Blackfoot Star Beings: Navi, Rock Art, and the Medicine Hat as a Cosmic Conduit

In various Native American traditions, beings inhabit different planes of existence, and many stories recount exchanges between star people and humans on earth. Among the Blackfoot, Navi (also rendered Nabhi or Naphi) is the creator god, depicted in a petroglyph inside a disc with an elongated skull and four fingers. Creation myths tell how Navi formed animals and then a living human from clay, promising to return, and the Blackfoot regard Navi as a real being descended from the heavens. The star people are said to have brought civilization—agriculture, medicine, healing—and they carried maps of the cosmos to earth, especially in the western regions, leaving rock art of star-beings. Such petroglyphs are viewed by some as depictions of extraterrestrials, offering potential evidence that ancient Blackfoot encountered visitors from the sky. The idea that the Badlands Guardian may reveal how these ancients communicated with otherworldly visitors is also discussed. The Medicine Hat worn by a shaman-like figure is not a typical chief’s regalia but a headdress that integrates eagle tail feathers and acts like an antenna. This medicine hat indicates that the wearer is a communicator with invisible dimensions and with spirits and energies beyond ordinary understanding. The medicine man is described as a combined doctor, priest, and priestly scholar, using the hat to connect with higher realms and possibly the star people. Taken together, these threads describe a worldview in which real beings from the sky influence Blackfoot myth, ritual, and the broader indigenous imagination of cosmic contact.

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