CAN I SAY "INDIAN"?

Monday, November 19, 2018

Among all the other current identity struggles in the world as we try to define "nation" and "sovereignty" is the complex, painful, and enduring opposition between the originally only inhabitants of the Americas and the cross-ocean invaders from Eurasia.  Almost half-a-century later than I arrived to be a witness, the terms of the problem have changed, the results remain bloody, and there are few answers.

Probably the best way to approach the dilemma (for those who are brave or crazy enough to approach it) is along a spectrum or maybe two spectrums, one for rational reflection and one for acknowledging passionate emotion.  I don't know how to think about the halves - of-tribes who have left for the cities.

In terms of the rational, the early logic was to eliminate the cost and immorality of straight-out violence by creating zones, reservations or reserves or ranchos where the land was "Indian."  But the government never gave up supervising them, as though they were wildlife preserves because one of the rationales for taking the continent was that they were not "human," but rather a subspecies.  (Now that we are reclassifying even Neanderthals as more than knuckle-draggers, this won't work.)  Another argument -- one I hear around here next to the rez where prejudice is still old-fashioned -- is that "the Indians weren't using the land anyway."  This is an idea from the 19th century when "using the land" meant growing crops, which is still done here on the flatter parts, but not everywhere.  

It also privileges the idea of "using," which is pretty much how white, older, semi-educated, conservative men see the world.  When I objected to being "used," my husband at the time asked, "What's wrong with that?"  I spent ten years helping to build his career and I don't regret it, but it WAS using.  He also used the low incomes of the rez people to get low labor costs, some of them unreported in the confusion of overlapping labor jurisdictions.  When he reached out for meaning and dreamt of becoming a "Bundle Owner," he could not in their system assume such a role without a wife.  Me.  I was honored as well as used.

Land and occupations are one way of finding identity.  Since 1961 when I first came here, "Indians" were expected to be helpers: labor, janitors, nurses, teacher assistants.  Now they are doctors, lawyers, administrators, and other primary roles.  This has confused some people who fell out of sync with education, mostly because of dysfunctional or missing families.  Their identity is tied to the tribe's definition of membership.  But whites have also been victims, losers.

In the beginning it was very clear that first contact original people were very different.  They had adapted to their ecosystem, which was dependent on the bison, so they dressed, ate and thought differently.  Their language was different and its assumptions were dependent on a different experience of the world, not just names or counting.  The reaction of the white exo-culture was double, a split rather than an increase.  One half relished being conquerers and wanted to preserve the idea of power through violence.  The other half took up a morality of compassion and recognition of humanity.  The first half depended on the Industrial Revolution (guns and railroads) and the second referenced New Testament Xian religion.

Both sides produced much literature: that of battle and heroes or that of natural nobility and continuousness with nature.  Both literatures were intensely, emotionally popular, and both produced injustice based on their fantasies.  Some men used women as murder victims, often with a sexual focus.  Many people, esp white women, tried to make tribal people into angels who would justify their romantic codependence.  All kinds of people WANTED so badly for some people to be their Indian friend, the person who could confirm their value by being their friend.  They were so easily bamboozled by anyone with long black hair and a good tan.

Two complicating surprises have arisen and are apparent on Twitter.  One is an oversimplification of the use of genomes to discover identity, based in part on a misunderstanding that blood quantum is about genomics  --but it is really about genealogy.  Its Biblical: "begats."  The fractional notion of origin is based on slavery (half-black) and should be rejected.  The heritage understanding of identity is based on paper records of descent which are Euro-inventions: birth certificates, marriage certificates, baptismal records.

Those who sell DNA tests are pushing the limits of identity: certain alleles (gene groups) are typically associated with possible tribes, but none will definitively have a label.  The story is complicated by the typical base or "operating system" of the American originals being Asian, which leads to two more complications: the political use of the idea of Beringia to define the original people of America as "immigrants" -- ten thousand years ago -- and the wariness of original peoples to supply a database big enough to be reliable, partly because of being used (!) as a source of medical ideas and partly because at the time of development, when the early versions of blood type for transfusions were defined, the idea of an origin in Asia was when Asians were deadly enemies at war.  

The other complication seems to arise from feminism of the aggressive kind which has pulled in the idea that to name something is to define it and tries to control the terminology of the discussion.  Sometimes there is also backlash against asking people personal questions about who they are.  These people insist on the names of tribes at first contact and want geography to be scrubbed of slang stigmatic names on the maps.  "Squaw" creek or valley or plant.

Deeper and more significant in terms of consequences are legal questions of jurisdiction, contracts, and entitlements.  Much of the precedent was created at a time when the people entitled were confined to reservations, could not speak English and didn't understand law.  This made them easy prey for unscrupulous dealers.  Understanding, much less unraveling these events, is hard work and often dependent on missing documents or witnesses.  This is the area where Eloise Pepion Cobell dug in her heels and fought in court.  She won.  

