NAPI'S FINE HOUSE

When a Blackfeet has ideas about writing a book, which they have no doubt will be published and earn lots of money, they almost invariably say they’re going to write the true version of the Napi stories, which they learned from their grandparent (usually about my age by now).  Though the stories were originally oral, there must be a dozen versions of printed Blackfeet Napi stories out there floating around, not counting other tribes. Why add to the pile?   When I ask these would-be authorities, they just look confused.  In their minds it is clear that a book about Blackfeet should have Napi stories in it, that there are definitive versions that are more valuable than the others, and that everyone in the greater world will fall on them with great delight and tons of money.  (They have not gotten the news about the collapse of the publishing industry, but that’s beside the point.)

If you speak to a white person over sixty about a book about Blackfeet, their minds will turn to James Willard Schultz -- dramatic horseback adventures of hunting and war.  If the white person is a little younger, the book will be about post-colonial misery and injustice: alcoholism, lousy housing, drugs, broken families.   If the white person is female, it will be about a cross-race romance.  Everyone thinks of their little sub-category as representing the whole.  They never question this, never investigate, and even if they come to the rez, they will see it on those terms.

Star Boy

Let’s go back to Napi stories.  The anthropologists like Wissler, Ewers or Kehoe had a great interest in them and scientists recorded them as accurately as they could in the early days of contact, hoping to understand the culture better.  Anyway, in those days it was salvage anthropology: save what they could.  At the same time the missionaries were looking for equivalents to the Christian stories so they could say, “You see?  These are universal elements.”  So Starboy or Blood Clot Boy became versions of Jesus.  And there WERE correlations, but they became an argument something like genetic purity: kill all the buffalo that have domestic cow genes.  (An old Aryan idea: variation as pollution.)  

The general public saw Napi stories as more like Aesop fables or the Greek myths.  Entertaining.  Suitable for children.  (Which they were, since they were meant to socialize the tribal children with tribal values like generosity, courage, and willingness to experiment.)  But trivial, non-threatening.  So James Willard Schultz, Frank Bird Linderman, George Bird Grinnell, the Demings, Walter McClintock did pretty well selling the stories.  None were Blackfeet.  None got rich.

In the Sixties local people began to pick up the idea of Napi, Natoosi (Sun), and others.  For instance, Napi's Lookout; The Story of Willow Rounds by Dorothy M. Hamaker (1964)  (A white rancher’s wife.)  And not long after that the Blackfeet themselves were chiming in.  Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Came Down,” was commercially successful.  

Napi and the Bullberries (The Indian Reading Series Stories and Legends of the Northwest, Level II Book 17) was by Joan Kennerly, Carmen Marceau, Doris Old Person and June Tatsey (1978)  (Four Blackfeet sisters, “the Bullshoe girls,” who were all involved with education.)   Darnell Doore  (Rides at the Door) (1979)  Blackfeet Heritage Program, Browning Public Schools, put another turn on the wheel.  There are others, I’m sure.

Loki

Brer Rabbit

Napi is a trickster figure and a universal in stories around the planet.  Here he’s Brer Rabbit and there he’s Loki.  He’s the guy that thinks he’s so smart, but gets carried away.  On the other hand, because he’ll try anything, he’s creative and makes contributions. 

A few years after I left the reservation for a while, I earned a degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus on anthropology.  There I learned about revising sacred stories or writing parallel new ones in order to make a point. 

Windigo

In part I learned this in a dark way from a student who combined the Baker Massacre with Dracula, a figure from European vampire lore, very much like the cannibal figure of the Windigo, the woodland tribes’ starvation horror figure.  (There’s a modern movie version spelled “Wendigo.”)  On the other hand I tried playing “what if” with traditional teaching stories of the Gospels.  Sometimes this was pretty enlightening.  What if Jesus had turned all the wine at the wedding party into water instead of the other way around?

What Napi story might I invent for the situation of today’s Blackfeet?  I’ll give it a try.

______________

Napi’s neighbor, Striped Skunk, was experimenting with the white man’s way of building a house.  First he wove one of grass, but the wind soon got rid of that.  So the next one was made of logs, which stayed and looked good.  

