TWO RECENT BLACKFEET DEATHS (fictionalized)

Camp Disappointment Memorial Obelisk

Suddenly one of my old blog posts came to life and began accumulating hits.  It was posted on December 7, 2011, and is entitled “A Card File Made in a Decade.”

It begins with this explanation:  “When I moved to the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation in 1999, I started cutting out all the obits from the Great Falls Tribune and sticking them on cards, which I filed. By now I have 2 file boxes mostly full. At first I kept dates of publication, but then I stopped. Mostly I figured I would use them for genealogy since they list next of kin. But someone was inquiring about rez violence because of what I’ve been blogging, so I sorted my cards. . .” 

There are enough computers and adepts on the rez now to do effective searches for information.  People were prompted to search this time in order to frame up background for two recent deaths.

Tom Mancha (60) is alleged to have recently murdered his wife Charlene Little Dog Mancha at the obelisk commemorating Camp Disappointment, the site where Lewis and Clark realized the boundary with Canada would be the 49th parallel.  It has become a popular spot for bad behavior.

Mathew Grant (21, visiting from the Canadian Reserves) was found dead in an alley of Glacier Homes, an extension of Browning, weeks after he disappeared December 15.  Cause of death is not determined yet.

I am not a journalist and I am white.  But my history with Browning goes back to 1961.  Very little is showing up in the media and in my experience these stories soon fade.  But maybe there are some dedicated and aware tribal members who won’t let that happen this time.

I tried to think what I could do to help, since I have no power, no information, no muscle, no connections.  But I do have an imagination, so I’m going to use it to invent two generic deaths and try to make them vivid.  As though they were cell phone images.  These are totally invented.  If you quote the stories, make sure you note that they never happened in reality.

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FIRST STORY: Domestic Violence does not necessarily happen at home.

When he beat her up, which was totally unpredictable until minutes before the violence began, he began by demanding her cell phone.  At least once she had managed to dial 911 and scream for help before he smashed it, her little friend she kept in her pocket.  After that she bought a cheap emergency cell and hid it.  But he found it.

This time they were drinking in the county seat, but not in the upgraded tavern where the rez professionals and businessmen went.  And when it was closing time, they took a bottle with them.  One more DUI and there would be real trouble, but her reminding him of that was a mistake.  

They hurtled through the snowy landscape, heedless of livestock or deer.  Not much other traffic at this hour.  He veered off onto the rising turnout road up to the obelisk so suddenly that she fell over on the seat, which made him even more angry.  There was no one else on the parking space at the top where in daytime a person could look out over the valley to the far away ridge where the Louisiana Purchase watershed ended.  

In the past he’d tried to drag her out the passenger door and knew she would lock it, so he just yanked her by the hair past the steering wheel, which she tried to grab but couldn’t.  She wasn’t exactly sober.  Then he had the tire iron.  She only felt the first blow.

SECOND STORY:  ‘Spose you think you’re better than us.

The little group sorta thought of themselves as Ninjas in their black sweats.  They didn’t have anything to do and didn’t think they should have to do anything.  They were tough guys, not exactly welcome with their families, though some were more tolerant than others.  No one was very sure how these guys paid for drugs, but they always had them.

What they really liked was violence.  They talked about blood lust and sort of confused it with historical battles.  Their scars, tats, and piercings were supposed to be like war paint and they would draw faces with painted designs they saw in movies or at pow-wows, but they didn’t have the stamina for actual dancing.  Their energy was rage.

This was a cold night and they hadn’t found a place where they could hole up to slam, so they were just cruising the alleys.  Then they saw a guy come out of a house and walk their way.  They didn’t know him.  

“Hey!  Who are you?”

“Oh, uh, I’m Stephen.”  He was soft-spoken, in newish jeans with a nice jacket.  A bit of an accent. 

“How come we don’t know you?”

“I’m Kainai.  Just visiting my cousins.  Going over to the Community College to use the library.”

The guys doubled over with laughter to cover their true feelings, which were that they were intimidated.  None of them was a good reader or had a high school diploma.  Their older relatives had tried to make them understand that school was access to success, but they refused to believe it.  Elders had also impressed on them that the Canadian part of the Blackfoot Nation was the Grandfather people who knew the old ways, and should be respected.  This thought also threatened them, so they turned mean.

“So you think you’re better than us, aayy?  College boy?”

“Hey, nice toque!  Lemme try it on!”  They snatched his hat.  “You got any money?  You want to help us have a good time?”

The boy was confused, which the guys took as weakness.  They were right.  Then they turned seductive, mock coaxing.  “Come on with us and we’ll show you how.”  The boy now wearing his hat grabbed him between the legs.  He yelped and tried to pull away but then the knife slid between his ribs.  There was just enough light from the houses to see the blood.

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These stories never happened.  Or maybe they happen all the time.  But why?  What should we do about it?

"DOMESTIC VIOLENCE": AN EFFECTIVE HELPING ORGANIZATION

“Domestic Violence” is a hard movie to watch.  Thank goodness for video discs one can watch quietly in a safe place with breaks now and then, though the film itself builds-in intervals of peaceful images, quiet empty spaces.  It’s three hours and 15 minutes long, beginning and ending with police interventions into verbal and physical violence.  There are no deaths and very little of graphic wounds.  There is no exploration of the underculture world of drugs, prostitution, and trafficking.  No churches or ministers were included, nor any psychologists, who are there but sequestered by confidentiality.  It is not a sensational Hollywood movie.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305489/  DVD from Netflix.

