FORKED INDIAN HISTORY

Thursday, September 16, 2010 A person who writes and speaks about Indians from the conventional Western History Association and Western Literature Association http://www.usu.edu/westlit/ point of view, meaning a basically white point of view (whether or not the originator is Indian), called to ask me for my notes from the Piegan Institute August history seminars over the years. I’ve tried to take careful notes because after I write them up I put them into the books I sell on Lulu.com/prairiemary. Because these seminars are organized by Rosalyn Lapier and Darrell Kipp and the scholars are also academic Blackfeet, usually from Canada, they draw from a body of knowledge that is quite different and mostly invisible to white aficionadoes who as teenagers fell in love with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” In short, the whites like being on the winning side but sympathizing with the noble victims, not that they mean to do anything practical about it. It’s the dream of a boy against adults, looking back, sadly reconciled to what “had to be.” The same division is there in “cowboy” art versus “NA” art which is often abstract, maybe on objects like pots, blankets, jewelry. The NA or Aborginal view is best illustrated by a painting I saw that I wish I owned: buffalo going over a jump, tumbling to the scree below, then leaping to their feet unharmed and thundering up the cliff opposite, stampeding off across the prairie again. That is, Indians realize that the the prairie clearances were an interlude, a break in a long continuity that has a future. There is another split that is within the WLA and WHA, not between red and white. This is between the professional historian within the academy and the amateur enthusiast who reads freely and widely, but “popularly.” As a possible illustration, consider James Willard Schultz who wrote for a popular audience with maximum whizbang, largely ignored by proper historians who work in an entirely different footnoted, peer-reviewed manner. Indians so far have not generated a very notable body of history books because publishers simply don’t believe in that point of view if they know it exists at all. In fact, much of what some local Indians tell interested inquirers comes from books written by whites, often the 19th and 20th century authors who really DID profit from raking off the Napi stories from the rez to sell in Manhattan. This is why Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana, is so phenomenal, such an indicator of sea-change. Though their main focus has been restoring the Blackfeet language and though their immersion school has been running for twenty years and has successfully produced fluent speakers, one of their side activities has been finding and accumulating copies of all the master’s and doctoral theses that have been written about the Amskapi Pikuni without their writers ever bothering to return copies to the people who supplied the information. Only lately have people like Paul Rosier responsibly come back to explain what they learned doing research. Partly the problem was finding a way to return the materials and to find a proper occasion and setting for discussing them. Recognizing this, Piegan Institute has for ten years organized a history seminar in August. The notes from the seminar have been posted on this blog as long as I’ve been writing it, but since I’m aggregating the notes by request, I’ll put them on lulu.com/prairiemary in book form, both separately and then as part of the book called “Blackfeet Trails.” I’ve taken notes every year that I’ve attended. The only year I missed was the History of the Women, which was too scary for me! I attended these years and still might be able to locate notes, though I wasn’t blogging yet. 2001 “APATOHS-OHSOKOI” Blackfeet history and places along Apaatohs-ohsokoi. (The Old North Trail) Ted Binnema, Scott Carlson, Sally Thompson, Bill Farr, Lori Falcon, Narcisse Blood. 2003 “Aakawattop’a” A Gathering Darrell Robes Kipp, Dorothy Still Smoking, Paul Rosier, Richmond Clow, Bill Old Chief 2004 -- 2005 “Aki iaks” The History of Blackfeet Women (One of those years was skipped and I didn’t attend the other.) I attended the following years and have typed up notes that will appear in a “book” on www.lulu.com/prairiemary. They are also included in the book called “Blackfeet Time-lines,” which is also available on Lulu.com/prairiemary. 2006: “Innaihtsiiyi: Examining Blackfeet Concepts of Peace (and War) Theodore Binnema, Hugh Dempsey, James Dempsey, Nicholas Vrooman, Narcisse Blood and Cynthia Chambers. 2007: “Aka” The Ancient Past Hugh Dempsey, Eldon Yellowhorn, Wilena Old Person, Brian (Barney) Reeves 2008: “Sinaake” Images of the Blackfoot People Dave Beck, Bill Farr, Darnell Rides at the Door, Valentina LaPier 2009: “Kiippippoistoyi” One Hundred Winters Shawn Bailey, David R.M. Beck, Joe Gone, Louis S. Warren 2010: “Imitaiks” When the Spirit Moved with Us Kaawa’pomaakaa Society, Martin Eagle Child, Eldon Yellowhorn, Tom Shawl For much more information and background, go to http://www.saokioheritage.com “Saokio is a Blackfeet term that describes the prairies as a space that is large, open and flat. At one time the Blackfeet called themselves the Saokio-tapi or the prairie people. On the prairies they used their creativity to change this wide open space into a unique place. “Saokio Heritage was created to enhance the appreciation of the wealth of prairie peoples creativity. Our goal is to stimulate and preserve the history, language and traditional knowledge of prairie peoples. “Saokio Heritage acknowledges the U.N. definition of traditional knowledge which encompasses cultural, technological, scientific, and artistic knowledge that originated from a connection to a specific territory or place which is transmitted from generation to generation within a group of people. “ Ironically, perhaps some of the most unaware Americans are some of the Native Americans themselves, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were forced into assimilation so harshly and thoroughly that they’ve felt that even learning the old languages was dangerous or “backward.” In contrast, the young ‘uns have become enthusiasts, hungry for information. And then there are the bureaucrats, passing and sporadically enforcing legislation, trying to sort out claims and indignations and compensations against a great tide of re-assessments and realizations. Much of what seems highly theoretical turns out to have real-world consequences, sometimes unintended and unexpected. The tension between the abstract and concrete can be intense.

