THEY WALK BESIDE US

When I found the article linked below, I thought it was about the Birch Creek that separates the Blackfeet reservation from the state of Montana,  But this "Birch Creek" was in Idaho.  It turns out that there are hundreds of "Birch Creeks," "Willow Creeks," "Deer Creeks," and the like, all named for what was found there.  In this case, the Birch Creek that I know is the southern boundary of the rez.  It turns out that the Birch Creek in the title is from the "Intermountain West," which is the area on the west side of the Rockies as far as the Cascades, but some of the study is in the Dakotas and Nebraska.  The study is not based on living dogs but on fossils.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/birch-creek-canids-and-dogs-as-transport-labor-in-the-intermountain-west/48A53AA5293475692DDBF79BB0862936

The study merely refers to the whole canid family.  "The biological family Canidae /ˈkænɪdiː/ (from Latin, canis, “dog”) is a lineage of carnivorans that includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, and many other extant and extinct dog-like mammals."  (wiki)  Most of us easily think of dogs, wolves, coyotes and foxes, the best known canids of our continent, but don't know as well the jackals, dingoes, and various canids evolved to fit their location, like fennecs or singing dogs.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canis_species_and_subspecies

The scientists who studied these fossils were looking to find out how much weight they could carry.  Pulling a travois seemed to max out at about the dog's weight (approaching a hundred pounds) while the weight of carried paniers, backpacks, were about thirty pounds if much distance was involved.  Their assumption was that dogs come from wolves, which has been challenged in recent times.

No one, so far as I know, has identified the characteristic of plastic genes in domestic dogs that allows them to look so different in size, kind of coat, and even temperament.  If one defines "species" as the ability to interbreed, all domestic dogs seem to be fertile with each other in spite of attempts at control by humans, and also with related animals like coyotes, wolves, and foxes.  Coy-dogs and wolf-dogs exist.  Fox dogs may be possible but sometimes fertility is prevented by things like size or habits.  That is, a fox may have such different habits, ranges and diurnal timing that mating is impossible or unlikely.  A wolf cannot fall in love with a fox and follow it down its hole.  (Good material for a mythic story.)

Controversy about what happened to make dogs domestic and from which basic canids is unresolved.  It appears that some genomic change is powered by the discovery of a new means of subsistence -- attaching to humans and living their lives with them.  This may have happened repeatedly to several sub-species in paleo-times.  Wolves are popular candidates.  Domesticity is somehow linked to the plastic genes.  Some domestic dogs revert to being wild, feral, and that behavior is always present just under the surface, potentially a danger or perhaps attached to other dogs rather than humans.  They seem naturally to be group animals, which are the only kind I know of that become domesticated like horses, cows or sheep, including humans.

Scientists were startled to realize that domestic dogs actually share molecular genes with humans.  We hadn't known that genes could cross from one entity to another.  The Blackfeet, who knew nothing about genes, thought of dogs as a separate tribe that chose to join the human tribe, not as dependents but as separately cooperating beings who chose to share the fates of people, becoming attached, intimately involved, and empathic.  

Robert Hall's seminal video essay about rez dogs evokes this conviction from the idlers hanging around an alley next to a source of alcohol and drugs, which they wait for the same way a dog watches for a dropped hot dog.  The drunks go so far as to say that the dogs were once vulnerable disreputables like themselves, but after dying these guys missed the group so much that they came back as dogs and now hang around with them in that form.  Mishaps and suffering are so common among the these people that it forms a solidarity with the dogs' bad luck.  https://vimeo.com/21163086

The video shows how the dogs have plans for their dog-lives as they travel among homes, and sometimes form packs to kill livestock or breed.  Of course, if they are a danger to livestock, they are shot.  Dogs that are bred to guard homes and are therefore inclined to bite are more tolerated in a place where human law and order must cover too wide an area to be effective.  Humans on the rez learn to be respectful of this.  Arriving at an unknown household by car, it is wise to stay in the vehicle and honk the horn until the owner comes out.

Many of these dogs seem to have genes like those of "molosser" dogs  "Molosser is a category of solidly built, large dog breeds that all descend from the same common ancestor. The name derives from Molossia, an area of ancient Epirus, where the large shepherd dog was known as a Molossus."  These big sturdy dogs don't hesitate to bite, but can be trained to pull or carry loads.  Pit bulls, bred to fight, are in this category.  Also, in rez dogs there seem to be genes of shepherd dogs, like collies or Australian heelers.  The biggest versions are those white dogs who are raised with sheep as one of them capable of fighting off predators.  However different from each other domestic dogs seem to be -- poodles, retrievers, Boston Bull -- when they escape from attachment to humans and join the rez dogs, it only takes a few generations for them to look like generic rez dogs: big to medium-sized, shaggy, alert, and always busy when awake.

Stories about beloved dogs becoming human, the way beloved toys can do, show how little appearance counts when an attachment forms.  Other stories are about guardian dogs who fight off bears and murderers.  But the wild dog underneath can lead to attacks and even murder by dogs.  As an animal control officer I took many reports of damage usually, in the case of toddlers, mutilation to the face and in that of infants, death.  Dogs have been used by criminals to hurt their victims, so that the courts classify them as "dangerous weapons."  Others have become support to police by finding lost people or even bringing down escaping lawbreakers.  Some dogs are purported to write stories!

When I write a story about indigenous people on the rez, I always try to get a dog into it somehow, partly because that's just realistic and partly because it always enriches the dimensions of the tale.  There are good reasons for keeping dogs in fenced yards, but I always sort of regret the fences and leashes of "civilization."

