NODES AND INTERSTITIAL TRAVELERS

Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, art and taxidermy studio

In Browning, Montana

On frontiers, especially new ones that combine paradigm shift with boundaries between cultures, there are two kinds of people.  One is the interstitial traveler who explores across borders, making contacts and finding sources.  The other is the stays-put node where persons who travel for any reason can leave messages or ask for directions.  When these two types work together, understanding grows and also material culture is transported as marketable goods.  In the Sixties the Scriver Studio was a trading post as well as a natural history museum, an interface between humans and game animals.  

Indigenous materials got involved various ways.  Bob was a fur-buyer and also supplier, so he was dealing with the local trappers.  Sometimes they wanted to sell artifacts, often obscure little leather sacks of substances like yellow fungus paint or balsam fir needles.  Maybe something found or whittled.  Only very rarely did someone have an emergency that meant selling something like parade suits, the white buckskin and glass-beaded shirts and leggings that were highly glamorous.  They have now become more valuable than any paintings.

There were always painters or sculptors or art dealers, though we didn’t usually handle large important objects.  Our gallery room was meant to exhibit Bob’s sculptured portraits of the game animals that were mounted in the main museum.  They were part of the preparation of papier maché bodies underlying the glued-on hides.  We never exhibited any Blackfeet materials.  There was a glass case in the sales room where things were stored, some of them hung up.  The case had glass doors so we could see to find things but they were not for sale.  Somehow over the years a few artifacts were stashed there, but it was important from the beginning, when John Ewers was building the Museum of the Plains Indian during WWII, that Scriver did animals, not challenging anything Ewers was doing.

Ewers was a formal anthropologist who went on to a respected career in the semi-academic, semi-bureaucratic world of public museums and publishing, since being there in the middle of the Blackfeet reservation meant the opportunity to interview elders and ceremonialists.  His focus was history and his assumption was that “Indians” were dying out.  The point of the Museum of the Plains Indian was that it was a place to protect materials, but mainly in order to use them as patterns while making replicas to sell, the way Appalachians made quilts and Navajo wove blankets.  

Claude Schaffer was the next anthropologist curator and then Tom Kehoe, whose photos show up on Paul Seesequasis’ twitter feed.  Next was the first indigenous curator, but he was not Blackfeet.  Rather Ramon Gonyea was Onondaga, part of the five “civilized” tribes, and he was sophisticated politically.  I remember his painting of an anguished Vietnamese child in the style of Picasso’s “Guernica.”  

This link to is to the 2013 obit of an anthropologist named George Stocking, a white man.   http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/12/man-who-forced-anthropologists-respect-native-cultures.  To quote:  “As the Times obituary says, "his work helped produce a culture shift in anthropology during the 1960s and ’70s that heralded a growing respect for cultural diversity.”

“The primary target of Stocking's work was the anthropological presumption that "civilization" means Western civilization. Stocking argued that this idea was the root of brutal, even genocidal, "civilizing" programs directed at American Indians and other peoples around the world. He also challenged the mythology of "race" that fueled colonial domination.”  He was part of the great paradigm-shift empowerments that are right now brutally demonstrated in North Dakota to force the corporation pipeline crossing Native American lands.  But that’s not exactly what this post is about.

In the surge and struggling times of the Sixties there were individuals who spoke several languages, who listened and watched carefully, and who married across “race” lines.  One of those was John Hellson who brought us news from Canada, where the reserves sequestered and protected the tribes, which sometimes felt to them like capture.  On the Montana side, the people were far more on their own and pressed to be “white.”  They felt abandoned.

The government assigned Cree-Chippewa bands to the Blackfeet reservation, over-stressing already inadequate supplies and functions, and blindly including those people’s long-standing intermarriage with Euros, which blurred “tribal” lines and “race” lines in many ways.  “Half-breeds,” “mixed bloods” — most rudely, “Squaw men.”  I’m talking about people like Charlie Russell’s cousins, the Bents, those who were white but thought like indigenous people.  The Bent Trading Post was famous.  The Bents shared Indian lives, married into their families.  

Who did what with which consequences became crucially mixed, making the interstitial people and the stays-put nodes a kind of unacknowledged system moving money and access through a complex underculture.  This was joined by artists, writers, wheeler-dealers, all making a little money by discovering artifacts, investing them with stories, and reselling them.  Later drugs and politics joined the channels.

