The retirement of Mary Margaret McKay Johnson has me thinking about all the Marys on the reservation whom I’ve known over the last half-century, many of them as students of high school English. Mary Jo Bremner, Mary Jo Brown, Mary Lynn Lukin, Mary Lee Rosenburger, Mary Kay Ward, Mary Ellen Johnson. Mary Kay Ward, the superintendent’s daughter in 1961 when I came, died young of cancer. Mary Lee Rosenburger was the school board chairman’s daughter. I haven’t heard about her for a while. Mary Margaret, Mary Jo, Mary Lynn and Mary Ellen -- all about the same age -- became school people of a certain kind: dependable, warm, determined, poised, capable. They weren’t flashy. They were never mean. They are almost like an unofficial order of nuns.
In those days (the Sixties) Mary Ground was still a dynamo and the Mary Mittens I knew was an excellent beader. I’m probably overlooking some of the Marys on this reservation, but not on purpose. A history of all these Marys would be a pretty good guide to the early development of the Piegan. Not all of the “Marys” were named that -- one was Eloise. I often wish I had a genealogical spreadsheet of the first half of the 20th century, which I think would show that these women were often cousins. Not all of them married and had children, but they became “aunties” who kept track of everyone in the next generation. In the Blackfeet tradition, as in other tribes, the mother’s sisters are also considered mothers.
Mary Margaret McKay Johnson carries the best qualities (and there were lots of them) of both her parents, Iliff and Lucille McKay, as well as those of her husband, Randy Johnson -- also a superintendent of School District #9, who died of cancer far too young. She is not just intelligent, she’s a good politician and demonstrated that by leading a tumultuous School District through a long comparatively peaceful time. She makes me think of Helen Clarke, the first school superintendent of Montana, who was half Blackfeet, the daughter of Malcolm Clarke whose murder precipitated the Baker Massacre. In the midst of the violent attack on Malcolm, Helen and her sister escaped out an upstairs window and over a roof. They went to the Clarke family in the Midwest and were educated there. Like all the other Marys, she was beautiful -- even for a season toured as an actress in Europe with Sarah Bernhardt. Another of this kind of woman was Natawista Culbertson, who accompanied her fur trader husband on a boat up and down the Missouri all summer, acting as interpreter, and in winter occupied a fine house (a mansion, really, with a lawn that ran down to the river). In that season she wore a red silk dress and carried her eyeglasses on a gold chain.
We don’t know much about these women. History is written by men about men. But that was an advantage in Edwardian times when these women were go-betweens, diplomats, interceders, who could quietly throw on a shawl in the night and go to parlay with people who couldn’t afford to be seen consorting with rivals. The work of those times was not red versus white so much as it was among the various internal forces, the ones described in Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954.” As a Canadian observer remarked, the elimination of polygamy lessened the power of multiple wives joining together to persuade their out-numbered husband. But their capacity for learning new ways and translating among languages was a new kind of power. Mae Aubrey Coburn, known to most of us as Mae Willliamson, married a lawyer and became the first woman on the Tribal Council.
In the index to Rosier’s book I see Joseph Brown, Brian Connolly, John Ground, Leo Kennerly, Henry Magee, Iliff McKay, George Pambrun, Walter Wetzel, all familiar names to me but only the beginning of a list of the fathers and grandfathers of the “Marys.” And yet the similarity of these daughters is not so much a matter of genes as of education and temperament. There were others with same genes who went off the rails. The women I’m talking about were the ones who did the school yearbook (Etaikasi) and the school newspaper (Etumoe), joined the National Honor Society, played basketball, and mostly lived in town where their parents had bureaucracy jobs or ran small businesses. They liked to read. (In the days I’m talking about, there was no television.)
Mary Margaret says she hasn’t planned what to do with her time now. Maybe she’ll learn to act or play the piano, but I’d love for her to write the story of the Marys and of her own family. After all, her brother Tom McKay is a firebrand lawyer and her brother Mike McKay is a much-loved standup comedian. These sibs rock! But the last half of the twentieth century has seen both deep change and a stubborn interlocking set of problems for children that appear impossible to resolve. The specifics have changed since the early 20th century, but the dynamics are the same. I suspect she knows some of the keys better than she realizes without having time to reflect. If she undertook a memoir, it would be a great contribution.
The two major achievements she claims are the building of the high school and the acquisition of Adolf Hungry Wolf’s four-book heritage-in-a-box, “The Blackfoot Papers,” both of which are truly major achievements. Maybe the building the most obvious, but everywhere I go, I watch for Blackfeet books, both history and fiction, and I’ve been in a LOT of libraries and museums. In every place Adolf had been there a year or two earlier -- his name was on the checkout cards. “The Blackfoot Papers” are not so much original writing as they are the raw, uninterpreted, on-the-spot records that Adolf found and included. He was wise not to filter them. They are primary sources rather than scholarly work (though Adolf has a scholar’s training) but scholars will be using them for reference forever, and now ordinary people also have access around the world. The public school district is the proper place for them to be preserved as a source of learning. Many of the little chapbooks (Heritage books) the district has produced are also available to buy online.
http://www.blackfootpapers.com/heritage They make excellent gifts for graduating students, Blackfeet or not. For video go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yi3JW3YpPkQ#!
Some day I’m going to see a little girl with an iPad sitting on the bank of Willow Creek with her fishing line in the water while she reads the online “books” of School District #9. Maybe she’ll be named “Natawista.” More likely, “Mary Natawista.”
(PS. I put Blackfeet historical time-lines and other notes on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/
Some are for sale but the ones most useful as history guides are set to be .pdf’s for free.)
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