TIME-LINE

Friday, April 08, 2005

Time-Line

When I went back to teaching high school English on the Blackft Reservation in 1971, the school board (always Indian) had made it a rule that all new teachers in the district would have to take a class in Blackft history. Great! At the same time, an Indian in a Boston detective’s trenchcoat had returned to the reservation and they figured he was the perfect guy for the job. They were right. 

Darrell Kipp had been a senior at Browning High School the first year I taught in Browning, which was junior high so I was never Darrell’s teacher. But I saw him one of the first days I went up to the school buildings. A kid was being teased by a big high school guy and another smaller high school guy in government-issue eyeglasses made him stop. The guy with the glasses was Darrell and that was pretty typical of him. He attended Eastern Montana College because it was free and his teachers (especially his senior English teacher, Mrs. Holloway, who had a face like an old-fashioned rose) thought he should. Then, after serving in Korea in the military so that he had the GI Bill, he went to Harvard to get a master’s in sociology and then went to Goddard in the hippy years for an MFA.

The first problem he faced was that no one in the class could agree on “Blackft History” because to them it meant “reality” and no two people -- even those who grew up right there -- could agree on the reality of what happened. Darrell’s Harvard solution was to rename the course “Blackft Philosophy.” Everyone understood that philosophy is a matter of opinion and argument, so then it was okay to go ahead and argue without getting so mad.

The new teachers were an odd assortment -- from whites who’d never been there before, to locals -- and even some of Darrell’s old classmates. He started us off with a time-line. This was before computers, but I put my time-line in a card-file, one card per year, so I wouldn’t have to retype the whole thing every time I added something, and I added a lot -- even after the class had been over for a long time. We got our dates from reading, from sharing and swapping, and from just guessing -- especially the dates for the coming of the horse and guns. Sometimes I’d pull a card or sequence of cards and lay them out on a table top to think about.

My time-line is now in the computer, 26 pages long. When I run it out, I put a wire spine on the back, add covers I also print on my computer, and have a handy reference book. It’s never put away, because I use it so often. In fact, as I work on this blog, I often make a little three-by-five penciled card with an index of things like the births and deaths of famous people I’m discussing. Otherwise it’s sometimes hard to see that their differences are due to the times they were in -- their relative ages.

I’ll give you a sample to start you off on your own time-line.

1720: Blackft get guns and horses.
1739 First trading posts at forks of Saskatchewan River.
1754: Anthony Henry meets Blackft along present Alberta/Saskatchewan border. Guided by Cree, he visits the “archithune” which is Cree for strange/enemy/slave, likely Blackfeet.
1769: Contact between Blackft and de le Verendrye
1772: Mathew Cocking of Hudson’s Bay Co. describes Blackft.
1774: Cumberland House trading post established on the lower Saskatchewan River.
1778: Continental Congress signs the first Indian treaty -- with the Delaware Nation. At this time the US Articles of Confederation say that one purpose of the Articles is to regulate trade with the Indians.
1780: Blkft population estimated at 15,000, distributed over the top half of Montana and bottom half of Alberta & Saskatchewan but only east of the Rockies.
1781: Devastating epidemic of smallpox, evidently caught from raiding the Shoshone.
1782: Snake and Shoshoni tribes flee the Bow River area. Smallpx mortality among the Blackft is about half the population.
1784: Congress grants the War Department rule over Indian Affairs. Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Fur Co. are competing for Blackft trade.
1787 David Thompson winters with the Blackft on the Bow river. “Dog Days” old men (those who remember pre-horse) say they came from the NE. Blackft war party goes south to Santa Fe and steals horses from Spanish miners.
1790 Duncan McGilviray is in the area. Trade and Inercourse Act passed to license Indian traders.
1792 Peter Fidler approaches Chief Mountain.
1794: Blackft trade at Fort George on the Saskatchewan River.
1795: Kutenai tribe offers horses to the Blackft to get passage to Fort George, but Blackft say NO for fear of them getting guns as well.
1796: On July 14 Chief Mountain is identified and given the English version of its Indian name.
1799: Northwest Fur Co. builds Rocky Mountain House at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River.
1800 Trappers LeBlanc & La Grosse of Northwest Fur Co. come to live with the Kutenai. Pikuni group is master of the plains.
1801: McKenzie, explorer, estimates the Blackfeet warrior class as 9,000 men.
1802: The Louisiana Purchase
1803: Disease among the buffalo
1804: On March 10 formal ceremonies in St. Louis finalize the Louisiana Purchase. In May Lewis & Clark start west.