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY by Jim Welch III

Saturday, October 23, 2010 In 1990 when I was teaching high school English in Heart Butte, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation, I had a problem. Some of the students had flunked sophomore, junior, and senior years of English and were enrolled in all three years at once. I was the only English teacher except for a remedial teacher working on basics. Most of these multiple enrollees were making one more valiant try for a diploma. They were older, very hip, and masked. They felt “maudit,” cursed. Outcasts. Both because they were Indians in a tiny foothills community where the old ways still cling and because even within that community they were criticized. The women in their families tried to control them. The men were mostly missing. So I thought that for all our sanities, I would assign a different Native American book from the then-recent NA literary renaissance to each grade. What I assigned to the seniors was “The Death of Jim Loney” by James Welch, Jr. They did not approve. They had ten thousand reasons to resist James Welch, Jr. As it happens, I had been married to Jim Welch SENIOR’s best friend (white) when the two of them were in grade school. No one was impressed by that. They pointed out, accurately, that Jim Welch SENIOR. was only half Blackfeet and Jim JUNIOR’s mother was Fort Belknap and Jim was raised on the Fort Belknap rez. They were only partly right. Jim Welch Sr. moved a lot and much of young Jim’s education was in Minneapolis. Jim Welch Jr. was a mild-mannered guy. I’ve met his dad and sibs and they are responsible, respectable people who could pass anywhere for, well, Italian or something. Jim’s parents were well-respected and so were his grandparents. The original Jim Welch (there were three) was from Carolina. He met his Blackfeet wife at Haskell. But Jim III knew about rez life and told it straight. It was one of the first novels about Indians that was “maudit” rather than anthropological or romantic or just historical. I’m interpreting the “maudit,” “noir,” sub-genre of Native American literature in a Thomas Kuhnian way, the ragged edge of coming change. Kuhn proposed that we think of something, whether science or society, as though we have it named and nailed down and taken for granted until there is a pile-up of things that don’t fit, that hurt, that were senseless. For Jim’s age group, which is the same as mine, a lot of damage was coming down on intelligent, aspiring, young Indian men who couldn’t quite fit into the world of the white female teachers who took them on. I could quickly (more, given twenty minutes) name six of the type, most of them approaching seventy now, some of them no longer living, including Jim. (This is about the age of Van Sickle and Ivan Doig as well.) These Indian men were victims of what I call “splitting,” which is that on the one hand they were considered drunks, no good, losers -- sometimes abandoned by their own fathers. On the other hand they were told they were noble, special, chosen, and should be brilliant. They were “labeled,” people thought they knew all about it, but the actuality was full of contradictions and double-binds. The reservation that was imagined as a refuge could be a trap. Jim was one of the first to find a way to express both. Some of these guys became college professors, others became bureaucrats, and many were plagued by booze and so on. If they really busted loose in a bar, it was quietly and someplace else. (Like Valier.) With relentless unromantic clarity, Jim maps out in his individual characters the various factions of a reservation, even among the cops. The important divisions are not white/red, but rather levels of prosperity and authority (jurisdiction), genetically tangled relationship webs, and the ghosts of athletic victories. Clinging to what seems like fellowship in the one place where whites and Indians mix as adults -- namely the bar -- they cannot step away from suspicion and rivalry. Meanwhile, the women got to work and the next generation is the one that has made reservations into a going concern: casinos, wind-farms, oil, high tech materials, fine cattle. The mothers, aunties and sisters -- even the lovers and social workers -- went back to college in middle-age. Relocation, NA hiring preference, IHS jobs, worked better for the women than for the men. Eloise Cobell is from the same generation as Jim Welch III. They and their children run the rez schools now. No more of those cruising white English teachers with wealthy parents back east. Denise Juneau, Blackfeet of the next genertion, is the state superintendent of schools. It’s a new paradigm. I took four of my best writers from Heart Butte to a feschshrift honoring A. B. Guthrie Jr. in Choteau and -- finding Jim Welch -- towed him over to meet them. They were paralyzed, though Jim was generous and