BOB SCRIVER EXHIBIT AT THE MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Bob Scriver exhibit ‘Mastery in Bronze’ 

at Montana Historical Society

A new exhibit at the Montana Historical Society Museum features the work of Robert MacFie Scriver, whose rodeo, wildlife and Native American bronzes have been shown at galleries and museums, and been prized by collectors across the nation

and the world.

“Mastery in Bronze: Selections from The Bob Scriver Collection” features bronzes from all three genres and tells the story of the man who was born in 1914 on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, where his parents operated a mercantile company.

This is the 100-year anniversary of his birth, and when he died in 1999, he was still at work in his studio at his gallery and museum in Browning. He grew up amid the vast plains and “shining” mountains surrounded by frontier characters and Blackfeet elders.

His work with taxidermy soon led him to begin experimenting with sculpting and later bronzes. He had his first major exhibition at his Browning studio in 1961. It received acclaim and national recognition followed.

In 2000, his fourth wife Lorraine donated a large collection of his work including bronzes, sculptures and other artwork and memorabilia to the Montana Historical Society.

There will be a public event on Thursday, Aug. 14, to commemorate his birthday.

____________________

Robert MacFie Scriver, 1960

Photo by Butch DeSmet

Bob Scriver was born in 1914.  This year he would have been a hundred years old, but he died in 1999.  Below is a transcription of a letter to the editor of the Glacier Reporter in March of a year that has been accidentally torn off, but it may have been close to the year of his death.  Anyway, I wrote it.

_________

When I’ve done memorials for very old people, I’ve always tried to summon up a mental picture of them as they were when they were young.  We forget what people were like when they were young, or maybe we weren’t even born yet.

When I came to Browning in 1961, Bob Scriver was 47 and full of energy.  He still kept his white horse (half-Arabian from Andy Whitford’s mare and some visiting stallion who could jump fences) in a corral behind his museum and rode him up and down the alleys of town as well as in every parade.  None of his work had been cast in bronze yet -- just hydrocal.  He’d had his first big-time show in Los Angeles and was about to ride in the buffalo roundup in Moiese with Ace Powell.  The C.M. Russell Art Auction hadn’t been invented yet and John Clark was still whittling in his studio in East Glacier.  Al Racine was an artist buddy along with Blake the Woodcarver in Hungry Horse.  Bob had just bought his first “real” painting, a moose by Carl Rungius sold to him by Rex Rieke.  He had to borrow the money from his mom because when he asked Andy Greenshields for a bank loan, Andy said,  “There’s no money in art, Robert!”

I like to summon up some of the names from way back then -- maybe even from before I knew Bob.  For instance, there was Jimmy Welch, Sr., the father of the novelist, who was only a little boy who used to sleep over with his playmate “Robert” at the Scriver house.  Later on on were Merle Magee, hunting partner, and Calvin Augare, who saved Bob’s eyesight in the summer of 1962 by taking him up to IHS, insisting that a doctor look at his inflamed eye, and then driving him to Great Falls to a specialist.

After World War II there was a whole raft of musicians -- a lot of Girards -- and for a while there was an art club, where a bunch of guys including Jason Devereaux used to pool a few dollars to hire a model to pose.  Of course, some students from Bob’s teaching years stayed friends his whole life.  When Bob needed something written correctly, he went to Edythe Harris, English teacher -- and if he wanted to hear something improper, he went to R.W. Harris!

Bob always had a lot of lady friends -- no, not that kind, at least not “only”!  He always had older women friends, some of them his baby sitters when he was little.  Mae Williamson posed for “Transition.”  Cecile Horn helped in so many ways -- like teaching him to put up a tipi properly.  Rose Surechief did good work.  Mary Blackman was -- well, they don’t come any better.  Esther Becker was a true friend as well as bookkeeper.  Finette Connolly made the best sourdough pancakes with chokecherry syrup of any cook this side of heaven.  

And the anthropology informants in those days were often young, but they knew a lot.  Calvin Boy and Darryl Blackman, I fancy were much like the young Duvall before he became unhappy.  Dick Whiteman and Joe Old Chief often stopped by.  Alonzo Skunkcap wasn’t an informant, but because he only lived a couple of doors away, we’d give him a ride out to his place.  He was the Real Thing, a hunter nonpariel, though in old age he was blind.  Chewing Black Bone was another inarguably authentic person, a friend of James Willard Schultz (rather less authentic).  The old Bundle Owners of the Sixties are gone now, even George and Molly Kicking Woman who were the youngest.  None were more devoted than Louis Plenty Treaty and his wife Maggie.  None were more careful than Tom and Margaret Many Guns.  No one was more shamanic than Dick Little Dog.

"Proper" anthropologists included Claude Schaeffer, Tom and Alice Kehoe (Bob performed their wedding ceremony), and Ramon Gonyea. Improper anthropologists included John Hellson and Adolf Hungry Wolf.

Bill Cochran and Eddie Costell got the rodeo stuff moving when the chance to do the Linderman statue came along.  Old Joe Davis was an honest-to-goodness open range cowboy with the “hair on.”  Joe Evans helped invent the very first foundry out in the garage behind Bob’s rental while Bob’s mom sat across the street with her hand on the phone in case it blew up.  The Weathereds helped in those early days, and so did Bob Gordon, a master welder.

Carl Cree Medicine was absolutely key to the whole Scriver Studio complex.  Over the years he learned to do most everything and it was his sons, David and Junior, who have continued on as expert casters -- not just bronze, but also plaster and mold-making, which are harder in some ways.  Gordon Monroe was the fiberglass king.

For a while there was hardly anyone in town who didn’t get pressed into service some way or other -- skinning or cleaning molds or building or cashiering or cranking out mimeographs.  Milo Fields kept the Glacier Reporter full of stories about it.  I’m undoubtedly forgetting lots of important people -- some of them probably hardly aware of how much they contributed at some small turning point.  It took a village to make this sculptor and his studio.

It’s not my place to thank all these people.  I just wanted to note them -- some are gone now.  Maybe you could thank each other and explain to the younger folks how it was.

Tell them Bob Scriver started out with $500, an old red pickup, and a vision.  They could do the same thing and maybe they’ll go even farther, esp. if they have computer skills.