At the moment there are teaching jobs unfilled in both Heart Butte and Browning on the Blackfeet Rez.  These are county schools and governed by state qualifications rather than race.  What happens in the future is dependent on the students in the schools now.  The weather is beastly, the adventure is rewarding, and most of my warmest friends are tribal from my teaching days, though they don't necessarily look like it or wear feathers.  Pass it on.

HARVEY LITTLE DOG (1946-2010)

Sunday, April 25, 2010 “Harvée Little Dog, 64, the East Glacier Park Postmaster, passed away Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at a Kalispell hospital due to cancer. Survivors include his brothers, Forest Little Dog and Floyd Middle Rider, both of Browning, Donald Little Dog of East Glacier, Howard Little Dog of Heart Butte, and Wheeler Little Dog of Kalispell; Germaine Little Dog and Lee Ann Hoyt as well as numerous other nieces and nephews. Harve’ is preceded in death by his parents, Richard and Louise Little Dog; sisters, Germaine Little Dog, Lorraine Little Dog and Hazel Anderson; and brother, George Little Dog. He was born in Browning, March 12, 1946, to Richard and Louise (Spotted Bear) Little Dog where he grew up and graduated from high school. He had worked with the US Postal Service for the past 20 years and served as the East Glacier Park Postmaster for the past many years. Harve’ was an avid art and antique collector. __________ Yesterday was the funeral mass of Harvey Little Dog, my former student, my postmaster for several years and my friend. There’s another dimension: because Richard Little Dog’s father was a Bundle Keeper and transferred that Bundle to Bob Scriver and me in the Sixties, I am in the Old Way a member of that family. Bob was given the Blackfeet name of Middle Rider (Sik-pokes-si-mah which translates to “He Who Likes His Backfat Burnt Black.”) In the old way, of course, I would have picked up the obligation of helping to support and serve that family. I didn’t. Partly because I moved away and partly because the other members of the family went in very different directions. Harve’, for instance, was a faithful member of the Church of the Little Flower in Browning with a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. However, Forest Little Dog gave an eloquent prayer in Blackfeet and Father Ed emphasized that there was no contradiction between the two Ways. This was the first time I’d attended a funeral mass after a cremation, which rather derailed the conventional mass in subtle ways. Since there was no coffin, a simple shrine included the cremains, photographical portraits, and flowers, which are not usually present as the same way as secular and protestant memorial services. Immediately after the service the cremains were taken to the Little Dog ranch and scattered, which is also unconventional. (I approve. Too many people have cremains in their closets, unable to part with the last traces of a loved one.) Father Ed confronted the ashes straight on: “This is what happens to the human body after death,” he told us. “We must see that fact and grieve for it, but Harve’ was a good Christian and lives on.” Then he said something else. He said, “Some people think of heaven in which we eternally indulge in our favorite practice for the rest of eternity. Consider what it would be like if you loved fishing and continued to fish forever. You’d get tired of it.” But I know people who would not! Lofty mountains and rushing streams beat pearly gates and golden streets! I understand what Father Ed was trying to get across: the terms of Heaven and Eternity are not human terms, but utterly transformed into something we cannot conceive of on this side of the barrier death erects between this world and the other. The Church of the Little Flower is in Browning, but Harve’ was part of the East Glacier community. I don’t know how to get an accent mark on the second syllable of his name and neither did the funeral chapel, so we’re both using an apostrophe instead. Harve’ was out of the closet. When someone teased him about his name by Frenchifying it, the same way that some pronounce “Tarjaa” to convey that Target is a high class big box store, Harve’ embraced the practice and put it on his official postmaster ID tag. He was an EXCELLENT postmaster, in somewhat the same style as the beauty parlor operator in “The Ladies Number 1 Detective Agency” or the nurse/friend in “Angels in America.” That is, compassionate fact-facing and practical help. East Glacier is a resort town with a lot of young people living away from home, a lot of drifters, and -- esp. over the winter -- a tendency to get embroiled in small but hot feuds. A postmaster, like a hairdresser or bartender, does a lot of counseling and advising as well as a bit of detective work (to find out where to forward mail) and a certain amount of bending the rules. He received awards for excellence in service. The congregation that gathered was far more eclectic than usual with no big shots or politicians. The three resort towns of the rez (East Glacier, St. Mary and Babb) have more year-round white people, so park rangers, shop-keepers, retirees, cooks, and teachers were there. Other gay people were not necessarily public. I caught up with several friends I hadn’t seen for a while. Dr. Dorothy Still Smoking, one of the founders of the Piegan Institute, drove all the way from Coeur d’Alene where she’d been attending a workshop on racism and tribal sovereignty and arrived just in time. Harve’s companion, guardian, and chauffeur (Harve’s feet had suffered amputations.) proudly offered his love and appreciation. Because Highway 89 is being drastically rebuilt where it crosses Two Medicine, I went up the “inside road,” which pretty much stays close to the mountains and overlays the Old North Trail. Springtime in the Rockies means intense sunlight between and through massive clouds moving swiftly towards the east. Clouds on the ground crept through every high pass and cleft and gap in the mountains, coming like nebulous cats out onto the prairie where they sprang up into the sky, vaporizing. I’d allowed lots of extra time, just in case, so I got to Browning early and went on up to East Glacier for lunch and to look around. I lived there after Bob divorced me, trying to decide what to do next. For those who are bound to ask, I had a grilled cheese sandwich in the Little Diner at a table next to Joyce Clarke Turvey and her granddaughter, Chantell, who is a park ranger on the west side of the mountains, a botanist who moved a year ago. Joyce was also at the funeral mass. She has a Blackfeet name, since she was adopted by John Clarke, the famous woodcarver, but the grand-daughter has none. I would call her “Sweetgrass Woman.” This sort of weather, this depth of history (many photos of the original Little Dog in Washington to discuss treaties -- the Clarke family deeply embedded in events) weave on the loom of time a transcendent tale of cross-purposes and deep friendships. Harve’ was one who understood that, even as he contributed his rich, proud strand. I think Heaven will look familiar to him.

