THE HYDRAULICS OF LAND

A desirable location for a renewable industrial-scale irrigation development must include:

1.  An inclined plane so no pumps are needed as they are for the big underground aquifers.

2.  Flat land that will be fertile if irrigated, not too far away from the source of water, and not needing to be cleared of trees, only plowed.

3.  A source of water,  collecting it from the sky in the form of snowpack which will hold it in the frozen geological “water tank” to extend the period of melting.

4.  Geological locations for gates and reservoirs -- narrow places and natural bowls to hold liquid water.

5.  Natural waterways that can be extended with canal systems.

6.  Willingness for people to work together for projects too big for individuals.

7.  Government regulators to guard the greater good and keep order.  This includes populating parts of the country in ways that will encourage production and shipping product, particularly food supplies or natural resources like oil or coal.

8.  People willing to work hard for future rewards.
9.  A town big enough, resourceful enough and harmonious enough to serve and hold a maintenance population after the initial boom is over.

The Foley report,

"Before the Indian Claims Commission, the Blackfeet Tribe of Indians, Plaintiff, V. the United States of America, Defendant: Docket No. 279-D : Digest of Historian's Exhibits".  This important 600 page report was written by a researching lawyer to defend the interests of the Blackfeet reservation.  It outlines adventures with irrigation projects on the rez that were constantly blocked, bungled or neglected.  The northern waterway of Milk River was diverted south to supply American-side off-rez ranchers now called the “High Line” after the Great Northern railway route.  If this water were shut off, the High-Line communities would reconfigure drastically because the population would have to leave.  Towns are already shrinking.  Also, revising historical legal rules will affect profit lines.

Near Heart Butte at the foot of Major Steele Backbone.

Photo by Tom Kotynski

At the south edge of the rez, the Marias watershed, which was partly on the rez, was diverted into the Conrad brothers irrigation project with the cooperation of “Major” Steele (he was not military -- it was an honorific) the only Indian agent to serve twice, and the original Kipp, a Mandan/Hidatsa man of enormous energy and intelligence.  These developments went mostly unrecorded, but they were part of a much larger movement to develop the prairies into a profitable part of the nation. 

When I look north along the Rockies, either in fall or spring, I often see that there is snowpack on the mountains that are defined as Glacier National Park.  The geologists say that this area was formed by the action of the continental glaciers, but what we’re seeing now is the melting of the remnant glaciers in the park.  (Al Gore stands as a marker in today’s climatologist’s videos so we’ll look at what has been recorded ever since photography was invented.  Actually that technology -- machine-recorded images -- developed about the same time as the confining of the indigenous people, replacing them on the original lands with Europeans displaced by Civil War or pending war or famine in Europe.)  The rez' southern border was moved north three times -- the last time was to Birch Creek.

Major George I. Steele (1837 - 1916)

Why would the mountains, say, south of Heart Butte at about the same general area as the mountain called “Major Steele’s Back”, be about the southern extent of heavy snowpack in the watershed that feeds Swift Dam?  Was it really “Major Steele’s Backlot” for his profitable crop of melt water in Spring?   Such questions are cross-disciplinary: weather-patterns, geology, sociology, the development of nations, the transition from improvised frontier law-free times into highly complex laws and regulations enforced at many levels and in many hierarchies.  Some of the science reaches back by aeons and millennia and projects into the present Anthropocene with terrifying implications that are yet ambiguous -- very chancy indeed.  Both the terror and the fact of information affect thinking and governing.

The Rocky Mountain Front and the Lewis Overthrust

Actually "fronts"  of the Lewis Overthrust

The East Front is on the right.

Let’s take a different angle.  “The Rocky Mountain Front is the easternmost portion of the Lewis Range which rises abruptly 4,000 to 5,000 feet above the Great Plains.”  When the land was crumpled by tectonic plate pressure on the West coast, it broke in different ways.  Much of it was “uplifted,” like a broken cake layer half on its plate, creating the great stone ramparts right out of “Game of Thrones” or like the Great Chinese Wall, which gives its name to one section.

Collisions of southern heated air currents coming clear from the Gulf of Mexico against this high stone mass creates intense thunderstorms and cyclones.  Lightning hitting the land contributes fertility and the fires set by it repeatedly clear the land of trees.

The earliest maps of the Front were sketched by first white men informed by indigenous world-views.  They didn’t think about the cordilla of parallel N/S ridges -- which we can now see from the air and which so taunted Lewis and Clark, because they would struggle up to one divide only to see another range on the horizon.  What they saw was a horizon, the eye-sight panorama.  The earliest maps show landmarks, esp. peaks often compared to a “tooth” and the deep valleys with streams eroding and irrigating them, good for hunting and for camping with a little shelter and source of firewood.