The actual time-line that I use includes a lot of material from a Canadian winter-count book that is copyrighted, so I don’t include it here. (” Winter Count: A History of the Blackfoot People” Paul M. Raczka. Oldman River Cultural Centre: Brocket Alberta, 1979)

I’ll post more time-line later. What’s clear from this excerpt is that the Blackft were first approached by white people from the north. They were Hudson’s Bay employees because Canada was not a separate country and the Canadian prairie was only a mercantile franchise. The Blackft got right with the program and were soon organized to sell dry meat, pemmican, and tanned buffalo hides to the new people. They were NOT inclined to wade around in a lot of icy water to catch beaver -- let the Cree and the Metis do that. (Discussion in “Anthropological Esssays” by Oscar Lewis. Random House, @ 1946, 1949, 1953, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970. So many years because these are articles written and published separately, then anthologized. There were no ISBN numbers then but the Library of Congress Cat. Card # is 79-85586. The article is called “The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, 1942.”)

AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Many people relate best to Indians in the old boy scout way. They may feel no discomfiting politics will be involved. No such luck. This posting will discuss three books of Blackfeet myths and stories.

“Blackfoot Lodge Tales, The Story of a Prairie People” by George Bird Grinnell. Bison Book. University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962. My copy is too old to have an ISBN. My mother paid $1.50 for it some time in the deep past.

“The Sun Came Down: The History of the Wold as My Blackfeet Elders Told It” by Percy Bullchild. Harper & Row. Copyright 1985. ISBN 0-06-250107-0.

“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall with an introduction by Alice Beck Kehoe. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8032-9762-9

George Bird Grinnell (b. 1849) slightly preceded McClintock. He was the stock broker of Cornelius Vanderbilt, father of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who was the sculptor of the big Buffalo Bill equestrian monument in Cody, Wyoming. Her son endowed the Whitney Gallery of Western Art which became part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. When the stock market hit bad times, Grinnell became the editor of “Field and Stream” magazine. He accompanied Custer and the 7th Cavalry to the Black Hills in hopes of finding fossils but had so little luck that he bowed out when Custer went back to the West and ended at Greasy Grass.

Perhaps if a movie is made, Grinnell could be played by Daniel Day-Lewis to capture that strange “neurasthenic” but callisthenic sort of personality that seems to have rather circulated around Teddy Roosevelt, but Teddy married and had lots of children -- George Grinnell Bird did not marry until he was 52. Make of it what you like. He was certainly part of the upper-class group of people, mostly men, who had access to the West and also the means to write about it. Sherry Smith seems to like Grinnell better than McClintock, who also recorded many myths and stories in “The Old North Trail.” Both were friends of Siyeh, Mad Wolf.

(In case you lost the last citation: “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, Oxford University Press. This book has a good chapter on Grinnell.)

“The Sun Came Down” is written by a genuine Blackft, though there are those who mutter than he was pretty assimilated and put Christian content into the old time stories. Could be. But it’s an engaging, respected set of the tales and it needs always to be acknowledged. I don’t know much about Percy Bullchild, though I’ve taught many of his descendents. They are very proud of him.

“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Wissler and Duvall is the reissue of another old book. Wissler (1870-1947) was the first anthro of the Blackft, a classmate of Alfred Kroeber (protector of Ishi and father of Ursula LeGuin). Duvall WAS a Blackft (though he had enough French in him to be called “The Frenchman,” and Kehoe is a feminist, a staunch defender of post-colonial theory, and the former wife of Tom Kehoe, whom she married when he was the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. Note that Bullchild (or his editors) uses BlackFEET, but both Grinnell and Kehoe (or their editors) use BlackFOOT in the titles. This has implications. Generally, Blackfeet is the South Piegan choice and, therefore, taken to refer just to them. Blackfoot is the choice of the Blackft Confederacy as a whole, which is 2/3rds in Canada, so this implies that the Grinnell and Kehoe versions are more inclusive. There’s not a great deal of difference in the actual stories, though if one looks closely, there are always small variations. Hard to know what they mean: faulty memory or significant variation?

If I could only buy one of these three books, I would buy the Wissler/Duvall/Kehoe for two reasons: I love the painting on the cover (“Kills Night” by Paul Pletka”) and the Kehoe introduction packs more information into a small space than you could possibly find anyplace else. It is an excellent map to the sequence of anthropologists visiting the Blackfeet and supplies a thorough bibliography.

There is another problem (which you won’t meet in these books) when dealing with raw, collected-in-the-field stories by writers who believe they should be reporters rather than interpreters. I refer to the obscenity problem. Blackft were quite innocently frank about sexual matters and their trickster figure, Napi, has a penis worthy of “Elasto-man” and a libido that never rests. One set of translators agreed that they would use the euphemism “lariat” when they meant penis, and it turned out to be quite a remarkable lariat. Sometimes anthropologists wrote about ceremonies having to do with (ahem) birth and death in Latin to save the sensibilities of the masses. More about the issue later, but it is still -- even in our raunchy age -- unresolved and likely to set people’s hair on fire, especially Indians with strong mission backgrounds or conservative Christian commitments.

The stories are endearingly universal. At Heart Butte I taught Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” by analyzing “Star Wars,” the movie. In 1990-91 the movie was not much in circulation and it was mostly new to the 7th and 8th graders. Some had demon fathers and understood exactly what it meant to discover that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. I should go look those former students up after the “Revenge of the Sith” is released and see what they think. But the point is that when we looked at the Blackft mythology after that, we could see the story patterns that so fascinate Campbell, Eliade, and Jung. (Don’t mention Eliade to Alice Beck Kehoe or her hair will burst into flames! Feminists are on the outs with Eliade. No escape from politics, whereever you turn.)