IMITAIKS: WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US Part Two

Remember that the takeaway idea from this panel is not dogs but “THE RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY.” Often the audience laughed and nudged each other. Whenever I’ve spoken about dogs this has been true. It’s an automatic trigger like “commodity cheese.” So many dogs. A dog is an ongoing character in Bob Tailfeather’s cartoons in the Glacier Reporter. Often it’s the truth teller.

Darrell says we need the children because that is who takes us into the future. One of the things they do at Cuts Wood School is invent new words. They wanted a field trip to Pizza Hut in Cut Bank, so in order to convey that name, “Pizza hut,” they combined the name for rose hips (red berries), farina, and lodge. There has been a word for television for quite a while, but the word for computer hasn’t settled yet. New concepts as well as new objects demand new words.

The people move into the future as a tribe, revitalizing as it goes. They learn how to Google on their “Sarvisberries.” But they don’t discard the old ways. Yet when tourists come asking to see 19th century lodges and to meet elder ceremonialists, they don’t recognize what they see right in front of them: TODAY’s ceremonialists and homes. Darrell asks them, "Do you have a churn at your house?"

Those who really long to know more about the old days, should go to the website called: www.saokioheritage.com/ where much research is recorded. Rosalyn LaPier works hard on this as she earns her Ph.D. at the University of Montana. It can also be found by going to www.pieganinstitute.org

So the subject here is the value of relationship and reflection about what that relationship is and what it might mean. The first demonstration of this was that two speakers, who knew about historical traditonal life in this tribe had to come from Canada because the governmental structure up there was one that protected old ways and the remoteness meant that the language persisted. The other side of that was they had to cross the border, which meant they were made late.

SPEAKER: MARTIN EAGLE CHILD, Kainai Elder and Cultural Leader
Martin says he does NOT like to be late! His practice is ALWAYS to be on time. He is a handsome older man carrying a big old-fashioned briefcase containing his papers. His iron-gray hair is in braids, his earrings are the big round shell kind, and his Burt Lancaster wraparound smile is brilliant.

Martin is both a Kainai (Many Chiefs) Elder and a Catholic server of communion. He is one of those Blackfeet men who naturally includes the spiritual of any kind in his life. (Joe Eagle Child, who has been gone a long time, was part of the original Pipe Bundle circle that Bob Scriver and I sat in.) His talk went back and forth between English sentences and Blackfeet sentences, each explaining the other. He often comes to Cuts Wood School to interact with the kids and is used to giving the audience questions to answer. But he also travels to other places and was recently with the Eskimo -- whom he confirms don’t like to be called Eskimo. Say Inuit or whatever else they want to be called. Sled dogs! His eyes lit up at the thought of them!

His own dog’s name is Apache. Apache is very fond of Chinese food, but needs to have sweet and sour sauce on it. He says he’s very good to Apache and makes sure he gets Chinese food twice a week. (In Alberta a good share of the restaurants are Chinese.) He remarks about the story about the dog who tattled on the unfaithful wife, that Apache would protect him from any harm, but Apache always sides with his wife! Apache would not tell about her lover, but she has none anyway.

He remarks on the many Blackfeet names that include “dog.” Dog Child (Imitahpoka), Richard Little Dog (that’s who gave Bob and I our names), Dog That Curls Up, and White Dog. (More about White Dog later.)

In his young days Martin drank. Every time he did and woke up throbbing and bleary with a hangover, he would pray to the Great Spirit, “Oh, get me through this! Help me out here and I’ll never drink again!” But he did anyway. One night he had a dream. He was sitting on a rock and a dog came towards him, intending to bite him and tried to tell him something. It took Martin a while to understand that the dog wanted to punish him for constantly making a vow and then breaking it. He realized what he was doing, that he deserved a dog bite, and he quit.

He mentioned the epithet “dog face” which means something like unreliable and deceptive. Imituskee. (One of the first Blackfeet words I learned!) And he said that dogs howling are unwelcome because the feeling is that they are announcing the coming of death, that they can sense it.

He spoke of a huge Okan or sacred event in Brockett this summer where there were eighty lodges and nine pipe smokes, all the people coming together to share their holy ways. He says “Sun Dance” is a wrong interpretation. His own sons took part in piercing (then his voice got low, because that was against the law for a long time). Quickly he changed the subject to the name of Darrell’s dog: “Destroyer.” It’s a female. (The India-Indian goddess of destruction is named Shiva, which means the same thing.)

For five years Martin worked with the police as an elder to get them to understand the people they were protecting. They used dogs as helpers and he told about a boy who ran away and how the dogs found his frozen body. He told about them figuring out murders, both finding who was killed and who did the killing. He went off on a short diversion about a friend of his who recently had a run-in with an insufficiently civilized cop when the friend was taking his Bundle back home. The policeman told him that all of his native religion was crap. The friend said he thought the officials would be surprised to hear that he thought that. The policeman said they were crap, too. Martin did not think this policeman’s prospects were very good in the future. Dogs might bite him.

If a dog dies, one should not grieve too much but rather be grateful to the dog, because sometimes dogs will die in order to take the place of one of your family members who was supposed to die.

Wolves are closely related. When one goes on the war trail, one sings a wolf song. He sang it for us. He told about a man-dog song in which a mother dog and her pups come to a man in a dream and ask to come into the lodge by the fire because it is very cold. The words are like “have pity on me, pity on my poor pups. Then I will help you sometime.” And Marvin sang us that song with the help of a drum. The beat was a quick trembling one.

