LONG TIME AGO

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Everybody likes to hear the stories about “long time ago” Blackft. Fewer are interested in right now, except the Blackft, who are living in the Now -- most of them hustling hard, feeling that they see the New World coming over the horizon. Gotta keep up the payments on the new pickup and the old lady won’t put up with no second-hand sofa no more. Kids want college. Anyway, plenty of work to do since the Blackft began to take the management jobs in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to manage their own land and its resources.

Two books exist about the olden days, both worth reading. One is “The Blackfeet, Raiders on the Northwestern Plains” by John Ewers. University of Oklahoma Press, Copyright 1958. ISBN 0-8061-1836-9) Ewers was the curator and creator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. He was a trained and expert anthropologist who interviewed a lot of old-timers and went on to be an important person in Washington, D.C.

The other is “The Old North Trail: Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians” by Walter McClintock. (Copyright by University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book printing 1968. ISBN 0-8032-5130-0 McClintock (1870-1949) came to the rez as a young man with a Forestry Expedition under Gifford Pinchot in 1896. He was a botanist and a photographer and was swept into the friendship of Mad Wolf (“Siyeh” -- which is also the name of the wholly-owned subsidiary that runs the tribal businesses: bottled water, casinoes, cable TV, and other things.)

The two books are quite different. The old timers that Ewers was interviewing in the Forties were still young when McClintock came earlier. The very-old-timers of McClintock’s arrival dated back to Lewis & Clark. Ewers’ discipline was anthropology, while McClintock, equally scientific, was focused on botany -- he didn’t look on his friends scientifically but rather more as Ned Jacob did on Moccasin Flats: as equals and friends. Ewers would have been watched by colleagues to see if he might be “going native,” but McClintock just did it. Although he felt a little sad when he spent an evening playing with a pup who turned up in an old lady’s stewpot the next day, he took a photo of her stirring the pot.

McClintock was given rather a bad rap by Sherry L. Smith in her book, “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes: 1880 - 1940.” (Oxford University Press, copyright 2000.) Her emphasis is on early white friends of Indians who were not quite politically correct (often patronizing) and whose stories had consequences in terms of how people thought about Indians. She felt that McClintock, whose family was well-connected, didn’t do enough for his Indian friends politically and didn’t come around much after he made a splash with his book. But the newspapers in Browning carefully note his arrival by railroad every summer with crated presents for Mad Wolf and his family.

Bob Scriver (1914-1999) asked his dad once, “Pop, did you ever know a guy named McClintock?” T.E. Scriver (1879 - 1971) came to Browning in 1903 and had run a mercantile store there his whole life. “Oh, yes, he was around here quite a lot in the old days.” Bob knew John Ewers well and built a “homemade museum” under the influence of the example of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. But he was not a buddy of Ewers. He would have been a great friend of McClintock’s if he hadn’t been out of time-sync with him.

About 1990 when I was teaching at Heart Butte during the first year of a high school there, I tried to think of a book that this all-Blackft student body could read at the same time. I chose “The Old North Trail,” though it was politically incorrect because of being by a white man. (This political stuff can be a big nuisance.) The book is full of explanations, adventures, natural history, and fuzzy reproductions of the photos Walter took. It was an immediate experience of the reservation, not objective reflection like Ewers’ book. I squeezed the budget hard and got enough copies out of it for one classroom of kids. So I didn’t check them out to individuals -- just handed them out and then collected them. They were supposed to read a chapter a week and then do a worksheet. They could not play basketball until they finished that worksheet.

One smart aleck protested, “Hey, this isn’t English. It’s history.” I asked, “What language is it in?” “Um, English.” “Get back to me when you have a book written in Blackft.” It will happen some day.

Of course, they all copied off each other, but they had to be careful because the worksheets were not just a list of questions but a hodge-podge of drawings, circles, squares, numberings -- all pointed in different directions. I had to make myself a template for correcting -- a piece of tagboard with strategic holes over the places where answers should be. I heard them explaining to each other. The theory to which I was responding was that Indian kids don’t think linearly, but rather in spatial relationships. (Me, too. And I’m Scots-Irish.)

The theory that actually made it work had nothing to do with all that, but rather with horizontal/lateral learning rather than hierarchical/authoritative learning. I saw this recently when I subbed for a very small class of junior high kids. I told them what the grammar rule was and gave examples. Then the brightest kid in the group turned to the others and explained what I’d said. He did a good job and didn’t mind repeating. The boys did this more than the girls. They clearly wanted to know what I was telling them, but they didn’t trust me and didn’t want to learn from me. I’m still thinking about this.

Though I was white and they were Indian, I don’t think it’s Indian -- I think it’s generational. Young people now just don’t believe that adults really know anything -- they don’t WANT to believe that. If adults are so smart, why isn’t it a better world? On the other hand, in the post-colonial era, no minority wants to be told anything by someone from the dominant culture for much the same reason.

Anyway, Ewers and Smith are TELLING YOU and McClintock is just sharing. He’s all caught up in the stuff himself. When we started reading “The Old North Trail” together, in homes all around Heart Butte people went to trunks and chests and boxes and drew out the copies of “The Old North Trail” they had had all the time without the kids even knowing it. I never heard of anyone having a stashed copy of “The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains.” Maybe. (Darrell Kipp even has a copy of that book about Ned Jacob, “Sacred Paint.”)