IT WAS BETTER IN THE OLD DAYS! NOT!!

Jeri Show, myself, Candi Henkel    Early Sixties

On the first day of school in Browning, MT, about 1962, Gail Hoyt showed up in my high school English class.  Looking me over with my bright red hair and zany schtick, she sighed,  “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for an English teacher!”  From then on, she seemed to feel a special connection to me.  It was partly because she spent her early years on one side of the duplex house where Bob Scriver and his second wife, Jeanette, lived.  Gail was barely a toddler, but Jeanette taught her French and was a close friend of her mother.  

In fact, Gail followed in the footsteps I was making at that time by becoming a teacher of English, music and art.  She’s about ready for retirement now.  Yesterday she and her mother took me out for “tea” (they have English roots) at the Panther and we had a high old time talking about the past and telling funny stories about people who have long ago “gone on ahead” over the horizon that is Death.

Gail in her rodeo days

A theme came up that provoked me because I’m hearing it repeatedly.  It is “Oh, Browning was so much better in the Sixties.  We were safe and peaceful.” So I’m going to deconstruct that idea a bit.  It’s not “wrong” in experienced terms, but it IS much distorted by the fact that women and children were protected then.  Over the half-century we were talking about the terms of the rez have changed.  In some instances it is the women and children who have become the protectors.

When I threw in with Bob Scriver, he was just starting a taxidermy and trinket business made possible by the opening of the Al-Can highway, which brought a steady stream of tourists and hunters past the front door on Highway 89.  As an extra income, he was the Justice of the Peace and the City Magistrate.  The role of City Magistrate is gone now, because in those days Browning was governed as an “island of jurisdiction” on the reservation, like a kind of embassy.  It was understood to be a bit of the state of Montana, a reservation inside a federal reservation.  That was foreclosed in the Sixties.

Myself -- early Sixties

After WWII many damaged men had returned and the world economy was in chaos.  The babies boomed.  (There was no "pill," abortion was illegal.)  Petty crime -- mostly theft and drunkenness -- was high, beyond the resources of the tribal police, so the Browning businesses formed their own police with its own magistrate.  Since I left teaching to be with Bob, I acted as the informal bailiff when the chief of the city police brought up the dirty dozen drunks of the day to be sentenced.  “Stand in a line, keep your hands in your pockets and don’t talk.”   They were more obedient than high school students. If the charge were more serious -- maybe even murder -- Bob was also the Justice of the Peace where the sequence of justice began.  I came to know the folks we now see as “street people,” but in those days they weren’t on the street except for a few who had a kind of walking compulsion, around and around the blocks.  There were plenty of little shacks and cabins where people holed up.  But then the government built housing projects and pulled down the shanties.  

I suspect that in terms of percentage -- rather than raw numbers -- there were about as many then as there are now hanging out in front of Ick’s where everyone can see their quarreling.   (In my time this was Joe Lewis' cafe.  It was Joe who commissioned Al Racine to paint on the wall Napi eating a short stack.) There are just a lot more people on the rez now.  And those drunks were often ranch-raised by grandparents, so they had acquired rough skills.  When sober, they might be good workers.  Today's drunks might not have been raised by anyone.

Ick's Place

In those early days Browning was the Bakken of its time.  The oil boom fueled Browning business so that there was a jewelry store (the part above painted black), two drug stores, two building materials yards, several gas stations, and so on.  All owned and run by white people.  The Government Square, where people were either BIA employees or IHS nurses and docs, were all white people until finally -- after the oil money left -- Indian Preference was a law passed at the federal level.  (Not necessarily Blackfeet.)

By that time the aging white men who had started town businesses wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t sell to Indians -- they had no capital and no credit anyway -- and their children went elsewhere as soon as they could, often to college.  The whole Highline was being “run to failure” -- meaning inventories sold out and then the door was locked, the property sacrificed to taxes -- but at the same time the malls (which would eventually transition to Big Box stores) started sucking all the business down to Great Falls.

Almost overnight the white people were replaced by enrolled people with much less experience, facing far different times.  It was a pretty steep learning curve.  Those with strong families -- as has been true since the ancient times when “families” were at the core of bands -- could support each other through the difficulties.  One way they did that was to siphon off the political federal money and the cynical industrial money from the resource developers -- those resources including access to Marias Pass, oil, and space for grain, beef, and Air Force training.  And the water, of course.  Family comes first is a survival rule.

White veterans who married enrolled Blackfeet women began to ranch on the woman’s allotment, a practice reaching back to the first British Empire trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and produced a new kind of Metis.  Today’s leaders come from that mix when the best of the whites mixed with the best of the tribal people.  The worst-and-the-worst also mixed but maybe didn’t legalize and certainly didn’t accumulate wealth.  Still, some of them had such strong survivor genes and drive that in the end they did well.  Others simply died young, erased.  I’m telling you this because I could name names and so could Gail.

Al Swearingen

While my friends noted the dress shops, the hotels, and the cafes, I reminded them of the bars they had conveniently forgotten, all gone now.  The Napi was probably the worst -- I don’t even know who owned it, but slumming adventurers and ignorant tough guys simply disappeared there.  Sometimes bodies were found, but no one investigated much.  Now “Napi” refers to the school and the building has been razed.  Same for Minyards where Johnnie Minyard lounged in the front door, rolling a toothpick in his teeth and undressing with his eyes any woman who passed by.  He sold booze to kids out the back door, even the sons of the white rez agent.  A gambling table was always running.  It was Deadwood.  He was “Al Swearengen.”   The best bar was the "Businessman's Club, where you had to be buzzed in.  It wasn't about race -- it was about class.

Don’t even ask about trafficking.  No one bothered to prosecute so they never turned up in Bob’s informal court, which was often held in the parking lot with the pickup hood for a trial bench.  Women arrived at all hours of the day or night to bail out the menfolks who had been arrested for beating them half to death, so recently that the men were still drunk and the women were still bleeding.  Sometimes there was no paper but a torn-off piece of brown paper sack and no pencil but a .22 bullet -- always one rolling around somewhere.  Bob balanced the numbered tickets monthly, innovations he had created when handed the first equipment: a shoebox of loose tickets and cash, but he ended up tearing his hair out while sorting the notes.  No one wrote checks; there was no such thing as credit cards.

I don't know who these kids were.  They'd be in their fifties now.

A child who was abused was avenged by his or her family -- if it weren’t the family that imposed the abuse --  and if anyone even found out about it among the kids who were near-feral, sleeping where they could, eating mostly at school.  Kind people took them in, but they were too wild to stay.

I will admit that when the biggest drug was alcohol, things were different from today’s drug culture, but I want to point out that the drug trail, the modern equivalent of the “Whoop Up” whisky traders, leads to Missoula, which is also the source of disruptive, rebellious politics, never quite resolved into progress.  Much of the rhetoric in front of Ick’s echoes post-colonial Algerian deconstructionists.

The reference is to rape drugs.  Krakauer will reveal all soon.

It wasn’t that things were better then but that the nice people of the town simply never knew what was really going on except for a few of the menfolks.  This was great for those who throve on blackmail, extortion, loan-sharking and other aspects of the brisk trade in secrets.  I’m not saying none of that happens now, but in those days I was positioned to know about it while being protected by my association with Bob.  It wasn’t a privilege, but more of a burden.  And it was racist.   This should be a "book" but it shouldn’t be by a white person.  All I can do is point at the strange entries in the journals before all the record ledgers are painted over by colorful revisionists.

"Budweiser killed more Indians than Custer" 

by Duane Wilcox, Oglalla Sioux