Last summer the Piegan kids had a camp at Buffalo Lake so they could look for buffalo stones, or iniskim. Martin was there. Then he told us about a very earnest man who really wanted to sing Indian, so he learned all the words to a song and sang them alone at a ceremony. The only thing he got wrong is that he accidentally changed the last line slightly so that he sang, “I make babies!” That won't be forgotten!


SPEAKER: DR. ELDON YELLOWHORN, PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHEOLOGY, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Eldon brought along a slide show to illustrate his talk and used his own dog as an example but it was hard to imagine his dog pulling a travois: it’s a Yorkie! Eldon is a big guy. He says the dog was intended to keep his wife company while he out-of-town, but the dog decided to be his -- though he has to be careful not to step on it. His name is “Omi,” the Japanese word for rain.

He told us the story of the Lost Boys who had been put out of the tribe because there wasn’t enough food because of drought. (Eldon points out that this probably happened repeatedly. He did not say it was the boys who were put out because the girls could make new tribal members later and because boys are resourceful enough that they might survive on their own.) The dogs pitied the boys and they prayed to the Moon (howled) asking her to speak to her husband the Sun and persuade him to let the waters return. This strategy worked and the drought ended. He repeated that people don’t usually like to hear a dog howling because it means spirits coming to take someone away.

Eldon told a real life story about when he was a boy. (He’s sort of young adult now -- everyone looks young to me.) They lived out in the country and used soft sage plants as wipers in the outhouse. One day he, his mother, and their dogs were gathering more sage. He was very small, maybe four years old, and he had to move his bowels. So his mother got him properly arranged. When his droppings hit the ground, the dogs darted in and ate them, which surprised him very much. Why was that? Then his mother told him the old story about why dogs can’t talk. This time the wife’s lover was a man, whom the husband killed, but this time the wife shoved shit into the dog’s mouth as his punishment and that’s what he barks to cough out. And yet he got a taste for the stuff and eats it when he can. (This is one of the duties of “pye dogs” or pariah dogs in Third World countries -- to clean away excrement and dead things.)

Then Eldon shifted to formal archeology. The skeletal and material records of the direct association between people and dogs goes back 14,000 years. If you Google “Blue Fish Cave” on your Sarvisberry, you’ll find many valuable references. A dog skeleton 12,000 years old was found there.

He explained to us “DNA archeology,” which means working in the lab to analyze both nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, which is actually more useful because it doesn’t change except by mutation. (The whole point of nuclear DNA is to recombine during sex to create a new individual.) The current thinking is that dogs departed from whatever common ancestor was there between themselves and other canids probably 135,000 years ago. This means that dogs became a separate species before they took up with humans. Previously, humans thought that they caused the split into dogs. (Humans think they cause everything. This is a Napi quality.) Dingos, when looked at through DNA, turn out to have developed out of the dogs who went to Australia with humans and then turned feral.

It is an open question whether humans domesticated dogs or dogs domesticated humans. The relationship long predates the change from nomads to farms and villages (about 10,000 years ago) and many dogs still live on the boundary of that change, going back and forth, in and out.

SPEAKER: TOM SHAWL, PROFESSOR OF ASSINIBOINE LANGUAGE, FORT BELKNAP COLLEGE

Tom Shawl is a third handsome man who looks young to me. His father was Assiniboine (Crazy Bear) and his mother was Blackfeet (Lone Walker). He came to Browning to get to know his mother’s family and ended up falling in love with a Blackfeet woman and marrying her. He said he had asked Darrell to provide a couple of husky bodyguards for him because through history the Assiniboine and Blackfeet clashed hard. His specialty was accumulating stories about a real person named “White Dog.”

A number of people were at this seminar because they love the 19th century romantic horse-people stories and this was right down their alley. Tom sketched out the history behind it. The Assiniboine were actually a segment of the Sioux nation, in sign talk named by drawing one’s finger across one’s throat: “Cut Throat,” also called the Nakota because their dialect drifted in a way that substituted N for the D we are used to in Dakota states.

Indian warfare before the horse and even before the Euros, was patchy and band-on-band rather than tribe-on-tribe. At any given time probably seventy-per-cent of the people were not at war while the other thirty per cent busied themselves with daily work. War was with shields, arrows and spears and as much a ceremony as a destruction. He spoke of Assiniboine shields, very big, so many of them that every man had one to stand behind, and Assiniboine armor, several layers of leather with sand quilted in between. Heavy but effective. Assiniboine were related to and allied with Cree, in a similar way to the Gros Ventre, who are the buffer group between Blackfeet and Assiniboine, usually allied to the Blackfeet. For a long time the bands had worked out their boundaries, as though they were jigsaw pieces fit together.

When the Euros hit the east coast, they pushed the jigsaw pieces so that they buckled and disengaged all across the continent. Then they added the de-stabilizers of horses, guns, metal goods, fabric -- all things that kindled greed and created gradients between haves and have-nots, all of which started wars. The tribal histories tell of fighting the Iroquois, but then less than a hundred years later they had been pushed so far West that they were fighting the Sushwap tribe in British Columbia. Their relations are sometimes called Stoneys. (Shawl counts Hugh Monroe among his ancestors, as do more than a few Blackfeet.) The Assiniboine were so widespread that they became middlemen who disseminated material goods. Their territory extended from Texas to the Bow River. They fought Comanche/Shoshone whose sign was a snake, a wiggling motion across with the finger, going one way for Comanche and the other way for Shoshone.

