TRIBAL WOMEN WHO LIVED LONG LIVES

Selena Not Afraid, a young Crow woman, has been found dead.  Her death must be marked, attended, mourned, and remembered.  But it is not the whole story.  I do not want Ō’m”kaistaaw”kaa•kii,@mariahgladstone to have that as her only mind picture.  I put against it two other deaths, those of  two Blackfeet, both named Beverly Kittson.  

__________________________________________________________________

Beverly Kittson "Sopiiakii"

Browning — Beverly Kittson "Sopiiakii, 90, began her journey home on October 8, 2016, at Blackfeet Community Hospital. Born in a tipi south of Browning on Aug 17, 1926 to James Reevis Sr. & Fannie Middle Calf, she was raised by John & Insima YellowKidney. She attended schools at Cold Feet & Mission Schools, the Cut Bank Boarding School, Browning and Flandreau Indian School where she graduated before studying Business Admin for two years at Haskell Indian School in Kansas.

In 1948 she married Jim Kittson and they made their home at Old Agency where she helped ranch, rodeo, started the Busy Badger 4H group that she was also a leader of. She also worked for the County Extension Office as a liason for the Commodity Program before going to work for the Home Development Program and CHP Program as an Outreach Worker and Director, retiring after receiving many awards in her 31 year career. She received the Appreciation award for outstanding and dedicated services, another for 20 years of service from 1968 - 1988 and was awarded the National outstanding CHR award in Las Vegas. She retired in 1998. However, retirement she found boring and she went to work for Headstart as a Cultural Teacher teaching them to speak the Blackfeet, and then on to Blackfeet Comm. College where she was an advisor to the students in the Indian Cultural Program.

Beverly was a well known and well loved woman, who always had an open door and heart for those who came to visit. She loved to bead, sewing and knitting, bingo, playing the machines and traveling as well as being with family (5 generations) and friends for any and all occasions. She was one of the last members of the Green Wood Burners Society and the War Mothers Society.

She was preceded in death by her parents, siblings Sharon LaPlant, John "Buster" YellowKidney, Russell "Gordon" CalfRobe, Wilbur, Freddy, Herman, Herbert, & Jimmy Reevis; daughter Zelda Kittson and grandson Clint NotAfraid.

Survivors include children Donna Guardipee, Cookie Gonzales, Kathy "Kat" (Darrell) Momberg, Mary Kittson, James (Bunny) Kittson Jr., Donald Kittson, Ronald "Smiley" (Charlene) Kittson, Jerry (Carol) Kittson; numerous grandchildren, nieces, nephews, her sister Lorraine WhiteGrass, and extended family.

A wake will be held at NAID Stickgame Arbor in Browning with Rosary on Tuesday at 7 pm. Mass will be held Wednesday at 2 pm in Little Flower Catholic Church in Browning with burial following at the Old Agency Cemetery.

____________________________________________________

In 1961 the Browning Elementary School grades were "tracked." For the 8th grade there were four tracks.  The highest was for those with the highest grades but also -- without admitting it -- for whites and tribal families who were prospering.  The bottom was for those who didn't care, who were semi-delinquent, and so on.  In the middle two tracks were classes that were mixed in terms of grades and we sometimes moved them back and forth, but it was just bookkeeping with no regard for relationships. There was no counselling. None of it touched who the person essentially and potentially might be.  One of the least responsive in the 4th group was the father of one of the most responsive and intelligent boys I ever taught.

In those days "boarding school" was not the Catholic Holy Family Mission with its religious focus and determination to impose a culture, nor was it the shameful public school north of Browning where conditions were horrible.  The kids I knew were boarding because their families were too far from Browning to get to school reliably and they bused to the Elementary School daily.  They had formed a family of their own among themselves.

Then there was the Speech and Drama class which was all girls, about a dozen.  Donna Kittson was one of them.  Dolores Butterfly Bird was also in that class and she "went on ahead" a couple of years ago.  Dorothy Still Smoking earned a D.Ed. and went to London, England, to read her thesis.  Beverly Bullshoe was devoted to the church but I don't know whether she ever became a nun.  None was murdered.

____________________________________________________

Donna Marie Kittson Guardipee, 71, passed away at Browning Indian Health Service, in Browning, Mont., on Dec. 14, 2019. A wake was held at College Homes with Rosary on Thursday, Jan. 9; Mass was celebrated on Friday, Jan. 10 at Little Flower Parish, followed by burial in Kittson Cemetery at Old Agency.

Donna was born Jan. 31, 1948, in Browning, to Beverly Reevis-Kittson and James Kittson Sr..  She was raised and educated at the Blackfeet Boarding School in Browning until high school, and then went to Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma.  She graduated from Browning High School.  

Donna married David “Chug” Guardipee in 1968 and later divorced. She worked for the Blackfeet Tribe for 50 years as a secretary and office manager.  She was currently working for the Blackfeet Environmental as an office manager.  Her hobbies included going to the local casino, camping, taking rides, picnicking, and especially spending quality time with family and friends.  

