BLACKFEET BOYS

Clifford Kicking Woman

Newspaper obituary:

Clifford George Kicking Woman, whose Indian name was “Thunder” (Ksis-si-kohm), was born Dec. 16, 1946, to George Kicking Woman and Mollie Blood. He went home on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015, at Benefis Medical Center in Great Falls.

He was raised in Starr School and Browning – Fort Kick, Montana. Clifford earned his Bachelor of Arts degree – social services from San Francisco State University in San Francisco, Calif., in 1983. He lived in San Francisco, Phoenix and Havre for several years where he made many friends.

His employment included Blackfeet Manpower Program, Blackfeet Family Services, assisted with tribal, local, state and national elections – the Obama Campaign. He served on the Siyeh Board of Trustees, Blackfeet Community College Board of Trustees and Glacier County Election Board. He worked in Helena at the State Capitol in education.

He enjoyed playing bingo, listening to music, watching tennis, football, basketball, baseball and reading the newspaper. He was his son Keyhn’s number one fan at his football games. He was very proud of Keyhn. He loved the San Francisco 49ers. He enjoyed joking and laughing with his huge smile. Clifford enjoyed his bingo partners, enjoyed being with his family, being at the family picnics and getting his sports pools going. He sponsored Fort Kick and Jazz baseball teams and enjoyed being in the beer garden at the baseball fields.

Clifford was preceded in death by his parents George and Mollie Kicking Woman. Sisters include Susan Ann Kicking Woman Heavy Runner, Maybelle Kicking Woman Omeasoo, Rita Many Hides Old Chief, Eula Kay Kicking Woman and Irene Last Star. Brothers include Leland Kicking Woman, William James Bear Medicine, Wilbur Lee White Calf, Lawrence No Runner and Aaron Shoots First.

Clifford is survived by his son, Keyhn Long Time Otter Kicking Woman; sisters Doris Kicking Woman, Delores Kicking Woman Iron Shirt and Diane Kicking Woman Dorris; brother Leland Kicking Woman Jr.; and nieces Lissa and Kenland Kicking Woman; adopted mother Margaret Plain Eagle from Brocket, Alberta; aunts Helen No Runner and Hazel Shoots First; and numerous nieces, nephews and relatives from Montana and Canada.

Our family would like to thank everyone who helped our family during this time of sadness and sorrow. It is very difficult without our parents George and Mollie to help us through this challenging time of losing our last brother and uncle.

If we forgot to mention a relative, friend, co-worker or someone that Clifford had a profound impact on, we apologize to you. He touched many lives and had many friends to mention.

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I’m one of those people Clifford touched, one of the first of the boys who taught me what it is to be Blackfeet when I came in 1961.  He was assigned a composition about his home so he told about how proud he was that that the family’s Thunder Pipe Bundle was hanging above his bed, an honor and an obligation to protect.  For me it was the first mention of a Sacred Bundle and through the decade this grew deeper and deeper with meaning and connections.

It was at the Kicking Woman’s home that we attended our first Bundle Opening.  Clifford’s parents helped develop Bob Scriver’s ceremonial Badger Tipi.  Bob and I had become the Bundle Keepers for the Long Time Bundle with the little green parrot that was transferred to us by Richard Little Dog. 

Badger Tipi

Years later I moved into an empty old house where the Little Dog family had once lived and  discovered a cluster of big nails over the location of my bed, clearly where the Bundle had been.  I had no Bundle except in memory (quite vivid), but  when I wallpapered that room, I made an opening for the nails to stick through.  Molly said that since I’d participated in Bundle Opening with Bob after our white man’s legal divorce, in the old-time Indian way we were still married.  Things persist, relationships continue.  But they change.

The Sacred Pipe Bundle at the Scriver Studio

I think it was Charlie Morgan who opened another realization.  He wrote that his family had just moved into a different house away from Moccasin Flats and it had piped water in the house, so he no longer had to carry water from the neighborhood communal hydrant.  Moccasin Flats was just outside my classroom window.  That row of log cabins, originally built at the turn of the 19th century to house aged Blackfeet, was still inhabited by the families of the original Nitsitahpi.  We had thought it was part of trust land, but it turned out to be privately owned, which meant that we were no longer entitled to the tax compensation money the federal bureaucracy was supposed to pay -- a rather big hit for the budget of School District #9.

