"BUNDLE, BUNDLE, WHO'S GOT THE BUNDLE?"

This post is not about Wikileaks.  But I want to use two of the most interesting comments about Wikileaks to explore something else.  The first comment was about what a jolt this information is giving historians of the international scene who have built whole careers on the limited information that was previously known.  Like the collapse of the USSR releasing the truth about who was or was not a spy, some researchers are finding out they were on the wrong track and all their reasoning means nothing.

The second comment was actually a double comment from the startling but distinguished team of Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky on the BBC.  It is that Wikileaks is a vivid demonstration that we are in a “tectonic” paradigm shift.  Power no longer is controlled by authorities at the top who presumably know what they are doing, but rather comes up from the bottom in a surge -- many many people reacting to their own lives and demanding change.

Bob and Mary Scriver at the opening of the addition to the Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming in 1969.  The sculpture is "Parade Indian."  I contributed the beading on the horse accouterments.


You can come back to check on these two ideas, but this post is about an essay by an historian, Bill Farr, who is on the faculty at the University of Montana in Missoula.  He is a friend of mine.  This is not meant to be malicious and we have discussed this issue I’m taking up now, but (a) his information was limited and (b) there has been an unrecognized tectonic paradigm shift. 

The essay he wrote was about Bob Scriver and Blackfeet artifacts.  Bob sold his artifact collection (actually a family collection plus two purchased collections, one of old Mountie uniforms and the other a collection of guns) to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, where he had been stationed in WWII.  Prompted by Chuck Rankin, then editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History, as well as by Blackfeet activists in Missoula, Farr tried to interpret what was “really” going on.  He was handicapped by Bob Scriver’s refusal to talk to him.  He described Bob as “crusty” and “aggressive,” even before Bob, outraged by the article, did his best to get Farr and Rankin fired.

Rankin and Farr were operating in a Hollywood depiction of the 19th century prairie clearances, thinking they were Richard Widmark befriending Jeff Chandler.  They did not register that there had been a fire in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife or that the Browning Mercantile had burned to the ground, both events blamed on AIM by the obsessed FBI.  Nor could they know that Phil Stepney, the curator who had tried to acquire the Scriver collection for years and who was formally cursed by the activists, would die of an exotic cancer.  They did not know that these activists had threatened to rope Bob off his horse at the Indian Days parade and to drag him to death.  (Famously, it had been done to a policeman a few decades earlier.)  No older, wiser, more assimilated tribal members were consulted for the article.

Let me address part of the issue first:  Bill Farr did not know that women are a crucial part of Blackfeet ceremonies.  All these guys, profs and AIM activists alike, imagine warriors in “ceremonies” as ordeals involving thongs piercing their well-developed chest muscles.  In fact, the Blackfeet ceremonies depend upon a holy woman, a very old, virtuous, devoted mother who fasts and prays.  Bob knew this.  He believed in the power of women, particularly mothers.  (Particularly his.)  This is an example of the part about the unknown facts.  One cannot own a Sacred Bundle unless there is a wife to take care of it.  The Bundle is transferred to the couple and both own it.  Richard Little Dog transferred (not SOLD -- the money was one part of many gifts, including a horse) to Bob Scriver and I in part because Richard didn’t have a wife and Bob did.  (Me.) 

A consequence of Farr and Rankin writing out of the romance of it all instead of the actual facts, was that neither had any awareness that I WAS THERE.  I really hate being erased.   It makes me itch. 

In fact, by the time Farr was writing, I had earned an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in part because I wanted to understand the deep functioning of this ceremony IN WHICH I WAS ALSO A RECEIVER AND KEEPER OF THE BUNDLE.  The fact that I was no longer a resident in Scriver’s lodge is irrelevant.  I acted as a Bundle Keeper at its opening and as a co-religionist at the creation of the Badger Tipi AFTER the legal Montana law divorce, which Molly Kicking Woman gleefully told me was now erased.  Ha!  (This was not good news to the fourth wife, though it didn’t bother Bob who knew about polygamy on the plains.)  When Rankin, now editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, was considering my manuscript of "Bronze Inside and Out," he tried to make me take myself and my opinions out as a condition of acquisition.  So I took the book to the University of Calgary Press.  This is exactly the sort of nonsense Wikileaks is trying to reveal.

The Bundle Keeper’s circle that Bob and I joined was open to us because of Bob’s dreams.  I was sleeping beside him as he dreamt and he told them to me on first waking, still on our pillows.  I documented everything.  (Alice Kehoe documented the tipi painting.  Harold McCracken and Paul Dyck documented the Sacred Pipe Bundle transfer.  McCracken (also hypnotized by that strange dream of the horse warrior in which guilt over destroying a way of life is replaced by identification with the victim) was inaccurate and self-celebrating.  Paul Dyck, whose collections of artifacts and knowledge about them far exceeded Scriver’s, was accurate. (His materials went to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.)  Bob documented the people in the circle by depicting them in a sculpture, making portraits of each, replacing me with Mary Blackman and himself with Charlie Reevis.  This is not mentioned in the essay nor are the participants named.

There were no white people in the circle.  The Keepers were ancient: the youngest (aside from myself) was Bob’s age.  He was born in 1914, the same as George Kicking Woman.  These people were mostly born in the 1880’s and their suffering had been great but their natural culture was the last of the Blackfeet way of life.  Today there are Sacred Bundle Keeper circles, organized around repatriated Bundles given back to them by institutions.  They’re a little wobbly on the songs and so on, but they do their best and include several devoted white men, dreamers. 

One of my favorite moments was when the female halves of the Bundle Keeper pairs organized a panel discussion to advise the community how to improve.  One look and it was clear that arguing would be a mistake.  Farr didn’t have the facts because he depended on books, newspapers, and unreliable informants.  Rankin didn’t want facts: he wanted to improve his own status.  Neither of them could see the female participants in the story.  Today, Rosalyn LaPier, a Blackfeet woman, is a Ph.D. candidate in Missoula and produces far deeper and more meaningful work than we’ve had before.

The “problem” (if that’s what it is) with the contemporary Bundle Keepers’ interpretation of the Bundle Ceremony is based on “doing what our ancestors did because we are their children.”  But the old-time Circle, as they danced with the contents of the Bundle -- which are skins of animals meant to prompt thoughts of those lives on the shared prairies -- were relating to the actual animals, each well-known to them with its penumbra of characteristics.  The modern Bundle Keepers are worried about maintaining their relationship with their culture.  The ancient Bundle Keepers were worried about maintaining their relationship to the land which both preserved and destroyed them: it was their essential source of life itself, the foundation of their culture.  This is what I learned by earning a degree in religious studies.

“Bundle Keeping” is not just something exotic about Blackfeet to put in a museum of cultural artifacts and brag about owning.  It is a celebration of the essential truth of life everywhere on this planet which far too few of us have learned.  Instead of pursuing the Bundles of other people, we should be looking to our own.