She was preceded in death by her father James Kittson Sr., mother Beverly Reevis-Kittson, son David Guardipee, and sister Zelda Ann Kittson.  

She is survived by her son Clifford (Tammy) Guardipee; granddaughters Donnell Williams and Kaylee Cassidy; two grandchildren and three great grandchildren whom she loved dearly; siblings Jim Kittson Jr., Donald Kittson, Ronald “Smiley” Kittson, Kathy “Kat” Kittson-Momberg, Myrna “Cookie” Kittson, Jerry Kittson, Mary Kittson and all of her nieces and nephews.

__________________________________________________________________

When people ask me what "Indians" are like, I can't tell them all the stories or trace out all the families, who are so much a part of the indiividuals they are but once I knew them very well, shared my days with them, ate lunch sitting at the same table eating the same chili with commodity cheese.  They were all funny, full of stories -- many of them about narrow escapes or peak experiences.  This is about time for the celebration of the so-called Baker Massacre and some of them were descendants of youngsters who barely escaped and still lived as their grandmothers.

The man who triggered that revenge killing was Malcolm Clarke who lived on what became the Baucus ranch.  He married a Blackfeet woman.  His daughter, Helen Clarke, was educated in the Midwest, acted on the stage and went to Europe in the troupe of Sarah Berhardt, and became the one who assigned the Indian land allotments.  She gave herself East Glacier and lived in a modest house behind the Big Hotel with her brother.  She's buried up the road to the EG water source.  Her nephew was John Clarke, the famous woodcarver who could not speak.

So, Mariah, that's just on the US side!  Plenty of stories among the Canadian Blackfoot.  Someday they will be celebrating that Gladstone girl who taught indigenous sustainable foods and who could fly on a trapeze, way up high.  There's already been time enough for that.  But we won't forget Selena Not Afraid, a Crow girl.

NICHOLAS CURCHIN PETERSON VROOMAN

Nicholas Curchin Peterson Vrooman

Aug. 11, 1949 – June 26, 2019

Nicholas Curchin Peterson Vrooman, 69, passed away suddenly on June 26, 2019, in Helena, Montana. He will be deeply missed by his extended family.

Nicholas was born August 11, 1949, to Hugh Thomas Vrooman and Marjorie Joy Curchin in Rochester, New York. He was the third of six children. When Nicholas was 10, his family moved to Schenectady, New York, where Nicholas’ love of history, community, families, research, and storytelling began. Nicholas had a wonderfully adventurous childhood with his family in Schenectady and summers in the Adirondacks.

In 1975 Nicholas traveled from New Mexico to Montana. There he took a job as a ranch hand for Bert and Darlene Mannix in the Helmville Valley. He loved his time there immersing himself in the cultural traditions of the Mannix family, ranch work, and the valley, including the little-known history of the region’s Métis people.

Nicholas and Linda Peterson met in February, 1988 at a North Dakota arts conference. They fell in love and were married on July 3, 1989, in Bismarck, North Dakota. In 1990, they moved to Helena, Montana, and welcomed the birth of their son, Hans, later that same year. Linda and Nicholas shared thirty years as partners in a life well lived. Nicholas is survived by his beloved family: his wife, Linda Vrooman Peterson, MT; step-daughters Jessica (Steve) Egers, PA, and Larissa (Todd) Mahlke, NV; son Hans (Bethany) Vrooman, MT; and 10 grandchildren; his siblings Kirsten (Marty)Ruglis, NY; Peter Vrooman, NM; Trista Vrooman, NM; Joy Vrooman Sayen, NJ; and Juliana Vrooman, NY; as well as extended family nieces and nephews.

Becoming Montana’s second State Folklorist in 1989, Nicholas worked with traditional and cultural arts and folkways across Montana. Nicholas saw himself professionally as a folklorist leading the Montana Arts Council to deepen its involvement with traditional arts.

In 2010, Nicholas returned to school receiving his doctorate in history from the University of Montana, with the dissertation, “Infinity Nation: The Metis in North American History.”

Perhaps his greatest work, Nicholas researched and wrote "The Whole Country was One Robe: The Little Shell Tribe’s America." One reviewer wrote, “This is a wonderful, intelligent, extremely well-written and thought-out history of a people whose past was obscure.”

His latest book, "Infinity Nation: New Peoples, the Medicine Line, and American Prejudice" will be published in 2020

.

Nicholas is considered one the West’s most passionate and important folklorists, historians, and creative spirits, always larger than life, immensely generous with his knowledge, Nicholas made an incalculable contribution to our understanding of the diversity and complexity of cultural life on the Northern Plains. His absence will be felt by his extended family and countless friends and colleagues in the United States and Canada.

A Celebration of Nicholas’ Life will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday, July 18, 2019, at ASW Funeral Home, 3750 N. Montana Ave., Helena, Montana. A reception will follow in the social hall of the funeral home. Please visit www.aswfuneralhome.com to offer the family a condolence or share a memory of Nicholas.

