CARL CREE MEDICINE'S FUNERAL MASS

Thursday, August 12, 2010 Carl Cree Medicine’s funeral mass was in Heart Butte at St. Anne’s Catholic Church, a large and pleasant building that replaced the little 19th century church made of logs held in place by buttresses. I drove there in a transparent sunlight-suffused summer day of drifting clouds, pale mountains, and the scent of hay being cut and rolled. The road along the north side of Birch Creek, the official southern border of the reservation, was veiled at the sides with pale purple, the spotted knapweed that everyone hates regardless of how pretty it is. In fact, further along, the barrow pits turned turquoise from weed killer. The spray crew was attentively supervised by three mares standing side by side so that it was easy to compare the wide white blazes down their noses. They appeared identical to me. Their colts slept in their shadow, swept by their tails. In another place I saw two ravens on fence posts, watching for road kill. Crows go in flocks, like lions, but ravens are usually alone like leopards. This pair must have been mates. It’s cool enough for the ground squirrels to be up. Normally this time of year they would be estivating, which is the hot weather version of hibernating. Since I taught in Heart Butte for a couple of years (1989-91), I knew where I was going, but my memories were all about Carl in the Sixties. With no warning, he died at 74. He’d fallen a few times and was using a cane or a walker, but seemed okay otherwise. “Natural causes” -- maybe heart or a clot. His coffin was a very dark blue with silver handles. The sleeve corsages of his white-shirted pall bearers were black bows, some with guitar cutouts and some with tiny hats. The musicians, solid older men with electric guitars who have been playing this lamenting evangelical cowboy music for so many decades that they barely need to speak to each other, began to play early. Though there were pickups in the parking lot, I was the first one into the church out of necessity. Father Dan was setting up chairs and when he saw me looking around, he knew what the need was. “Just down that hall,” he said. We’re used to each other. He has lost eighty pounds under medical supervision. The bathroom was well-supplied and included a shower, nicely tiled. Gordon Monroe and his wife were early. Gordie worked in the Scriver shop with us. He was the fiberglass man who made the giant replicas of “An Honest Try” and the PRCA bucking horse. He was also a student of mine, but went into the ministry years before I did. He’s evangelical, charitable, Bible-based. On this day his wife sang, as did a couple of other women. Gordie says he’s writing now and I promised that if he gave me a copy, I’d put it on this blog. His own sculptures are available at the Blackfeet Heritage Center and Lila Evans’ Bearpaw Gallery. He likes to do groups, like drummers or stick game, and uses a larger scale than Bob’s, with a slightly different style. Glen Horn was also my student in Browning in the Sixties. He gave me a little art tour, beginning with the mural of the old St. Anne he painted up high in the entry. I loved it. There were other intriguing objects of devotion -- I’ll take my camera back some time. Of course, everyone is always impressed by the mural of an encampment with the line of the Rocky Mountains, “Spine of the World,” behind it. It’s the entire front wall of the sanctuary. I don’t remember whether Fern Omeaso or Clyde Heavyrunner painted it -- both of them worked for us and modeled for Bob. There were others I knew one way or another, but I kept thinking about Carl. We were both kids, really, when we worked together in the shop. Both of us stormy, but he lasted twenty years and I only lasted ten. He never balked or flared, always could figure things out. Then his son David Cree Medicine came to work, and sometimes other members of the family. David was the trusted foreman, often the babysitter one way or another, or the chauffeur. Even the nurse. He witnessed everything and told nothing. But when Bob and I confronted each other, it was Carl who uncomfortably pretended he couldn’t hear or see. He knew about marital quarreling -- he and Carma had some dramatic moments -- but they stayed married for fifty-one years. They had 35 grandchildren and 47 great-grandchildren. The sanctuary rang with piping voices and busy scrambling -- remarkably little crying -- and the mothers and aunties (who in the Blackfeet way of thinking are all mothers to all the children) expertly interceded, distracted, cautioned and guided. Now and then a father took charge. A little boy ahead of me with a braid as long and thick as my arm had brought a floppy plush turtle to play with but then became absorbed in his bubble gum, not to chew but to stretch and wad and twist. By the end of the service, many babies were sleeping. A few rows up was a gaunt man with an iconic Indian face, wearing a cowboy hat with a scarf tied in back under it. I suspect he was Canadian. Not until the end did I see that the man down the row from me was wearing a bear-claw necklace with human teeth in the front. I wasn’t close enough to do more than sign that I liked it. There were no drums, no prayers in Blackfeet, or any other old-timey doin’s though Carl was an active member of the Tribal Elders Council. What propelled him into sobriety was the Catholic context, so he was a member of the Holy Family Mission Board where the old boarding school was and also the HIP Board. (I have no idea what that is.) But his major contribution in later years was running a shelter for street people where broken alcoholics came to smoke and drink coffee, trying to gather another attempt to get organized -- or just to endure. Above his desk Carl had hung two Certificates of Appreciation from Bob Scriver. In 2009 he invited me to witness his induction into the Native American Art Hall of Fame in Great Falls during the big March events. Two hours after we had entered on a transparent summer day, we emerged into a dark world aromatic with rain and had to scurry to our cars, lamenting sun roofs left open. Along Birch Creek the trees were black silhouettes and the skies were low, dragging opaque purple curtains of rain. But in the distance the Sweetgrass Hills stood bright, still dry. I was nearly back to Valier when the first fall flight of Canada geese went over.

