by Jared Tailfeathers
DURVILE & UPROUTE
2026/$45.00/208 pp.
Finding the way home can be hard for one who didn’t live there. The journey is particularly challenging when it also requires learning to think about and perceive the world differently than how one was taught.
Jared Tailfeathers was a grown man before he embarked on his own journey back to his Blackfoot origins. His father, Darcy Tailfeathers, died in a vehicle accident when Jared was only 14 months old. The accident that took his dad left him to be raised by his non-Indigenous mother in an urban setting, largely disconnected from Blackfoot heritage. “For others,” he wrote in his first book, The Art of Making, “the grief was in losing the man they once knew; for me, it was the sorrow of never having known him, only experiencing him through the memories and stories shared by friends and family.”
A talented artist and musician who has invented four musical instruments with which he seeks to reinterpret and celebrate Indigenous musical traditions, Jared’s quest for his own Blackfoot culture was in part a way of connecting with the father he never knew and in part a search for his own identity.
To our collective good fortune, Tailfeathers has chosen to take us on his journey, through writing, photography, art and music. His second book, Music of the Earth’s Heartbeat, brings the reader ever deeper into the spiritual, cultural, geographical and artistic heritage of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot people). It is an important contribution to an emerging genre of Indigenous reconnection literature—a genre that also includes Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Betty Bastien’s Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, in which Bastien seeks to develop better, more culturally centred approaches to social work for her Piikani people.
The unique appeal of Jared Tailfeathers’s work is in the humility and amateur enthusiasm (“amateur” in the real sense of studying simply for love of a subject) that infuses the book. He takes his children and dog on journeys of discovery into Blackfoot country and describes what they find there. Sometimes he explains the cultural backstories through research and teachings he’s received; in other cases he simply wonders out loud. Parts of the book read like a series of letters home—to us. Other parts are meticulously researched or draw on teachings his Blackfoot mentors have shared with him. It’s a highly readable and well-illustrated exploration into place and culture. It even has music!
On the eve of the 150th anniversary of Treaty 7, Tailfeathers’s newest book is a generous invitation to everyone to accompany him on his journey home—here where we all live.
Kevin Van Tighem’s latest book is Understory (RMB, 2025).
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