Another bitter lesson came later from a boy in Heart Butte who was in special ed classes but often hung out in my classroom room before school, tearing off strips of Scotch tape to chew, and generally goofing around.  A few years after he “graduated,” he got high, went to a party, walked up to Clifford Kicking Woman’s mild-mannered, devout and studious cousin whom he didn’t really know, and stabbed him in the gut, killing him.  No one understood it, then or now.

Gabe Grant was in one of my classes.

A mixed memory is in Heart Butte, sitting on the floor, legs straight out and back against the gymnasium wall, monitoring basketball practice.  Sitting next to me was the third generation of Kennedy’s I taught.  I was sitting in my classroom at lunch time with this boy's grandfather in Browning when the word came over the loudspeaker than John F. Kennedy (no relation) had been assassinated.  Decades later this boy in Heart Butte was complaining to me that I had ruined his life by doing something I don’t remember.  Put him on detention at a crucial moment, gave him a bad grade, something like that.  He’s done pretty well since then -- ups and downs like everyone.  I’ve always had a special fondness for this family.  In my mind they WERE somehow related to JFK, who was the instigator of new housing on the rez.

One of the boys did very well indeed, Kenny Scabby Robe, the grandpa who founded the Black Lodge Drum group, was in my eighth grade class once in a while.  Often he was on the road, sometimes in Europe, for competitions and exhibitions.   I’ll try to attach a sample because I particularly love their pow-wow songs for kids.  If it's "Mighty Mouse," I have to get up and dance!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zXJdxpPc8I

Another boy, a writer of dark stories, I could not help.  He served ten years in a federal penitentiary for manslaughter.  I tried to help him for several reasons, guided in part by his sister.  I sent books, accepted phone calls, and passed family messages.  I read his case file and talked to his public defender.  I had taught his father, worked with his grandfather and great-grandfather, and had the idea that he could be like another of his relatives, Percy Bullchild, author of “The Sun Comes Down.”  When he got out of prison, he didn’t want to speak to me, was not grateful, and soon broke his parole.  Some said his father was a zealot, an AIM type with shamanistic overtones.  The manslaughter was over a quarrel about part of the family that was diverting the old age pension of the great-grandfather.
Later an uncle killed his step-grandmother over money and hid her body under her own house.

Marvin Weatherwax, an intelligent boy, went his quiet way, learning to speak Blackfeet and the foundational myths.  Now he is a respected professor at Blackfeet Community College, teaching Blackfeet.  Gary Foundagun had an IQ about forty points above mine and drive truck for a living for a while, then got a job with the government.

Vietnam veteran Marvin Weatherwax presents an eagle feather to Martin Connelly.

Mike Doane grew up on the ranch Bob Scriver owned for a while, now the Flatiron Blackfeet and Nature Conservancy Consortium for Environmental Study.  He is the only student of mine who died in combat in Vietnam.  I have a rubbing from his name on the memorial wall.

"Turk" Cobell married Eloise Pepion, so then she was Eloise Cobell, but I can't claim her because she went away to school.

Curly Bear Wagner became an official heritage rep of the tribe.  

Since Curly Bear's death, John Murray has become the historical preservationist.

Background is the Badger-Two Medicine country that is sacred.

All the boys are grown up now.  Corky comes to save my house from complete collapse.  Francis Wall is a successful abstract painter in Helena who graduated from American Indian Art Institute.  His brother Thomas says he went to a lot of trouble to learn how to paint like a child.

"Prairie Home" by Francis Wall. "

I wonder where Pat Fields is now.  He was Milo and Irene Fields' son and Milo was the owner-editor of the Glacier Reporter.  In 1966  Pat had his boot heel shot off by Charles Whitman at the U of Texas clock tower. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShlbXlfQlkU  Whitman is considered the first mass shooter/domestic terrorist.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKtP57U0nnM

I’ve always felt that I failed these kids (girls, too), that I didn’t teach well enough, didn’t try hard enough.  Maybe remembering them is really all I can do.  So I do it.  How can I not?

INVISIBILITY AND FAME

From the call for papers of the Western History Association annual conference.

