BLACKFEET JUST UNDER THE SURFACE

This post is a suggested list of the various forces at work on the Blackfeet Tribe that have caused the present “perfect storm” and keep it going on despite the price being paid and the efforts to intervene.

All indigenous populations, by definition, are creatures of their environment.  The East Slope of the Rockies was never an easy place to live but in the day of the herds of buffalo, it was a balanced and sustaining human place to live.  There was plenty of food, there were “rules” for managing how to get it, how to store it, how to share it, and so on.  Times of hardship still happened, but the great bulk of the population went forward.

However, there were edges and interfaces with other populations: those of the far north, those of the woodlands to the east, those that were partly guarded by the Rockies, and there must have been an ambiguous relationship with peoples to the south, particularly after the Spanish began to arrive, bringing the horse.

There is some evidence that from a planetary point of view, esp. if you look at it from the north pole, there was penetration of the area by various means from people with roots in Asia (I’m not just talking about the Bering Straits, but also about dog-sledders and kayak paddlers) and people from the Norse areas, stepping from Greenland to Iceland to North America.  Climate change had a lot to do with this, since sometimes the Arctic Sea was open (as it is becoming now.) 

Also, there were clearly boat people who managed to cross the Pacific much earlier than anyone has thought.  There were circum-Pacific trade routes that are hinted at by artifacts.  Kon-Tiki showed how primitive those boats could be, functioning on ocean currents and prevailing winds.

For the Blackfeet, the early penetration of explorers came up the Mississippi and then the Missouri.  Lewis and Clark were not the first whites in the area.  But there were not many whites until late and then mostly from “Canada.”

The Blackfoot Confederation was bisected by the 49^th parallel, which very much confused relationships and resources, and continues to do so.  The Hudson’s Bay Company injected a population of tough Brits and venture capital that demanded profit.  Then rival French and American companies also began to compete, which meant introducing trade goods of dangerous high value like gunpowder and guns, and esp. alcohol.  The Red River Metis/Cree Chippewa culture formed out of all this.  The occasional Mohawk or Polynesian passed through.

The Euro idea that “tribes” were “races” of people with clear edges who could be detached from their ecological location and treated as units was a distortion.  Various people came and went from small bands who had family relationships at their core, plus a ceremonial unity reinforced by summer rituals.  The intrusion of missionaries disrupted all this.  Then, after the buffalo were gone, the priests become a means of survival.  For the Red River Metis, the Catholic missionaries were easier to accept.

Washington, D.C. has always been a problem -- too far away, too beholden to other people.  Right now they are simply a national version of the same deadlock as the tribal council.  Money, virtue, precedent, status, and coping with international corporations are forces that deserve whole books of analysis.  The main point I want to make here is that MUCH is covert.  Even the legislators who take an interest and try to pass helpful laws have no grasp of how much underground action there is.  Two things to watch: water and the private ownership of rez land -- both limited commodities that will increase in value.  Sovereignty means moving ownership into private and sometimes inexperienced hands just as the Dawes Act was a trust buster.  Very mixed consequences.  And yet we know what happens when the government is the trustee.

Some of this is criminal (both from inside the tribe and from the larger society, including both Montana elements and international networks), but some is law enforcement that represents itself as being against criminal activity and justifies bad behavior that way (which always leads to goals that serve the persons involved, i.e. cops).  Murders, DUI accidents, violence and sexual abuse have gone unaddressed and unresolved.  This serves the interests of some people.  We know what the history of casinos is and who they attract.  Alcohol is only one drug.

Old grudges about jobs, family conflicts, various sorting and subsidies for education or investment, are not forgiven.  Again, the rez justice system is stymied because there is no ultimate "outside" superior court that everyone trusts.   But also there are illicit handshake deals about rez business: contracts, sweet agreements, definitions, stipulated and secret consequences, penalties, evasion of oversight and regulation.  Government desk-riders do NOT want to risk coming to the rez, esp. in winter.  Indians play cats-paw's for whites.

Outsiders depend on personalities more than systems.  In fact, many needed systems don’t exist.  Outsiders can’t figure out how to get statistics or names and addresses.  Addresses don’t mean much when people float around.  Often one needs to know family relationships to locate someone and the relationships will not be tagged by names.  Land line phones don’t work well (the bills run up too easily, the distances are too long) and cell phones have no directories.  Reporters call Earl Old Person because they saw his dancers at the Russell Auction and the media thinks of him as a “chief” as in the movies.  His great strength is personal history with many people over decades.

Schools are state creatures: they run on state law.  In the last decades they have become more hierarchical, more controlling, and more prescriptive. This is the context for Willie Sharp, as a former principal in a time when disobedient kids are sometimes arrested by police.  I’ve taught with two of the former teachers on one version or another of this council.  They have not changed.

The idea of Tribal Councils came out of the time decades ago when “corporations” were being formed in business.  I had always thought of them as democracies controlled by their shareholders, but these days they have become oligarchies everywhere -- mostly because of the greed of the shareholders.  They want profit and will fire any board members who don’t take whatever measures are necessary, regardless of social damage or consequences displaced to the future.  The timeline is today-tomorrow, and no later.  Anyway, half the share-holders are ON the rez, taking the consequences of immediate decisions, and half the share-holders are OFF the rez, without being much involved except to cash their check.  The latter are more likely to be “fractionated” and low “quantum.”  Many have no attachment to the place in an emotional sensory way -- only the entitlement to a check.

