Linda Rosekrans  teaches in the English department at SUNY Cortland, NY (since 1985) and Tompkins Cortland Community College (since 1990).  She worked with Cornell University's American Indian Program from 1996-2003, and continues to serve local Native communities through volunteer service work. She serves on the Board of Directors of a Native not-for-profit educational foundation (Educational Fundamentals) and has written two papers for publication this year, celebrating Jack’s art.

 Recently Linda wrote about Jack Gladstone:

Most captivating in the work of Jack Gladstone is the ever presence of the spiritual - the sacred - the awareness that we are spiritual beings among other spiritual beings.  For Gladstone (Blackfeet), great great grandson of Chief Red Crow, the sacred is “the air, the oxygen, the atmosphere, in which everything is placed; the wind, what informs this motion, the energy of Creation.”  Sharing this through song came to Gladstone as a “call.”  In his song “Into a Child's Eyes” from the Storysmith double album, itself a collection of stories told by his father and mentor, Wallace J. Gladstone, Jack Gladstone writes, “earth and sky are unified in story.”  The stories, and awareness of their importance, was passed down through his family, centrally from his Blackfeet grandmother. ” She recounted the stories of her life and the mythology of their Blackfeet Indian people, something Jack holds sacred to this day.”  He writes, “Grandmother's stories ignited the spark, Now warming the heart of a man.” (Legends)

His work embraces many aspects of the sacred, retelling traditional Blackfeet tales, honoring those sacred to Blackfeet (and other Nations') cultural histories, restoring oral history through oratory (what he calls storatory), everything in language that reminds that all life is fundamentally spiritual.  Says Gladstone, “we sing, we heal, we grow.”

One of Jack's early songs takes a hard look at the absence of the sacred in consumer America, responding with compassion for the plight in which this leaves Americans.  “Does the spirit or material reflect your point of view,”  “Drifting hearts have longed to wash ashore.”, “Lost we weave our way through mall-faced stores/ Dyin for a Metaphor;”  He asks, ”what is the proper way to express what can't be seen,/For our senses grasp only a glimpse of the mystery between,” But, “words tumble short to say;” Gladstone reminds that for the “most sacred, there are no words.” so we are “resigned to weave our way through the forest of word lore.”  He wishes for us: “May you love reflect the spiritual into your point of view,” and encourages us to “explore the metaphor to inspect what can't be seen,” to “align ourselves with the eternal.”

The spiritual, eternal, for Gladstone, is understood in a traditional way. { PLAY CIRCLE OF LIFE}

This spiritual platform provides the context for most other songs, including but not limited to (in Legacy) “Last Best Place” “the sun loom of Creation has spun our heart a home”; “Tappin the Earth's Backbone”s  “celebrate relation with Creation”, and “tappin’”, referring to not only dancing and drumming, but drawing strength from the mountains, the Earth - sacred below as well as above.  In “For Those Who Cried” (Buffalo Republic), “miracles still work within the heart and in the mine of the human soul, where ancient rhythms flow.” “Faces the Blizzard” honours the bison, sacred to the Blackfeet,  “the heart of the circle Nature formed/ A covenant born” In the title song to the Buffalo Café album, we are told we will learn “about the land that taught us to talk,/ With Mother's hand we learned to walk.”  This world is “Sun's creation,” a “symphony on waving grass/ Was composed by sun and cast... Our Creator's voice was the thunder roll/ All of creation shared one soul.”

