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.

______________________

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.

WILL WONDER WOMAN BE ON THE PANEL?

Academics enjoy a constant stream of conferences about their specialities which can be so “cutting edge” and esoteric that I’m amazed and jealous at once.  The pattern is that there’s a sponsoring umbrella organization.  I’m on environmental and language lists, so I get notification, but I can’t afford the dues so I can’t participate, much less travel to faraway locations.  The idea is that someone has an idea for a panel, gives it a title and gathers up a few presenters with related ideas.  At the conference they read their papers, interact a bit, and then the audience discusses.  I can’t go to the conferences -- I’m not sure who’s picking up the tabs -- I presume the institutions do for which they teach and do research.  I did go to one in Banff which was close (relatively) but didn’t present.  These people are almost always young teachers, sometimes fresh from field adventures.  This is NOTHING like how professors used to function, which was to sequester themselves and only share ideas at cocktail hour.

I cope with this inability to “get there” in a strategy something like the way I treat current scholarly books, or more accurately the pop derivatives of them.  So many of them have only one idea, that it’s practical to just read the reviews or maybe watch a YouTube lecture.  The books about neurobrain research have been too complex and multisyllabic to do this.  In that case I end up watching the YouTube talks repeatedly in an effort to really grasp the books.

Some panels I would dearly love to hear.  I’ll repeat the announcements of three in case you can attend, but I think they are fascinating even in this form.

I.

From ancient Greek myths to 21st century post-apocalyptic novels, cannibalism abounds, forcing us to reconsider easy binaries of self and other or civilized “us” and a savage “them.” As Maggie Kilgour argues in From Communion to Cannibalism, incorporation—the most basic example of which is eating—“depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears,  dissolving the structure it appears to produce”. What, then, when the food being eaten is human flesh?

This panel proposes to examine the various ways literature explores acts of cannibalism to break down notions of absolute difference and articulate the dual fears of anthropophagy: the fear of being cannibalized and the fear of becoming cannibal, the fear of becoming human meat and the fear of eating it. Often considered the demarcation of civilization and barbarism, cannibalism in fact explores the problem of our status as human beings who become hungry: the specter of our common animality. As Simon Estok points out, “Cannibalism is an unambiguously ecocritical issue.” One cannot be a cannibal without also being human, and meat cannot be but human flesh to mark the consumer of it “cannibal.”

Following the conference theme, then, this panel explores “the importance of experiences that lie beneath (and before and after) the shiny edifices of progress, rationality, and industry […]. to consider what lies beneath us” in terms of culture, definitions of humanity, and what makes us human via explorations of fictional anthropophagy and what those representations mean.

_______________

II.

The Poetics of Grass, panel proposal for the ASLE Eleventh Biennial Conference, June 23-27, 2015, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. The panel will focus on grass—which is so often underneath—to think about the following questions:

• For Whitman, grass emblematized American democracy and vitality in the wake of the Civil War. Recent environmentally-aware poetry suggests that the Whitmanian question “What is the grass?” bears re-asking in the twenty-first century. How is Whitman being reinvented in the 20th and 21st century, in an era of environmental crisis, multiple wars, and the emergence of ecopoetics?

• Grasses can grow from rhizomes, underground root systems that laterally connect. Can we draw connections between this kind of lateral multiplicity and formal experimentation in poetry? Might certain experimental or avant-garde poetic forms be considered “grassy”? (Implicit in these questions, but certainly not imperative to their answer, is Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus).

• Where does the presence or absence of grass signify “nature” or “city” in poetry, and where does it transcend these categories? How do post-pastoral, anti-pastoral, and urban pastoral poems turn to grass to think about space and how those spaces intersect with race and class?

• “O grass of graves,” wrote Whitman, echoing the Biblical passage, “All flesh is grass.” More recently, in his review of Tracy K. Smith’s book Life on Mars in The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes that “grass is the very signature of human presence.” How does grass construct the presence or absence of humanity in poems? How does grass function in contemporary elegy? How does it function in poetic constructions of gender and sexuality?

• Grass is one of the many names for cannabis. Does the literature of cannabis use (broadly interpreted) offer us a way to interrogate environmental impact of a growing marijuana industry? (See Josh Harkin’s “The Landscape-Scarring, Energy-Sucking, Wildlife-Killing Reality of Pot Farming” in Mother Jones for more on this issue.)

_________

III.

You don't know what it is? Me neither.

 “EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter” will bring interdisciplinary graduate work to bear on the ongoing critical discussions grouped under the umbrella of “new materialisms.” While what exactly these new materialisms might be or look like remains a vitally open question, this conference is an attempt to map a number of conceptual coordinates that give this emergent field of inquiry some consistency. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in the introduction to their edited collection on new materialism, “If we persist in our call for an observation of a new materialism, it is because we  are aware that unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life,  production, and reproduction. It is in this contemporary context that theorists are compelled to rediscover older materialist traditions while pushing them in novel, and sometimes experimental, directions or toward fresh applications.”

While reconfiguring materiality and our relations to environments has significantly opened the scope of our theoretical engagements, there remains in this same gesture the risk of ignoring other potential lines of thought and practice. “EcoMaterialisms” is intended to open a forum for thinking through these possibilities and their attendant problems. Submissions may address the following topics, but are by no means limited to:

Philosophical approaches to new materialism

New materialism: problems and limitations

Ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and other practices of reading

Biopolitics: governing life and matter

Postcolonial studies and the politics of location

Indigeneities and new materialist thought

Environmentalism and political praxis

New materialism and theories of race

Material feminisms and gender and sexuality studies

Animal and/or posthumanist studies

Materiality in the arts and a material aesthetics

Corporeality and modes of embodiment

Historical materialism and revivals of other materialist traditions

New materialism in visual, sonic, and digital media

New materialism and Speculative Realism

_______________________

I had never heard of “new materialism” but on reflection I see that if a 3-D printer can make you something solid and useful, if the chip in your refrigerator can talk to the chip in your automobile and the chip in your furnace, if your Google Glass can interact with your wrist Fitbit, then the new materialism is at the very least on the Internet, webbed and talking.   And if our techological capacities are now capable of making materials that never existed before -- like nano particles that can travel in the blood (with chip, of course), or elements at very extreme temperatures never before achieved on this planet, or living growth patterns that develop in no-gravity space stations -- then indeed this materialism is new.

Data, man of the future

How do we develop the consciousness of how to manage the new materialism when so many people are unable to understand the limits and intrinsic nature of all the old materials ?  We are reduced to wondering.