Outside but parallel to the “corporation” structure of the reservation there remains a cultural system, partly the remnants of pre-existing ways and partly the product of literature, other media, anthropology, political bodies like AIM, Christian churches with strong pentecostal elements, charter schools based on culture, and university work, including both Montana state schools and elite places that give priority to Indians, like Harvard.  This “virtual” structure doesn’t always match reality.

Another competing but quiet network is that of the Cree Chippewa greater community, which is woven into the Blackfeet rez by history, marriage, and provenance.  Outsiders don’t grasp that a person can be fully indigenous without being enrolled in the Blackfeet tribe. Indeed, they might be without enough provenance quantum big enough for them to belong to any tribe at all, as fractionated as the land. This is because of government schools for people of courting age, the government’s bright idea of pushing the Cree Chippewa onto the Blackfeet rez, and the relocation movement that tried to disperse rez people into the cities but only created Indian ghettoes.  Maybe military service creates another network.

SHAUN TAYLOR-CORBETT ("Blackfeet")

In the opposite direction, both the change to Indian preference in government and tribal jobs and the coinciding “aging to failure” of white-owned small businesses and ranches that were established after WWII has removed a social element that was politically untenable but also stabilizing.  Their children have a sense of entitlement that is more family than tribe-based.  Some are easily able to “pass” and have good off-rez connections that allow them to leave, which is a loss of brains and energy.

In the end all these forces combine to create a “nation” of dissenters, who are invested in maintaining their identity and the status quo by BEING dissenters.  The point of difference simply moves from one resolution to the next problem without acknowledging that anything got done.  There’s a sense of righteousness, separation from the possibility of failure and denial of all experiments or advances.  It’s common in survivors, a reaction to trauma.

Some essential people have died.  We miss them deeply.  They were from a generation of idealists and doers.  Think what they would say.

_________

In addition to posting some things on this blog, I have a small email list to whom I forward selected posts.  I was startled to get this reaction from Sidner Larson.  If you don't know him, he's Jim Welch's cousin, grew up on the High Line where he acquired and managed a successful bar, then became a lawyer, and finally now is a professor of Native American literature.  He is the author of a fine memoir called "Catch Colt," which was published by U of Nebraska Press before they caught the French philosophy fever, and "Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing" from the University of Washington Press.  For the past decade he has noted that the boom-time Indian Studies programs of the '70's and 80's have been eroding by underfunding.

Hi Mary, thanks for this, which, in my view, is very significant.

There is much talk and some effort to open discussion of cultural and environmental sustainablility in some areas of Contemporary American Indian Studies, but it often fails to get beyond perpetuation of  old stereotypes of the Noble Savage rather than address actual issues of living communities.

The what-goes-without saying, which is most everything, again in my view, is driven by late-stage capitalism, which cares for nothing except immediate profits.

The profit motive is also systematically eliminating and neutralizing those capable of understanding and articulating essential cultural and environmental issues, such as some scholars formerly protected by academic freedom.

Your post has enormous potential; I hope you develop it fully and that others see the possibility of incorporating it into their own work.

Meanwhile, the weather is just plain weird around here, and, quite excruciating again this morning.

With Best Regards,

Sid

GET OUT YOUR TABLETS !!

Going apart as a way of going forward is one of the springs of evolution.  When a population is isolated -- on an island or in a valley or through some human social circumstance from quarantine to security-protected privilege -- then they may develop new specific anatomies or strategies that suit the circumstances.  Then if a boat, a railroad, a change in social mores, releases those new factors into the general larger population, the effect can be invigorating.  Or merely destructive.  Or fatal.  Or creative.

Our attention tends to be drawn to the moment of confrontation when the subcategory suddenly erupts and insists on change.  But in fact the accumulation of preceding small changes plus the macro-change of the context, either of which category could have been the precipitator, is probably the most important object of study in order to cope with emergency level events and fallout over the following years.

I’m watching this closely on the Blackfeet Reservation where has been a cascade of colorful events.  Let’s stick to the case of Shannon Augare.  The recent incident is that this young man, a member of the Tribal Council and also the elected state representative, was at the local prestige bar in Cut Bank, a white oil town next to the rez, with his mother.  He left at closing time, was followed by a pair of Cut Bank cops and stopped on the reservation which begins only blocks away.  Arguing about jurisdiction (a very old dilemma), the cop escalated by reaching into the car to get control of the keys.  To prevent this, Augare drove off.  He was found on the rez by the tribal cops, parked, with his mother in the driver’s seat.  

There was no OJ Simpson pursuit.  At no point was an objective measure of intoxication made.  A ticket for a court appearance was issued and served by tribal police the next day.  The tribal council law and order head moved the issue over to the federal justice system.  The tribal chair, Willie Sharp, asked Shannon to recuse himself until the matter was sorted out.  So far, he has refused.

I’m not interested in right or wrong, though everyone else -- involved or not -- is pursuing the incident in terms of whether Augare is guilty or innocent.  What interests me is the long “grazing plain” behind this “buffalo jump” moment and the long processing period that we are working on now.  These two areas are where the connections can be made.  These are the contexts that cause off-rez people, esp. non-Indians, to become completely baffled, including young reporters sent to get something factual out of the situation. 

