BUNDLES

Between 1982 AND 1985 I was the Unitarian Universalist minister of the renewed Helena Fellowship.  At some point in those years some women came to me who belonged in the Presbyterian congregation but had a "spot of bother" with their minister.  Years later, when I met Kenneth Hayes Lokensgard, he told me frankly that minister was his father.  At the point when we talked, he was trying to find a way to be "religious" without being a Presbyterian.  He found it as a scholar of Blackfeet religion.  It was long enough ago that academia would still hire white people to work with indigenous people and he still is doing that.

As nearly as I can tell, this is Ken's only book, an academic technical book, an entirely different genre than I usually read about something I knew rather well.

"Blackfoot Religion and the Consequences of Cultural Commoditization" (Vitality of Indigenous Religions).by Kenneth Hayes Lokensgard

Paperback  $49.49

Besides taking a different point of scholarship, one much more classically encouraged than mine, Lokensgard's approach is as well different from mine because his sources are quite different.  For one thing, he says he's known John and Carol Murray, a married couple, for fifteen years.  My acquaintance goes back fifty years to when I was a high school English teacher in Browning where they were teenagers. My experience sitting in a Bundle Opening and becoming a Keeper is also that early. The ceremony was still technically forbidden, but secret.  Except for Bob Scriver and I, everyone was full-blood and born in the 19th century.  The Murrays became keepers on a new wave rebirth of the ceremony.  I have not participated in this generation.

What I'm saying is that the Blackft international community contains many strands and lines of culture which sometimes overlap and sometimes don't. Ken and I do not follow the same paths in terms of disciplines and sources, but they don't contradict each other.  They sometimes compete or argue.

Lokensgard's highly philosophical approach is through the accepted duality of "gift" versus "commodity", a theory of exchange.  So that's the first difference: the Bundle that Bob and I kept came to us through a dream that Bob had.  Whether one considers that dream to be psychological -- which is easy to defend -- or actually supernatural as the elders seemed to believe, that is not the same as anthropological exchange theory. Pentacostals or Catholics would understand and indigenous people often mix these traditions.

Another dimension of a holy entity like the Bundle is that it is connected to and responsible for the welfare of the entire tribe.  That is, not only is it an Entity, as Lokensgard puts it, but it is a member of the community with effective impact.  Being white, yet all our impacts could be defined as either negative or as positive, since the fortunes of the Tribe are far better now, fifty years later.  We did stay, participate, and wish everyone well.  But commodification is present.

My own understanding also has a "white man" historical dimension.  "The Hako: Song Pipe and Unity in a Pawnee Calumet Ceremony" by Alice C. Fletcher, assisted by James R. Murie, describes how the concept of a long, decorated pipe became conceived and then spread across the prairie with variations according to the tribe.  "Alice Cunningham Fletcher  1848 - 1923 was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and social scientist who studied and documented American Indian culture."  She was also notoriously the woman who organized reservations into allotments to be more like homesteading, definitely commoditized.  It didn't work very well, but Helen Clark, half-Blackft daughter of the equally notorious Malcolm Clark whose murder triggered a massacre, was an assistant in this work.  As nearly I can tell, she was never part of Blackfeet ceremonial life.

Because the actual "medicine pipes" are decorated with falconry bells, glass beads, and satin ribbons -- with the occasional "stuffed" bird including a green parrot as on ours or a rooster on another -- alongside ermine skins and the entire tail feather fan of a golden eagle, they can't precede white contact, though to the indigenous people pipes felt like "always."  I don't know what the procedure was for accumulating the wrapped animal skins bundled with the calumet, but they would have been easily acquired in early days.  I always thought of them as a hymnal since their use was as prompters for specific songs and dances connected to that animal.

The colorful central pipestem was appealing to collectors.  Few paid attention to the rest of the Bundle.  In addition, the Bundles in the homes of ceremonial elders were vulnerable to minor theft of bits that could be sold without recognition.  Some of the elders themselves were in the grip of addictions that commodified everything and everybody.  A few became enflamed Christians who came into homes and carried off Bundles to throw on a bonfire as though they were martyrs, which they were.  What remained went underground.

The reason Bob and I went into the Bundle circle in our different way was that he had grown up in Browning, as a child had been at ceremonies with entire innocence but not sent away, could even sing a few songs. When the anthropological understanding came to us it was through John Hellson, who was married to a Canadian Blckft woman, and Adolf Hungry Wolf, who was also married to a Canadian Blckft woman and lived in the old style in a cabin.  Hellson is dead now. Hungry Wolf, an Austro-Hungarian raised in California, put everything he knew into four massive books, one of which is entirely devoted to ceremonial matters.  Ryan Heavyhead is another in this married-to category as well as Canadian.  Narcisse Blood, now dead, was his partner.  

These people are in Lokensgard's bibliography.  So far as I can see, George and Molly Kicking Woman and Richard Little Dog, who were our main guides, are not mentioned.  Mike Swims Under, Curly Bear Wagner, Buster Yellow Kidney, and other accepted shamanic people are not in appendixes as informants, collaborators, or authors.  When the Province of Edmonton, which had bought the Scriver Collection, returned all the Bundles to the Blackft, they put them in the care of Alan Pard.  We didn't know him then, but I talked to him on the phone before his death. He was a well-qualified and aware man.

Technically, the Bundle is kept by both marital partners as a unit and from some points of view I remain a part-keeper of our Bundle.  It was stolen when Bob died --  never sold -- and the traditional way of putting it was that "it left" and that at some point, "it may decide to come back."  It is seen as sentient.

Lokensgard naturally turned to white academic "experts" like William Farr at the U of Montana and "curators" like Kirby Lambert at the Montana Historical Society.  They are white outsiders.  Enrolled Blackft informants were from established families who put emphasis on education, like the Bullshoe/Tatsey complex at the Blackfeet Community College.  Joyce Spoonhunter is related to Earl Old Person, Emeritus Chief of the Pikuni. 

Modern thought asserts that reality is a construct made up of experience and the interpretation of facts.  These differences in our pasts and contexts control how we see something like Blackft Bundles, right down to spelling.  On the Canadian side the "English" spelling of Siksika is Blackfoot and on the US side it is Blackfeet.  I choose to dodge that issue by leaving out both oo and ee.  I don't know how long I will evade the contrast between versions of "Bundles."  Maybe there is no need.