“Blackfoot/Whitehand” is one of the strangest and most reassuring little movies I know. It’s a half-hour documentary about Darrell Kipp walking around in Bulgaria -- that’s it. He meets people, he gives some short speeches, he learns a bit of Bulgarian and offers Blackfoot words. You get this from the Parnas House Film Agency in Sofia. The director/producer was Vlado Trifonov. The film has gone the rounds of the festivals.
Darrell, whose Blackfoot name is “Apinakwe Peta” or “Morning Eagle,” was invited by a friend from college, Vern Peterson, who teaches at the American University of Bulgaria. Kipp wanders casually among Bulgarians, Croatians, Turks, Sunni and Shiite Muslims in tiny villages in the Rhodope Mountains. They are baffled about who he is in his Harvard garb: khakis and Oxford cloth blue shirts. He’s huge, wears a pony tail -- no feathers -- at first they get the idea that he might be from India -- but wait, no, from the USA where the Indians are going extinct. They know that much. Darrell has to tell them that Indians are far from extinct, but the government likes to keep them invisible, which turns out not to be that different from Bulgarian peasants. They give him a sausage, a loaf of bread. Big smiles. When he stays at the house of a professor, which is a stone house where the bedroom is furnished with a one-legged bed built into a corner and one peg on the wall, he is given brandy, eggs that come from the hens in the yard, and bread toasted for him by the old professor on the top of the wood stove. The effect on Darrell was intense: it threw him back to his childhood in the little town of Blackfoot on the Montana reservation. His grandfather made him toast that way.
The bits of his speech that he re-enacts for the camera make three points: 1) All people are equal, but that does not mean that everyone should be the same. 2) Indians were nearly destroyed but they managed to survive, just like Bulgarians who even now are dependent on a cow, burros who do impossible labor to create crops, small businesses like coffee shops. 3) We cannot go back from the polluted world but we cannot trust it either. We must solve this problem but it is everybody’s problem.
The last point seems impossible: the water in the ancient stone spring basins is clear and clean. Darrell splashes it on his face and drinks it with no fear. Then the camera takes us to the village dump, where the wind-blown plastic catches on the bushes and fences just as it does on the rez. When he asks a group of men if they have questions, they say, “What brandy do you drink?” The men -- and the more privileged women -- drink rakia and tea constantly.
The Rhodope Mountains and foothills look very much like the Blackfeet Reservation along the Rockies in Montana. It’s a stony place where the paths wind among stone walls and houses. An old woman with a long stick harries her sheep towards home. A dog, looking like any rez dog, shows up and proves it knows Blackfeet though it refuses to speak for food. A little boy appears and tracks along with Darrell, looking waaaaay up there at this man who talks all the time, but not Bulgarian.
Darrell is an observant Catholic and Blackfoot at once. In these mountains he prays Blackfeet prayers for the people and their mountain springs. In the Orthodox church, among all the icons, he lights a candle. In the Muslim mosque he sits silently as the men tip forward on their rugs in prayer. Worship is worship.
These are humble people, less well-off even than reservation Indians if one looks at material goods. Yet both cultures are rich with story and song. At the professor’s house the guests dance Greek style with hands held up high while a simple bagpipe whangs out the tune. There’s not much that can be explored in words except at the University, but much is conveyed with faces: curious, suspicious, skeptical, amazed. A legless man announces proudly that he is a journalist, and then goes on his way scooting a homemade cushion attached to his torso.
Darrell has only recently broken his rule against taking any official position, except for the development of the Piegan Institute which has run a Blackfeet Language Immersion School for twenty years. He’s descended from the “peace chief” Heavyrunner, who was massacred by mistake in what one could call a terrorist strike by the U.S. Cavalry. We’ve wondered how much he’s like Heavyrunner, because somehow he is able to turn away wrath. Not that he doesn’t get angry, even outraged, but somehow he doesn’t let it curdle him. Maybe it helps that he’s big but I remember him in high school, a little guy with big black glasses.
One of his secrets is his farflung network of friends: small town Montana classmates from when he went to Eastern Montana College; sophisticated and wealthy Harvard classmates from his graduate days there; nutty hippies from his MFA days at Goddard; army buddies and locals from Korea; Hawaiians from the indigenous language movement; and Canadian Blackfoots of every kind. Also, he relates well to women and isn’t afraid to learn from them, especially his wife, Roberta.
All the time Kipp goes all over the place, talking. His message is always something like: “Take hold of life. Decide what is good and then make it happen. Don’t ask anyone for permission. Just get to work.” This makes some people very angry. They want chapter and verse -- and guarantees. A workbook.
He said that when he was in Bulgaria, he had a kind of breakdown or breakthrough. It was suddenly clear that there are poor suffering people everywhere -- it is not just that Indians have had to endure so much, but that people everywhere must endure. He no longer felt that Indians were alone. Wisdom grabbed him.
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