A few days ago I got an email from Charles Dye — not just any Charles Dye but a cinematographer and professor who has a website at Dyeworksfilm.com. I hadn’t known him before, though I knew his film about “Relay Racing”. He’s not indigenous, but he films Blackfeet. Among them is one of Darrell Robes Kipp speaking about indigenous art. He’s sitting at North American Indian Days in Browning with kids running and shrieking all around him. This is the way things are at big events. These are not sit-down-shut-up people. You can hear the big dance drums in the background. On the website it’s under “Reading” on a long list. The photo title access is petroglyphs, writing on stone.
Here’s the link to the film about Kipp, which has a home at the U of Lethbridge. The shoot is edited to about 23 minutes, full of ideas. The City of Lethbridge is a couple of hour’s drive north of here but the border is closed. You can get access to the interview at this link. https://www.blackfootdigitallibrary.com/digital/collection/bdl/id/317/rec/6
Here are some topics mentioned. But before I make a little list, let me note that Darrell chose his own middle name, “Robes”, to honor a group of the Blackfoot Confederacy that was small and open to trading with outsiders. This exposed them to diseases that shrank them so much that they were absorbed into the bigger subgroups of the confederacy. Darrell didn’t want them to die completely so he assumed their identity as internal to his. Their name is translated as “Scabby Robes”. The word “scabby” seems to refer to their tanning methods, but no one really knows what it means. Maybe “mottled?”
This was a man who was not afraid to travel the world and then not afraid to come back to the rez to be a force for good. He is able to speak Blackfeet — and even I know a few words that I learned from his programs — though he had to learn it as an adult, so that through the Piegan Institute he could help teach the children to speak their language again. Much of his time was spent traveling to speak, act on boards, attend conferences, be an advisor, and raise money for the school. His principles would not allow him to accept federal money from the entity that originally stamped out the People’s Language.
Success didn’t just come from his many insights but also came from working with people like Dorothy Still Smoking or Shirlee Crowshoe or Roslyn LaPier. He was known and honored in Canada as much and maybe more than in the US.
The secret success ingredient was a wild sense of humor which he used when speaking. At one point he was before a group of elders of the Confederacy who said they would endorse him if he could speak Blackfoot for half an hour. After twenty minutes he had run out of standard subjects so he began to tell jokes. By the time he was certified a speaker, everyone was laughing too much to talk!
This video is more serious. The artist he is talking about is Terpning, who made romantic but academically accurate paintings of the pre-contact prairie tribes. He was very much an illustrator for mass reproduction. Darrell is explaining pre-horse art in the days when art and religious meaning were blended and identified as “belonging” to certain qualified people.
He is one of the sources of my idea about the ecosystem basis of religious meaning. It is his conviction that the People must be connected to their place on the East Slope. Art can do this. Also gathering as a tribe from the diaspora where they have gone to live in order to "be glad to see each other".
Kipp notes that Terpning comes to the rez to use them for models, but doesn’t really know the People, isn’t part of their lives. It’s distant, cold, and even grave robbing. He talks about the difference between people who portray “Indians” and collect their artifacts, and the actual Tribal People who are artists as a kind of role endorsed by entitlements, not ownership but rights to use. It’s a version of Holy Orders that requires good intentions and proper behavior.
Then he speaks of the Blackfeet conviction that they were always here, the millennia that bind the People into “cousins.” And has made them a handsome people! He wants the fine ways of yesterday to be kept and protected. But they should also be beautiful, “aesthetic.” He’s speaking of art, but he’s also speaking of the People. Today is a day to remember them.
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