THE SCRIVER THUNDER BUNDLE

Recently a gallery owner told me he had acquired a framed “invitation to a Bundle Opening” and wanted to know whether I would be willing to accept it in trade for copies of my biography of Bob Scriver. This person was not aware of many factors. First of all, he does not understand Bundle Openings, which do not send out formal invitations as if they were a Debutante Ball! The word comes quietly from friends, neighbors and relatives when this event will happen -- in theory when the first thunderstorms come in the spring. Bundle Openings precede the Western written invitation and because of religious persecution the ceremony was quietly underground for nearly a century. It is not a spectator event, as some of the SW reservation festivals have become, but rather an act of participation by a believing community. They know who they are and they know who should be there.

So what is this? Even more confusingly, it’s a Christmas card sent by Bob Scriver and I for the 1970 Christmas, even though he had divorced me in November. It was an act of reassurance to ourselves and our friends (not customers) that we were still friendly and still -- outside Montana law -- acting as a pair. In fact, the next summer I helped open the Bundle again as well as helping to create the Badger Tipi, an act recorded in a photo in the catalogue of the Scriver artifact collection Bob called, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”

After that ceremony Molly Kicking Woman said that by Blackfeet custom, I was still Bob’s wife. This was agreeable to Bob, whose idea of divorce was simply to sever any entitlement to money or restrictions on his behavior with other women. (Blackfeet had nothing against polygamy.) When Lorraine was named by him, “Badger Woman,” and acted as his wife in ceremonies, she did not displace me. Now that both Bob and Lorraine are dead, from a certain point of view, I remain the owner of the Bundle. The only trouble is that it has disappeared. Lorraine had threatened to destroy it, so it may not even exist. On the other hand, Sacred Objects often seem to have some plan of their own, so it may be biding its time in some quiet place, until it surfaces again.


Here’s the fine photo that Marshall Noice took of the Bundle with its accoutrements for the artifact book. The copy alongside tells about how Bob acquired the Bundle and its “provenance” -- all the owners it had had from the time Shorty Whitegrass captured it from the Gros Ventre.

Of course, this is a studio portrait arranged in a still-life and properly lit.

Below is a home photo of the way the Bundle “lived” in our studio-home.

People laugh at the juxtaposition of the television with the Bundle and don’t really recognize that the tripod is set up on the hearth of the massive stone fireplace at one end of the living space. What they are thinking is that television is mundane and even debased, but that sacred objects in the Euro tradition are meant to be sequestered, protected, put on an altar. In Blackfeet thinking the Bundle is meant to participate almost as though it were a person and it honors whatever space it is in. The first I ever knew about Bundles was when Clifford Kicking Woman, as my high school English student, wrote about it hanging on the wall next to his bed.

Anyway, Bob liked to watch television in the evening when he was exhausted, with the Bundle in his line of sight -- a different sort of vision. He hadn’t “collected” it as a precious object, but had made it part of his life.

I’m bemused by the sudden rush to value what people think is small art by Bob Scriver. I guess their pattern is Charlie Russell who left so many place markers, little Marblex Arabs and elephants and pigs, walking stick tops, and so on. But this is the third time that Christmas greetings made by me -- both the linoleum block prints that I made (see an earlier post) and this page have been mistaken for Bob's work,in hopes of a profit. The circumstances were that I was living out on our small ranch on the Two Medicine River after the divorce because Bob’s mother thought it was improper for me to stay on in the studio. She probably suspected but chose not to know that Bob often came out to bring groceries and to stay the night. To her, appearances were what counted.

Anyway, while I tried to get my bearings and sort things out, I wrote and drew. This little drawing was made on a mimeo stencil -- you remember those bright blue greasy-seeming sheets? Then I ran the drawing onto a pack of buckskin-colored paper I found, and hand-colored them as though in a coloring book. The Blackfeet prayer was the one Bob and I were taught in order to qualify as Bundle Keepers at the same time that we acquired our Blackfeet names. It’s hardly great art, but it means something to me and I keep it hanging in my bedroom next to the crucifix Bob made.

I’ve been making Christmas cards since college (1957-1961) -- actually, family greetings for birthdays and so on since grade school days, as we were taught to do. One of my first efforts in college was a torn piece of brown paper bag, crinkled and rubbed to look like parchment and scorched around the edges. Then I wrote “the Astonishment of Living” and spray-painted in gold an overlay of weed skeletons. Again, some people were puzzled because it was kind of an inside joke. I’ve never seen an example show up on eBay, though plenty of other bits of Scriver trivia are there. Because I had made cards, Lorraine also made the Scriver Christmas cards for a while, but as Bob became more upscale, he went to printed photos from the Noice-illustrated book. Marshall Noice is now an artist whose striking Fauvist paintings sell very well.

Bob was astonished at my homemade cards, because in his Victorian mercantile family it was “boughten” cards that were valued: the Hallmark syndrome. The first cards I made in Browning were Valentines made on 3X5 cards with cut-out red satin and velvet hearts of different sizes pasted onto the card with red-and-white beading over the top. I only made two: one for Bob and one for Jim, who was living with him at the time.