NA CONTROVERSIES: GENOME

Friday, April 23, 2010 When the “tribes” -- which were a concept introduced by Euros -- were mapped (as they were at first contact), given names, assigned territories, engaged in treaties (some of them never signed by both parties), organized and reorganized, they ended up becoming corporations. That was the metaphor for self-governance: that each “member” was defined as owning shares in a “company” which had the object of doing business, i.e. making a profit. The best reaction to the way things turned out is probably sustained laughter. Nevertheless, in this monetized world, the idea keeps its grip on “tribal business councils.” So do the ideas of tribes, reservations, treaties and -- come right down to it -- money, which basically a system of standardized IOU’s backed up by bureaucratic record-keeping that hasn’t changed all that much since it was invented in Egypt to keep track of crops along the Nile. The whole notion of unitizing value in some standard way (dollars) and then writing the amounts into ledgers dominated the army -- which was in charge of all Indians at first. Not only did they deal in dollar values (which might not really represent the true value of the food and blankets, esp. after some of them were siphoned off during transport or from warehouses) but also they had to figure out a way to quantify the Indians themselves. Since most officers were from Britain where domestic animal breeding had been very successful at producing defined kinds of dogs, cows, pigs and so on, all of them susceptible to the idea of prestige eliteness (“King Charles Spaniels”?) and since they could not wrap their heads around the humanness of indigenous people, they went to the idea of pedigree. These would be people with “papers” -- sound familiar? “Tribes” equals “breeds.” So they lined them all up and asked everyone who their parents were, thinking of parents as the two exclusively defined and limited mater and pater they knew from their own lives and had many many laws and moral prohibitions to define for sure. Of course this hardly fit the reality of tribal life where all aunts and uncles were defined as auxiliary parents and people freely adopted children, entirely forgetting who the biological parents were. Still -- illogically calling these pedigree papers records of “blood quantum” -- access to food and other commodities, assignment of lands, and the fact of being a shareholder in the corporation that was the tribe all hinged on “blood quantum.” It was not until WWII that “blood types” (A, AB, B, and O) were widely known because every soldier had his blood type on his dog tags in case he needed a blood transfusion in the field. Now, of course, we can quickly look at genome snippets and learn far more. Part of the secret of successful organ and bone marrow transplants is getting a very close genetic match in the gene sections that seem most crucial. Celebrities go on TV shows to explore their genome, believing that it can reveal their “racial” heritage, unconscious that humans everywhere share almost all the code. Snippets might be more common in one place than another, but very few are unique unless they’re recent mutations. Anyway, it’s unlikely that their entire genome will be de-coded. We’ve only recently discovered the “epigene,” which influences the genes tremendously. Indians are hoping they will be descended from famous chiefs, but they are just as likely to have inherited the genome of a mother kidnapped or seduced from some entirely different tribe. But since adjacent tribes are often derivatives or break-offs from other nearby tribes, their genomes will be very similar, indistinguishable. Most shocking of all, since American Indian genetics derive from Asian “rootstock” (quite apart from the controversy of how they got over here) they are possibly related to some ancient Chinese emperor! And then there are those troublesome very ancient “Caucasian type” bones that turn up now and then. All this nineteenth century thinking has been coming into increasingly urgent collisions with modern monetization of everything and the interests of the corporate tribe versus some other corporation, esp. the big Pharma corporations. First it was the Pima, whose systems had adapted so exquisitely to their ancient foods that they reacted to modern Wonder Bread, soy mayonnaise and Twinkies by blowing up like balloons and then dying of diabetes, the Isles of Langerhans in their pancreases devastated beyond salvation. Exactly how this happened interested the scientists very much. The next tribe to be studied was the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, who were having so many deaths from diabetes that they could hardly refuse “help,” esp. when there was a little money involved. So they all gave blood samples. Then the unthinkable happened: some of the tribal members went to college, learned how to use search engines, how to interpret medical studies, and so on. The white scientists in the ivory tower were still 19th century, thinking of people unlike them as never being able to understand what they did. And anyway, that old agreement made at the time of the blood drawing never to use the blood for any other studies, was forgotten, molding in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.) Those Havasupai college students realized that the blood was being used in studies of things like psychosis and in-breeding. Hot button topics when you’re trying to convince the world that you’re as good as anyone else. Since tribes are corporations, they had lawyers. They knew how to go to court. The agreement they reached with the researchers included money, return of all blood samples, and an apology. By this time some tribal members had also returned to the 19th century and were “remembering” all sorts of rules and beliefs, all of them religious, about blood. By the time they brought the blood samples “home” any onlooker could see the ghosts of many bygone people whose blood represented them. That much, at least, had escaped the corporation context. Can’t a people own their own genome? Is declaring a blood draw sacred the right thing to do? In what way is owning one’s blood formula the same as owning the right to depict the people as mascots? Spirituality becomes monetization, control becomes self-defeating. It is very hard to find a genetic database for organ and bone marrow donors that includes enough American Indian people to get a good match. They don’t want even the cheek scrape that will give the docs the code for fear of betraying ancestors. And yet, one of the common consequences of the rampant diabetes is the need for a kidney transplant. Indian people are mostly poor unless they’ve found something to monetize like gambling or minerals. But the thing they are most short of is trust. You can’t buy it. It cannot be monetized.

