Around the Campfire

April 7, 2005

Around the Campfire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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