THE SACREDNESS OF BLACKFEET LAND

Carol Murray

Before Charles Dye made the exciting video about Indian Relay Racing, he made one about contemporary Indians reflecting on their relationship to wilderness.  That’s how he met Carol Murray, who put him in touch with the Relay people.  Her grandfather, Francis Bull Shoe, had two strong interests: one was relay races and the other was education.  These were cross-generational traditions.  Francis Bull Shoe, 1910 - 1974, was born in 1910, to Joseph "Joe" Bull Shoe and Cecilia Bull Shoe (née Russell).  Joseph was born circa 1879, in Montana.  Cecilia was born circa 1882.  Francis had 8 siblings.  He married Lillian Henault, who lived to be 102.  They had 6 children.

Carmen, June, Francis Jr., Doris, Joan

Lillian seated in front.  This is probably in the Sixties.

The four “Bull Shoe girls” all became teachers in the local Browning or Heart Butte school system.  Doris married Earl Old Person who is chief and often chair of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. Joan Kennerly was born in Browning on March 5, 1933, the third eldest of five children.  The other teaching sisters were Carmen Marceau and June Tatsey.  I knew them personally but I’m slightly younger.  They earned Master’s degrees in the Seventies after I had left.  All but June have gone over the horizon.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/tomorrows_test/2016/06/the_blackfeet_tribe_needs_more_teachers_so_it_s_letting_them_train_without.html

To get a bit of formal written history, I pulled out Adolph Hungry Wolf’s major biography book.  John Ewers, the WWII era anthropologist who lived in Browning and did much basic research, wrote that Bull Shoe (after the death of Many Horses) was the wealthiest Pikuni and he remarked on his fine horses, the result of careful breeding.  In 1921 Superintendent Campbell noted that the 43 year old “3/4 blood” Francis had the best house in the district, a log cabin with six rooms well-furnished.  Campbell felt he was an excellent farmer.  These achievements indicate the temperament and family pride that carry people through many bad times.  What visiting journalists don’t necessarily see is how recent has been the culture shift or just how low people can go and still recover.  I’ve seen the Bull Shoe girls at their best and at their worst — they lived life when it was both easy and when it was hard.

But I’m not an historian — more like a consciousness raiser.  Part of that has been participation and part of it has been academic reflection.  Feeling the immanental sacredness of the land can and has been justified by serious academic and historic tradition from the beginning.  What do you think the Biblical Psalms are about?  There is no need to see Blackfeet spirituality as separate and therefore either too mystical to think about or too primitive to take seriously.  But maybe it is best addressed in images like Charles Dye's video:  “Before There Were Parks: Through Native Eyes” about Glacier and Yellowstone.  http://www.montanapbs.org/BeforeThereWereParks/

Allan Pard

Part of what I’m doing in this post is to acknowledge that even the near mathematical theologies of the European Cartesian world support what Allan Pard called the “much more”, somehow perceived by our hundreds of specialized brain cells rather than the utilitarian five organ senses.  And another part is to claim participation in the lives of the indigenous people on the sacred dimension and the ability of “whites” to contribute and feel it.  (Allan Pard, who just passed this May — the time of Bundle-Opening —was the person to whom the Medicine Bundles in the Scriver Collection were returned after the Alberta Provincial Government had received them through the Alberta Royal Provincial Museum.) 

This video by Charles Dye comes close to tracing the old indigenous ways in relationship to the new ways that are also indigenous to people who have spent a long time in direct contact with this land, maybe from birth.  Both are holy ways of great human meaning and that is what is recognized when these lands are protected.  

The Medicine Pipe Bundles that Carol describes and legitimately protects as a Keeper and Opener are like these videos.  The ceremony in the first spring thunderstorms means dancing and singing with the skins of animals, mostly birds like the Thunderbird that lives on Chief Mountain.  (That spirit may refer to the huge buffalo-carrion condors that used to soar on the prairie thermals.  Or maybe the fossil bones of the pterodactyls that weather out of the ground.)  The collection of wrapped skins is like a hymnal.  But it is not simple because each song/dance is dependent on a knowledge of the animal represented by a particular skin.  Regardless of one’s DNA, without the kindled ability to “become” that creature by making its sounds and movements, the spirit of it is not present.  This is why it’s so important to get the kids out there weaving the land into their bones and blood.