THE IMPERMANENCE OF IMAGES

Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Blog subjects just come to meet me. I got up early to drive to Cut Bank to get blood glucose strips because I was out of them and discovered they were, too. But I ran into Mary Lynn Lukin in the salad dressing aisle and we had a good conversation about rounding up the photographic records of the past. She was saying how often she would go to visit some of the older folks on the rez and they’d hear about her putting photos on line or in archives. (She says use TIFF, not JPEG, because JPEG’s deteriorate more quickly and here I’ve been using JPEG exclusively!) They sit over their coffee thinking for a few minutes, then go into the back room and bring out a box of old photos -- like a hundred years old -- and dump them out onto the kitchen table regardless of what else is scattered on it. Mary Lynn yelps and rescues them. Native Americans get emotional whiplash from the twists and turns remembering can take. First around were the artists without cameras, people like Paul Kane, Bodmer and Catlin, who portrayed Indians as accurately as they could -- paraphernalia in great detail -- but never quite got bison right. For a long time then Indians were supposed to forget Indian stuff and just try to be like the whites around them. (Which was only one way for whites to be: after all, cavalry, priests, cattlemen and sheepherders are not exactly typical.) Then, if they put on buckskin parade suits and rode horses around, everyone thought the past was a great thing. The anthros came and wrote down a lot of stuff, took a lot of photos, put them in books, advanced their careers, got a lot of stuff wrong. There are a lot of photos you never see unless you’re pretty close to Indian families. Indians in bobby sox and sweater sets, riding around in the big cars of the Fifties, the girls all with perms and head scarves. Mom and Dad playing love bird at the kitchen table. These are the people who grew up speaking Blackfeet but gave it up and didn’t teach their children. They thought life would be like in the Small Town Fifties forever more. They swilled Coca Cola, smoked cigarettes, and danced to the juke box. They felt American and played basketball with all their hearts, even the girls. Won, too. Then the people began to split up: some went city and some went ghetto and some went beatnik and some just stayed home in the little cabin where their grandparents raised them in the foothills. They all took photos, but what people want now are the posed photos of white photographers who were selling re-enactments what was being stamped out just decades earlier. Last night’s movie was “In the Light of Radiance,” 2001, shown on PBS, available at Netflix, narrated by Peter Coyote and Tantoo Cardinal. It’s about the tension between Native American sacred places and commercial interests like mountain climbing, ski resorts, and gravel pits. This is a genre I mostly see for sale on DVD around here. The photography is gorgeous and there are many references to Mother Earth. Tense but earnest forest rangers talking to naked New Age people. The resident wise man of the film is Vine Deloria, Jr. (b. 1933 - 2005). A local cinematographer, Darren Kipp, has just finished a video about him. Some people, local and Indian, have already forgotten or never knew who he was. http://blogs.nwic.edu/deloria/ If you’re in doubt this website will help you. You might want to attend the symposium, but if you do or if you want to be a presenter: “Individual presentations may be formal or informal, but in keeping with the spirit of Vine, there will be no PowerPoint or other electronic presentations.” (Big story about the military’s overuse of this in the New York Times today!) Deloria was actually quite assimilated -- his father and grandfather were Episcopal priests and he himself had both a theology and a law degree, as well as being a Marine. His hat trick was turning everything around and examining the reversal. His most famous book is probably “God Is Red” if not “Custer Died for your Sins.” His formal position was that white civilization was decadent and corrupt, dead on its feet and raiding red civilization in hopes of recovering its vitality. He makes a good case. Since Bob Scriver’s life (1914-1999) was so entwined with NA lives, I looked through piles of rez photos from the Twenties. Recently I’ve been posting Twenties photos from my own family, the Strachans, at www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. They aren’t so different. My friend Jim Stebbings was here yesterday. He’s been retrieving historic photos of the St. Louis stockyards where he worked as a kid, cleaning them up and placing them with societies who will presumably protect them and use them for study. There are always two schools of thought about such things: those who want to preserve it all and those who say it’s OVER, dump it. Forget it. Don’t obsess so much. Both are reacting to the power of photos to SEEM as though they’re telling us something about reality, when in fact they are not, except that time passes quickly and even the photos that seem to have frozen an image are vulnerable. I sit and look at a photo of Louis Plenty Treaty taken as a young man to prove that Blackfeet can successfully grow kitchen gardens. There he is, handsome and strong with his shovel in his hand. And then I look at a photo taken of him in old age to prove that Blackfeet are religious people who attend Christian churches, and there he is, still handsome but now his braids are gray. In fact, he was one of the most serious of the Bundle Keepers and an important leader, but how would you know that? Photos of the ceremony are forbidden and he didn’t write anything that I know of. What did he really think? I never thought of asking him and I doubt he would have told me anything. Photos are but a faint shadow of reality. And just now the pharmacist called to say that my glucose monitor is obsolete. He can’t get me more strips.