Here are some links for the actual overthrust:

Lewis Overthrust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Overthrust

Glacier National Park, Montana - NPS: Nature & Science ...
www.nature.nps.gov › ... › Geology › Tour

Geology - Glacier National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
www.nps.gov/glac/learn/education/geology.htm

Images for Lewis overthrust fault

The Lewis Overthrust Fault and Marias Pass - Montana ...
www.mdt.mt.gov/.../LewisOverth...

This last one is meant to point out actual geology as you drive on Highway 2 through Marias Pass.  I’ll come back to the overthrust.

The Inland Seas

First, I want to bring into consciousness "the great Western Interior Seaway (also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea) was a large inland sea that existed during the mid- to late Cretaceous period as well as the very early Paleogene, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The ancient sea stretched from the Gulf of Mexico and through the middle of the modern-day countries of the United States and Canada, meeting with the Arctic Ocean to the north. At its largest, it was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long."  (This paragraph from Wikipedia.)

It is this vast often-shallow sea in which the baculites and ammonites of the Blackfeet ceremonial iniskum formed, the little squidish creatures with segmented shell compartments which -- when broken apart -- look like teeny buffalo.  The original shell with its rainbow mother-of-pearl sometimes still present suggested fat to the indigenous people -- meaning prosperous times.  They are good luck charms.

Iniskim with mother-of-pearl shells

The edges of the seas were interrupted by lagoons and atolls where vegetation grew vigorously, as did the algae and seaweed beds in shallow water.  These conditions produced the oil and coal deposits left by vegetation -- no doubt with a few dinosaur inclusions -- that was eventually crushed into simple carbon fuel we extract today.  Very lucky prosperity for the people who found it, but they are not satisfied.   They hunger for what they might find in the Lewis Overthrust, thinking it will be geologically like the formations that produced the early Blackfeet oil fields and the Alberta oil fields to the north.  Others say the Overthrust is much more jumbled and has trapped any oil in small scattered amounts impractical for drilling.

Badger-Two Medicine

This is the power-struggle at the core of the fight over the Badger-Two Medicine land: a trajectory of profit for a human organization that will disperse in the near future versus a continuous upwelling of sacredness that comes from reducing human lives to humble specks in the great arc of time.

REOPENING THE GOLD MINE

Yellow Kidney and Little Plume

Their descendants, whom I knew, were also religionists.

Photo by Curtis

Through the decades after the Civil War and maybe until WWII, a loose cohort of “white” writers, mostly in the West, wrote books about Indians in a faux historical romantic way based on the idea that they were disappearing.  Of course, they really meant the First Contact people, mostly on the prairie, whom we might call “buffalo people.” The US had deliberately eliminated most of the buffalo that were their life foundation, so then they had been blanket people and next in the 20th century wore “citizen’s dress.”  But it's been tough becoming actual citizens.

The quick way to understand what the early 20th century period was like might be to flip through old photos, many of them with glass negatives, as presented in Walter McClintock’s “The Old North Trail” or the photo books of Edward Curtis.  Then compare the photos with the immediately preceding art work of George Caitlin, pre-photo.  They are the rough equivalent of the books written by George Bird Grinnell, Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Marion Russell, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and James Willard Schultz.  (See Paul Seesequasis (@paulseesequa) on Twitter, who posts wonderful old photos.

These books were loved by my mother (b. 1909) and my husband (b. 1914).  Bob was born and grew up on the Blackfeet reservation; my mother was born and grew up in the Pacific NW when lingering historical Indian camps still supplied seasonal labor.  Writing about these people was recently re-examined by professors using post-colonial thought and Native American activists to explore the new reality (they thought) that was neglected by the sentimental and hegemonic books of what I called to myself, “the three-named authors.”  My own kid favorite was “Tangled Waters’ by Florence Crannell Means, written by a Navajo trader’s wife who wrote many books about NA’s for young people.  Sympathetic but accepting assimilation.

Sherry L. Smith

Lately it has been books like “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, an academic historian, that have reopened the exhausted mines of sentimental assumptions. Smith and company are white scholars of disillusionment and they spared no whites from their new interpretation.  Even McClintock and Curtis took a bashing, McClintock for not using family prestige to reform Washington DC and Curtis for posing his Indian subjects wearing his trunk full of costumes and artifacts.

Then there has been a generation of books lamenting the suffering of reservations and the city ghettos created by the effort to break up reservations through relocation.  Some call it “misery lit” and claim those stories are also exploitations rather than calls to reform.  When AIM took up the flag of revolution and led a new version of Indian Wars,  there was an accompanying new wave of “war” stories with the FBI taking the cavalry role and proud of it.  

