Chef Thomas Fitzgerald invited us out to Fire in the Mountains. We'd been watching him produce live-fire cooking through his company, Region Sauvage, for a while, and the chance to work alongside him was reason enough on its own — especially with the ranch in the picture. Thomas is building a culinary program at Hightail Ranch, a regenerative buffalo operation in Montana, and getting to see how those buffalo are being cared for and brought back in real numbers, after they were very nearly wiped out through colonialism and manifest destiny, would have been worth the trip by itself.
Toby, Chef Thomas Fitzgerald and Food Origins Podcast Host Dave Sands
What made us even more excited was everything stacked on top of it. A like-minded music festival. The Blackfeet Nation in Browning. A chance to understand how buffalo is woven into that community — not as a history lesson, but as something living and current. How a people and an animal had kept each other alive, and were quietly doing it again.
Here's the part that got us. Fire in the Mountains works closely with the Firekeeper Alliance, a nonprofit that grew out of Buffalo Hide Academy, the alternative high school on the reservation. It supports Native youth dealing with mental-health struggles that come out of generational trauma and a real lack of proximity to opportunity. The festival itself is alcohol-free and built around suicide prevention in the Blackfeet Nation. Jeremy Walker, who runs the festival, told me that a group of these kids had traveled with their teachers all the way to Wyoming to see the original festival — so they brought the whole thing north, to them.
That is putting your money where your mouth is. Moving an entire music festival to a different state is not a gesture. It's a logistics nightmare that somebody decided was worth it. We were in from the jump.
Feeding the people who build the thing
The culinary program at Fire in the Mountains has several jobs, and only one of them is the part the public sees.
The first job is feeding the staff. These are people who have worked production on music festivals for a very long time, some of the best in the world at what they do, and they were there entirely out of passion. Watching them work was humbling in a way I wasn't expecting.Â
We also fed the interns — Blackfeet youth volunteering across the festival to learn how things actually get made. Lighting production. Sound. Running the general store. Some of them worked front of house with us. Every day we'd cook off a quick run of grilled hot dogs in the back for anyone in the staff section who was hungry, the interns included. Nothing fancy. Just the food that keeps a crew standing up.
The community feed
Thomas was put in charge of the community feed, which happens the day before the festival opens. Staff, VIPs, and the Blackfeet Nation all eat together off of one buffalo, ceremonially harvested back in winter and kept frozen until we needed it. The animal came from the tribe's own herd, part of the Blackfeet Tribal Buffalo Program, an effort run through the tribe's Siyeh Corporation to restore a centuries-old relationship between the Blackfeet people and the buffalo, and to put healthy, locally sourced food back within the community's reach.
Mark McGee, who runs the program at Siyeh, led a workshop on it at the festival, and the story he told about how that animal was chosen is something I’ll never forget.. People went out and played drums near the herd. One buffalo stayed. It stood there watching them play while the rest of the herd moved on. In that way the animal offered itself.
I don't have a tidy way to talk about that. It's a spiritual practice belonging to the Blackfeet Nation, and we were guests to it, not narrators of it. What I can tell you is that the animal was cooked over live fire and smoked overnight, with somebody awake and watching it the entire time, and that it was served on Thursday ahead of a showcase of local bands that kicked off the weekend. Real community in action!
Four proteins, a row of grills, and a line out the door
Alongside all of that, we cooked every single day for the VIP barbecue — an add-on people could put on their festival ticket. They'd come through and get a plate. Thomas had a ton of sides going, four proteins, plus vegetarian options.
The best part, from where I was standing, was the row of Thaan grills lined up along the back. We used them to finish the proteins and vegetables right before plating — bringing them back up to temp and giving them one more kiss of fire before they hit the plate. Watching that line run was very cool. Volunteers ran service and front of house with us, and the whole thing moved.
Same philosophy underneath
The festival curates two workshop locations every day, each hosting a rotation of hour-long sessions. I sat in on as many as I could. They ranged from music and its healing properties to Blackfeet sovereignty and a lot of ground in between. They were threaded through the entire weekend rather than tucked off to the side, which changed the shape of the whole event.
A ceremonial powwow opened things up. Then the bands. Watching YOB take the stage was a highlight, partly because they're Portland buddies of ours. And watching Kevin Kicking Woman, an elder of the Blackfeet Nation, get on stage with Enslaved for the live world premiere of "Spirit Helper" — a song built from a morning prayer song he'd entrusted to the band — was one of those moments you know you're going to be describing to people for years.
From the outside, metal and Blackfeet culture look like they have nothing to do with each other. Up close, they have almost everything to do with each other. Both are built for people carrying more grief than the daylight world knows what to do with. Both refuse to route around that grief — they build a room for it instead, loud and communal, and make you stand inside it together rather than alone. That's what heavy music has always been for. You gather. You turn what people have survived into something you can say out loud. You witness each other's pain in public instead of swallowing it in private.
So it isn't a coincidence that a festival built around suicide prevention found a home on the Blackfeet Nation, or that the kids who most needed it were the reason it came north. Grief witnessed together weighs less than grief carried alone. Both of these cultures already knew that. The festival just put them in the same field.
There were families there. Kids. People who'd flown in from Germany and Norway and other places you wouldn't expect anyone to travel from to stand in an open field in Montana. We camped in scout tents at Red Eagle Campground, on the shore of Lower Two Medicine Lake at the eastern edge of Glacier. There was a bear across the water the first day. We swam every morning, cooked and served and ate well, worked next to people who are very good at what they do, and stayed surrounded by art and making the whole time.
When I try to explain what the weekend actually was, I keep landing on one word, and it isn't metal and it isn't barbecue. It's care. Look at what all of it was built on. A people who were nearly wiped out, bringing back the animal that kept their ancestors alive — and an animal that, the way they tell it, offered itself back. A festival that pulled up stakes and drove to another state because some kids needed it closer. A culinary program whose first and biggest job was quietly feeding the people who build everything else. Music made to carry other people's grief. Every piece of it was somebody taking care of somebody else, most of it where nobody was watching.
That's the thing I brought home. Not a recipe or a set list (but plenty of merch, trust me). Just the reminder that everything worth building: a herd, a festival, a meal for a thousand people, a way through grief, it all gets built by people quietly deciding to take care of one another. And that when someone hands you a plate at a table like that, the only real thanks is to pick up a tray and help feed the next person.
The Firekeeper Alliance does this work year-round, on the reservation and beyond. You can find them at firekeeperalliance.org.