_____________

Moiese Buffalo Roundup, 1962

Now and then I run across some retired Montana man who will assure me that he knew Bob Scriver and was his close friend.  I never know them.  Bob had few white friends, esp. people from off the rez.  In his last years when he was sometimes bedridden, it was Boyd and Lila Evans who kept track of both him and Lorraine, since Lorraine herself was not in good health.  I’m not sure they were repaid.  Bob bought his beloved ranch from Boyd's brother, Corky. 

Bob published three picture books.  The first was "An Honest Try" about the rodeo pieces with photos by Asger Mikkleson.  The second and third, both about the Blackfeet bronzes and his artifact collection, were photographed by Marshal Noice, who is now an artist in Kalispell.  My biography of Bob, "Bronze Inside and Out", is available on Amazon.

PAST/FUTURE -- PASSIVE/ACTIVE: FORT BENTON

Sometimes the most subtle shifts have the most impact in the long run. I’m thinking about the shift from watching television to using a computer, which appears to be the same but is radically different. A television is a passive instrument: your only choices are on/off/change-channel. A computer is active: your choices are unlimited whether you are writing something, building database, or prowling the internet. A gameset is in between: you are acting voluntarily in a choice of ways within a limited context.

With that in mind, this is a story about books. Someone sent me an email saying they had been to Fort Benton, a wonderful (truly!) old (OLDEST) Montana town, and had been in a bookstore where they were told that “Bronze Inside and Out” was no longer available. EAACCCAKKK!!! I called a museum bookstore down there. (There are about four.) The girl said she had never heard of the book and there was no bookstore in town either -- just a little shop with a collection of old junk with one shelf of strange books. On Friday I nailed the Fort Benton contingent at the history seminar about the elusive bookstore and they assured me it was a MAJOR and ADMIRABLE -- in fact, STUNNING -- bookstore with terrific treasures all through it. I called there and got a very evasive owner. So I saddled up and went to scout yesterday. I like to see the whites of their eyes.

The little junk shop with a few books was there. Pretty good stuff, I thought. The guy is actually a saddlemaker and works in the back. He knew about the other bookstore: Riverbreak Books and Gear, 808 17th St., 406-622-5816. Tom Carrels, owner. It was indeed a terrific bookstore -- not just that. Zillions of hats and other outdoor kinds of stuff.

Some people will recognize this boomer life trajectory: South Dakota boyhood in Aberdeen; Missoula in the Seventies studying wildlife and landscape; then U Dub for a slightly more sophisticated degree, last ten years in Alaska. (Anyone know what ever happened to Jay Vest? Neither of us did. Last night I googled him. He’s a professor in North Carolina publishing books about Blackfeet, like, yetanother set of Napi tales.) Carrels has bought this historic two-story riverfront building and will create a hostel upstairs. His ideas are sound IMAO: not just history but also geological adventures on the river and surrounding land. Not just folks driving out from Great Falls for supper (it’s about thirty miles and there are good places to eat) but European backpackers and Calgary empty nesters in RVs. He doesn’t really understand the new books, ebooks, print-on-demand, Canadian, academic presses, wholesalers, self-publishing, etc. He’s just always bought books, objects, real things, maybe used and maybe new. He has good taste, meaning it’s a lot like mine. It was worth coming to check out. Easy to check the whites of eyes wide open.

I went on to the fort reconstruction and its museum. The women there called the men, some of whom I already knew slightly. Though presumably Fort Benton is a “Bob Scriver town” because of the Lewis & Clark monument and the portrait of Shep, they insisted they knew nothing about “Bronze Inside and Out,” Devotees of the Montana Historical Society, closely enough related to be assuming custody of the Scriver Blackfeet series of bronzes which is currently stored in Edmonton, they knew nothing about me. (The society finds me an inconvenience, an anachronism.) Though “Montana, The Magazine of Western History,” published by the Montana Historical Society, has printed two quarter-page ads and two reviews of “Bronze Inside and Out,” one man explained to me, “No one came here to us and asked us to buy a copy.” Passive.

That’s the key: they are passive television people. NONE of them uses the computer to look for information. The word “blog” scares them. The Internet sounds to them like a trap. They assume the internet will grab them, force them to look at dirty pictures, and blab all their confidential information to the neighbors. Meanwhile, their kids are texting like mad, talking to other kids all over the planet. They are very impatient with the older generation, and they are right.

So I make these big bold accusations and it turns out this generalization is WRONG !! (Not for the first time, and ever so cheerfully!) There are three blogs coming out of Fort Benton, as follows: http://fortbenton.blogspot.com/
http://mthistoryrevealed.blogspot.com/
http://viewfromthefbbridge.blogspot.com/ Active.

This idea of Fort Benton being blog-blind is my projection. Now I must go look in the mirror and ask myself why I have been so passive in the past that I didn’t find the Fort Benton blogs? (They still have not found mine, I think, though I just mailed them a complete guide to the publications of Mary Scriver.)

Fort Benton is where it is because that point on the river was as far into the interior of Blackfeet country as you could go on a steamboat. That meant the European aristocracy and the most enterprising of the early artists (like Audubon) could come to the heart of Blackfeet country on what was essentially a floating hotel. Regardless of what that meant to the visitors, it meant that shrewd and clever local eyes were watching as soon as they left St. Louis. And they are still here. Natawista was the resourceful wife of Culbertson, whose office will be replicated in this newly reconstructed fort, complete with log palisade. Her great-grandson was in my English classroom in Cut Bank a few years ago. He looked a lot like her and his personality was not so different either. Today, if you had five dollars for every Blackfeet living in Fort Benton, you might be able to buy an ice cream cone at the Tastee Freeze.

It appears to me that Fort Benton is operating on several levels. One is the sober historians and solid citizens who have raised the funds for and now operate this excellent and accurate fort reconstruction, according to historians and documents. The other is the entrepreneurs (saddlemakers and used book dealers) in the solid but decrepit actual historic buildings on the waterfront across from the sculpture promenade. They are still having adventures, open to possibility. I find myself -- as usual -- on the boundary. I began this post intending to find one type passive and one type active, but it’s more complicated than this. It’s more like this: Jack Lepley, one of the town’s revered history fathers, just finished a book on the last brothel in Fort Benton. What makes him think there are not brothels now? Maybe the last anything is still in the future.

