THE NEW BROWNING HIGH SCHOOL

Sometimes I think maybe I blundered when I moved back to Valier instead of Browning, which is where I’m really connected, but sometimes the best way to preserve intense relationships is by keeping a little distance. Today I went to the dedication of the new Browning High School in the gymnasium big enough to stage a rodeo. Rows and rows of chairs. I always sit in the back so I can watch the people, and the entrance was mostly at the back so people saw me and came over to give me a hug. People here used to shake hands solemnly but now they throw their arms around you. Except that I noticed the older men were very careful about hugging the cheerleaders who helped cut the ribbon.

There were a lot of “gimme caps” in the audience, only a few cowboy hats. Earl Old Person wore his splendid fanned-out Sioux eagle feather warbonnet and William Sharp, the present Tribal Chair, wore a brand-new straight-up Blackfeet-style headdress with red, white and blue down.

Everything was polished, vast and spare. The maintenance man for the school district right now is Joe Fisher, who is actually a very fine free-lance photographer. His father, Jim, was the maintenance man in 1961 when I arrived on the train with twenty whiskey boxes filled with books and the trunk my father had carried to college at the University of Manitoba many decades earlier. “I sure don’t know about you,” joked Jim. “Seems like you must do a whole lotta drinkin’!” He taught me how to get that high shine on the Scriver museum floor. Jim’s grandfather used to snowshoe down to Browning from St. Mary in the winter when the roads were closed. He’d bring down the mail and pack some necessities (coffee and tobacco) back up with him. It’s about forty miles on a steep grade with deep snow.

The new counseling department has a spacious glass-enclosed foyer and a star quilt hanging behind the receptionist counter. In the Seventies the counselor’s office was in the most distant boys’ bathroom, the only space there was in the crowded school, which gave all his phone calls a peculiar ceramic ring. They did take out the (ahem) fixtures.

The town bank, Indian-owned and where Eloise Cobell found the platform and power to challenge the United States government over their management of Indian assets “held in trust,” decided they would give the school some art. They bought several very large paintings by Lyle Omeaso, who is the son of Fern Omeaso, who worked with us in the Scriver Studio. They are quiet, pleasant, diligent people from George and Molly Kicking Woman’s family. In this place one hires a person, then if they work out and you need another person, you ask him to bring his brother or cousin. The paintings are portraits of George and Molly plus Bird Rattler, all of them traditional people who tried to pass on what they knew. George and Molly were more or less our sponsors for our own Bundle-Keeping.

I greeted Merle Magee Jr., who nearly shot us one cold morning on top of the Sweetgrass HIlls, first day of deer season. His daddy was on the board that hired me to teach in 1961 and froze my salary in 1965 because I was sleeping with Bob Scriver, then hired me back again when Bob divorced me. Browning has always had an almost solidly Blackfeet school board.

The change has come in gender. The present school board chair is a woman, Donna Yellow Owl, who has been both dynamic and peace-making. The school superintendent is also a woman, Mary Margaret McKay Johnson, who was married to Randy Johnson who was white and previously also the school superintendent. He died of cancer some years ago, leaving an inspiring speech that was delivered to the Browning kids at his funeral. I spent a summer working for his parents in St. Mary at their campground/restaurant. Iliff McKay, Mary Margaret’s father, was chair of the Tribal Council when he died suddenly from reaction to a penicillin. It was a major loss to the development of the tribe. Her brother, Tom -- tall, steady, handsome and brilliant -- was also there. Her other brothers, Joe the lawyer and Mike the humorist, weren’t present that I could see. I just want you to get an idea of what Blackfeet families are like: amazing.

One of the people who tickled me most was the student body president: Riel LaPlante. I went to find him so I could shake his hand. He spoke easily and intelligibly without notes, wearing a suit and a red politician’s tie. LaPlante’s are noted for being, well, pretty French because they were part of the dispersed Red River people who fled when their visionary leader, Louis Riel, was hanged by the Canadian government for treason. It was true. He was trying to secede. Fred DesRosier, who belongs to a family that arrived on the rez in 1896 or so, slightly ahead of the Scrivers (Thad came in 1903), told me that one of his aunts knew Riel because he taught school for a year or so in the Mission near Great Falls. We love history here because we are so conscious of being in it, living it out.

I copped a hug from Darrell Kipp and another from my biggest Hoyt fan from Methodist minister days there. She’s the secretary of the counseling department, a little gal with a big heart. Another of my students/parishioners was Gail Hoyt who said when she first spotted me in the Sixties, “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for a teacher!” She has been teaching for years but just finished a college-level writing class and is proud. She had brought along the new Methodist minister (an engineer who shaves his head!) and his lovely wife. He seems to have resolved the plumbing problems at Heart Butte -- for now.

I missed some folks. In mid-August some people are taking last-minute trips or, especially this summer, trying to harvest. The prairie is still green except where there is a purple haze of spotted knapweed, a nasty weed but very pretty from a distance. The mountains are bare stone.

The cafetorium is on several staged levels and has sound baffles hanging overhead to keep down the clatter. There was a big feed after all the thanks and awards. What I kept thinking of was the state administrator who lamented to me that “Indians never want to do anything they didn’t think of themselves.” No kidding. It took them ten years to think through exactly what kind of building they needed, how to finance it, and how to stage the construction. They never stopped thinking about it, they never backed off, and they finished the job. Even Louis Riel would be impressed.

I kept an eye on one little boy with the traditional three braids for a male Blackfeet. His hair was brown, not black. When Willie Sharp was in high school he wore the three braids until the basketball officials made him cut them. I’ll bet someone saved them, black and glossy as licorice whips.