"Nitsitapiisinni"

“Nitsitapiisinni” means “the Real People” and especially, the old Blackft before Europeans came. It is also the name of an exhibit and its accompanying soft book from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. (www.glenbow.org) This is an excellent destination for field trips, not that far from Montana High-Line schools. The book can be ordered from the museum or from Key Porter Books Limited, 70 The Esplanade, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1R2. (www.keyporter.com)

Because Western Canadian museums were a little late creating collections of objects, they have concentrated on excellent presentation. And because they were sensitive to the issues of their aboriginal peoples, they have included them in the planning and construction of Indian exhibits. This is how “Nitsitapiisinni” came about. The book is less than a hundred pages, but includes excellent information and photos about the pre-contact tribe. These Montana Blackft participated: Doreen Blackweasel, Tom Blackweasel, and Earl Old Person. The book does not always flatter the United States!

At the end of the book is a glossary of Blackfoot words. It’s interesting because the Canadian parts of the Blackft Nation speak a slightly different dialect than the States and even on the Montana reservation one end has a little different accent than the other. This list was of words that everyone could agree upon. Mostly they are names of spiritually important entities, probably because the old language is used today most often in prayer, so these are the words that people hear over and over. The exhibit has a movie screen where two old ladies tell stories, one speaking in Blackft and the other one translating for English speakers.

To me, one of the most interesting exhibits was not that old. It was a little one-room cabin, reassembled in the exhibit hall and provided with a voice-over narration for the visitors standing in it. The little house is furnished sparely with a metal bed, a wood stove, a table, a couple of chairs and a minimum of pans and basins hanging from nails. In fancy interior decorating circles right at the moment there is a great interest in “little houses,” but I’ve never seen one of these cabins included. Chicken houses, the tiny refugee houses built quickly to shelter San Franciscans after their city was destroyed by earthquake, tool sheds, “Sunday houses” where rural Texans stayed overnight after church because the distances were so far -- all of these have been in books. It’s time to add the one-room cabins where many Indian people made the transition from lodges to multi-room houses.

When Doreen Blackweasel tells about the house, she says that they had almost nothing except that they did have enough to eat and they had their families around them. That was enough. Many have fond memories of those places, especially the young ones who stayed in them for summer, maybe with grandparents. I remember some myself.

A strength of the book is the emphasis on place through photos. Pictured are the Rockies, Chief Mountain, the Sweetgrass Hills, buffalo jumps, and the Milk River Valley. Also, there are photos of the middle times, just after the turn of the century when steam tractors were first appearing. There is a moving photo of an Indian man hand-sowing his plowed fields with lodges far in the background. He is very small against the wide prairie. The residential schools are pictured and so are men in regalia participating in the Glenbow Stampede.

This book is reliable enough and clear enough to be used with junior high readers as the spine of a classroom unit or it would be an excellent subject for an individual report. The Glenbow Museum archives are for serious scholars. The papers of Claude Schaeffer, who was the anthropologist at the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, are housed there.

In the Seventies, when Darrell Kipp was first teaching graduate classes for teachers and local Blackft scholars, he took a carload of his students up to use the archives. It was the time when AIM was being obstreperous, so when the little group of definitely Indian people strolled into the library, the librarians became very nervous. They seemed to think that there would be shouting or possibly even book-throwing. But everyone was on their best behavior. Darrell explained to the librarian in charge what they were doing and everyone settled at tables with their notebooks. (No laptops in those days.) They took pages and pages of notes, material not available anyplace else. At the end of the day they all thanked the staff, who still looked a little stunned when the scholars left. They just weren’t used to Indians studying Indians!

If a field trip is possible, there is another museum to the south in Fort McLeod called “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.” A buffalo jump or piskun is a cliff where buffalo could be stampeded over, so that they would be killed or severely injured. The meat would be sliced thinly and dried to keep over the winter. When this particular piskun was excavated, among the bison bones was a broken human skull. Young men would disguise themselves as calves or wolves and try to lure buffalo into position, jumping out of the way at the last minute when the stampede was underway. This one didn’t get out of the way fast enough.

The museum is built in stages up the cliff so that one can see the many layers of bones alternating with charcoal where the offal left after butchering was finally burned. Exhibits are wonderfully inventive so that Napi tales appear and disappear on boulders and there are participatory exhibits. The best part is that the museum is in open country where it is easy to imagine both grazing bison and Blackft riders off in the distance. Often there are programs with singers or storytellers.

The URL is www.head-smashed-in.com which is worth visiting just to see the little wee silhouetted buffalo running over the cliff! The museum is a Unesco World Heritage Site. The jump itself is more than 5,500 years old -- that compares with the Egyptian pyramids. Sometimes tipi camping is available. This is not a campground experience, but rather two or three lodges alone on the prairie under the stars.