JOYCE MARIE CLARKE TURVEY: A TWO-DOG FUNERAL

THE FAMILY OBITUARY:

Joyce Marie Clarke Turvey lived her large and wonderful life from November 28, 1928, until August 6, 2013.  A Montana girl always, she lived in California a few years while raising her family -- but returned to her much-loved childhood home of East Glacier Park 36 years ago.

As the adopted daughter of a woodcarver, John Clarke, and his wife Mamie, Joyce was raised simply but with art and artists, a love for the outdoors, horses and as many dogs as they could safely feed.  Her interest in photography led her to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, where she met and married Irv-- WWII vet, photographer and Hollywood cameraman.

With a work ethic as big as the Montana skies, she took her job with Avon to a management level and earned trips to wonderful places, including Bermuda and New York City.  After retiring from Avon, Joyce opened the John L. Clarke Art Gallery in 1977 -- and although recovering from a broken hip last fall, proudly opened the gallery this summer, right up until her death.  A published photographer in her own right, her photos were featured items at the Clarke Gallery.

In her “twilight” years, she was able to travel more and more, adventuring to Europe twice (one with daughter, Dana, and once for Christmas in Vienna), Hawaii a few times, a cruise down the Mexico coastline and various trips with her motorhome through the west.  

Her husband, Irvin Turvey, Jr., preceded her in 1969.  She leaves behind her daughters, Dana Turvey and Sharon Ewing, granddaughter Chantell DeLay, cousin Larry Snyder, sister-in-law Doris Hansel, super-sister from another mother, Brenda Bailey, and her two beloved pooches, Quannah and Bruce.  Joyce’s wide range of friends are too numerous to list in one printing, but the love and appreciation of these friendships were one of her biggest treasures.

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The Church of the Assumption in East Glacier is out at the edge of a bluff looking over the gorge where Midvale Creek goes on its way to meet Two Medicine River, and then looks up the foothills of aspen and pine to the Rocky Mountains behind East Glacier.  “Assumption” is when the Virgin Mary, who was too Immaculate to die, simply went up into the sky like a rocket to Heaven.  It would be easy from this place .  The church is a round log design with wall-sized windows on the side in the lee of the wind, which means south and west.  I was there early, but the first person was already Steve Barcus with his wife and daughter.  Steve, who was the mayor of Browning for many years and on the school board that hired me in 1961, had performed the marriage for Joyce and Irv.  Steve’s wife, always full of ideas and flair, is now in a wheelchair because of a stroke, but she was there.

It was a two-dog funeral.  Father Ed Kohler is the gentlest and most generous of men and now, of course, the Pope is named for Saint Francis who loved animals.  The dogs, good-sized generic shepherds, are what I call “camp dogs,” (one black-and-white, one blue merle) and since they knew most of the people attending, they went from one knee to another, comforting and smiling.  Most of us were older women in dresses who knew each other.  They are the village, the ones who get things done.  Joyce’s friends.

The first boombox song was “I Dreamed a Dream”.  The second was “Amazing Grace” and the little congregation began to hum along, and then softly sing until the verse that was bagpipes and the one that was a velvet tenor.  I didn’t know the third song, a duet.  The fourth was a surprise: what sounded like a didgeridoo and a Hindu chant!  The younger people told me it was by Krishna Das, whom I had not known.

The Clarke burial ground is up a road behind the Big Hotel and these days it’s only a horse trail, much eroded by the cataracts from heavy rain this spring.  The women parked by “Clarke Avenue” and walked in groups, linking arms so the younger ones could steady the older ones.   Doris Sherburne is 91.  They walked with skirts swaying in that eternal way that women do when when they’re not in a hurry, just full of purpose.  On both sides of the road were clouds of spotted knapweed, which is toxic, but beautiful with purple flowers if you can forget its wicked nature.  The day was overcast, but not the kind with low gray skies -- rather with towering shifts of amethyst geode that moved light across the cool land. 

The backhoe had done its job, but the cemetery itself has not been cared for so it was a rank tangle of burrs and reeking weeds the machine had crushed.  Helen Clarke’s tall headstone with the cross on top was nearby and Horace’s stone was next to hers, but had been twisted off the base.  I couldn’t see John’s stone, though Bob and I attended his burial. 

It was in January, and when they lay his coffin down in the arms of roots, great goose feathers of snow floated down on us.  Dana had asked some of us to throw red roses into the grave.  One of the women paired her rose with a wild bluebell she picked nearby.

