http://www.foliomag.com/2010/revolution-magazines-will-be-here-summer
This is a VERY important article! It’s a demonstration of the cutting edge screen devices that do NOT replace books (nothing can replace books) but which will open up into vistas of communication we’ve never seen before. There is a handful of video demonstrations that will spare you a lot of tech talk and just SHOW you what this stuff can do.
The next two are about subject matter, both connected to Native Americans.
“Last Stand at Little Big Horn: American Experience.” (1992) is a DVD available through Netflix. The hour-long program was produced for the television series called “The American Experience” and mixes interviews with history and many landscape photos plus clips from old movies about Custer, dubious hero. It is narrated by N. Scott Momaday, that great bear of a man who pioneered Native American writing and poetry, but threw caution to the winds in his private life so that today he needs help to keep his bad health from making his old age a torture. The program was written by Paul Stekler, film maker, and James Welch, Junior, one of the most admired of the Native American Renaissance writers. Whether you need an introduction to this event or a prompter for thought about what you already know, this video is invaluable.
The third element is a website of the Blackfeet Tribe -- yes, the one where the valiant Eloise Cobell is enrolled. This is the place and the people where I came in 1961.
http://www.blackfeetcountry.com/gallery.html
Go to photos. You will find “carousels” with photos on them. Here is the one I want to show you:
At first in Browning I lived in a duplex apartment where Faught’s Blackfeet Trading Post is now. But then I lived in this house when it was across the street from the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. Elsie Wright owned it and lived next door, but it had been just previously occupied by Hughie Welch who may have inherited it.
This photo was taken about the time Bob Scriver (b. 1914) was a boy and the family that lived there was not Jim Welch Junior, but the parents of Jim Welch, Senior. Actually the Jim Welch my age was Jim Welch the Third, since his grandpa had the same name. That man had a large quantum of Carolina Cherokee but a Blackfeet wife. Jim Welch, Junior, the novelist, was my age. His father was Bob’s age and was a close boyhood friend of Bob’s. I went to his graveside service which was in Dupuyer. He had asked to be buried between his mother and grandmother there.
You can see that this house on the highway has a two-door biffy. Perhaps that back shed is for wood. When the house was moved, a shed containing a modern bathroom was attached to the back. The bedroom was where the high windows are but when I lived there, that window was the same as the others and the high window had been moved to the shed addition. The two front rooms were connected by an arch and the kitchen was in the corner you can’t see. I loved that house, which I left only because I married Bob Scriver. I bought this house in Valier because it reminded me of that house in Browning.
In the background is the school built by Doug Gold which became highly controversial because of its name. Doug Gold was the first Browning Superintendent of Schools. His father was the local Presbyterian minister, serving a very small congregation of mostly white folks who met in a converted house behind today’s Methodist church. In the Depression the little church failed and signed over its property to the Methodists. At that time they moved their own church to town. It had been by Willow Creek towards the west, on property still occupied by the Methodist parsonage. I lived there in 1986 when I served the Methodist congregations (there is also one in Babb and one in Heart Butte), though I was a Unitarian-Universalist, because the “called” minister was in the Navy which denied his exit at the last minute.
Doug Gold did not personally build this school, which is now sometimes called “Napi School,” but he did fund and supervise its building. Jim Welch Senior and Bob Scriver (the only) were such major trouble-makers that when any prank was pulled (like putting stinky cheese behind the ventilation grill in the hall) Doug Gold would say to his secretary, “Send for Robert and James. I just KNOW they’re behind this.” And usually they were.
The Gold’s other major interest was in battling trachoma, which blinded many Blackfeet. They brought a doctor out from Pennsylvania where they had previously lived and began to educate the people about eye infections, much aggravated by wood stoves. I think that the big square building next to the school was teacher housing. The school itself is still in use, the most eastern of a whole line of school buildings.
If you are patient enough to watch all the carousels -- and if they remain the same, for I see that they have a tendency to change from one day to the next -- you will understand why this town and place are so dear to me. You’ll see the original Scriver Museum of Montana Wildife, which was also the Scriver Studio (basically an art atelier employing Blackfeet) and also the Bighorn Foundry (where Bob’s bronzes were cast). You’ll see the giant concrete tipi that Bob bought to save from demolition but eventually gave back to the town. The Rocky Mountains stretch along the western horizon.
You can’t see what matters most to me: the growing sophistication of the people, for the youngsters in this little reservation place that some people see only as decrepit and hopeless are able to understand the devices and content management of the first url I put on this post. They are Star People who can go into worlds we didn’t even imagine.
That little Welch house where I lived was once visited by the county assessor who wanted to know why I hadn’t paid the tax on my television. He thought I MUST have one because there was an aerial on the house. Hughie Welch, enrolled Blackfeet, was an electronic technician and DID have a TV. But I read books. I had two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that I built myself, the first in many generations of them. I still read books. I hope the Blackfeet kids read books.
BUT. . . how I love these new things and the access they give me to images and ideas so dear!
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