This time the situation is particularly interesting because a videographer is putting speeches on YouTube, so the world can see the famous Blackfeet gift for rhetoric and dramatic gesture.  Shan Fagstrom is unknown to me so I won’t speculate about where he came from or what he’s up to.  The fact of video is quite different from written documents and restores the Blackfeet to their comfort zone, which is oral communication.  This is a technological shift -- the fact that it exists, that there is probably close to critical mass of cyber-skill and availability of devices on the rez (the schools are investing in tablet computers).  It will draw back the curtain for off-rez people who are either afraid of visiting or have no reason to come.  On the other hand, there is among the People a pent-up desire to be seen and heard -- hopefully understood -- without an intermediary.  It can seem like grandstanding and sometimes it is.

Let’s begin with two videos that I saw for the first time this morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B9C_8uywQM   is Bill Old Chief, a middle class rancher from the same social context as Augare.  What he’s doing is traditional: counting coup, telling about defying the enemy.  The father of Jim Welch, also called Jim Welch, told me that when he was a boy the sidewalks in Browning were actually boardwalks, raised alongside the dirt horse-trodden roadway.  Welch was small enough to lurk under the lip of that walkway in order to listen to the old men who would sit there on a long bench in front of the mercantile store to warm themselves, both with sun and with stories of their feats as young men.  They spoke Blackfeet, which Welch understood though he didn’t speak it well.  And they added signtalk, something like Old Chief demonstrating how he tore the Blackfeet constitution in half and then tore one half into bits which he threw in the air to demonstrate how disrespected the document is.

http://www.vidstopin.com/video/2UkoqFiLe4k_san-francisco-police-threaten-to-arrest-zachary-running-wolf-for-burning-sage/   Zachary Running Wolf would be described in different ways depending on who’s doing the describing:  activist, outlier, provocateur, traditionalist . . . trickster.  He’s a bit of a Napi figure, defying two minority cops, who were produced by the efforts of law enforcement to co-opt the social divisions that resist order.  This woman officer has made the mistake of choosing shaky ground to take a stand.  The black officer is divided between trying to back her up and his own opinion (I'm guessing) that it's minor.  Zachary’s sage burning is a twig in his own hand and more likely to burn him than anything else, but on the other hand fire is always a danger.  This is a city combustible with social issues that can flare over symbolic gestures.

By now I’m curious about Shan Fagstrom.  He’s not editing, just filming straight.  No fancy camera work, just a solid tripod.  Both situations were evidently staged but not scripted.  Fagstrom has a whole series on YouTube.  So I viewed more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noGNFIOIKtc  This vid is of a beautiful, educated, Tribal Judge named Dawn Running Wolf explaining her struggle with Augare and his attorney Tom McKay.  She is explaining how she applied standard US law in the interest of objectivity and legality.  An ongoing problem is that there is no intertribal appeals court or supreme court.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOunJzZNQB0  is Gordon Monroe, the person I know best because he was a student of mine and a co-worker with Bob Scriver.  He made the two big fiberglass statues of Bob’s rodeo series.  He is a Christian pastor who has been deeply involved in relief work among the tribal poor.  He’s a person who stands on many boundaries, but not a man who’s easily stampeded. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP7wMXorRWQ  Geraldine Gordon is a long-time activist who has written many letters to the Glacier Reporter.  I taught her children and her husband worked with Bob Scriver, but I don’t know her.  I think she’s not particularly religious, but many women on the rez have entered the political arena through the social services, empowered by old-time ceremonial participation or by the Catholic Cursillo movement.  A curious result of this is that when I came in 1961, the rule was that whites and Indians never touched, except that men would shake hands to indicate equality.  Now, women like Betty Cooper, Theda New Breast, Frosty Calf Boss Ribs, and so on will hug other women warmly, including white women.  Some men will do that, but with ceremonial caution.  The symbolism is full acceptance as human beings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSPOq9E9EaQ  I’m not entirely sure who this is in the wheelchair, but I think it’s Tiny Man HeavyRunner, much aged and ill, quite unlike the young Tiny Man who was a rhetorical point man for AIM.  He’s a Blackfeet speaker and, as is usual, the language is used as prayer.  If this is Tiny Man, he was on my class rolls as “Floyd.”  I worked with his father and his grandfather and also taught his son.  

These cops standing around are BIA.  They know the difference between protected ceremonial speech and political rhetoric.  The shift in the nature of police is a big part of this story.  Highly trained, often with military experience, uniformed and armored, they look impressive but are never completely funded enough for a reservation this huge.  These people are basically imported temps.  The tribes they may have worked with in the past may include those in the Middle East.

It’s going to take a long time to work through all these videos.  But what a great thing it is to have something to work with -- IF we can prevent YouTube from dumping all the evidence.  These materials can be censored at the touch of a button, not the one in your hand, but the one far away in the Cloud.

GEOLOGICAL METAPHORS ON THE EAST SLOPE OF THE ROCKIES

The term Allochthon in structural geology is used to describe a large block of rock which has been moved from its original site of formation, usually by low angle thrust faulting. From the Greek "allo" meaning other and "chthon" designating the process of the land mass being moved under the earth and connecting two horizontally stacked décollements and thus "under the earth". . .