At one point there were seven Assiniboine warriors and three Cree who came to help the Blackfeet because their backs were up against the Rockies and they needed to learn new techniques. Two Assiniboines stand out in more recent history (1820’s and 1830’s). One was “Left Hand,” noted for his military genius, to the point where whites called him “the Wild Bonaparte.” These men could muster huge forces of warriors, from 500 to 1,000 men at once time. In 1836 a huge force of 3,000 gathered to attack the Blackfeet, but the leader, “White Dog,” for some reason changed his mind and decided not to attack after all. The reason is not recorded. It was not typical because White Dog was one of the few who had a categorical vendetta against all Blackfeet. He would ride to a ridge overlooking camp and scream sexual insults at the men. In their own language!

White Dog was a shape-shifter who, when he was cornered, became a huge grizzly. He could reconstitute himself and there are many stories about how he was killed and who killed him (one can start a bar fight over whose great-grandfather managed the deed). He had a sweat lodge that he would go into, stay in for days, and emerge with fresh scalps dripping from his belt, brandishing captured weapons, all Blackfeet. Evidently it was a teleportation “worm hole.”

(My notes say that “David-Rodnick” is the source of this next, but I don’t think that’s the right name.) In 1935 “Returning Healer” went to war alongside White Dog. Two parties set out but “Returning Healer” had a dream that though horses would be succesfully stolen, someone would die, and he didn’t want that to happen so he turned around and went back home. But some of his warriors still wanted to go on, so they joined White Dog. He had the same dream, but his reaction was, “So? The dead person might be me and I want to continue.”

He decided to make medicine and sent someone out to find a buffalo skull on the prairie. He took a bit of this and powdered it. His medicine caused the skull to become a living bull bison that snorted and pawed the earth. He had an enchanted buffalo robe and a war shield both of which could repel bullets and arrows. One man swore that he saw a bullet bounce off White Dog’s forehead, leaving him unharmed. He specialized in stealing women right out of their lodges and also horses so valuable that at night they were tied to the owner’s wrist or ankle. (Tom said once he himself had a car so new and beautiful that he considered doing that, tying his ankle to his car with a rope out the window. But that then he realized that the consequence would probably be that he was dragged out the window behind the car the thief was driving away!)

Probably it was the Blackfeet who killed White Dog in the end, though they don’t agree on the place. Mary Ground says it was here but Schultz identified a place farther away. Shawl did find one Blackfeet elder and then again an Assiniboine elder who was a nephew of White Dog’s, and they told the same story. The night before he died, White Dog rode around the village on his horse, singing his war song, which went this way: “My relations, it is a hard thing to lose someone but only the earth lasts forever.” The Blackfeet took this song and they still sing it as a victory song when they take the state basketball championship.

Shawl is trying to establish whether White Dog was with Custer on the Greasy Grass and says he was with the band that surrendered with Sitting Bull. But that’s about the facts.

The more interesting story is that one of the features of White Dog's exploits with women was that many of them fell in love with him. He taught them the magic spells that would reconstitute him if he were chopped into parts, which those who tried to kill him were intent on doing. But he was mean to these women and sometimes beat them up. So the last time he was chopped into pieces, the women came together with their parts of the ceremony to reassemble him and then got to talking. They became jealous and angry and some refused to perform their part of the ritual. Therefore, parts of White Dog remained severed and he stayed dead. In fact, some time later, he was dug up and his corpse was mostly together, but parts were missing. (Do you know the Egyptian story of Osiris?)

Unyiyee.

Add comments or make corrections as you see fit.

IMITAIKS: WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US

IMITAIKS:
WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US

THE TWELFTH ANNUAL PIEGAN INSTITUTE HISTORY CONFERENCE August 20, 2010

OPENING PRAYER: Emmett Dusty Bull, Cuts Wood School student
(In Blackfeet. Stay seated.)

PRELIMINARY WORDS FROM DARRELL KIPP:

Piegan Institute is an immersion school for teaching the Blackfeet language. It was founded in 1987 so the first students have graduated from college. They have done exceedingly well. This was a privately funded school without tribe or BIA or any other “ownership” except for sixty people who thought learning the Blackfeet language was a crucial thing to do. Of those sixty, only Darrell and Dr. Dorothy Still Smoking are left. But many of the people who predicted it would never work or even that it was a bad thing to do, have now converted to the idea. Many schools try to teach indigenous languages but it is far harder than they realize at first, so some quietly shut down. But this school has persisted.

Part of the reason is the actual school building. The present Cuts Wood School was designed to provide space for sacred doings and many Bundle Keepers and affinity societies meet here. The old Blackfeet ways are saturated with spirituality. To take that out of the school would be to destroy its purpose, which is to explore the language.

In that exploration, inquiry is made into records and memories to discover what the earliest recorded meaning of Blackfeet words might be. They found that in the oldest definitions of imitah the words mean “the spirit that moves with us.” NOT the animal that moves with them, though the dogs were indeed carrying the materials for the camps or pulling them on travois or traveling alongside the people as they walked so they could be sentinels and scouts. The SPIRIT -- not the ghost or the beast or any of those English words, like domesticated (domicile, ownership). So Piegan settled down to sort through the facts of relationship to dogs, the dependencies, the reciprocities, the companionships. They found these things as well as others: protection, hunting, objects of love, trading items, and (controversial) food. (The Sioux admit to eating white dogs as a ceremonial dish.)