IMITAIKS: WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US

Saturday, August 21, 2010 IMITAIKS: WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US THE TWELFTH ANNUAL PIEGAN INSTITUTE HISTORY CONFERENCE August 20, 2010 OPENING PRAYER: Emmett Dusty Bull, Cuts Wood School student (In Blackfeet. Stay seated.) PRELIMINARY WORDS FROM DARRELL KIPP: Piegan Institute is an immersion school for teaching the Blackfeet language. It was founded in 1987 so the first students have graduated from college. They have done exceedingly well. This was a privately funded school without tribe or BIA or any other “ownership” except for sixty people who thought learning the Blackfeet language was a crucial thing to do. Of those sixty, only Darrell and Dr. Dorothy Still Smoking are left. But many of the people who predicted it would never work or even that it was a bad thing to do, have now converted to the idea. Many schools try to teach indigenous languages but it is far harder than they realize at first, so some quietly shut down. But this school has persisted. Part of the reason is the actual school building. The present Cuts Wood School was designed to provide space for sacred doings and many Bundle Keepers and affinity societies meet here. The old Blackfeet ways are saturated with spirituality. To take that out of the school would be to destroy its purpose, which is to explore the language. In that exploration, inquiry is made into records and memories to discover what the earliest recorded meaning of Blackfeet words might be. They found that in the oldest definitions of imitah the words mean “the spirit that moves with us.” NOT the animal that moves with them, though the dogs were indeed carrying the materials for the camps or pulling them on travois or traveling alongside the people as they walked so they could be sentinels and scouts. The SPIRIT -- not the ghost or the beast or any of those English words, like domesticated (domicile, ownership). So Piegan settled down to sort through the facts of relationship to dogs, the dependencies, the reciprocities, the companionships. They found these things as well as others: protection, hunting, objects of love, trading items, and (controversial) food. (The Sioux admit to eating white dogs as a ceremonial dish.) Darrell and his “talking circle” have been pondering the “dog days” for quite a while now, trying to figure it all out. They come to something that the scientists agree with: that the special gift that dogs have is the ability to “talk” to people through body language and through watching human faces. Of course, we know they also sense whether or not we have diabetes, cancer or fear, using their sense of small. (Darrell mentions people who are always getting bitten by dogs and who ask “why me?” He advises them to go smudge themselves.) So dogs were the first animals to “throw in with us” and share our fates. They understand our doings and intentions intuitively as well as by learning. Darrell tells one of the “Why Dogs Can’t Talk” stories. (There are many dog stories.) A woman has a lover whenever her husband is gone. (Blackfeet stories, like those of many cultures, always portray the unfaithful one as the woman.) The lover is a bear. The dog is afraid to intervene, but it observes and, since in those days it could use human language, it told the man. The man killed the bear and in revenge the grieving wife stuffed a big piece of meat into the dog’s mouth. Its barking is partly an effort to dislodge that lump. PANEL: A REPORT on KAAWA’POMAAKAA SOCIETY Darrell’s position is that the Blackfeet NEVER ate dogs, that they always held them in very high regard and considered them too valuable to simply kill and eat. He mentions that there are specific individual dogs with names who have been remembered in stories. He asserts that Blackfeet are anti-euthanasia and could never support the killing of surplus dogs. They are cultural icons. However, he recognizes that there are always lots of dogs around in Browning, that often they are hurt or starving, and that outsiders are often upset and offer to help the dogs if there were some way to do it. At one time there was an organization called “Friends of Imitah and Poos,” but the sponsor, Peter Berger, moved away. (You might notice that the Blackfeet name for cats is "poos" or "puss," since both animal and name came with the Euros. The cats were invited to participate in this seminar but declined. They said, "As if we cared!") But there have always been individuals who did their best to take care of dogs. Darrell told about a female documentary producer who was working in Browning and who became attached to a cute little pup. When it was time for her to go back to New York City, she really wanted to take the pup with her and asked Darrell what he thought, He asked around subtly, and it seemed to be okay. So she bought a shipping kennel and loaded it up for the airplane. About six months later this woman called Darrell, desperate for advice again. The cute little pup was now the size of her sofa and had just eaten the coffee table. What should she do? Darrell told her to take it to Central Park and turn it loose! “What?? Impossible!! I’d be arrested,” she