An allochthon which is isolated from the rock that pushed it into position is called a klippe. If an allochthon has a "hole" in it so that one can view the autochthon beneath the allochthon, the hole is called a "window" (or Fenster). Etymology: Greek; 'allo' = other, and 'chthon' = earth.

In limnology, allochthonous sources of carbon or nutrients come from outside the aquatic system (such as plant and soil material). Carbon sources from within the system, such as algae and the microbial breakdown of particulate organic carbon, are autochthonous. In streams and small lakes, allochthonous sources of carbon are dominant while in large lakes and the ocean, autochthonous sources dominate. (Eby, 2004)

The term "allochthonous" is also used in the social sciences, as the opposite to autochthonous.

I love all these geological structure words and the concepts they suggest.  I understand them a lot more easily than I can understand structural concepts that come from human geometry and engineering, like cyber-technical stuff.  So let me see what I can do with this great set of words I just found.  They’re right out of the Rocky Mountains.

Since I’m already reflecting about the current situation on the Blackfeet Rez, which is highly emotional and affects individuals in ways that both evoke and justify passion, what might be gained from looking at the forces in terms of huge masses of stone, especially since the rez is on the east slope of the Rockies where the geology is much affected by subterranean forces?  I left in all the links so non-geologists can check out definitions.  You’ll note that much of this is relevant to oil fields and mineral deposits.  I’ll proceed in a simplistic way.

Structural geology is the study of deformations and stresses and the resulting patterns.  This is what “doodlebugs” (exploring geologists) look for: the patterns that are likely to have created underground capture pockets for oil and gas, or that may show igneous intrusions (volcanoes) that pushed up deposits like the gold in the Sweetgrass Hills along the Canadian border.  

One of the phenomena produced by these forces is a huge block of stone that has been pushed along a weak layer of rock to a new place, usually from low down on the block.  It may be a klippe. “A klippe (Danish for cliff or crag) is a geological feature of thrust fault terrains. The klippe is the remnant portion of a nappe after erosion has removed connecting portions of the nappe. This process results in an outlier of exotic, often nearly horizontally translated strata overlying autochthonous strata. Examples of klippes include:  Chief Mountain, Montana.”

“A nappe or thrust sheet is a large sheetlike body of rock that has been moved more than 2 km (1.2 mi)or 5 km (3.1 mi) above a thrust fault from its original position. The term stems from the French word for tablecloth in allusion to a crumpled tablecloth being pushed across a table.”

Autochthonous is a word I use a lot as a synonym for indigenous, something that developed where it is, out of the potential and materials right there.  I haven’t used allocthonous, something that came in from another place like the Euro-culture wave that came in over the top of the pre-existing peoples on the prairie.  In this case, they didn’t "rumple the tablecloth," they burned holes in it and tore it into pieces.  And then, to pick up the reference to limnology, they threw water on it and all sorts of things floated in.

A fenster (you know, fenestration or defestration: windows, holes; jumping out windows) is a place where it’s possible to see through the overlying allocthonous to the indigenous underneath.  I’m trying to think about what a cultural “fenster” on the Blackfeet rez might be.  Is it North American Indian Days when everyone comes to dance to the drum?  Is it Piegan Institute which supports the Immersion Blackfeet Language School?  Is it the Museum of the Plains Indian where artifacts are displayed and explained?  The Catholic church is clearly not one, though Father Ed tries to make places in the European Mass where the indigenous symbols and values are included as “fensters.”  

But who is sophisticated enough to know what are true fensters?  My criteria would be geological: if it relates to life on the prairie in the buffalo days, then it’s a view of the original autochthonous culture.   It might not have anything to do with material culture: a buffalo robe is not necessarily a fenster.  Taking in a child who has no home IS a fenster, a cultural practice arising from the group that traveled together on the prairie.  A discussion circle that included elders (who are now my age and older) might happily identify fensters as guides for future decisions.

Typically, the basal detachment of the foreland part of a fold-thrust belt lies in a weak shale or evaporite at or near the basement.  Rocks above the décollement are allocthonous, rocks below are autochthonous.  In my view it is clear that the “evaporite” was the buffalo -- that’s what evaporated -- and that the “weak shale” remains economic.  NOT military or even political.  People begin to rebel when they feel they are starving, or shut out from success.  This is a moral issue: all human beings “deserve” enough to eat, a decent place to live, educated children and so on.

When all the supply is on one side (often allocthonous) and the demand is on the other side (often autochthonous) what fensters will help us understand and think of stabilizing the culture “strike and slip”?  Chief Mountain is a klippe that gives us a literally outstanding reference point, in this specific case a guide to where the 49^th parallel is, so what are the cultural klippes that will help us all figure out where other “lines” are, even the ones that mark arbitrary allopolitical boundaries? 

At present the tendency is to use strong personalities as guides.  The more prominent they are, the more chief, the more likely to attract attention, but that doesn’t mean they are useful, and often they have become prominent by using the slippage between the allocthonous overburden and the autochthonous substrate.  At the worst they can be Samson in the Temple, which is an old Euro Bible story about a man who pulled the stone temple down on his own head.  It’s in Judges 16.  