charming. Afterward they lectured me, “You must not expose us like that! He shouldn’t know about us!” They were exactly like Tim’s boys. “Do not draw attention to us!” The “cursed” like the dark -- they fear celebrity which makes them a target. (Ask Tim.) As self-fulfilling prophesy, they scoffed at Jim behind his back, accusing him of being a phony, of taking advantage of the other tribal members. They felt that they were safe at home, where they even swaggered and dominated. But in a slightly different place (Choteau is only a few miles down the Rocky Mountain cordillera and only a little bit bigger) with unknown rules, they collapsed. My senior boys hated “The Death of Jim Loney.” They stonewalled me. Events in the book didn’t happen on this rez but all the people had Blackfeet names, which is a trespass. On the one hand they wanted to be seen and recognized, but on the other hand they didn’t want to be revealed. Every character in this book had an equivalent on the rez in those days. Now, not so much. And now “death by cop” is sort of a city phenomenon, though people are still mysteriously found dead. Open the Great Falls Tribune any morning and you’ll read about violent deaths of low-income men, often among drinking buddies, maybe white and maybe not. The Native American female dead are never noted, their bones found years later. Their families miss them. The lowest point for Native Americans was not the massacres where a man could at least be a warrior. Rather it was the existential despair of a trapped small-town life or urban ghetto idleness. For some it triggered revolution. The second Wounded Knee was 1973. It didn’t turn out well, but it triggered more than gunfire. At great cost it made the huge gimbals and gyroscopes of society begin to turn. Just as they are now.

THE PIEGAN BLACKFEET: 1900 TO 1910

Saturday, October 30, 2010 Before beginning to seriously compose a vernacular history of the 20th century Blackfeet, I’m trying to note the “keynote” to each decade, the same as I noted the “theme” of each generation for my historical sequence of stories called “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” which start with the coming of the horse and proceed up to the present. So this post will not be an organized essay, just a list of ideas as I reflect and begin to sort through my library. I’m relying heavily on the notes I organized in “Blackfeet Paper Trails” which is available as a free download or a low-cost book from www.lulu.com/prairiemary. If it doesn’t work, contact me at mary.scriver@gmail.com. 1900, like 2000, was a year of optimism. There was considerable feeling that things would turn around, that it was a new beginning. With number magic there’s always a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy. The “whiskey” traffic was dying down and the railroad was coming. James Willard Schultz and Joe Kipp were acting as guides into Glacier Park which was visited by the same people in the same spirit as went on safari to Africa or India or Hawaii. These people are very focused on England as a source of civilization so they were shaken when Queen Victoria died, beginning the Edwardian Era, which I think of as the Upstairs/Downstairs years. The first decade, 1900 - 1910, was when the small towns formed both on and off the reservation. Browning developed, beginning in 1894, alongside the final location of the US Indian Agency on Willow Creek’s flood plain, about two miles from the eventual railroad depot. No one knows why. The post office was established in 1900. The Methodist mission was begun by Rev. E.S. Dutcher in 1893. There was a lot of exploration for minerals, hoping for another Butte, and Altyn began as a mining town, eventually abandoned and covered by Sherburne Lake. What is now East Glacier was then Midvale, originally clustered around the ranger station. Teddy Roosevelt appointed a man named Herrig as the first ranger in the newly created Glacier National Park. This was the location of the flagship lodge. Much of the infrastructure that in 2010 begins to fail, esp. water and sewage, was first built around this time. A few years earlier Walter McClintock had come for the first time to do a government survey of Glacier Park and he was returning annually with crates of gifts for his adopted family. “The Old North Trail” has many photos that will make this period real. People still lived in canvas lodges and tents as well as log cabins. The traders who worked from forts -- Power, Conrad, Kipp, Weatherwax, Wetzel -- were old men. J. H. Sherburne had built his mercantile store and Thad Scriver came to clerk in it in 1900. Broadwater and Pepin were there as partners. Willits and Scriver started the Browning Merc in 1907. James Willard Schultz, in trouble for poaching, left for California where he wrote his autobiography. He would return later. Charlie Russell was around and as soon as the railroad got to Glacier