Rosier points out that in the first half of the Twentieth Century the Blackft Nation was just like the rest of the United States:
patriotic during war time
community oriented
racially and ethnically segregated
economically stratified
democratically organized
The SINS of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council included:
squandering money on bad investments
distributing tribal proceeds to those who deserved it least
violating their own constitution and charter
faliing to live up to the ethical standards of anybody
BUT
The VIRTUES of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council included:
supplementary welfare and per capita
burial and sickness funds
credit for individual and cooperative livestock enterprises
support for job training
support for tribal enterprises like the arts and crafts cooperative
grants to full-blood groups to help maintain traditions
defending the IRA by using it, mostly as intended
providing mechanisms for orderly change
An academic theorist proposes that a democracy can protect fundamental rights and interests in a democratic order four ways:
1. Changing the size of the body of people, for instance, reducing the number of people in the tribe by requiring a higher blood quantum or requiring residence on the reservation.
2. Moving from every person voting to representative voting through districts or the other way
3. Controlling public opinion, sometimes in a negative way.
4. Giving power to a quasi-guardian, hopefully a benign one (BIA).
For forty years the question of termination dominated discussion. Termination would mean dividing the tribal assets among the people and closing down all the offices and services. Now attention has turned to sovereignty: how can the reservation become self-sustaining and self-regulating? What infrastructure is still needed? How can it be developed?
Each entity (BIA, Tribe, various sub-groups like ranchers, full-bloods, businessmen, and off-rez entities like state, county, and town) distrusted the other entities. Each tried to get the others to carry the load of welfare, law and order, and so on. In the meantime, through things like Earl Old Person and Walter Wetzel becoming active with the National Congress of American Indians, ideas from across the nation filtered back to the reservation.
Paul Rosier’s book only describes the first half of the twentieth century and is based on hour after hour after hour of reading documents like tribal minutes or correspondence between tribe and Washington, D.C. It’s much too early to write the history of the second half, and I probably won’t be around long enough to read it. What propels me in this project of posting historical materials is the individual lives of the people I’ve known in the last almost-fifty years, since I came to Browning in 1961.
The first year I was assigned to teach seventh and eighth grade English. In those years they grouped kids by “achievement” so I taught the “top” of the seventh grade and the “bottom” of the eighth grade. Looking back, I see what actually happened was that the “top” was the more assimilated kids with more white blood and with supportive families, and the “bottom” was the less assimilated kids who were more likely to be full-blood and Blackft speakers. They were also more likely to live way out in the country where the roads were bad -- too bad for school buses to get kids into town -- so their attendance was not good unless they were at Boarding School. No wonder their grades suffered. After forty years of watching, I’ve seen both groups do well, but in different ways. Kenny Scabby Robe founded Black Lodge Singers, repeatedly identified as the best Indian drum group in the country. Most of the seventh graders became management or professionals: paper pushers. There were plenty of people who were in neither group and who found a way to succeed.
A local Browning businessman, a successful entrepreneur, called to let me know he was reading this blog and to recommend another book. I asked this businessman what made him successful -- what was it in him that drove him to get up every day, do all the little stuff necessary for running a business, and so on. He said HUNGER. He went to school to get the lunch, but that wasn’t all. Somewhere in there he made the connection that if he hungered for a shiny new car, the way to get it was to get an education and then work hard. So he did. Simple as that. Hard as that. It worked.
When the people hunger for law and order, they’ll find a way to get it. When the people hunger for clean streets, they’ll get it done. When the people hunger for a Tribal Council that runs without constant warfare, they’ll look for the ways to make that happen. Step by step, little by little, evolution more than revolution.
The old buffalo people never wrote anything down. There were no elections. Leaders showed what they could do by doing it. If someone was a troublemaker, he was made to leave the rest of the group -- go somewhere else. If he couldn’t find a new group to accept him, he might starve. Food and clothing was everywhere -- getting them was simply a matter of finding and capturing them, which was much easier with a group of people who cooperated. The group was pretty much family, and so family loyalty became a value so high that it was stronger than anything else. That has remained.
For a while families were smashed by violence, booze, starvation, smallpox, bad boarding schools, loss of language and religion -- you name it. The Amskapi Pikuni were flattened as far as people can go -- farther than Iraq, almost as far as sub-Saharan Africa. But then they began to regroup. The same strategic thinking that had been used for hunting, stealing horses, and surviving extreme weather now comes to the problem of how to survive in a world even the whites don’t understand. The whole planet has been changing quickly in the last hundred years -- nations industrialized, redrawn, renamed, computerized, outsourced, ended and begun -- and we aren’t even close to the end yet. No wonder everyone gets confused and impatient.
The businessman I talked to said the town businesses are converting to use bar code technology now. A far cry from “writing it down in the book,” which they still do at the Valier grocery store. He asked me what a certain person looked like -- I suggested he Google up this guy’s picture. He knew what I meant, had a computer, and knew how to do it. It’s a new world. And will be another new world tomorrow -- and then the next day. The important thing is that Blackft can make it.
“Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954” by Paul Rosier is available in paperback now ($14.95) from a bookstore or from the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 68588-0255. Online they are at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/ The International Book Number is ISBN 0-8032-3941-6
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