--- HELENA INDEPENDENT RECORD

"DEATH IN ALL IT'S . . ." WHAT IS IT, ANYWAY?

Daily I review the obits in the GF Tribune.  If the person is from the Blackfeet rez, whether or not enrolled, I clip the piece, stick it to a card and file it.  Sometimes I file others in the state.  Today I cut out the obit for the amazing Great Falls mother (Jeanne Elizabeth Bartsch) of a UU in Bozeman (Susan Backer) who is much like her mother.  This week I cut out the obit for the wife of my neighbor up the street.  Valier’s population is old and cards record a number of people on our street, but nothing like the number of dead on the rez.  (No one in Valier has been murdered since I got here in 1999.)

Two recent deaths not on the rez were from my past and could not have been more different.  Neither will fit on my filing cards, so they’ll have to go into a folder.  One was the movie star Karen Black (74) and the other was the cartoonist Stan Lynde (81).  Both were gentle, imaginative, hard-working people who were each married four times.  Black had a son and Lynde had eight children.  People are always fascinated by the interplay between private life and presented work.  I have no insight into that, only a few memories that don’t really add up to anything.

I began to read “Rick O’Shay” when it was first published and continued always whenever I had access.  In Browning when the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife opened a gallery room in 1962, the first show we hung was enlarged Rick O’Shay comic strips. Both Bob and I dearly loved Stan, though we kept calling him “Rick”

The memory that means the most to me came after I returned to Montana in 1999 and attended some shindig for writers.  I was discovering that people had me pegged as an adjunct to Bob Scriver, a surviving remnant who was no longer useful and had no other identity.  I was wallpaper.  Until Stan recognized me and came to sit by me, visiting as though we’d just been together a few days before. THEN people saw me. When the Charlie Russell auctions first began at the Rainbow Hotel -- well-lubricated with champagne -- Stan’s wife at the time and myself, both of us little more than teenagers formally gowned for this major event, wandered down into the basement and enjoyed a game of tag in the echoing storage hall until a majordomo caught us and shooed us out.  I told Stan.  He smiled and named the wife with rueful affection.

Karen Black attended Northwestern University’s famous theatre classes at the same time I did but she was only there two years.  We were in the same play at one point -- I think maybe “Queen of the Rebels” -- and while we were waiting during rehearsals she read my palm.  She was fully conscious that her voluptuous figure and Siamese cat eyes gave her an eerie aura.  She said that my lifeline predicted I would have a life-long passion (which we thought meant a man) that was broken in the middle and that the creases under my pinkie meant I would have children but that part was vague and she couldn’t tell whether there would be three or four of them.  It all came true.  (The man and Montana are conflated; the children are his grandchildren, one deceased.)

My Valier neighbor is a Jehovah’s Witness so when we met on the street I said his wife was in a place better than this one, which made him smile.  Oddly, the cartoon sheriff  “Rick O’Shay” was a church-going Christian whose pastor was “Jubal Lee”, the cartoon version of Stan’s real pastor, but it was “Hipshot Percussion”, the gunslinger, whose Sunday sentiments, out there in the mountains with his horse, evoked far more reverence than any human institution.  Not quite nature worship either, but respect for the world as the Face of God.  Whenever I had a bulletin board, a Sunday “Rick O’Shay” strip seemed to be on it.  My Bozeman friend’s mother was a sturdy Episcopalian; the daughter was a sturdy Unitarian Universalist.  It was not the content of these women’s faith that counted so much as its expression through community.  

And what about Karen Black who was in so many horror and free-spirit movies?   (I know nothing about her formal religious affiliations.) The French would not have a problem with the venue nor would they consider it “downscale”.  They recognize the transcendent and sacred in all its forms, even underground and defiant, as horrifying as catacombs.  It’s Americans who have the silly idea that only the conventional are religious and that faith means only that you must follow the rules.  Neither do the French puritanically demonize sex.  Hedonism can be a respected choice.  As my mother said on her deathbed, “I hope the next world is as much fun as this one was.”  The French respect nihilism (meaninglessness) and France is where Catharism (the world is evil) bloomed.  But those ARE meanings.

The shift from father-fixation on the Creator to the “works” focus of Creation, has left us with a problem, usually phrased as a-theism or sometimes called “deus absconditus,” the god who abandoned us, which is the opposite of the “deus machina” which is rescue through the intervention of a supernatural being.  Our explorations of outer space and inner DNA have challenged our “humanism”.  Our evil deeds insist we are a-human, which is to say “inhuman.”  The horror side emerges when we realize that the Cosmos includes but does not give special status to humans.  The Milky Way will not lower a basket containing a god as in Greek drama.

But it’s all theatre, isn’t it?  Acting training teaches us to look at the unique person in the specific context -- not at all the position that psych (which is cleverly disguised missionary work) takes in trying to make everyone “normal,” a concept so slippery that the official shrinks’ handbook of definitions changes all the time, by VOTE, not by ART which would call us to inhabit humans and all else with our hearts.  One can’t do rational scientific research on death.

