A QUICK AND DIRTY STORY OF BROWNING, MONTANA, OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

This is for Mistyne Hall, a grad student from Browning who is studying in Berkeley, CA.

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I always start with geology, so to tell this story one begins with the “eruction” of the Rockies which are caused by the smashing together of tectonic plates of the crust of the earth, deep under the continents.  (This present set of mountains is the third to be pushed up and then worn down.)  Even the lands to the east, which had been an ancient sea bed, were raised up so that when the glaciers melted the water drained off into the break between plates that located the Mississippi River.  The dried sea bed became grasslands.  The river complex gave access to the heart of Blackfeet lands where buffalo lived on the grass and tribal people lived on the buffalo.  This enormous drainage, which reached into the Rockies where snow pack run-off formed a network of small waterbodies where beaver lived.

The indigenous people spared little attention or energy on beavers.  They were entirely enmeshed in buffalo and the natural plants: camas, berries of several kinds, other roots and tubers.  They occupied their terrain through their economic base and its seasons.  Not towns but harvest camps that developed according to what was ripe and according to places where buffalo could be run over cliffs. 

Then came the horse and that was a new relationship that affected where they camped, because horses must have a steady supply of grass and water.  Dogs live as people.  Narcisse Blood, before his tragic death, and Ryan HeavyHead, his very close friend, walked those old trails with a GPS device and found the camp locations, both dog-based and horse-based.  Now there is a parallel to the towns, but transient and adapted rather than built.  Bands were essentially movable towns, like the gypsy population of Europe.

Mistyne grew up a few blocks from here.

The European adventurers and exploiters, pursuing the beaver, came into the northern prairies and the east slope of the Rockies.  Mostly under the sponsorship of Hudson’s Bay Company, they spread out across the land and married into the indigenous population.  In the earliest days the western half of Canada was called Rupert’s Land and was really a merchandizing franchise granted to Hudson’s Bay by the King of England, according to their understanding of how things should run.  Trade and resource exploitation are the ground of empire. There were other nationalities who sent trappers and factors.  The combination of white and indigenous was the base of the Metis people.  Many of the people who live on the rez today are Metis, often with French names and allegiance to the Catholic church.

The site of the only killing Lewis and Clark did.

When Rupert’s Land became Canada, it was necessary to define a boundary between the US and Canada, so it was decided arbitrarily to draw the 49th parallel straight across the prairie, cutting the Blackfeet Nation in half.   Today this boundary is much hardened and policed by drones.  It was set by the headwaters of the Mississippi as determined by Lewis and Clark, camping on Cut Bank Creek near Cut Bank.  That was just before encountering a horse raiding party and killing at least one of them.  That was on the Marias River.  

Horses meant it was easier to kill buffalo and whites also killed buffalo.  The population of the herds collapsed.  This enabled the US, which had been clearing the prairie for white settlement by killing the indigenous people and the buffalo, much helped by contagious disease, now had control of the tribes through supplying food.  (Commodities were another source of corruption.)

Broadwater Merc, one of the earliest on the town square.

Town Square -- looks like the pond is a bit dried up.

The water tower has just been demolished.

Originally a bank, then the tribal jail.

Browning Merc is the building on the right end.

The water system, which was not equaled in Canada, made it possible to come by boat as far north as Fort Benton, where the first Indian Agency was located.  This history is very emotional and confused, including the death of Montana’s first governor, assumed to have fallen overboard drunk and thus drowned.  It was also the location of the hostilities that gradually exploded into the massacre we call “Baker’s”, another notorious drunk.

Then as the ranching communities expanded and wanted grasslands (it was open range times) they pushed back the agency to Choteau.  When the Civil War ended, it sent a wave of traumatized, impoverished, and calloused men to the grasslands, hoping to ranch.  This is the subject matter of all A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s novels from “The Big Sky” onwards.