Carol Tatsey-Murray

Carol is an educated woman who can stand alongside academic anthropologists in a way that her mother and aunts could not because they lived in a time when such ceremonies were stigmatized and mocked as “hokey-pokey” with no meaning.  They only partly believed that, but they were trying hard to be legitimate and certified people in a white state-controlled system.  No such option as Blackfeet Community College existed in their time.  

In Carol’s time, she has actually run the institution and traditionalists/ceremonialists have been welcome.  Even the hair-on-fire zealots have attended to sit arguing together.  Now Jack Gladstone plays his peace guitar-songs in the same space.  The days are gone when such young men were sent off to semi-military schools like Carlisle Indian Industrial School where they studied idealistic white thinkers, were inspired, returned home and tried to form a “literary society”, but were banned because of white fear that they would “get ideas” about empowerment. 

Ceremonies were punished, so they went underground, which is where Bob Scriver — guided by John Hellson who is also gone now — found them by dreaming.  We were Keepers with the old people that Carol knows about but didn’t sit with in the circle.  In those days the practice was shadowy, but Scriver was a City Magistrate, a Justice of the Peace, a local teacher, a respected musician, and the son of an early trader who ran the Browning Mercantile — as well as being a sculptor and curator of a wildlife museum.  If he did it and was not struck by lightning, even spent thousands of dollars to do the Transfer properly, maybe the grandchildren generation ought to step in.  So they did.

While Carol was working on BCC, her husband, John Murray, was fighting hard to remove oil leases from the Badger-Two Medicine.  Now they are all gone but two.  What worked was what this video shows: the felt meaning of a splendid fabric of land spread out before us to inhabit with care and eloquence.

INDIAN RELAY RACING

Part of the Native American renaissance on reservations has been due to “re-birthing” the past, bringing back once traditional practices that were suppressed by white overseers.  One of the most stirring returns has been the revival of Indian Relay Racing.  The proof is in the video linked below:

http://www.pbs.org/video/2365111911/

There is personal meaning for me in this phenomenon through a peripheral relationship in the Sixties.  Pairing up with Bob Scriver meant that I needed a horse, so I bought one for $100 from Don MacRae who had used it for pack trips, since it was an old horse with a scabby problem on its head that looked like mange but wasn’t.  It was an old Bullshoe relay race horse, a tall brown gelding probably descended from cavalry mounts.  Diverting cavalry horses and railroad horses accounted for the origins of many horses on the rez, even into the Sixties.

Bob provided a saddle. He wanted me to ride with him early in the morning.  The first morning I woke up in Browning in my little apartment where the windows looked across an alley and then an empty lot at the Catholic Church, I heard the thunder of hooves.  Before I was quite awake, the white legs of a galloping horse — and boots in stirrups — rushed past that window.  I had no idea who it was.  Later I realized it was Bob  By the next summer, when I was still living there, he would lead my horse up to my window and I would rush out --tucking in my shirttail -- to mount up.

The old brown horse’s improbable name was Skeeter.  He was my “learning horse” and would not do anything he thought was unwise or not according to horse protocol.  You could ride him in any direction as far as you wanted and when you turned around for home, he was there in fifteen minutes.  Bob’s policy was only two words:  “Keep up.”  His horse was broke for bull-dogging and had two speeds:  greased lightning and stop.  Skeeter could and would keep up with Gunsmoke, Bob’s beloved white horse.  Skeeter also stopped abruptly, with the goal of throwing off the rider.

My biggest problem was getting on the horse, even though in those days I was skinnier and had more muscle.  If I used an overturned bucket as a step, Skeeter knew just the right time to kick it out from under me so I’d plant my face instead of my keister in the saddle.  I’d line him up with the corral rail fence, and he’d go perpendicular just as I threw my leg out.  But I didn’t have to whip him to make him go faster.  He’d been quirted in races so thoroughly that all I had to do was hold a twig out to the side far enough for him to see it, and he’d go for miles, rocking along.  There were fewer fences then.

I never did fall off (it was a long way to the ground) but I had no pride about how I stayed on, gripping the horn or whatever else came to hand.  I had no thigh muscles and not much balance.  Bob had two pieces of riding advice: “lean back” and “keep your heels down.”  I bought some boots but the first time I wore them in snow, they disintegrated.  Cheap.

In the early Sixties, the one-time fairgrounds were nothing but a short row of a few stalls in a weathered little tumble of shed.  That’s where I kept my horse: no rent, no permission, total ignorance.  I went out daily with water and I must have taken hay, though I picketed him sometimes which was hopeless because he became mercilessly entangled. and then I tried hobbling, which rubbed his thin thoroughbred ankle skin raw.  He wanted to go back to Trombley’s field where the other horses were.  Once at dawn I met him on the highway, intent on going forward with his front legs tied together, sort of rowing along.  People looked at me sideways and shook their heads.  Clueless Napi-ahki.