The little boy asked, “Do dogs go to heaven?”

The wise man answered, “We don’t know, but we should act as though they did.” 

We feel as though these beloved people are still alive somewhere, so we should act as though they are.  It could be as real as anything else if we feel it to be so.   The boy, who was in a hospital bed, went gladly to meet his dog.  Maybe.  There was no obit.

ANTONIO C. BURNSIDE (MANY HIDES)

FROM THE GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE

Written by

KRISTEN CATES

In addition to close family and friends, the Blackfeet Nation is mourning the loss of one of its "warriors" in the wake of U.S. Army Spc. Antonio C. Burnside's death in Afghanistan on Friday.

Burnside (Many Hides, his Blackfeet family name), was killed when insurgents attacked his unit with small-arms fire in the Ghanzi province of Afghanistan on Friday.

The 31-year-old, originally from Great Falls, leaves behind his wife, four children, parents and siblings, as well as a grieving Blackfeet Nation.

Tribal officials report that Burnside's parents are on their way to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to retrieve his body and bring him home to the Blackfeet Reservation for services and burial.

"All Blackfeet hearts are broken today as we learn we must bury one of our warriors whose life was tragically cut short on the far side of the world," said Blackfeet Chairman T. J. Show. "We are reminded how inadequate our words are when a warrior has made the ultimate sacrifice. Tony represents the best among us and our thoughts and prayers are with the family as they struggle to deal with the shock of this terrible loss."

Tribe officials report that from an early age Burnside was active in Blackfeet tribal life, was a traditional dancer and grass dancer, and participated in Blackfeet traditional ceremonies. He sang with the Gray Horse Singers and studied Cree in school.

Burnside is the second Blackfeet warrior killed in the current conflict.According to the tribe, Master Sgt. (Ret) William F. "Chief" Carlson was killed in the Konar province, Afghanistan, in 2003, shortly after leaving his Fort Bragg unit to work for the CIA.

"For 10,000 years, the Blackfeet have reserved our highest honors for warriors killed defending our homeland," said Henry Butterfly, Tribal Councilman and Navy veteran. "As Spc. Burnside makes his final journey home, we await his arrival and reflect on the great pride he has brought the Blackfeet Nation. He served with pride, dignity, and integrity and we thank him for his service."

Keith Heavy Runner, Blackfeet Veterans Affairs Officer, said the tribe is assisting in every way possible and once plans for services and burial are made, information will be posted on the website www.blackfeetnation.com.

Burnside (Many Hides) is survived by his father Bob Burnside, mother Annie Burnside (Many Hides), spouse Christine Burnside, daughters Ariana, Hartlynn, Angel and son Tony Jr., sister Ramona and brother Milo, and grandparents David Chippewa Jr. and Marilyn Many Hides.

He was assigned to the 1st Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, based in Fort Bragg, NC.

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Cates at 791-1463 or kcates@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter @GFTrib_KCates.

(The mention of Cree language and the name "Chippewa" indicates a Metis connection.)

MONTANA HEROES

Mr. Dillon is dead.  Miss Kitty and Doc had gone on ahead.  Chester, too.  So the biggest guy was ridin’ drag and eatin’ dust.  But he wouldn’t make a fuss.  If the job needed doin’, he did it.  No super powers, just big, clear-headed, and competent.

Dennis Weaver came to Browning once in 1986 to film “Amy Grant’s Headin’ Home for Christmas” show.  Bob Scriver, who was also in the show, reported that Weaver was courtly, generous, and patient.  In 1951 James Arness was in Cut Bank to film “The Thing,” which was scarier then than “Alien” is now.  It was in the early days of stunts and Arness walked through fire in a special suit.

We seem to be deeply invested in our comic book heroes, even as some of our local real-life heroes slip away from us.  Two recent Montana losses registered strongly with me.

One was the Reverend George Harper in Helena, born on the fourth of July, 1923, in Salem, Ohio.  He was a great big guy, a political force to be reckoned with, a star athlete, and the progenitor of five gifted children.  His wife was his match.  His partner in ministry, the Reverend Robert Holmes was a little shorter but just as dynamic with his own tribe of achieving kids.  The children of the two men formed the Montana Lumberjack and Ballet Company which blew us all away with their sharp but hilarious political satire.  

When I landed in Helena, green as grass and over-motivated to make a success of a Unitarian Universalist circuit-riding ministry, George Harper listened to my breathless declarations of undogma.  Then he leaned forward in his chair and put the tip of one giant finger on my knee.  “Mary,” he said gently.  “God is love.  That’s all you need to know.”  Then he made a couple of phone calls to help me get a vehicle since I had no money.  And he let us meet in the Methodist parlor -- no charge.  That was 1982.  George had a basketball court named for him -- there’s probably no higher honor in Montana.