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.”)

BROWNING, MONTANA

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Browning, Montana

April 5, 2005

Browning, Montana

Not everyone is fond of Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackft Reservation which belongs to the Amskapi Pikuni Siksika (otherwise known as the South Piegan Blackft). Sandra Dallas, who wrote the copy for Ned Jacob’s art book described the town thus: probably quoting Ned, she says it was “a tough, squalid Indian town. Set at the edge of the awesome grandeur of Glacier National Park, Browning had all the beauty of a prairie chicken squatting in the grass. It was treeless, cold, drab as its name, with unadorned, raw board buildings, many of them bars. But for Ned Jacob, Browning was the real West.” I felt pretty much the same way. Ned was there straight out of high school, between 1956 and 1960. I was there straight out of college (I’m a year younger.) between 1957 and 1973. Both of us, though we’ve never met in person, were deeply shaped by our experience and, in fact, I came back. Ned went to Denver to become a famous artist, especially known for his fine drawing. Now he’s in Santa Fe, in theory, but he’s quite a “fiddlefoot.”

[Ned’s book is called “Sacred Paint,” by Sandra Dallas, copyright 1979, Published by Fenn Galleries Publishing Co. ISBN 0-913504-50-5. It’s a beautiful book, prize-winning, with a silver dust jacket. You can find it on the internet, though it’s expensive. My copy came via Abebooks from a bookseller in Australia.]

The prairie chicken squats along Willow Creek in what was originally a flood-plain swale. Once the daughter of the man whose Indian-allotted land it was told me she used to love to wake up in the spring mornings and gaze out at the sheets of wildflowers: buttercups, wild iris, glacier lilies, shooting stars. They say the location was chosen for the agency because of this beauty.

At the chicken’s head (north) is the ridge with the hospital on it (inevitably “pill hill”) and at the chicken’s tail (south) is the ridge with the row of schools on it. The town’s real main street is stretched along the chicken’s spine and bisected on the perpendicular by Willow Creek. The creek runs underground in a culvert now, but it used to be bordered on the hospital side by Government Square, a big grassy area suitable for horseback cavalry drill (Originally the town was Fort Browning and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was in the Department of War) and bordered by the government housing. On the south side of the creek was the town square, which used to have a pond suitable for watering horses, but now has a park. That’s where the bank, the post office, the bowling alley are, in the real center of town. 

All the little creeks that used to wander through the townsite were gradually put into drain pipes and storm sewers under the streets and buildings, but when the year is wet, they come back. Few buildings have basements and those that do must keep their guard up. In the 1964 flood, the Museum of the Plains Indian that is on the west side of the west boundary road (which is in fact a dike) had part of the foundation pushed in and valuable artifacts destroyed in their preservation drawers. When the high school basketball court gymnasium was built just before I came, the pond under it returned and the floor became into a roller coaster. Some engineering was necessary. You can’t have Indians without a basketball court.

I’ll steal a story from Ned. When he first arrived, he fell in with a bunch of boys his age (eighteen) who were getting high on wine. He drank with them, even contributed money, until they moved on to drinking “rub.” (Rubbing alcohol.) Finally they crashed in a tent pitched in the yard of one boys’ house. Since Ned had refused rub, he woke first and stuck his head out of the tent to see where he was. He saw “an Indian man next door in a shapeless dark suit, a felt hat with an open crown on his head, and a red silk scarf around his neck.

“’Hungry?’ the Indian asked.

“’Yeah.’

“Well, come on over.’” 

Breakfast was boiled coffee, frybread, and a big chunk of a boiled beef heart. They were on Moccasin Flats, which was a piece of land that ran along behind the schools. Once I looked out the classroom window in time to witness a drunken man flat in the dust while his equally drunk romantic interest tried to run their old car over him. Luckily the car had a lot of clearance and he mostly just bounced around under there, while his “old lady,” who recognized the problem, tried to get a wheel to go over him but was too drunk for proper calculations. Someone intervened before it became a murder.

Moccasin Flats had begun in about 1900 as an emergency project of log cabins for old people who were living in tattered tents, nothing like the felt-thick hides of oldtime lodges. Once the old folks moved in, their children could not be denied. By the time Ned and I got there, the place was a tangle of abandoned cars, trash, crazy TV antennas, and all the other Dogpatch paraphenalia you could think of. Many people think this is hilarious and the true preference of Indians, but in fact it amounted to abandonment by the Indian agent who should have been seeing to the tilted privies, sagging electrical wire, missing garbage service and widely spaced water spigots on the street. On winter mornings the place rang with the buzzing of chainsaws because everyone heated and cooked with wood. The people there were living a 19th century rural life because they had no choice. Shortly after I came, JFK stepped in and things began to change.