Again the pressure increased and the agency was moved to Badger Creek (Old Agency).  That’s when the rez boundary was treated as a true confinement enforced by cavalry and Starvation Ridge, where the bodies were piled together because so many died because the last buffalo were off the rez.  There was “walking food”, but they couldn’t get to it.  The ranchers treated the eating of their cattle as criminal acts and the agent was forced to agree, but in the end he told the people to eat cattle they found on the rez.  (The ranchers preferred to use up rez grass.)

Maybe because of the tragedy associated with the place, the agency headquarters were moved again, this time to a place on highway 89 called “Nine Mile,” but it just wasn’t a good place, so they pulled back to where Browning is.  It was marshy ground with the “fort” part (which was a parade ground on the north higher side of Willow Creek) organized as a square of houses, though there was no palisade.  It was deliberately developed with surveying and designs on paper, but technically it was not rez land — rather it was federally owned land.  These kinds of distinctions have much to do with development on the rez, governmental lines drawn across natural geology.  When the Town of Browning drew up its plat, the center of their square was a small lake used to water horses.

The next important development was allotment, which instead of assuming the land to be owned communally by all members of the tribe (which is still the way it’s done in Canada), divided it up homestead-style into privately owned parcels.  It was assumed that people who lived by old ways and didn’t speak English would be brought into the system if they owned their land, but at first the allotments were all kept “In trust,” with the purpose of the agency being the financial management of that land.  Of course they were corrupt.  This is what Eloise Cobell took on, finally winning.

 

One kind of corruption was the ability of a tribesman to petition for equal status with whites (though not citizenship in the beginning), esp. the children of the Metis marriages whose white fathers understood the Euro system of ownership and profit.  They wanted control through their progeny.  But, alas, the system was used to move land ownership out of the hands of people who SHOULD have had protection.  Now their land could be sold, which some didn’t understand.  Land just “was.”

The town of Browning was established on fee patent allotments bought by merchants and other individuals.  The churches were on land donated by the Blackfeet who owned it, thus the real original location of the Methodist church was on Willow Creek, west of town, the “Methodist ranch.”  By now the town lots are owned in a scramble of legalities.  Mae Williamson, for instance, discovered that her house and lot could be put back into trust, thus avoiding any state taxes or regulations.  In fact, I’m told that there are several lots in Valier that are technically “in trust” and therefore part of the rez!  This loophole has resulted in satellite casinos near reservations.  

The official plat that defined Browning.

In those days the town boundaries were understood to create an “island of jurisdiction”, a part of state land that was a bubble inside the rez land, which was ambiguously owned by the tribe as a corporation and also federally owned land.  The Town of Browning was an incorporated governmental entity meant to manage the shared infrastructure of water, sewage, electricity, streets, and so on.  The actual dwellers were mostly white merchants like the Broadwater, Sherburne and Scriver families.  TE Scriver came in 1903 and the Sherburnes at about the same time, maybe a little earlier.  Their homes were built together on the street where the Cuts Wood Immersion School is now.  There was a major national Depression that scattered people from Eastern cities onto the prairie, and also pressure from locust plagues that destroyed ag families and increasing drought.  Plus contagious diseases that didn’t leave the cities untouched.  Immigration from starvation and war in Europe also pushed people onto Blackfeet lands.

Industrialization was expanding everywhere, partly through the technology learned in WWI.  The railroad across the top tier of the US states and Canada were competing with each other.  Blackfeet dominated the only pass viable for a railroad:  Marias Pass, now highway 2.  This affected their economy both positively and negatively.  The builders took land, grass and timber, paying for some of it.  Once built, the railroad was a major economic opportunity but it was never properly exploited by the tribe.  For some reason I’ve forgotten, the railroad deliberately bypassed Browning by a few miles, but East Glacier was built on the economy of tourism.  

Glacier National Park was separated from the rez in 1911.  It is a national park with corporations franchise awarded variously, none of them Blackfeet owned or run.  They have to be pressed to employ Blackfeet, which is opposed politically and also by educated tribal members who “own” the place by studying its geology, history, biology and so on.  When you love, know, and work in a place, it's yours.

The other impact of WWI was the importance of oil, the key to industrialization.  Huge deposits under the high east slope meant resource exploitation at its most intense.  White politics meant that all the benefits and management headquarters were located in Cut Bank, though most of the oil was under the rez.  The east boundary was simply moved.  