When I threw mine, I said the Blackfeet prayer I learned in the Sixties:  “Natoosi, (Old Man Sun), Keepatahkee (Old Woman Moon), Keemokit, Spumokit, (Pity us, help us.)   Unyiyee.  (That’s enough.  The end.)”  I noticed that Father Kohler made the gesture of hands crossed on the chest that is the Blackfeet sign of acceptance and thanks. 

I felt the spirit of Joyce as I traveled up the east slope.  It was a trip marked by young men:  the Blackfeet clerk at the gas station in Valier; a young Navajo man who was working in the little sundries shop in the Big Hotel; a handsome wanderjahr who had linked up with a local girl and who says he wants to write; a hiker on the trail when we all walked out -- he had left New Orleans to find a new place.  Joyce would have loved them and flirted happily while she found out more about them.  She took good care of her artists.

In fact, it was a man once young like that who wrote the piece Dana read as eulogy.  Ray Djuff is a journalist who worked for a Calgary newspaper for decades and now writes books about Glacier Park.  He’s at work on a book about Two Guns Whitecalf who may or may not be the profile on the buffalo nickel.   (The tribal buffalo herd was lounging peacefully alongside a pothole lake as I drove up Highway 2.)  In the process, since he is a first-source kinda guy who interviews people and reads original files instead of books, he has learned a lot about the Clarke family: how Malcolm -- that stiff-necked ODD case -- had gotten into a brawl with his Blackfeet wife’s family and been killed, triggering a terrible massacre in retaliation; how Malcolm’s daughter Helen toured Europe with Sarah Berhardt; and how Joyce was the adopted daughter of John (Horace’s son) and Mamie when Mamie was fifty.  It is usual on the reservation for older people to adopt children.  Ray's email was about first meeting Joyce when he was an adventurous but wary young park employee and then the great pleasure of finding her again when he was doing research.   So many of we history dabblers felt she represented a fabled time.

But to her family and neighbors, she was their familiar friend.  There are many stories about her -- she was not necessarily easy-going!  We didn’t tell the stories that weren’t suitable for a funeral, but we’ll tell them later.  In the meantime, Father Ed’s homily proposed that on this earth we are all struggling infants and that death is a New Birth that sets us free in a place we can’t even imagine.  No sitting on a cloud twiddling your toes and humming.  Get ready to rumble the galaxies!  (He didn’t actually use those words, but I do!)  Joyce was ready.

HELEN CLARKE: MONTANA'S FIRST SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT

Now that our colorful governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, has announced that he will not run for Baucus’ seat in the Senate, one of the names being mentioned is Denise Juneau, our beautiful Blackfeet Superintendent of the state Office of Public Instruction.  Actually, only her dad is Blackfeet.  Her mother is Hidatsa/Mandan/Arikara, tribes that conflated when they were decimated by smallpox because they were at the headwaters of the Mississipi River and thereby vulnerable to what was carried on river steamboats.  The advantage of their location was that they were traders, used to braiding together and interfacing cultures.  Lewis and Clark wintered there on the first leg of their journey.  The tribe was also the source of the Kipp progenitor whose descendants went from vigorous entrepreneurs to vigorous educators.

But this is not about Denise.  Rather I want to lift up Helen Clarke, the first Blackfeet school superintendent in Montana -- actually I think she may be the first Montana school superintendent, period.   She is the hinge-person, the lynch-pin, of the Clarke family generations which continue today as an art gallery in East Glacier run by Joyce Clarke Turvey.  The book “A Mixture of So Many Bloods: A Family Saga of the American West” by Andrew Graybill, is outlined at this url  http://scarlet.unl.edu/?p=6484  The book has been postponed by several forces: the usual being money and politics, but also Graybill’s acceptance of the directorship of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.  Now his focus will shift from the Montana border to the SW. But DAMMIT!  I WANT THAT BOOK!!  

I went searching, which didn’t work until I contacted Graybill directly.  The title is now:  “The Red and the White:  A Family Saga of the American West.”  Due out in October, about the time Graybill will be a keynote speaker at the Montana Festival of the Book.  http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294976104

Why are publishers fooling around with books about teens who masturbate when they could have been publishing (and hopefully selling movie rights) the stories of women like Helen Clarke and Natoyista Culbertson!  (The latter HAS had books written about her: “Frontier Diplomats: The Life and times of Alexander Culbertson and Natoyist-Siksina” by Lesley Wischman as well as a fictionalized version by Mildred Walker (“If a Lion Could Talk”) as well as articles in “Montana, the Magazine of Western History.”  The independent historian, Jack Holterman, wrote about Natoyista so much that some accused him of having a psychic love affair with her.  Impossible to blame him!

