Where Are the Rez Readers?

Where are the rez readers?  Why is it all right for white people to buy and read books by indigenous people, but not okay for white people to write about them, even if they’ve lived in the community a long time?   Why don’t rez people buy books and read them?  Once there was no place to buy them on the rez, but now you can find them online, read them on the screen or download them.

Where are the rez publishers?  Browning School District #9, which is still under the governance of the state rather than the tribe, has the rights to publication of several valuable books but has no idea how to publish them or how to sub-contract to someone who does — even a newspaper.  I ordered a copy of one book two years ago, but it never came.

Notably, Adolf Hungry Wolf (whom purists love to despise because he's white) has given them the rights to his four-volume Good Medicine books, virtually a museum in a box, that gathers a century of history and photos.  It could be a bonanza if sub-contracted to the Museum of the Plains Indian if that institution hired a “curator” who was capable of advertising and distribution, even through Amazon.

Where are the rez fabricators who could learn to bind books in custom covers?  The graphics artists who could create knockout designs are everywhere.  Existing used books about Blackfeet could be bought on the internet used book market (Abebooks, etc) and re-bound in new covers to sell, if only through the Museum gift shop.  Even an individual could do such a thing.  A teenager!  The cash layout wouldn’t be much, but it would take a credit card to make the online transactions.  How-to classes are free on YouTube.

First you have to think of it.  I take the problem to be one of horizons.  Those who dare to look beyond the boundaries of the rez are often enticed to just leave and establish a new life, maybe in the city or maybe with a partner from another tribe.  But on the computer one can explore while staying in place.

Another problem is trying to hold everything still, to keep it all the same, which is a response to trauma.  Also to the capriciousness of both tribal and federal politics, which constantly interfere with trying to start a business or an education without any assurance that funds will be there.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, efforts were made to “salvage” what was assumed to be a vanishing culture.  The premise that writing by/about Indians is more precious is rooted in this period when white experts wrote for the white curious.  As it happens, the Indian culture simply adapted, incorporating aspects of at least two cultures to create something new, but as yet not defined yet.  Books could do that.

Part of the interference is the war over who is “really” Indian or not.  Consider that James Welch attended high school in Minneapolis and as an adult lived in the college community of Missoula, married to a white female professor.  His childhood summers were often with his mother’s family in Fort Belknap rather than his father’s family in Browning.

Jimmie Welch, as we called him was actually the 3rd with that name.  Jimmie Welch’s father was the 2nd.  He was a classmate of Bob Scriver, the white man to whom I was married in the Sixties, and the two got into mischief together which I heard about from Jimmie Pere when I interviewed him for the book about Bob.  I attended his graveside burial in Dupuyer where the cemetery is on a hill full of wild strawberries.

Jimmie the Senior did well enough alternating a master welder occupation with hospital administration.  At one point he bought each of his children an automobile.  One son became a pilot.  The daughter went into administration.  I forget what the other son did, but this was not a “moccasin” family.  None of James Welch the author’s Missoula family attended.  (If I’m wrong, let me know, but I wasn’t introduced to anyone from the U of M.)

This does not lessen the power or truth of what the books tell.  He was always generous and aware of kids, made time for the Heart Butte kids I took to a literary conference, but didn’t spend a lot of time on the Blackfeet rez.

His cousin, Sidner Larson, from his mother’s side, was also an academic and author.  Most of the Indian writers that I’ve met in person were at a conference at the U of Oregon where Sid was teaching at the time and organized the event.  He also has a law degree, I think, and ran a bar for a while.  He likes to keep his head down now, after getting bruised by the academic world losing faith in the virtue of Indian Studies and saving money by closing them down.  His book, “Captured in the Middle” is highly relevant.

Welch himself tried to escape stereotypes by writing about an Indian who was a lawyer or one who emigrates to France, where Jimmie is a great favorite.  After a person has seen the movie “Winter in the Blood”, so idyllic and tragic at once, one can hardly blame him for going back to the old tropes in “Fool’s Crow.”

But the audience and the publisher wouldn’t hear of anything different from the early books, any more than the public would buy Sherman Alexie’s attempt at a murder mystery.  Alexie's  frank young adult books went better, because the kids didn’t get stuck in old assumptions.

As soon as recording devices were invented, both amateurs and anthropologists began to record the oral language of the Blackfeet.  Crackling and semi-intelligible recordings steadily got better until we come to the modern dilemmas of technology moving so quickly that no sooner is a CD made than the machine that can play it will be too old-fashioned to be on the market.   https://windspeaker.com/radio occasionally broadcasts speeches in Blackfeet/Blackfoot and they are probably not the only tribal radio stations out there.  

Maybe now there are more rez listeners and videographers than readers and writers  Not everyone realizes they can watch on YouTube as easily as opening a book.  This link will take you to some contemporary people, including Earl Old Person and John Murray from Browning.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E9W1rWYJbk

The link below goes to a classic 1930 conference recorded on film and at one time almost impossible to find.  These people were born about 1850 when the first prairie treaties were signed, the first attempt to secure peace, faulty as it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfT2a5SGDFA&t=131s

National Geographic  and other natural history websites have taught us to expect public performances and high cinema values, though there’s far more to it than that.  But first you have to think of looking for it.