It’s like this: Bob Doerck, another of the resident historians who has a formidable book collection, wanted to know if I’d written another book. Books have changed as much as brothels. I’m writing “books” but he’d not recognize them nor are they history. “History” is not always the best position for the future, but it’s a good foundation.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF BOB SCRIVER

Today, January 29, 2009, is the tenth anniversary of the death of Robert MacFie Scriver. I jogged the Great Falls Tribune to see if they might note that fact, but they didn’t. They are absorbed in their struggle to prevent their own death as a newspaper. The actual paper has been shrinking in measurement, the ad revenue is down as it is in all media, “headquarters” is busy trying to decide what to axe next (they aren’t in Montana), reporters are over-loaded, and no one knows exactly what counts as news or whom to believe anyway. The Lee-owned newspapers are consolidating services, turning back towards the good old Anaconda-coiled world. Why gone those times? Maybe they’re circling back, just temporarily out of sight.

The positive notch about Bob Scriver is that his biography is written and was published in Canada by the University of Calgary Press. “Bronze Inside and Out.” I’ve been asked to sign copies at the CM Russell Museum benefit auction in mid-January. The Ad Club-organized soiree is also a plus, constantly re-energized and consistently growing in spite of being nearly a half-century old.

However, the Montana Historical Society refuses to speak to me, even as they unsuccessfully try to raise money for a new building. They told me bluntly that everything belongs to THEM now and they will do what they please with it. Montana Humanities has struck me from their list of authors invited to the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, evidently because I’m uncontrollable.

The only entity that appears to appreciate Bob’s actual estate is the Royal Alberta Museum, the institution that Bob wanted to have everything. However, the artifact collection that caused so much contention (including the curse put on Phil Stepney, their director, that may or may not have resulted in his death from a rare cancer) has been at least partially dispersed, the Sacred Materials going back to the elders of the tribe, who sold at least some of them to tribal individuals on the Montana side of the line. I’m not sure I object to that. The Royal Alberta Museum did mount an exhibit of the Blackfeet bronzes and did invite Bob’s sister-in-law, Helene DeVicq, an integral part of his work who lives in Edmonton, to attend their opening.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which was given custody of all the full-mounts from the Scriver museum, and who for a while provided employment for Arnold Olsen, the dismissed MHS director who made the transaction for the Scriver estate, will not respond to my visits, phone calls or emails.

Bob divorced me forty years ago and as his “third wife of four,” I have no legal claims. In Montana, which lags a bit in social assumptions, people believe that all former wives are predators who hate their former spouses and crave money. In this case the description better fits the fourth wife. But as the only surviving wife, a year younger than Bob’s daughter, I have rather slipped over into a daughter-like role. This is recognized by Bob’s Quebec cousin, Margaret Meeks, gracefully aging in a retirement home.

Bob’s children, produced by his first marriage, died in his lifetime. The five grandchildren are in their forties now, solidly middle-aged. One is a contractor, one is a beverage distributor, one is a testing lab administrator, one is a CPA, and one has had a warrant issued for her arrest because of a forgery charge. The great-grandchildren are college-aged. None is married yet as far as I know: they don’t keep in touch. One is an international fencing athlete (Ariel DeSmet). None are artists. None carry the Scriver name.

Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the Blackfeet Tribe, is running the Blackfeet Heritage Center in the former Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. Siyeh also accepted custody of the two major fiberglass monumental rodeo sculptures. David Cree Medicine, Bob’s foundry foreman, is doing well, working for Siyeh. His father, Carl, continues to create art and shows at the Indian Art show that runs parallel to the CM Russell Museum benefit auction. Flatiron Ranch is in the joint-custody of Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust. I know nothing about it except that Googling is complicated by a housing development near Hamilton also called “Flatiron Ranch.”

These observations are only about the local and smallest circle of Bob’s world. I figure there are three circles where Scriver’s work have significance. The local is based in large part on people who actually knew Bob and visited the museum or dealt with him in some way. This is the least significant in terms of his work, though it includes a few people who have tried to get rich from what they could siphon off, including Flathead entrepreneurs producing illegal copies.

The second “circle” is the world of Western art, kind of a double-yolked egg that is half “cowboy” artists and half historical recorders of the West as a place. Cowboy Artists of America, which began explicitly as a friendship group, was so successful that as soon as the founders had been removed by Father Time, the second generation has worked hard to make it a profit-aimed group. The controversies and power-struggles among them have interfered with that goal.

The other “yolk,” the Morans, Bierstadts, Catlins, and Russells, are a bridge to a larger art world, currently beset with some of the same problems as the other humanities spheres, such as dance, music, and publishing. Over the years institutions have been gifted or have acquired works of art as “investments” worth tax credits as well as prestige and scholarly value. Now the dark side of the equation has come to the fore as the institutions, much diminished by investment collapse, try to get the money back out of the art. The most recent, perhaps wishing to avoid the struggles over trying to market a beloved piece of art, is Brandeis University, which proposes to simply close down their Rose Museum and auction ALL the art. Which goes to show that the executors of Bob’s will were ahead of their times when they closed down his museum and auctioned his collections: his Russells, his Remingtons, his Rungiuses, and so on while trucking his own works down to Helena to be locked up, not even unpacked. As the former director said to me, “I don’t much care about art. I like the saddles and wagons, the paraphenalia.”

The wheel continues to turn. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

FACES OF COMBAT: PTSD & TBI: A Review

There are two kinds of people: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. One way to divide people into two kinds is according to the way they react to evil, pain and injustice. Some turn away and pretend it’s not there. Others go straight towards it with the intention of doing something about it, if only to get an accurate description. Eric Newhouse, a Pulitzer prize winning reporter for the Great Falls Tribune, is one of the latter. I guess I am, too, which is why I read “Faces of Combat: PTSD & TBI.”

