TOUGH ALL OVER

Heart Butte and Featherwoman

A couple of weeks ago a man in the Midwest asked me via email what I thought about him and his family coming to teach in Heart Butte on the Blackfeet Reservation.  I didn’t know what to tell him.  On the one hand, there were joyful times of real success.  Other times were full of despair.  It’s one of those “inkblot” things, except sometimes there’s real danger.

Rarely do I go up to Browning any more -- not much reason to, lots of work to do at home, pickiup is aging, and so on.  But I had a box of books to give someone and the best destination was the Blackfeet Community College’s “Medicine Spring Library.” I know Ginnie Weeks and she was happy to have the books, though some were duplicates she’ll pass on to someone else.

Medicine Springs Library

Last night there were thunder storms lingering over town so long I wondered whether I’d be able to post at 10PM.  The Baptist church next door attracts lightning strikes.  (Don’t ask me why.  I’ll tell you it’s the new metal roof.  Maybe.)  At dawn we had a pelting rain.  By the time I was headed out the door, the mountains were visible for the first time after weeks of smoke from the Northwest and from Alberta.  

This year is the second wet cool summer, which is both good and bad.  The mustard (rape) is just ripening its bright yellow geometry and each field has a stack of bee hives alongside.  They used to be white wooden boxes but now someone has suggested that since flowers are bright colors, the bees would like colored boxes.  Bees are endangered, but not by the color of bee boxes.  

Colors after a rain are so intense that they look as though they’ve been “enhanced” by a computer program.  Snow is gone from the mountains.  Hay fields are mostly cut and the roadsides are maybe half done.  The wheat is headed up, but still green.  Every time I pass chemical fallow fields the color of putty I feel sick.  They’re poisoned on the theory that it saves moisture, but this year there’s plenty of water.  The potholes still gleam, mirroring the big cumulus sailing the sky.

highway engineering for erosion

I was interested in the construction continuing on Highway 89 at Two Medicine river.  It was drastically recontoured last year, massive amounts of earth and stone moved from the descent over a bluff into a valley created by the melting of glaciers ten thousand years ago and used as buffalo jumps for millennia.  This year there is the same kind of close-detail earthwork as on the way to Bynum.  In Portland my clerical assignment was with the soil engineers who did site development, and when times were slow, I read their professional magazines.  

This work is far more extensive than anything we’ve seen around here in the past, a combination of granite chunks laid into coulees as though they were fitted stone walls, coir pathways for run-off, spray planting on inclines, and work being done by hand with crews of men, small detailing.  It looks to me as though 89 is being prepared to be a highway suitable for industrial or military use -- as though there were any difference.  Some people continue to be convinced that there is as much oil under the East Slope in Montana as there was in Banff.  The Frakkers have boners for everything.

East Slope of the Rocky Mountains -- note pumpjack at the right

Along the way I got a whiff of sour gas and then worried that I hadn’t checked the oil this morning, so I pulled over to do that and add a quart.  I always carry oil.  The dash light hadn’t come on.  Though I was into a field and ranch access side road, the massive vehicles -- partly 18-wheelers and partly huge RV’s towing cars -- were coming so fast (I’d guess the speed limit, which is 75) and so close that I decided I’d better pull down into the field.  In the process the screw-on lid to the oil input fell into the motor somewhere.  It’s still there despite my search for it.  It didn’t fall onto the ground.  The case is not pressurized as the coolant is, so I finally stuffed the hole shut with paper towel and continued.

By this time the morning coffee had been processed, so as soon as I hit the BCC campus I stopped to use their facilities at the new science building.  This campus was mocked in the 1990’s as a loser mudhole, but now it is as grand and maintained as any high grade hotel -- far better materials, construction, and supplying than the U of Chicago.  Everything is polished, scented, carefully matched, and computerized.  Wave your hands under the faucet -- water.  Wave them under the towel dispenser -- down it comes.  The striking photovoltaic buildings stand in the midst of fields of white top, sweet clover, escapee alfalfa, tall weeds waving in the breeze.  The fabric of Montana.  