This went on until the officials realized what was happening.  Already the practice had been established by the European formal religionists, esp. the priests and lay workers who came to missions before Lewis and Clark staked out territory.  These literate priests sent back to Europe a steady stream of significant objects — some sacred and used in ceremonies — and information written down in Italian, French, or Latin, anthropological information before such a discipline had been defined.  Some of that is barely being recovered by modern translators, but the bright side of Euro-hoarding is preservation.  In Rome is a fine collection of Plains Indians artifacts.

High prairie culture was oral, not written.  Written materials were invisible, inconsequential.  All was spoken, signed, or acted out, maybe with prompters, objects with meaning.  I will say a thing that will outrage some:  the ceremonial life at its most intense was not based on exotic valuables as in the oldest Eurasian cultures, but on practises and body states.  It was like sophisticated sexwork: secret, intense, personal, and gender-inflected.  Sometimes the most daring thinkers, like Darrell Kipp, would say that opening Sacred Medicine Bundles was like splaying one’s grandmother’s body naked in a public place.  

Ceremony altered consciousness by interfering with the most basic needs of the body: hunger, thirst, movement, cold, cutting, strangling, sweating, torture. (Today they might be called "kink.") These can be made to break ties to the physical world and take a person to another realm without the use of any inhuman substances.  Kids discover these acts and so do the insane, because they are spontaneous symbolisms of the brain responding to molecules.  But in the secret ceremonies of the tribal people, they were done in a context of protection: someone experienced was always monitoring and setting limits.  On the other hand, they accepted death as a possibility.  Coitus was also sometimes part of the event.

Euro officials despised all this.  Maybe part of the reason was the always failing attempt of major forces to dominate the indigenous worlds of Eurasia, which they never quite achieved.  (Check out the history of Cornwall.  Are you watching “Poldark” on PBS?)  They label the authochthonous ways of people still embedded in their local ecology as “animal”, “deranged”, “profane”.  They are afraid of the power.  They forbid and criminalize — and John Hellson got caught by that, serving a prison term, probably not for the most transgressive things he did, though I couldn’t guess what they were.  Those who know should not tell.

And so now the People, who hadn’t really understood they were powerful, have seen how to protest, how to escape bureaucratic ligatures that are tied to profit, and how to collaborate, esp. by image.  So far two symbolic moments have happened at the protest site:  one was the arrival of the running tribal bison herd, coming over the hills like cavalry; the other was a prairie fire which did not reach the improvised shelters.  

This level of events puts the weapons of the government — bean bags, shriek cannons, and so on — also into a symbolic context.  “Embrace” is not included. It's petulance, frustration, a desire to rape.  

I’m a stays-put person.  I watch.  So do others around the planet.  The internet lets us all be both stays-put and traveling witness at once.

MARRYING INTO A TRIBE

This post is about men who wish to be tribal people, that is, indigenous, or for you disingenuous folks, “Indians.” Out of this love they married Blackfoot women.  They are John Hellson, Adolf Hungry Wolf, Ryan Heavyhead, and Grey Owl (1888- 1938), an Englishman who married Anahereo and raised beavers.  The couple even had a hole in their floor over water so the beavers could come and go.  They traveled far and wide, talking about conservation.

Grey Owl and beaver

From the earliest days, especially in the context of empire and colonies, some people have “gone native.”  Fur traders, writers, artists and adventurers have gone to some foreign place, found it to their liking and decided to join the People.  If they went as academic anthropologists, they were less likely to do this because their obligations as objective record-keepers and interpret the results in reports interfered with direct participation.  

The white folks back home greeted these people with a range of emotion: envy, contempt, longing, and curiosity.  They are accused of being fakes.  Women and children who had been captured by tribes -- and had become wholly committed to that way of life -- were thought to be insane when they were grief-stricken.  Today they are still accused of being hoaxes.  As though it were fake to grow to love people not your own color.

In the Sixties two men who fit roughly into this pattern showed up in Browning and became a huge influence on Bob Scriver and, because I did what he did, on me.  One was Adolf Hungry Wolf and the other was John Hellson.  Next door to the Scriver studio was the federal Museum of the Plains Indian, established during WWII with the leadership of John Ewers, the first curator.  It was meant to encourage the Blackfeet to create artifacts for sale.  They were not seen as religious.  Ewers, Claude Schaeffer, and Tom and Alice Kehoe were curators there and friends of Scriver but he didn’t learn from them with the intensity and romance both Hungry Wolf and Hellson could convey.