This book, produced entirely outside the Manhattan book machine and published in the Seattle area (see info at end), has the immediacy and clarity of local news, though it is relevant to our entire nation, pressed into a war fought by the National Guard and mercenaries while our formal military struggles to keep up. It focuses on the terrible consequences to the men and women involved, who return home (IF they do) changed in ways that make ordinary life impossible, so much so that many commit suicide.

We are used to stigmatizing suicide by blaming it on weaklings, losers, and loners, but the lead case in this book is that of Chris Dana, a much loved young man, a cheerful Montana kid who tried to help others. Combat changed him entirely. The damage leaks over into all our lives.

Newhouse sketches out the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, once called battle fatigue, and vividly describes the kind of ghastly experiences that create the syndrome, situations both psychologically and morally unbearable. Then he takes us through the symptoms: nightmares, hallucinations, flash-backs, hatred of authority, and explosions of inappropriate violence that endanger everyone nearby. These are people who can no longer sleep, who keep a gun at hand at all times, who have cut so many throats that they could do it in their sleep if they could approximate that state, and who trust no one. They are unemployable and may live in little wilderness camps both because they feel safer that way and because they are afraid of what they might do to others. The numbers are impressive: more soldiers have died of suicide than have died in combat. Got that?

Mysteriously, some of the people exposed to the events that throw some soldiers into madness can adjust to normal life and return to their old selves relatively unchanged. They are “resilient.” No one knows why, but it is vital to find out since ending the Iraqi war will mean bringing the National Guard home in great numbers. They will be living in our neighborhoods again, riding the bus with us, maybe walking the streets at night.

TBI is less discussed but equally troublesome. It refers to Traumatic Brain Injury, which Newhouse calls the “signature” injury of this war because of the many explosions. Also, we have the tools to actually detect some of the internal bruising that comes from the Jello-like brain “sloshing” inside the hard skull meant to protect it. This holds my attention because of three family members (father, brother, cousin) whose personalities have changed for the worst after forehead blows. On this reservation many people have suffered such blows and I’m convinced it contributes to disordered behavior. Studies of prison populations show a very high percentage of head injuries, none of which are treated or even regarded with much interest since the outer physical symptoms are minor. Violence is simply thought of as their personality.

The most subtle injuries of all may come from both PTSD and TBI: changes in the molecular reciprocal interactions that operate our brains and damage to the tiny sensitive structures that sort and shunt our sensory memories. The hippocampus, a tiny seahorse-shaped organ over each ear, is measurably smaller in soldiers suffering from PTSD. This little gizmo is responsible for classifying and organizing incoming perceptions, then sending the significant ones on to the amygdala and cortex where conscious “thinking” happens. If it gets “stuck,” it can replay the same perceptions over again or mislabel and misdirect them. No one knows whether trauma makes the hippocampus shrink or whether the people with small hippocampi develop PTSD as a result. With proper treatment, it can grow again. The brain is far more variable than anyone suspected.

But the most disfunctional system of all is the military itself: bureaucratic, hierarchical, denying and underfunded, it uses and discards soldiers with impunity. One of the great values of this book is that it describes what progressive leaders can do: Governor Schweitzer, Senator Tester and Senator Baucus -- reacting to public pressure -- put the levers on the Montana National Guard to improve vet care. Newhouse lays out the specifics: better medical care but also mobilization of the vets themselves to monitor and support their fellow vets. “Operation Standdown,” for instance, called the anonymous people to come from their hidey-holes (one of them was living under the end of a bridge within eyesight of the Great Falls Tribune building without Newhouse ever having a clue) to get basic health triage (blood pressure, dental work) and to register for entitlements. The bait was a huge mound of surplus gear such as sleeping bags and tents, warm clothing, socks and boots.

The saddest kind of trauma is that of women soldiers who were sexually assaulted by their fellows so often and treated with such impatience by officers that Newhouse recommends females be kept out of the military. In Montana the kind of strong women who know weapons and identify with brothers will not react kindly to this opinion, but even the cartoon “Doonesbury” has been pointing out with heart-breaking humor that it exists.

Soldiers suffer in extreme forms of ways we all suffer in ordinary times and places. Advances in prosthetics, trauma care, and technology are often triggered by war, but we also ought to be paying attention to the social reforms necessary for a better society. I’m particularly worried by the acceptance of mercenary soldiers, highly paid and out-of-control, operating for private or corporate interests. They will be looking for police jobs.

To give us hope, Newhouse describes some of the strategies and treatments that seem to help traumatized people. Things like “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing” or gentle brain-wave entrainment or religious ceremonies or talking cures all seem to help individuals to various degrees. Acupuncture and a variation based on tapping seem effective in some cases. But the training and money for them isn’t there.

Newhouse concludes with a practical list of people to call to get help with housing, employment, legal problems, health and so on. If I were struggling with this stuff personally, I’d tear out those pages, take them someplace to be laminated in plastic, and refer to them daily. Isolation is an enemy. A book is a friend. Eric has done us all a major service.

“Faces of Combat, PTSD and TBI,” by Eric Newhouse. “Issues Press,” an imprint of Idyll Arbor, Inc, 39129 264th Ave. SE, Enumclaw, WA 98022. ISBN 9781-930461-06-2.

ANOTHER MILLION DOLLAR INDIAN ARTIFACT COLLECTION: DAVID HUMPHREYS MILLER

I was interested in the Great Falls Tribune Sunday story (8-31-08) about the proposed acquisition of the David Humphreys Miller collection. Actually, they say it's worth 1.4 million. (Inflation, you know.) With the Miller collection in mind, let’s take a look at what makes collections of Indian artifacts (and portraits) valuable.

First of all, let’s be blunt. Indian artifacts were often the trophies of the wars that cleared the prairies for white development. A scalp, a quiver, a shield, guns and bows and so on might have been actually collected off the field the way my uncle acquired Herman Goering’s tableware and stationary after WWII. This collection is in part made valuable by its connection to the Battle of the Little Big Horn or the Battle of the Greasy Grass or Custer’s Last Stand. Naming rights to the event is part of the dynamics.

Second, Indian artifacts were often sold because the People were pressed into need by the loss of their former economy and the graft of the US government, from agents to railroaders, who constantly skimmed tribal wealth. (One might accompany this point with the CMR portrait of the Indian mother selling a buffalo horn hat rack, trudging down the sidewalk in front of an elegantly porched Great Falls house where a prosperous but oblivious white woman rocks her child.)

