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Sarah Harrison Grigg

WRITER + EDITOR + PRODUCER
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A sample of my journalistic, fiction, narrative nonfiction and screenwriting work.

Montana's Smith River is one of the most iconic waterways in the Lower 48 United States.  Photo :  Jim Klug Outdoor Photography

Montana's Smith River is one of the most iconic waterways in the Lower 48 United States. Photo: Jim Klug Outdoor Photography

Mining Proposal on the Smith

Sarah Grigg April 16, 2014

Publication: Field and Stream
Date: April 2014

Montana's Smith River is perhaps one of the most iconic waterways in the Lower 48. Offering 60 miles of limited river access, permits to float this pristine stretch of water are limited to an annual lottery system. Recent mine exploration permitting on Sheep Creek, the most critical trout spawning tributary, was recently challenged by several Montana environmental groups. Read my post for Field and Stream's Fieldnotes here.

Tags Field and Stream, Smith River, Montana, Mining, Copper Mine
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Painting through time and space. A sample of illustrations by Jesse Greenwood. @cactuspup #illustration #painting #art #history #western #ranch #book #montana #yellowstone
Our history project team. Photographer and art director Arnica Spring Rae 📸is a native of Moran, Wyoming. Raised in the wilds fringing Grand Teton National Park, her work reflects the realism and romanticism of the American West. Nowhere else in the country will you find a talented artist who spent the first year of her life in a wall tent while her father worked the Wyoming oil fields and who then became Miss Wyoming USA. Her assignments have carried her from the presidential campaign trail to post-earthquake Haiti to the backwoods of Tanzania. + Researcher and archivist Ciara Pares Kempf 📚is a student of natural horsemanship and has put her vast equine knowledge to work as a wrangler in Yellowstone National Park, as well as at some of the premier guest ranches in the Rockies. She was a homesteader in a past life and her experience as the lead for a similar project for a ranch straddling the Colorado-Wyo line was invaluable in building an impressive Mountain Sky and West Creek Archive. She and her husband ranch in Wise River, MT. + Illustrator Jesse Greenwood 🎨was born to capture Western subjects in paint and ink. His father is a celebrated Western furniture designer and Jesse spent his childhood immersed in the Native American, mining and ranching lore of Nevada and California. His surreal and historically accurate illustrations have appeared in a variety of publications, including Big Sky Journal and Western Art and Architecture, and his work hangs in galleries throughout the Rockies. + As for me—born in the South, bred in the North, broke in the West. I’ve spent about a third of my life in each region and have pursued the history of each to better understand the complex picture of what our very big, very young country is and why it is the way it is. This work is for my grandparents, who with great dedication taught me everything they could about where they and where those before us had been and where I might choose to go. + Recognition is due to our editors, Whitney Tilt, @anne.johansen and @cinnamonruby, as well as our layout and design guru, @lindseyk_28. #montana #ranch #history #american #photographer #illustrator #research #writer #book
In Fall 2017, Arthur Blank asked a team and I to undertake a history project focused on Mountain Sky and West Creek Ranches. There was just one hitch: we had 10 months to complete the entire production. + It was a tall order, but we’re excited now to see "Legacy of the Land" come off the press this fall —294 pages and 500 million years of Paradise Valley history compiled through the images and stories of 150+ collaborating museums, private collections, artists, essayists and individuals. + The story of two ranches in the Paradise Valley carried us into the lives of people from Sheridan, Wyoming to Crow Country; from Pray to the heart of the Blackfeet Nation; from the basement of the Yellowstone Heritage Center in Gardiner to the digital archives of the Smithsonian Institution. + If indeed the job of history is as it seems—to give the past a voice and home alongside the present, to heal things intentionally or accidentally forgotten, to shine a light on what might be next to come—we fiercely hope we’ve achieved that end here. This started out as a team project, but it turned into a community project. We thank all those who supported us in this effort and hope we’ve sufficiently honored your stories herein. + A lot ghosts show up and want to speak when you start poking at the earth and rummaging around file cabinets in museum basements. To those who came before and to those yet to come: we hope we did right by you all. @arnicaspringlifestyle @cactuspup @lindseyk_28 Cover image: @arnicaspringlifestyle #montana #ranch #indigenous #geology #naturalhistory #homestead #cowboy #yellowstone #history #book