protested. “Oh, no,” reassured Darrell. “That’s a rez dog. In two weeks it will turn up back here in Browning.” More realistically, it was decided to organize the Kaawa pomaakaa Society, a group with big hearts and small resources. One of the gathering places for the rez dogs is hanging around near Ick’s where the street people gather. (In fact, some of them suggest the dogs are reincarnations of old buddies.) So one of the first projects of this group was to make friends with these guys enough that they would allow the dogs to be spayed or neutered, then returned. They figure that nearly all the dogs are now sterile. Though they had taken along a small tranq gun in case some of the dogs were wild or hostile, Georgeanna Horn simply opened the door to her car and they all jumped in. In fact, the outsiders who come in to help in practical ways (like those who do the spay and neuter clinics) say that the street dogs in Browning are very well socialized animals that get along fine with people, so they can be adopted out even in other places. One of the strengths of this group has been establishing ties with other groups and individuals who have the same goals. These are not the big national humane societies, but more the local person-to-person animal lovers. Darrell had the members of the group tell who they were. Erin Trombley had been a veterinary assistant at Grasswinds Veterinary Clinic and though she doesn’t work there anymore, she was so conscious of the many dogs brought in, sometimes hurt, and how they were all accepted by Dr. Ethel Connelly until a home could be found, that she has continued the work. Ellen Woods is the town librarian who volunteered to help with the spay/neuter clinics. Debbie Nikou is a nurse at the Indian Health Service hospital and has rehabilitated and rescued animals for decades, including horses. Debbie administers a small grant account at Grasswinds. One person she was not able to help was a tourist who wanted to send a found dog home via UPS! But she has connections to Calgary and three states. She told the story of a little fluffy pup that she saw hit by a car. When she cme back and found it, the street people by Ick’s said it wasn’t really hurt, it was just “depressed.” But it was passing blood in its urine and had other bad symptoms, so Debbie took it home. Now it’s a fine boisterous Blue Heeler, exceptionally beautiful. Denise Sollars has a whole menagerie: dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles and so on. Sandra Watts, the tribal attorney, has eight dogs. One sixth grade boy has a specialty: he takes in female dogs that are pregnant, births the pups, raises them, and then adopts them out. When he comes to the meetings, he gets very impatient with adult protocol. “Let’s get to work and get things done!” he urges. Tomorrow I’ll post the rest of the content. The important governing concept of this whole seminar is “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY.” They are strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy which tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes. They are also questioning the value of being old, being an “elder”, as qualification for saying what should happen. As Darrell says, “A person who is mean and selfish at the age of 20 or 40 or 60 is not very likely to be different when he or she gets to 80. So why pay attention to them just because they are old?” Remember that the takeaway idea from this panel is not dogs but “THE RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY.” Often the audience laughed and nudged each other. Whenever I’ve spoken about dogs this has been true. It’s an automatic trigger like “commodity cheese.” So many dogs. A dog is an ongoing character in Bob Tailfeather’s cartoons in the Glacier Reporter. Often it’s the truth teller. Darrell says we need the children because that is who takes us into the future. One of the things they do at Cuts Wood School is invent new words. They wanted a field trip to Pizza Hut in Cut Bank, so in order to convey that name, “Pizza hut,” they combined the name for rose hips (red berries), farina, and lodge. There has been a word for television for quite a while, but the word for computer hasn’t settled yet. New concepts as well as new objects demand new words. The people move into the future as a tribe, revitalizing as it goes. They learn how to Google on their “Sarvisberries.” But they don’t discard the old ways. Yet when tourists come asking to see 19th century lodges and to meet elder ceremonialists, they don’t recognize what they see right in front of them: TODAY’s ceremonialists and homes. Darrell asks them, "Do you have a churn at your house?" Those who really long to know more about the old days, should go to the website called: www.saokioheritage.com/ where much research is recorded. Rosalyn LaPier works hard on this as she earns her Ph.D. at the University of Montana. It can also be found by going to www.pieganinstitute.org So the subject here is the value of relationship and reflection about what that relationship is and what it might mean. The first demonstration of this was that two speakers, who knew about historical traditonal life in this tribe had to come from Canada