Third, Indian artifacts are based on the 19th century assumption that Indians were doomed as a separate people, that the death of their previous culture would mean NO culture at all, so they would stop existing. The idea is that we killed them, but we saved their good stuff as curiosities or maybe “works of art” or for a veneer of scientific research.

Fourth, religious artifacts are laden with the “magic” quality that many attribute to the American Indian of the 19th century and that contemporary Indians use to accrue value and status to themselves. But it’s my understanding that the value and status of ceremonial objects and their allocation to the stewardship of individuals, though they were connected to prosperity (both bringing it and necessitating it for the expensive performance of the ceremonies) actually belonged to the tribe itself. That is, the elders of the tribe determined worthiness to manage ceremonies, because the "magic" affected the welfare of the whole.

Yet this is problematic because the “tribe” was an assemblage of independent bands whose leadership shifted according to the task at hand so as to put capable people in charge. There was no “tribe” as a whole until the US Government began to impose the requirement so as to have a coherent entity with which to deal, who could sign treaties in the European manner. Many problems have been created by their failure to recognize that in the best of times (even now) the bands never universally assented to decisions. The tribe’s most powerful portion, not necessarily a majority, is associated with a lot of small groups who go along only if they must and often with a great deal of noisy objection. If two factions are about evenly matched -- well, watch the newspaper.

Even in the case of Lyle Heavyrunner, who is a good man and a capable leader (as well as posing for one of the buffalo hunters in Bob Scriver’s major bronze called “Real Meat”), is only a member of one branch of the Eagle Calf (John Ground) family and the branches are not unanimous among themselves. Add the complication of several different tribes intermarrying and interacting (or parts of tribes since no two tribes merged -- certainly not traditional enemies like the Sioux and Blackfeet) and the fact that some of these artifacts (Black Elk’s) possibly represent a synergy with Christianity, and entitlement becomes very cloudy.

Sioux are not a prominent tribe of Montana, are they? Aren’t they a South Dakota-based tribe these days? Or maybe Hollywood-based? (The pattern has been that Sioux play the parts and Blackfeet do the dangerous stunts and provide the horses.) Are the Sioux willing to let these materials stay in Montana or are they going to come over and claim them back the way the Blackfeet went up to Edmonton and demanded back the materials Bob Scriver sold up there?

As long as we’re talking about the Scriver artifact collection (which included a gun collection and a RCMP uniform collection), it should be noted that the materials defined as “Sacred Bundles” soon left the Royal Alberta Museum as “loans” to the Blackfoot groups in Alberta and possibly a sale to a Montana Blackfeet person. Also, Scriver artifact materials that were NOT in the sale to the RAM, were impounded at the border when they were sent north by Lorraine Scriver and/or returned to Lorraine Scriver by the RAM curator. They were left for safekeeping at the Montana Historical Society, but impounded by Fish & Game, and went from there back to individuals in the Blackfeet Tribe not representing the tribe as a whole, who has no suitable secure repository anyway.

The Museum of the Plains Indian remains the property of the US Government, who has tried to give it to the tribe, who will not accept it because they also want enough money to maintain the Museum. As standards for museums keep rising -- climate control, access, insurance -- and because the Museum is built on a flood plain (like much of Browning), this is problematic. The damage from the 1964 flood, which destroyed much valuable material plus damaging the foundation, has never been repaired. (This was a war-time no-frills build financed by the Crafts Association of the US Government and the Lions Clubs of America.) The bottom line is whether the university system is capable of guarding and preserving the Miller collection.

The nature of institutions is that they have very weak memories, especially since the people with expertise often come from elsewhere and don’t know the local history and culture. Institutions are political animals and if anyone thinks that the “white” population of Montana is less divided than the historical and present Indian population, they haven’t been paying attention. In an era when institutions are never properly funded -- partly because of so many competing needs like poverty, crop failure, wildfire, and weather disasters and partly because of resistance to taxes and regulation -- institutions are far more tempted than usual to deaccession materials to fund salaries and maintenance. It has been a scandal everywhere.

In this Miller case, the anonymity of the selling party, masked behind representatives, is traditional. It is unclear how the legal owners acquired the collection. Also unclear is how much compensation those representatives are expecting: the honor of it all? Friendship? A percentage? It also worries me that the appraiser is nameless: he could be anyone, maybe the present Museum Services Manager of the Montana Historical Society, an expert on Native American materials who was let go from the Portland Art Museum. (The reason for parting was temperament, not irregularities with his work.) Appraisers are normally paid, sometimes a percentage of the value of what they are appraising, a practice that probably needs to be rethought.

Another factor is the copyright issue in regards to such materials as Miller’s 1957 book: “Custer’s Fall: the Indian Side of the Story.” The law has been changed so much in the past few years, sometimes with retroactive inclusions, that an expert would be needed to confirm that indeed the materials were still under copyright rather than public domain. (Someone is recasting Scriver bronzes copyrighted in the Fifties, I assume because they think they are public domain.) Beyond that, copyright rests on the absence of challenges from the persons who are rightfully entitled to the materials. Who would try to declare standing in the case of Miller’s writing and photographs? Does he have descendants? Why are they not identified?

My last point is a bit of a niggle, but I’m going to put it in just the same. Adolph Hungry Wolf (some people will quit reading at this point) personally and at his own expense, both money and effort over decades, has published a four-book compendium of photos and documents specifically about the South Piegan Blackfeet in every aspect. Anyone can buy it for $400 and have a lot more on hand than the Miller collection.

Unless one is looking for war trophies. Maybe the wars have continued, but more subtly than just killing an enemy outright. Oh, and since it seems to have dropped out of institutional memory, Bob Scriver played an important part in the Exalted Ruler effort by creating a small bronze that was sold in large numbers.

BOB'S BODY

Photo courtesy of Laurel Scriver. Bob's name and dates are not as worn as the light makes it seem.