Returning again to the mine of drama has slowed because the People themselves have begun telling their own stories.  They recognize that white post-colonials are often just colonialists in disguise.  The result is two completely different approaches to writing about indigenous people.  The split between them exists in the fields of history, anthropology, art and religion.  What had originally been an ecologically-based People had been both feared and attacked by the industrializing forces that consumed land and resources.  These are now in the throes of legal and governmental struggles trying to control mighty international corporations with no perceptible heads except for insatiable mouths.  They leave piles of their dung behind him and crave access to sacred grounds.

The Scriver Collection in book form.

Self-published by Bob Scriver.

What had once been a folk understanding of curiosities to collect and hang on one’s parlor walls has now become a legal battle over entitlement and increasing monetary value that has led to suicide and sweat lodge deaths of whites as well as the stripping of the heritage of Native Americans.  That’s the reality and yet many people hang onto the idea of tribal lives as “child-like” and entirely separate.  After Montana state law was changed to REQUIRE Indian history (millennia-old) to be taught in the schools, an educated woman protested to me,  “Why should WE have to study THEIR history?”  She hadn’t noticed that the head of the Montana  state school system was tribal or that the history of her town dates to WWI.  Not WWII.  World War ONE.

The Scriver family’s memorabilia was sold to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum for a lot of money.   The Blackfeet felt that the items were acquired in a dishonorable way so demanded them back.  In fact, the items designated Ceremonial Bundles were returned -- not to Scriver but to the Canadian Blackfoot tribes.  This was a new source of pique though the original Blackfoot Nation was on both sides of the 49th parallel.  What IS a nation?  Who controls what?

Attributing high values to ancient and exotic materials is both understandable and a source of mischief, as the “ISIS” destruction of historic temples and statues has demonstrated.  When no one cared about them, they were safe.  As objects become more valuable and symbolic, their trade tends to go underground, disappearing from public access.  Maybe that’s just as well.

"Jimmy P."  Misty Upham is gone.

Both authenticity and spiritual/religious meaning of objects -- whether monumental or territorial (I’m thinking of Badger/Two Medicine) or contemporary books, film and art -- has become an aspect of great concern to worldwide people, attributes that affect practical commercial strategies and raise the question of compensation for presumed loss to the originators, the creators.  Suppression of those whose work is critical of power-mongers.

Is a book written about or by people who have been dead for decades or centuries more valuable if one can establish antiquity or authenticity?  Is a very early and maybe rather primitive Navajo rug more or less valuable than a sophisticated and refined later version?  Should intangibles affect concrete objects?  What is the value of speaking one’s language when the world to which it was fitted is now gone?  Or will the language teach us what we lost?  

Tony Bynum photo

Is something like the spiritual value of pristine mountain slopes quite real and perceptible, as well as “owned” by a People?  In terms of history, wasn't the Badger-Two Med originally the Ceded Strip, which was an ambiguously assigned part of the 1910 purchase of Glacier National Park (urged by Linderman) and therefore unavailable to development?  Wasn’t Glacier Park -- behind the scenes -- a boondoggle to create traffic for the Great Northern railroad at the expense of the Blackfeet tribe, just another industrialist exploitation of resources?  Even forcing dignified adults, through hunger, to perform dances and tell stories on the lawn in front of the Big Hotel?  Or did that honor them?

The fantasies of generations attach to the Real People who once occupied the various eco-niches of the continent, now flattened by resource industries.  The newest revisioning of the tribes focuses on this, trying to rediscover the principles of sustainable life.  We’ve traveled from museums across the spectrum to reburial of the skeletons recovered from museums, feeling our way -- which accounts for the very different paths.  There IS NO rational and logical strategy that will unify peoples on such different sides of viewing the Way or the destination.  UNLESS we face the inevitability of everything passing away no matter what we do.  It might take longer if we try to preserve what we know about.  It will be short if the only goal is commodification.

In truth, whether or not the identity of tribal peoples has been damaged fades when confronting the reality that the whole planet of living creatures is in danger.  Changes in air, water, and climate are affecting us all AS A SPECIES and muddling the ecologies, possibly beyond our ability to live in them.  The books are just now being written.  We thought the Indians were disappearing.  Now it looks like we might ALL be disappearing.  Certainly the glaciers are.

JESSE DESROSIER SPEAKS OUT !

Piegan Institute Immersion School graduate.

He DOES speak Siksika!

United States Marine

Junior at the U of Montana with a double major in anthropology and Native American studies.

SAFEGUARD BADGER TWO MEDICINE LAND  (from the GF Tribune, Aug. 24, 2015)

I was raised with the traditional values of my people, and found peace in the outdoors.

As a Pikuni warrior and veteran of the United States Marines, it is not only my duty to protect my country and lands but my obligation. It is my obligation to uphold our traditional life and to protect our natural resources for future generations. A Pikuni (or Blackfeet) warrior was shown a code of ethics by his/her elders and the proper protocol for war. For the Pikuni, it was a warrior’s obligation and duty to defend the rights of both the land and the people. Above all there were two distinct reasons a Pikuni warrior would defend and give their life for if necessary — the children, and the land.

