"The Piikani Blackfeet" by John C. Jackson

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)