because the governmental structure up there was one that protected old ways and the remoteness meant that the language persisted. The other side of that was they had to cross the border, which meant they were made late. SPEAKER: MARTIN EAGLE CHILD, Kainai Elder and Cultural Leader Martin says he does NOT like to be late! His practice is ALWAYS to be on time. He is a handsome older man carrying a big old-fashioned briefcase containing his papers. His iron-gray hair is in braids, his earrings are the big round shell kind, and his Burt Lancaster wraparound smile is brilliant. Martin is both a Kainai (Many Chiefs) Elder and a Catholic server of communion. He is one of those Blackfeet men who naturally includes the spiritual of any kind in his life. (Joe Eagle Child, who has been gone a long time, was part of the original Pipe Bundle circle that Bob Scriver and I sat in.) His talk went back and forth between English sentences and Blackfeet sentences, each explaining the other. He often comes to Cuts Wood School to interact with the kids and is used to giving the audience questions to answer. But he also travels to other places and was recently with the Eskimo -- whom he confirms don’t like to be called Eskimo. Say Inuit or whatever else they want to be called. Sled dogs! His eyes lit up at the thought of them! His own dog’s name is Apache. Apache is very fond of Chinese food, but needs to have sweet and sour sauce on it. He says he’s very good to Apache and makes sure he gets Chinese food twice a week. (In Alberta a good share of the restaurants are Chinese.) He remarks about the story about the dog who tattled on the unfaithful wife, that Apache would protect him from any harm, but Apache always sides with his wife! Apache would not tell about her lover, but she has none anyway. He remarks on the many Blackfeet names that include “dog.” Dog Child (Imitahpoka), Richard Little Dog (that’s who gave Bob and I our names), Dog That Curls Up, and White Dog. (More about White Dog later.) In his young days Martin drank. Every time he did and woke up throbbing and bleary with a hangover, he would pray to the Great Spirit, “Oh, get me through this! Help me out here and I’ll never drink again!” But he did anyway. One night he had a dream. He was sitting on a rock and a dog came towards him, intending to bite him and tried to tell him something. It took Martin a while to understand that the dog wanted to punish him for constantly making a vow and then breaking it. He realized what he was doing, that he deserved a dog bite, and he quit. He mentioned the epithet “dog face” which means something like unreliable and deceptive. Imituskee. (One of the first Blackfeet words I learned!) And he said that dogs howling are unwelcome because the feeling is that they are announcing the coming of death, that they can sense it. He spoke of a huge Okan or sacred event in Brockett this summer where there were eighty lodges and nine pipe smokes, all the people coming together to share their holy ways. He says “Sun Dance” is a wrong interpretation. His own sons took part in piercing (then his voice got low, because that was against the law for a long time). Quickly he changed the subject to the name of Darrell’s dog: “Destroyer.” It’s a female. (The India-Indian goddess of destruction is named Shiva, which means the same thing.) For five years Martin worked with the police as an elder to get them to understand the people they were protecting. They used dogs as helpers and he told about a boy who ran away and how the dogs found his frozen body. He told about them figuring out murders, both finding who was killed and who did the killing. He went off on a short diversion about a friend of his who recently had a run-in with an insufficiently civilized cop when the friend was taking his Bundle back home. The policeman told him that all of his native religion was crap. The friend said he thought the officials would be surprised to hear that he thought that. The policeman said they were crap, too. Martin did not think this policeman’s prospects were very good in the future. Dogs might bite him. If a dog dies, one should not grieve too much but rather be grateful to the dog, because sometimes dogs will die in order to take the place of one of your family members who was supposed to die. Wolves are closely related. When one goes on the war trail, one sings a wolf song. He sang it for us. He told about a man-dog song in which a mother dog and her pups come to a man in a dream and ask to come into the lodge by the fire because it is very cold. The words are like “have pity on me, pity on my poor pups. Then I will help you sometime.” And Marvin sang us that song with the help of a drum. The beat was a quick trembling one. Last summer the Piegan kids had a camp at Buffalo Lake so they could look for buffalo stones, or iniskim. Martin was there. Then he told us about a very earnest man who really wanted to sing Indian, so he learned all the words to a song and sang them alone at a ceremony. The only thing he got wrong is that he accidentally changed the last line slightly so that he sang, “I make babies!” That won't be forgotten! SPEAKER: DR. ELDON