If you read this early Saturday morning, you’re probably reading as I drive up to Browning for a reenactment of an American Indian Sign Language Conference. I’ll head west toward the Rockies for fifteen miles, then turn north and cross the three bridges on 89 that cross the life streams of three rivers: Birch, Badger and Two Medicine. Along the way I’ll pass Blacktail where Eloise Pepion Cobell grew up and I’ll go over the top of the railroad built as the Great Northern. I’ll register at Blackfeet Community College on the south end of Browning, then attend the ceremony at the Museum of the Plains Indian on the north end of town, near the casino. Between the two are eighty years of history and many millennia of geology.
The original Sign Language Conference in 1930 was memorialized by a circle of bronze foot prints in front of the Museum of the Plains Indian. I’ve stood in them many times since June, 1961, when I first came. I’ve seen video of the actual people, all male, going into a lodge all dressed up in their ceremonial best, so solemn and dignified. And then as the day wore on, full of mischief and memories, having a very good time indeed telling jokes in sign talk.
In 1930 the nation was in a different place: between wars, united by radio and railroad, In 1927 Congress had passed the Indian Oil Leasing Act, which authorized the Secretary of the Interior to make long-term oil leases on reservations, without the permission of the tribes involved. In 1928 the Meriam Commission, all white, surveyed the American Indian social and economic conditions and found them sorely lacking, including allotment policies, Indian rights and traditions, education and health. Let alone bookkeeping! In 1931 Black Elk said, “Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us anymore.”
it’s hard to tell whether things in 2012 are in the middle of death throes or birth throes, but my guess is that it’s both. Something new is coming out of the old things and it will be different but the same. Chaos and conflict are probably unavoidable, but I’m not sure that those who enjoy uproar realize how much it serves those who want to eliminate reservations, tribes, or any other separatism. Every dissension and secret deal makes another opening for the thieves and interlopers that demonstrations are against.
The actual identity issues have been intensifying over the years. Tribal membership through provenance of what is called “blood quantum” actually has nothing to do with blood genetics -- which were unknown until recently -- and has everything to do with birth records. Whatever the basis, people have been intermarrying with people not on the rolls (either white or other tribes or maybe black or Asian) for generations now. Even in 1930 some estimated that only 10% of the people on the rolls were “full-blood” Blackfeet. Those born and raised the 19th century buffalo culture -- which is unquantifiable -- cannot be living now. Their culture cannot be restored without restoring the buffalo and the open prairie. Clothes and customs are not enough.
The terrible dilemma is that to cope successfully with the modern world as truly sovereign people -- not just on paper and not with supervision by the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- the people must have effective contemporary educations. But to do that is to become culturally modern. Over the years both blood and culture have thinned and morphed so that many of today’s Blackfeet youngsters are fully capable and educated members of society. It might be argued that old-timey ways just hold them back -- but it could also be argued that old-timey ways are a source of sustenance and inspiration that strengthen not only the individual and the Blackfeet nation, but also the entire American and global cultures. It’s not a matter of beading patterns, after all, but a way of looking at the world as a harmonized whole into which humans fit if they are careful. (That’s care - full.) But another danger is that if the Blackfeet are fully competent, the US government may try to drop negotiated treaty obligations.
Some tribes go to residence to define identity: only those who live on the reservation are tribal members. But half the Blackfeet live off the reservation and some of them are strongly identified tribal members and leaders. Some locate sacredness in specific places and others want to go back to the original boundaries of the reservation which were indeed high-handedly moved ever smaller as a function of white greed. It is unlikely that the reservation can ever be half of Montana again.
In the old times, the marker of belonging to the Blackfeet was the ability to speak the language. For a long time no one spoke it publicly and most people were even afraid to speak it. The government and missionaries had made it a way of changing identity to eliminate the indigenous language, so that people couldn’t say what they knew but because they didn’t really understand the new language, couldn’t use it well either. so that it hobbled negotiations. Piegan Institute and others have at the very least made learning Blackfeet respectable and have taught many youngsters how to speak it.
Sign language was a way of transcending spoken language by miming symbols and movement. Today the problem is not knowing the difference between know the sign for moose and the sign for elk, but rather knowing the moose and elk themselves. The knowing is in the interaction between the land and the person. There is no sign for things that the earlier peoples didn’t know. There is no sign for fracking, but there are signs for water.
The early Nitzitahpi stories tell about Water Monster and Thunderbird, often at war. Possibly the stories arose from dinosaur fossils which erode to the surface constantly on the northern plains. It is fanciful to think of oil and gas as the blood and breath of monsters, but if the stories caution us to guard our lives in ways both small and large, ways that are probably best recorded in stories and religious ceremonies, that is unmistakable.
Some are fatalistic and say that the tribe will be disbanded, the land boundaries will be erased, that it is inevitable. Therefore, they will get what they can for themselves and their grandchildren, no matter the consequences. I hope that the majority will take quite a different point of view, standing in the moccasins of Sign-talkers who were here to tell stories -- not to participate in war.
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