Not long ago Bob Scriver’s niece stopped by the cemetery in Cut Bank. She got a surprise. During WWII Thad Scriver, her grandfather, bought four graves which was how he thought of his family: mom, pop, two sons. No provision for daughters-in-law or descendants. This made more sense when both sons were in the army and men from Browning were being killed. The graves were in Cut Bank because that was the “white town.” Of course, now that has less meaning that it did then.

By the time Bob Scriver died, his mom, pop, brother and sister-in-law were occupying the original four graves, so two more were bought, head-to-head with the four originals. The four graves had been marked with modest flat stones for ease when mowing. When Thad died, his wife (Bob’s mom) installed a “family stone,” which simply had “Scriver” on it, at the head of the four graves. While nice enough, it is hardly elaborate.

Bob Scriver’s wish was that he be buried next to his beloved horse out at the Doane ranch and he’d made Boyd Evans promise to come back with his backhoe to bury Bob there. Bob’s fourth wife, Lorraine, would have none of that! (I was the third wife. Lorraine was a common-law wife as nearly as I can tell, if that makes any difference. She was with him longer that any of us.) Lorraine, having had a dubious and outlier background, was determined to capture respectability and inclusion, so she insisted on the Cut Bank cemetery.

The only other people involved in the decision were Bob’s remaining three grandchildren by his daughter, who had died much earlier. She is buried in Anacortes, Washington, where she died, and her mother, Bob’s first wife, is interred in the same grave. There are two headstones on that grave, one for each woman. The only time the grandchildren saw their mother’s casket was when the grave was opened to bury their grandmother. Bob’s two granddaughters by his son don’t appear to have been consulted. Bob’s contemporaries, his cousins, were not even told he had died until I contacted them in the course of writing his biography.

The grandkid’s and Lorraine’s solution to the problem of markers was to cut Bob’s name in the Scriver family stone and add a “foot stone,” though Lorraine in particular had visions of a statue. One thing they never thought of was noting that Bob was a WWII veteran, since that was long before they were born. The consequence of that oversight is that every Memorial Day when the Veterans of Foreign Wars mark every veteran’s grave with a small United States flag, they put one on Harold’s grave according to the information of his service on his stone, but never put one on Bob’s grave. For a few years I drove out early on Memorial Day and reminded them. I threatened to tape a photocopy of his portrait in uniform onto the headstone.

When Bob died, I decided not to come to the funeral or be involved. The grandkids plainly wanted me excluded and, as for Lorraine, need you ask? In Spring I came to find his grave and though “Crown Hill Cemetery” is small, I stopped at Bob’s lawyer’s to see where I should look. The lawyer was clearly not happy to see me -- had rather forgotten that I existed -- and went into a long explanation of how Bob had chosen to be buried near the lawyer’s family plot because his family and the Scrivers had been such wonderful friends. News to me.

Within a year a second lawyer had captured the attention of Lorraine, eliminated the first one, and was re-arranging things to suit himself and his bank account. He paid no attention to Bob’s grave. The family stone is at the head of both Bob’s grave and the space next to it, which is empty. It’s unclear who has ownership of it. (The niece believes she does.)

My idea was that when they cleaned out the taxidermy walk-in freezer under the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which contained the bodies of more than a few of Bob’s beloved pet animals so that “someday” he could make their portraits in bronze, they ought to bury the pets in the grave next to him. Since he couldn’t be next to his horse, maybe he could be next to his springer spaniel, his bobcats, his fox, his badger, and his ground squirrel. One of my friends advised me that he thought others would consider this blasphemy, since cemeteries are hallowed ground. He was rather confusing a cemetery, which is simply a burial ground, with a graveyard, which is part of church property.

The surprise Bob’s niece got was that Lorraine’s name had suddenly appeared on the gravestone. She died in 2002 in Vancouver, B.C., where she was born (she was always a Canadian citizen as was her first husband), was cremated and cast into the Pacific Ocean. (So was Bob’s second wife. An interesting fantasy about what the two sets of ashes might say if they met.) Maybe her family sent or brought some of her ashes to be buried here, but they never came to visit while she was alive so I don’t know why they could come five years after her death. I suspect this was the work of the lawyer attempting to strengthen his ties to the estate. Bob paid him in bronze castings and he rents a room at the Russell Auction every year to try to sell them. So the memorial for a common-law wife is an empty grave. Maybe the lawyer dances on it -- I don’t.

The symbolism of grave locations and styles is still strong among us in theory, but not always well thought-out in fact, not least because when people have just died, the survivors are stunned. No one can enforce their wishes beyond the grave. Multiple marriages make it even more problematic. Bob’s first wife’s parents are buried in Conrad, where the cemetery is in a cool forest of evergreens (shelter belt trees, really) watered by a special ditch. Her brother is also buried there as well as his two wives. As far as I know, no family members go to visit.

When my own mother was close to death, we asked her what she wanted. She had buried my father’s ashes in the grave of his parents in Portland, Oregon. We knew her own father was buried in one of a double plot in Roseburg, OR, bumped out of the marital double plot by his daughter who was killed in a car crash as a teenager. The other grave is empty, and we asked if she would like to be there. “NO!” she said with some vehemence. “Just put me somewhere that there’s an evergreen tree and a lot of daffodils!” In the end her ashes were interred next to my father’s and both their names were added to the grandparents' headstone. Later I went to visit the graves in Roseburg and saw that her father’s grave is near an evergreen tree and daffodils bloomed nearby.

In the end graves are not for the dead but for the living: avaricious, yearning, indignant, or whatever else they might be. Unless it’s wartime, the symbolism of graves fades for most people. Everyone moves all the time now and many families have totally lost track of where graves might be.

My own instructions are cremation and dispersal without interment -- just let the wind take me wherever it goes. I find that a comforting idea. But I do occasionally go by the Scriver graves -- in fact, as far as I know, no one else did until that niece paid her recent visit. Not even the Montana Historical Society who grabbed Bob’s estate and has kept it warehoused ever since, a kind of interment. And I suspect that lawyer doesn’t put flowers on either Bob’s grave or the empty grave.

WHAT IS A POST-MODERN MUSEUM?

