Heavy Metal is Healing Teens on the Blackfeet Nation

For High Country News, B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster reports on Blackfeet Nation’s semester-long course on metal and hardcore music and the Fire in the Mountains festival, a three-day celebration of music that’s fast, loud, and cathartic. Both were the brainchild of some observant teachers in Browning, Montana, who wanted to offer Indigenous youth showing signs of isolation a constructive way to work through their troubles.

NOTE: This piece deals with suicide. If you’re having thoughts about self-harm, please call or text 988 in the US, or chat online at 988lifeline.org, for a free, confidential conversation with a trained crisis counselor.

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.”