“It’s not about the past. It’s about where we’re going. There’s no way I can know where I’m going ’til I know where I am and where I’ve been. + See, in the lower right corner of this painting, ‘Xuluush—Protect and Sanctify,’ there is yellow wording that reads ‘Xapaalia,’ which means ‘medicine.’ But nearby are the insignias for Copyright, Trademark, and Intellectual Property. I’m asking questions about technology. How far does a culture have to go into embracing technology in order to have an equal stand among mainstream society? + For a culture that has been around for millennia, how much do we have to change ourselves to be given a voice? Beads, tipis, Sundances, war paint, sweat stones—these are our tools, our technology. Our cultural items, our philosophy, us as contemporary beings with ways of doing and seeing things . . . Why is it all not acceptable? + I think a lot about how we define ourselves versus how other people see us. Recently, I saw a photo series. Native Americans were presented as either powwow dancers or drunks on the street. It’s a message, of, ‘They’re like this, the powwow,’ which isn’t traditional dancing; powwow dances are new and modern. Or it’s a message of, ‘They’re homeless.’ We’re not just drunks or dancers; it’s not that simple. We’re everything in-between. We’re contemporary people with diverse individual identities like all other humans. + I work in temporal multiplicity. I combat nostalgia. These things ought to be happening all at once, I believe. That’s not easily translated to paper, but that’s what I’m here to do. I’m honoring my children and their children to come. I’m honoring my parents and grandparents, honoring the mothers before me and the mothers after me, honoring the fathers before me and the fathers after me.” —Ben Pease, Crow and Northern Cheyenne painter. Ben descends from Xuluush (White Man Runs Him), a scout who rode with Custer just before Custer vanished in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Ben also descends from Fellows Pease, first agent of the Crow Agency at Ft. Parker. The Pease family were among the first Europeans in the 1600s to settle upon Martha’s Vineyard.Portrait:@arnicaspringlifestyle
"One reason I’m dangerous is that my great-great grandfather knew his coup. If your grandfathers can count their coup, you know the power of history and you know your own history, why things are the way they are. If you can’t count your grandfathers’ coup, how can you know where you came from? How can you know if you are right or wrong? + During the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Crow sided with the United States. But many Crow did not want to participate. My great-great grandfather was in a group of men that ran to the mountains and hid the women and children. These leaders were hunted by U.S. soldiers. When my grandfather was caught, he spent 30 years in prison for being an Army deserter during the Little Bighorn. He died soon after he was released. + When I was very young I was taken off the Reservation and sent to a boarding school. There was a lot of mistreatment and abuse. I couldn’t speak Crow. I couldn’t learn about my own culture. I survived by keeping my language in my head. When I returned to the Reservation I participated in Sun Dances. An elder told me that I had to heal myself. I had a vision. I saw myself working in a place where children and elders could come and learn about their culture. I decided to name it after the place where I got my prayers and healing: The Center Pole. + Today, I run a food bank here at The Center Pole. We do food recovery in Billings. My son takes a trailer there to collect produce so we can offer fresh vegetables. When we go back in time, when Crow occupied this land, we didn’t worry about these things. They knew where to get their food, where to get their blessings. They knew how to survive. + + I bring people here to empower them, to teach them how to live life without pain. Young people need to know where the sacred sites are. They need to identify traditional herbs. They need their self-worth. We have to live in things that provide beauty. + + At the The Center Pole, we talk about how we can take traditional knowledge and put it to use in our lives today. You don’t need pills from the Indian Health Service. You need your grandfathers." —Peggy Wellknown Buffalo Portrait: @arnicaspringlifestyle #history
Siblings Ivan and Ivy MacDonald of the Piikáni (Blackfeet Nation) are filmmakers dedicated to bringing awareness to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. There is not a Native family in America (and Canada) that does not have a female relative who has gone missing or murdered. For Ivan and Ivy, that person was their young cousin who was kidnapped from a an elementary school playground and found frozen to death on the roadside in Glacier National Park. These stories are the norm in Indian Country. The reason they occur is attributed to a nearly 600 year-old imposed colonial history of violence toward Native women, paired with 21st century holes in the legal system that makes it easy to target this demographic for trafficking, abuse and murder. The MacDonalds contributed an essay titled "When They Were Here" and wrote: "Women are the foundation of many Montana Tribes. They are central to our ceremonies; our societal structure is built around them. If the Creator made the ground and earth we walk upon, women made the grass grow and the rivers flow. Our women are both grace and force, warriors and caretakers, providing love but protecting with it as well. Our work as a brother-sister filmmaking team centers around giving voice to women whose voices have been silenced or taken away entirely through abuse, trafficking and murder. The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is often only know to the communities that are affected by it. The voices of these women are often silenced more than once. Their stories and voices are taken away and then ignored by the general non-tribal populace. While our communities cling desperately to memories of these women, hoping to hear even a whisper of their voices, it seems nobody beyond the bounds of our lands can hear us. This is a crisis, not an epidemic. An epidemic is rooted in biology and occurs naturally. Crisis is human-caused and, this particular crisis can be stopped if the lives of these women are valued.” Portrait: @arnicaspringlifestyle #mmiw #indigenous #filmmaker #nativeamerican #brother #sister #portrait #history #piikani #montana