The school had been assuming that Moccasin Flats was trust land, held for protection by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and therefore not taxable. The law allowed for the federal government to pay the equivalent of property taxes for all land in trust or owned by the US Government, like military bases or reservations, and they had been doing that for Moccasin Flats and for the new border patrol homes up along the highway where the officers put up a sign that said “Moccasin Heights.” Then one day we discovered that Moccasin Flats had belonged to some white absentee landlord all along. All that federal money would have to be paid back. I don’t remember how it was resolved.

The Dawes Act, which split up reservations into allotments the same way homesteading did, had another very dark side. When the first owner died, his allotment was divvied up among his descendents. When they died, the land was divided again. By this time, some city lots are owned by more than a hundred people, some of whom hadn’t been seen or heard from for decades. Some of the land was put back into trust by regular owners, so they wouldn’t have to pay state or county taxes, but land with so many owners could only be handled by keeping it in trust and any profits sent to the various owners. Only there weren’t any profits. And if there were liabilities, everyone ducked.

Part of the reason Browning can look pretty derelict is that no one can get enough of a grip on the old buildings to do anything about them. But the present mayor has really bitten down on the problem and his constituency agrees with him, so this year fourteen rickety old firetraps were burned to the ground by the fire department. Legal instruments like condemnation were used, I think. Also, persuasion and threats. Few, if any, of the buildings had foundations. Strangely, people were sentimental over each shack -- myself included -- remembering how it had been, what had happened there, what the dreams about the place had been.

Getting back to the water problem, the present town supply has a strange characteristic. The manganese in it reacts with germ-killing chlorine to make a black sediment. The water can’t be used by the hospital dialysis unit, which is crucial because so many people have kidney failure from advanced diabetes. In fact, it turned out that this very wet place has the least water in its drainage of the other originally considered locations. Now a huge project that will pipe water down from Two Medicine River in Glacier Park is underway. It will serve several communities and supply lots of good quality water -- until the glaciers are all melted. Then Browning, like Katmandu and the cities of Peru, will have to think again.

THOSE GUYS ARE LIKE THAT

Saturday, April 30, 2005

Those Guys Are Like That

The Blackfeet were a nomadic people who constantly moved over their range in relatively small groups, mostly affiliated by family ties. Far from wandering randomly, the groups followed a rough pattern that was mostly seasonal (and therefore varied if the weather did) harvesting camas here, gathering sarvisberries there, and always on the lookout for small bands of buffalo (not unlike their own bands) that might be conveniently close to a nice steep cliff where they could be panicked into stampeding over. That way even stone knives could make them into dry meat.

The small family groups, over time, developed personalities and reputations or had some leader with a quirk worth noting by others and then used to indicate which band was being discussed. Thus, “Never Laughs” or “Eats Alone” became the names of bands, rather like surnames. Here is a list someone in the past made of the bands at that time. (They would, of course, change as they merged, spun off parts, or died out.) The translations are not much good, so look for a Blackft speaker to give you the REAL names.) They’re not always flattering because jokesters invented the names -- not the band themselves.

Siks-uh-kah (Blackfoot) from
Siks-i-nuts (black) + uh-kuh-tehit (foot)

Puh-ksi-nah-mah-yiks (Rotten bows)
Mo-tah-tos-iks (Many medicines)
Siks-in-o-kahs (Black elks)
E-ma-ta-pahk-si-yiks (Dogs naked)
Ah-ki-stan-iks (Much manure)
I-yo-mo-ki-kan-iks (Sliders)
Si-yeks (Liars)
I-sik-stuk-iks (Biters)
Pis-ti-kum-iks
Sin-ik-sis-tso-yiks (Early finished eating)
Ap-pe-ki-yiks (Skunks)
Is-si-sak-wi-ah-wat-op-iks (Meat-eaters)

Ki-nah (“Bloods” or maybe
Many Chiefs from Ah-ki-nah)

Siks-in-o-kahs (Black elks)
I-yo-mo-ke-kan-iks (Sliders)
Ah-uo-nis-tsests (Many lodge poles)
Ah-tut-o-si-ki-nah (Behind direction “Bloods”)
Is-tse-Ke-nah (“Bloods”)
In-uhk-so-yis-sum-iks (Long tail lodge pole)
Ne-tit-skihs (One fighters)
Pis-ksis-sti-yiks
Siks-ah-pun-iks (Black blood)
A-kik-sum-un-iks
E-sis-o-kas-im-iks (Hair shirts)
Ah-ki-po-kaks (Many children)
Sak-se-nah-mah-yiks (Short bows)
Ap-pe-ki-yiks (Skunks)
Ak-o-tash-iks (Many horses)

Piegans or Pe-kun-i (spotted tan, a robe that has hard spots on it after being tanned.)

