Unbroken: Indigenous Peoples Today

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"The Highest Mystery" by Tammie Dupuis, Bitterroot Salish Artist

“From the 1920s to the 1970s, my tribe [The Bitterroot Salish] did oral history interviews. Anthropologists would go out to elders and ask them questions while recording them on tapes, and then they would make transcripts with some of them now becoming books. The things that these elders talked about were stories told to them by their parents and grandparents, and some of them were the last to go out on buffalo hunts and to deal with settlers.

“And so in one of the books, I believe it's 'I will be Meat for my Salish', they talk about what religion they had before contact. They talk about this thing, this entity, this being called 'The Highest Mystery’, and it’s what they had before the Christian God. It was responsible for everything and it didn't have a gender. So when I was reading that, this sort of image came into my mind about it.

“I was just thinking about, ‘What is sacred? What is really sacred? What was sacred before? What is still sacred? What is still hidden?’ It just gets back to that. Here’s this woman, or maybe it’s a man - it’s got this ambiguity to it - and it’s preoccupied with breathing the world into life. The world as it was before the sun and where everything began. It’s almost like my own version of Genesis."

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