It was nothing like today’s sophisticated horse culture where people take lessons and ride in circles in big covered arenas.  Today the Browning fairgrounds are a proper regulation racetrack with well-built stands and respectable stables.  I’ve never attended anything there.  It seems like a foreign country to me.

Nor did I understand anything about Bob’s motives and practices.  He was old enough to be my father and trying to reach back to his youth, which was in the 1920’s.  He needed me to be along in case someone had to go for help and because I was so impressed that I trusted him entirely and that gave him confidence.  If he lost his nerve, he got mad at me and that brought it back.  There was little talking.

This PBS video about Indian Relays impressed me in part because these young guys (no female riders) are just like the Blackfeet, Metis, Cree, and mixed tribe (why isn’t there a word for them yet?) kids I was teaching in the Sixties, except these riders are focused and they have strong male mentors, who are handling them as much as the horses.  There’s just enough chaos and chance involved to offer good lessons about how to manage oneself in a world that’s always going cattywampus.  Like a rez, for instance.

Dutch Lunak

An interesting development was the connection of relay racing with stunt riding for the movies during a little spurt of Westerns in the Nineties.  The competitors were longhairs so they didn’t have to worry about their wigs falling off, and they were rodeo hands and ranchers who weren’t afraid of livestock or getting hurt.  The local story was recounted by John Gill in this linked article:   http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/glacier_reporter/news/article_5b039cad-f685-58dd-affc-f9c2d74f3461.html  

Jobs were not just stunt riding, but also caring for the horses and teaching the actors how to ride.  Then there were spin-offs, like classes in horsemanship for tourists on the rez or training how to be a stunt double.  When a film is being shot on location, the demand for housing and food are high.  The good part is that the quality of the final product doesn’t matter so much as that the producers, cast and crew have good experiences, which locals know how to do.  A sense of humor is crucial.

These folks far outclass me or even Bob.  But more importantly, the contact with professionals who come to the area, the experiences when locals go on location in other places, and the sudden awareness of the whole realm of film in a place where there was no television in the Sixties and the “show house” burned down in the Seventies, has thrown open local people’s lives to the world.  Horses were the unexpected key.  Now we need scripts with horses in them -- but there’s no need for stereotypical 19th century battles.  You don’t need feathers to be an Indian.  But you might need a horse.  A horse can teach you things.  Like tenacity.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/indian-relay-qa-filmmaker-charles-dye/

BTBC CHAIR REPORT 1-27-16

Before and after: 1883

BTBC CHAIR REPORT  1-27-16

by Harry Barnes

I often wonder how we as a people would look today if the Boarding School (Resident School in Canada) experience had not been a reality.  Of course, we as Native people know the purpose of those government institutions.  The vast majority of the white population has no understanding that these schools were designed with the goal of enculturation.  That is the nice way to say “Destroy the Indian and recreate a new good citizen.”

Having gone to Cut Bank Boarding School for two years, I had no idea what was going on.  I guess back then I was just a slow learner.  The older boys tricked us into putting our tongue onto a frozen handrail.  What more did we need to learn?

About Cut Bank Boarding School

These schools were just a part of our movement away from our roots and culture.  Today there are good positive remnants of that society that roamed this area for over 10,000 years, given by the Creator for us to flourish and go beyond existing.  We have the land that has not disappeared to the federal government.  We have an abundance of wildlife, no longer enough to sustain ourselves the way we had.  We have some amazing people that hold onto our old ways and carry it forward.  Not as many as we had, sadly.

If you study the history of the Jews as related in the Bible you will see they were twice taken into captivity.  They could have lost their culture, but some held onto it and cared for it knowing it could return.  For those who hold our old ways, Creator’s blessings on you.

The 2014 Audit has been finished and posted to the Federal Audit Clearing House website.  Please go there and do a search for Blackfeet.  We have made a commitment to fiscal accountability and transparency.  We will now start the 2015 audit, and then we will stay current.

A Washington DC senator

As I type this article I am stuck in Washington, D.C., where people have no idea or concept about travel in snow.  I have been here with a contingent from Blackfeet on issues of Tribal concern.  There has been much concern raised on Facebook about why the Chairman takes so many travels when we have such financial difficulties.  A fair question, and if it is seen on Facebook, it must be true.