E-nuk-s-iks (Small)
Ap-pe-ki-yiks (Skunks)
Ke-me-tiks (Buffalo manure)
E-pok-se-miks (Fat roasters)
Ah-pi-tup-iks (Blood people)
Ne-tyu-yiks (One eaters)
Kut-i-im-iks (? Laugh)
Sik-ut-si-pum-iks (Black moccasin soles)
Sin-ik-sis-two-yis (Early finished eating)
Me-ah-wah-pet-seks (Seldom lonesome)
Mo-twin-iks (All chiefs)
E-nuk-si-kah-ko-pwa-iks 
Isk-sin-i-tup-iks (Worm people)
Me-oh-kiu-i-yeks (Big tops)
Sik-o-pok-si-miks (Black fat roasters)
Mo-kum-iks (Mad campers)
Ne-tot-si-tsis-stum:iks (Bulls come close)
Sik-oh-ket-sim-iks (Black smoke holes)
Mo-tah-tos-iks (Many medicines)
Ne-takus-kit-se-pup-iks (One will their hearts)
Ah-ki-ye-ko-kin-iks (Many loose women)


I asked Darrell Kipp, the Harvard Indian, which band his family had claimed. Without hesitating, he said, “Camps by a lake.” He said the phrase in Blackft somehow includes a reference to the blue heron, who is often seen along a lake. This pleased him since his cabin in the St. Mary’s valley is indeed along the lake. The people liked that location because first thing in the morning they would plunge into the lake to wake up and start the day clean.

Last summer Piegan Institute, of which Darrell is a founder, sponsored a summer history seminar where the presenters included a team from the North Piegan tribe far north in Alberta. They arrived a little late: wide straw hats, slim hips in jeans, hiking boots, packs, dark skin, white smiles -- walking easy. They’d been covering the prairie all summer, mostly on foot, with GPS instruments, looking for the ancient camping spots. Once they found the first few it was pretty easy to know what they were looking for and how far apart they would be. Not only were there subtle signs of old campfires and shelters, but also it became apparent that the Old People were packing plants or seeds along to establish in each spot, so they would be growing there when needed. Sometimes they did a little cultivating to help their favorite things grow. Might be tobacco, though it was more likely to be in hidden spots so no one else would harvest it. Could be sweet grass, which doesn’t spread well by itself.

When the team found one of these places, they noted it on the GPS and when they got back to their tribal college, they put the information into a huge computer-driven map-drawing machine that traced it all out on paper. Two “trails” were very old, camps about as far apart as a person and a dog could comfortably travel in a day on terrain where a dog could drag a travois. That meant gradual slopes to riverbeds and around big brushy patches. Then there was one newer trail, for horses, where the distances were greater, not just because they could travel farther but also because the horses needed more water and lots of grass.

When the reservation system forced everyone to stop moving around, the bands settled as they could, some in favorite places and others in not-such-happy places and today they are still associated with those places. Individuals might move to Browning or go to Canada for a year, or even travel out to a city for a while. But they remain attached to the place they grew up and don’t miss moving across the prairie to follow camas or buffalo as their great-great-grandparents did. 

Today it’s the white people who restlessly move back and forth over the continent, looking for work.

Friday, April 29, 2005

Whose History Is It?

In 1961 when I came to Browning, Bob Scriver’s outfit on the highway was next to Ed Anderson’s Fifties ranch-style house was next to Bill Kipling’s quite modest frame house was next to Alonzo Skunkcap’s log cabin. ‘Lonzo, very old, had been blinded by epidemic trachoma in the early part of the century and so had his wife. Their allotment was out of town to the West, maybe ten miles, and to heat his log cabin in town ‘Lonzo would hitch up horses and bring wood to town on the running gear of a wagon. If he needed to get out to the ranch and didn’t have his horses, he’d come over and ask for a ride. Since he was agreeable to waiting until we had a break in our work, we always took him. Bob said he had been one of the best hunters on the reservation and his sons were as well. But they verged on the disreputable.

Recently the governor of Montana appointed Gayle Skunkcap to a state commission. Shannon Augare, Elouise Cobell and Wayne Smith have also been appointed to various posts. In four generations, maybe five, the Skunkcaps have gone from subsistence life in a log cabin to being on state regulatory bodies that require a good bit of expertise, which they have acquired in part through managing the reservation. The American story and we’re all proud, right? Wrong. The governnor has gotten DEATH THREATS by phone in the middle of the night for being “too Indian friendly.”

Part of the reason I began this blog project was that in conversation with a town librarian she remarked, “I don’t see why WE should have to learn THEIR history.” She was a bit taken aback by my reaction, probably because she’d never been taught how interwoven is the history of both whites and Indians, Belgians and Blackfeet. The stories of the Conrads and the Sherburnes make that clear. The plot lines include all humans here as well as “natural” history -- even geology. (Coal? Gold? Rivers?) And world history. Blackfeet were warriors in both World Wars.

The story of Bob Scriver is also the story of the Cree Medicine family, skilled foundrymen and mold makers. My autobiography must include all those students I taught (and who taught me). Those who try to draw a line between white history and Indian history are simply not paying attention. The dynamics, both personal and political, alternate between opposition and collaboration, tragic error and idealistic intimacy, business downturn and economic success.

