Seeing the Firekeeper Alliance name and logo plastered alongside every mention of the Fire in the Mountains festival might make it seem like it is solely a partner in the production of the fest. But their work extends beyond the past couple of years of festival association and has its initial roots in Indian country suicide reduction. The Firekeeper Alliance’s website spells out its mission as “a suicide prevention and mental wellness nonprofit organization serving community members within the Blackfeet Nation. Firekeeper provides strengths-based counseling support and delivers creative, cultural, and music-based programming designed to promote healthy coping strategies, emotional regulation, and community connection. Suicide rates are significantly higher on American Indian reservations compared to non-reservation locales, and those rates continue to climb each year. This stark reality underscores our mission to illuminate this pressing concern while fostering a culture of support and resilience for our loved ones. By engaging with the most at-risk age groups in Indian Country and empowering them to embrace new coping mechanisms, we aim to keep the sacred flame of life alive, ensuring that every young person within our Tribal community feels valued, connected, and equipped to thrive. Together, we envision a future where every member of the Blackfeet Nation has access to sustainable mental health resources and support, leading to a significant decrease in suicidal behavior.”
The point man in all of this is Charlie Speicher who has combined his lifelong love of extreme music with his professional work as a counsellor and educator to not just shine a light on the tragic issue of indigenous suicide rates, but provide ongoing help to youth and communities embattled by crisis. This includes an ongoing local involvement, an introduction to and development of skills, creative workshops, festival internships, and/or simply a chance to let off some steam, all using extreme music as entry point. Following the interview with the Fire in the Mountains production crew a few weeks back, and in advance of the festival’s kick off in a couple months time, we got on a call with Speicher to inquire about his and the Alliance’s work.
Can you shed a bit of light on background and mission of the Firekeeper Alliance?
Firekeeper is a non-profit organisation and our mission is to create more safety and protection, specifically in the Blackfeet Nation, from suicidal distress. We’re a tax exempt and social advocacy organisation. Really, we’re a group of counsellors and educators working in this field in Browning, MT which is the biggest town in the Blackfeet Nation. We have experienced a lot of sudden, early and traumatic losses in our families, friend groups and with our students and clients we work with. I think it’s widely known and understood that suicide disproportionately impacts indigenous communities. We’ve been working with this issue for a long time and we coalesced around this issue to form Firekeeper about a year and a half ago. In the fall of 2024, we acquired tax exempt status and became an official non-profit. At the time, we’d already been working in close association with the Fire in the Mountains festival. It gets a little confusing. They’re their own thing and we’re sort of their sibling organisation working alongside them and we’ve just kind of partnered and aligned in terms of scope and mission to do this work. So, Fire in the Mountains had existed for a few years before Firekeeper becoming a thing. They had a few years where they did the festival down in Wyoming. July 2022 was the last year they did it there. I attended the festival, liked what they were doing and followed their social media messaging about how they didn’t get their permit renewed. I reached out to their generic email address and got ahold of [festival owner, cofounder and director] Jeremy [Walker] to come on up here and check it out. He did a month later and we got to know each other a little better, we became tight and I talked to him about suicide and what it’s like here and thought it would be cool to do something to fight that. He was onboard.
Before becoming an official tax exempt non-profit, how long had you been doing work in this field?
I’m the director of the alternative high school in Browning [Buffalo Hide Acacdemy] and I’ve been an educator and a licensed counsellor for about 20 years. So, I’ve been doing this work for quite a while before Firekeeper became an official organisation and I work with several other like-minded educators and clinicians in our school and community and we’re all very invested in trying to create as much safety in the face of suicide. We became an official thing under the Firekeeper moniker and 501(c)(3) status recently, but in our eyes this is what we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been here. Most of the members of Firekeeper are tribal members who have been born and raised here. I’ve been in Montana most of my life, but I’m not Blackfeet and I wasn’t born here.
And is the tie-in to extreme music essentially you? Or are others into it as well?