Unintelligible as much of the theory-based post-modern culture criticism has been over the last few decades, many far-reaching questions have emerged that are quite significant in terms of Montana lives. Naturally, much of it has had to do with Native Americans, but much of it also is very relevant to European-based peoples, to say nothing of the African and Asian heritages. Many of these issues are about education or museums, which most of us probably think of as educational. Since Montana formed as the Industrial Revolution was transforming the planet, much of this material is crucial to the future.

What IS a museum? In preparing Bob Scriver’s biography, I read a number of books that examine the origins of museums and the history and development of collections. Mostly they seem to have arisen from people’s natural inclination to save things they liked or that seemed to have value. The early Popes had a room like a vault where they kept precious objects, often commissioned from outstanding artist/craftsmen or perhaps gifts from great kings and leaders. In the modern United States, objects created in crystal by someone like Steuben Glass -- gorgeous, fragile, and one-of-a-kind -- might be presented.

In the 19th century, when taxonomies were the great obsession, natural history buffs (often amateur) required extensive accumulations of insects, bird skins, eggs, and so on, all in the interest of grouping them into categories and thus discovering something about creation. This was one of the duties of Lewis and Clark. (Now, of course, all those taxonomies and “family trees” have been blown away by DNA analysis.)

In those times anomalies and freaks interested a lot of people. Bob was of a “one excellent example of each” turn of mind, probably coming from the assumptions of taxidermists with hunter clients. He was always having to shoo away people who wanted to give him albino skunks or two-headed calves for the Scriver Museum. (This museum is dispersed now.) He continued this frame of mind with the bronzes, keeping “one of each,” which is now the basis of the estate entrusted to the Montana Historical Society.

Another influence from the 19th century was the growing awareness of “the last of these.” This continues today with even more anquish as we see whole species, whole languages, entire peoples, whole life-works, disappear under the wheels of time. Rare-ness has always been a criterion for value. Museums treasure the last dodo bird, the last passenger pigeon.

At present we see a great fascination with family trees so that -- running parallel with DNA studies of inheritance -- many people are looking up their own pedigrees, the begats that brought them to this place and time and the stories of those lives. My newly discovered branch of the Welsh sister descendants brought me two new documents, one a transcription of a Christian Oklahoma homesteader family and the other a book length account complete with photos. The closer we get to the present, the easier it is to find documents such as letters -- until we get to email. The Internet, of course, has been an amazing help when things are scannned and posted.

The idea that a museum is a repository for documents and objects is a strong one with an intense emotional engine, whether or not values are shared by others. When my mother died, one of the hardest problems was finding new homes for her most prized objects: the bisque porcelain hen that had been brought intact in a pioneer wagon by burying it in a barrel of flour, the huge blown-glass bluegreen Japanese float found at the beach, a gold lustreware vase that had been saved from disaster many times. We were shocked to discover that no one wanted them, not even dealers.

19th century anthropologists collected skeletons with no particular thought for their meaning to families. 20th century accumulators stole the heads off “death house” burials with grisly disrespect. Sometimes they kept such objects secret, showing them only to their closest friends, and other times skulls rested on the back bars of taverns, grinning at the clients. Reversing this practice has been a battle for NA activists.

Family is such a deeply embedded aspect of humans that the celebration of family versus their branding as traitors and failures has dominated much of historical interpretation. Quite aside from the discomfort of homesteaders living next to the Native Americans pushed off the same land, is the on-going rivalry among families of both populations, so strong that it still affects ordinary commerce in towns. My cousin once remarked to me that the “Pinkertons” which are the branch of my maternal grandfather were not as good as the “Cochrans” which are the branch of my maternal grandmother, because the Cochrans walked to the West on the Oregon Trail -- making them tougher -- but the Pinkertons came on the train, which was somehow weaker. I pointed out that the Pinkertons came quite a bit later than the Cochrans and would be FOOLS not to take the train, since by that time there WAS one! I think he had gotten the idea partly because a Cochran ranch was honored by the state of Oregon as a “Centennial” 100-year ranch. The Pinkertons never had anything but a prune orchard that went bust. Prosperity and endurance are the pioneer criteria. Maybe they’re pretty basic to all humans.

But there ARE other issues of value. For instance, whether or not Two-Guns Whitecalf posed for Fraser when he created the buffalo nickel is a matter involving considerable prestige and people have spent hours poring through archives to figure it out definitively.

What I’m leading up to is that the Montana Historical Society, kindly accepting papers, collections, and family heirlooms for decades and decades, is bulging at the seams. Storage is so crammed as to make items impossible to locate. Staff works in a small labyrinth, elbow-to-elbow. Yet there has been little discussion of what the real defining goal of the historical society -- much less its museum which many people see as its only function -- ought to be in the future. By what principles are decisions to be made? And if there is anything that the post-modern critique insists upon, it must be a “people’s” decision, not fiats from high-status, high-power, high-dollar experts.

Is the point of an historical museum to interpret what has happened? Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is my favorite example of interpretation-based exhibits, though the Glenbow is Calgary is also outstanding. Or is it to show off the importance of an area or a people? Might it be to store information as a way of researching and developing the future?

Should it be a way of preserving valuable objects like the CM Russell paintings? Or should it be a kind of public gallery developing art in general, as the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls has become, raising questions about the relationship with private for-profit galleries? The CM Russell, which needs to build an endowment for maintenance, lately put its Couse paintings up for auction. Couse was a major SW painter of Native Americans, but the curator felt they were “outside the mission” of the museum. The Montana Historical Society owns works by de Kooning and Picasso, which would fetch a pretty penny on the current hot art market. Can these be defended as part of Montana’s heritage? Or consider the Alberta Bair ranch, stocked with fabulous European objects.

Questions abound and should not be answered by decisions already made without realizing the limitations they can impose.

MONTANA HISTORY CONFERENCE, Oct. 19, 2007

Bob Scriver used to say it’s always better to be a pessimist, because then if you turn out to be wrong, you’ll be pleased. So right away I was pleased to arrive in the conference hotel next to Blackfeet scholars! I didn’t expect to see any there. None were advertised in the publicity beforehand. Willene Old Person, who gave the fine archeology talk about Glacier Park last August at the Piegan Institute history conference, was there, as well as Patty and John Murray and others I didn’t spot right away since I don’t know them so well.