Napi was jealous, but he didn’t get upset until he looked over one day and saw that Striped Skunk even had lights on in his cabin.  How did he manage that?   

When he went over and demanded to know the secret, Striped Skunk showed him that he had captured a Farting Horse, which emitted a gas from under his tail that could be set on fire, making a pretty good light.  It was warm, too, which is a big advantage in a prairie winter.  So Napi went over one night and stole the Farting Horse.  

Indeed, the gas burned bright and warm, but Napi kept Farting Horse picketed next to his lodge so it wouldn’t run away.  Pretty soon the horse had eaten everything nearby and stopped farting.  This made Napi very indignant and he decided to find out where in the horse the farts were coming from, so he cut the horse open.  It didn’t work.  No clue.  

Napi was pretty sure the horse was getting something from the ground -- it was always going along in the grass with its nose down.  So he went to look for whatever it was.  All he found was horse dung, which would burn, but nothing like farts.  However, he did find a lot of shiny black rock, something like obsidian.  Thinking about Striped Skunk’s log cabin, he decided he would make a house of this black rock, which would be very beautiful and strong.  So he did.  In it he burned buffalo chips and horse dung, because there was never enough wood on the high hilltops where he liked to live because of the view which made him feel important.

Then came spring and the thunderstorms.  Lightning struck everywhere.  Striped Skunk was always careful to open his Pipe Bundle at that time and to give away what he could to his family and friends.  One day in spite of this his cabin was struck by lightning and would have burned but all his friends and neighbors came quickly and put the fire out.

Napi’s lookout house up there so high was also struck by lightning, but he had thought,  “Ha!  Nothing will happen to me!  I don’t need to do any ceremonies because this house is made of stone.”  Alas, it turned out that the black shiny stone was coal and it burned very well.  The tribe tried to get up there to help, but it took a long time to climb such steep slopes and the house burned completely.  Napi spent the rainy season huddled in front of his smoking, smelly fire of dung.  He couldn't even afford a canvas lodge.

________

I tried to get oil into this story but failed.  Maybe you can do it.  This is a creative story -- anyone can add to it or change it.  Just like life, especially tribal life.  I don’t recommend this music, but it IS very windigo.  Maybe it is sound from a windigo who thought he could eat oil. Or was that drinking frakking liquid?  http://tiktik.bandcamp.com/album/windigo-psychosis

THE WORLD GOES AROUND

The issue of whether the government should allow two Arapaho Indians to kill two bald eagles for the sake of freedom to practice their traditional religion has been going the rounds. I blew my cool on the subject on a listserv called “The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment” which I’ve belonged to for many years. This is what I said.

Both eagles and Indians are "third rail" issues -- not just in America, but also around the world. They are sacred subjects with much mojo attached, and yet trying to get anyone to do anything practical or even moral about them is pretty damned tough. The issues are confusing, painful, and internally contradictory. They take a lot of stamina just to investigate. When you're living in the middle of wind turbines that chop up hawks and eagles on their traditional migratory paths, where Indians who are as mainstream as anyone else try to re-create old ceremonies without living that life, which is what validated them in the first place -- let's just say there's plenty of blame to go around. And I suppose that's why so many people make a leap to romance, totally detached from first-hand contact, and then become enraged if anyone challenges that. There is a big split in the nature of the discourse. One is practical, experience-based, and in situ. The other is theoretical, spiritual, and seeking some kind of absolution or participation. (I'm trying not to be pejorative.)

We tend to run headlong into each other.

A few miles from here to the north -- I can see them -- is a wind farm. Sounds great. Clean energy. There are a HUNDRED of these massive turbines with blades big enough to drive a car into. There is no plan for what to do when they wear out, which they will. The problem of how to hook them up to the grid has not been solved because they are intermittent power and there is no practical way to store it. The transmission lines that the Canadian company wants to build has not been completed because they were so ham-handed about forcing condemnation on the land owners and have built on wetlands and archeological sites as they promised NOT to do. Condemnation of Montana lands for the sake of a corporation from a foreign country? The court cases are proceeding.