National Park, there was an influx of fine artists. Monteath, the new agent, also has a “new policy” which is the old one. Logan, the previous agent, had left collapsing buildings, dry canals, a scandalous school and a failed hay crop. The biggest problem was the constant incursions of the surrounding ranchers who liked to graze their large herds on the reservation. Monteath issued permits and tried to drive off those without permits. When the ranchers left the rez in the fall, they took their cattle AND the rez cattle. In the big to-irrigate or not-to-irrigate vacillation, Monteath claims he wants to make farmers of the Indians so he’s for irrigation. The last recorded smallpox epidemic comes through about this time, though vaccine has been developed. In 1902 the headline in the Great Falls Tribune reads: “Piegan Indians in Open Revolt.” Monteath threatens to arrest White Calf, whereupon the Indian Police all quit. Little Dog comes to the agency office to say that if Monteath arrests White Calf, Monteath will be bound with ropes and thrown in front of the next train. Enrolled Blackfeet number 2,084 with 50 births and 33 deaths, the first year that the births outnumber the deaths. 10,000 cows with 4,000 calves and 22,000 horses. Mike Connelly is a nearby stockman who ran his cows on the rez. (His descendants joined the tribe through marriage.) This is a flood year and 75% of the seeds wash away. Monteath says all his troubles are due to Joe Kipp, Maggie Wetzel (who married Joe Kipp) and Horace Clarke. He wants to eject them from the rez. In 1903 White Calf dies. He is usually identified as the last of the hereditary chiefs. (Ray Djuff in Calgary is developing the first biography focused on his family. Someone is also developing a book about the Clarke family. Events are now far enough in the past to be interesting.) Now the first of the formal tribal councils is organized: Joe Kipp, Horace Clarke, and seven older full-bloods. There’s a terrible outbreak of mange among the cattle. 1904 is year the Conrad Investment Company takes hold in Valier and begin to divert water from Birth Creek. They are able to effectively irrigate, a system that persists to this day at considerable profit. This is a drought year. Bookkeeping begins to be a problem: embezzlement is now a factor. Also nepotism, as agents conventionally employed their wives and grown children. In 1908 C.A. Churchill arrived as agent. His daughter married J.L. Sherburne, the son of J.H. Sherburne. Schemes and accusations abound as the Dawes Act assigns acreage to each Indian and a system of “patenting” makes it possible for an enrolled person who is automatically defined as an “incompetent” to take his allotment out of government trust and own it himself. Many do that, partly reacting to the epithet of “incompetent,” partly because they wanted personal control, and partly because they didn’t really understand what’s going on. As soon as the land was individually owned, it could be taken for debt and since Sherburne Mercantile had extended credit in large amounts to many people, they used this legal strategy. Of course, the land and its profit that was left in trust with the US Government did not fare much better. In 1910 150 Rocky Boy Chippewa was dumped onto the reservation because they had no place to go. Until a reservation was found for them (a decommissioned fort) the friction between Blackfeet and what were called in shorthand, “Cree,” was a constant problem. One might call this decade “Civilization and Its Discontents.” I’m relying mostly on the Foley Report, which is the most detailed account I’ve found of these early years. If you feel I’m in error, let me know now while I’m still in a noting and outlining mode. I will appreciate it.

"THE BLACKFEET" by Theresa Jensen Lacey

Monday, June 27, 2005 “The Blackfeet” by Theresa Jensen Lacey is a good example of a steady stream of small books about Indians that are rarely even acknowledged by scholars, but constantly offered to the public. This one, again typically, is one book from a series, each devoted to a different tribe. This specific series, “Indians of North America” is generally edited by Frank W. Porter III, whose degrees are from the University of Maryland. The author of “The Blackfeet,” Ms. Lacey, is a descendant of Chief Quanah Parker (Comanche and Cherokee). She has a website with her photo and confides that when she began this book, her first baby was six weeks old. She researched for a year and talks as though she made at least one trip out to Blackfeet Country, probably to Lethbridge. Lethbridge is a city of 200,000 in Alberta, Canada. (No city in Montana exceeds 100,000, except Billings -- some years -- if the surrounding county is included.) The University of Lethbridge is built like a wall across the mouth of a deep coulee, with a big space under it so it won’t become a dam. The hillsides roundabout are dotted with silhouettes