For a while the claim has been made that only Indians can properly write about Indians. Indian scholars wish to claim back the right to look at events from their own perspective, so that they can reap the benefits of Indian intellectual achievements and so they can tell parts of the story that are resisted by the larger society. (Today I read a review that said if Hitler had won WWII, there would have been genocide of Jews in the United States. There was no consciousness that genocide of Indians only stopped a little more than a century ago.)

A lot of energy has been wasted on the pedigrees of “volunteer Indians” (sounds nicer than “wannabe,” don’t you think?) when the same amount of attention to their ideas might have been more productive. If it’s a good idea, who cares what color the author is? If it’s a bad idea, what does the color of the author matter?

At a recent “health fair” in Browning, Thunder Pipe Bundle Keeper wives formed a panel. These women were nothing like each other. One is the young wife of a rather colorful restauranteur. One is a diligent television producer. One is the wife of a prominent Neotraditionalist, a man who once objected to whites being Keepers but who now includes a white Keeper in his Bundle Circle. Another wife is a former president of the Blackft Community College -- her husband is also a strong Neotraditionalist. All are relatively prosperous. The focus of the panel, surprisingly, was “letting go of the past.”

In the past it was unheard of for Bundle Keeper wives to be on a panel that advised others what to do. And only recently people thought of Bundle Keepers as people of status, not as people with an obligation to guide others by their example and advice, though that was clearly the role of very old Keepers. These are not “old-timey” women, but modern, educated professionals. Some of them have devoted many years to recovering the past, for instance, organizing the annual commemoration of the Baker Massacre.

I’m forever telling a story though not everyone appreciates it. Bob and I went fishing out at ‘Lonzo’s place which is full of beaver dams and willow. We waded and lounged and generally were lousy fishermen, but we did catch one small trout. When we stopped back by the log cabin house, Bob put the wee fish on the bare table and told ‘Lonzo we’d brought some fish for dinner.

‘Lonzo felt around until his hands touched the fish and then he laughed, which is what Bob had hoped he would do. Afterwards, thinking of that bare house, I thought it was a cruel trick for an old couple and we’d ought to have given them some real food. But then I remembered that Blackft don’t even eat fish, at least old time ones never did, even when starving. To me, this little story is like a koan or a gospel lesson. But what does it mean? It tugs at my mind.

‘Lonzo laughed. That’s the point. No matter what we did -- what mattered was how ‘Lonzo took it, and he chose to laugh. After all, he could SEE what lousy fishermen we were, so wasn’t the joke on us?

As history meshes and morphs, engages and elaborates and withdraws, the joke is on different people at different times. Certainly the advice of the Bundle Keeping Women is wise in terms of not hoarding old grudges and past offenses. Their own behavior shows that they are not against innovation and experiments. They are not pretending to be 19th century Indians by only preserving ancient rituals, but pointing the way forward towards how Indians can be in the future. They are making history. So is Governor Schweitzer.

12 BLACKFEET STORIES: An Overview of the Book

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Twelve Blackfeet Stories: A Summary

The twelve Blackfeet stories that I’ve just posted are by myself -- some people didn’t realize that -- and represent my own quick shorthand of what I think has happened since the first “Euro” horse got to the Blackfeet. Each story is about twenty years later than the one just before it. Some of the people are in more than one story and others only appear once. They are meant to be atypical, in unique situations that we don't normally think about much.

1. The first story, Dogwoman, is about the days when the first horses show up and make change. She is so put out by this change that she ends up leaving the band. The US is just forming at this point. Spain and France think they “own” the prairie except that the Hudson’s Bay Company is already coming into the north which is called “Assinnaboia.”

2. Eats Alone. The cultural infrastructure of the Blackfeet when they were dependent on dogs was very strong and tightly knit. Horses were enough the same as dogs that the transition was actually pretty effective. The biggest difference was that now the men could cover long distances for hunting and fighting -- or just exploring. Two men, buddies which is an old human motif, go far to the SW and even begin new lives there, but return after a tragedy. One of them dies back in Montana, so his buddy takes his wife and has a daughter with her. He becomes a very rich and important man, but hesitates to be responsible for his band through ceremonial obligation. These years are the ones that represent a “peak civilization” so colorful that people who weren’t even on this continent have yearned for it ever since. The Eats Alone band was real.

3.  "Horse Healer." By 1800 Lewis & Clark were almost on their way and trading forts were in place in Canada where most of the Blackfeet were. A woman of importance among her own people gets kidnapped and thrust into this new context. She manages.


4.  "Two Medicine." Next came the missionaries, trying to learn the language and figure out what was going on. Though they didn’t approve of the native ways, they did think Indians had souls and should be treated properly. A “two-spirited” young man sees a priest in a dress and assumes that he has also chosen women’s roles. Not.