There are government subsidies and these enterprising companies (some of them are Irish) are determined to use them before they dry up. Therefore they want to build another wind farm (There are maybe a half-dozen so far in this and adjoining counties) a few miles north of the one I can see from the street in front of my house. (At night they are topped by pulsing red lights.) They need to be on a ridge where there is strong wind.

Because there is strong wind, the hawks and eagles and other cruisers have used that area for migration and nesting for millennia. You can see the ledges with nests in that ridge because there are big white swashes of eagle poop under them. Bald eagles are fish hawks and stick to waterways. The birds that will be chopped up in mounds will mostly be golden eagles and other raptors. I helped to raise a golden eagle and am sentimentally attached to them, not for their symbolism but because of holding them, talking to them, squirting the hose on them (they love it), protecting cats from them, shooting gophers to feed them, and other little acts of personal nurturing.

That's the eagles. Now for the Indians. I do not know the Arapaho tribe or rez -- only some individuals. I DO know Blackfeet after fifty years of contact teaching people a few years younger than myself, then their children, then their grandchildren. (With long periods when I did other things.) Bob and I participated in ceremonials that other white people didn't know existed, but that now their grandchildren have decided to resurrect as much as possible. The people I participated with were 80 in 1961, so you see they were 19th Century folks, very very different from these modern entrepreneurs. I've seen people be very white, go Indian, decide that was a mistake and come back to being white, then try to manage some kind of compromise. It ain't easy and I support them. If two Arapaho want to catch two live eagles in a ceremonial manner, I can't see what terrible damage it will do. I would hope it would help them resolve their identities and fates.

A woman my age, Marie Heavyrunner, was just found in the crawl space under her house -- dead, tied, wrapped in plastic. She'd been there since July when she is rumored to have received a check for $90,000 for her oil leases. (Have you read "Mean Spirit?" Linda Hogan. She’s been speaking about the new boom.) The dead woman’s son is the suspect. Another relative helped him somehow. They were part of a drug gang which had taken over the house. The woman was my age, 72. I worked with her late husband, a very much respected WWII veteran, a man who helped liberate the death camps. I taught his son by a different wife and his grandson who served ten years for murdering his cousin -- hit him in the head with a baseball bat. All through those ten years I tried to keep him supplied with books, magazines, and letters in hopes that he would write. He was released on parole, re-offended and went back in. The tribe and the FBI are stone-walling all attempts to find out more about Marie’s case because they want the leasing to continue.

An old Blackfeet woman called me late at night which she often does when she gets scared and wants advice from a white woman. She thinks I have secret information. She's my age and went on relocation so most of her life has been in cities with white people. She was being paid by the oil companies to get old people to sign over the frakking rights to their leases. I was horrified. She couldn't understand why. "It's good money and I need it!" she said, and this is true. A couple hundred dollars per signature. The old timey people think she knows best because she's been in the city and knows a lot of white people.

Today it was announced that one of the oil companies had realized that Red Blanket Hill was sacred and had scrubbed their plans to drill there. Bob always told me it was a place that attracted lightning because there are iron deposits under it. I would not want to be drilling there in a thunderstorm.

Now the subject of religion.

Seizing eagles is easier said than done. This is not Santeria where a rooster has its throat cut. (I don't know whether anyone ever eats those birds. Soup?)

It's an ordeal, a test of courage and skill. One digs a pit, makes a lattice of branches and leaves, puts bait on top -- a rabbit will do -- and waits for an eagle to come try to grab it. Then one grabs the eagle. But the eagle grabs back. Their talons are like scissors and are infectious, though golden eagles are less so because they eat live animals. Bald eagles eat fish and carrion.

Wearing eagle feathers is all very totemized these days. I daresay it was more of an honor before one had to apply to the US government for a boxed-up dead eagle found in the woods or along a highway.

When people talk about religion, they are generally informed only by the media. I consider the current wars over God or non-God to be an adult game equivalent to YA vampire novels. All about love and sex and who's in and who's out. It is NOT religious.

Religion is in many layers and pockets everywhere, not just in institutions or books. It is what we truly believe and that is determined by actions.

Like maybe seizing an eagle.