At the library Ginnie and I had a bit of a visit but a very polished upscale lady came to take Ginnie's photo for something promotional.  She was from a NGO called “Global” something.  Eco or Cultural or Peace -- some kind of volunteer do-gooder outfit.  I tried to give her a quick verbal map of the rez.  Wheat fields to the east, old-timers to the West (Heart Butte and some in Starr School) with housing projects imposed on them, and the three resort towns along the edge of the Park.  She disagreed that Babb was tourist businesses. (??)  I tried to tell her about Metis, but it didn’t register.  She’s from Moses Lake where she just sold her fine wines and art shop.  Now she just wanted this photo op for an article.

Quick tour around town.  Still graffiti on Bob’s little studio home.  Not many people circulating.  All quiet at the booze and white powder shop.  Piegan Institute buttoned up.  On to Cut Bank.  Many more horses with mustang blood, judging by colors: claybank, gray, dun, lined down the spine and striped on the back legs.  Kneehigh in grass and pothole water.

Charlie Reevis

I rarely go into Cut Bank past the little shopping village at the west edge.  Alco for 50¢ cat food.  Albertson’s -- which I have to think to remember it’s not Buttreys, which it hasn’t been for decades.  In the soup section I ran into a tall Blackfeet man and introductions revealed that we know each other on paper.  Larry Reevis is a descendant of Charlie Reevis, who is the Pipe Keeper in Bob’s sculpture of the ceremony.  His relative Gordon Reevis is one of the most gifted writers I ever taught.  He died young.  Larry is in his fifties, a graduate of U of Montana, and has studied water law.  He is a dedicated editorialist on the Glacier Reporter, always fighting for the righteous.  We haven’t talked much, so our talk was mostly exploration.

The rez, for those who are far away, has been in the midst of an emotional and damaging deadlock on the Tribal Council that has gutted any confidence in progress, while waiting on the money owing because of the Eloise Cobell lawsuit.  Larry puts a lot of emphasis on law and order and testifies to the lack of policing that lets criminals and the violent dominate everything.  I agree with him.  

In fact, earlier I had twittered in response to an article by Saul Elbein in The Texas Observer ( http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118675/child-migrants-guatemala-are-fleeing-m(ore-just-gang-violence ) that Elbein’s “take” on Guatemala also applied to the rez.  That is, resources have been devoted to the situation enough to maintain order and supplies for the more public parts of the rez, but that the back country has been allowed to run rampant.  Families and toughies (interpreted as gangs) do what they want without intervention.  That nice lady at the Medicine Spring library will not run into them.  If she did, she wouldn’t recognize what they were.  She would not be interested in figuring out the arcane laws, the fine social groupings, or the water entitlements of the rez.  Larry was trying to explain some national “Guardian” program to me, but I couldn’t get my head around it.  I'll try to follow up.

Somehow we have all everywhere managed to go from governments that protect everyone --including dissenters, the needy, and the minority -- to “winner take all.”   No rest for the wicked and no help for the poor.  This is global.  Thugs rule. “Game of Thrones.”   So I told this Midwestern man who was a potential teacher here to reflect on his appetite for adventure.  And suggested he read my book about teaching in Heart Butte:  http://www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com

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SQUANTO DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Squanto, whose real name was Tisquantum, was the inventor of “tisquantum physics,” which premises that everything is relative, especially all one’s relatives, who are always around if there’s a feast but not so much in times of need.  (I’m kidding.)  He crossed the Atlantic four times without dying of a European disease which is better than usual.  He kept getting abducted by various Euros and at the end of his life was for sale for twenty pounds, which is about forty dollars today (unadjusted), which (also today) is about the price of a little boy on the world market.  I am not kidding.  Even the Great Falls Tribune admits it.  You could read all about it on that eminent source of information Wikipedia, although I have to admit that the Wikipedia is very weak on accurate Native American information since it’s mostly written by know-it-all youngish white men from the East Coast of America.

The clergy who sometimes owned Squanto assured him that Jesus loved him so long as he was obedient and they taught him English though few of them learned Patuxet.  (They still talk funny over there on the East Coast and in Europe.)  He lived to be thirty, acting as a peacemaker among tribes, and died rather mysteriously, possibly poisoned by Waupanoags but not with polonium.  (No one had an umbrella to poke him.)  At least he’s famous.

But I’m grateful not to be Squanto, not to be famous, and not to own an umbrella.  I’m grateful to be me, to be here, to have a lot of books and too many cats, but none of it was my doing, really.  It just happened.