“Plains Sign Language was known and used by 44 identified Tribes, covering the entire Great Plains. The sign language was especially important to the Tribes of the Upper Yellowstone, as the Reservation lines have little to do with the shifting boundaries of traditional homelands. Blackfeet, Apsáalooke (Crow), and Shoshone languages are all mutually unintelligible, coming from distinctly different language families. Yet, despite their language barriers, the Tribes share many of the same star stories and share a common form of song, dance, dress, housing, ceremony and social values. + This remarkable sharing of culture was made possible through Plains Sign Language because it was not taught within tribal communities to communicate with just the hearing impaired; rather it was designed as a lingua franca, so that communities could interact on a seasonal basis and maintain peaceful relations. Before English, Plains Sign Language was the lingua franca of the Paradise Valley for thousands of years, empowering tribal communities to strengthen their circles of life and friendship. + Tribal friendships and alliances were transformed dramatically when horses and rifles, European diseases and the disappearance of the buffalo became part of the permanent cultural landscape in the 19th century. Tribal communities suffered cataclysmic losses of life and resources, striking at the core of their identity and their very survival. Despite the loss of their traditional ways of life and a loss of 80% of their population, the Blackfeet, Crow, Shoshone and others have persevered into the 21st century, maintaining a sense of their ancient traditions from within their reservation homelands and throughout the region.” + —Shane Doyle, EdD (Apsáalooke) in his essay, “Tribes and Culture of Paradise Valley: What Was and What Is.” Shane appeared as a subject-matter expert on the 12,600 year-old Anzick Child remains in the 2016 NOVA/PBS documentary “Great Human Odyssey,” chronicling the evolution and migration of humans around the globe. Here, Shane and his wife Megkian are pictured with their children, ages 5 - 15. Portrait: @arnicaspringlifestyle #indigenous #family #history
In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, this week I’m sharing a series of profiles from a history book recently completed by a team and I on the behalf of Mr. Arthur Blank and Mountain Sky Guest Ranch. “Chapter 2: First Montanans” is a collection of essays and narratives written or told by tribal members from across Montana. We did our best to leave ourselves out of the story and to let Montana’s first people tell the history they know best. + Writer Cinnamon Spear (Mo’kee’e) of the Northern Cheyenne Nation edited this chapter and contributed an essay titled “Flies About,” which details her discovery of and connection to her biological father, and the history that colonizers attempted take from her and her people. She said, “Indian life today revolves around babies being born, basketball, rodeos, ceremonies, powwows and funerals. Every time a Native baby is born, it’s a celebration. We are collectively invested in continuing our lineage and rebuilding our Nations because we literally just survived genocide. The United States was built with bloody hands on stolen land. We cannot forget that history. Every time a baby’s born, it’s us resisting colonization. It’s our future materializing against a system that tried to kill us all off.” + Cinnamon is completing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from Dartmouth College. She also currently serves the Indian Health Service as a Public Affairs Specialist and was recently selected as a featured individual for the OPI “Making Montana Proud” poster series, a campaign to promote American Indian culture and inspire all Montana students to succeed. @cinnamonruby + Portrait: @arnicaspringlifestyle Ledger skirt by: @byellowtail HMU: @etherealhairmakeup #indigenouspeoplesday #indigenousgoddess #nativewomen #nativeamerican #montana #indigenous #history
It’s been so rewarding to grow as an upland hunter alongside Tully. Last year marked both of our first seasons in the field and this year, she’s really gotten it (and I’m still working toward getting it). I learn something new from her every time we go out. It was amazing this past week to watch her blend into a group of dogs and to witness all of them work hard together to put us on birds. Thanks for a great few days @mitchhurt, @sarahdaviestilt @besstofthebess! #dogmom #upland #americanbrittany #brittanysofinstagram #munsterlander #pointersofinstagram #prairie #montana #birddog
Tully on Tour. #brittanybeast #americanbrittany #uplandhunting #huns #grouse #ranch #prairie #roadshow #brittanysofinstagram

© Sarah Grigg, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author/owner is strictly prohibited.