The first truly spring-like day coincided with my little gig as a judge for a spelling bee at the Browning Middle School on the Blackfeet rez. It’s a fifty mile drive, moving north and west closer to the Rockies. Gentle swells and moraines near Valier become foothills in Browning and the mountains there are so close they appear to be moving into town. The altitude gain is about 1,000 feet, enough to make my ears pop. They got quite a bit more snow, but their temps were also in the fifties and everything was melting.
The land is now the colors of true-line mustangs: mouse, dun, and a little bit of sorrel. Snow still blazes the land with chalk. White marks out all trails, all lee-sides, all erosion gullies, all irrigation ditches -- any place the scouring wind or the erasing sun can’t get at it. The wind moved the snow into those places, then can’t move it out, esp. when the sun has solidified them into near-ice.
In Brownng I had lunch at the Junction Drive-In, which used to truly be a drive-in where Lucille McKay taught a generation of high school girls how to run a business while we -- in our pickups with our elbows out the window because in those days no one had air-conditioning in houses, let alone cars -- thought we were really in the mainstream of American culture. I guess we were.
But now the drive-in is a sit-down cafe with lots of tables and a view of the Museum of the Plains Indian across the street. The daughter of Boyd and Lila Evans, long-time Bob Scriver friends and former students of mine, was there discussing some plumbing work to get the water back on in someone’s house. She can do anything a man can do, except with more charm.
Up at Blackfeet Community College, I party-crashed Darrell Kipp’s writing class where the assignment was “sayings.” The concept was still a little fuzzy, but coming along. The class was the same familiar mix: five people in hoodies; one young mother with an infant who fussed remarkably little; one older woman with a ‘30’s style shingle hair-cut that revealed a little gray, wearing pink plaid bermudas that rather exaggerated the weather; a couple of slumping boys; a sturdy red-neck-culture older female Indian who was remarkably self-educated; people who said nothing until Darrell teased and prompted them into a response, at which point they became articulate in surprising ways. The saying for Darrell is from Shakespeare: "No profit goes where there is no pleasure ta'en . . . ." (hat tip to Dave Lull). That is, he jokes, he gently mocks, he imitates, he tells preposterous stories, he makes impossible claims. In the vacant lot next to his house someone abandoned a car battery, which he claims for his “best neighbor.” His description of the meth lab burning in the abandoned trailer on the other side sounded like a 4th of July display, so spectacular that they ought to have invited an audience instead of the fire department. He says he stood on his deck and called out, "Let it burn!" He says that five to ten per cent of the new students are not Blackfeet but part-Hispanics from the Pacific coast. It’s easier to pick them out by their names than their faces.
We visited for longer than we have for a while, which restored my balance considerably. I’ve been fortunate to have a series of friends who are men-who-teach, men-who-lead, men-who-break-trail. They are all, indeed, men. They are all close friends but none of have been romantic interests except Bob Scriver.
Darrell’s claim to fame is Piegan Institute which by now has completed a twenty-year arc. In the beginning everyone opposed learning Blackfeet at all. Now that the last of the Blackfeet-as-first-language teachers from Canada is about to retire, it has become precious and a few youngsters truly have become proficient speakers, not just people who can count to ten and name three colors.
At the Middle School a Blackfeet version of the “prairie princess” type stopped me at the door, put my name on a clipboard, put an ID badge on me, made phone calls, directed me to sit and wait. I asked her name, didn’t recognize it, she offered her mother’s maiden name and I didn’t recognize that either. Then along came Craig Wellman, whose mother lives across the alley from me and who was a student of mine. Now he’s the assistant principal. These job descriptions generally include discipline, and often the type who is good at it is the kid who had a lot of contact with assistant principals in his day. It’s sort of like the military making barely controllable guys into MP’s. Craig was a kid when the ‘64 flood came through and waded out with his mom, narrowly surviving. His sister nearly washed away but the man who was helping them grabbed her by the braids.
The spelling bee was in the gym, where pick-up basketball had to be interrupted. The janitors, asked to set up three tables, had dumped them in the corner. The bleachers had to be motored out and a boy formally asked me to please “stand away from the bleachers for your own protection!” The Cut Bank kids arrived, the configuration of the space was discussed, and the kids put up folding chairs lickety-split. Gail pinned a printed and laminated number on each kid and taped its mate to each chair in order. The AV equipment, as usual not quite adequate, was set up plus a video to make a record and break up controversy. (There was no controversy.)
We judges had a half-inch thick packet of rules and procedures to read. The over-all organizer was a slender efficient ranch-wife from Seville Flats who had home-schooled all her kids. She had a “binger” to signal wrong spellings and positioned a little stuffed bee in front of it. The “pronouncer” was her daughter, a graceful blonde young woman with hair in an intricate braid. She looked like a Disney good queen.
If you’ve watched “Anne of Avonlea” you know about this ritual survival from one-room school houses in the days when ranchers around here ate their family meals at the kitchen table where next to the ketchup was kept a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and an almanac. Much of the meal was almost a class. They might have been poor, but they knew their facts.
The best spellers tended to be in “types” I watch for in my own mind. One is the quiet, alert, glasses-wearing Blackfeet girl with a sweetheart face. Another is the two-ton, sorta clumsy guy who seems to be in outer-space but is not. The little buzz-bomb white boys were there from Cut Bank as well as the future prom queens in their clicking open-toed heels. (I have no idea how they negotiated the mud outside.) Three finalists were tied over and over for half-a-dozen rounds, so the director jumped us up the list of words to the truly hard ones. One of the buzz-bombs missed “femininity” which led to a lot of jokes. In the end there was a blonde coach’s daughter who was last years champ, a sturdy brunette girl, and a Harry Potter clone, who became this year’s champ.
Gail took the judges out to dinner at the Casino, which I’d never been in before and which was -- in my opinion -- just a jumped-up Montana cafe with a fast food counter and long lines of identical machines. Gail walked over to Jim Polk to say hello, touched his elbow, and he immediately won $4,000. He didn’t give her 10% as a good luck charm. Piker!
The three of us all had history with the Methodist church and that was our focus of conversation. A new minister will be coming soon. They told me that Father Dan at Heart Butte’s St. Anne Church has had a major stroke, so there will probably be major changes there, as well. When we left, it was late twilight.
My eyes are not good for driving at night anymore, but for the first time I realized I could see Valier from edge of the rez, twenty miles away. Then I saw a row of red lights, blinking, that I’d NEVER seen before anywhere. It looked like a landing guide for a major airport, surreal in the empty prairie. Seemingly just over the hill no matter how far I drove, it was still blinking away in the distance when I got to Valier. It had to be either the masts for the wind farm or the towers for the new international transmission line. But it is the future.
What will it mean for the kids? What good will it do to speak Blackfeet or spell words “correctly”? I dunno. But they will need the jobs and the electricity.
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