"Many Tender Ties" Women carry the heritage.
June 5, 2015, on the Montana East-Front High-Line was as idyllic as this place gets. In fact, it was almost exactly like June 5, 1961, when my parents and I visited -- heading from my graduation at Northwestern University with a BS in Speech Education (actually theatre) back to home. We were on the way through Glacier Park and stopped at the Museum of the Plains Indian. I got out of the car, where I’d been sulking the whole way, stood there in fragrance and said, “Just throw out my stuff. I’m gonna live right here.” And I did, at least for more than a decade.
In 2015, now old and living in Valier just off the rez, it was warm enough to drive with my elbow out the window and a big enough occasion to wear a silk shirt and a straw hat. I was going to listen to a talk by Nicholas Vrooman who has just finished a study contracted by the Little Shell Tribe, which the US government refuses to recognize. (The state of Montana does recognize them.) The talk was a redacted pictorial slide version of Nick's book, “The Whole Country was ‘One Robe’”: The Little Shell Tribe's America," funded by the State of Montana. He is not an anthropologist but a folklorist. The distinction is lost on me, but I wonder whether there is such a thing as salvage folklore. Salvaging “folk” instead of ceremonial objects as in “salvage anthropology.”
blooming chokecherries
Going north up the Old North Trail, now called Highway 89, one travels along the the Rockies as people and animals have done for millennia, moving in swirls and cycles through the seasons. I think that at the low altitude the berries of several sorts are blooming now. The good thing about living on this long slope is that as the summer heightens, the berries develop a little higher and will bloom a little later, extending the season.
There are two kinds of “refugia” in this country. One is the volcanic mountains out in the middle of the prairie that were never entirely scraped by the glaciers and therefore still harbor pre-glacier species and a cool place for summer lodges. The other is the many-fingered east slope where valleys reach back into the cordillera, offering shelter for hunted folk, esp. the Metis, the mixed people -- down south they might be called Meztizo or even Creole.
Little Shell and his council.
Mostly they’ve been thought of as “white-and” -- Indian hyphenated French, Scots, African, Irish and English. As they were pushed out of their previous places in a turbulent and greedy Europe, they wandered into the prairies inventing new things (the Red River carts with two giant wheels that could handle prairie travel -- Nick calls them the equivalent of pickups and showed a photo of Sitting Bull in front of his lodge with four “pickups” parked nearby, one for each of his wives.) and improvising to make up for losses, dressing in wool “citizen’s clothes” because there was no more buckskin or buffalo robes.
Gradually they sorted themselves out along a continuum so that one photo showed three brothers, each at a different point between “Indian” and “white”. The mixed people were inevitable because men came without wives and found females among the indigenous. They brought fiddles and jigging, finger-woven sashes and beards, so that all those things are part of life in Heart Butte, near here and one of those valley refugia. The smooth hairless full-blood Blackfeet called them “hairy noses.”
Charlie Russell wore one of these.
Pickup of the Plains
The spectrum of indigeneity was overlain by a spectrum of economic opportunity. Nick’s talk explained the nature and self-declared identity of the small groups who traveled and settled together and why some settled into poverty that made dump grounds into a source of survival and some assimilated, building nice homes and dressing well. Dominant whites judged them according to their prosperity. They thought in categories: tribes, nations, affiliations, but not all these mixed people even considered such distinctions. They were busy staying alive.
So the government decided on a strategy they have managed ever since to keep secret, knowing it was scandalous. They sent out the “buffalo soldiers” (black cavalrymen produced by the Civil War) to circle through all Montana communities big enough to have dump grounds or shanty towns, to round up the people -- hundreds of them -- and push them into Canada at least as far as Lethbridge. The money allocated for transportation was as usual not enough, so the People ended up on foot being herded across the vast land in the wind and sun. It was a genocide. No one knows how many died.
Hill 57 near Great Falls
Of course, many of them managed to escape and slip back “home,” fueling the resistance that became the Red River Rebellion and ended in the hanging of the leaders, including the extraordinary visionary named Louis Riel. Many “Blackfeet” names are from those people.
Nick’s slides started way back at first contact with drawings of people and communities and worked forward through photographs until he was naming the grandparents of those in the room.
This museum is not a patronizing white institution teaching about the curiosities of the Red Man, though it was founded on assumptions about Blackfeet crafts. Nor is it an AIM-powered demonstration of emotion. Gregg Paisley is from the half of the tribe that lives in diaspora, pulled away by the World War II need for workers and much transformed by Internet technology. http://www.americanindianpartnership.com/the-blackfeet.html is meant to support friendship. One way to avoid the stigmatizing of “mixedness” is to keep on mixing, celebrating the richness of what is sometimes called “thick description.”
Another way is by adding image to print. This museum has specialized in lifting up Indian artists. Below, I scanned-in the work of Louis Still Smoking, the current exhibitor. The manager of the art scene in the museum is David Dragonfly, an artist himself. I know these families though it’s been fifty years so I mix up individuals. David’s mother, Dorothy Dragonfly, I confused with Delores Butterfly, whom I taught in 1961 when she was in the Seventh Grade. She herself became a teacher. But David recognized some of the names: Gerald Butterfly, Geraldine his twin. He knew I felt real relationship.
After the talk Nick and I walked across to the “gambling den,” Glacier Peaks Casino, to sit in the sun and gossip. Along came a “character” intent on sharing his part of the movement to revitalize the Blackfeet Language. “Oki,” he said, and in Blackfeet welcomed us. “You understand what I said?” I did. He was staggering drunk and transparently leading up to asking for money.
“What’s your name?” I asked. He turned out to be the son of Alfred Guardipee and he’d mistaken us for strangers. Alfred was also in my classes that first year, called “Small Fry” then, and part of a sort of spontaneous family out at boarding school. They traveled together and protected each other. There was adult “supervision” but that always turns into “us against them.” They left their imprint on me in ways I didn’t even recognize.
Nick knows the family names and origins of almost everyone on the big prairie spread, not just the Blackfoot Nation but the one next to the east, mostly Chippewa/Cree/Assiniboine. Plus the white settlers. It’s a jigsaw puzzle except that the pieces don’t come to rest. Darrell Kipp used to call the moving forces “the hydraulics of the prairie.” Of course, they fit into the hydraulics of the planet, where we are all fish following currents.
It is to the credit of Montana Humanities that they have pulled Nick Vrooman into their speaker bureau and made him available to everyone across Montana. Metis have always been moving out of consciousness, not like the scattered “sheep” cumulus that filled the sky yesterday -- more like the thin silk sliding shadows they make against the land. The Metis learned to keep their heads down in order to survive. But that’s over now. Mostly.
The cover image of the boy is by Louis Still Smoking. Dorothy Still Smoking was also in those first classes I taught. Dorothy earned a doctorate
and presented her thesis at a conference in London, England.
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