Darrell and his “talking circle” have been pondering the “dog days” for quite a while now, trying to figure it all out. They come to something that the scientists agree with: that the special gift that dogs have is the ability to “talk” to people through body language and through watching human faces. Of course, we know they also sense whether or not we have diabetes, cancer or fear, using their sense of small. (Darrell mentions people who are always getting bitten by dogs and who ask “why me?” He advises them to go smudge themselves.) So dogs were the first animals to “throw in with us” and share our fates. They understand our doings and intentions intuitively as well as by learning.

Darrell tells one of the “Why Dogs Can’t Talk” stories. (There are many dog stories.) A woman has a lover whenever her husband is gone. (Blackfeet stories, like those of many cultures, always portray the unfaithful one as the woman.) The lover is a bear. The dog is afraid to intervene, but it observes and, since in those days it could use human language, it told the man. The man killed the bear and in revenge the grieving wife stuffed a big piece of meat into the dog’s mouth. Its barking is partly an effort to dislodge that lump.

PANEL: A REPORT on KAAWA’POMAAKAA SOCIETY

Darrell’s position is that the Blackfeet NEVER ate dogs, that they always held them in very high regard and considered them too valuable to simply kill and eat. He mentions that there are specific individual dogs with names who have been remembered in stories. He asserts that Blackfeet are anti-euthanasia and could never support the killing of surplus dogs. They are cultural icons. However, he recognizes that there are always lots of dogs around in Browning, that often they are hurt or starving, and that outsiders are often upset and offer to help the dogs if there were some way to do it.

At one time there was an organization called “Friends of Imitah and Poos,” but the sponsor, Peter Berger, moved away. (You might notice that the Blackfeet name for cats is "poos" or "puss," since both animal and name came with the Euros. The cats were invited to participate in this seminar but declined. They said, "As if we cared!") But there have always been individuals who did their best to take care of dogs.

Darrell told about a female documentary producer who was working in Browning and who became attached to a cute little pup. When it was time for her to go back to New York City, she really wanted to take the pup with her and asked Darrell what he thought, He asked around subtly, and it seemed to be okay. So she bought a shipping kennel and loaded it up for the airplane. About six months later this woman called Darrell, desperate for advice again. The cute little pup was now the size of her sofa and had just eaten the coffee table. What should she do? Darrell told her to take it to Central Park and turn it loose! “What?? Impossible!! I’d be arrested,” she protested.

“Oh, no,” reassured Darrell. “That’s a rez dog. In two weeks it will turn up back here in Browning.”

More realistically, it was decided to organize the Kaawa pomaakaa Society, a group with big hearts and small resources. One of the gathering places for the rez dogs is hanging around near Ick’s where the street people gather. (In fact, some of them suggest the dogs are reincarnations of old buddies.) So one of the first projects of this group was to make friends with these guys enough that they would allow the dogs to be spayed or neutered, then returned. They figure that nearly all the dogs are now sterile. Though they had taken along a small tranq gun in case some of the dogs were wild or hostile, Georgeanna Horn simply opened the door to her car and they all jumped in. In fact, the outsiders who come in to help in practical ways (like those who do the spay and neuter clinics) say that the street dogs in Browning are very well socialized animals that get along fine with people, so they can be adopted out even in other places. One of the strengths of this group has been establishing ties with other groups and individuals who have the same goals. These are not the big national humane societies, but more the local person-to-person animal lovers.

Darrell had the members of the group tell who they were. Erin Trombley had been a veterinary assistant at Grasswinds Veterinary Clinic and though she doesn’t work there anymore, she was so conscious of the many dogs brought in, sometimes hurt, and how they were all accepted by Dr. Ethel Connelly until a home could be found, that she has continued the work. Ellen Woods is the town librarian who volunteered to help with the spay/neuter clinics.

Debbie Nikou is a nurse at the Indian Health Service hospital and has rehabilitated and rescued animals for decades, including horses. Debbie administers a small grant account at Grasswinds. One person she was not able to help was a tourist who wanted to send a found dog home via UPS! But she has connections to Calgary and three states. She told the story of a little fluffy pup that she saw hit by a car. When she cme back and found it, the street people by Ick’s said it wasn’t really hurt, it was just “depressed.” But it was passing blood in its urine and had other bad symptoms, so Debbie took it home. Now it’s a fine boisterous Blue Heeler, exceptionally beautiful. Denise Sollars has a whole menagerie: dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles and so on. Sandra Watts, the tribal attorney, has eight dogs.

One sixth grade boy has a specialty: he takes in female dogs that are pregnant, births the pups, raises them, and then adopts them out. When he comes to the meetings, he gets very impatient with adult protocol. “Let’s get to work and get things done!” he urges.


Tomorrow I’ll post the rest of the content. The important governing concept of this whole seminar is “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY.” They are strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy which tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes. They are also questioning the value of being old, being an “elder”, as qualification for saying what should happen. As Darrell says, “A person who is mean and selfish at the age of 20 or 40 or 60 is not very likely to be different when he or she gets to 80. So why pay attention to them just because they are old?”

IMITAIKS: The Dogs with Us

These history seminars in Browning in mid-August are always wonderful just as an experience, quite aside from what one learns from the experts. Bill Grant’s design of Cuts Wood School works beautifully to pull breezes through the open spaces of the classrooms and the grassy yard is a good place to eat the traditional-style lunch, maybe buffalo soup. Usually the attenders are an interesting mix of local and traveler, Blackfeet and other.