But this Samson, Will Sampson, gentle giant, would not have done that.  He bailed out of the cuckoo’s nest. In him was the deep ignited fire of a passionate autochthonous heart.  

ISLANDS OF JURISDICTION

Town of Browning, Montana

Pockets of jurisdiction and the necessary dividing lines are always problematic.  When I was an animal control officer, even a dog knew that if he stood on his own lawn, we could not “catch” him.  It was a headache to keep track of several small subdivisions that refused to contract with us to enforce their dog laws, then agreed, and maybe a few years later again refused.

When I first came to the rez in 1961, there was a town police force and judge that enforced town ordinances -- mostly public drunkenness.  This was the result of post WWII chaos and the legalization of booze on the rez, which triggered many burglaries and much violence, mostly Indian-on-Indian.  The town businessmen (mostly white) taxed themselves to pay for law enforcement separate from the inadequate reservation police guided by the Indian Service and sort of semi-governed by the tribe and the usually uninterested FBI.  (There was no Indian Power movement at the time.)  Bob Scriver was the town magistrate, so as his sidekick I was a witness to a lot of things, both social patterns and the difficulty of managing a sovereign entity (the town) in the middle of the reservation.  Some enrolled members put their land back into trust with the federal government, and that land became an island of the reservation in the middle of the island of jurisdiction that was the town.  As always, patterns of race mixed with patterns of space.  Bob put drunks into the jail; the tribal council -- who ran the jail -- released them.  Unless they were enemies, in which case, good luck.  

I’m not clear about what started the movement to end town sovereignty.  The man who was supposed to close down the Browning town police was named Suarez and I’m also unclear about what his source of authority was, except that it was federal.  He wore a puffy down coat all the time because he was always cold.  I remember him as being from Cuba, but that doesn’t seem possible.  There was one big showdown meeting, VERY intense, in which the town argued for its right to hire police (as many universities and shopping malls do today) and Suarez resisted.  In the end he won.  

At the time I was writing a column in the Glacier Reporter called “The Merry Scribbler.”  It began as natural history and soon turned political, but Mike Mansfield did not read it into the Congressional Record since it was not about funny Indian drunks, the way John Tatsey’s columns were about the same time.  I was okay so long as Milo Fields was the editor, since he was an old-fashioned journalist, but he left.  When I wrote about the mayor running the city waterline outside the town boundaries in order to supply his newly built motel, The Warbonnet, my columnist days and Bob’s magistrate days were ended.  Bob kept being re-elected as a Justice of the Peace, but always declined because by that time the sculpture business was taking off.  As I write, the motel building is being torn down.  I still think of it as “new,” but it doesn’t even compare to the actual “new” motel attached to the casino. 

The Warbonnet -- state of the art in 1972.

We've reached a new flashpoint.  Everything moves on, the pattern changes.  What was once taken for granted becomes intolerable and what was once regulated comes undone.  The results are very mixed.  The basic underlying causes are always economic, and that always comes back to two kinds of “turf,” one virtual and the other actual.  It is the dividing lines between two turfs that either make trouble, prevent trouble, generate profit, or prevent profit.

There is an entire academic field called “border studies.”  There’s much theory, mostly about relations between nations.  New York journalists are fascinated by the border between the Pine Ridge Reservation and its vampire town “White Earth” which is based on the blood quantum of beer.  Rez towns are generally federal. (Maybe what doomed the Browning “island of jurisdiction” was that it was an intrusion of the state into a territory the feds wanted ultimate control over.  The tribe makes an effective red herring.)  The tribe would need to protect its umbilical cord to Washington DC more than it would need the mid-level governance of the state, though it did finally accept some child and family services, the schools, the public county library -- non-threatening services with little profit.  

But blocking state laws on the reservation had a lot of advantages: think building codes, business law, distribution networks, fireworks, tobacco, etc.  All this worked a lot better in some ways when the population was thinner.  Certainly it worked better before tribal members got more sophisticated.   

Sovereignty (who gets to be the king) is an issue so enflamed with emotion that it’s very hard to reason out causes and consequences.  Emotion always trumps obvious solutions, if someone finds the right hot button.  The Blackfeet never had kings.  There was a lot of rhetoric and sometimes quarrels, but the bands were small and the prairie was wide -- a person could move on.  Or just kill the enemy.

Hugh Dempsey tells about how it was managed when the Kalispell or Flatheads wanted to come to Blackfeet territory to hunt buffalo.  The hunting group would stay hidden while they sent the most persuasive among them to sit on a hill overlooking the camp and wait to be spotted.  If the band were in a mood to parlay, someone would go up and bring down the diplomat.  Sitting in a circle smoking “three bowls of tobacco,” the important men would get used to this visitor: his smell, the way he dressed, how well he handled the pipe when it was his turn, whether they remembered him, who he reminded them of, and so on.  Eventually he would tell them how much his group needed to hunt and how good buffalo would taste.  After enjoying the suspense as long as it was interesting, the men would agree and the hunters could cross the land.

