Thursday, September 05, 2019

DRIVING INTO THE STORM

One of the things I needed to re-home was file boxes of obituaries from the GFTribune in the years after I got here, before the newspaper began to charge to print obits and I stopped subscribing anyway. I was lagging and putting it off, imagining that they would simply dump it as soon as I was gone.  Instead, I found that they welcomed the whole concept and were eager to use the material for genealogy projects.  That was the story of the day:  I drove up the highway in high wind and lowering clouds, but as soon as I got to Browning there was the kind of magical transformation, a flood of golden light, like one sees in movies or in a play.

The Blackfeet Community College is a big campus with striking modern buildings, each with a poetic Blackfeet name.  The library is called the BeaverLodge.  Twenty years ago it was a bit spare, disheveled, aspiring more than achieving.  Today it is organized, buzzing, and on its toes.  The place is immaculate.

Besides the books and magazines I was also leaving at the BeaverLodge, I had some clothes to recycle but the Catholic-run center didn't open until 1PM so I stopped by the library, where they had just been smacked with a serious funding reduction.  They are a county function, a branch, and the county is in a financial pickle.  The attendants were there -- but a little grim.

Still with time to use up, I went out to the Methodist Ranch which now really IS a ranch.  I've never known it to be so inviting and busy!  I was met by the Corgies -- Beau (Beauregard), Aero (Aerohead), [Bow+Arrow), Pickles -- and Reptar ( from a Rug Rats dinosaur character) who is a Australian Blue Heeler. 

Bumpmission.com will give you the full story.  There are horses that kids ride, in some ways giving them companionship better than that of people.  Two tipis are pitched in the yard and back in the trees by the creek where the mission once stood, there is a fire ring and a shelter.  Sherri, the minister's wife says this was a good year: two cuttings of alfalfa, chickens, other stock and garden projects.

I've blogged about this couple before and was curious to see what the house was like since I lived there the year after I left the UU ministry.  MUCH improved!  Rev. Calvin Hill is Navajo and still has his braid.  He's working on his doctorate at Claremont, in Oklahoma, and expects to finish this year.  The subject is comparing the early Judean Christians with today's special mission to indigenous reservations.  Sheri is Ojibwe.  They don't make a big fuss about it -- they just are what they are, and that is as much plain and basic Jesus as can fill the day.  In 1988 I was there at a low point for both me and the mission, so I was ecstatic that everything had bloomed in this solid fashion.  No hate, no blame, no fancy stuff, just helping each other.

Back on the highway I was passing the high school and went in.  Amy Andreas was someone I wanted to meet because of her success with poetry, speech, drama, and all the things no one was prepared to address when I taught there.  The office sent me off with Adrien Wagner as a guide, which I needed in this building as big and complex as the Pentagon.  A Blackfeet-sized young man (really BIG) he once attended Stanford where he sang.  He took me to the choir room on the tour and got out his laptop to install cyber contacts with me.  I'll come back to him.

Amy Andreas is the librarian this year and the place was jumping with amazing kids.  It was not unlike a scene from "Star Wars" with kids in every permutation of presentation: purple hair, metal piercings, see-thru clothes, some kids basketball-player tall and others simply uniquely shaped.  There is an LBGTX group and Amy is a sponsor.  When I taught at BHS in the Sixties, most people were thin, short, and dressing Western, except girls could not wear pants. Most had been starved as children.  They kept their heads down.

People rave about Amy and what she has been able to do with her combination of acceptance and vision.  Nineteen years she's been here, which is a year less than me this time around.  But we both are attached to this place.  She brings in writers to speak to the kids, but my pickup doesn't allow me to travel much -- there were ominous sounds today -- so I suggested Skype.  That would mean a much larger "stage" for presentations and access to the world for research.  

Amy lives in East Glacier so we know some of the same people but I think they mean quite different things for each of us because East Glacier has changed so much.  Still, it's connection and the changes are a ready topic of discussion.  There is so much change in so much of the world, even in ideas as well as constructions. that shared recognition of something specific is somehow reassuring.

I stopped by the Scriver complex that is now a Blackfeet place. Ernie Heavyrunner was the receptionist and gave me the tourist spiel.  There is not too much for sale, but it's a good place to show the works by Gordon Monroe who worked for Scriver, but then mastered Fimo, plastic clay, and created vignettes of sacred and social events.  The scale is a bit bigger than what Bob used but the pieces are skillful, colored and intriguing.  Gordon has died.

Going back to Adrien Wagner at Browning High School, he reviewed their instruments for me including an imposing bass and a cello -- a CELLO!  Then he made me cry.  His first instrument was a clarinet and the one he was given, a good instrument he said, was in a shabby case with the initials "RMS."  Robert MacFie Scriver.  The instrument had been there since at least WWII.  

At Stanford Adrien was singing.  I need to look into this whole story a lot more, partly because I have a compelling feeling that somehow he's connected to Matthew DeRoche, who was my student in Heart Butte, but has since died.  It's likely that they are relatives.  He has same high intelligence and openness to the world.


I've been wary about re-establishing ties to Browning -- with good reason.  But today changed all that.  I'm too tired to write as well as I would like to, but my brain is singing -- or is that a cello?

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