That’s me. I’ve been into hardcore and metal my whole life and it’s always been a deep reservoir of wellness, inspiration and healing for me, so it just naturally appears in my clinical work. That was a goal early on; to galvanize the messaging and spirit that there’s a lot of safety and community to be found in the world of punk and metal. It’s a really organic life pursuit. There are other members who are into it and part of our mission is to try and position all the creative potential in punk, metal and hardcore as a source of protection. And the presence of that protection can be the different between having a really shitty day full of anguish or reducing that pain a little bit and giving it a place to cathartically process.
As you’ve gone along, has the extreme music angle been a tough sell and have you had to do a lot of convincing to school boards, kids, parents, etc.? And when you brought the festival into the mix, was that a big sell to the locals and Blackfeet people?
A little bit yes, a little bit no. In the broad sense, it hasn’t been that tough of a sell, at least for our local community. There are a lot of different entities that we network with closely to pull the festival off. We have a tribal council here in Browning; there are nine of them and they’re the governing body and decision makers for the tribe. We first had to get approval and their blessing to move forward with the festival. Fortunately, I know a lot of the councilmen and women and we’ve worked closely together on different mental health initiatives over the years. They’re familiar with me, our school and the work we do and they see me walking around with Converge tattoos and battle jackets, so I’m kind of known as the metal guy around here. That kind of presence, and my identity as a lover of music and having it be a part of everything we do at school, has been a thing before any of this work began, so it wasn’t that tough of a sell. I just had to talk to the council and explain that this is something that we’re doing for the kids that aren’t really tied into sports, the rodeo crowd or other extracurricular activities. These are the kids with hoods up and earbuds in and probably the demographic that expresses the most profound amount of suicidal material. That’s who this is about. It’s not for everybody, and we completely understand if they weren’t big fans of death grind or whatever, but this music is an important thing to a lot of people and I think everybody could get on board with that. We mostly describe it as heavy music so we’re trying to cast a wide net; anything that gives us the ability to connect to experience that cathartic element and help us to pursue our own avenues to take care of ourselves is a good thing. It definitely wasn’t a tough sell to get the Fire in the Mountains people to get on board with our work. I definitely know we’re not the first people to talk about mental health and metal. There’s a connection there so I think the Fire in the Mountains team was already naturally there and, if anything, Firekeeper helped provide a little bit of language about how to talk about it and how to contextualize it.
What sort of impacts have you noticed in the kids and community that you can obviously connect to last year’s festival?
That’s a great and really important question. This works if there’s continuity to it. If it was just a one-off event that goes away and disappears forever, it doesn’t have much of an impact. The way that there’s actual safety being integrated into people’s lives here is if it’s a regular and expected thing that they can look forward to. It can provide a little bit of meaning, a little bit of hope and a reason to keep going. Having it be an annual event is critical to being able to reinforce those clinical goals, to foster hope and meaning and to create that safety. The impact I’ve experienced here being intimately connected to the festival and carrying the torch in the months since has been awesome. I know our kids were positioned as leaders at the festival and were seen as these cool creative ambassadors of the Blackfeet Nation and its culture, and people were treating them like celebrities. They were up on stage for a few different sets. Alan from Pan-Amerikan Native Front brought our class up and had like 20 kids waving Blackfeet flags up there, head banging and going apeshit. A few of our kids joined Inter Arma during one of the songs of their set and did some drumming. Our kids were working as interns at the festival which was really important to us to show there are some pathways beyond just being a shredder or a ripping drummer. That you can be involved in this scene. You can dork out on soundscapes, and lighting and there’s work and jobs to be done as well; to articulate those potential career pathways. The impact has been awesome. At my school, heavy music is a big part of what we do and we teach regular classes celebrating punk and metal that have somehow been green lit by our superintendent and school board. So far they’re trusting and onboard with what we do. There are bands developing, there’s an after school program where we give kids access to instruments and our recording studio, we’ve run battle jacket workshops. We’re really trying to build a scene. We want to book shows and help our kids through the classwork we’re doing and the outreach in the community that we can have shows here and capture touring bands that come through and there’s no reason we can’t have shows to look forward to which is the same thing as having the festival repeating every year. If we have shows to look forward to that could help us keep going and help make those really shitty days just a little bit less shitty if there’s something fun happening that night. That could be the difference between fucking ending it or getting to tomorrow.