In the Spring 2011 issue of that same magazine appears an article by Andrew Graybill entitled “Helen P. Clarke in “The Age of Tribes”: Montana’s Changing Racial Landscape, 1870-1920.”  It’s a bit of the book-to-come which whets my appetite even more.  Malcolm Clarke, in case you’re a newbie, was murdered by his Blackfeet wife’s cousin, which triggered the “Baker Massacre” a mistaken atrocity in which a drunken cavalry killed a small group of peace-declared (supposedly protected) people suffering from smallpox.  The men were hunting and the weather was sub-zero.  A few people, some of them children, escaped barefoot over the frozen river to other camps.  All lodges and supplies were burned.  Some claimed that living people were burned as well.  This story is told over and over and over.

This article is the much longer and more meaningful story of the trigger, the attack on Malcolm -- not much of a surprise since his Indian name was “Four Bears,” probably because of his temperament.  Guesses at the trigger range from horse theft to rape.  The attack happened on the ranch Malcolm owned, now the Baucus family ranch not far from Helena.  Malcolm, like Baucus, was political.  It is particularly strategic because it is in a narrow access valley where it was possible to charge toll on the road.  Do not picture howling savages circling the house and shooting fire arrows.  The murderers had stayed to dinner and were cousins of Malcolm’s full- blood wife.  It was more like a bar brawl.  But the renegades threw Malcolm’s body down the well and injured the two sons.  Helen and her sister escaped out an upstairs window, over the roof, and away.  

Helen, the oldest child, had been educated in a convent in Cincinnati,Ohio, where Malcolm sent her and her brother, Horace, who didn’t stay.  She came home just a few years before the murder and left soon after with her sisters to live in Minneapolis with Malcolm’s sister.  Then Helen went on to New York City where, in Graybill’s words, she “began a brief but acclaimed stage career.”  She traveled with Sarah Bernhardt in Europe but one must realize that this were the time period of the American Civil War and the Prussian Siege of Paris that killed thousands by starvation.  1864 is the year Montana became a territory and Tolstoi published “War and Peace.”  1870 was the end of the Red River Rebellion in Canada, which spun off many Metis to Blackfeet country.  (I’m not pulling this out of my head.  I have an extremely useful reference book called “The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events” by Bernard Grun (1946, 1963))

In 1872 Nathan, who with Horace had gone with the Cavalrymen who attacked Heavy Runner’s band, got into a knife fight with the father of nineteen-year-old girl he wanted to marry and was murdered.  The man was a Metis named Swan.  Race had suddenly become an issue and prosperity could make you white.  Economics always trumps love.

In 1875 Helen returned to Fort Benton and then Helena where Wilbur and Harriet Fisk Sanders and their five sons extended protection to her.  Wilbur was a prosecutor for the Vigilantes and a founder of the Montana Historical Society.  Hey, we don’t need to watch Deadwood -- we’ve got Last Chance Gulch.  The end of Custer is in 1876.

Helen taught grade school and became the Lewis and Clark County school superintendent.  1883 was the year six hundred Blackfeet on the reservation starved to death because of failure to receive the commodities they were owed by treaty.  By then there were no more buffalo except farther south and east, but the Blackfeet were forced by cavalry to go back to the reservation and stay without food.  If the Parisians were helpless against the Prussians, so were the Blackfeet helpless against the United States government, which was listening to cattlemen like Sanders.  Economics trumps treaties.

Helen never married, Graybill found in Helen’s papers a long letter from a lover named Henry, writing from SF in 1884.  She was beautiful: tall, graceful, long-haired, with a deep husky voice.  Her face is almost sweet, nothing at all like the gaunt later face of her nephew, the wood-carver John Clarke, a exceptionally handsome man in youth.

  

http://johnclarke.lppcarver.com  Helen evidently did not write any books, though Graybill tells us what she read and admired.  I might pretend to be her and see if I could produce a convincing manuscript.  Maybe I’ll “find” it and see what happens.  (Check tomorrow.)

None of this is so longagoandfaraway.  Denise Juneau’s father, Stan, was one of my high school English students.  Natawista’s great-great grandson was in my Cut Bank High School classes: he looked just like her.  Bob and I visited John Clarke many times and attended his funeral.  History is a river of blood running through us and someday we will be someone else’s history.