of howling wolves, looking very realistic. Their Indian Studies program is well-developed and pretty much focused on the Blackfeet -- although they, being Canadian, generally use “Blackfoot.” Lacey is trapped by her title into using Blackfeet most of the time, but she usually uses the Canadian spelling of Piegan, which is Peigan. In fact, in a number of places she seems pretty influenced by Canadian views. But maybe that’s what’s interesting about this book. It’s meant for juveniles, probably high school age, and strives to be colorful, exciting and (Lacey’s word) “amazing.” The photos are quite different from what we usually see. She managed to write the whole book without ever mentioning Napi! This book was published in 1995, so surely it wasn’t a matter of prudery, but it certainly COULD have been. It seems like a shame to deprive teenagers of a sex-obsessed trickster! The long creation story she quotes includes a lot of Christian notions plus intrusions from other tribes and modern science. After a person has been exploring Blackft materials for a few years, one learns to look first at the index and the bibliography. The bibliography here reveals the problem: no Ewers and no Schafer, though they are the acknowledged experts on the American side. Hugh Dempsey, the outstanding Calgary historian, is there with three books. Grinnell’s “Blackfoot Lodge Tales” is referenced, rather than later more bold versions. or earlier more anthropological ones. One of Adolf Hungry Wolf’s books is present (“The Blood People”) but she spells Adolf’s name with a ph. Beverly Hungry Wolf’s book, “The Ways of my Grandmothers,” is on the list. She includes McClintock’s later and more minor book, “Old Indian Trails,” but not “The Old North Trail.” Happily, she found Malcolm McFee’s small but influential “Modern Blackfeet, Montanans on a Reservation.” One book I don’t know at all: Ann Walton’s “After the Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection of Indian Art.” I assume that’s where Lacey found many of these excellent illustrations. Two books I know very well indeed. One is Richard Lancaster’s “Piegan,” mostly about Old Jim Whitecalf whom Lancaster claimed had adopted him. I dislike Lancaster personally and cannot give you an undistorted opinion. My distorted opinion is that he was a nutcase and a patronizing ego-maniac. The other is “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” which was written and personally published by Bob Scriver, to whom I was married and of whom I have an opinion highly biased in his favor. It is an inventory of the so-called “million dollar artifact collection” that was sold to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton, Alberta, in the midst of much controversy. Sacred objects in the book were returned to the Alberta Blackfoot tribes by Premier Klein. Other objects were intercepted at the border when being carried back and forth between Edmonton and Helena, Montana, where the Montana Historical Society is the guardian of the entire Scriver archive and body of work. The United States Federal Fish and Game authorities repatriated these materials to selected Piegan personalities, who kept the valuable items for themselves and sold the rest through an auction house that specializes in Indian artifacts. The collection in this book no longer exists as a unified entity. Maybe this little run-through makes it clear why Lacey’s “The Blackfeet” is not considered a major reference. Nevertheless, it is appealing and as an introduction to the tribe for high school kids across the continent, it ought to do the job. There is a whole photo section in the middle about modern Indian crafts, made new on the pattern of old examples. The closest to a photo of modern Blackft is a 1939 shot of King George and Queen Mary in Alberta -- Queen Mary’s fox-trimmed coat goes well with the ermine-fringed buckskin suits of the chiefs. The actual account of historical events is not inaccurate but not the usual narrative. At the very least this book offers a kind of example or template for a compact book suitable for a unit on Indian studies. Maybe it could even be a model for a high school class sophisticated enough to compose and “publish” their own book on the computer, basing it on their own research. If McLaughlin’s high schoolers could produce a textbook using a mimeograph machine in the 1970’s, surely a good desktop publishing program and careful use of the internet could turn up more materials than Lacey had to work with. (I have a mental image of her in a library with her baby on her back.) The University of Lethbridge website would not be a bad place to start. (“The Blackfeet” by Theresa Jensen Lacey. Frank W. Porter III, General Editor of the series “Indians of North America.” Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Main Line Book Co. Copyright 1995. ISBN 0-7910-2491-1 Paperback, 103 pages.)

CRAFTS OR ARTIFACTS?

