An enrolled friend is about my age and we overlap rez experience somewhat in several parts of their territory, which is surprisingly various unless you're from "outside." We're both retired, the same generation as Jim Welch and Ivan Doig, neither of which really knew more than the edges of this rez. Ivan, white, was helping to run sheep near Heart Butte, and Jim grew up a lot of the time at Fort Belknap. In fact, his high school years were in Minneapolis. I guess he was a little out of sync with AIM somehow, though that's where the roots were.
My friend, who now lives in Great Falls, was a good scholar and became a lifelong force for education on the Fort Peck rez. He says his present entry into the Blackfeet world is through his big library of Blackfeet and other books about the indigenous everywhere, but more than through his family's genealogy. My own entry is through the Bundle Opening world, the ceremonial world, which has motivated much of my thought ever since and took me into theories of the sacred at the most elemental level, most recently inquiry into how the category forms and subsequently guides human lives.
My focus is problematic for a number of reasons. The tribal writers on Twitter -- at least the ones who haven't blocked me -- often joke about the "sacreet" because the larger culture imposes a kind of magic version on "Indians," part of their "orientalization" into a mythic story. The US government contributed to this idea by banning all indigenous religions as competitors to Christianity (at least their version, which had a lot to do with a rigid notion of how to live), making them much more attractive to seekers. The same thing is happening now with Muslims.
Never mind all that -- I come back to it again and again, and simply find more complexity, more ways to inquire, more results. But each of us, my friend and I, have a kind of doppelganger who is a "presentation" in regard to what we know about this place. We don't seem to be who we are with each other. It is necessary to be careful and a little veiled because there are murders, illicit sex, even political forces that reach around the world. If you are interested in this last, take a look at Ron West's work which he describes this way:
"Penucquem Speaks (ranked five stars by Howard Zinn at amazon) is an autobiographical sketch of my many years life with Indians of the Northern Plains (Blackfeet, primarily.) I recovered the copyright and give it away free these past several years.
Napi Mephisto is a collection of essays stitched together simply intended to get teeth grinding and provoke outrage in those people really stuck in the ethnocentric bias of euro-centric (western) culture
Queer Chicken Dinner is a rip into Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’
Cosmos and Consciousness is a translation of pre-Columbian world view into modern modern western terms (the most difficult to write, by far)
If one gets into the politics of my work, it’s likely going to provoke either denial (most feedback) or sometimes cognitive dissonance. Less often, there is a real appreciation expressed."
http://ronaldthomaswest.com/ Very timely work and not what outsiders expect in the most remote foothills settlement on the rez. This strand is woven into both the least Westernized lives and the pervasive violence. West lives in Europe as a refugee, not from HB but other forces.
Last night when I looked briefly at the clips from the "debates", I had the illusion that behind each speaker stood a looming semi-apparent shape with its hands on the shoulders of the candidate, Biden-style. That is, I was personifying the source communities of the people, the same way I do with the people of the Blackfeet Rez, who are not all Blackfeet by a long shot. There are no Blacks or Asians, but a lot of Central and South American indigenous people. Almost everyone is white to some degree, about like Democrats are every "degree" of the party.
Like Democrats, my friend and I share a dilemma but not a genome. Our puzzle is in our accumulation of known things/ideas, mostly in the shape of books, and the question of where they should go when we exist no more. Neither of us has a direct descendent, but more than that, the general culture seems so focussed on materialism that unless the collections are provably worth money, where do they go? Where are the young people who would be interested in taking on which is finally a task, a burden?
Museums and libraries, like political parties and government bodies, have been captured by people who control access and also de-accessioning. The managers tend to make them conform to whatever sentiments will get them money, which often comes from know-nothings seeking status. What keeps us two going is sometimes sharing. "Did you know . . . ?" The people we know and knew are overlapping but different. I knew very few white people -- neither did he -- but the tribal people that Bob and I knew were quite a different assortment: school kids, drunks, casual labor, trappers, old timers who had known Bob since he was a little kid, the best friend of Jim Welch's father, also Jim Welch. There were quite a few medium-quantum people who had become professionals, including doctors and lawyers. I've named the old people we knew through the Bundle Keeping posts.
My interest in the NA Literary Renaissance writers came after I left. Bob's dad had known Walter McClintock. James Willard Schultz, too. We attended his son's burial on Two Med north of the Holy Family Mission. Charlie Russell dominated Bob's professional life, but these are all whites who "loved" tribal people.
My friend and I are not just aware of the variousness of what most people lump into one big "Other" category, but also have thought and participated in fifty years of change as people struggled to stay the same and yet renew themselves, which is also the problem of political parties. Half of the Blackfeet enrolment is not on the rez, many moving off during or after WWII, and their children are left with vague impressions. What obligation do we have to preserve the records and maybe even write more books?
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