_________

I tried to download some of Tony Bynum's photography of oil wells and windmills, but don't have the tech skills. So here's the website. Have fun exploring.

http://www.glacierparkphotographer.com/

FRAKKING

Oil on the Blackfeet rez has been a hot issue for more than a century. From the beginning it has driven a wedge between the older, more traditional people who thought the US Government would protect their interests in a context they could not hope to understand and the younger more activist people who felt competent to learn whatever was necessary and take charge of their own decisions. This split was an opportunity -- as all splits are -- for wheelers/dealers/sneakers/traitors to increase their webwork of inside info and sweet deals. The antidote is knowledge, so I was delighted to see the GF Tribune add a regular feature, an Oil and Gas Report written by Darryl Flowers, who is the publisher of the Fairfield newspaper, The Sun Times.

I did not know that oil wells have names, but that’s how Flowers lists them. Here are some of the local wells he has mentioned so far:

Anschutz Exploration Corporation:

SW Browning 1-35H-32-11 in Glacier County, aiming for a depth of 11,725. It is a horizontal well, meaning (I suppose) that it is drilling sideways, one of the new capacities that seems likely to restore old wells.

Paisley 1-4-37-13 in Glacier County.

Rosetta Resources

Brandvold 3509-25-05, completed at 7,502 feet.

Glacier Farms 3207-22-12, 6,200 feet.

Benton Bench 16-5-28-4 is a vertical well by Primary Petroleum Company USA that is aiming for the Duperow formation at 5,000 feet.

UnionTown

New Miami 42-20H (west of Dupuyer) is using horizontal drilling to get at the Sweetgrass Arch and is actually producing oil. They expect to place as many as 17 wells to tap the Sun River Dolomite pay zone in the Madison formation.

Newfield Production

Peacemaker 1-5H (NW NW 5-33N-6W) in Glacier County went to 9,038 feet, shooting for the Nisku Formation,

Flowers contacted companies that provide the drilling rigs and they claimed there are about a thousand of them out there. I don’t know how many jobs that represents. One must count clericals and community impact like cafes and motels. The real boom is over on the Dakota border where the Bakken formation promises major strikes. Those small towns have now discovered the dark frontier side of boomtowns: a teacher out jogging as she was accustomed to do has disappeared, evidently into the tar pit of a couple of violent floaters who had come looking for work. People in Valier are salivating over the prospect of oil field money but not thinking much about having to start locking their doors and hire more peace officers.

Throwing such a big rock into our small ponds has a lot of impact. Rings of waves go out and out. One faction is insisting that we must provide more rentals to prevent boom-town trailer ghettos, and suddenly there are people trying to map out subdivisions and others figuring out whether their deceased grandma’s house might be rentable. Maybe the Panther Cafe or the motel might finally find buyers -- or maybe the present owners will take them off the market.

Here’s my amateur English teacher version of origins. Once upon a time there was a continent-wide not-very-deep ocean covering the whole prairie from here to the Midwest. At some point, due to plate tectonics, the continent tilted up along the Rocky Mountains and creased at the Mississippi River, which drained off the water. But the bitter alkali and salt remains in our soils and the water itself is in underground pools called aquifers, some of them sealed over with limestone formed by the zillions of years of tiny shells of animals that died in that shallow water.

Much of what we see now as land formations were once underwater and began life as reefs and atolls, home for little squiddy things as well as shelly things. All along the water’s edge or where bumps stuck up, there was vegetation and, to take advantage, browsers and then carnivores to eat the browsers. It was tropical here then, and there were no mammals because they hadn’t been invented yet. We’re talking dinosaurs and giant ferns.

When the weather or the meteorites or whatever killed all these carbon-based creatures -- plants and animals alike -- and then crushed them under millennia and millennia of geological developments, they became oil. So there are pockets of oil, of gas, and of water under the surface. Our small towns exist because of those water pockets or else because of the run-off from the mountains that at this point accumulate snow all winter. The snow load seems to be diminishing enough to stop creating glaciers or even maintaining them. So the pockets of water under the ground are more crucial and more non-renewable.