I ran my limited knowledge of Squanto past the clerk at the gas station, who is actually an Amskapi Pikuni scholar.  He said he knew all about Squanto, so nevermind telling him anything, and anyway, there have only been two polonium deaths.  (I’m betting he doesn’t own an umbrella.)  We talked about a few other issues, too, like whether there is no word for goodbye in Blackfeet.  He says there is but it’s a bit of a circumlocution, like “not-hello.”  I really like this guy but I don’t buy much gas so I never get to talk to him as much as I want to.  He’s a type not much known or appreciated, but not unlike Squanto, except that he belongs to himself.

Yesterday a scholar referred to me another scholar’s question about a Sixties writer who won big prizes by writing a faux journal patronizing a local Amskapi Pikuni famous for being very old.  In those days it was very “cutting edge” to call the book about this old man “Piegan.”  (Some kids have been troubled because they thought it was the same as “pagan.”  Not.)  The writer, who is dead now, went mad, was confined for a while in Texas, then stumbled drunk through the streets of a minor city until he died.  Never wrote another book. He was a bad man in many ways.  When he came around, Bob Scriver locked himself in the shop and pretended he wasn’t there.  Yet people still think the book is reliable.  

Since this guy used our shop phone to call his editor, always claiming to reverse the charges though I don’t think he ever did (this was before calling cards), I stuck my ears out to see what I could learn.  Mostly what I learned was that his editor (in those days people had editors instead of agents and the publisher paid them instead of the writer paying them) was demanding that he write things more like what people expected to know about Indians.  He had a tendency to write about himself in self-flattering ways, though the book opens with him forcing open a window and climbing into the old man's the empty house, on grounds that they were expecting him and would want him to do that.  I think they were trying to do the same thing Bob did, but forgot to lock that particular window.  Anyway, this semi-scholar wanted to know where this author’s papers were.  As if he HAD papers and as if a drunken madman would put them in a safe place.

Anyway, the point is that a white man forcing himself into the lives of tribal people -- whether or not they are expected -- is no longer a viable concept.  Even book editors sort of realize that.  But then what about my book, “Heartbreak Butte,” about the two years I spent teaching there?   (It’s online.  www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com )  What about my Blackfeet name and what about my teasing of the gas station cashier?

The other day I got an email asking for contact with a renegade anthropologist who was also around here in the Sixties.  This inquiry came from Cornwall, England, where the anthro (uncredentialed) grew up with the inquirer, who had some connections with Sioux country, entirely honorable, and assumed that his renegade friend was the same.  Not.  The renegade had become an artifact dealer/stealer and spent time incarcerated for it.  He even stole from white people.  Bob should have locked the door.

On the way to Darrell Kipp’s funeral mass, I stopped in at the Blackfeet Community College library which has come a looooong way, baby.  Most recently, they just finished cataloguing the acquisition of an outstanding collection of books about Indians that was given them by Bob Doerk, a deceased Air Force lieutenant colonel, who then became a banker, and, in addition, a Lewis and Clark and fur trapper aficionado, which led him into an admiration of the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet).  He was tall, intelligent, patient, and capable of managing a dignified interface with the tribe itself.  It’s a huge collection of books, all of them significant and timely.  Not enough of them by Blackfeet themselves.  It takes more time to build authors than it does to build structures.   http://library.bfcc.edu/resources.php  

Bob Doerk

Doerk was one of the most faithful attenders at Darrell Kipp’s and Rosalyn LaPier’s August Piegan Institute seminars.  He was always interested, comprehending, and diplomatic.  That was better than myself, who holds grudges, pays off old offenses, and pins people to the wall -- which defeated the purpose of the seminars.  The seminars were supposed to dissolve some of the local animosity and urge appreciation.  Doerk was in line with that goal.  His library was a valuable gift since a book these days (including the one I wrote about Bob Scriver) often sells for about forty dollars, or as much as a small trafficked boy, who would be a lot more trouble but a worthy recipient of care and affection.

Some people on Thanksgiving will express gratitude for living in a civilized country, for being good religious folk, for having a nice income and owning in a pleasant house, for living in an advanced technological world where one can visit with a man who is in Cornwall and have a scholarly discussion with a gas station attendant.  I don’t think about turkeys much.  I think about that little boy quite a lot.  And also the seven-year-old grandfather of Darrell Kipp who escaped a winter massacre with only his life but made Darrell possible as well as all the boys and girls inspired by Piegan Institute.  It’s not some romantic fantasy -- it’s reality.  Well, at least as real as I can manage today.