They had been encouraged and enticed by a special program showcasing Montana Tribal College History Scholars and managed by George Oberst, a quiet force for good, who gave out some nice money rewards supplied by the Washington Foundation (the millionaire, not the state). It was enough for gas for whole families of the presenters to travel, so you know it was generous.

Deanne Morris, Blackfeet daughter of Jackie Parsons who is the head of the Montana Arts Council, gave a Power Point presentation that was elegantly simple in concept but one of those door-opening bits of work: she simply researched the lives of the Blackfeet signers of the 1855 Lame Bull Treaty and even managed to find drawn portraits. What surprised me most was that several had signed both the Lame Bull Treaty and the Canadian Treaty 7, which was with the Blackfoot tribes up there. She didn’t explore the political implications or even outline the splits among the Lame Bull signers, which were severe, but somehow that helped to give the audience a sense of who those men were.

The other presentations were by Jason Smith from Salish/Kootenai and Peter Bearcomesout, a Cheyenne from Chief Dull Knife College. I had very little sense of what they said since no effective microphones had been provided and they had soft voices. Just another of the little oversights that make minorities feel shushed. On the other hand, I went around beforehand and turned all the lights up, in hopes of seeing the faces of the speakers. But then someone else had to go around and turn them all back down so we could see the Powerpoints, which all worked very well. Remarkable. The IT man was on his toes.

Two “regular” presentations were about Native Americans but not from them. The one I really drove down there to hear was by Andrew Graybill from the University of Nebraska, who has been researching the Clarke family, esp. Helen Clarke, the first female (as well as mixed-blood) school superintendent in Montana (in Helena) and the first owner of a piano in the state. Blackfeet on one side and upper class white on the other side, Helen’s accomplishments included touring Europe with Sarah Bernhardt. She declined to continue with her acting career on grounds that she could not “step out of herself” to be the characters, but maybe it was a case of people being so curious about her genes that they didn’t pay attention to her stage work. Anyway, she never lacked for things to do.

The Blackfeet emerged from the Dawes Act vivisection of the rez with better results than some tribes, probably because of the efforts of Helen. She’s a beautiful woman with the hair-curler bangs still popular among Indians today, but with a back arrangement in a kind of roll, more in keeping with her period. She never married. Who WOULD she marry? She was a “Parlicoot” -- a unique being. But she was an accomplished hostess and kept house for her brother, Horace who also sometimes was called Malcolm, on their ranch behind the Big Hotel in East Glacier, surely one of the most beautiful locations on the planet. Graybill is proceeding through the documentation in many places, reading accounts by friends and actual correspondence to and from Helen as well as newspaper stories.

Which leads me to a conversation that began about a session concerning Teddy Blue Abbot. I was talking to Dale Burk, there as the owner of Stoneydale Press to promote their books, about whether the descendants of the persons being researched had been invited or would receive accounts of what was said. Abbot’s son, for instance, is living and could attend, as is Joyce Clarke Turvey, John Clarke’s daughter. It has been my dismaying experience that historical societies and so on are quick to separate historical individuals from their families and communities. Maybe it’s because they are afraid of interference, or out of a sense of ownership, or because it’s too confusing to address, but research tends to be limited to what can be found in papers and books, especially those in official archives. Maybe it’s a simple matter of those institutions promoting their own services.

But the effect is a kind of flattening and a loss of context that could make the subject both more accurate and more alive. For instance, I believe that Sherry Smith, in her book called “Reimagining Indians,” got Walter McClintock entirely wrong. For a while there was such a tendency to candy-coat major figures, that maybe we’ve gone too far in the other direction, demanding that evil and conspiracy be unmasked on all sides. Sometimes it's a matter of (again) ignoring minorities. No one has ever interviewed the Cree Medicine family about their long relationship with Bob Scriver.

We speculated on whether this might be aggravated by the dynamic of researchers and writers having come from the East, educated in eastern schools and simply not realizing that people living a hundred years ago have descendants alive today who actually knew their ancestors. The West seems to these researchers a mythic place without real connections to the ordinary. While looking up something about Bob Scriver, I sat with one young archivist who told me with great feeling the contents of an essay about the death of Bob’s daughter. She regaled me with the facts, not realizing that I was THERE when Margaret died and had written the piece she was quoting. I felt both disrespected and invisible. Like an Indian.

The second speaker at this session was Carol Williams from the University of Lethbridge, just a little over a hundred miles to the north of me here in Valier. In Canada many of the US movements live on even as they sputter out on this side of the line, so Carol is an “old-fashioned” feminist who thinks in terms of labor, specifically NA and Aboriginal women’s labor, both professional and -- what to call it? “Women’s work?” You know: cooking, laundry, typing, and all that. Indigenous women have always been pressed into that sort of jobs, but some manage to escape mission and school categories. I want to put her in touch with some of the professional women among the Blackfeet. Margaret Bell is particularly interesting since she worked as management in the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Chicago during some major transitions.

But I also want to point out to Carol the “sister chains” that often govern employment around Browning. I’m thinking of the Bremner girls, the Bullshoe girls, the Pepion girls, and Lucille McKay’s “Drive-In girls” who were not genetic daughters but were trained by her. One member of a family would get a job clerking or cleaning or cooking or even teaching, do well and then show the way and recommend sisters. Sometimes this system would go down several generations. It always made me think of the old polygamous chief who recommended to the young man that when he chose his wives, he should marry close relatives so they wouldn’t get into fights over how to run things.

The conference center in Helena, a part of town developed when the old rail yards were abandoned, makes me shake my head. Organized around a sheltered carousel, everything is in a faux antique style with no edges knocked off, very studied and for some reason DARK. Dark woodwork, dark brocade unholstery. The two big federal buildings, both named for living politicians (Hatfield and Baucus) look like penny banks or industrial kitchen equipment. The ridged dome on the Hatfield Court House looks like a juicer. Some of the buildings feature “quilted” stainless steel. I don’t understand this architecture at all. Maybe it’ll mellow. But it’s clear what the main amenities in that section of town are: coffee and ATM’s. Presumably a little justice and knowledge gets worked into the pattern now and then.