The 2015 Program Committee invites proposals that consider what has divided and connected the many peoples who have traversed, sojourned, and settled the North American West, and what might yet link their histories. A generation of new western histories has opened windows in the walls that separated histories of race, gender, class, sexuality and nation. New borderlands histories have mapped selectively porous borders: a fence at the U.S./Mexico border, a Peace Arch marking the Canada-U.S. boundary. Walls, both physical and metaphorical, have divided the spaces our histories have explored: domestic and public workspaces; sites of exclusion and containment like reservations and reserves, internment centers, labor camps, barrios and gated suburbs . . . Histories of community, environment, and culture, of national and social boundaries have brought us to the thresholds of new syntheses and narratives. 

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http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/montana-writers-share-happens/   Scott McMillion, editor of the Montana Quarterly magazine, organized this festival in Livingston, MT [“How It Happens”] because, he said, he “wanted to make the writers and artists featured in the magazine leap off the page, come alive, interact with readers. For two days, the famous and the less famous talked about art, film, music, poetry, and literature.”  The website said the event was “sold out,” but didn’t indicate how much the tickets had cost.

Scott McMillion

Strange.  It was invisible to me even though my PBS radio station streams from Billings.  I’m invisible to the literati of Montana.  The cowboy art people know me as a pesky footnote from the Sixties.  The UU networks know me as "some broad who used to roam the state preaching."  When I commented about this review noted above to a friend, he said,  “Funny, how writing and literature, as the university professor from Bozeman [Bridget Kevane] seems to understand it, is much like what art critics mean when they say "Art," i.e., gallery art/fine art. . . .I think we should hold our own conference, inviting all of our ilk, i.e., those not included in the "fine art" definition of writing, and have a rollicking time.” 

One of Sid Gustafson's books.  His dad, Rib, was our vet in the Sixties.

I note this friend doesn’t mention blogs though he reads mine every day.  (I should say that Sid Gustafson is published in Montana Quarterly and he does qualify as a memoirist veterinarian.)  But I know what my friend means.  There are a whole lotta people out there writing that the ordinary people don’t even consider.   Well . . . they think they're warts.  Not famous, you see.  Just little frogs in little puddles.

Part of our understanding of “how it happens” is dominated by the academics and part is commodified -- the two cross-breed.  The prof and the editor.  Access takes money.  Marketing and experts are the sources of the valuation put on fancy stuff for the uneducated and not-that-wealthy-but-aspiring.  Print is supported by ads.  If you run ads, the stories and articles must compliment the ad worldview, often pretty luxurious and generally young.  I stopped allowing ads on my blog because the algorithms for religion can’t tell bogus from genuine.  I’d write some idealistic piece and it would be followed by an ad to “ordain” you for $40.

Curly Bear Wagner

In the grocery store I was talking to a tall, serious Blackfeet whose milieu is letters-to-the-editor.  “Why don’t you make me famous?” he suggested.  Gee, I think I left my magic wand with Harry Potter.  I can’t even make myself famous.  What IS famous?  It’s pushing out there above the clamor of the crowd that writes everywhere, everything, all sorts.  Not the same thing as writing well.  A woman from somewhere else called to beg me to make people remember Curly Bear Wagner.  An older man from the High Line knocked on the door to ask me to write a book about his friend, a fine artist, to make him more famous.  A gallery owner suggested I write about her gallery.  No one offered money.

Sales and experts are the sources of visibility, meaning fame.  Offend them and you don’t exist.  Somehow fail to attract their attention and you don’t exist.  Belong to a category they know nothing about and you don’t exist.  But when I sent the review of the Livingston event to some of my writing friends -- a few of them actually have had books published -- they said they preferred to be invisible.  Being a “Montana writer” can be a quagmire of expectations.  Partly it can be the “regional” put-down that stalks people like Ivan Doig, but also the politics, which are very much produced by the cross-entanglements of academics and commerce.  Of course, Indians still get ridden down by that 19^th century horseback guy with the eagle feathers in his streaming ebony hair.

He wrote "Three Cups of Tea" and was punished severely for it.

His co-writer committed suicide.

History gets into it, racism, ownership, what words can be said, how writing should be used to raise money for charities (“How many will there be for tea?”), entitlements (Can men write about women? Can whites write about Indians?  Can Jewish handcart peddlers write about Chinese railroad labor?  Will whites ever READ Indians?  Should Puerto Ricans write about Montana?).   And science comes in through environment issues, more passionate than almost anything else except pets and fav pop music.  

