Having stumbled upon the idea of culturenomics in the last post, this time I’m going to try making a stab at tracing threads in two culturenomics. I will be wrong, it will be crude, and it’s only a tool anyway -- not an eternal truth, but it’s interesting to think about. The two cultures are Native Americans (whom I intend to call Indians) and the Blackfeet Reservation (where there are all sorts of people). I’ll do the Blackfeet this time because I’ve already done some of the thinking and then do the Indians in general the next day, beginning with the “bird-on-the-head” issue. (Tonto/Depp)
The bedrock of culture is geology, so we need to think about these things as we figure out the nodes and connections. The reservation is on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, which means that it has a differential in altitude and rainfall sharp enough to dictate different economics. That of the foothills, often tourism, is different from the economics of the flats, raising grain. There are (or were) big deposits of oil on the eastern side.
The valleys descending from the mountain snowpack and crossing from west to east are “long towns” where people on both shores consider themselves a community, where the first missions and ranches tended to locate, where water-travelers first penetrated all the way from New Orleans, and where geology is “cut-down” so that the sandstone bluffs made buffalo jumps and -- later -- quarries and sources of fossils left from the Cretaceous Era when a vast inland sea stretched across the whole continent. The foothills were then shore lagoons and marshes inhabited by dinosaurs and the vegetation that would become coal and oil.
The differing altitudes of the rez meant that berries ripened at different times so that harvest began in the sheltered valley, continued up through the foothills, and ended almost at the snowline. Animals responded to the different areas, moving to graze or for shelter. In winter it made sense to be on the river bottoms by the sheltering trees that dropped firewood. Then the streams were bridged by ice. Constant wind scrubbed snow off ridges so that grazing could continue. Blackfeet were interested in fire, both the forest and grass types, and often initiated and manipulated them. This has grown into the skills of a crack hot-shot firefighting team.
The reservation started out being the whole top half of Montana and then began to shrink in cook-the-frog fashion, the most painful loss being the strip that became Glacier National park. Because it is a large area, other groups were occasionally forced onto it, notably the Cree-Chippewa-Metis complex which later acquired Fort Belknap as their own reservation. At least the Blackfeet were never moved wholesale to a foreign environment. Now much of the rez (some say more than half) is in private ownership, not belonging to the tribal trust which is overseen by the Federal Indian Agency. Hutterites have begun to colonize the rez.
There were no settlements in the earliest days but they formed in various ways. Political boundaries have dictated some settlements, like Robaire which was deeply involved in reservation life though it was technically south of Birch Creek on the southern boundary. Evicted Catholics and rum-runners formed this town. On the east boundary of the rez, once it was pushed west a bit, was a cluster of oil wells with headquarters in Cut Bank, the only part of the county not on the reservation. Heart Butte is also in a different county, but it is one of two “old-timer” settlements formed by people who still hunted and kept the old ways. The other one is Starr School.
Three resort towns, East Glacier, St. Mary and Babb, overlap with Glacier Park culture, but also ranching. (Del Bonita, which is little more than a border crossing, is ranching and rodeo culture). Kiowa Kamp is a little tourist crossroads at the confluence of two roads: highway 89 and the road that goes to Starr School. Both Heart Butte and St. Mary have Metis presence, having offered refuge to Louis Riel and other Red River rebels. Holy Family Mission is a special case, having once been a cultural center and still retaining its church. The same is true of Boarding School, which is on Dumpground Road, though the dumpground is long gone.
Browning has cloned and re-cloned. Housing projects form neighborhoods technically in the city. They often have names formed colloquially the same way as the old band names: Hell’s Corner, once notorious for bootlegging; Chinatown where the architect designed overhanging second stories that reminded people of Chinese streets; Knott’s Landing and Disneyland (sometimes Dizzyland) that were more famous for behavior; the Easter Egg houses where the homes were painted in pastel colors. The complex build-out that started in the Kennedy Era now is listed on maps as “North Browning” or “South Browning.” There are other places that are only names: Red Blanket Hill, Palookaville, Cree Corners. You’ll probably have to find someone over fifty to tell you where they are.
People tend to gravitate to the locations where they fit or to be shaped by their location. The Browning/Heart Butte axis is dynamic. Kinds of employment matter, so the people who get GNP jobs or tourist jobs in cafes or motels are exposed to different cultural ideas. Blackfeet descendants who grow up off the rez are different, assimilated. At one point around 1900 there were only 500 people in the Pikuni branch of the Blackfeet and half of them were children, so their descendants are different, the young ones being less “buffalo-culture,” more mission-imprinted.
Much of this has been attached to “blood quantum” and genetics, but in fact there is NO blood quantum, only descent from persons listed on the early rolls. Genetics as it is understood now was not known in the 19th century. In those days when it was a matter of appearance, dark skin tied to the African-American population was a stigma. Early Blackfeet populations used their lodges as shelter at night or in severe weather while otherwise living in the open. Even cooking was done over an exterior fire. Their physiology adapted to the intense ultra violet of high altitudes as well as a much higher level of Vitamin D. They were dark where skin was exposed.
Another cultureome node-and-connection system would come through families, depending not just whether they were white or tribal but also the “kind” of white: military, traders, hippies, scholars, direct from Europe, environmentalists, artists. The “kind” of Blackfeet/Cree/Metis etc. they hooked up with created a little threads of influence. The major early white families (Conrad, Clarke) and the 20th century traders (Sherburne, Scriver, DesRosier) plus the Indian agents (McFatridge, Campbell, Steele) all brought their own “culture” with them, weaving new threads into the peoples, sometimes intermarrying. But there was a strong pre-existing network of powerful families gathered around individual patriarchs and sometimes matriarchs: Little Dog, Tailfeathers, Running Crane, MadPlume, Mary Ground.
Cuts Wood School, drawn by a student
Institutions like schools vary from the Tribal college, Blackfeet Community College, or Winold Reiss‘ art school to the old one-room school houses where individual white people taught and formed alliances like Clare Sheridan’s friendship with the Tailfeather’s family or the Uhlenbeck linguistic project involving the Tatseys, or McClintock’s close friendship with Mad Wolf and annual summer visits injected ideas and understandings in both directions. Of particular importance have been internal projects like Piegan Institute that brought international Blackfeet scholars into contact with local white history hobbyists as well as maintaining Cuts Wood Immersion Language School. Some of these interactions have never been recorded or noticed by outsiders, even those who live just across the rez boundary.
Darrell Kipp, co-founder of Piegan Institute
Culturenomics at this level is complex, arguable, sometimes meant to be secret, but it can be what tips the scales or -- just as significant though neglected -- PREVENTING the scales from tipping, holding the status quo in place. At least enough to survive.
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