YELLOWHORN, PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHEOLOGY, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Eldon brought along a slide show to illustrate his talk and used his own dog as an example but it was hard to imagine his dog pulling a travois: it’s a Yorkie! Eldon is a big guy. He says the dog was intended to keep his wife company while he out-of-town, but the dog decided to be his -- though he has to be careful not to step on it. His name is “Omi,” the Japanese word for rain. He told us the story of the Lost Boys who had been put out of the tribe because there wasn’t enough food because of drought. (Eldon points out that this probably happened repeatedly. He did not say it was the boys who were put out because the girls could make new tribal members later and because boys are resourceful enough that they might survive on their own.) The dogs pitied the boys and they prayed to the Moon (howled) asking her to speak to her husband the Sun and persuade him to let the waters return. This strategy worked and the drought ended. He repeated that people don’t usually like to hear a dog howling because it means spirits coming to take someone away. Eldon told a real life story about when he was a boy. (He’s sort of young adult now -- everyone looks young to me.) They lived out in the country and used soft sage plants as wipers in the outhouse. One day he, his mother, and their dogs were gathering more sage. He was very small, maybe four years old, and he had to move his bowels. So his mother got him properly arranged. When his droppings hit the ground, the dogs darted in and ate them, which surprised him very much. Why was that? Then his mother told him the old story about why dogs can’t talk. This time the wife’s lover was a man, whom the husband killed, but this time the wife shoved shit into the dog’s mouth as his punishment and that’s what he barks to cough out. And yet he got a taste for the stuff and eats it when he can. (This is one of the duties of “pye dogs” or pariah dogs in Third World countries -- to clean away excrement and dead things.) Then Eldon shifted to formal archeology. The skeletal and material records of the direct association between people and dogs goes back 14,000 years. If you Google “Blue Fish Cave” on your Sarvisberry, you’ll find many valuable references. A dog skeleton 12,000 years old was found there. He explained to us “DNA archeology,” which means working in the lab to analyze both nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, which is actually more useful because it doesn’t change except by mutation. (The whole point of nuclear DNA is to recombine during sex to create a new individual.) The current thinking is that dogs departed from whatever common ancestor was there between themselves and other canids probably 135,000 years ago. This means that dogs became a separate species before they took up with humans. Previously, humans thought that they caused the split into dogs. (Humans think they cause everything. This is a Napi quality.) Dingos, when looked at through DNA, turn out to have developed out of the dogs who went to Australia with humans and then turned feral. It is an open question whether humans domesticated dogs or dogs domesticated humans. The relationship long predates the change from nomads to farms and villages (about 10,000 years ago) and many dogs still live on the boundary of that change, going back and forth, in and out. SPEAKER: TOM SHAWL, PROFESSOR OF ASSINIBOINE LANGUAGE, FORT BELKNAP COLLEGE Tom Shawl is a third handsome man who looks young to me. His father was Assiniboine (Crazy Bear) and his mother was Blackfeet (Lone Walker). He came to Browning to get to know his mother’s family and ended up falling in love with a Blackfeet woman and marrying her. He said he had asked Darrell to provide a couple of husky bodyguards for him because through history the Assiniboine and Blackfeet clashed hard. His specialty was accumulating stories about a real person named “White Dog.” A number of people were at this seminar because they love the 19th century romantic horse-people stories and this was right down their alley. Tom sketched out the history behind it. The Assiniboine were actually a segment of the Sioux nation, in sign talk named by drawing one’s finger across one’s throat: “Cut Throat,” also called the Nakota because their dialect drifted in a way that substituted N for the D we are used to in Dakota states. Indian warfare before the horse and even before the Euros, was patchy and band-on-band rather than tribe-on-tribe. At any given time probably seventy-per-cent of the people were not at war while the other thirty per cent busied themselves with daily work. War was with shields, arrows and spears and as much a ceremony as a destruction. He spoke of Assiniboine shields, very big, so many of them that every man had one to stand behind, and Assiniboine armor, several layers of leather with sand quilted in between. Heavy but effective. Assiniboine were related to and allied with Cree, in a similar way to the Gros Ventre, who are the buffer group between Blackfeet and Assiniboine, usually allied to the Blackfeet. For a long time the bands had worked out their boundaries, as though they were jigsaw pieces