Much earlier I got to know Dr. Robert K. West because he and his partner Dr. Marquette were the Scriver’s family “docs.”  Born in 1921, in Great Falls, he was a different kind of athlete, a top-flight rodeo roper.  Bob Scriver used him as the model for his bronze in the major rodeo bronze series.

What I didn’t know until I read his obit was that his original degree in 1942 was in geology.  He graduated a year early, joined the Marines and served for four years.  He was at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  When he got out, he put himself through the University of Minnesota Medical School by taking boys from Camp Lincoln on pack trips through the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  In 1952 he returned to Cut Bank to set up his practice.  The original idea was that the two docs would spell each other, but they were soon overwhelmed and worn out.  Marquette died of a heart attack.  Doc West had an accomplished wife, the historian and writer Helen West.  I’m not supposed to tell you what happened, but it was predictable.  

The Doc went to Fresno, CA, then (1970) to become an emergency room doc.   In 1981 he married a woman named “Billie” and that union was for the rest of their lives.  She died just days ahead of him.  Much of his time and energy went to Salvation Army medical projects and as much as he could manage went to rodeo events, where he was a strong competitor, and to backpacking through the Bob Marshall with his grandkids.

Sometime in the early Eighties, probably on the way to the Calgary Stampede, he stopped to see Bob and I happened by.  When I walked up with my hand out, he was a little startled, maybe not quite sure who I was.   But he shook it, wary but cordial.  It was like shaking the foot of an eagle.  (I do KNOW what that is like since we once had an eagle.)  Some worried that he would lose one of his surgeon fingers to a rope loop, but he didn’t.

It used to be that heroes like that -- professionals with a sense of place, a strong spirituality, and a feeling of obligation to the community -- were what we expected.  They were big physical guys like those Sixties cowboy heroes, but they were also very, very smart.  Both these men were valedictorians of their classes.  I often wonder whether it was WWII that created them or whether somehow their kind is just not noticed so much now.  Have we lowered standards by letting women and minorities and people educated in other countries come into our churches and hospitals?  (I’m not supposed to say that.)  Or is it that the great struggles of the Fifties and Sixties and even Seventies had a way of calling out heroism in men and now the world is just too confused for Knights in Shining Armor.

Or is it that our tightly managed-for-profit hospitals and emptying churches just don’t provide the kind of platforms that lets these men grow and shine? Was their education different?  Were their moms at home with milk and cookies when they were little and got bruised by life?  Were their dads role models?  It’s a puzzlement.

I taught here in the Sixties when the country elsewhere was metamorphosing so fast it had the bends.  Now it’s fifty years later and people are backed way off from change, still not sure what happened.  I know this:  if I had had to pick out which of those kids in the Sixties would turn out to be the heroes of right now, I would have gotten it all wrong.  For one thing I would not have thought Eloise Cobell could take on the US Government and win.  Those 1950’s cowboy heroes were all big male gun-slingers who were a force for good.  Eloise is a force for good, but she’s -- well -- SHORT.  I love it.

But I mourn for James Arness, Dennis Weaver, Amanda Blake (oh, THERE’s a clue!), Milburn Stone, the Reverend George Harper and Doc Robert West.  Giants.  Walking through fire.

VICTORIA ADELE SANTANA

Curly Bear Wagner and Vicky Santana could not have seemed more different: Curly Bear like his nickname and Vicky a slender friendly woman. The two died within days of each other and Vicky’s funeral mass was the day after Curly Bear’s. Curly Bear’s foundation board had flown in to try to understand what to do without their guru and there were other bigshots in attendance. Things went differently at Vicky’s mass, though the ceremony was the same. Most people were local, though some of her friends flew in from Oklahoma where she had worked in a major Indian Law library for many years. There were more women and old people.

These two were part of a remarkable cohort of “boomers” who stuck together all through their years. Even when some of them were gone from the rez for decades, they never forgot their roots and came back again and again. Eloise Cobell is part of this group. Darrell Kipp is another one. Dorothy Still Smoking, Woody Kipp, Mary Margaret McKay, Mary Lynn Luken, Jackie Parsons -- there are quite a few, more than these, and they were mostly present in the last two days. They were able to interface with the larger world in quiet ways that local people, even Blackfeet, were simply not aware of -- except maybe when the newspaper reported on whether the US Government was going to cough up the trust fund millions they squandered instead of protecting. Each of these strong people chose a different field and became effective in it. Many of them are totally unknown to county, state or even federal officials. They work quietly. Except maybe Curly Bear, who was always being interviewed by the media, which was his job. They didn’t do a lot of shaking -- but they did a lot of moving. Outsiders rarely know more than the one person they happen to have encountered.

Vicky Santana’s parents met and married at the University of Chicago and she was born there. I hadn’t known that, but it gives me a special little link with her mother because of my sojourn there. People in Browning were sometimes puzzled by the way she thought, but there is a special approach to issues there, as President Obama knows, based on analysis and community consensus. Rita must have conveyed it to her daughter, though Vicky was educated by Catholics in Spokane and by law school in Oklahoma. Exasperatingly, she was probably seen by some as a nice little lady librarian, instead of the brainiac she really was, and by others as a solitary eccentric because they didn’t know she’d been married to an Edmo and was a pleased stepmother to his children.

