PIVOT POINTS FOR THOUGHT ABOUT THE BLACKFEET

These are meant to be reminders, not facts.  Thoughts may added over time.  Please feel welcome to contribute thoughts.  I'd like this post to be a bit more dynamic than usual, possibly a good basis for classes or books or at least papers.

 BOUNDARIES FOR THE RESERVATION

1. There can be no boundary but the ecology for the original Blackfeet -- that is the boundary was enforced by economics: what there was to eat.
2.   Original boundaries were changed and changed again, so they weren’t real boundaries, only convenient temporary boundaries for off-rez people.
3.   Boundaries actually became “border states” -- that is the land on either side of the Medicine Line (49th parallel) exploited the line.  
4. Gerrymandered boundaries were Dawes Act among “owners”, the “mineral strip” where the oil was, conveniently shifted to the Cut Bank side.  The “Ceded Strip” which eventually became the Badger-Two Med wilderness that cooperating forces want to save from exploitation.
5.   Historical:  the habitual locations of bands, Campbell’s granges, river valleys that become settled enough to feel like communities.
6. At least two unacknowledged sociological splits, one between the north and south rez and one between the resort towns and the strictly Indian towns.  Maybe one between stockmen in the foothills and grain farms on the flats.  
7.   In the Sixties the incorporated town of Browning was considered an island of jurisdiction with the rez, like an embassy but for the State of Montana.

MEMBERSHIP

1. The history of enrollment lists: who made them for what reason and how were they preserved.
2. “Blood quantum” and what it really means:  genome or pedigree (descent)
3.   Cultural divisions (originally white v. indigenous)
4.   What is the meaning of an Asian basic genome?  Are there local, tribal, epigenomes? (meaning environmental forces turning genes on and off)
5.   Some tribes have gone to residence as a requirement for tribal membership.
6.   Impact of the differences between enrolled and unenrolled and “enrollable” but not registered?  Money, access to services, entities that “help Indians.”
7. Self-defining of tribes by tribal members

DEMOGRAPHICS

A.  The four confederated tribes on the South Piegan US side (Including Scabby Robes)

B.  Gros Ventre

C.  Metis/Cree Chippewa

D.  Fur traders their tribal wives  (Including Iroquois and Hawaiians)

E.  Military

F.  Mercantile  (including whiskey and commodities)

G.  Mexican

H.  White government vs. white entrepreneurs
I.  Romantics: white American, European, blacks

EDUCATION

1. Gender-assignment both in indigenous and white classes and subjects.
2. Government schools on the rez, possibly residential
3. Government schools off the rez.
4. Carlisle’s impact on the Blackfeet
5. American Indian Art Institute’s impact on the Blackfeet
6. The one-room school houses of the early days
7.   The Heart Butte school
8.   The Free School 
9.   The Catholic school
10.   Blackfeet Community College
11.   Winold Reiss’ summer art school at St. Marys

COMMERCE

1. Fur-trade vs. bison meat and robes
2. Handling of commodities
3. Whiskey trade
4.   Licensed Indian Traders
5.   Entertainment: show house, bowling alley, Glacier Studio, video, radio
6.   Banking: the “Indian” bank
7.   Mercantile, lumberyard, grocery businesses
8.   Infrastructure coops: electricity, telephone
9.   Passage: highways, RR, transmission lines
10.   Natural resources:  mineral (oil and coal), forest, water
11.   Specifically cultural:  rodeo, pow-wow, casino, churches

GOVERNING 

1. Tribal Council
2.   Blackfeet Environmental Office:  Solid/Hazardous Waste,Underground Storage Tank Program, Air quality, Water quality, Wetlands, Brown fields, Non-point source.  General Assistance Program
3.   Law enforcement:  Federal, International border matters including Homeland Security, Immigration, CIA, and others.
4.   Tribal court system: judges, lawyers, interaction with tribe
5.   History of the Browning standalone law enforcement years: City Magistrate and officers.  Relation to Justices of the Peace, jail, and how began and ended.

