The idea of generations of people is breaking up. I'm hearing about "micro-generations" and the cusp of generations -- mostly young people wanting to be described in more complex ways, out of step with the conventions of everyone being in categories like grade school. Today not every family has babies in lockstep after war or stops having babies because of recession. Still, successive changes in cohorts of people are fascinating.
The kids in the halls of Browning High School yesterday are the great-grandchildren of the kids in my classroom in 1961. That was about the time Headstart was brand-new, never imagined until then. Today's colorful young people are far more confident, free-wheeling, and various than any before as a group, but there were always a few like this. Maybe they came from certain families or had been out in the world for a while. But -- looked at from the outside in a much blander, still conforming, town like Valier, they are wild.
And the town itself is no longer what I expected. Memories present ghosts on every street. The house where Bob Scriver grew up is about the same, but the rental across the street is a bit scruffy. Piegan Institute, next door, is more guarded but still intact. On the West end of town the studio home that Bob built almost single-handedly behind the museum is in ruin: paint peeling, big picture window broken. I stay emotionally separated, even from the serious deterioration of housing on some blocks. Many houses are empty.
I get the feeling that the population is mostly scattered out into the many housing projects outside what was the town boundary, which helps to explain why the old-fashioned version of the town is no longer relevant. A project to reclaim and refurbish what are basically solid houses would be timely, but it won't happen with this administration. The goal of the white establishment elsewhere is clearly to disperse what was and to force conformity to BIA plans. The casino is an obvious exception which suits the idea of lawlessness and safe wickedness. Only the idea.
I didn't go to the three tourist-related towns along the edge of Glacier Park: East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb. They are small and East Glacier has become a teacher housing community as well, at least for the dwindling proportion of white teachers in Browning. In summer the place is maintained to attract visitors. In winter it settles into semi-prosperous routine. St.Marys and Babb almost disappear in winter, snowed in. The wind and extreme cold prevent these villages from being winter resorts, so enterprising people often have separate lives on the other side of the mountains where there are luxury ski businesses and corrupt politicians, barely in Montana.
Outside visitors rarely see more than one side of the rez, usually the most outside parts, esp. if it's not what they expect because they see what they already have seen or expected somewhere else. (Where are the tipis?) 30% of the population of Valier is "indigenous" by census, but you'd never know it. The Glacier Reporter newspaper runs a Sheriff's Report that is not separated between on and off the reservation so most Valier people assume that the disorder and crime is all on the rez rather than in Cut Bank, which has always been a rowdy oil-roughneck drinking town. There is no reservation newspaper, but then newspapers everywhere are shrinking and changing as the Internet moves across the planet. There are a LOT of computer hip people around.
The school complex is now divided between the town axis where it has often been the center, one end of main street, and the high school a few miles out of town, too far for a white person to walk, but not too far for tribal people. On the way out of that end of town one encounters a circulating drive-around island where the two highways, #2 and #89 separate, one to go to East Glacier and across the mountains and the other to go to St. Marys and Canada. (Locals are more likely to travel the Duck Lake Road which leaves town on the other side and travels a gentler route.) This invention prevents collisions and the unwary speeds of semi-truck drivers who used to crash through the fence protecting the Museum of the Plains Indian so often that Guy Smith made a living all winter by repairing it.
Sometimes it worries me that local kids have no idea about such small historic events that are never marked in textbooks. Their sense of belonging and identity get thinner and political grievances take over. For instance, they don't know that once there was a governmental plan to by-pass Browning for the convenience of truckers and tourists in massive RV's who never want to slow down.
The change would have killed every tourist business and isolated the population. A dedicated group of Browning people prevented the change, citing an ancient burial ground right where the Transportation Dept. planned the by-pass. This heedless national strategy has relentlessly changed the entire country's small-towns, leaving impoverished motels and gas stations to survive however they could, often in shady ways. Working together, both white businesses and tribal forces managed to block the idea.
At the same time it was realized that the Duck Lake Road, then mostly a gravel ranch-access road, would also bypass town if it were paved. It was a long time before the people living out that way insisted on getting that much safer road paved all the way, about the same time as paving the road out to Heart Butte and roads along the riverside ranches on Marias, Badger, and Two Medicine. But you have to know where the Browning end is -- it's hard to get onto because of an island that is more of a triangle divider than a circle.
The rez road that goes out Two Medicine valley NE past Holy Family Mission to Cut Bank is not exactly a marvel of engineering, but rather like driving on a roller-coaster. it's named for Governor Aronson, which is a mixed honor. Yesterday I traveled on Minnie Spotted Wolf Highway, which is the section of #89 that turns north from the Valier cut-across to I-15 Interstate. Minnie as a Marine, a driver including heavy equipment operating. She grew up on a ranch where she drove a tractor and helped with harvest.
It helps one's mental health to balance out the semi-secret corruption in Washington DC by remembering how strong and competent local life can be when it works together. I take the dishevelment of what was once the Town of Browning to be a sign of transition, changing from one kind of being to another, a metamorphosis like an animal or insect going from one stage to the next. Partly it's a matter of envisioning something new and partly it's a matter of discarding an old skin. The People go on.
No comments:
Post a Comment