fit together. When the Euros hit the east coast, they pushed the jigsaw pieces so that they buckled and disengaged all across the continent. Then they added the de-stabilizers of horses, guns, metal goods, fabric -- all things that kindled greed and created gradients between haves and have-nots, all of which started wars. The tribal histories tell of fighting the Iroquois, but then less than a hundred years later they had been pushed so far West that they were fighting the Sushwap tribe in British Columbia. Their relations are sometimes called Stoneys. (Shawl counts Hugh Monroe among his ancestors, as do more than a few Blackfeet.) The Assiniboine were so widespread that they became middlemen who disseminated material goods. Their territory extended from Texas to the Bow River. They fought Comanche/Shoshone whose sign was a snake, a wiggling motion across with the finger, going one way for Comanche and the other way for Shoshone. At one point there were seven Assiniboine warriors and three Cree who came to help the Blackfeet because their backs were up against the Rockies and they needed to learn new techniques. Two Assiniboines stand out in more recent history (1820’s and 1830’s). One was “Left Hand,” noted for his military genius, to the point where whites called him “the Wild Bonaparte.” These men could muster huge forces of warriors, from 500 to 1,000 men at once time. In 1836 a huge force of 3,000 gathered to attack the Blackfeet, but the leader, “White Dog,” for some reason changed his mind and decided not to attack after all. The reason is not recorded. It was not typical because White Dog was one of the few who had a categorical vendetta against all Blackfeet. He would ride to a ridge overlooking camp and scream sexual insults at the men. In their own language! White Dog was a shape-shifter who, when he was cornered, became a huge grizzly. He could reconstitute himself and there are many stories about how he was killed and who killed him (one can start a bar fight over whose great-grandfather managed the deed). He had a sweat lodge that he would go into, stay in for days, and emerge with fresh scalps dripping from his belt, brandishing captured weapons, all Blackfeet. Evidently it was a teleportation “worm hole.” (My notes say that “David-Rodnick” is the source of this next, but I don’t think that’s the right name.) In 1935 “Returning Healer” went to war alongside White Dog. Two parties set out but “Returning Healer” had a dream that though horses would be succesfully stolen, someone would die, and he didn’t want that to happen so he turned around and went back home. But some of his warriors still wanted to go on, so they joined White Dog. He had the same dream, but his reaction was, “So? The dead person might be me and I want to continue.” He decided to make medicine and sent someone out to find a buffalo skull on the prairie. He took a bit of this and powdered it. His medicine caused the skull to become a living bull bison that snorted and pawed the earth. He had an enchanted buffalo robe and a war shield both of which could repel bullets and arrows. One man swore that he saw a bullet bounce off White Dog’s forehead, leaving him unharmed. He specialized in stealing women right out of their lodges and also horses so valuable that at night they were tied to the owner’s wrist or ankle. (Tom said once he himself had a car so new and beautiful that he considered doing that, tying his ankle to his car with a rope out the window. But that then he realized that the consequence would probably be that he was dragged out the window behind the car the thief was driving away!) Probably it was the Blackfeet who killed White Dog in the end, though they don’t agree on the place. Mary Ground says it was here but Schultz identified a place farther away. Shawl did find one Blackfeet elder and then again an Assiniboine elder who was a nephew of White Dog’s, and they told the same story. The night before he died, White Dog rode around the village on his horse, singing his war song, which went this way: “My relations, it is a hard thing to lose someone but only the earth lasts forever.” The Blackfeet took this song and they still sing it as a victory song when they take the state basketball championship. Shawl is trying to establish whether White Dog was with Custer on the Greasy Grass and says he was with the band that surrendered with Sitting Bull. But that’s about the facts. The more interesting story is that one of the features of White Dog's exploits with women was that many of them fell in love with him. He taught them the magic spells that would reconstitute him if he were chopped into parts, which those who tried to kill him were intent on doing. But he was mean to these women and sometimes beat them up. So the last time he was chopped into pieces, the women came together with their parts of the ceremony to reassemble him and then got to talking. They became jealous and angry and some refused to perform their part of the ritual. Therefore, parts of White Dog remained severed and he stayed dead. In fact, some time later, he was dug up and his corpse was mostly together, but parts were missing. (Do you know the Egyptian story of Osiris?) Unyiyee.