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 At one time the vocational education program of Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas, printed a series on Indian Handcraft books for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was discontinued long ago, but Richard C. Schneider, a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin found there was still enough interest in 1986 to reprint the series. (In case he still exists, his address was “R. Schneider, Publishers, 312 Linwood Ave., Stevens Point, Wisconsin, 54481.) The Blackft crafts book was written by John Ewers, one of the several expert Blackft anthropologists, and the man who built the Museum of the Plains Indian. “Indian Crafts” and “Material Culture” appear to be the “low” and “high” ways of approaching things made by Native Americans. Maybe the difference is that Indian “Crafts” are still made today -- but maybe not by Indians and probably for sale rather than use. “Material Culture” is the antique kind of object, one that shows real use in a world gone by. Cub Scouts with a bead band loom are making crafts. A quilled pipe bag from 1750 is something else entirely, and probably worth a lot of money. Ewers’ book is somewhere in the middle of the muddle. On the one hand he was an anthropologist at a time when much of the work was sorting -- creating taxonomies of objects with close attention to their construction and use. “Just exactly what IS a typical Blackft moccasin beadwork design?” they might ask, with full confidence that there was always a “typical” to be found. Jessie Schultz, surviving wife of James Willard Schultz, was famous for insisting that Blackft designs were geometric and Cree designs were floral. After she’d been saying this for a while, it certainly became true of all the moccasins made for sale to her. Jessie and John Ewers were collaborators in the creation of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, which was funded in part by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs Craft Board. The building has a workroom on one end, supplied with tables that have drawers for storing half-finished work. The vision was that tourists would come to visit the museum where many wonderful objects were displayed and then they would buy reproductions or new creations from the dedicated workers, through the little shop also in the building. This would be much needed income for them. Ewers’ little 66 page book (“Blackfeet Crafts,” no copyright given, paperback, ISBN 0-936984-0) would be useful for someone buying artifacts and concerned about their authenticity, or it could also help a person who wanted to make new reproductions or original creations. Adolf Hungry Wolf began his literary career with dozens of this sort of book, full of photos and diagrams. At the elite “material culture” end of the spectrum, one would do well to buy a “book on demand” reproduction from UMI (300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106-13460). “Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indian” was edited by Clark Wissler, an earlier anthropologist of the Blackft. The book was originally published by the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. V, Part 1. Wissler’s introduction is dated October 1, 1909. He acknowledges Robert H. Lowie and Walter McClintock, his contemporaries, for helping. It’s interesting that of Bob Scriver’s three self-published books, the one that has doubled in value is not about sculpture, but rather the high-quality, super-close-up photo inventory of the Scriver Artifact Collection. (The book is called, “The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains,” in homage to Ewers’ history, “The Blackfeet, Raiders of the Northern Plains. It is out-of-print.) Several crafts workers on the Internet advertise that they take their designs from this book. When the first Euros came up the Mississippi and then the Missouri, they arrived in Montana with trunks and crates capable of taking many objects back to Europe with them. Just as the Blackfeet were enamored of needles, awls, strike-a-lights, falconry bells, brass buttons, iron kettles -- metal objects -- the Europeans fell in love with the buckskin/bone/fur objects of the prairie people. Some, like millionaire Heye who had to have one of everything in existence, even if there WAS only one, became obsessive. (His collection is the foundation of the new Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.) When Europeans saw the wonderful things unpacked by aristocrats returned from the great American plains, they were also smitten. The effect on the ones unlikely to travel was to try to duplicate what they saw. Today there are German craft clubs who make “arti-fakes” so authentically that no one can tell them from the real objects -- except that they’re not old. While this imitation Indian phenomenon has continued to the present day in Germany, something entirely different has happened in the United States. Instead of treasuring and defending the unique tribal characteristics of dance gear, the Pan-Indian Pow-Wow movement has supported the development of cross-cultural styles that become ever more flashy and ingenious. They rather remind me of Ball Room Dancing Competition costumes: many feathers, much glitter, and -- on grass dance costumes -- much bright yarn. Anything that might distinguish a person from the others and catch the eye of the judges. After all, the prizes are money and a person has to pay for the gas to get there. Even so, individuals have discovered that they will stand out in competition if they wear costumes designed like those Catlin painted, with their faces painted in striking ways. These folks can run into trouble in two ways: some of the most authentic and striking accoutrements were once considered sacred and some purists might claim that using them at a pow-wow is disrespectful. The other problem is that the more authentic the costume is, the more likely it is to include some material that comes from protected or extinct animals like eagles or swift foxes. This imposes a legal taboo that could get problematic. Who can kill enough elk today to adorn an entire dress with their ivory incisors? A quite different stream of consciousness than pow-wows focuses on originality and treats material objects and their making as art. These people don’t necessarily think of themselves as doing “crafts” but as creating something like a fine painting or sculpture, an expression of their vision, maybe something never seen before. This is undoubtedly what the first Blackft craftpeople believed, too, but their vision was conditioned by their own world, much of which is gone now. What was once the inventory of a museum crafts shop has now become the display of an art gallery.

