Maybe the first Blackfeet Indian I met was Jimmy Fisher, the school district engineer who brought the rest of my things down from the Great Northern depot when I arrived for my first job. Besides my trunk, there were dozens of whisky boxes which I had discovered were ideal for books, since they were small enough and sturdy enough to be carried. “Sure did hire a drinker this time!” he joked. Then he warned me to fill the bathtub with water since the town pipeline tended to airlock.
No, wait. The Blackfeet Indian I met before that was Rose, the waitress at Joe Lewis’ café, about sixty years old with coal black dyed and permed hair and two vivid spots of rouge, according to the fashion of her cohort. I never knew her last name. She must have been born around 1900. Now she had a wide waist and a cheerful manner. My parents and I, traveling home to Portland from NU, warmed to her at once.
When I was shown my new classroom, I was also introduced to Ramona Davis, the teacher across the hall. Sophisticated in tailored suits, she seemed a little European though from a darker country, maybe Spain. She was married to a white rancher. Eventually, I would be the officiant for her funeral.
All these relationships were complex, moving in and out of ideas about class or race or culture. Jimmy Fisher helped Bob Scriver figure out how to make a rafter pattern for the major hall of mounted animals in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. They went out to one of the long trestle railroad bridges to copy them. Joe Lewis retired and sold his café to “Ick” where it became a liquor store rumored to know how to find drugs. I never knew Ick's last name either. The cartoon of Napi that Al Racine painted on the wall eating pancakes was kept, but slightly altered to take out the product. For a while I lived kitty-corner and observed the little cluster of the faithful hanging around outside. I knew some of them.
Next door to the Museum was a newer ranch-style house belonging to the Bobby Anderson family, pretty much assimilated. Next to them was the Kiplings, mixed bloods. The husband was a county tax assessor and his wife was an administrator for an international children’s charity at the grassroots level.
Then came the Skunkcap’s log cabin. Their allotted ranch was a few miles out of town so they went back and forth with a horse and wagon, bringing stove wood to town. Alonzo, grandpa, was blinded by trachoma, a plague that had affficted the Blackfeet early in the 20th century. His descendants were hunters — we bought hides from them and once observed the tracks of their tough little ponies going up through snow into Glacier Park, as was entitled by treaty. The family was Blackfeet-speaking, full-blood.
On my side of the street was Elsie Wright, an older widow whose son was a Fish and Game administrator for the State. She owned the little house next to her, which I rented for a while. It’s previous owner had been Hughie Welch and before that it was the house where Jimmy Welch, the author’s father, grew up, but at that point the house was blocks farther north along the highway, close to where Don MacCrae built a shop that became Glacier Studio, a photography studio.
I bought my first horse from Don MacCrae. It was an ancient steed raised by the Bullshoe family as a relay racer out by Heart Butte, probably descended from Cavalry horses given his brown hide and traces of hot blood. Just recently Tristan Bullshoe, Blackfeet enrolled but living in Valier, was admitted to an MD program at the University of North Dakota School of Medical and Health Sciences. Because of the pandemic, he had to take his Hippocratic Oath online.
When I began to blog, I was emailed by a family in England whose ancestor had received a Blackfeet artifact on a visit to the rez. They asked if I could find out about the “Pull Shoe” family. As soon as I realized they meant “Bullshoe,” that was easy.
The Bullshoe girls, a set of sisters in a family that valued education, became leaders in the schools, each one supporting the others and backing their children and grandchildren. This pattern recurs among indigenous people, so there are also “Bremner girls” who were considered exceptionally hard workers with a wild sense of humor. In the annual Indians Days parade, they dressed up as “hoochy-coochy” dancers with balloons down the front of their shirts, brandishing life-sized plush pythons and cavorting in the back of a pickup blasting stripper music. The family may have been as much Métis as Blackfeet.
Métis, mixed Cree and European, came to this rez from two sources. One was the government decision to assign landless Crees to the Blackfeet rez, which immediately caused backlash among those already struggling with limited commodities and support. The other was the refugees fleeing from the Canadian government because they were followers of Louis Riel and others who tried to establish a new nation in Red River country. Many of them, including Riel, were hung, but for a while he taught school in Montana at St. Peter's Mission near Great Falls. He was a deeply spiritual man who might have been safe if he had stayed in Montana.
Families had always been key to the Blackfeet, the kernels of the traveling groups that formed around the patriarchs, and became known by the characteristics of those leaders, like Eats Alone who took his meals out of camp on the nearest hillside. Even in the Sixties one might have a notion of what last names meant about the related people. This was much more meaningful than the tribe’s title, though that was suggestive as well. South Piegan were known for being proper.
People have a tendency to develop into family cultures according to where they fit in the hierarchy and priorities of the larger group. The point of the original Indian Days and ceremonial gatherings was to reinforce the sense of the larger demographic so bands didn’t split off and become too different, so they couldn’t be depended on for buffalo drives or war. Not that they excluded each other. In particular young men tended to travel among groups, trading and courting. Those who were contributors to the host band might be invited to stay. Those who were soreheads and trouble-makers were pushed to move on.
None of this is recorded by Hollywood or even by the those who have exotic fantasies and mysticisms about living on the prairie in the buffalo days. It was hard work and individuals who were solitary didn’t last long. In modern times, the dreamers, the traumatized veterans of foreign wars, the gays looking for a place to fit, and even the young women seeking adventure, come often but don’t stay long. They are rarely the type to write books and screenplays.
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