The entire cost of this trip was funded by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).  The cost is only one part of the answer.  WCS has partnered with the Blackfeet Tribe to help grow our buffalo herd.  They bring scientific research and funding for our efforts.  With a limited herd size, we are limited on what we can do.  With 450 head we can meet cultural requests, and with buffalo meat from the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council we can distribute to elders.

How do we expand our herd size without money?  It is through strategic alliances with those who have resources and believe in some of the same things we do.  WCS founded the Bronx Zoo and has the first Yellowstone buffalo created by embryonic transfer.  It was carried by a surrogate cow at the zoo.  It is a really big bull!  Their genetics is not to create a Jurassic Park, but to study ways of preserving the DNA purity of the buffalo.  We are not looking for created buffalo, but natural buffalo.

We found original buffalo from Blackfeet country that were captured in the 1870’s and moved to the Salish/Kootenai reservation which became known as the Pablo/Allred herd.  In 1900, because of encroachment when reservations were opened to whites, the surviving Pablo sold them to Canada as the US was not interested in saving buffalo or Indians.

Elk Island Park is just east of Edmonton, and when I heard that they must cull their herd every two years, we began the conversation.  Parks Canada likes to support conservation efforts and has a genuine heart for these animals.  (Some staff, of course, would prefer to send them to auction where they can fetch up to $3,000 each, program money.)  They agreed to give them to the Blackfeet for $350, and Blackfeet must cover transportation.

This is where WCS came in.  Through various funders the Tribe will not have to pay anything!  We met and thanked some of those funders in New York, New York City Trust and Lindeen Foundation.  This will be $40,000 plus in buffalo to the Blackfeet herd expansion towards sustainability.

This opportunity has opened the door to Blackfeet Buffalo Restoration becoming a Field Project with the Oakland Zoo.  We will have intern opportunities at the Oakland Zoo for our college students, and exchange trips for younger students in both directions.  Their animal specialists will travel to Blackfeet Country to work with our program and college, and our people will travel there.  The cost will be covered by the Zoo!  We are talking with the Bronx Zoo about expanding the same opportunities in New York.  The gain of buffalo is a great accomplishment.  The chance for our young people to be exposed to an incredible career option is even greater, not in New York or Oakland, but right here in their homeland.

http://anthropology.si.edu/repatriation/reports/regional/plains/blackfoot.htm

In New York’s Museum of Natural History there is a fantastic display of Plains Indians.  Our Blackfeet way of life is portrayed in a very credible way.  Contained in their collection are objects of a sacred nature.  The Museum has agree to fund a trip for the Blackfeet to start the consultation process of repatriation.  They are very accommodating.  We also met with staff at the Cultural Research Center of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian for the same purpose.  John and Carol Murray were there as respected elders with transferred rights and John’s role as Tribal Historic Officer.

John Murray, I presume in the Badger/Two Med

Tyson and I met with the state delegation on the Water Compact issues as it heads to Senate Markup  on Jan. 27, a major step in a very long process.  We met with the National Park Service over grazing our buffalo in Glacier National Park, and we met with the US Fish and Wildlife officials to make them aware of our intent and to assure the definition of buffalo as wildlife.

It has been a dead run since we got here.  A lot of meetings.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely!  I am meetinged out.  Elders say until the buffalo returns, we will drift.  This trip and these buffalo will not fix everything.  They are a step in the right direction.  I may still be a slow learner, but the numbers add up.

JUSTIN MANY FINGERS: KAINAI

Justin Many Fingers

Narcisse Blood was killed in a car accident not long ago.  He was a center post for many innovations and creations and it has taken a while for people to begin to pick up the threads and begin again.  Justin Many Fingers is a performance artist and dancer from the Blood Reserve of the Kainai, north of Montana in Alberta.  It is a place that has been sheltered from whites, which has protected the aboriginal heritage but also given the People a secure base from which to operate in the larger world.  Justin is an example of that.

Another factor is readiness to work with worldwide indigenous peoples.  Darrell Kipp, also gone now, was much empowered by this force since the Hawaiians and the New Zealand Maori had done a lot of work with language restoration and were happy to share.  I first met Narcisse at a Piegan Institute sponsored conference.  These People are “reconciliation” People who wish to preserve and energize the old ways, but not punish the present.  Inclusion and transformation are the values.

Beverly's book is key.  (This is an historic photo -- not Beverly.)