5.  "Horizon." The mid-1850’s was the period of Indian removal to west of the Mississippi as settlers poured into the mid-West. This story is based on a true happening, which actually came a little later: Helen Clarke, daughter of Malcolm Clarke (He is a whole other story leading to massacre which I’ve chosen not to tell since it’s well-told other places, including in Jim Welch’s “Fools Crow.”), was visiting an insane asylum back east when she thought one of the men seemed Blackfeet. She was told that he didn’t respond to English, seemed catatonic. She sang a little Blackfeet nursery song to him and he wept. He WAS Blackfeet! Not crazy at all. The railroads were being built and Indians took to them at once!

6.  "Eclipse" By the Civil War period things were worse, but institutions like the army, the church and the school tried to take hold. Rationality was very important -- progress! But things were not what they seemed. An old lady turns out to be a surprise.

7.  "Whiteout." After the war brutalized men and abandoned women clawed desperately at ways to survive, whether they were Indian or not. This story is an attempt to show just how bad it can get. An old woman, a little girl and a wolfer are trapped in a blizzard.

8.  "Cut Nose Woman." In the Edwardian period, just before WWI and maybe a little after, there was a kind of idyllic time -- a pause -- even though many men served in Europe. Old wounds began to be bound up and the dream of an agricultural Indian settled on ranches and farms began to seem possible.

9.  "Gay Paree" World War II marked a turnaround on the reservation. Wool from the sheep and beef from the cattle meant real income. More important, many Blackfeet served as soldiers and were appreciated for it. But there were dark doubts. Three Blackfeet men come to very different conclusions.

10. "Basketball Hero." By the time the Korean and Vietnam veterans began to see that they were being shoved into urban ghettoes caused by relocation and Eisenhower began to close down the reservations, they felt the Pan-Indian network of organizations wasn’t vigorous enough. AIM led the way to trickster acts and near-insurgency. Sometimes it was luckier NOT to be there.

11. "Sweetgrass Hills" After AIM there was an American renaissance of Native American writing which lifted up spiritual values. In this story a young Blackfeet man goes on vision quest and by accident acquires an odd companion -- a young white woman -- but doesn’t even know it.

12.  "The Sun Comes Up." Recently there have been real strides of progress. The Governor of Montana, Schwietzer, recognizes and empowers Indians. The Blackfeet are finding new ways to act vigorously and prosper. 8,000 tribal members live on the reservation, and 8,000 live off in a diasphora that keeps track of “home.” This story is about two returns to the reservation: an Indian man who has never been here and the bones of the earliest people in these stories.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Sweetgrass Hills

The artifact in this story is the rattle. The person? Oh, my! So many! I borrowed Becky Cooper's name.


1961-81 Historical Time-Line

1961: National Indian Youth Council, first all-Indian Youth protest group formed in New Mexico. Empowerment
1964: Devastating flood of the reservation, caused by three poorly maintained federal dams breaking, interrupts Centennial celebrations.
1968: Congressional investigation of Indian education finds "national disgrace." In July AIM organized by Dennis Banks and George Mitchell in Minneapolis.
1969: In November "Indians of All Tribes", a San Francisco activist group, seizes Alcatraz.
1970: On July 8, Nixon disowns termination and relocation. In November, Russell Means captures the Mayflower II on Thanksgiving.
1971: AIM holds prayer vigil on top of Mt. Rushmore. Alcatraz campers evicted. On Sept. 22 Russell and Ted Means storm the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Crow. In fall and winter the Onondago stop traffic on Route 81 just outside Syracuse, N.Y. In Browning, the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop begins operation.
1972: Means and Banks capture Gordon, Nebraska, to protest the death of Raymond Yellow Thunder. In April the AIM leadership fragments over the use of guns at Cass Lake, Minnesota. On Nov. 1-8 AIM establishes the Trail of Broken Treaties, which becomes the capture of the BIA. They leave with files and $66,500 cash from the White House.
1973: On Feb. 6 Means and Banks are at Custer, South Dakota, to protest the killing of Wesley Bad Heart Bull. The incident becomes a riot. Feb. 27 is the capture of Wounded Knee.
1977: Jan. 2 consultative status to the United Nations is awarded to the International Treaty Council of the Western Hemisphere.
1978: Earl Old Person is made Chief of the Blackfeet Nation.
1979: Blackfeet Community College received candidate status for accreditation in Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges. One of its roots is the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop.

WHY GONE THOSE TIMES?

fgrtv

Eddie Big Beaver

Two exceptionally honorable, handsome, and traditional Amskapi Pikuni (US Blackfeet) men I admired were very old in the Sixties:  Louis Plenty Treaty and Chewing Black Bones.  I knew them because they posed for portraits by Bob Scriver.  Eddie Big Beaver also posed for Bob’s “No More Buffalo,” but Eddie was a different sort of man who had also posed for Phimister Proctor and lived in the big cities.  He was a park ranger for years and died tragically before I was in Browning.  By that time he had become fairly assimilated.  I wrote a blog post about him and some of his children, whom I taught in Browning.  

"No More Buffalo" by Bob Scriver

All three of these men are included in Adolf Hungry Wolf’s marvelous four book series about the Pikunni that is available through the Blackfeet Heritage Center and that is now owned by the Browning Public Schools.  Adolf arrived in Browning a couple of years after me but made it a point to sit down with these old people, born at the end of the buffalo days, and to collect old photos of them.

