INNAIHTSIIYI: "Make Peace"

Judith Landing on the Missouri River, site of 1855 Blackfeet peace treaty.
Innaihtsiiyi
(“Make a treaty -- make peace.”)

A history conference examining Blackfeet concepts of peace and peace agreements.
Friday, August 18, 2006, 10:00am to 4:00pm
Free & open to the public
Nizipuhwahsin School, Browning, Montana

Guest speakers will include both academic and community scholars.


Piegan Institute
Researching, Promoting & Preserving Native Languages
www.pieganinstitute.org

For information call Rosalyn LaPier at 406.338.7740
or email rrlapier@pieganinstitute.org

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Rocky Moutain West at the University of Montana.



This invitation arrived in a recent email. These summer history conferences are always wonderful, a chance to meet some fascinating people and to enjoy the graceful building where the Blackfeet Immersion School teaches little kids to speak their own language. Roselyn LaPier, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Montana, is the heart of the event and has been known to go so far as to pick bushels of sarvisberries for the participants. You can’t get much more traditional and land-connected than that.

I was thinking about how I would define Blackfeet peace and peace agreements, especially before white contact. Of course, we don’t KNOW because there’s no written record or video. But there are some things we can work out, some things we can guess.

First, it would have to be an oral agreement. In those days most disruptions of the peace were probably over the allocation of resources, especially who could hunt buffalo when and where. This would mean that groups would have to discuss where to set boundaries and where, and to what lengths to go to defend them. When times are fat with good grass and lots of animals, far more trespass and voluntary sharing would be tolerated than in lean years. When things were tough, people would be more on edge, more ready to fight, more in need of domination to keep order. Then it would take a lot of gathering to talk in order to decide what should be done.

On the personal level, the most disruptive behavior might be over sex or competition -- arrogance, possessiveness, the human comedy. (The nastiest thing one Blackfeet can say to another is still, “You think you’re better!” The next thing is likely to be an act of leveling.) A woman in a violent marriage might have been defended by her brothers, who came to exact retribution. A faithless woman might be punished with mutilation: a sliced-off nose. A lazy woman might be sent back to her family. True troublemakers might be settled by the Dog Soldiers, who kept order in the camp and might even destroy a bad person’s camp and drive them away. In fact, my impression is that dispersal -- making physical space among persons or bands -- has always been a peace strategy and that one of the violence-making forces on a reservation is the confinement to the same space.

In those days daily peace and standards of conduct would be imposed by known persons, real and at hand -- not abstract roles or persons in official robes, often acting as “societies.” It might not be more fair or objective than today’s trials, but it would be understandable.

Peace itself might not have been defined the way we do today, when the concept is prone to be either “at rest -- stasis” or “controlled:” held in a certain pattern by power. Rather, peace might have been a matter of fittingness, harmony, keeping the pattern moving smoothly according to the seasons. These are the conditions of prosperity. Rain comes when it ought to, sun comes when it is needed, and the plants and animals respond dependably. Since humans are part of the whole, what they do affects nature and they ought to be careful, respectful.

Someone has said that Native American religion is "ecosystematic": a religion that sees how things fit together as they need to for the good of each other and also for the good of the whole. Sometimes ceremonies were ritual re-enactments of birth or coitus, so the bison would know how to do it and be encouraged. Often there were gifts to show good will. And always there were stories to remind everyone how life fits together -- and even death.

It has also been said that Native American religion is “omni-theistic,” that is, it sees the sacred in everything, not removed or confined to some other realm in the sky or place on the planet. In other words, the sacred is immanent, at the core of existence and burgeoning out through life everywhere. If this is so, it might be a source of peace and grace, accessible to everyone everywhere and in every time, not to be hoarded.

These are just first thoughts. I look forward to hearing what the learned and the local say at this conference in August. Maybe much of it will be about written treaties, but maybe not.