One of the ways to get more oil and gas out of the ground is to inject water into wells to make the pressure break up the solid rock formations into fractured, cracked rock. (Frakking.) This injected water is loaded with chemicals. There is no real way to tell whether this undrinkable and harmful water will seep over into the pockets of water we’re using at wells and watering ponds for livestock. In some cases the frakking has opened pathways for gas to get into water dramatically enough that one can set fire to what comes out of the kitchen tap. Also, the injections are highly pressurized and there is some evidence that they can trigger local earthquakes. All these consequences are irreversible: no backing out of frakking.

Here’s where the rez comes back into the picture. Oil companies started contacting people early to get contracts before the bad publicity got around. They hired people to comb the records for people who didn’t live here any more, to find and call them. And they hired older people with some education and a big need for money to get to the more traditional tribal members who might be susceptible to a pitch about how harmless frakking is.

As statewide pushback, the Montana Farmers Association has begun offering workshops on leasing that are drawing big crowds in sub-zero weather. A category of people called “landmen,” who had mostly cleared out when the last wave of drilling ended, are now back. Sort of like the “locaters” who helped the homesteaders find good claims. Some reliable, some not. It’s hard to tell when the laws and regulations are complex.

Flowers’ articles are hard to read until one has a little experience. It can’t be harder than the sports analysis or politics, can it? In many ways it’s the same thing: winners and losers, the inevitable split everywhere.

OIL ON THE BLACKFEET REZ: The Twenties

The following message came to me on my blog from Dr. Hypercube, who

“I saw this: http://hollisterhovey.blogspot.com/2009/06/oil.html and thought of you. I'd be interested in your thoughts and observations. The 20's always make me think of the end of some things - people who remembered the previous world were almost gone. Is that a dance lodge at 2:10 or so? Best - J “

“Dr. Hypercube” writes the blog “Diary of a Mad Natural Historian” at www.hawkdog.net/wordpress/ which I love.

Indeed, the Twenties in Browning, Montana, where this footage of Blackfeet chiefs was taken at Indian Days (still the second weekend of every July) even then were barely the end of the 19th century. Probably the real end was WWI, which heralded the industrial age even more definitively than the Great Northern Railroad coming through, because at this point oil was struck on the reservation. Oil is still being pumped today, though at nothing like the same rate since most of it has been removed. The big fields were and are Kevin/Sunburst and Cut Bank.

An oil strike was a fateful event and everyone knew it, because oil had previously been struck in Oklahoma and everyone learned from how things played out there. A fictionalized version is in the fine novel “Mean Spirits” by Linda Hogan. Native Osage and Ponca people had little understanding of what was going on and swindling opportunists rushed to marry enrolled women so that they could inherit their oil rights. The impatient ones removed older members of the family the old-fashioned way: murder.

For the Blackfeet events were more muted. The boundaries of the reservation was juggled over a bit to accommodate the Cut Bank predators. A long struggle over the legal arrangements split the leaders. Briefly, the issues were very basic: since the people, especially full-bloods, were in dire poverty, they wanted the money right now. Their idea was that they needed to live through today. They also wanted the government to handle all the leasing arrangements because they didn’t trust the mixed-bloods, who had white fathers. Those people thought that the oil rights should be divvied up among tribal members for their own individual use and that the tribal council should make all the leasing arrangements. The hangup was that it takes money to drill for oil and the tribe had none -- therefore they were dependent on an outside entity or the BIA.

Fred Campbell, the tall red-headed agent (who always makes me think of George Washington though he evidently had better teeth) felt that too much cash flowing too quickly would ruin the people and that their best bet was to turn away from oil and stick to developing the land. But outsiders with carpet bags were constantly on hand to tell the people they were being robbed and oil was “the new buffalo.” Campbell was eventually forced out by the issue.

Other forces were in Washington, D.C., where they tried to argue that the oil didn’t belong to the Indians since it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the treaties of 1850. James J. Hill managed a ten year lease, but didn’t drill. In fact, there were test wells on the Blackfeet land but no real pumping. Meantime, the whole High Line from the eastern reservation boundary (which mysteriously somehow moved to the west) towards the east exploded with oil exploration and development. Some felt that the oil reserves under the rez were being emptied by aggressive drilling along the boundary. It’s instructive to look at a map that shows the wells.