But if tempers were running hot and patience was worn thin, if maybe a war party had killed an admired person, someone just went out and, while the envoy sat on the hill, simply shot the man.  Definitive.  Finito.  There were crying children in the lodges on the other side of the Rockies.

http://nativenews.jour.umt.edu/2013/?page_id=30

I don’t have a dog in this fight.  Except that I would like to see all deliberation in thinking through this everlasting human problem of turf.  Perhaps the way is to think of what the ultimate goal might be, like no crying children, and no more games of King of the Hill.  Sometimes I think the real reconfiguration needs to start with the United States, maybe breaking them into ecosystems: west coast, prairie, midwest, east coast, south.  

Most people would agree that there are too many counties in this state, due to some entrepreneur in the past who made a lot of money by organizing new counties.  Maybe instead of gerrymandering voting districts, the thing to do is to reconfigure all the counties, beginning by making each reservation match its boundaries to the county line, so that it WAS a county.  I don’t know what to do about the Federal presence now that they have the mighty crowbar of Homeland Security in their hands.  The FBI is only one among the many law enforcers now.  And there is the problem that due to borrowing, much reservation land has slipped into non-Indian ownership.

Most countries have indigenous peoples and are putting pressure on them.  I include the Romany.  Once a caravan of gypsies came through Browning and we all went outside to watch them slowly drive through town.  Ordinary trailers, but with canary cages and geranium pots, and a police escort because they psyched out the cops.  The Romany pay a high price to keep their culture, but they do it without any land base at all.  Kings of the road.

LEVI JULIAN BURD

LEVI J. BURD, BROWNING, RANCHER AND OILMAN, DIES

Great Falls Tribune, Vol.69, No 357, Sunday, May 6, 1956

Levi Julian Burd, 78, Browning rancher and oilman, died Saturday morning at a Great Falls hospital.

Private funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Monday at the George Co. with Rev. Vernon Hanks officiating.  Cremation will follow.

Burd, a Montana native, had been active until he was hospitalized two weeks ago after suffering a stroke.  He suffered another stroke Thursday night.  Five years ago he underwent brain surgery.

Burd was born Sept. 7, 1877, at Sun River, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Burd.

His father came to Virginia City from Michigan in 1864 in search of gold and stayed to establish a ranching empire that extended from the Sun River north to Canada.

The family later moved to Choteau where Burd, the last survivor of a family of six children, received his education.  He also attended Gonzaga University at Spokane.

At the age of 12, Burd’s father made him a representative in charge of his outfit which joined with wagons and wranglers of other ranches in finding and branding cattle on the range.

These roundup teams would leave Choteau in March and travel to the Sun River, Great Falls and into the Sweetgrass Hills seeking cattle.  They usually ended their job in November.  At that time there were no fences or homestead farms in the region.

Following his father’s death, Burd managed the vast estate.

He married Daisy Francis Wetzel of Fort Benton Dec. 1, 1897, at Holy Family Mission near Browning and the couple ranched in that area until Burd’s death.  They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary here in 1947.

Burd served two terms on the Montana livestock board.  He had been active in promoting the oil industry in Glacier county and managed the Levi Burd Trustee Oil Interests in association with a son-in-law, B.P. McNair.

Survivors include the widow; two daughters, Mrs. Ben P. McNair, formerly of Great Falls, now of Laguna Beach, CA., and Mrs. Dorothy Cassutt, Detroit, and a grandson, Richard Cassutt, Browning rancher.

____________________________

Levi Burd, who was thirty when the 1907-08 census was taken, married Daisy Wetzel, who was a sister of Pearl Wetzel Hagerty.  Levi Burd and Wright Hagerty were the two richest tribal men on the Blackfeet reservation, worth $100,000 in the Thirties.  They ranched five miles apart along the Milk River.  Both were active in tribal politics, oil development, sheep and cattle.  One of Bob Scriver’s prized possessions was Wright Hagerty’s custom saddle.  It was one of his markers of success.

Levi Burd’s mother, Susan Two Guns, was married three times:  first, to Sam Burd, who was white; then to Anthony Austin; and third to Two Guns Whitecalf “in the custom of the country,” for 35 years.  Her father was Good Medicine.  Her half-sister, Gretchen, (same father) was the wife of David Duvall, the informant for Clarke Wissler, the first anthropologist to seriously study the Blackfeet.  Susan was well-connected.  

In fact, the Burd/Hagerty/Two Guns Whitecalf complex is an excellent illustration of how power and wealth develops in a delineated hybrid group.  There are cross-overs that supply starter investment, a family conviction of superiority and entitlement that lends confidence, lines of private communication between Indian and White as well as among contingents of full-blood, mixed blood, and hardly-any-blood.  Levi Burd was capable of putting on a beaded white buckskin parade outfit plus Sioux eagle-feather bonnet in order to visit Washington, D.C.  But he normally wore a suit appropriate for visiting a bank.  In that guise one might assume he was Mexican or Mediterranean, a stocky man with sturdy features.

His most remarkable alliance has only recently come to light in the process of Joyce Smith sorting her aunt’s papers, which include correspondence with Clare Sheridan, Winston Churchill’s cousin, who was on the Blackfeet Reservation in the summer and fall of 1937.  Officially, Clare was there as an artist and did indeed learn from Hans Reiss how to carve a tree trunk, not into a totem pole, but into a vertical sculpture, often religious.  She also stayed with the family of Gerald Tail Feathers on the Alberta side.  But she spent enough time with Levi Burd that people talked.  Technically, she was staying with Norma Smith, who was teaching in the one-room school house near the Burd ranch.  