The children are the future of the Pikuni and the most innocent members of the community. The land gives us life, and nature is what provides us with all the necessities of a good life. For thousands of years, my people defended our territory, battling disease, starvation, genocide, and forced colonization. We have seen our territory shrink vastly, but still we continue to defend what natural resources we have left, and share them with our future generations.

“Nit-sit-ta-pi-ksim-stat”, which in Pikuni means “Think Native,” the literal translation when broken down linguistically means “Real People Thinking.” Nit-sit-ta-pi which means “Real People” or better Human Being, the word my ancestors used when referring to not only themselves but all the idigenous groups of the North American continent.

Nature and our mother earth provided life for my people and every part of it was considered living. Thus many names in my language including places, plants, rivers and mountains have animate meanings. We understood the power of nature and the importance of respect we had to show to it in order to survive. The natural world is where my people found spirituality. Across the world, different cultures have constructed libraries, temples and churches for the purpose of gaining knowledge or places to worship and pray. My people are no different; we believe the power of knowledge and worship is in these animate elements of nature.

Our warriors are noted in several books for their bravery and aggression toward enemies who threatened the Pikuni way of life. Today, Native Americans serve in the U.S. military at the highest rate per capita of any minority group. Some of these veterans make up the Blackfeet Veterans Alliance and Blackfeet Warrior Society.

To my people there are these designated places which are reserved as “sacred lands.” Badger Two Medicine is one of those places; this is our “holy land”, and our “old country.” Not just a specific river or mountain, but all of it, from the prairie flats to the mountain front, and every body of water and stone upon it. By understanding the Pikuni culture and connection with the land, we can understand why it is essential for a healthy life.

I urge any outside entity to respect sacred land. I wish to share and pass on the phrase nit-sit-ta-pi-ksim-stat, or “think like a human being,” when considering violating the laws of my people. Badger Two Medicine is our Vatican, our “holy land,” and is there to be kept in its natural state, to gain knowledge and worship. I advise any oil companies to honor and respect the beliefs of my people.

Jesse DesRosier is a junior at the University of Montana with a double major in anthropology and Native American studies. From Browning, he is a member of the Blackfeet tribe and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, 2007-2011.

________________________

Below are a few of Jesse's distinguished non-tribal family members.

"Montana Indian reservation administrator. Fred Choteau Campbell, was born in Shawnee, Kan., in 1864. In 1890 he entered the U.S. Indian Service as a teacher in Genoa, Neb. He was later sent to the Fort Peck Indian Agency in Montana and in 1898 was appointed superintendent of the Fort Shaw Indian Training School. Campbell also served as superintendent of the Blackfeet Agency for ten years before becoming the district superintendent for Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho. Campbell retired from the Indian Service in 1932.  Campbell's daughter Mary Freda married Peter LeRoy DesRosier, a Browning, Mont., merchant. Campbell died on October 5, 1942, in Portland, Oregon."  [Campbell is arguably one of the best Indian agents the Blackfeet ever had."

"Drugstore owner in Browning, Mont. Peter DesRosier was born in 1873 in Providence, R.I., and moved to Havre, Mont., in 1892, where he was employed by the Broadwater and Pepin Company. He later opened the DesRosier Drug Store. In addition, he was postmaster at Browning from 1915 until 1921 and raised cattle on the Blackfeet Reservation. DesRosier also founded a theater in Browning. Peter DesRosier's wife, Emma Jane DesRosier, was active in several community activities in Browning. Peter and Emma Jane DesRosier had four children: Lauretta Mary, Peter LeRoy, J. Stuart, and Patricia Alouise. Peter DesRosier died on 29 Dec. 1932. Peter LeRoy DesRosier was born on 4 Apr. 1902 in Havre, Mont. He worked as a customs inspector, deputy game warden, and was the subsequent owner of Glacier Drug Company in Browning. During World War II he served with the 79th Battalion of the U.S. Navy Seabees. He was married to Mary Freda Campbell (1898-1961), daughter of Fred Choteau Campbell."

Bob and I used to go to a movie at the Park Theater, run by another relative, Ledbetter, and then have ice cream sodas at Roy's drug store.  He had red hair, like Campbell.  I never really thought about whether he was enrolled.  The Park Theater and maybe Glacier Drug had been rebuilt after fires, but after the last fire the Park Theater ("the show house") was not rebuilt.

The Broadwater-Pepin mercantile building was derelict and torn down by Bob Scriver with a crowbar.  The nails were square and Bob hammered them out to recycle.  The lumber was used to build the Scriver Taxidermy Studio, which is now the Blackfeet Heritage Center.

I've admired Jesse since his elementary school days.  Clearly, he's still growing and what an amazement that is!  Ik soka'pii !!