HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELOISE PEPION COBELL!

Eloise Pepion Cobell, born November 5, 1945, was as remarkable in the years before the lawsuit against the federal government as she was during them. I taught English to her husband in high school and later taught with her sister, Julene, but didn't know Eloise well. she was part of the contingent of "boomers" who accepted JFK's challenge to "do for your country," which they defined as Blackfeet Country. This Browning cohort has been the hinge on which progress has swung.

Educated in part by government boarding school and then by Great Falls Commercial College and some time at the University of Montana in Bozeman, she was a careful and diligent bookkeeper, which earned her the post of tribal treasurer. She comes from a family of famous artists, all descended from Politte Pepion, a French freight hauler in the early days, who married into distinguished Blackfeet families like Mountain Chief. She was the member of the family who stayed on the Blacktail Creek original Dawes allotment to take care of her parents and there she remained to the end.

In 1983 the only bank in Browning closed after seventy years. It was originally founded by white traders and businesses that had mostly closed by this time. Story at:

http://www.communityinvestmentnetwork.org/CDB-L/showthread.php?t=2667

It’s hard to realize what this means to a small prairie town forty miles away from the next bank in a place where roads are often closed. Just the physical act of taking money to the bank was a major vulnerability. No one owned an armored car. In 1987 Eloise was active in starting the Blackfeet bank, a key to progress and growth and, I believe, the very first Native American bank. It was a turning point. One of the major problems in a place like the reservation is that people consider so many things “unthinkable.” Eloise’s great gift was that she found NOTHING “unthinkable.”

So when Bob Scriver was trying to find some way to keep his ranch on the Flatiron Creek off the commercial ranching market as a perpetual wildlife easement, even Nature Conservancy said that it was not possible because their authorization was through the State of Montana, which doesn’t include the reservation. Eloise’s insight was that if a reservation is outside the state, its sovereignty entitles it to the same rights as the state, so it DID have the authority to work with Nature Conservancy.

The result was a collaboration between Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust which made the ranch a center for the study of ecology. Bob had thought it deserved preservation because grizzlies and wolves hung out there. (Especially since he dumped carrion to attract predators where he could see them from the house, which the neighbors didn’t appreciate.) He was surprised that because the drainage descends from the Rockies through small lake after small lake, it becomes more saline as it goes downhill. This causes the ecology to shift, both plants and animals changing since they are inter-related.

After Bob’s death I went on the botany hike around the ranch, which was at the outer limits of my walking capacity. Eloise was there to explain what had been done and why. I was not emotionally attached to that ranch (I was bonded to the smaller place on Two Medicine where I spent a winter) but I was very grateful to Eloise. Within weeks her relative was wanting to run his cattle there. Local people were not yet able to “see” such things as ecology or its study, much less wildlife easements.

The Nature Conservancy development of the Flatiron Ranch has been low-key but it has fared better than the privatized Seven Eagles Ranch not far away that once belonged to Bob Scriver’s brother and more recently was the home of an ill-fated project to raise traditional wild horses. Bob never made money off his ranch. It was a sacred place to him. It’s where he put up his badger tipi and where he wanted to be buried. The Montana Historical Society cannot say what they did with that tipi. Bob ended up being buried with his family in the Cut Bank cemetery. Water that runs downhill becomes more salty.

Because Eloise was solid and discreet, and because she was now traveling in banker’s circles, which always included a lot of lawyers, and even overlapped Kentucky racehorse circles (the Cobell ranch must be the only one on the rez with white-painted board fences), she was able to attract the attention of people who really manage the money systems of the United States, not necessarily those dominated by the US Government. The value of moving in such circles is not just being around money enough to understand how and where it goes, but also access to the relaxed times of sitting around, sipping something smooth, shooting the breeze, and speculating on what could be done. It was in one of those times that a lawyer remarked, sort of casually, “You Indians are fools for not suing the government for their abuse of trustee status.” Bingo.

Eloise was not naive about this. She knew she would be under attack almost from the beginning. She just decided to do it. (“If not now, when?) Earl Old Person, normally bold if strategic, couldn’t make up his mind, going in and out of the lawsuit.

Regardless of what happens with the money, I take the position that the raw nastiness of what was uncovered in this lawsuit -- records dumped into warehouses, chewed up by rats, unsorted or posted, discarded, scrambled, guestimated, a computer system that was open to any casual hacker, plus the fact that there was no decent on-going system of record-keeping even after the lawsuit began, is enough consciousness-raising and pressure for reform to be in itself worth the cost. Inevitably the payout will stall and be minimized if only by death of the persons entitled to their own money for all these decades. Whatever the checks amount to, they won’t be as much as an agriculture subsidy, and soon will have been spent for things good and bad.