"LOLITA LAST STAR"

Saturday, September 04, 2010 (In real life Lolita Last Star is the daughter of Irene Blood Many Hides Last Star who just died recently. She may not be amused that Micaela Marie Young used her name. In the Blackfeet way, names are serious business and require permission.) PHONE RINGS: “Hey, you’re in some babe’s master’s thesis!” “Huh?” >Yeah, does ‘Lolita Last Star’ ring a bell?" “Nope.” “Check it out. It’s on the Internet. I’ll say this: clearly, she didn’t have you for her high school English teacher! Her spell checker doesn’t help her out a whole lot. There are some real howlers in there, even though it was approved by SIX MSU professors who declared it ‘satisfactory regarding content, English usage, format, citation, bibliographics style and consistency.’ I’ll say this much: it’s consistently lurid and sensational, if not inflammatory. The punctuation is consistently, um, creative." PHONE RINGS: “Is this thesis author the same woman who made up that tale about Bob Scriver raping Indian women?” “Possible. She cited my blog post about that tale in her bibliography, though her bib sure wouldn’t pass at the University of Chicago or even at BCC!” PHONE RINGS: “Hey, isn’t that the smart mouth Bambi-as-social-worker who wanted to get laid by Browning hotshot firefighter Indians but was afraid of going on the rez so wanted to come sit all cozy in your kitchen for some coffee and comforting?” “I refuse to answer.” EMAIL ARRIVES: “I remember this one. You blogged about her last spring. She’s the one who was a fire-fighter for two weeks and then washed out, ruining her love life. The one who was the head of Amnesty International at Bozeman but has a real fascination with violence. The one who can’t decide whether she wants to be Native American or Buddhist. The one who wanted to research the Flood of ‘64 but wouldn’t interview actual survivors. The one who can’t keep the names of the highways straight, maybe because she tried to interview you on her cell phone while driving?” “Explains a lot, doesn’t it?” PHONE RINGS: “Isn’t this the one who claimed she already has an agent? Book to come out soon?” “Yup. Now all she needs is a plot for her wandering narrative and a good editor with a sharp pencil. It’s high energy writing but she has a tin ear. Sometimes she’s channeling Gary J. Cook’s wild Vietnam stuff and other times it’s pure bodice-ripper or misery lit. The theory could be left out: it’s only name-dropping. She never integrates it.” “What did you do?” “Called her prof and told him to tell her that she’d better not be hanging around Ick’s or they’d find her face down in a creek somewhere.” “What did she do?” “Threatened to sue me.” ____________________ QUOTES from “Lolita Last Star”: “This project started a fight. Well, to take ownership, I inadvertently started a fight through a poorly planned interview with an old windsock flagging around on the plains, south of the Blackfeet Reservation. In her evaluation of me, she chided 'you are an alien, digging around in what you don’t know.' I hung up the phone feeling terrified, mostly of myself, as the ultimate freak and outsider.” “The novel Lolita Last Star, that I view as a collectively owned and created work, due to its inclusive, collaborative nature, serves as a careful, yet creative response to shared criticisms of the pitfalls, grave omissions, and false representations common to the works of many nonnative writers.” “Mary Scriver is an old white lady, and a missionary with a background in Speech Education and Religious Studies—a granny with a punch, and a library card.” “I pulled off of Highway 44 in a turnout, taking a moment to compose myself, when I saw a freshly smashed pigeon on the side of the road—all dry, blue gray feathers covering the shame of purple entrails and red death. 'That’s me,' I told Debbie, 'A smashed pigeon on the side of the road.' She laughed lovingly at my naiveté and said, for one, 'I should have gone with you,' and 'well, don’t give up.' Smashed pigeons aside, the reason I linger about my new prairie dwelling friend, is that despite my desire to instantly dismiss her as a bit on the 'unique' side, like many old shut-ins scattered about in rural landscapes, her criticism and claims pertaining to credibility are common.” “In a recent conversation with my mother to do some fact checking, she said 'Well, there are rumors that a Cherokee or two married into the family.' Even though I groaned a bit, she meant well, and her desire to patchwork our family identity came mostly out of a place of empathy. My maternal grandparents are Romani holocaust survivors who in their words, settled in Tennessee, Illinois, and Texas to make a fortune in oil.” “Charlene cleared three cement steps without effort, and blast [sic] through the screen door, gasping for air as her parents sat looking out the window at the rain. The orchestra of chaos and truncated time delivered a hot, impatient rust brown Chevy to the driveway, and she scuttled their bodies out the door and into the cab of the truck with the slam of a heavy door.” “Miles away, Frank fought a war of his own, comforted only by the thought that his new wife lived safely and comfortably in a small home paid for by his enlistment advance, and a loan from each of their parents. During