In 1924 Indians were given citizenship. Some had fought in WWI. If they were individualized, they could be dealt with politically much more easily. Divide and conquer always works with Indians. Foley details events after that. My notes from Foley are included in “Reservation Blackfeet” which can be purchased at www.lulu.com/prairiemary. It’s hard to get one’s hands on an original full copy since it’s not really a publication but rather a lawyer’s brief on the mismanagement of the reservation by the government. Eloise Cobell’s lawsuit against the US government comes in large part from the Foley report and oil asset corruption.

H.L. Lambert (not Fulton), a personal friend of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, finally managed to secure a lease from the tribal council at a 7 to 1 vote (not 9 to 1). (See Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1812-1954” for details.) This film footage was intended to celebrate and certify that. Note the “flappers” getting a little thrill from squeezing into the line of “chiefs.” The chiefs, which may or many not have been members of the elective Tribal Council, were well-accustomed to wearing their full buckskins and feathers to ceremonial events, though the poorer ones stayed in their “citizen’s clothes.”

The closeup photos were taken in front of the “Big Hotel” in East Glacier, not at the campgrounds just west of Browning. There was normally an “encampment” of several lodges in front of the “Big Hotel” and after everyone else had eaten, the Indians were allowed to come into the employee cafeteria to finish off the leftovers. The people complained that the meat was always gone. Then around a campfire the Indians would dance and tell stories.

The boys whose faces appear would have been about retirement age when I arrived on the rez in 1961 and I probably knew them if they lived that long. Attrition among rez boys is always high. I don’t know anyone who might recognize these boys in their early years. They would be very old now.

Lambert’s coup was certified by a vote of the tribe, 55 to 1 in favor of Lambert. That’s right. 56 voting members. Women still didn’t have the vote. The Office of Indian Affairs shut everything down, probably for fear of scandal. An early Twenties oil scandal concerned a formation in Wyoming, the Tea Pot Dome, that was illicitly and secretly leased under the Harding administration. The La Follette investigation panel's most junior minority member, Montana Democrat Thomas J. Walsh, led what most expected to be a tedious and probably futile inquiry seeking answers to many questions, which turned out to be anything but. It was very major scandal, played up big in the newspapers.

Two Guns Whitecalf, the fellow with the famous profile, was one of the leaders of the full-bloods at Starr School. His son, James Whitecalf, as “Old Jim”, became famous for being famous and also for being very old. Even his son, “Young Jim,” is gone now. He was a little older than myself. Old Jim Whitecalf has been chronicled by two writers: R.L. Lancaster in “Piegan” and Adolf Hungry Wolf in several volumes, (somewhat more reliably than Lancaster.) Ray Djuff, a writer in Calgary, is currently tracing out the entire Whitecalf family.

James Earle Fraser was the sculptor of the buffalo nickel and protested that he used several people as models and that he didn’t know Two Guns Whitecalf, but this didn’t slow down the conviction of many people that Two Guns was “the one.”

The brushy structure at 2.1 in this video COULD be only a dance pavilion but was likely for a Sun Lodge Ceremony. The framework is constructed of heavy cottonwood logs and will remain for many years, long after the leaves that provide shade and privacy have shriveled away. Of course, the structure could be a rather ambiguous blending of secular and religious, since most whites didn’t really know what they were looking at. Torture was forbidden.

How much of the ancient ways could survive depended in large part on the agent at the time. The original version required that an ancient and universally acknowledged virtuous woman should fast in a lodge for three days, then emerge to pray. Sometimes they didn’t survive the ceremony. At the same time warriors would use dancing to exhaustion and torture (thongs tied to skewers in the breast) to achieve an endorphin-fueled mystic trance. This is what alcohol provided without so much effort.

Bob Scriver, who was born in 1914 in Browning, attended the erection of this structure and was deeply impressed by it. All his life he remembered the thrilling song of the men riding in on horses, carrying the leafy branches.

This precious video shows the power of the Internet to find and connect history with today.