World War II, which included many local people as soldiers, was a new major force when those men came back.  Some were so traumatized, partly by combat and partly because their families had dispersed or changed while they were gone, that there was much alcoholism and the resulting violence, theft, bootlegging (on two levels, one to supply the tourists and one for the lowest addicts), and destruction of general order that the town formed its own police force and appointed its own judges. Bob Scriver was the City Magistrate at that point, probably in part because as a music teacher and band leader, he was strongly authoritarian and many people (including Earl Old Person) had been his students, therefore willing to accept that.  But now tribal members knew what was possible and that they could do it.

SNOWPACK AND BEAVERS

Rocky Mountain cirque, cut by a glacier now gone.

This has been an easy open winter — so far — which is what was predicted.  But we watch the mountains nervously to see how white with snow they are.  And we squint at the news when they show us that the glaciers are disappearing.  We already knew that Glacier National Park was not named for its many glaciers, but for the great scoop of geology that was formed by glaciers.  Repeated glaciers, putting down layers carried from wherever they started, inconsiderately putting the rocky sources on top of the fertile soils.

Valier sits alongside -- and because of -- what’s now named “The Pondera Canal Company” which was founded when Swift Dam was built on reservation land owned by Major Steele and his Blackfeet wife, and partly funded with federal money but never legitimated legally.  In 1964 the dam collapsed and killed over thirty people.  I was here then.  Sid Gustafson was a kid or maybe not born yet, but this event was so local and deep that it takes someone from here to get it right and he’s from here. 

Out in April, pre-order now.

Now owned by the Pondera Canal Company, and Cargill, a worldwide grain business, this irrigation system supports Valier and other villages at the center of a wheel of ranches, strip-farms using high levels of oil-derived chemicals, a huge monoculture.  The federal government is demanding the realignment of water allocation first defined mostly by habit.  Since the Blackfeet are at the headwaters, they have the first legal claim, which they have not used over the years.  Many plans have been laid and even some canals dug, but everything always dwindles off to nothing on that side of Birch Creek, which is the southern boundary.  On the south side, off the rez, ranchers press hard to get as much water as they can.  Water is profit.  If the federal government forces reallocation, some ranches will fail.

We all look to the mountains.  That’s where the water begins.  This east slope country is in the center of two great atmospheric forces, sky forces.  One is the wind that comes from the West, laden with ocean water.  It must pass over several mountain ranges, the last and most serious being the Rockies.  Water is heavy.  The air drops it as rain or snow, until it is light enough to pass.  That's where trees grow tall. 

Chinook arch

We look up at the mountains and see a storm shelf — in winter a snow shelf — of clouds forming a kind of higher, rounder range behind the Rockies.  If there are clouds on the east side, they are pushed back in a great curve of blue called the Chinook Arch.  It means that there is wind up high, pushed by the jet stream from the West, and things will warm up fast.  Go to bed with feet of snow under the window, wake up with water traveling fast over bare ground.  And the Rockies turn dark blue.  The snow pack sinks.  The water master at the Canal Company rethinks how much water he should impound behind Swift Dam or in Lake Francis, a secondary impoundment.

On a little stream that runs through Heart Butte, the beavers in their round house rouse and consider that there is more water running.  They rush to raid the willow brush so as to poke more sticks into their dam.  Not all of them manage to evade the traps set by the local Blackfeet in hopes of making a little money for Easter bonnets for their daughters.  Beavers are too busy to worry about it — they’re not thinkers.  They DO and what they do is impound water.

A beaver lodge

The trouble with global warming is that it throws off timing that has been calibrated by millennia of weeding out whatever doesn’t work.  That goes for water, vegetation, crops, and snowpack.  If the weather is already warm or too warm too early, the snow pack can’t melt slowly over the summer, keeping the trout as chilly as they like to be.  The water is gone by late summer when the cottonwoods need to suck ground water. 

