And I think you're looking at time in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. And so your art has definitely got me to reflect at least, or question maybe, the way I see landscape and time. Yeah. And so I think that probably comes from your training as an archeologist that when you look out at a landscape that you're working in, you don't just see the landscape as it is today. Right. You see other stuff?

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And it's about this concept of time. Yeah. The worst enemy out there right now are cameras, because they condition us to see snapshots and to see just a stuck scene, a stuck moment in time. And, I mean, we're inundated with these images all around us, and we, we learn to live our lives like that, like we're just in the present where things are static. But if you throw those cameras away, and you start seeing time in a broader way, yeah, as a duration instead of a moment, you're able to see these—these dynamic processes of change. Animals, birds, living and dying, multiple generations of of creatures and humans and stuff that have occupied the land under our feet and have become the soil. They've become the trees. Like everything gets regenerated and gets, again interwoven into everything else out here.

Daniel: And into us, if you live here long enough.

Eric: Exactly right. Yeah.

Daniel: One of the best ways I can think of to describe your work in your approach to time, you know, I think you said it pretty well that it's, it's not about a snapshot. It's not like the photograph. One of our episodes this season is going to be, it's going to talk about Charlie Russell, you know, and whatever you think of his art, he really painted in snapshots. I think he was finding like a really fun or wild or dramatic scene and then he's painting one instant in that.

Eric: Right.

Daniel: But that's not what you do, at all.

Eric: [laughs] No. No. And that's, I think one of the most important parts of of illustrating is this idea that it's not a snapshot at all. It's kind of an anti-snapshot. You're looking at things, you're drawing things from multiple perspective points. And all of those perspective points get compressed into a single image. Like with artifact illustration, you're looking at an object from at least six or seven different locations, or you're moving it in your hands, you’re rotating it and looking at it from almost an infinite amount of perspective points. And they all, all of those perspective points you're drawing from, and you're combining them into a single image that—an image that you can't ever find or take a snapshot of.

Daniel: That's really interesting that you say that it you know, I've been thinking a lot as we work on this season three, we kind of want there to be like one perspective that's true or Right.   [pensive piano music begins to play]

Eric: Right. Yeah.

Daniel: But your work is like deconstructing that, and historians tell us this too, that the study of history you know, it's about being okay with a lot of different perspectives.

[music finishes]

Daniel: I showed someone a draft of the art you're doing for for Headwaters. And they were like, “there's a lot going on here, and it looks a little bit like a disaster happened.” And I was wondering, I was like, well, I mean, this is a culmination of real events and real things that have happened here. And disaster's kind of a loaded term, but it's—a lot has happened here. And your art captures that.

Eric: Yeah.

Daniel: Represents that.

Eric: Yeah. I don't know what to say to that. [both laugh] It's yeah, it's been a chaotic last 200 years or so on this landscape. Yeah. But, but yeah, prior to that too, I mean, there was constant change. Glaciers come and gone. Pleistocene creatures have come and gone.

Daniel: Whether or not you see it as a disaster kind of depends on your perspective, your–

Eric: Your point of view.

Daniel: It kind of depends on your point of view. Yeah. I love the idea that this year's podcast, you know, Headwaters, is kind of represented by that style of art of yours. This, this scene of the park, but unbounded by time, kind of breaking free of its traditional—it's not a snapshot of the park. It is, it is something different. Like it's a—the background is all, it's the Many Glacier valley. You'll recognize it. But it's full of ice.

Eric: Yeah. With a glacier that it's probably a mile thick, which is what the glaciers were, about that thick about, you know, in the middle Pleistocene. And I think there's a, you can just see the peak of Grinnell Peak there sticking up over the the bit of glacier, that's about all you can see.

Daniel: And so anyone listening can can just probably pull up, look at their phone and look at this art. But the glacier, this massive glacier, is kind of receding and melting a little bit. And there's all of these characters and elements of the park's history spilling out of it. I love the, as the as the ice retreats, you can see the stromatolites making up the ground beneath.