We don’t like to read about horrifying murder mysteries written by authors with PTSD, or accounts of child abuse, either on the frontier or from the victims.  Oh, we’ll gasp at the reviews.  But we won’t put out money.  Poor people don’t buy books -- maybe they didn’t learn to read  (poor people=poor schools) -- so they don’t read books, they don’t know what books are out there, they don’t talk about books, books don't exist.  It’s all film, dude.  Video.  Movies.  Music. Go back to the review of “How It Happens.”  That event is not about books: it’s about movies (the invasion of the Missoulians into the Hollywood valley of Livingston, Montana), music -- the stuff that moves freely through the air -- and writers who are “famous.”

I went to the library and checked out three issues of Montana Quarterly.  (My only magazine subscriptions are to the National Sculpture Review and Vanity Fair.)  I’ve never sent Montana Quarterly any writing.  After the first few years back in Montana I stopped sending anything to anyone in Montana.  I sold a book to the University of Calgary Press.  I sent some short stories to the website called “Rope and Wire,” which is in Oregon.  Then I settled into doing the narcissus thing:  writing for myself.  For family.  For friends. For a few people I care very deeply about -- I could even say I love them and really mean it.  

Too tough for Montana

Every day a post on prairiemary.blogspot.com.  You won’t be able to tell who I’m writing for.  I write about brain research, the embodiment philosophy of Lakoff and Johnson, comparative cognition (important work in Bozeman), a little bit of memoir, and a lot of liturgical design.  I try to think what ideas would comfort lost boys everywhere. I take on local wartiness.  I’m working on a post about how cannabinoids actually operate in the body, which they saturate with endogenous substances without any marijuana plants at all.  They are part of the essential lipid molecular scene of flesh, esp. neurons.  It’s organic chemistry -- I barely get it. 

Writing is not publishing.  Publishing takes as much or more time and energy as writing, because you have to pursue those "experts" and make lists of possible customers.  It’s evangelizing.  Pushing.  Drumming.  But for a writer the main thing is to be writing all the time.  TIME.  Not sitting around talking to other writers, getting a little tiddly and stealing ideas.  Time alone at the keyboard, or flat on your back, figuring things out.  Festivals are promotion, not for the reader or the writer -- but the publisher.  They need to sell actual THINGS.  Or people.

The trouble is that the process of writing is invisible.  A mystery to non-writers.  The way fame comes is the mystery to writers and artists.  But the secret is obvious:  MONEY.  You've got to have product -- but after that all you need is money.  So few writers have money that they keep thinking there's something else . . . but, NOT.

CURLY BEAR (CLARENCE) WAGNER

The popular notion of “medicine men” or gurus or whatever you want to call them is that they are ascetic, wise, and circumspect. That was NOT Curly Bear Wagner. He was more along the lines of Russell Banks: belligerent, excessive, and colorful. The boy in my high school English class in 1962 who showed up in my roll book as Clarence, was the same as the man who died yesterday, aged 63. Integrity he had. He was what he was. If you want nice manners and power, look for Earl Old Person. If you want a Harvard education and thoughtful achievement, see where Darrell Kipp is hiding out. If you want shrewd thinking and sharp writing, check out Woody Kipp. If you want excitement and challenge, you could have found Curly Bear.

You can find Curly Bear’s public image at his website: http://www.curlybear.org/ I suspect it was white women who crafted this persuasive material. Curly Bear has been photographed and interviewed everywhere and was selling a video of himself on the website that is worth getting. You should buy one while they’re still around. The website will persist for a while. It was good enough that I called Curly Bear and told him I admired his work over the years. I knew he was wrestling with cancer, but I thought it had been vanquished. I’m not sure what the immediate cause of death was -- the “cure” of cancer can be almost as damaging as the original affliction.

My earliest memory of him was a play he was almost in. In those days we often thought up plays and wrote them as a group, creating characters for everyone who wanted to be in it. This one had Curly Bear in it, but when it was time to rehearse, he didn’t show up. “We’ll go get him,” declared his cast mates. “We know where he went fishing.” Pretty soon they brought him in, soaked to the knees, trailing creek water and protesting. That got to be pretty time-consuming, so we just “killed” his character.