The second wind stream comes down from the Arctic.  It’s not so violent as the 100 mph Chinooks and it is not katabatic because it is not decompressing when descending a mountain -- that's what creates the famous hot katabatic winds.  There are only single volcanic buttes to the north.  So the air comes cold and hard, more of a bulge than a wind, an erratic pattern in arctic air pressure, possibly caused by melting polar cap.  If cold air meets wet west coast air, which it often does over this place, we get snow.  If the arctic air is not so cold, we get rain.  

Even Texas gets the shivers.

Rain washes away snowpack.  Nothing stores the water then — except beavers.  A zillion busy beavers equals one big heavy snow year.  Recently it has been discovered that when smallpox killed so many indigenous people, the North American weather was changed.  The people had set fires, cut wood, even planted crops.  Without them, the vegetation started storing carbon.  The same thing happened in Europe when the Black Plague wiped out the majority of the people.  On the other hand, one vigorous volcano spewing filtering dust and rising to float in the atmosphere was able to make the weather so cold that no crops grew that year and people starved.  It’s not radioactivity that makes the atomic bomb so dangerous, nor even the ghastly immediate effects of the explosion — it’s the ability to throw so much dust into the air.

Kids are like beavers — they are always busy.  If a beaver doesn’t gnaw all the time, its teeth will grow and grow until the beaver can’t eat.  They need to gnaw.  The same with kids.  They need to think all the time and ideas are their willow banks, the raw material for the impoundment of knowledge. 

Tony Hartshorn with kids

This message from Tony Hartshorn arrived via email:  “I’m a soils scientist interesting in applying for federal funding to co-develop (with folks at the Blackfeet Community College) educational materials that might reignite interest in Blackfeet soils, patterned at some level along the lines of Les Carpenter's "Natural history of the Blackfeet Reservation" or the NASA astronomy tutorial "Blackfeet Skies" that Leo Bird helped with.  I've tracked down this 1969 soils map, discovered that some libraries will not share maps of the reservation (or apparently share scans of those maps), and most recently learned that CH2M Hill ran backhoes all over the reservation about 10 years ago to measure soil water-holding capacity (though those results are somehow not public).  This effort loosely aligns with ongoing ideas to lead a "Drought planning workshop" in Browning close to the end of March; that effort is mostly being led by Lea Whitford.  I am eager to figure out a way to harness soil stories for greater student engagement.”

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  Tony said there were 150 attendees at the meeting !!  He’s on the faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman if you want to find him.

GEOLOGICAL METAPHORS ON THE EAST SLOPE OF THE ROCKIES

The term Allochthon in structural geology is used to describe a large block of rock which has been moved from its original site of formation, usually by low angle thrust faulting. From the Greek "allo" meaning other and "chthon" designating the process of the land mass being moved under the earth and connecting two horizontally stacked décollements and thus "under the earth". . .

An allochthon which is isolated from the rock that pushed it into position is called a klippe. If an allochthon has a "hole" in it so that one can view the autochthon beneath the allochthon, the hole is called a "window" (or Fenster). Etymology: Greek; 'allo' = other, and 'chthon' = earth.

In limnology, allochthonous sources of carbon or nutrients come from outside the aquatic system (such as plant and soil material). Carbon sources from within the system, such as algae and the microbial breakdown of particulate organic carbon, are autochthonous. In streams and small lakes, allochthonous sources of carbon are dominant while in large lakes and the ocean, autochthonous sources dominate. (Eby, 2004)

The term "allochthonous" is also used in the social sciences, as the opposite to autochthonous.

I love all these geological structure words and the concepts they suggest.  I understand them a lot more easily than I can understand structural concepts that come from human geometry and engineering, like cyber-technical stuff.  So let me see what I can do with this great set of words I just found.  They’re right out of the Rocky Mountains.

Since I’m already reflecting about the current situation on the Blackfeet Rez, which is highly emotional and affects individuals in ways that both evoke and justify passion, what might be gained from looking at the forces in terms of huge masses of stone, especially since the rez is on the east slope of the Rockies where the geology is much affected by subterranean forces?  I left in all the links so non-geologists can check out definitions.  You’ll note that much of this is relevant to oil fields and mineral deposits.  I’ll proceed in a simplistic way.