In recent years she lived alone in a manufactured house on the main street of Browning and let pickups park in her yard. Next door were two tiny cabins and sometimes she went back to the one she grew up in because it was warm and familiar. Forget the white middle-class suburban markers of success and safety. Quietly, alongside her deep thinking about knotty international indigenous law, she helped with the small practical but life-shaking issues of adoption, divorce, and inheritance -- sometimes for free.

------

From the Great Falls Tribune obit (There’s a photo and you can post thoughts online:

BROWNING - Victoria Adele "Vicky" Santana, 64, of Browning, whose Indian name was Sak Oon Is Taah Saa Kii, meaning "Last Calf Woman," and who served the Blackfeet Indian Tribe as a tribal attorney, judge and tribal government advisor, died of natural causes Friday at her home in Browning.

Survivors include cousins Carmelita Brown Hoyt, Marie Croff, Billy Brown, Patty Treadwell, Mary Jo Walters, Delores Hagerty, Don Brown, Keith Brown, Chico Brown and many more.

Victoria A. Santana was the daughter of Rita Brown Santana of Browning and Arthur Santana of Puerto; she was born Aug. 31, 1944, in Chicago. She grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and always introduced herself as Vicky Santana from Browning, Montana. Like her parents, she became a scholar, earning a sociology degree, Juris Doctor and Master of Library Science law degrees.

Vicky served the Blackfeet Indian Tribe as a tribal attorney, judge and tribal government advisor, and was engaged in community legal work on the reservation at the end of her life. She was both an attorney and a policy analyst for the American Indian Law Center at the University of New Mexico, where she earned her law degree, and she was part of a US-Canada Native policy exchange between the National Congress of American Indians and the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada, advising First Nations on international policy and on the founding meeting and establishment of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.

Vicky directed the American Indian Law Center's review of federal policies under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and was a contributing author of the President's Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom (1979). She served as Reference Librarian/Native American Resources for the Oklahoma City University Law Library and taught Native legal research and other subjects at the OCU School of Law. She was a longtime member of the Board of Directors for Americans for Indian Opportunity.

Vicky provided legal services to Native peoples and organizations in matters including constitution revisions, legal codes, tribal court development, cultural property, domestic violence and child welfare.

She was policy advisor to the Morning Star Institute's 2004-2005 Native Languages Archives Repository Project of the National Museum of the American Indian and the administration for Native Americans, whose report, "Native Language Preservation," was distributed to tribal leaders on CD in 2007.

Before returning to the Blackfeet Reservation, she lived in Washington, D.C., and worked at the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall as the community services manager. She also was an active volunteer in the Obama for President Campaign. One of Vicky's greatest accomplishments that she was most proud of and humbled by her involvement with the repatriation work of Blackfeet Elder Buster Yellow Kidney.

Vicky is remembered by her myriad friends nationwide as a kind, generous, brilliant professional and community woman who was devoted to her extended family, her tribe and all the Native people throughout the hemisphere.

She was preceded in death by her parents, grandparents, and several aunts and uncles.

A memorial fund will be set up at the Blackfeet Community College, Education Department, Dee Hall, chairperson.


Vicky’s priest noted that, like Curly Bear and Darrell Kipp and others, she was a faithful Catholic and attended vespers at the end of the week. Darrell said that the 6:30 PM meditative mass (which this priest makes it a point to reconcile with Blackfeet spiritual views) was particularly moving over the year because of the light changing. In deep winter at that hour it is solidly dark, people huddling their coats around them. In summer it is still broad sunlight. The Blackfeet know how to live through both and these two losses do not mean sundown, partly because their work has always been focused on the future. The children might not remember them, but they will live in the light of their work.

COLLECTING THE DEAD

The second of two dozen people indicted and seized in their homes for collecting and trafficking in Indian artifacts in the Four Corners area (we think of it as Navajo county) has killed himself. This time the person was Steven L. Schrader, 56. He wasn’t in Santa Fe on the day he was supposed to appear in court. Instead his body was found in a corn field behind an elementary school in Shabbona, IL, not far from his mother’s home with two bullet wounds in his chest, evidently self-inflicted. There was a note that is not being disclosed. Something has got to be going on that we don’t know yet.

Schrader lived in Santa Fe. His home was not searched and he had turned himself in rather than being arrested in the SWAT team manner the others were. The objects he had were ancient sandals and baskets which had collected while with the Crites, a married couple who had been arrested before for the same offense. The Crites did have arrowhead collections; they also had sacred prayer sticks, baby blankets, seed jars and other objects included in ancient Puebloan burial mounds. Schrader was a single man with a job and no police record that was disclosed.