But his strongest memory of me, which I didn’t remember, popped up when we were on the same panel at the Montana Festival of the Book. A writer who specializes in children’s books about animals had wanted to write a book about the white buffalo called “Good Medicine” which Bob Scriver mounted for the Montana Historical Society. Either she or her publisher realized that this would be controversial, considered a case of a white person making a profit off of sacred Indian material, so they were smart enough to bring Curly Bear on board as “advisor.” The Montana Humanities people are scared of Indians, except for Jackie Parsons, head of the Montana Arts Council, an enrolled Blackfeet and a long-term Blackfeet tribal judge, and whomever she considers worthy. I was on the panel because I wrote an aid to Blackfeet history that I called “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” (Available on Amazon, naturally.)

So Curly Bear played his high card right off the bat. I had required the class to read “Macbeth,” as prescribed in the Montana curriculum for seniors. He had objected on grounds that it had nothing to do with his culture and that he would never use Shakespeare in his whole life. He made enough of a fuss that I sent him to the office. Our principal was Roy Buffalo, an enrolled Native American, one of the earliest. He didn’t get there by making a big fuss. He counseled Curly Bear to follow his example and sent him back to class.

On the panel I laughed and teased and didn’t really take Curly Bear very seriously. In fact, I rather derailed the white lady author which was my real motive. The audience didn’t know what to think since they were mostly white, middle-class, idealistic students. To them I think Curly Bear was out of a movie, not a real person. At that same festival Adolf Hungry Wolf presented his extraordinary four-volume “Blackfeet museum in a box.” The audience might have attacked him except that his half-Blackfeet children were there. Curly Bear didn’t attend.

At a high school reunion up in Babb at the Cattleman’s Club, Curly Bear appeared with his wrapped braids attached to a whole otter skin on each side. He looked quite splendid and I teased him again, but he never knew how to react. On the one hand he’d have liked to put me down as not giving him proper status, but on the other hand he still had respect for school teachers. In fact, when I came back from Portland one summer and attended his presentation at the big hotel, he was amazed to see me and announced to the audience, “That’s my teacher!”

On another visit Bob Scriver was sitting with his fourth wife and some white guys in the Red Crow Cafe, growling and scowling at the “AIMster” guys glowering and muttering on the other side of the cafe. When I came in, I walked over to Bob’s group and said hello, just to bug them, and then crossed over to the Red Rhetoric group, just to bug the whites more and also to flummox my former students, including Curly Bear. It would have been more fun if the FBI hadn’t been so willing to fan the flames into something much more damaging.

In the 1907-08 census book it’s hard to find much about Curly Bear’s family because they were mostly on the Canadian side, coming down into the American rez because they moved into the St. Mary’s valley bisected by the 49th parallel. I think there is a relationship to Jack Gladstone, the award-winning musician. What I find is this:

John (Jack) Wagner was 31 at the time and considered 3/4 Piegan, the American sub-group of Blackfeet. His father was William Russell and his mother was Pipe Woman, married to Frank Harrison. (Pipe Woman is a major name carrying a lot of power.) Pipe Woman’s father was Crow Bull but her mother was unknown. William Russell’s parents were unknown, probably way back east if not in Europe.

Jack’s wife was Mary, a Blood Indian married to him 13 years earlier at Belly River, Canada, by the priest. Her father was Red Crow. (I don’t know whether the cafe was named for him.) Her mother was Water Bird, whose mother was Sin-ah-ko. Red Crow’s aunt was Small Woman, who was the mother of the original Curly Bear. A second aunt was Mink Woman, widow of Running Rabbit, another prominent chief. These people are recent enough to have been photographed.

Mary had previously been married to John McDougall, half Scots. This appears to be a fur trading family in the Hudson’s Bay tradition. Mary’s daughter with McDougall, Maggie, married Monroe Arnoux, a Metis name, and was living with him at St. Mary’s Lake at the sawmill. St. Mary and Babb were about to become tourist destinations and today remain tourist towns at the edge of Glacier National Park.

Getting back to Jack Wagner, his father’s sister was Louise Higgins, wife of John Higgins. His own half-sibs included William Wagner, Annie Cobell (wife of Pete), Frank Harrison, and George Harrison, all with the same mother but different fathers. These sur-names would be recognized on the rez as families who included achievers.

William Wagner married Edna Wagner, born in Fort Macleod and wedded at age 21 on November 4, 1907 at Stand Off by a priest. They lived with Peter Cobell on Milk River.

If there is a church service for Curly Bear, I will attend. If there is a Blackfeet ceremony, I will not. It will not be meant for me. I’ll smudge a little sweetgrass and say my prayer in Blackfeet.