I don’t know what the collection of suicide data is like where you are, but I’m assuming it’s still too early to tell if last year’s festival had any noticeable impact on the raw numbers and statistics?
It’s too early to tell. The numbers for suicide and mortality tracking in Montana are typically a year or even two years behind. Right now we have data from 2023 and that’s about as recent as it gets. There’s typically a lag when it comes to mortality stuff with the department of public health, in Montana at least. I can respond anecdotally to that, though. Our mission is very intentional when it comes to reducing suicide, instead of most western methodologies which are rooted in preventative terms. The truth is we fucking suck at predicting suicide. And most Western clinical frameworks are designed to try to do that, basically. If you’ve ever sought out therapeutic counselling services and indicated that you might be suicidal, you’re typically given a checklist of all the ways you feel like shit and that’s the lens with which a treatment plan is built. So, the framework is rooted in pathology and negative symptoms and it’s a deficit-based model. We intentionally use a different framework, a different clinical approach, intervention and different terminology. Our goal and mission is to reduce, bring it down, not to convince ourselves or anyone else that we’re going to eliminate all suicide because that’s just not going to happen. If we set those expectations of getting to zero suicides in five years, we’re going to feel like failures. The unrealistic approach is going to set us back even further. So with great care and intention, we’re using terms like ‘reduce’ and do everything that we can to provide as much safety and as much opportunity to be safe from this experience and just do our best. Our clinical mechanism is really informed from a strengths-based perspective, which is way more aligned with indigenous values and worldview. It’s basically the total opposite of the western framework. A strengths-based mechanism, instead of looking at what’s wrong with you, looks at what’s strong with you; what’s working and what are the areas of your life that are okay, what can we build on and how can we increase the amount of benevolent experience that exists already. That’s one of the cooler things about being in Indian country. It’s true there’s a lot of distress, misery and anguish here. Life can be very hard for everybody. But what’s also true is there’s a lot of laughter and strength and cool shit going on. There are a lot of strong, bad-ass beautiful people doing some really amazing shit and that’s where our focus is. And as soon as I switched my cognitive psyche towards that different therapeutic orientation, I actually felt effective and like I was being helpful.
Being based in Montana, how did Firekeeper end up sponsoring and doing events in other parts of the country?
I’m a big Converge fan and they played here last year. Steve von Till is on our board of directors and he’s gotten us connected with a lot other people in the heavy music world. We got connected with Converge through Steve last year and wanted them to play because they sing about what we’re doing. They talk about suicide and our kids will like it because the atmospheric black metal may not resonate with the kids who want to go nuts, lose it and mosh. Converge came to be a thing and they crushed it and that became a highlight for a lot of people. We kept in touch and they had the Saddest Day fest in December and they invited us out to check out the event and talk about what we do. We jumped at the opportunity and went out to Boston, which was a great experience. We travel around here and there, mostly linking up with other bands or entities adjacent to the festival and relationships and partnerships we’ve developed since then. As a giant fan and music nerd my whole life it’s been awesome to be validated by my heroes and brought into the fold like this.
From this year’s lineup, who are you most looking forward to seeing?
Full of Hell, for sure. I love those guys and gotten to know them a little bit over the last year. [Vocalist] Dylan [Walker] has done some work with our class, Zoom-ing in to visit with our kids, and they seem like great people. Their style is kind of the flavour I’m always pushing; let’s not just be heavy, but let’s be fucking aggressive, caustic and intense. Anything from the world of hardcore or death metal, anything with a style that’s more combative or hostile, is what I’m trying to push the hardest. I’m also a big fan of YOB and have seen them a number of times and deeply respect what they do. We’ve got to know them a little bit over the years and they’re great people and have worked with our kids as well. I like all the other bands on the bill, even if some of the stuff isn’t my number one, favourite kind of jam. I think the common thread linking all the bands on the upcoming bill is that everyone believes they are quality people and that’s the really important indicator that they’re on board with the mission and what this fest is all about. You gotta be cool and you gotta be a believer.
Fire in the Mountains info and tickets
The post Q&A With Charlie Speicher of the Firekeeper Alliance appeared first on Decibel Magazine.