There were 150+ comments in the Salt Lake Tribune and rising. I was stunned to see that they were attacks on the two men who had committed suicide for being cowards! I think some of the commenters were thinking but not saying the same thing that I am: these suicides are disproportionate. Are they really suicides? Or did this investigation stumble upon something more serious than collecting arrowheads, possibly a gay relationship? None of them addressed the morality of digging up artifacts to buy and sell or even mentioned the practice. (If Tony Hillerman were writing this story, he would have.)

Lance Foster suggests that sometimes objects themselves are powerful, affecting the fate of those who come to them with bad consciences and much secrecy. (See his post entitled “The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon” at his blog called “The Sleeping Giant: Bioregional Animism in Montana” Lance is an excellent Metis archeologist, writer and artist in Helena. (http://hengruh.livejournal.com/)

It doesn’t seem as though a person in Santa Fe would have to hide being gay -- though the other suicide, a married doctor in a small Utah town, might have to hide a clandestine relationship. If they were truly in love, one could interpret this as a Romeo/Romeo script. But maybe that’s not the factor that was in danger of being unmasked at all. Many are asking why the home invasion-style arrests -- full body armor, sudden entry, heavy weapons. Are collectors so dangerous? Was the real reason for secrecy something more sinister, like drugs, terrorism, pornography or a militia group? There’s been an element of self-fulfilling prophesy in the whipped-up emotions of people who are convinced Obama will destroy them all. And too many law enforcement people, especially on the federal level, are prone to harbor television script-writer-type convictions about the world. It was lucky no one was shot during the arrests.

Since the change of administrations with the new emphasis on transparency, many rocks are being turned over. Economic collapse, growing world hunger, renegotiation of the meaning of family, populations of all kinds on the move across borders, new diseases. We’ve been deceived, ignorant, foolish, and the suicide rate is up all across the country, isn’t it? So many layers of secrecy. So little social sophistication that is helpful. I mean, we know so much about crime from the media, so much about immorality from talk radio, and so little about our own reality. (Where’s that reality czar? Why isn’t she doing her job? What is she, a committee??)

I’m against secrecy, but foregoing at least a little discretion is like going nude. It’s fine in the right context if you have nothing to hide, but it makes you terribly vulnerable. When I was very small, I was curious about what people looked like under their clothes -- once I realized that in under there they were ALL naked. But now I don’t care anymore. I’d rather stay warm and dry myself and I assume others would, too.

Over the last few days I’ve been sorting my collection . I don’t collect artifacts, I collect people from the Blackfeet reservation. That is, every time there’s an obituary in the Great Falls Tribune, I cut it out and stick it onto an index card, then file it. At first it was a way of keeping track of lost friends and I put the dates on each card. Then I realized that I didn’t always recognize people I’d known over the last fifty years and even their names had changed, sometimes many times. I appreciated the trend to include photos of the people at both young and old ages. (So many of the young faces of men are in military uniform these days.) So now I just cut out everybody from the rez, even if they’re not here and related to an Indian only by marriage.

The edge of the enrolled tribe has always been a porous membrane, ever since the first “enrollment” list was made by some Army clerk sitting at a wobbly table on the prairie while the people filed by, giving their unpronounceable Indian names so they could get government food. You can count on there being some starving non-Indians in that line and no one until then had thought much about who was “in” and who was “out” or even what a tribe was.

I got lazy about putting the dates on the obits I saved. If I couldn’t find the scissors, I could tear out the notice, but I couldn’t always find a pencil and there was no backup. So now what makes the cards useful is the same thing that makes the genealogy in the 1907-08 Blackfeet Census so helpful: the family relationships that are at the heart of tribe anyway. It grows from the center out, not by people coming in from outside.

That Census book was simply typed up from a shoebox of cards just like mine. It’s alphabetized the same as mine are -- right this minute. Yesterday they were a jumble and there will be more filing to do in a few weeks. While I sorted them, I remembered the real people. So many tiny babies. So many former students. So many wild characters and sturdy citizens. So many suicides. So many diabetes deaths. Just “so many.”

The point of forbidding the collecting of arrowheads is not the value of them, not that white people are getting rich off red people. It is, as Lance Foster points out, the information embedded in where they were found. In fact, so many are found in the high arid west because the land is constantly being stripped by wind and eroded by storms so that the layers of objects re-appear where they were put down and then covered up long long ago. Just so am I interested in the information recorded in a few inches of newspaper print. Though I know there is deep secrecy in some of these stories, there’s no need for a SWAT team.

JOE HALKO: 1940 to 2009

Choteau sculptor Halko dies at 68
By ERIC NEWHOUSE • Great Falls Tribune Projects Editor • March 12, 2009

CHOTEAU —Joe Halko, who was born on a ranch near Stockett and grew to be a successful and much beloved wildlife sculptor, died early Wednesday morning at his home in Choteau.

Halko, 68, had suffered a series of severe strokes starting in late December.