The sequence goes from police at a family home, to the work of “The Spring,” which is a shelter in Tampa, FL, for women, children and a few men -- very focused and experienced.  If you bring them up on your computer http://www.thespring.org , the first thing you see is a reminder that a computer entry can be traced and a red button for “quick escape.”  This is not to evade law enforcement, but to keep the contact secret from abusers.

Then we go to the telephone where trained listeners provide information to people needing help.  (The number is on the website.)  This film is very much about words, the exploration of people’s inner worlds as they can express them.  The kids draw pictures.  The women’s group emphasizes that they have been harangued, insulted, put down, limited, confined, all their lives -- many times as children by their mothers, and then their partner and even their own children.  

But the group leader lets them talk until their assumptions begin to be clear, so as to be challenged.  The women are from every level of society.  One, reflexively smiling, was married to a college professor who had put her down, mocked her in front of others.  As he aged and  then retired, he switched to physical abuse.  She had accepted the verbal accusations as deserved, but at least was smart enough to recognize physical violence.  

Many of the helping women don’t look much different from the clients, but they have a radically different worldview from the abused women.  They use the jargon of helpers in our society: choices, helpers, contracts.  Finally realizing that their “reality” is not real -- which is hard for the receivers of abuse -- often leads to laughter!  So many of these people are smart, tough, hard-working, and protective even of men who go haywire.  A few are haywire women, and after evaluation they are shunted to a different kind of care.  Some are sassy provocateurs and some are as violent as the men.

Always -- between the women’s child-like insistence on their suffering (which is real) and the men’s insistence on their right to control and dominate (which is aligned with the culture) is the protective interface of the counseling wisdom (leave before violence starts, take charge of yourself, make good choices by thinking things through to the end) and the structured reality of the law thought it doesn’t always address the situation.  We watch a lawyer work with women who can’t accept any solution that doesn’t give them their way (which is mostly impossible, like a magical transformation of their husband's basic character) and we watch the cops work with men (often drunk) who also want THEIR way (also impossible).  We hear about women, naked and bloodied, running down the street and screaming for help, without anyone so much as calling the police.

Sam Elliott

The very last case is a man who seems a sort of Sam Elliott -- complete with mustache, accent and righteous posture -- who wants his live-in girl friend removed RIGHT NOW.  She’s pretty but older.  He says he “loves her to death” which is an unfortunate turn of phrase, and he acts out what seems a reasonable position, a man of means who can no longer tolerate a clinging hysterical woman.  Then we go to her, this pretty woman with a bladder infection, a disabled adult child, a grandchild to care for, no income, no relatives in town, and most of all, no sleep.  With the cops, they play a game of “why don’t you -- yes but” as described by Eric Berne.  The most obvious solution would be for the woman to go to a motel for the night -- if she had money.  The man won’t pay. The man refuses to go to his friends, the woman insists her relatives are all out-of-town because it is a three-day weekend, etc.  The cops don't quite have enough justification to remove one involuntarily.  All these people play this three-cornered game (victim/offender/savior) which keeps the police present, so that the contenders can try to pull them into their own “reality” like little kids each trying to pull their parents to their side of accusations.  They talk about “facts”, but little of what they say is factual.

Often, just as cops begin to leave, people tell the real truth.  In this case, this man had been so enraged a few days earlier -- though both claimed they’d had good times -- that he shot a rifle at her car when she tried to leave.  She called the cops, he was arrested and jailed, and presumably the case is pending which is why he needs her to be in the wrong.  But she did stay on in the house, his house.  Laws for cohabitation are confused, which is a good reason not to do it.  Little kids were involved but not present in these “cop bookend” scenes.

A culture is a constructed world that exists only in heads and with as much pressure from those who have consensus -- the current hegemony -- are willing to fund in the way of social services, cops, lawyers, safe houses, classes and so on.  The voters escape many costs by blaming some categories of people, thus shunting them into incarceration where they generate profit and jobs in a way most people don’t want to think about very much.  Eventually incarceration reaches its limits and backfires. The lawyer points out that a prison is a place where one learns how to break the law without getting caught.  Of course, those “teachers” all failed or they wouldn't be there.  But that’s a different movie.

What this way of looking at the movie allows me to say is that recognizing the cultural components of the problem is crucially relevant to rez violence, in ways more vivid than off rez.  In the beginning the Siksika world was whole, clear and working with built-in checks and balances until white immigration overwhelmed it with their European hegemony.  The idealized memory is still alive.  So are the marks of missionaries.  Cultures come from the ecological interaction of place (which has stayed the same though now it is threatened by industrial exploitation) and time (which radically changed with the removal of the buffalo). The numbers of people have exploded and changed, still emotionally attached to the here that was “here” before the 19^th century.

Sovereignty, if the People are to become whole and sheltered, will mean talking as much as these women, exploring the new reality.  It will not emerge from different people insisting on THEIR reality but from trying to find ways to fit all of the assumptions together WITHOUT force or blame.  Essentially, it means creating a new world of space and time.  What a daunting task!  But there is a pressing need and it is demonstrated by the level of violence.  It will take historians, activists, medical people, churches, change agents, and ordinary folks.  Most of all, it will take pooling resources and listening to each other.