As prep or, if you bring your laptop, as preface, you might enjoy one of my fav vids, which is Tom Hall’s video of reservation dogs. The url has wandered off from my notes, but you might enjoy the search since now there are a LOT Of YouTube vids about reservation dogs, as well as a homegrown soap opera called “Rez Dogs.”

It’s hard to think about dogs, as it is always when the subject is familiar and daily, too close to see. I just watched a show about advertising called “Art and Copy” which is a very vigorous (and profane) exploration of the GOOD side of advertising, the side that pulls us to a new way of thinking, often in service to better behavior. For instance, here’s an innovative Brit public service ad that a friend sent me:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=embrace+life++UK&aq=f

It’s quite wonderful. I love looking at it. But my response is NOT to buckle my seatbelt. It makes me want to hug people I care about. Maybe I’m dense or maybe I’m too anti-sentimental, but it’s clear to me that much of the advertising done on behalf of dogs is along these lines, by humane societies and based on the human/animal bond. The alternative strategy is like the ghastly photos we see about refugees or babies with cleft palates: shocking. Both approaches are through emotion. There is more to dogs than that.

“Art and Copy” talked about taking YEARS to analyze how we feel about milk or Volkswagens and why, trying to disassemble the unconscious assumptions we have, boil it down to a two word slogan. “Got milk?” (“Got dogs?” )

When I was working for animal control, at the beginning of a talk I would sometimes ask everyone to draw a quick cartoon of a dog and hold it up to share. No two dogs were alike. The trouble with the subject of dogs is that they are so various, but people insist on seeing them as all one category, just like the dogs they know best. Of course, they’re aware that dogs are big and little, black and white, male and female -- but they are usually NOT aware of the incredible variety of ways that dogs are shaped by their environments, whether as companions to a person they imitate so closely that they begin to look like them, or as near-wolves, pack animals loyal only to the strongest dog -- the one they call the alpha dog. And sometimes the alpha is a bitch. Loners are rare.

We know that dogs look different from each other except that where dogs are used for a specific purpose they will often standardize into what we call breeds. (In plants they would be cultivars.) The Victorians, a little twisted as they usually are, made dog breeds into status indicators and inbred them to the point that in the last hundred years formally classified dogs -- meant to meet arbitrary appearances for shows -- are cripples and invalids. The word on this has not spread as far as it needs to, but the AKC is beginniing to see the error of its ways. Their advertising assumption has been like big glamorous cars that malfunction. The working breeds, valuing performance, have fared better.

Two books raised my consciousness. One was “The Hidden Life of Dogs” By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Growing up in Africa had taught her to see animals in a rather different way, so when she was house-sitting and caring for their family dogs, she noticed that the dogs disappeared for a couple of hours every morning. This made her curious, so she put on her running shoes and followed them for a few days. She learned their route around the terrain, the smelling signposts they visited (which she understood), their ritual activities, and the other dogs they stopped to visit. Her conclusion was, in fact, that what dogs want is other dogs. The reason they like us is that they think we’re dogs.

The other book was Alan Beck’s first book. He’s at Purdue University now, where he runs their human-animal bond program, but when he was young he wanted to study wolves. There was no money. So he decided to study dog packs in New York City. Most people until then had thought of dogs as either “pets” or “strays.” To them, “strays” were lost “pets” who should be restored to that status. This idea has given rise to a whole genre of books about rescuing dogs and dogs, like Lassie, trying to get home. What Beck saw was that some dogs don’t even relate to humans -- they belong to other dogs. The word is “feral.” Since in this country we see dogs as possessions, an undomestic dog had never registered in the public mind.

In third world countries the pariah dogs -- like vultures and pigs -- live on the streets, cleaning up everything edible including corpses, even human. No wonder the Islamic people consider dogs filthy. “Pye-dogs” barely survive so the selective pressure on them is high. Peckinpah, filming in Mexico, often included them. They slip around in “Blackhawk Down.” But lately I saw a news story that said now with war in the Middle Eastern countries so much more food and offal is in the streets that the dogs are reproducing rapidly and becoming nuisances. Officials have resorted to the same kind of animal control we used to have in Browning when I first came in 1961. In spring during calving, the ranchers and police simply shot all the loose dogs they saw. If you valued your dog, you kept it in the house for a few weeks.

Lately people here have lost their tolerance for dogs in traffic and dead dogs and injured bony dogs. Their response more strategic now, gathering them into spay/neuter clinics and encouraging fenced yards with leash laws. But the back side of that in the three communities close to the mountains is that with no dogs in the streets, the bears and cougars come into town. In Helena it’s deer who can jump the fences to taunt the dogs, so the deer have to be periodically culled. I have a friend who suggests they ought to just turn the dogs out loose at night. But deer kill dogs.

The family across the street have a golden retriever. This summer they are traveling a lot because this fall their daughter starts school and the family will begin to empty the nest. The dog, too big to take along, is fenced. He grieves for his pack. He doesn’t get over it until they are back. They don’t hear it -- I hear it. A high proportion of dog complaints is about noise.

I never forget the complainant whose daughter was dying at home -- a dog blocks away was a howler and to her it was the Black Dog that in the end comes for us all. In Browning dogs manage to attach to the street people who sometimes fancy that the dogs are the spirits of old friends now dead. Their “pack” is interspecies and includes spirits. Don’t ever make jokes with them about “dog soup,” no matter what your anthropological information might be. Dogs don’t pull travois anymore either. But now they go to Heaven. Don’t they?