"POIA" THE BLACKFEET OPERA

Saturday, May 29, 2010 When I googled the phrase “remnant anthropology” nothing came up, so I don’t know whether it’s technically supposed to refer to either anthropology done with a remnant group of people from a defined culture or whether it’s about the impulse to “save” as much as possible of a culture clearly doomed. Maybe it’s a muddle. Anyway, I’ll go ahead and embroider on an article in “Montana, the Magazine of Western History” called “Following the Old North Trail to Berlin” by Steven L. Grafe in the Spring, 2010, issue. The article is about the relationship between Walter McClintock and Arthur Nevin, who is NOT the composer of “Narcissus” by ETHELBERT Nevin which I laboriously pounded away at when my piano teacher locked me in a small room with said instrument, saying I could not come out until I mastered the piece. Here’s the url of a YouTube version, much more largo than Mrs. Winter’s notion. She liked spritely. This “Hiawathan” version is illustrated with a portrait of a boy painted by Caravaggio. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DE8DG5QQYY But that has nothing to do with Arthur Nevin and Walter McClintock who visited the Blackfeet Reservation in 1903 with the goal of creating an opera about a Blackfeet myth called “Poia” around the North Star personified. That was the same year my father-in-law, Thad Scriver, arrived in Browning to make a living in the mercantile trade. He said he did know McClintock, who was still visiting year-after-year in the Forties. This thrilled Bob Scriver, a musician and a bit of a composer. In fact, Bob himself composed a little Christmas operetta about a star performed by the Browning Schools, where he taught. (I hope the music is somewhere in the unprocessed materials the Montana Historical Society owns.) It’s easy to understand why anyone, particularly anyone early in the twentieth century before light pollution developed even in Montana, would be nearly overwhelmed by stars. Today you’d have to go to outer space to see them as they were. Trying to capture fraying cultures and to reinvent them with “modern” contexts like opera (though opera itself was meant to recapture the dimensions of Greek tragedy) is Romantic. The grip of this point of view is so strong that even the Native Americans have now begun to chafe against it, because it insists on the 19th century outsider view that sees “other” cultures as innocently childlike, noble, and idealized. Anything that seems adult or businesslike finds no sympathy. Romantics would have no problem with Arthur Nevin who was apparently quite childlike and impractical. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOmWtZ1TSI8 I googled and found this vid, which has nothing to do with Nevin or Blackfeet, but is an excellent depiction of the Romantic attitude: a lone yearning man traveling through nature. At this website is a quite Romantic version of the actual legend. http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TheStoryofPoia-Blackfoot.html To no avail I looked for a recording of the music. If I find it later, I’ll post the url. “Indianist” composers of this period tended to be naive, offering music like “Song of Hiawatha” with its BOOM-buh-buh-buh, BOOM-buh-buh-buh “tom-toms” and no consciousness of the sonnet-like structure of indigenous songs. Still, McClintock did his best to steer Nevin to reality. “The Old North Trail” records the melodies of a number of songs of the Blackfeet. In 1903 the buffalo had been gone for decades and the hide lodges had all worn out, which is why McClintock’s metaphor of lodges as lanterns was inspired by firelight inside canvas tipis. The people had mostly been born since the 1850 prairie treaties and were living within the boundaries of reservations, but they had not greatly changed their ways and kept their ceremonies alive to the extent that the Indian agents and missionaries would tolerate them. In fact, they survived underground until the Sixties and lately have revived. On page 48 is a photo of the handsome and preening Nevin, who has just had his face ceremonially painted as a sign of blessing. On page 47 Mad Wolf and Gives to the Sun are photographed with their Medicine Pipe Bundle on a tripod. The pipe Mad Wolf is holding is NOT a Medicine Pipe but a traditional social pipe with a Sioux red stone bowl. Smoking structured many gatherings in something like the same way as serving coffee. When Nevin and McClintock went to Berlin, hoping to find support for “Poia,” they were helped by the American-born Lillie Greenough de Hegerman-Lindencrone, who was married to the Danish ambassador to Germany. She was a singer and a lady-in-waiting to the German empress. (Talk about a Romantic context!) Bob Scriver’s first wife was the granddaughter of a Greenough woman. This has absolutely no significance whatsoever, but artists and musicians grasp at straws, so Bob would have liked to have known. Not only was there insufficient support for the opera in Berlin, but when it was finally presented (somewhat entangled in the personality of Teddy Roosevelt and German contempt for the underside of Romantic which is primitive savagery) it was booed from the stage and went broke. “Poia” lay dormant until the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial revival of all things peripheral. Even then, the more sophisticated and contemporary opera, “Summer Sun, Winter Moon,” by the warm and accessible composer Rob Kapilow with libretto by Darrell Kipp, was more appealing to some. There ARE other Indian operas. In 1951 my family attended an open air version of “Bridge of the Gods” which personified the great volcanic peaks of the Cascades in a love story. Arthur Nevin blamed all the troubles of “Poia” on McClintock, but I reject that notion, just as I reject the accusation by Sherry Smith in her book “Reimagining Indians” that McClintock betrayed the Blackfeet by not doing battle in Washington, D.C., to bring about better political outcomes. It’s true enough that McClintock, with his tales and photos of the early century and his Romantic attitude throughout his lecture and “anthropology” career, didn’t think much about the coming world. But he was a young man with a good education (Yale), a true friendship with Mad Wolf, and the financial resources (mercantile father) to bring generous gifts every year. “The Old North Trail” is a MAJOR contribution. McClintock never married and no doubt someone will make something of that. (Nevin married an older woman with children.) History is a tricky business. World-views of the time become unintelligible, let along indefensible. Anthropology is even now trying to re-frame itself in some way that can get outside culture, since our own 20th century assumptions have become remnants. But how can one be human without some kind of culture, whether remnant, constructed or simply unconscious? Can we be blamed for loving the Romantic and the Operatic?

NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN DAYS 2010

Monday, July 12, 2010 The roots of North American Indian Days go back into the mists of the millenia as an annual gathering of Blackfeet gens (what you might call bands, usually clustered around a patriarch’s family) who followed roughly the same seasonal rounds of the prairie. At this gathering news was exchanged, the young people courted, and ceremonials of hope and repentance tried to protect everyone from lightning strikes and hail poundings. For the last years since I came back, I haven’t gone. I’m not Blackfeet -- they remind me over and over -- or even Indian. But the real reason is that now it’s like a fair in Indiana: midway, 4-H, horse races, rodeo, night time stage shows, parade. It was a little like that in 1962, my first, but there was plenty of the old time left around. It was an affair of wood, canvas and dust with regalia half-saved, half-invented out of what was at hand. It’s dumb to be nostalgic about it, because there was much poverty and people came as much for the feed as for the performance. The anthros were all very serious in their khaki clothes, still believing they were doing culture rescue. Tourists were solemn and a little scared, and indeed there was violence down along the creek where there were groves of trees -- also quite a bit of sex. They called it “tipi creeping” but most was “leafy rolling.” In those days there was a competition to see who had the most authentic lodge and Bob was the judge. Everyone knew everyone. I was young. Everyone was Blackfeet except the whites. No regal White Earth girls with baskets on their heads. No Meso-Americans or Hopi. It was the key to our tourist season. We put on extra help, the Museum was swarmed, and in our backyard, recently a horse corral, I set up a table and served formal meals with centerpieces I picked along the roadsides. In the following six weeks we either made enough money to carry through the winter, or we didn’t. I haven’t made a secret of my -- well, not disgust or disdain or anything like that -- but my lack of connection with today’s Indian Days. This year I thought maybe I should relent and go make a new effort. So I did, going early in the day yesterday which I knew would be a winding-down day because it was Sunday. Highway 89 is rebuilt, easy passage after a year of dynamite and tremendous earth moving where the highway crosses Two Medicine. The weather was glorious, cleared by a big thunderstorm the midnight before in Valier. In Browning it had come after supper and included hard winds and walnut-sized hail. It had soaked and bruised everything. By Sunday noon bedding and buffalo robes were draped everywhere to dry. For decades the number of lodges dwindled, but this year there were a double-dozen plus house-shaped tents between rails plus small trailers and campers, and hordes of nylon pop-up camp tents everywhere. Some outfits had leafy arcades or tarp flies strung for shade. There were few people around, just enough to make a Grand Entry in the expensive finery they had sheltered in cars. They looked a little stunned. Ordinarily there would be a sea of mud but over the years the grassy field that had been the campground has been hardened: asphalt roads, a concrete food court with concrete picnic tables and benches, the dance floor has been a permanent structure with astroturf for years. Stick game is in a huge pavilion with a concrete floor with a white plastic wedding marquee over it. The players sat in folding chairs instead of on the ground and there were hand drums instead of two logs for pounding. One drummer had a little terrier-mix pup on his lap. The sticks and “bones” looked new. The blackjack card games are in a permanent motel-like line of rooms they share with law enforcement offices at the end. A huge BIA trailer for the processing of drunks stood alongside. (Alcohol sales are banned during NAID.) Two large Indian Health Service trailers were also present, I presume for medical emergencies but maybe with some