TURNING RED: Rez Demographics

Informal discussion among Blackfeet.

Nathan De Roche speaking.

In the years between 1973 when I left Browning to make a new start to 1999 when I returned to Valier at the edge of the rez to make another new start, Browning was very much changed by two forces:  businesses established by white people after WWII aged out and closed; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs — which was supposed to eliminate the need for its existence — transformed itself into an Indian-preference supervising governmental body.  The white people largely disappeared.  It looked as though the rez was no longer a colony with its two-level administration (BTBC and BIA) in Browning, because the faces had changed, but the business of the people was just as complicated and full of double-binds as it had ever been.  Nevertheless, it was the sustaining core of the town.  Then income collapsed.

From the anonymous Wikipedia:

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is an agency of the federal government of the United States within the U.S. Department of the Interior. It is responsible for the administration and management of 55,700,000 acres (225,000 km²) of land held in trust by the United States for Native Americans in the United States, Native American Tribes and Alaska Natives.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of two bureaus under the jurisdiction of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs: the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education, which provides education services to approximately 48,000 Native Americans.

The BIA’s responsibilities once included providing health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives. In 1954 that function was legislatively transferred to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, now known as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where it has remained to this day as the Indian Health Service.

IHS hospital in Browning, MT

This is the most troublesome double bind of reservations. The pretence is that all the land has been divvied up and theoretically put in the hands of the tribal members, but the US government retains the actual decisions about the land without any auditing or accountability.  Meanwhile, the two most major obligations of the US government — medical and educational services -- are spun off into separate agencies.  In actual practice, much of this work is controlled by the State of Montana.  

Additionally, law enforcement is divided since the level of offences and the most serious crimes are delegated to the FBI.  Since that is a white male distant authority, murder of women of color is neglected.  In some ways the troubles that were once caused by sequestering the reservation are now created by dividing levels and kinds of services.  The FBI has fled, no longer maintaining an office.  Overlap between county and rez is a constant source of tension.

As though that weren’t enough confusion, the BIA itself is divided into four parts.  Particularly in contexts like law enforcement or child welfare, contract agreements delegate some of this work to the state.

• The Office of Indian Services: operates the BIA’s general assistance, disaster relief, Indian child welfare, tribal government, Indian Self-Determination, and Indian Reservation Roads Program.

• The Office of Justice Services (OJS): directly operates or funds law enforcement, tribal courts, and detention facilities on federal Indian lands. OJS funded 208 law enforcement agencies, consisting of 43 BIA-operated police agencies, and 165 tribally operated agencies under contract, or compact with the OJS. 

     The office has seven areas of activity: Criminal Investigations and Police Services, Detention/Corrections, Inspection/Internal Affairs, Tribal Law Enforcement and Special Initiatives, the Indian Police Academy, Tribal Justice Support, and Program Management. The OJS also provides oversight and technical assistance to tribal law enforcement programs when and where requested. It operates four divisions: Corrections, Drug Enforcement, the Indian Police Academy, and Law Enforcement.

• The Office of Trust Services: works with tribes and individual American Indians and Alaska Natives in the management of their trust lands, assets, and resources.

• The Office of Field Operations: oversees 12 regional offices; Alaska, Great Plains, Northwest, Southern Plains, Eastern, Navajo, Pacific, Southwest, Eastern Oklahoma, Midwest, Rocky Mountain, and Western; and 83 agencies, which carry out the mission of the Bureau at the tribal level.

The earliest laws about Indians were called “Intercourse Acts,” (which one is rudely inclined to call “fuck you” laws).  Frankly they assumed that indigenous people were somewhere between slaves and citizens, not quite either.  

(from Wiki)  “In 1789, the U.S. Congress placed Native American relations within the newly formed War Department. By 1806 the Congress had created a Superintendent of Indian Trade, or "Office of Indian Trade" within the War Department, who was charged with maintaining the factory trading network of the fur trade. The post was held by Thomas L. McKenney from 1816 until the abolition of the factory system in 1822.  The government licensed traders to have some control in Indian territories and gain a share of the lucrative trade.”  

The Sherburne Mercantile, one of several buildings.

This is the kernel of the mercantile businesses in Browning: Sherburne, Scriver, Broadwater and others whose names and families did not persist.  Founded early in the 1900's, none of these mercantile stores exist now.  The families are proud of being licensed traders, seeing it as a indicator of quality, a responsibility, like being a Hudson’s Bay trading post factor.  Two later stores have endured: Teeples became an off-rez grocery chain with a rez anchor.  Faughts, moved to the highway so as to serve tourists, is a source of supplies for clothing and specifically Indian materials like beads.  

“One of the most controversial policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was the late 19th to early 20th century decision to educate native children in separate boarding schools, with an emphasis on assimilation that prohibited them from using their indigenous languages, practices, and cultures. It emphasized being educated to European-American culture.”

These Haskell boys joined to question the number of deaths at the school.

The axis of every town is school and church, which are entwined together in Indian Country, esp. where the earliest whites were Catholic.  On a rez as big as the Blackfeet where the weather is severe -- after the abolition of one-room school houses -- the only way to get kids safely to school every day was to house them in dorms.  (White families sometimes bought a small house in town where one parent would live with the kids through the winter.)  

At the high school level, the students were often sent off to boarding schools far away, as in the English system.  Because they were from many tribes, the unforeseen result was a pan-Indian hybrid culture suspended halfway between tribal homes and second-class public white culture.  A generation or so later, this had powerful political results, since high school and college years are when people form families and friendship networks that persist for life, conferring power and information.

Tyson Running Wolf in formal regalia,

is sworn in as an elected Tribal Councilman.

This happened again after WWII when Eisenhower — with the obsessive planning and organizing that won WWII — wanted to eliminate the reservations as an unnecessary drain on the system.  A effort to move people to cities as a means of assimilation failed to provide the services that such an emigration needed in order to succeed and left the people in ghettos, already begun as ethnic neighborhoods when many NA people came to take advantage of the great ship-building and airplane industry of WWII, now shutting down.

Again, the assumed result of “citifying” NA’s only happened here and there.  Mostly the NA’s learned a lot from the new Black Empowerment movement, thus creating AIM, and found common cause with other stigmatized groups.  

But also, on visits and permanent returns, they brought back to the rez a notion of what life could be like and an appetite for improvement.  Military service had taught many of these men the value of organization, reliability, and a sense of heroism.  It had also traumatized some of them, so now there were deep divisions within the body of the tribe, most clearly in town where some successfully ran businesses and others slowly committed suicide by alcohol in the back alleys.  

George Kicking Woman, a transitional figure.

A strange dynamic was that the second category included most of the people who resisted assimilation by clinging to the old ways, but the first category was best equipped to interact with white people, esp. from a romantic angle, because they weren’t so scary.  The material culture, particularly those involved in old ceremonies, passed from the ownership of the old-timer-identified to the ownership of the educated tribal members.

Strangely, or maybe poetically, it was an English crew that brought the two sides together in a striking narrative: "Scarface," whom some identify with Jesus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9pU9FPz-dk

http://joshcolesworld.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/alive-video.html

Sterling Holy White Mountain is interviewed at the link above, reflecting on this controversial video.  Without an insider's tips, people who don't know reservations will have a hard time understanding objections.