Structural geology is the study of deformations and stresses and the resulting patterns.  This is what “doodlebugs” (exploring geologists) look for: the patterns that are likely to have created underground capture pockets for oil and gas, or that may show igneous intrusions (volcanoes) that pushed up deposits like the gold in the Sweetgrass Hills along the Canadian border.  

One of the phenomena produced by these forces is a huge block of stone that has been pushed along a weak layer of rock to a new place, usually from low down on the block.  It may be a klippe. “A klippe (Danish for cliff or crag) is a geological feature of thrust fault terrains. The klippe is the remnant portion of a nappe after erosion has removed connecting portions of the nappe. This process results in an outlier of exotic, often nearly horizontally translated strata overlying autochthonous strata. Examples of klippes include:  Chief Mountain, Montana.”

“A nappe or thrust sheet is a large sheetlike body of rock that has been moved more than 2 km (1.2 mi)or 5 km (3.1 mi) above a thrust fault from its original position. The term stems from the French word for tablecloth in allusion to a crumpled tablecloth being pushed across a table.”

Autochthonous is a word I use a lot as a synonym for indigenous, something that developed where it is, out of the potential and materials right there.  I haven’t used allocthonous, something that came in from another place like the Euro-culture wave that came in over the top of the pre-existing peoples on the prairie.  In this case, they didn’t "rumple the tablecloth," they burned holes in it and tore it into pieces.  And then, to pick up the reference to limnology, they threw water on it and all sorts of things floated in.

A fenster (you know, fenestration or defestration: windows, holes; jumping out windows) is a place where it’s possible to see through the overlying allocthonous to the indigenous underneath.  I’m trying to think about what a cultural “fenster” on the Blackfeet rez might be.  Is it North American Indian Days when everyone comes to dance to the drum?  Is it Piegan Institute which supports the Immersion Blackfeet Language School?  Is it the Museum of the Plains Indian where artifacts are displayed and explained?  The Catholic church is clearly not one, though Father Ed tries to make places in the European Mass where the indigenous symbols and values are included as “fensters.”  

But who is sophisticated enough to know what are true fensters?  My criteria would be geological: if it relates to life on the prairie in the buffalo days, then it’s a view of the original autochthonous culture.   It might not have anything to do with material culture: a buffalo robe is not necessarily a fenster.  Taking in a child who has no home IS a fenster, a cultural practice arising from the group that traveled together on the prairie.  A discussion circle that included elders (who are now my age and older) might happily identify fensters as guides for future decisions.

Typically, the basal detachment of the foreland part of a fold-thrust belt lies in a weak shale or evaporite at or near the basement.  Rocks above the décollement are allocthonous, rocks below are autochthonous.  In my view it is clear that the “evaporite” was the buffalo -- that’s what evaporated -- and that the “weak shale” remains economic.  NOT military or even political.  People begin to rebel when they feel they are starving, or shut out from success.  This is a moral issue: all human beings “deserve” enough to eat, a decent place to live, educated children and so on.

When all the supply is on one side (often allocthonous) and the demand is on the other side (often autochthonous) what fensters will help us understand and think of stabilizing the culture “strike and slip”?  Chief Mountain is a klippe that gives us a literally outstanding reference point, in this specific case a guide to where the 49^th parallel is, so what are the cultural klippes that will help us all figure out where other “lines” are, even the ones that mark arbitrary allopolitical boundaries? 

At present the tendency is to use strong personalities as guides.  The more prominent they are, the more chief, the more likely to attract attention, but that doesn’t mean they are useful, and often they have become prominent by using the slippage between the allocthonous overburden and the autochthonous substrate.  At the worst they can be Samson in the Temple, which is an old Euro Bible story about a man who pulled the stone temple down on his own head.  It’s in Judges 16.  

But this Samson, Will Sampson, gentle giant, would not have done that.  He bailed out of the cuckoo’s nest. In him was the deep ignited fire of a passionate autochthonous heart.