BLACKFEET DOG WITH MANY NAMES

From H-Amerindian, an academic aggregator of Native American news:

“Blackfeet Reservation Facing Cultural Dilemma Over Animal Control,” FRBB
News. February 14, 2010.
http://www.kfbb.com/news/local/84355487.html

“With an abundance of dogs roaming the streets each day, the city of Browning is facing a cultural dilemma over animal control on the reservation. The Blackfeet people have a deep love for their dogs that goes back many years, but the current living conditions of the animals on the reservation is causing concern. Once the protector of the camp, the Blackfeet Nation dog once carried the burdens of the people, guarded their camps and were allowed to roam free, but now the dogs are living in a modern day society. The reservation is looking to take a new approach to animal this year, while keeping the cultural beliefs intact at the same time. Darrell Kipp, Director of the Piegan Institute, is helping new mayor Lockley Bremner determine what changes need to be made. He says, ‘We're talking about a time when there were no streets, no technology. Today it's a different situation. We have to use modern day approaches to be friends with the dog.’ Today, many stray dogs roam the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, some limping, others so hungry they are forced to dig through the trash for food. New mayor Lockley Bremner says, ‘We've become immune to the atrocities that the animals face here in Browning. I'm not innocent, you know, I've neglected it myself.’ Bremner has only been mayor of Browning since January, but he says the lack of animal control has been neglected for far too long. Its something Office Wayne Higgins sees firsthand everyday during his patrols…”

(I think this Lockley Bremner is the son of the Lockley Bremner in the first class I taught in Browning in 1961. That would mean it was his grandfather, Robert Bremner, who hired me to teach since he was on the school board then.)

___________

Last night I found a good place to sleep with a couple of other dogs under a house trailer. The skirting had come loose enough for us to squeeze in there and we were right next to the hot water pipes. I hope they don’t find that place and fix it, but spring is coming. We’re through the worst. I can smell it on the wind.

In the really old days we’d have been busy but hungry this time of year, working with The People. But in the cowboy days, like even fifty years ago, we’d have had to lay low for a while, because it used to be that the cops would shoot every dog that was loose. The calves were coming and some of us dogs would kill them.

I guess you never really get rid of the wolf in some dogs. Some of us are pretty big and tough -- strange dogs don’t go into their part of Browning. But in the smaller towns closer to the Rocky Mountains those big tough dogs keep the bears and cougars out of the street. Cougars eat poodles, you know. (Some of us think that’s not entirely a bad thing!)

In those days there was an old woman named Eula Sherburne, whose husband was an important businessman and who was the daughter of the agent named Churchill. (No relation to Winston, I think.) She didn’t own a dog but she would hide one she liked on her sun porch. It was “McGraw,” who was no poodle. He was a St. Bernard and he DID kill calves, though no one with a gun ever caught him. We thought it was hilarious because she was just a little lady, but she was tough and made McGraw do what she said. It was for his own good. Even people did what she said.

The thing is, Blackfeet dogs are not really pets -- most of us. We’re like an interwoven tribe. Like, I belong to what they call an “extended” family, so I don’t just stay in one family’s yard because they might not come home at night. If they don’t, I go over to the auntie’s house or if they’re gone, too, like at basketball tournament time, there’s a ranch in the country where someone has to stay in order to feed the cows. They’ll put out food for me. Otherwise, I just rustle. I’m really good at rustling. I don’t need anyone to open a can for me. But I would be really upset to be tied or fenced. How could I rustle?

I don’t mind being on the lean side so long as I have the wind in my ears. But what I love most is being out and about with my buddies. I mean, next to my human family, the best thing in the world is being with my other dogs. On a spring afternoon, dozing up against a sunstruck wall where it’s warm and keeping one eye on things, I couldn’t be happier. It’s more than just happy -- hard to explain. Peaceful. In harmony. Sometimes the town street people come along and sit against the wall with us, talking or even singing. It’s a good sound. They might have food in their pockets.

Granted, it’s not much fun to be clipped by a car, even killed. But we have a lot of endurance and we either heal or we don’t. That way the weak ones get weeded out, which is the way it’s always worked on the prairie.

I’m the last of my mom’s pups. The family took her to one of those veterinarian marathons where they tied her tubes. She fussed over me longer than she would have otherwise. I miss her now. Not quite sure where she went. In fact, there aren’t as many dogs around as there used to be.

This college kid who belonged to one of our families made a movie about us. You could watch it at:
www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs-5530 I’m in it but I won’t tell you which one I am because a dog has to guard his privacy. I won’t tell you my name either, because I have a dozen names. Some of them are in Blackfeet and you wouldn’t be able to pronounce them anyway.

I know change is coming. I hate change. I want everything to stay the old way. I can’t help it. I’m just a dog. At least the mountains stay the same.

REZ DOGS/PYE DOGS

It’s well understood that the brain addresses reality through concepts it already has and that it is difficult to create new concepts except through new experiences. Much of science is a matter of devising ways to look at reality in new ways through experiment and statistical analysis to see whether subjective assumptions are right. Recently people have begun to look at the most subjective of our realities, our pets and, in particular, dogs with a cool eye.

Much of the motivation comes from the obvious atrocities of inbred “purebred” dogs that have resulted from 19th century assumptions, particularly the drive to make dogs the subjects of prestige and beauty contests. “Champion,” “with papers,” “not a mongrel” migrated over from the European entitlement class system to the genetics of these animals capable of unconditional love for humans. In the process the fancier breeds have become so twisted with so many painful afflictions that their shortened lives must be a misery.