Eric: Oh, yeah. Those stromatolites are really important to all my art. Yeah, there's I guess, a Siyeh Pass and Logan Pass, you can see stromatolites which are fossilized algae, basically, that's like 1.5 billion years old that lived in the shores of these ancient seas.

Daniel: I can see why you would love this. It's basically geologic reality, doing what you try and do in your art. It is these ancient, ancient fossils, [Eric chuckles] and they are literally uplifting and jumbling up the park's geologic history.

Eric: We want everything to be linear. We want everything to be a timeline. Mm hmm. But it's not. [laughing] And everything's mixed up all the time and the past is re-occurring in the present, all around us all the time. You just have to be aware of it. You have to see it.

Daniel: Coming out of this glacier, you illustrated… you know, we have the Great Northern Railway. We have lots of stories this season about that. So it's, I love that it's like crashing through the ice. Then you've got, you have the stromatolites beneath and then wolves kind of hunting and running around the whole scene. I love wolves. That's really cool.

Eric: Yeah, they're important part of this park for sure. Yeah. The wolves have always kind of symbolized basic freedom and life.

Daniel: And then all the other pieces you included in there are things that, that we're going to talk about in the season. You know, you have an oil well crashing down, you have a homesteading, you know, Euro-Americans homesteading and creating a mercantile store out in the forest. You have Buffalo Soldiers. So many cool pieces of the park's history colliding. Everything unstuck from its time.

Eric: Unstuck in time. Yeah. [both chuckling] But over the top of all that, you have the Native American presence. Yeah. That dominates the entire.

Daniel: The whole scene.

Eric: Yeah. And that's the history of the park. Mmhmm. You know, over 10,000 years here in the park. And then you've got all that jumbled chaos, you know, kind of coming unfrozen, basically in the bottom of that glacier. Yeah. Just in the, in the very, very, very recent past.

Daniel: But yeah, all of the, you know, the historic characters and elements from the past 200 years take up a good chunk of of the art piece but only a slice, just a sliver of the actual history.

Eric: Exactly right. Yeah.

Daniel: When we're talking about your Unstuck in Time series, the word, the word “becoming” rises in my mind.

Eric: Yeah.

Daniel: What does that mean for you? I mean, is that I think that's kind of a lot of what your your art is depicting is depicting a state of becoming. Do you think that's right?

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Things are… yeah, in a constant state of change, of transformation, I guess. And you don't see that, when you're looking at moments in time. That becomes evident when you are looking at longer durations, when you're seeing things again over hundreds of years, thousands of years.

Daniel: When I go walk down to the lake, I'll admit most of the time I don't, I don't know that I am thinking about myself or the place becoming something. But of course it is. We are, we are—and the world around us is—in a state of becoming.

Eric: And you know that by expanding time out a little bit, thinking about it at it at a different time scale.

[Frank’s music begins to play again—hip hop music with chanting layered over the beat and other instruments]

Daniel: Eric, thanks for talking today. It's been really, really fascinating.

Eric: Sure. Thanks, Daniel.

Daniel: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park. With support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This season of Headwaters was made by me, Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Michael Faist and Gaby Eseverri. We could not have made Season three without Lacy Kowalski or Melissa Sladek and Sierra Mandelko, Brent Rowley, Darren Lewis, the Glacier National Park Archives, and the Montana Historical Society. Thanks for listening.

Lacy: Next time on Headwaters:

Gaby Eseverri: We imagine the past; our history of oil exploration.

[drumbeat begins]

Daniel: [in the field] The park has a real history with fossil fuel and extractive industry.

Student: So we’re kind of watching the destruction happen, in a way.

Daniel: [in the field] This is getting serious. [group laughing] Hopefully, I don’t know, I want to like build the excitement about an oil seep, but I don’t’ know if we’ll be able to see anything.

Student: That is really gross. [laughing]

[sound of wet pebbles and mud plopping onto the ground]

Student: Oooh!

Daniel: [in the field] Oh, look at that!

[music finishes]

Gaby: That’s next time, on Headwaters.