the apex of the flood, Frank’s dizzy head lay in the lap of a naked Vietnamese woman. He visited the small hut when he felt lonely for Charlene, or left out by the other GI’s. The woman’s thin arms framed his face and he studied the soft black hair on the woman’s arm. She giggled and squirmed, occasionally tickled him, and whispered closely into his ear. The steam of her breath turned his inner ear damp and her words, indiscernible, soothed him into a rare state of relaxation. The structure of her body resembled Charlene’s in its thin, yet healthy composition.” “For such a supposed stupid man, his artful displays with a strand of fly fishing line must have been an anomalistic skill. In the morning and evening sun, the free floating, delicate thread gently flagged towards the surface of the water, and drifted whisper like until he pulled the swaying ‘S’ back the same way a beautiful young woman throws back her hair. Despite his secret grace, dog-like, he gazed dumbly at the water, and if the line bonked a few times before his final reel in, he slunk in late to work without a lunch. Many suspected that fishing, in actuality, afforded Larry a rare opportunity away from his pious and angry wife, to drink his secret stash of peach Schnapps. The reel, rod, and ample alone time provided the perfect diversion for Larry to drink and sing happily by the water. Around town, people awarded Larry’s behavior with a nickname, Too-Drunk-To-Fish-Larry. A few kids had seen him attempting to load his hook with a worm, but he dumped his rod in the water instead.” http://etd.lib.montana.edu/etd/2010/young/YoungM0510.pdf PHONE RINGS: “So is all forgiven now? Should Micaela Marie Young drop by for coffee with Old Windsock?” “No.” Old Windsock Posted by Mary Strachan Scriver at 5:27 AM 10 comments: Byrd said... "Old windsock"?!? I'm appalled at some of the writing and the comments this woman made. Her description of the conversation with you in particular (and I do remember reading your post about her call) is quite peculiar and self-centered. I did not know that one could submit a kind of 'novel' to fill the requirements for a masters degree. 6:51 AM Byrd said... Another comment, if that's OK. I read more of the opening section of the paper and it struck me at lunch that the careless informal style and language is like that found in many blogs by people who are writing about themselves and personal preferences or dislikes. I have returned to school (I'm now 54) and have to write papers. I'm sure that if I wrote what was supposed to be a formal paper with that kind of style my professor would have some serious comments along with a loss of grade. 5:10 PM prairie mary said... The most cynical possible "take" on this paper is that the six professors did not take this woman seriously enough to provide her with standard guidance in an academic setting. I did talk to one of her profs when she first picked the quarrel on the telephone and his main reaction was amusement. Prairie Mary 5:35 PM Byrd said... I'm not sure which could be worse, professors not taking a graduate student seriously or the possibility that the professors don't see anything wrong with the style. What could an instructor do if a student resists advice or guidance in improving her/his writing style, one wonders. Or could I be behind the times at my age with what is acceptable in academia? Whatever the case, this situation is still peculiar. 7:00 AM prairie mary said... Traditionally, when students submit a master's thesis that is as wobbly as this one, full of unsubstantiated, inaccurate, undigested, and ancient material, one simply flunks the wretch. What makes it truly vicious is that it goes on the Internet, is Googled by students and journalists, then reused as though it were validated by being in a master's thesis that was approved by SIX college professors. Prairie Mary 7:42 AM artemesia said... "Old Windsock" indeed! I didn't have time to read this "thesis" carefully, but how can a work of fiction qualify as scholarship? Or am I missing something? I like the way you look indomitable, Mary! Also I see a family resemblance, definitely. You look like my Grandmother Harcus! And her sister, Elizabeth Ramsay. Sam's cousins I think. 10:06 PM prairie mary said... You made my day, K! I didn't think I looked like anyone on this planet, but if I look like a Scots ancestor, then I'm authentic and pleased! Prairie Mary (AKA Old Windsock) 10:10 PM Byrd said... Yes, Artemesia, that was something that puzzled me mightily. I've known people who worked hard and got Masters and Doctoral degrees and I don't recall any of their thesis papers being "fiction". Some have gone on to writing fiction, but they know that there is a difference between the two kinds of writing. It's odd. 11:14 PM prairie mary said... Actually, a fiction thesis is an option at several universities, but the quality of what I've read is usually superior to this. Again, I am surprised that six professors were prepared to swear that this document was standard grammatical and properly spelled English. Prairie Mary 3:56 AM Byrd said... Thank you for that information; I didn't know that was the case. I quite agree with you, though, on the style and grammar.

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.)