But it is now demonstrably true that Indians do care about their lease money, where it goes and how, and that they are capable of doing something about corruption. Not so mysterious now are the web of laws, regulations, and ways of doing business that have kept Indians out of the marketplace as much as has the meddling of the BIA, diversions to cronies, and general cynicism. Whatever people might think about what they see now, Eloise tore away the web that covered their eyes and challenged them to look.

BEARS, BOOKS & BEES

When I went to sell books this last time, my hand hesitated over my grizzly bear books, left over from when I was teaching in Heart Butte and did a year-long theme of grizz bears. Bears were practially underfoot, hanging around the school in case of unguarded lunches or walking along way up on the side of Heart Butte, looking for rock marmots. No one ever got hurt by them, partly because everyone gave them lots of space.

I bought mostly picture books because even though I was teaching high school, some weren’t strong readers. Anyway, a photo of a grizz tells you lots more than any amount of written description. The kids pretended they were bears, they told real life bear stories, they told bear tall-tales, they read photocopied newspaper stories, and I read out loud Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years and Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly. (The first “grownup” book I ever read.) We saved Far Side grizzly jokes. I made a life-sized cutout of a grizz and stuck it to the wall alongside the door.

For several years I had attended the annual grizzly/wolf technicians' conference that formed around Chuck Jonkel, a professor in Missoula and a much-loved and powerful visionary. (It was not easy to attend these conferences since they went out of their way to pick an inaccessible campground and didn't let the public know where it is.) Jonkel, a strong believer in wildlife videos and student video work, loaned me lots of videos about bears. Once, for some reason, he included one about meerkats which knocked us all out. None of us had known anything about meerkats before. Now everyone knows, I guess because of Animal Planet.

We watched the Scandinavian movie, The Bear (The kids loved it, especially when the cub got high.), and an awful grade B movie starring Clint Walker about a demon grizzly that turned out to be very close in plot to one of the stories in The Old North Trail. An early warrior is heroically brave but is killed and burned. He becomes a grizzly and guards the old Cut Bank Pass trail, but then he is killed again and this time becomes a tree that still stands there, looking vaguely bear-like. People on the Rez can point out the very tree.

I described the Bear Knife Bundle, one of the most impressive objects in the Scriver Artifact Collection that went to Edmonton. I read part of the Craighead's book out loud and we watched a pretty inept film of Faulkner's story, The Bear, which was only a black bear anyway.

I got so into grizzlies myself that I rose up at 4 AM and went out to watch a road-killed bull from the safety of my pickup, in hopes a bear would show up. None did. It was cold and rainy, so there wasn't much smell to get the message to the bears. Sitting out there in steely darkness, gripping my thermos of coffee, I felt at last I was becoming a nature writer. I wasn’t. The kids shook their heads. White people are truly crazy.

When I got involved with the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, I went to their conference up at Banff and one of the events was a movie of the Charley & Andy Russell family and their relationship with bears, in that case the giant brown Kodiak bears on the China side of the Pacific Ocean. In remote villages they found two cubs scrunched into filthy cages and bought them, thinking the would set them free far to the north where they were doing studies on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Instead the bears became family members, standing upright in the river alongside “Papa” while he fished because they knew they’d get the results, or piling up with Papa for a nap in the grass. A full bear is a safe bear. But they had to put an electric fence around the garden, the same as the beekeepers around here fence their hives.

I’m thinking about all this because someone gave a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out,” my book about Bob Scriver, to Doug Seus, trainer of Bart the Bear. The bear team became friends with Bob when the latter made a portrait of Doug and Bart, so Doug knows what he’s reading about. Bob tried hard to pull Doug into his life towards the end, to get Doug to take on duties that far exceeded being a customer or even a friend. Doug sat with Bob’s grandkids at the funeral.

Bart the Bear died a natural death in 2000, “surrounded by family,” and has been succeeded by several other bears, including a pair of cubs, one male and the other a female called “Honey Bump.” Riiiight. A little sweet. It is remarkable how much human mammals can pull members of other species into their emotional orbits. Fur. Milk. Body temperature. Appetite. And a lot of not-well-understood capacities for bonding and trusting that humans seem to lose, maybe more than bears do, maybe because we’re the ones living in zoos.

Bart the Bear led to Vital Ground, an organization sort of parallel to Nature Conservancy. (You can Google all this stuff.) Bob Scriver’s Flatiron Ranch was for a while in play between the two organizations until it turned out that one advantage of the sovereignty of the reservation was the ability to enter into agreements on the same level of the State of Montana, which gave Nature Conservancy legal practices an edge.

Bob’s practices at the ranch were not legal or proper. He regularly left carcasses on a ridge he could see from the ranch house so that the carrion pile would attract bears and coyotes. But he wouldn’t let the local bear officials onto his land. Some say he shot at the low-flying airplanes trying to get readings from their telemetry. He was becoming a bear himself, territorial, caring nothing for the children in the adjoining ranches. Lawyers are more predatory than bears. They smashed the hive and took the honey. But maybe they didn’t get all the bees. I have not sold the books.