"Joe was the kindest, gentlest man I've ever known in the art world," said Norma Ashby, one of the founders of the C.M. Russell Art Auction, where Halko and his work were popular year after year. "His wife, Margaret, was always beside him, which speaks to the kind of man he was.

"I never heard Joe speak a bad word about anyone, and he was always very humble about the art he created," Ashby said.

"He was just a nice man," added friend and artist Doris Anderson on Wednesday. "He had a good heart. Everyone will miss him."

Throughout his four decades as a sculptor, Halko created a legacy of artwork that will last a long time. . .


Halko was born in 1940 on a ranch near Stockett and grew up sketching and playing with clay. He graduated from Centerville High School, then studied art at the University of Great Falls, where he worked with Sister Mary Trinitas Morin, a campus art professor for 33 years . . .

Then he moved on to the Fisk Studios in New York and the Scottsdale (Ariz.) School of Art.

But he always returned to Montana for his inspiration. For 17 years, he worked as a taxidermist with sculptor Tuffy Berg, the namesake for the Tuffy Berg Award that now recognizes the most promising new artist in the Russell Auction. Berg died in 1991.

"Sometimes I feel a little guilty about it — we live here every day, and we take it for granted," Halko told Southwest Art magazine in 1988. "Montanans should stop and look around them. Everything changes."

Four years ago, Halko shared the secret of how he researched one of his sculptures, a stylized but natural family portrait titled "Mama Duck & 4 Ducklings."

"I went down to Gibson Park because the ducks are real up close and personal," he said. "And because I live in Choteau, I went to Freezout (Lake Wildlife Management Area) a lot."

Halko has been part of the Russell Art Auction nearly every year since the fifth auction in 1973. In 1974, a sculpture of his, "Jumping Whitetail," brought a bid of $375. Last year, his bronze "Against the Wind" sold for $5,250. This year's offering is a sculpture of two chickens and three chicks titled "Busy Banties."

Halko was recognized with the peoples' choice award for best sculpture in 1979 and 1983, and was popular in the Quick Draw event that precedes the main auction. His sculptures brought the top prices for three years, 1977-79.

Much of Halko's art is familiar to area residents because it's squarely in the public domain.

Most recently, Halko created nine different station of the cross sculptures that represent the journey Jesus made on the road to his crucifixion. Last year, the bronzes were installed in the sanctuary of Holy Spirit Catholic Church at 201 44th St. S. in Great Falls.

"Some of the pieces I did over and over again," he said last year. "That's the trouble with art — it's never done."

Another of Halko's sculptures, "Heritage Honkers" stands outside the Fish, Wildlife & Parks headquarters on Giant Springs Road.



Joe Halko’s life and character were remarkable and those who try to say artists have a wicked side as a natural result of passion should take a long look at Halko’s work. I talked to him a little over the years and would have liked to have spent much more time with he and his wife. Sometimes Choteau is as far from Valier as New York City, though I can see Ear Mountain from here.

It’s not that Halko wasn’t passionate, it’s just that his gift was the kind of close attention and observant intimacy that is constant and protective. In the earliest days he tried to produce a few of the cowboys and Indians that the market liked because they were easy to sell as part of the Charlie Russell “brand.” But then the times changed to focus on the environment. His east front of the Rockies location plus his taxidermy work plus his natural love and ease with animals combined to produce the Halko “brand.”

Once when we talked he told about his delight in the way ducks’ butts curl and waggle along, the way domestic geese have a knurly knobby beak, the way deer’s ears stick out like parabolic satellite dishes when their attention is attracted, how animals naturally group themselves in interesting patterns. You can see those qualities in his sculptures, which are now distributed across the country, many of them life-sized and outdoors where they can be polished by the loving hands of children. Bob Scriver loved and admired Halko’s work and Charlie would have, too.

In Montana many of us like our art to be realistic. And yet a little gaggle of geese by Halko is absolutely recognizable as his work. Something about affectionate amusement comes into the castings through the sculptor’s hands and heart. So many people see art in terms of investment and possible profit if the artist becomes “famous.” Halko was not stupid about making a living, but he always kept his priorities straight and ironically, that’s what makes his sculpture worth investment -- not just money but attention and understanding.

If you are reading this in “real time” on March 12, 2009, you should know you can post words of condolence on www.mcm.com. The funeral mass is scheduled at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Great Falls at 10 AM on Monday. He was a devout Catholic and among his nine Stations of the Cross in the sanctuary of that church will witness the Celebration.

On every Friday the website makes available biographies of American artists. Other days of the week only the first paragraph is posted as a teaser. Here’s Halko’s: “Joe Halko grew up a student of nature of a ranch south of Great Falls, Montana. He learned the habits of the fox and the skunk, the crafty ways of the crows who nested in the same tree year after year, and whether the storm clouds held precious rain or dreaded hail. He built toy trucks and tractors out of leftovers from his father's shop and sculpted with clay out of the creek bank using ranch animals as models. He learned the basics of taxidermy from an uncle and so began his serious study. . .” I don’t know who wrote this, but they knew what they were talking about!