Another part of the motivation comes from the need to understand pet overpopulation, the public acceptance of mass killing of dogs to get them off the streets. Or perhaps the specific elimination of a troublesome animal. Maybe you remember my earlier blog post about the Lady Princess, living under a trailer on the back of the block, producing ten black wiggly lovable pups, resourcefully eating cats when there was nothing else available. She acquired her name because “Petunia” and I were feeding her and to feed something is to claim it in some way, to take responsibility, and to feel affection for it. Indeed “Petunia” became quite attached to this big, mangy, feral bitch with the sweet face and huge ears. When the sheriff finally shot her, Petunia grieved hard. I felt it myself.

Breed? Some guessed golden lab/shepherd/Akita. That’s what I’d put on an impoundment card if I were still an animal control officer, though after a while in that role one learns that “breed” is a pretty tenuous concept. Lady Princess was a rez dog. This might be a new term to you unless you drive through a reservation. A rez dog, in my opinion, is not a “stray,” which implies that someone somewhere owns it and takes responsibility for it except that it has escaped restraint. Neither is a rez dog a true “feral” dog which is a dog that has been domesticated and then gone wild. Rather the term that comes closest is a pye dog, or a pariah dog, which is a dog that lives with a human community but is not a pet unless someone tries to domesticate it. Otherwise, it lives in that ecology the way a raccoon might or even the whitetail deer that have invaded many towns. On a rez several households may feed a dog, name it, be guarded by it, but no one takes responsibility for it in the way we expect pets to be licensed, vaccinated and possibly spayed or neutered.

The Lady Princess was found in a garage in deadly cold weather with two pups, one dead. She was bone-jangling thin. The household had a split domicile, partly on the rez and partly in Valier, and a LOT of kids. The little girls of the family begged for the salvation of the dog and pup and brought them to Valier for care. In fact, they still have the pup as an “owned” dog. But the Lady Princess was not spayed right away and soon came back into heat. The pack of male dogs in Valier (which is not supposed to exist since we have leash law) drove this female away from the family so that she began to look for burrows around town. There were enough feral and pet cats in town and enough pheasants and grouse in the surrounding wheat fields, that she was able to produce the ten-pack of pups, but lactating pushed her into being more and more bold until I looked out my back window to see her nearly nail Squibbie, my cat. This got my attention. Also, Valier is not a town that tolerates big dogs of unknown origins in their yards. Most people are grass-proud and do not have fences. And they keep their garbage tightly controlled.

The sheriff’s deputy as well as “Petunia,” and I began to work on the problem. At first we women could almost hook a finger under her collar (no tags) but when Petunia did that, the dog went crazy and threatened to bite. In the following weeks people yelled at the dog, threw things, chased her -- then no one could get near. We began to feed the pups as soon as they came toddling out, so eventually we could catch all of them but one. The original family took them back out to Heart Butte. I don’t even want to know. One pup was left, grew waddling fat, and was finally captured, going off in the back of a squad car, curled up on the seat. “I hope he don’t throw up,” said Petunia.

“Oh, the drunks do a lot worse back there,” said the deputy.

In the end the Lady Princess came back into heat, began to fight other dogs and scare people, and by that time she was scabby all over with mange. Mange among dogs and horses has been a sort of animal non-deadly smallpox on the prairies, killing mostly by leaving an animal hairless in a harsh climate. At various times mange plagues have triggered mass killings to try to eliminate it. There are terrifying historical descriptions of whole tribal horse herds gunned down while the people wailed. So the Lady Princess was eliminated. This is a country town. Most people are not sentimental.

I googled “pye dogs” and was startled to find that they have fan clubs and there are even efforts to declare them a “breed” in that stubborn insistence to force reality into human-defined categories. In India there are efforts to capture, sterilize, vaccinate and return them to the street, in the same way that groups hereabouts are treating populations of feral cats.

Rez dogs, pye dogs, call for a whole new way of looking at animals that we think of as “domestic,” meaning “owned.” Our most overriding category is always “property.” The idea is to assign ownership to every creature and kill or exclude the rest of them, rather like the Dawes Act divvying up the prairie, assigning plots and taking the rest. That’s far-fetched, but not by much. The next step is "my dog is better than your dog -- therefore I am also better than you!"

Rez dogs are a survival of the wild pre-white prairie and nomadic settlements. Once again I recommend the “Rez Dogs” video produced by Robert Hall. www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs (Not to be confused with Ironman Mitchell’s vigorous comedy/mocumentaries.) The video explains how dogs are woven into tribal life historically, mythically, and practically. One of their themes is that the dogs are so much a part of the lives of the street people that they might be reincarnations of dead winoes. Another is that rez dogs take responsibility for themselves, rustling for food, finding niches for sleep or warm walls for sunning. They are like a parallel and interwoven tribe with its own rules and ordering principles.

It made a major impression on me that when all the dogs actually WERE eliminated from the streets of one of the small rez towns, the bears and cougars felt free to prowl all night. Ecological niches are always filled by something. I have a friend who suggests that getting rid of all the deer in town is simply a matter of suspending the leash law.

I try to be anti-romantic and not overly idealistic. Rez dogs, pye dogs, may have a lot to teach us about our need to impose ownership and neatness on the world. And what about this: is there such a thing as “pye people” who live like pye dogs all through our human settlements, not belonging, living off our leftovers?