kind of testing service like for diabetes, etc. The oil leasing company was giving out booty bags. “Helpers” and guides were everywhere in dayglo “pennies” (pinafores), smiling and pointing. No admission to the grounds but filtering at the entrance: “any alcohol, guns?” No, no, no. For lunch I had a foot-long corn dog. Stopping at the Blackfeet Heritage Center, which used to be the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, I used a bathroom as elegant and scrubbed as any public bathroom anywhere. I can only guess where the plumbing goes. In my day our totally substandard little toilet enclosure in the basement was only slightly better than a hole. On the display floor, which used to be our shop encrusted with plaster and paint, I noted the work of Valentina LaPier, Francis Wall, and Terrance Guardipee, all of it sophisticated and beautiful abstract-mixed-with-figurative far beyond most of the work at the Russell Auctions. Some of the sculpture is, as one might say, “after” the work of Bob Scriver. That is, groups like his “Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle” and close-to-copies of individual figures. Gordon Monroe is very good at it. But the only trace of Bob is the heroic-sized fiberglass version of “An Honest Try,” the bucking bull competition. I said to the clerk, “That’s Bill Cochran on the bull, you know.” A lady just down the counter lit up. It was Diane Magee, a member of that first seventh grade class I taught in 1961. She’s been a nurse in Salem, OR, for decades. Her father, Merle, was on the school board that hired me. He used to be a hunting pard of Bob’s. Diane is as intelligent, reliable, and far-seeing as anyone could be. Blackfeet, yes of course. Her son is big, rather like Merle. Her mom is ninety now, and the daughteres are taking turns month-by-month to keep her in her house. I’ll go back to visit her. Soon. No time to waste. Encouraged by all this, I went around to the back to the little house I helped Bob build and ended up living in with him for four years. The museum is pretty well maintained. The little house is coming apart and tagged with graffiti. I had thought the high board fence would come down but the same gate was there. I went through and greeted a big orange and white cat. Eegie’s cage still the same, Foxie’s cage still the same, the screen porch was enclosed in plywood, and here was a big Indian man with a broom. I thought he was sweeping. “How dare you intrude into this private space!” he said. Not shouting, but in that calm but charged voice of someone confronting danger. “Leave immediately. You are not wanted!” I tried to explain but he was having none of it. The broom was a weapon. I left. The gate was hanging by one hinge. He said that was none of my concern. I thought about it all as I drove home through the idyllic fields of blooming camelina and windrowed hay. I wasn’t grieving for the house -- I never had a lot of attachment to it. I know I have no privileged entitlement to my fifty-years’ memories because they can’t match the Blackfeet people’s memories of themselves. The destruction of Bob’s world began early and nothing was as destructive as the dispersal auctions of his estate by his worst enemies. People keep asking, “Where did everything go?” They don’t believe the answers. It wasn’t until bedtime that I got it. I was looking at the future. The innocent campgrounds of a nomadic people have been replaced by the technology of refugee management. Bob’s fortress, once built to protect him from the threats of AIM, meant to protect his accumulation of valuable art (his furnishings were from Hardware Hank), is now a refuge for another embattled and impoverished man with only a broom for a weapon. In the Sixties Hubert Bartlett, who belonged to groups expecting WWIII and who resisted the government (the Minutemen, Posse Commitatus), used to tell us he had buried battle-ready long guns, greased and sealed in plastic. I wonder if they’re still there. It’s not about Indians. Lightning and hail are the least of it.