"THE PIIKANI BLACKFEET" by John C. Jackson

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 If one were to see “The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege” by John C. Jackson on a bibliography next to “The Blackfeet” by Theresa Jensen Lacey, one might assume they were similar books, but they are NOT AT ALL! John Jackson, like Lacey, has a Native American genetic connection, but his is Algonkin, he is from Oregon and he spent twenty years as an advertising designer in Portland. Then he jumped ship in 1982, moved to Olympia, and became associated with the Kitchen Garden Project, which develops vegetable gardens for low-income people. He is an independent scholar with at least two points of attachment to the larger community of historians: he’s related to Tom Connell here on the Blackft reservation and he is friends with Alvin Josephy, a scholar and advocate of Indians esp. the Nez Percé. The formal text of this book is 213 pages and the notes and so-on are 62 pages. Nine pages of bibliography and eight of index. If one is looking for a reference to a person or incident, these are numbers that make you grin and gloat. There are no photographs except for a photograph of a bison hide with a picture story on it. All other illustrations are from pictographs or drawings by Indians, one at every chapter heading. One of those “candlelabra-shaped” maps from 1802 is on page 61. There is a whole chapter on “Manly-Hearted Women.” But the biggest difference is that the writing is poetic, evocative, and aimed at awakening a new understanding, a new synthesis of old historical stories. An advanced high school student could appreciate this, but it is not an easy book. To make the point, here’s the first paragraph of the preface: “The old ones are only shadows now, silhouettes moving silently in the soft dawn toward another camp and dancing around the glow of a buffalo-chip fire. Sometimes, in the sunset, a feathered horseman casts a long shadow across the hillside; too often, the image recedes and vanishes. Like a child trying to capture a shadow by tracing it in the sand, this book attempts to outline figures that have stepped away from definition.” Another paragraph, the second: “For the brief span of a century and a half, the horse people shimmered in the dazzling light of the northern plains. Then, like the buffalo, they are gone. Their lives merit careful attention that goes beyond stereotyping, sketchy images caught by a fur trader’s pen, or cold scientific re-examination. Yet this is not another book about injustices, laden with unresolved guilt and smothering sympathy.” The book is really a personal and interesting synthesis that comes out sort of halfway between the wildly unreal plastic shaman novels and a tough sociological study. There’s no talk about the present, much less an effort like McFee’s to come up with an explanation or description of where to go from here. Nor does he want to speculate on Dog Days. Jackson wants to contemplate and reflect on the climax culture enabled by horses and guns -- then snuffed by the source of those same elements. The danger in doing so is the possibility of leaving us behind. For instance, he maintains that Piikani, or Piegan were sometimes spelled “Peekanow, Pahkee, Pekan, Piedgan, Pikenow, Pekannekoon, Pikaraminiouach” among other ways. (He doesn’t include the Canadian Peigan.) He asserts that “the name comes from “pa’ksikahko,” a muddy place, which in Cree becomes pikan or pikakamiw, muddy or turbid water.” So his idea is that the Piegan are properly “the Muddy River Indians.” I don’t think it will catch on. Wait a minute -- is Tom Connell a Cree? Maybe Metis? Jackson’s bibliography is heavy on Pacific Northwest fur traders, about whom he has also written a book, but includes both Canadian and US sources, French as well as English. He touches the main Blackft bases: Ewers, Schaeffer, Wissler, Dempsey and even Alice Beck Kehoe, who was also a curator at the Museum of the Plains Indian in the 1950’s but didn’t publish much until lately. Another circumstance that recommends this book is that it is published in Montana by Mountain Press Publishing Company. Possibly they are the ones who brought Bill Farr, University of Montana history professor, into consultation, which resulted in a colorful cover. It is “Blackfeet: Raiders of the Plains,” a painting by Julius Seylor, a German expressionist who visited the reservation in 1913-14. The drawings at chapter headings and occasionally other places are from “Writing on Stone,” a Canadian Provincial Park that is just north of the Sweet Grass Hills. My training in judging scholarship is that one should value those who define their goals and methods, then go ahead to fulfill them. If you were to read this book to get information about the Blackft in more recent times or to get the conventional consensus, you might be disconcerted. (There are a few places where he doesn’t agree with other scholars.) But if you wanted a sympathetic taste of the stories, the images, the controversies and dilemmas -- this is your book. A sort of latter-day James Willard Schultz. “Why gone those times?” (“The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege,” by John C. Jackson. Published by Mountain Press Publishing Company in Missoula, Montana. Copyright 2000. ISBN 0-87842-386-9 Paperback)

FOUR MOUNTAIN MAN BOOKS