Okan, Star, Adolf, Judy Armstrong, Iniskim, Wolf, Beverly

There are probably formal terms and descriptions of people who both participate in and explain a culture to which they were not born.  Both these two men are grandfathers now.  Sometimes I’m in contact with their families, both on the Canadian side and doing well with their own nearly grown families.  A person could call them “half-breeds” but I call them “double-breeds” and it would be better advised to call them “enrolled.”  For a while not so long ago Hellson's granddaughter, who was in high school, traded doggerel about the weather via email.  These were family relationships.  They brought their wives and kids and in summer we had Bob's grandkids.  I think rivalry kept Hellson and Hungry Wolf from being friends.  Their personal styles were quite different.

Adolf was Swiss/Hungarian, raised in California, educated in historical methods.   He is a careful, orderly man.  John was from Cornwall, England, and had been a pugilist.  He can get swept away.   Adolf and his wife, Beverly, composed and produced many books and booklets explaining Blackfoot culture from material objects to myths and legends.  John’s only written contribution was “Ethnobotany of the Blackfoot Indians.”  He was a man of oral culture, partly because of secrecy in religious matters, but also he is a trickster.

Adolf has a strong memory and knows ceremonies and songs that the People themselves have forgotten.  He began to collect old photos and to tote them around in a suitcase to pow-wows and villages, asking the old people what they could tell him.  Who were these people?  What were they doing?  Where are they in the photo?  He wrote it all on the backs of the photos, added much historical material, and produced four big books that included everything.  I call them the “Museum in a Box.”  I like to read the books late at night so the images and stories will enter my sleep.

Sleep-stories were crucial to the old Blackfoot People and much of their ceremonial life was guided by dreams  which is why there is a little Maltese cross representing the sleep moth at the back of the top of a lodge.  Messengers came to tell a person that going to war would be unlucky or that it was time for them to have a child or that they should become ceremonial leaders for the Thunder Pipe Bundles.  Sometimes they told a person to do what he wanted to do and sometimes they forbade it.  

Bob Scriver had a dream telling him to become a Thunder Pipe Bundle Keeper.  The result was chaotic, punishing, but fulfilling.  (The whole story is in “Bronze Inside and Out,” my memoir of Bob.  U of Calgary Press.  It's on Amazon.)  At his death that Pipe Bundle disappeared.  The old People say it will come back when it’s ready.  I agree.  There are a dozen Bundles active on the Blackfeet reservations today.  

John Hellson and Bob Scriver working on the individual portraits 

of Bundle Keepers for the composite circle of ceremonialists.

Adolf’s version of appropriation (much frowned on by educated indigenous people today) was to take on their “lifestyle.”  He and Beverly raised their children in a little cabin in the Rockies where the running water is a creek and a solar panel runs the computer as the only electricity.  He keeps the old-time regime of a morning cold water plunge and a several mile run, but Beverly, who is now divorced, went back to town and married a professor.  

Neither man grew rich.  But like Grey Owl early in the century and Ryan Heavyhead today, they spread indigenous knowledge, emphasizing the environmental attitudes of people like Bioneers.  These were men at the fundamental interface between the Real People and their ecologies, absorbing the sensory world as well as the “facts” (not always so factual) that would interest an ethnographer.  They became what they studied.

Part of the wariness and blame with these "interface" men is that the tribal folks themselves don’t always know their own culture.  At one time the penalties were harsh.  It’s easily understandable that they resent outsiders knowing more than they do and that they go to blood quantum as an entitlement since, in the case of displaced diaspora, that’s about all they’ve got.  Now, of course, the academic world has taken up tribal culture and many universities have programs and departments focused on Indians.  (If money gets tight, they may be the first to go, along with the arts.)  It becomes proprietary information, intellectual property. 

Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavyhead

Ryan Heavyhead was a close friend of Narcisse Blood and often worked with him.  Narcisse was killed in a car crash, but Heavyhead, married to a tribal woman, goes on alone in the same context.  He is an oral culture presenter, posting many soliloquies on YouTube as he “repatriates” rattlesnakes and works out physical exercises.  His wife, Adrienne, maintains the Blackfoot Digital Library.com online, an exceptional source of information with a policy of inclusion, which was Narcisse’s way of doing things.

If we can get past the name-calling and gate-keeping, which I think some believe will increase their own value, the chances of preservation and renewal are much better.