RAMONA GOSS DAVIS: A Contributing Life

Thursday, August 05, 2010 We forget that history doesn’t just happen a hundred years ago. It’s happening right now and has been happening all along. Ramona Goss Davis is an important part of the story in two ways. One is that in the future the 20th century will be seen as a crucial time for the Blackfeet people as they struggled to hold their ground against an onslaught of change. (Just like everyone else.) And the other is that the story of human communities in history books is often told only in terms of the men, but sometimes it is the women who know best what happened because so much of it happened to them. Maggie Goss was 56 in 1907, which means she was born at about the time the major prairie Indian tribes signed the first treaties in the Midwest. Her father was Bill Kaiser or Kizer and her mother was a full Piegan, Comes by Mistake. She married Francis S. Goss in 1873. He was white and the marriage was performed by a priest. Her siblings were William, Leonard, Lomie, George and Elvira; Ellen Cowan, Susan Bell and Louisa Rodderville. At the time of the census of 1907-08 there were twelve children: Albert, 35, married; William, 30, married; Lomie, 29, married; Caroline, no age given, married to Johnny Merchant; Susie, 21, single; Nathan 21, single; Nellie G. married to George Paisley, 20; Abbott, 14, single; Francis 12, single; Vena, 8, single. Albert, the oldest of the children, was married to Mary Jane Wren who was a quarter Piegan. Her mother had been Malenda Wren, daughter of Charley and Rosalie (or Rosa Lee) Chouquette, sometimes pronounced “Shoo Cat” by the old-timers. Malenda’s photo is on page 29 in Bill Farr’s book of photos: “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945.” Along with Susie Williams and Isabel Coe, daughter of Joe Cobell, Malenda was a principal interpreter at Old Agency. In her picture her hair is parted in the center and smoothed down. Her silk dress is covered over the shoulders with a sparkling sequined cape and a gold watch on a chain. She is entirely elegant and more than a little bit French. Her daughter was Mamie Goss, born in 1899, a matron at the Cut Bank Boarding School, and buried from the Browning Methodist church. Ramona Goss Davis was Mamie’s daughter, baptized in this church, a life-long teacher. When I came to Browning to teach a half-century ago, I had the classroom next to Ramona Goss Davis. In those days we wore skirts and heels to teach. Ramona wore fitted suits with beautiful blouses. Though she was a ranch wife, her hands were always manicured and her hair was always permed and just so. Her classroom was organized and calm. No one gave her any lip. But it was not a cold place and students didn’t sleep. Through Lomie Goss, Ramona was tied into the families of Horace Clarke, Margaret and William Spanish, and John Clarke. If you follow these names through the record books, you will learn a great deal about the Blackfeet. When I first came, these names were still coming up in conversation. They were powerful, colorful, significant players in the development of the tribe. One theme to this story is that of interpreter -- Malenda Wren was evidently sent back east for education as were Malcolm Clarke’s daughters. (Helen Clarke became the first superintendent of schools in Montana and owned the first piano.) Mamie was a matron at the Cut Bank Boarding School in the days when attending there could literally save a child’s life. It seemed clear that the children must learn to be modern. (Nora Lukin raised my consciousness about boarding schools soon after I arrived.) Mamie was much loved. It was only natural that Ramona would become a teacher. In her later years she worked once again to bridge the cultures, this time carrying the past back to enrolled children who no longer knew the old ways. This is what the women do: feminists say their backs are bridges, connecting worlds. I remember well how straight Ramona’s back was when she walked proudly beside Clair Davis, that handsome man, and the two fine children. It is often said about religious congregations that there are really three congregations: one that wants to go back to the past, one that is content to just continue as things are, and one that goes ahead to meet the future. These women were all part of the group that went to meet the future. It will be up to Shelley to continue that path. Ramona was a summer baby, born on June 29, 1929, and attended the Browning schools, clear through to the high school class of 1947. In 1951 she received her teaching certificate at Montana Normal School in Dillon and in 1961 graduated from Western Montana College (which had also graduated from being a normal school by that time). She taught at Pontrasina, one of the dozen little one-room school houses that dotted the reservation and at Whitlash, near the Canadian border, nestled up against the east butte of the Sweetgrass Hills. She was in Browning from 1953 to 1962, in Libby, Pablo, and from 1969 to 1970 in Butte. After moving to Columbia Falls, she taught at Hungry Horse, and West Glacier, where she was also a ranger for Glacier National Park and a Remit Officer. Clair passed away on September 3, 1976. Ramona moved to Ronan in 1987, was a teacher’s aide at Dixon, then an English teacher at Two Eagle River, and substituted in Ronan. She tutored at Upward Bound throughout the Mission Valley. She worked at Kicking Horse Job Corp for many years as a supervisor/counselor and at Jore’s in Ronan as a tool assembler. Once she told me proudly that all these people just didn’t seem to want to let her retire. I don’t think she really wanted to anyway. When Ramona was a teacher, it was a true profession and she was a member of the Montana Education Association before it was considered a labor union. She was honored and proud to be the Montana representative to the National Education Association with the Minority Caucus. She was a member of Delta Kappa Gamma, an honor society of over 150,000 women educators in 14 countries that promotes professional and personal growth of women educators. Her dog’s name, Baby, tells a story. She is survived by Shelley and Shelley’s husband Kevin McKee of Butte, and her son Robert Davis of Mission Valley. She’ll be placed in the Columbarium in Whitefish, a resting place for ashes, next to her only husband, Clair Davis. The world has seen a lot of changes since Ramona was born in 1929 and yet more than a few people suggest that we’ve just lived through a repetition of the Roaring Twenties and the following Depression, which probably suggests we didn’t learn the lesson the first time. From “Comes by Mistake” through Maggie Goss through Rosa Lee Chouquette and Mary Jane Wren and Malenda Wren, to Ramona Goss Davis, these women kept their faith in the power of learning and the effectiveness of personal discipline.