Naturally, given Clare’s frank ideas about intimacy and the public suspicion about what rich men do, the idea was that they were having an affair.  But after looking at the references to Levi Burd in Paul C. Rosier’s indispensable book,  “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954,” I suspect that was just a distraction -- sex is always a dependable distraction.  1937 was the early beginnings of WWII.  My premise is that Clare had been asked by Churchill to scout the territory between Alberta and Montana, which has always been a major oil-producing field.  No one understood the oil business better or was more deeply involved than Levi Burd.

Far from being a revenue-generating serendipity that only has to be pumped out of the ground and transported to market, the business of leases, price-setting, governmental regulation, profit-sharing was then-as-now very complex.  Properly handled, there was a lot of profit.  Without some expertise and restraint, the carpet-baggers got most of it.  Old-timer tribal leaders believed that the government was legally obligated to take care of them.  Mixed blood entrepreneurs just wanted the BIA out of the way.  There were times when Burd reached out to protect full-bloods, and other times when Two Guns Whitecalf bowed to the Middle Class mixed bloods.  It’s confusing enough to reconcile participation in mainstream America with the need to retain Blackfeet identity, without figuring out how some of these little surprises happen.  No doubt at least sometimes it was family loyalty, consciousness of a need, creating favors to be called in later.  

There is another reason for Churchill to want to know more about this region.  The Fenians, Irish independents, had a diaspora here descended from fur trading and the Red River metis community.  There must have been worry about how they would react to an English/German conflict since they had such a long history of conflict.  In the end they were neutral, but there would be the possibility of some “monkey-wrench gang” interdicting the access to oil that a nation needs in order to wage war.  Gerald Tail Feathers’ mother was half-Irish.  Clare and Churchill shared another cousin who was landed gentry in Ireland.

Earlier Clare had gone to Moscow to make portraits of the important Communist leaders.  She always insisted that she did not spy and did not go there to spy but simply as a sculptor of busts.  Churchill was very angry with her.  And yet her opinions and observations had to be valuable.

Levi Burd was not a lean and naked young man on a buffalo-running horse, but he was also an important figure in the history of his people as the globe became more connected and therefore more dangerous.  On the rez they call oil “the second buffalo.”  One goes out hunting for it while wearing a suit.

_______

I'm including this in the post instead of as a comment, because I think it is too important to overlook.  It's SO vital to look beyond just Montana.

Dear Mary:

Interesting article on Levi Burd, Clare Sheridan and oil wells.

Regarding your idea that Winston Churchill wanted Clare to scout the region, you may know that the burgeoning Turner Valley oilfield southwest of Calgary so interested Churchill that he visited the region in 1929 while in Calgary for a talk to the local branch of the Canadian Club.

To understand the importance of Turner Valley, note that by 1941 it was providing about one-quarter of all of Canada’s oil needs during the Second World War. Churchill is reported to have said during his 1929 visit: “There are unbounded possibilities both to Alberta and to the British Empire in this valuable oil-bearing structure.”

Churchill is further reported to have bought shares in three oil companies while in Canada. Maybe Churchill was also interested in Montana oil production.

As for any possible dalliance between Levi Burd and Clare Sheridan, I think it would have been unlikely – not impossible, just unlikely. I found an old report about the reservation (1914-15) in which loose morals are a center of discussion. The head of the police was living with a married woman, and it asked how he could enforce the Montana marriage code when he was breaking it himself. There was quite a discussion about native marriage and divorce customs, the citizenship status of natives and whether the rules of white men could apply to natives who weren’t then classified as U.S. citizens.

Given that sort of atmosphere, Burd’s mixed blood status and his rank in the community, it’s more likely he would have stayed clear of any hanky-panky that could have brought him unwanted scrutiny.

Burd had seen what happened to Robert Hamilton, a mixed blood activist on the reservation, and took a lesson from it. I say that based on an investigation in 1915 of Hamilton that I turned up which contains some pretty nasty claims about Hamilton being a cattle thief, forging checks, abandoning his family and the like. Enough that there was a scuffle at the Browning post office involving Hamilton and others in which Hamilton says he was badly manhandled. The affidavits are fascinating reading – a who’s who of Browning and reservation society, including James White Calf, Dick Sanderville and Wades in the Water.

Burd, who was active in local politics, often opposing Hamilton’s efforts, would have wanted to avoid any situation (like having an affair) that would have compromised his influence and standing in the community.

Ray Djuff

Calgary

TRIBAL COHERENCE AMONG THE BLOODS

The most recent addition to my Blackfeet library is a double-monograph published in 1945 by the American Ethnological Society, Inc.  First monograph is “Changing Configurations in the Social Organization of a Blackfoot Tribe During the Reserve Period”  (The Blood of Alberta, Canada.) by Esther Goldfrank.  The second is “Observations on Northern Blackfoot Kinship” by L.M. Hanks, Jr. and Jane Richardson. 