ANIMALS

A.  BISON

B.  Horses, horse racing, first horses, rodeo, working horses, the genetic impact of cavalry and railroad horses, mules

C.  Sheep: first domesticated "crop."  Why no goats?

D.  Chickens and other poultry  vs. "prairie chickens"

E.  Hawks and owls

F.  Burrowers

G.  Game animals: deer, moose, elk, mountain goat, mountain sheep

H.  Predators:  bears, mountain lion, bobcat/lynx, wolverine

I.  Fur bearers:  mink, beaver, fisher, sable?, muskrat

J.  As meaning markers for religious ceremonies 

K.  Waterfowl, esp. migrators

ARTIFACTS

A.  Definitions needed.
B.  Sacred objects
C.  Antique objects
D.  Objects with trade inclusions from more recent times, like bucksin parade suits
E.  Who is a qualified expert?  A scientist, a collector, a maker, an enrolled person?
F.  What is the status of replicas?
G.  What is a museum and what is a shop?  Auctions?

CEREMONIES

1. Stick game
2. Horn Society
3. “Indian Days”
4. Pipe bundles
5. Sun Lodge

LANGUAGE

1. Understanding that language through its grammar and vocabulary assumes a specific worldview and understanding Siksika assumptions.
2. Spoken language compared to written language.
1. Stories only told under certain circumstances.
2. Variations and versions
3. Gender-assigned variations
4. Local drift.
5. Shifts in world view caused from going from oral to written.
3. Relearning a language that is not in writing.
4. English as a second language
5. Political implications: names on maps, heritage, reinforcement of enrollment.
6. Using Latin as a curtain
7.   Sign talk
8.   Joking
9.   Hands as puppets
10. Specific linguists:  Frantz, Uhlenbeck

BOOKS

1. Early records  (Caitlin, Hudson’s Bay factors)
2. Lewis and Clark
3. As told to
4. Archeological: early writing on stone
5. Anthropological
6. “NA renaissance” fiction
7. Film:  kitsch, serious, and anthropological
8. History:  primary
9. Memoir and experience
10. Myths and legends
11.  Informants  (Duval, ...

EARLY ONE MORNING: Writing Starters

When I was teaching in Browning or Heart Butte, I liked to do these little starter bits to hand out to the class.  They could continue on with them or start something new.  Once in a while it worked.  Other times they figured it was some kind of trick and balked.  But right now I thought I’d try some “morning” beginnings for fun.  I chose books about the same time periods to be illustrations.  If you want to go on with one of them, be my guest.

____________

If I were an Indian . . .

And it was buffalo days . . .

The day started early but the oldest and the youngest were already up.  Sun shone in the entry on the east side of the lodge because the calf hide was thrown back.  Not to let air in, because the sides of the lodgeskin were already rolled up to let the cool dawn breeze move through.  My little sister was curled against me but the baby was outside with grandmother.  I could hear him crowing while grandmother kicked up the fire and moved things around.  Puppies were yipping somewhere.

I’d been dreaming but I was too awake to remember, and yet I was still too sleepy to roll out and stand up.  I could smell the grass, the smoke as people threw wood on their fires, and then I heard the voice of the camp crier moving across the circle.  Now it really was time to get up. 
_________

And it was between the Great Wars at a residential school . . .

The bed still felt strange, too high, and the smells were all wrong: harsh soap, starched sheets, indoor air that hadn’t been moving.  I could hear the Sisters in the hallway, arguing.  That meant the Mother Superior wasn’t making her rounds yet, probably indulging in another cup of coffee.  She didn’t seem to eat much -- none of us did -- but she drank a lot of hot weak coffee.  The rest of us drank tea.

I hadn’t been here long enough to get used to it.  The other girls assured me that I would, but I missed my family and my dog.  I’d been careful to see how we traveled and was already plotting how to slip away and walk back.  The problem was shoes.  These lace-up heeled shoes were too tight anyway, but they had taken my moccasins.  It would be easy to hide bread in my pockets.

The best part of the day was the first part: Mass.  I did love ceremonies of all sorts and the Sisters had a foot-pump organ.  The children who had been here a while had been taught to sing and though it was strange-sounding, I liked it.  I even hummed with it.  I would try to remember while I walked.

_____________

If it was the Seventies . . .

