Jack Gladstone’s path to becoming “Montana’s Blackfeet Troubadour” has been a winding one.

It has taken him from scared child to warrior to scholar to singer. It has gone from the Washington coast to Browning and finally to Kalispell, where Gladstone now makes his home.

The path has ultimately shaped Gladstone into a spokesman for a history and heritage that have fought for centuries to be heard.

Gladstone was born in Seattle to a German mother and an alcoholic Blackfeet father. His dependence on the bottle, Gladstone said, was shaped by his experiences in combat in World War II and by his cultural heritage.

“Indians, especially reservation Indians ... were never socialized in the correct etiquette of drinking,” Gladstone said.

He said his father began drinking in 1949 or 1950, not long after the war ended. He was still drinking when Gladstone was born in 1958 and continued to depend on alcohol for the next decade.

“Ages zero to 9 — in those years, music was the zone that I could go to, to escape, to retreat, to deal until the floodwaters of insanity went down,” Gladstone said. “Music was a refuge from my earliest days.”

The floodwaters began to subside in 1967, when his father chose a new, alcohol-free life, which he maintained until his death in 2003. After his father sobered up, Gladstone found a new refuge of sorts — this time from the trials of puberty — on the gridiron.

“I blossomed athletically,” he said. “I blossomed a bit into the warrior archetype.”

Around that time he also read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” In the book, Dee Brown expresses an Indian view of American history and injustices against tribes by the U.S. government.

“As a young man [feeling] the rising tide of testosterone, I would read that, get pissed off and go play football,” Gladstone said.

The aggression worked in his favor; after graduating from high school in Seattle, Gladstone played football for the University of Washington. He was part of the team led by quarterback Warren Moon that defeated Michigan in the 1978 Rose Bowl.

But football no longer was Gladstone’s presiding passion.

“The quest that I was enamored with at college was not athletics,” he said. “It was finding myself, being comfortable with my place in the universe, humanity’s place in the universe.”

To that end, he studied anthropology, history and sociology. After taking a public speaking course, Gladstone declared his major in speech communication.

In that path, Gladstone studied the function of the spoken word in personal, group and public settings. He studied rhetoric, debate, persuasion — in short, he said, he learned the art of the spoken word.

The lessons he learned in college ultimately would shape his career as a singer.

“What affected me most deeply in the trajectory toward my chosen profession was American public address class,” Gladstone said.

The class covered speeches made in the mid- to late-1800s, a time when many of the recorded addresses by politicians and preachers involved what Gladstone called “flowery rhetoric.”

“The most compelling speeches, the most authentic speeches, the most spiritually real speeches were delivered by American Indian chiefs confronting the threat and the dissolution of the traditional life ways and the traditional homelands,” he said.

“This made my jaw drop and realize this is a real story that is being told.”

In 1979, Gladstone took a summer job in road construction in Montana, which allowed him to return to his roots and reconnect with his Blackfeet heritage. He returned to school in the fall, but his native roots ultimately pulled him back to Montana after he graduated from college in 1982.

The following year, Gladstone took a job teaching public speaking at Blackfeet Community College and coaching high school football and track. All the while, he continued to explore his cultural heritage.

Finally, in 1985, “I answered the call in the form of a newspaper ad to form a native lecture series,” he said.

That was the beginning of “Native America Speaks,” Glacier National Park’s program on the history of Indian tribes in the area. That series, which Gladstone has worked with since its inception, enters its 28th season this year.

In the program’s first two years, Gladstone realized there might be a niche he could fill that would combine his heritage and his lifelong love of music. Gov. Brian Schweitzer didn’t dub him Montana’s Blackfeet Troubadour until recent years, but Gladstone really took on that role in the mid-1980s.

He had been performing in bars since moving to Montana, primarily “baby-sitting drunks” and playing easy listening music on his acoustic guitar. He’d written a few original songs — “damn good songs” — along the way, and in 1986, Gladstone began marketing himself and his music to colleges.

His show combined music and history and brought Blackfeet culture to life for his listeners. He expanded his audience beyond the collegiate world in 1988, when he recorded his first album, “Wolves on Sea & Plain.”

Since then, Gladstone has recorded 14 more albums. Over the years, he has had the opportunity to work with some of the best in the business, including Grammy Award-winning producer Lloyd Maines.

Gladstone’s most recent album, “Native Anthropology,” won a Native American Music Award last fall for Best Historical Recording. It also garnered nominations for Songwriter of the Year and Best Folk Recording.

Even while recording and performing, Gladstone has never forsaken his program in colleges and schools. He has been active in Montana’s implementation of Indian Education for All, a state mandate that seeks to familiarize students with Montana’s American Indian history and heritage.

His goal is to make that information accessible to people of all ages through his song’s lyrics and through a more intangible quality in the music itself.

“Some meaning is without words,” Gladstone said.

“It triggers some emotions, some realization in moving way beyond the words. I want to trigger that in the listener. That is what my work is striving to do.”

For more information about Gladstone, visit www.jackgladstone.com.