Justin appeared at the Valier library with a posse of Blackfoot folks that included Beverly Hungry Wolf whom I know from the Sixties when she was married to Adolf Hungry Wolf.  Their daughter Star had recommended that they stop on a research visit to the location of the “Baker Massacre.”  The couple raised their children 19th century style in a log cabin with a creek for a water source and a photovoltaic sheet for electricity to run Adolf’s laptop.  Their children, now adult, have moved on to good jobs in the cities.  The Hungry Wolfs divorced and Beverly is remarried, teaching at one of the tribal colleges.  Everything moves on.

Justin Many Fingers

Justin has been active in many contexts and now is about to take on management duties.  This is his self-description on “Linked-in”:

“I’m 28 years 5 months.  My address is my suitcase and a back pack.

I live for the arts, as long as I have food in my tummy, a pillow under my head, and a studio to create, I'm all good. 

“I love traveling and making new friends and family.

“I am I bit crazy because I like to live life without any limitations, I live to push beyond them.”

Troy Emery Twigg and Cherish Violet Blood were with this group.  They had worked together on a production called “Making Treaty 7,” a previous key work.  (Treaty 7 is the Canadian Blackfoot treaty.)  I’m quoting from the website, "makingtreaty7.com".

“The board and staff of Making Treaty 7 are deeply mourning the tragic loss of ELK SHADOW / PONA KO’TAKSI, also known as Michael Green, and MIDDLE BULL / TATSIKIISTAMIK, also known as Narcisse Blood.  Elk Shadow was the founder and visionary behind the Making Treaty 7 project.  We celebrate his commitment to a shared belief that “WE ARE ALL TREATY PEOPLE”.  We are committed to ensuring that his spirit will live on.  Elk Shadow, One of Long Vision, had no boundaries and could not see color.  He was an inspiration to everyone he touched.  “This is the most rewarding and electrified piece of art that I have ever created in over 30 years,” he told us, “and to have, through this process, through the Sundance, been blessed with a spiritual awakening is a gift I could never have expected.”  Middle Bull was the Cultural and Spiritual Advisor to Making Treaty 7.  He was the Grandfather to the cast and crew;  he was the walking encyclopedia of our language, our culture and our history.  Together, Middle Bull and Elk Shadow brought First Nations and non-First Nations together.  They were the heart and soul of Making Treaty 7.  Narcisse will be truly missed within our spiritual circles.”

From "Wisakedjak"

Justin played the historical character Champlain in a production called Wisakedjak, which “is not just entertainment, it is the embodiment of sacred teachings.”  “To get to the essence of this half human, half spirit being, whose escapades  have been passed on through an oral and nomadic tradition, is like being played by the trickster himself. He is a shapeshifter, the original rebel without a cause, a stranger in a strange land, the manifestation of our hubris as well as its antidote.”

In terms of comparative religion, Wisakedjak is NOT Napi or Jesus or Starboy, but he occupies the same niche as an interlocutor between realms, including those of cultures. Champlain with his 17th century big hat, long jacket, and writing plume is clueless. (For more, go to “Troutinplaid.com.”)

As clueless as the drunken Major Baker of the US Cavalry who bore down on the peace camp of HeavyRunner and massacred women, old people, and children -- the men had gone to hunt.  One can read similar stories in the newspaper every day, but the people -- who are roughly the same color as American indigenous folks -- are in Eurasia.  Carol Murray, local Blackfeet historian, was the guide.  For many years since the location of the camp she and her husband, John, have organized annual commemorations.  If the road is passable, that is, since it happened in the middle of winter.

Baker Massacre commemoration on site

There are many accounts, some written and many more told by survivors only in their families.  There was great fear of retaliation on both sides.  In fact, it was used to justify the suppression of ceremonies, the language, and newly forming organizations of every kind, including the young educated men who wanted only discussion of ideas.

Carol Murray, Amskapi Pikuni

Now the discussion can happen freely and this group is leading it.  So much is just beneath the surface if we aren’t afraid to access it.  Canada has been much better about funding and supporting the arts and they are the better for it.  Many of our best Native American actors, like Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal were trained by Canadian companies.  They have resisted the commercialized entitlement wars that try to “own” cultures, wasting energy on suppressing others, American style.

Justin dancing in Iitahpoyii

Iitahpoyii de Troy Emery Twigg @ Studio 303  on Vimeo.  This is Justin dancing on vid.  I hope you can find it.  Yosemite hides links, at least from me.  vimeo.com › Studio 303 › Studio 303’s VideosVimeo