In order to find the entry about Louis Plenty Treaty, it is necessary to know that he also went by Louis Bear Child.  Many Blackfeet had more than one name.  In 1974 Adolf took Louis up Starr School to check out his cabin where he hadn’t lived for twenty years.  By then Maggie, his wife, had gone on “over the horizon” and Louis was living in the Browning old folks’ home.  Though he had moved away from the little old-timer enclave, he had felt confident enough about the building belonging to him that he had left his Crow-Water-Society Bundle tied high in the rafters.  The goal of the trip was to get it and transfer it to Adolf, meaning to teach him the songs and movements that went with opening it.  On the way Louis was trying to find (remember) the song that accompanied the first unbinding and spreading of the skins, tobacco, rattles.

But when they got to the cabin, there was a padlock on the door and it was obvious that someone was living there.  The squatters returned but didn’t make trouble once they understood who Louis was.  The Bundle was gone.  As it turned out, a previous squatter had removed it, but no one knew what she did with it.  Probably sold it.

In those years Bob was deeply interested in these Bundles, which were being destroyed by fundamentalist Christians and simply disappearing, maybe sold though they weren’t flashy objects.  Our deepest glimpse of what they meant to the people was not about Bundles but about the Horn Society, which was meant to encourage the bison to multiply with many calves.  It was deeply secret because it included ritual coitus.  

Ceremonial staffs

The people were gathered in a big circle and we arrived a little before men holding tall staffs with a crook on end would run around the outside of the circle.  It was an arduous task and a stumble, or worse, a fall, would indicate something very bad was in the future.  Louis ran, barely balancing his tall staff.  He was not a young man, but he had done hard physical work in his youth -- cutting wood and haying with wagons.  His face was intense.  He did not stumble.

Adolf includes a photo of Louis in 1933, dressed in a black leather jacket.  His hair is cut to above his ears so that he looks very modern, even hip.  He was leaving for Washington DC to act as an interpreter and councillor for James White Calf, a much more famous man.

Louis Plenty Treaty in 1933

In William Farr’s book, “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945,” there is a photo of him standing in his field with his long braids, leaning on a shovel.

He is one of the people in Scriver’s circle of portraits called “Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle.”

Louis is the one with the blackened face.

Chewing Black Bones was in an earlier bronze.

"Transition"

The portrait of Chewing Black Bones is sold in two forms.  “Transition” shows him seated on the ground, Marie Williamson standing in the middle wearing her elk tooth dress, and a little boy on her other side.  No one remembers his name.

When the seated figure is sold alone, he’s called “The Last Warrior” and, indeed, he was.  On page 1021 of “The Blackfoot Papers” is a photo of him taken in 1910 in his protective hairlock shirt showing the two scalps he took in war, both long hair.  His own hair was remarkably thick and long, worn in the men’s three-braid manner when he was young.  His daughter said each braid was “thick as a pickle!”

Chewing Black Bone was an observant and meticulous man who incongruously wore glasses most of his life.  When weather allowed he lived in a lodge apart from the family ranch-house on Two Medicine, dressed in buckskin, mended his own moccasins, and despised politicians.  His daughter, Agnes MadPlume, made it possible for him to live this way and pretty much maintained old ways herself.  

Despite all this, Chewing Black Bone was a close friend of two remarkable white men:  James Willard Schultz and Keith Seele.  In a letter to his son, Hart, Schultz told about Chewing Black Bone returning an ancient horned headdress to the Yanktonais Sioux in 1939.  Winold Reiss had painted him wearing it.  His most important religious role had been as a Weather Dancer in an Okan lodge, or Sun Dance.  It was another endurance assignment, to stand in a booth blowing an eagle bone whistle for long periods of time.

Schultz, who was a bit disreputable, had a studio next to the Browning Merc, so Bob in boyhood knew him, though he was instructed to stay away from him.  Keith Seele was an eminent and entirely conscientious Egyptologist from the U of Chicago who was involved in the excavations that tried to save whatever there was that would be destroyed by the building of the Aswan Dam.  He was in Egypt when Chewing Black Bone neared his end, was notified, and came at once to Browning.  

We were close to Keith and Diedericka Seele and loved to take a picnic out to Cut Bank Creek and sit by the last of the campfire, listening to Keith tell stories about Egypt. At first Chewing Black Bone did not want to pose for Bob, but Keith helped to persuade the old man.  Keith, who had once intended on going into the ministry, had also been devoted to Schultz.  

This may be Louis in his captured headdress.

The face painting is for the Horn Society.

I think the common denominator was the love of ancient lands and times.  As Schultz’ book title asked,  “Why Gone Those Times?”  There is no answer.  In the times of flowering, the “climax cultures” as the anthros call them, it seems the natural order of the world, deeply true.  But then circumstances that can’t be controlled wipe everything out despite our best efforts to remember.  And we can't yet know what the next flowering climax will be like.