Thursday, June 30, 2005 Four Mountain Man Books John C. Jackson’s first book was “Shadow on the Tetons,” a bio of David Jackson, a fur trader “for whom Jackson Hole is named.” His second book is “Children of the Fur Trade: Forgotten Metis of the Pacific Northwest.” (Mountain Press Publishing Co., copyright 1996. ISBN 0-87842-339-7. Paperback.) 276 pages of text, plus 48 pages of notes, bibliography, index. Lots of photos. I couldn’t find the name of the artist who drew the lively little sketches here and there. This book is not so much about Montana. In fact, it appealed to me because much of it was about Portland, where I grew up. From my grade school one could see through the Douglas fir of Alberta Park, on across the Columbia to what was once Fort Vancouver. There is enough convoluted plot in Jackson’s book to supply a novelist for a lifetime. I never have figured out the relationship between James McKay, the Scots fur trader, and the McKays on the Blackft reservation. I don’t know whether they have either. Might not be one. Perhaps Metis are neglected as a group because they did so well at assimilation. After all, they are simply the diasphora of the European countries, woven together with the webbing of indigenous peoples. Only on the great prairie of Assiniboia did they claim identity as a New People, the Red River Nation and try to start their own country. The many families described by Jackson took only a few generations to become simply American “citizens.” James A. Crutchfield’s book “Mountain Men of the American West” is a directory to the inadvertent patriarchs of hundreds of Metis families. (Tamarack Books, Inc., PO Box 190313, Boise, ID 83719-0313. Copyright 1997. ISBN 1-886609-0701) This book is a reference book but packed with snapshot stories about Bridger, Coulter, Beckwourth, et al. Crutchfield’s bibliography is actually a third of the book, an annotated list of sources, invaluable when working through historical questions. Crutchfield is a veteran writer, a prize-winning member of the Western Writers of America. He’s not a fancy scholar, but a “buff” which implies a more popular readership so the writing is plain and clear, but make no mistake. This is a man who knows the territory. There is art work, some of it sketches by the author. The third book I want to mention -- and highly recommend -- is “Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870” by Sylvia Van Kirk. (University of Oklahoma Press, copyright 1980. ISBN 0-8061-1847-4. Paperback.) 242 pages of text, 56 pages of notes, references, and index. Many quite wonderful photos of Metis women in black silk dresses with hoop skirts! The daughters clearly “try harder” and appear poised, coiffed, brooched with cameos -- standing gracefully in the photographic setting of cherub and carpet. On the cover is a portrait of a beautiful dark young woman with her adorable pale child in her arms. Western history often neglects the lives of the women, adding to the insults of their treatment. This book makes the point that some Hudson’s Bay-type men plainly took Indian women as wives “in the fashion of the country” so as to have the convenience of a cook/housekeeper/translator in the house, and cheerfully “turned them off” when they finally achieved a European wife. (Later General Custer did exactly that, although he already had the white wife when he took an Indian companion.) But some of the couples bonded in a true marriage, regardless of the ceremonies involved, and were faithful and supportive to each other throughout their lives. Nothing is so revealing of character as marriage in a time of cultural tumult. This book is beloved by many women and quite unlike any mountain man literature written by men. Maybe Wheeler’s series about “Mister” Skye comes close, since he gives weight to Skye’s two wives, their emotions and opinions. I look forward to the day when a movie script about Metis women is shot on location with enough authenticity to make us realize what it meant to be a woman from a culture that deeply honored the self-sacrifice of mothers (I mean Indians), who has hooked up with a man from a culture that considers them somewhat subhuman -- a woman whose life will depend on his ability to separate from that opinion. Often the children make the difference, creating “Tender Ties.” The fourth book I wanted to include in this piece is “Scottish Highlanders, Indian Peoples: Thirty Generations of a Montana Family” by James Hunter. (Montana Historical Society Press, copyright 1996. ISBN 0-917298-52-7. Paperback.) The thirty generations in question go back from Tom Branson, a contemporary forester on the Flathead Reservation, all the way to Fergus, twelve centuries ago the chief of a tribe in County Derry in northern Ireland. All the steps in between are recorded. This is a longitudinal study of a phenomenon often only looked at horizontally. The first tie in the generations between Scot and Indian was the marriage of Angus McDonald to a Nez Perce woman, Catharine, in 1842. (Her father was part Mohawk, showing a beaver-trapping migration across the continent rather than across the ocean.) The impact of this time-line is enormous, especially if one has the surname McDonald or MacDonald. There are 198 pages of text and 25 pages of notes, bibiliography and index. This undertaking was so enormous that Hunter required help from people in Scotland as well as Americans and he seems to have gotten enthusiastic support from everyone. There is an insert of excellent photographs, including a portrait of Charlie McDonald, the grandchild of Angus and Catharine, still living at the time of the writing of this book. People say “half-breed” or “mountain man” or “fur trapper” without much thought, using the words for categories without regard for the individual human beings and their challenges. Brief but turbulent, the cultural “surf” gave rise to many pejorative terms like “squaw man.” If a person sat down to read these four books, the stereotypes would be replaced by personalities worthy of both contempt and admiration, but individuals in real dilemmas. They made our world possible and their children are us or dwell with us in the “surf” of our own times. Some of them were heroes and some of those heroes were female.