Sacred language characterizes Jack's expression of sacred themes and concepts -- within a traditional framework, a blend of sacred language familiar from a Christian perspective.  Buffalo Café invites listeners to “Nature's anointed play.” In “Faces the Blizzard,” the word “covenant” has meaning within a Biblical context.  In lines addressed to the buffalo, “But for you, my black-hooved brother/whose flesh through us was reborn,” the listener hears the buffalo's import as a source of food/survival, but Gladstone reminds that a deeper reading recognizes the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, where one is reborn through partaking.  It is “in its deepest form, language of reverence and identification, and reaffirmation in the telling.”  The bison, blackfooted, is connected to the Blackfeet, people of the buffalo, reminds Gladstone.  The older, soft “Thee” graces both early love songs and the last track on the Storysmith album,  “Into A Child's Eyes,” speaking of one important moment of the sacred -- passing from this mortal world to the next.  A song honouring Western artist C. M. Russell, takes its title from his painting “When the Land Belonged to God,” called by Gladstone an “epiphany of spirit.”  At the end of the song, at the end of mortal live, “as we choose our trail up the Great Divide to an unknown stage on the other side,” the “land belongs to God..” Though on this mortal plane European “cashiers and surveyors” subdued and transformed Western landscapes, in sacred time, all life is still properly aligned.  “Legacy,” a song set in the Northwest, recalls an “earlier year, when cedars brushed the sky and the land was in line with God.”  Of the blend/sometimes juxtaposition of images Christian and traditional, Gladstone reflects he is “realigning with sacred imagery and language learned as a Catholic, applied to something more relevant” to himself as a person.

Jack Gladstone reminds us that mythos, “myth”, means original or sacred words.  Sacred stories place one in the fabric of his/her life; the storyteller weaves the fabric.  Jack grew up hearing traditional stories from his grandmother; in each album he returns the oral telling of these Blackfeet stories, sometimes as ballads, of Poia, “who ventures to the Lodge of the Sun to win the love of a girl” (Noble Heart), the Bear Who Stole the Chinook, the girl who was taken by the Sun to be his bride and the boy who loves her (“To Marry the Sun”, Legacy), of Kút-oy-is, “Blood Clot Boy, ancient Blackfeet superhero.  Stories of Napi (Old Man), Blackfeet trickster and culture hero, “contain principles” (Wally), lessons to build character, as Napi attempts to understand another species by asking to transform, to “become” a wolf.  (NAPI LYRICS).

In a contemporary historic song about Dineh (Navajo) codetalkers, to provide the proper cultural context for the codetalkers decision to contribute the gift of their language to the US military efforts, Gladstone sets a portion of the Dineh creation story, the “Changing Woman Suite.”  This segment creates, says the composer, an “ethereal, dreamlike oasis in the midst of the horrible turbulence of war; it opens the sky with Creation, ...stalking the spirit to capture it, placing it into melodic and rhythmic form as a gift to the people.”

A lighter, but far from irreverent, lesson about a traditional spiritual being is Gladstone's  “Thunderman”  (Tappin); prepared for the moment if “Thunderman gets his own TV series”, Gladstone brings to a popular setting knowledge of “Thunder Chief,...a personification of the ultimate power” and giver of the Thunder Medicine Pipe to the Blackfeet people.

Gladstone also honours the sacred by restoring sacred history told through oratory, oral again in song.  In “Beneath Another Sky,” Gladstone restores voice to Heinmot Tooyalakekt, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.  (PLAY FIRST FEW LINES).  In a more recent piece, “Colter's Run,” (Buffalo Café), Gladstone gives voice to a new narrator; both invoking and inverting Christian Genesis, oral historian Adam, Old Man's son (not first man) tells a revised version of the story of John Colter, this time from Blackfeet perspective.

Awarded the Montana State University Human Rights Award for Outstanding Community Service as a bridge builder between cultures, Gladstone builds sacred bridges.  His early song “Spiritual Brothers” celebrates his deep friendship with “cowboy” musician Rob Quist, “brothers” from different cultures, approaching Montana from different backgrounds but together in spirit.

At a time when we most needed compassionate spirits, Jack Gladstone (with Ken Flint) penned a song, “Letter to the World,” calling for us all to remember that, though theologically divided, we are all “children of God.”  In the days after 9/11, as Gladstone says he “struggled to transcend fear and anger,” he both reminds America that this is not new, that earlier terrorist attacks were perpetuated against Native villages by U.S. military and calls for healing through “selflessness within,” and the care of a “loving mother and children” to provide hope.
In an earlier song rereleased on the Storysmith album, about culture here Kút-oy-is,  Gladstone sets all into perspective:  “We're awake .........

“Earth and sky are unified in story” Through story in song, both Jack Gladstone and Joanne Shenandoah provide for First Nations and non-Native audiences the cultural bridges and the spirit of healing to celebrate the sacred in all, for all.  Their work is of paramount importance in the Sacred Stories of Native America.