Everyone’s fav “third force” psychology theorist, Abraham Maslow, he of the marvelous pyramid of “needs” with the cherry on top being “peak experience,” came out to the prairie to look around, possibly to help with this study, and soon concluded the land of wind and dust was not for him.  He withdrew.  The study made by Goldfrank and cohort was nine weeks long and included a Sun Dance, but no comment was made on whether it was a “peak experience” as many devotees in the Aquarian Age have thought.  (Pain endorphins work.)

The original plan for this set of monographs was that four small team of inquirers would do a study of each of the four main groups of the Siksika or Blackfoot Nation.  The instigator was the redoubtable Ruth Benedict but the plan was truncated by WWII.   Goldfrank consolidated what was available, mostly about the Blood.  At first everything seemed very open and agreeable in the collection process, though Goldfrank had worked with the Pueblo and had found them secretive, elusive, covertly at war.  Only back in New York City, when the Blackfoot oral material was compared to the written archives, did discrepancies turn up, often at the expense of the governmental authorities rather than the tribal people, who were being strategic in what they reported.  As would be predicted, the change in circumstances forced by the reserve had intensified an already competitive and individualistic sort of behavior.  What a male observer might not have noted was that the suppression of polygamy forced the women into harsher competitive relationships and allowed much less impact from women making common cause, possibly urging peace.

Esther Goldfrank came to the Blood Reserve in 1939, two years after Clare Sheridan was there, and after WWII had started, rather than just before.  She was from a different affinity group: the “left” German Jewish Ethical Culture socialists.  (In Canada, socialism and even communism are legitimate points of view, not demonized.)  Clare, though neither German nor Jewish but deeply Catholic, would have shared this. In Alberta the KKK had a strong foothold.  Neither Clare nor Esther would have had any sympathy.  However, Wittfogel -- Esther’s second husband -- named names for the political witchhunters in the Fifties out of disillusion with Communists.  These were tough, independent women. Esther died at age 100 in 1997.  http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/goldfrank-esther-schiff

When I come upon these seemingly dry old materials, I google everyone I see named, including the Blackfeet.  Sometimes I recognize the descendants of the named tribal people, or at least can find them in the Blackfeet census of 1907-08.  The scientists are all transient.  A few became famous.  Some have had impact on the larger world without becoming known, never famous in the way Benedict or Maslow are landmarks.  No one writes articles about Goldfrank and Wittfogel, but maybe someone should.  (They are at least in Wikipedia but we don’t know who wrote the entries or what the writer's point of view might be.)  It seems obvious that the writer, like the subjects, came from that company of highly educated German (and sometimes Marxist) refugees who brought so much high theory with them across the ocean to Manhattan.  Part of their value is that with their emphasis on subconscious forces they so challenge the other dominant American paradigm, that of English and Dutch order -- rigid givens fled by Edith Wharton and Henry James.  When we read about prairie indigenous cultures, do we take into account the culture wars among the investigators, their biases and assumptions?

Sometimes this stuff doubles back on itself in amazing ways, becoming suddenly relevant.  This quote is in the Wikipedia entry:

“Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, first published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India’s "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's sceptical view of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society, coining the term hydraulic empire" to describe the system.”

The original premise of the American Department of Indian Affairs was that they would imitate  the Conrad brothers’ success to the south of the Blackfeet reservation (right here in Valier) by irrigation.  The scandalous Foley report is largely an account of the bungling unreality of what actually happened on the rez, expending huge amounts of money and effort to dig ditches that didn’t work, even though the headwaters of what is now the Pondera Canal Company is at Swift Dam, right on the Blackfeet Reservation.  If you think about Wittfogel’s theories, it’s pretty easy to guess that the reason for the failure is the Federal “hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" -- political rather than a fault of either engineering or geology.

But now change focus to the present.  Forget irrigation.  Think frakking, which is another use of water but far more industrial and covert, since it happens underground.  I wrote a version of the Pluto/Demeter myth that is a “Western,” in which Pluto is coal and Demeter is wheat.  A new version of the old story might re-cast oil as the force of evil greed, but this time contamination of the underground aquifers might mean more than wheat -- indeed, it could end human habitation as we know it, instead imposing “the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them” in a new “hydraulic empire."  

Plains Indians are genetically Asiatic in origin -- neither European nor African.  Who knows what difference that makes?  The Wiki author continues:  “To do this, the state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. This required a large and complex bureaucracy staffed by competent and literate officials. This structure was uniquely placed to also crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such a state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy.”  This worked for Anaconda Copper Company, but not for the Blackfeet.

Both studies in the two monographs are about the Blood faction of the Blackfoot Nation.  The first, longer, one is an attempt to understand the internal conflicts and destructive competitions of the 20^th century reserve.  The conclusion is that what had held the people together in the earlier times, even into the horse days, was the need to cooperate in order to insure a food supply by hunting buffalo, either with piskuns or with guns.  Rivalry was always there, but it was held in check.  By “1939, these ‘turbulent’ Indians were still “exceedingly jealous among themselves”; they still had “frequent quarrels” which might “end in bloodshed or death”; and they still pursued the individualistic goals that had dominated their society for more than a century and a quarter.”  This conclusion is a disappointment for those hoping proof of the natural -- i.e. “close to nature” -- power of cooperation and sharing.  The conclusion is that today only governmental police can maintain order.  The pyramid is now upside down and the peak experiences must be underground.