REZ-DOGS, THE VIDEO

Strangely enough, it was someone in Paris who told me about a video made on the Blackfeet Reservation here by me. It’s called “Rez Dogs” and was a Documentary Production (March 495) at the University of Montana in 2007. Sean O’Brian directs the “Teaching with Film” program. This specific film can be found at http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs. I’m on dial-up, so I couldn’t download it very well. I asked for a DVD and Mo Mislivets sent me one, no questions asked. Robert Hall was the rez connection, but -- predictably -- no one is quite sure where he’s staying just now.

I chased this video because of a number of factors. One is that I have a few dog stories about Browning myself, dating back fifty years. Another is that I’ve just finished a book about my dog-catching days in Portland (available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary). In an earlier book, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” I put dogs in all the stories. And another reason is that the media spreads a wildly sentimental and unreal vision of pets demanding that they never suffer, be kept indoors, be given constant veterinary attention, and generally become children. This video is about grown up animals. There are no cute puppies.

But mostly I just thought this video was brilliant for the following reasons:

1. It was filmed in late winter when the land is still rawhide encrusted with snow and the wind has torn all flags back to mere strips along their ropes. But there are bare places and busy dogs traveling around both in town and across the hills. This is the rez that no tourist and few anthropologists ever see. The editing returns again and again to the Rockies, the Sun Dog in the sky, Chief Mountain, highways going on and on -- up and down over the hills and into the coulees, and the guardian warriors that stand at the borders.

2. It starts with a stereotypical street drunk -- they say “wino” -- hanging around snarling and knowing at all, about half dog himself. (He’s from a family that I know -- artisans, craftsmen.) Then there begins to weave in an old Blackfeet story about the “lost children,” kids who were so bad that the tribe moved on and left them behind. This is told in Blackfeet with subtitles -- sometimes the red subtitles linger after the image is gone, making them “rubrics” -- the red writing in the Bible meant to be emphasized. We never see this story teller.

3. But we watch serious interviews of people. One is an intelligent and handsome young man who speaks of the importance of dogs in Blackfeet history before the horse, about dogs in his own life (“Lucky” who survived one runover by a car, then succumbed to the next, so was renamed “Unlucky.”), and about “we’ve gotta love the doggies and not be sunnavabitches to them because they are our link to the land and the culture.”

An older man with a gray-streaked ponytail sits at his kitchen table, looking out the window, and explains the dogs he sees out there. (I think he’s in Starr School.) “That dog over there is really smart. Her real folks are in Cut Bank right now, so she comes here and we feed her or my mom’s over there and she can go there for food. A dog like that knows how to take care of herself.” He tells about a dog with a broken leg that he splinted and how the dog, in gratitude, now guards the place, feels a connection to the family. Might even run off bad spirits.

But a boy interrupted at a basketball court has the idea that, since the dogs always hang around the street drunks, they are in fact reincarnations of past drunks, hanging with their buddies, “chilling” just as they did when human. Why else would a person always see them near the places the drunks hang out?

The intelligent young man claims that rez dogs are different: “they walk different, they pack more weight.” But they are Blackfeet. “You don’t see them in the white towns.” The man at his window says, “Winter really thins them out” and speculates that they are all related in the same way as all the Blackfeet are somehow descendants of the 500 survivors of smallpox and starvation. The young man relates them to young people who can’t really nail down their Blackfeet identity because of mixed blood or not having local roots and how they become “lost mutts.”

4. Which brings us back to the legend of the “lost children” which in this version is eventually related to the acceptance of one-quarter blood quantum as the definition of “Indian.” A subtle point for white people far away, but a crucial and telling one for locals.

There’s a goofy conclusion in the parking lot by “The White House” or “Ick’s” which has devolved in my time from the best cafe in town (white-owned) to a source of alcohol and other things. Street toughs make a speech about how tough you have to be to survive in Browning, showing their muscles and fists, and then a last remaining guy -- after the others have left -- tells us “I love you, man, and we pray for you in a good way and hope you stay safe.” He knows what you’re supposed to do in show biz. The dogs look on, serene and patient.

That’s about as accurate a version of the reservation you’re likely to find. Full of contradictions and characters, swept by devastating political and climatological changes, watching from niches, going on about daily business. Tragedy walks with jokes. Sometimes the stories help. Always this self-consciousness: the world is watching. They judge us. They might come after us again.

There are people in Browning who scold careless pet owners, who try to rescue hurt animals and find homes for the puppies. There’s also a shelter for street people but they don’t like it much. Freedom is a way of life with its own reasons and pleasures. So what if it’s tough sometimes? The dogs understand. Survival of the most resourceful, man.