The radio alarm came on automatically with the weather and ag news.  It gave us barely enough time for clothes and a washrag on the face before school.  Grab toast on the way out.  Mom already dressed and starting the pickup to drive to her job in town.  The dogs and cats milling around under our feet, hoping to remind us they needed to be fed.  As soon as my mom had pulled out, we could smell our uncle’s reefers.  He’d stay up until the school bus picked us up, then go back to bed.  This was the longest he’d ever been unemployed.

I didn’t really wake up until I was by the window watching for our horses in the field by the road.  The sun came up slowly because there was a fog bank to the east.  My best friend got on the bus two stops later -- I saved the seat but anyway we all sat where we always sat.  We were excited because it was an assembly day so classes would be short.

_____________

If it’s now . . .

She tried not to wake up because it would just be another shit day.  The cardboard she’d put down to sleep on wasn’t enough to keep her hips from aching, but she was warm enough because there were people on either side of her.  Wait now.  Kika.  One was a dog.  Judging from the size and alcohol-sweat smell of the other one, it was a man.  Her mouth was bitter and fuzzy.  She smelled garbage and piss -- couldn’t escape either one in an alley.

Back into sleep.  There were birds flying and cat tails.  It was an old memory from when she had been on the rez.  They had told her the water birds flew far far far away and that the people used to make soft beds from cat tail fluff.  She heard the birds yelping.  Well, maybe it was only seagulls poking in the trash.  Or a car alarm somewhere.  The dog sensed she was awake and wagged its tail.  She reached an arm over it.  Maybe she could slip away before the man woke up.

______________

To do these, first you sit without writing and try to imagine, using all senses the way an actor might to become the character.  Then you pretend you ARE that person and reflect about what would naturally come next.

What interests me is that even in these short bits and even though there are just four entirely different historical periods and no narrative plot-line, they begin to suggest ideas for where to go with any of them or several of them or even the implications of all four.  The hard part is ALWAYS to get something down to work with and even harder than that is getting your brain “connectome” into the proper pattern for story telling -- if that’s what you’re going to do.  There’s no particular obligation to have a plot line.  Any of these four could be worked into a poem or an essay of some kind.  Maybe a character study.  A play. You could read them to an art class and see what they drew.  Or just draw. 

It’s clear that I already had patterns in my own head about waking up, that thing about being in two worlds at once, the first light at dawn, who or what might be in the bed with you.  What noises would be made by those already up.  Then that suggests more.  What news would the camp crier have?  Would that man in the alley wake up mad?  How to slip away from the boarding school for the long walk home?  What that assembly might be about.

If you go through every day being observant, questioning, reading history and listening to the stories people tell, it’s easy to come up with ideas.  The hard part is keeping the focus and being tenacious.  I once saw a vid of a boy learning to do a backflip off a stone wall maybe three feet high.  He was landing on concrete -- it had to be painful, knocking the wind out of him.  If he didn’t land on his feet -- which he didn’t for about ten tries -- he’d lie there for a minute or so, then gather up and try it again.  Finally he succeeded and that was the end of the vid, but it was a major statement.  

His neurons were saying,  “Didn’t quite push off hard enough.”  “Didn’t tuck in enough.”  Or other stuff like that, until they were all coordinated and so were the muscles.  The pain would kick in later.  He must have waked up bruised.  Writing is the same way, except it’s the ego that takes the bruises.  That can hurt more, heal more slowly.
 __________

An upbeat story . . .

This battered old oak table with its round top had been part of her life a long time, so when they built the new ranch house, she insisted on a big east window in the kitchen where she could sit at her table in the warming sunshine to start the day.  In the still-unpacked boxes from the old house she'd found a slightly crushed old Valentine candy box full of ancient photos and was sorting them.

Upstairs she heard the noises of her six-year-old moving around.  She never had to be told to get up and would soon be down to have her hair braided.  Out across the yard trudged her eight-year-old with a bottle of lamb formula under each arm.  His grandfather had given him a couple of bummers to raise for a 4-H project.   His sister called him "MomBoy."  The lambs stuck their heads through the fence, bleating.   The dogs barked at them with no effect.

Then the mobile phone, set on vibrate because she hated loud noise in the morning, began to hum and slide around on the table top.  That would be her husband, due to fly back from a conference.  She smiled.  "I just found a picture of you as a toddler with your great-grandmother!"