When the Empire Builders . . . (Did you know that’s the name of the main Amtrack that serves the High Line, because Empire Building is at the core of the industrial conquering of the West and the railroads were major industries?) Where was I? Oh, yes! When the Empire Builders come into a new land (to them), one of their strategies is to infantilize and sterilize the sacred stories. Uncle Remus, Aesop, and the Native American tales of origin. Another is to claim all the main characters and show they are really just other versions of Xian main characters. Starboy is “really” Jesus and so on. But then those nosy social scientists came along and started pointing out that the African trickster, who is a rabbit, is the same as Br’er Rabbit, and so is Napi. Pretty soon, along comes Joe Campbell and shows us that all these are Hero cycles and Freud also points out that Oedipus is a force in many boys. In the end all stories are human and constantly re-enacted. Culture tells us which ones to believe.
When I talk to young Blackfeet who want to write, they all tell me that they’re going to write a book of Blackfeet myths. When I point out that there must be at least a half-dozen versions out there already, they quickly say that THEIR family’s version was the authentic one, or -- if they’re really enlightened -- they say there are many versions so maybe they’d better also explain their family.
People who read myths and legends seem to think they’ve escaped controversy and troubles that abound in immersive genre or literary narratives -- even in histories. But NOT.
Some of the compilations around here in Blackfeet country include:
George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) “Blackfeet Indian Stories”
Frank Bird Linderman (1869- 1938) “Indian Why Stories”
James Willard Schultz (1859- 1947) “Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park”
DC Duval (unk) and Clarke Wissler (1870 - 1947) “Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians”
Walter McClintock (1870-1949) “The Old North Trail”
Percy Bullchild (1916 -1985) “The Sun Came Down”
Hugh Dempsey (1929 - ?) “The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories”
Beverly Hungry Wolf (1950 - ?) “The Ways of my Grandmothers”
It’s easy to see that the first set of writers were popular between the World Wars when German romanticism was trying to find a new “home” for the stories about nature. The Germans themselves were always madly in love with American Indians. These are all white writers. Schultz was married to an Indian woman and Duval was the Metis informant for Wissler. If you remember the post about linguists, Uhlenbeck and his wife were staying at the Kipp Hotel in Blackfoot (the terminus of the Empire Builder at the time) when Duval killed himself.
The second set is of writers I have known. Dempsey is white but married to a Blood woman. They’re Canadian. So is Beverly but she and friends traveled through here only a few weeks ago. The 49th parallel is an inconvenience, not the wall some would like built.
An index to recurring characters.
Lisa Mitten and her compatriots have worked hard to get non-tribal people to understand the latent and explicit racism in books like “The Education of Little Tree” (written by a Nazi sympathizer) or “The Indian in the Closet.” This struggle seems to have passed by now. The critique of “Indian in the Cupboard” has been removed from JSTOR. I’m sorry, because I finally understood that sentimental writers were making grizzly bears into teddy bears and that it was a step towards flattening the environment into mere scenery. When condors are made equivalent to little sparkly pink butterflies then monstrous jungle emperors who kidnap girls are just to horrible to contemplate -- and so most of us don’t. You won’t find much about all this stuff on Wikipedia. In fact, if someone up at the Blackfeet Community College wanted to do something worthy, they could research and write up the writers on my short list above and post their biographies. They don’t need permission. Making them think they have to please some faraway white authority is part of the infantilizing.
The movie sold very well.
But there’s more to the old stories than that. Greg Hirst, lifelong educator and currently superintendent at Heart Butte on the Blackfeet rez, explains that some stories are fine to just recount because they are funny and sometimes informative. Others are more serious and have sacred meanings, so the actual vocabulary in Siksika language has to be kept the same, as though one were an early Jewish or Christian student or -- even now -- Islamist. Oral stories can be accurate when they are carefully remembered like this.
Then there are stories that are only told among the old women late at night. They have consequences, secrets, maybe shameful or guilty aspects. No children or men should listen. In fact, when anthropologists realized these existed and managed (usually by paying) to get hold of them, they put the ones that shocked Euros into Latin. Of course, along comes an iconoclast like Alice Kehoe and translates them! I won’t tell you. Buy the book.
When Piegan Institute was sent early recordings that required special machinery to play, they rerecorded them on CD’s, hoping that medium would be more permanent. (Probably not.) So a Blackfoot speaker sat listening, writing down what she could. Pretty soon she began laughing. Men were telling the stories, but the women were sitting along the wall, listening, correcting and urging them on. They were getting paid by the hour and the women would say, “Tell them another one! We need the money!!” Who knows what variations and inventions were introduced for the sake of the dollar.
There must have been water bulls -- we find their bones!
And so the myth arose that if one were Native American, one could tell an “Indian” story and make a lot of money. Making a lot of money would mean life would be easy from then on. To demonstrate that this is a myth, consult the family of Misty Upham. It is the usual labyrinth, with the usual Minotaurs (suits) waiting to consume you, but in the end it is the “Water Bull” of mythology and dinosaur bones that will endure.
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