ALL THOSE WIND-INDIAN MOVIES

“Windwalker,”  “Windrunner,” “Windtalker” -- we seem to have an inborn idea that the wind and the indigenous population of these American continents are connected.  If you google “movies about native americans” you’ll get a banner across the top of your screen that notes a long sequence of various kinds of movies from cartoons to serious indie films by and about indigenous people:  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/11/28/11-essential-native-american-films-you-can-watch-online-right-now-158052  They come and they go, stirring our hearts and our hair, leaving us with impressions that are unique or stereotypical or mixed.  Some capitalize on nakedness so there’s always a little thread of sex running through it.  Sometimes there’s the equivalent of dietary fat and sugar -- movie violence justified by revenge.  No one shuts that off.  Then there’s the red meat of combat when warriors get to be warriors again.

“Windstalker,” “Windmocker,” “Windwriter.”

In this windwelter of possibilities it would not be smart to show to kids a movie you hadn’t previewed, whether your own or someone else’s at school.  But here are two films, very different from each other, that are mostly valid and probably won’t make trouble.  

“Windwalker” (1980) is an earnest, idealistic, traditional story in which the only political complaint is that the main character, an old man tipping in and out of death, is played by a white man -- not just that but a well-known English actor, Trevor Howard.  Maybe he was thinking of Richard Harris in “A Man Called Horse.”  Harris was supposed to be a white man captured and assimilated by a tribe;  Howard was supposed to be a beloved tribal grandfather pre-contact.  Both Howard and Harris were highly honored actors, alcoholic, temperamental, and probably inclined to think of American tribal culture as more comfortable than their own constrictive English milieu.  “Windwalker” has all the elements of a primal, idyllic world that suffers and then recovers through heroic struggle with a Christian patriarchal god helping.   The scenery is glorious, though Hollywood can never resist displacing all tribes to SW red rock country. 

In Windwalker all the other actors, esp. the women and children, seem to be authentic enrolled people.  In fact, the comments on the sample on YouTube include a poignant memory from Marie Pratt:  “I'm so glad U posted this Movie. My dad was part of this Movie he played Crow-Hair. I was 7yrs old when this was made, we were on set the whole time.. My mom did all the translation for the Cheyennes.”  Around here, as  in much of the world, Hollywood is the Eden of the imagination and the ground of fulfillment.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afuTRJ89xTc

I think this is Ramus.

But the public is fickle and, anyway, Hollywood “Indians” are not much like the real people who have that legal claim.  The same people who embrace Sherman Alexie have never heard of the successful main figure in “Windwalker.”  Here’s his “wiki.”  “Nickolas G. Ramus (September 9, 1929 – May 30, 2007) was a Native American actor, best known for his appearances on television. He was a Blackfoot. He appeared as Chief Lost Eagle of the Arapaho in the miniseries "Centennial", Red Cloud in "Son of the Morning Star," the 1993 TNT film Geronimo.  He played Gus Nunouz in the soap opera "Falcon Crest" and Chief Black Kettle in "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." Other TV credits include: "Gunsmoke", "Little House on the Prairie", "Northern Exposure", "MacGyver" and "Walker, Texas Ranger".  He appeared briefly in the film "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and in the comedy film "Love at Stake" as Chief Wannatoka. He died on May 30, 2007, age 77.    

If he was Blackfoot, he must have been Canadian or from the diaspora, which is pretty likely on the Pacific Coast because of WWII relocation.  (Means is from that group.)  In Canada there is much better support for First Nations theatre so many fine actors begin there.  This is the debut movie for Bart the Bear, a grizz tame enough to act.  He’s gone now but his descendants still appear in films.

Russell Means, in old age

“Windrunner” (1994) about a contemporary boy who plays football, is never mentioned in any of the relentless publicity for “Smoke Signals.”(1998) (It included a sensational attack on Nasdijj who had nothing to do with movies.)  In fact, “Smoke Signals,” a contemporary account of a stigmatized tribal boy, echoes “Windrunner” quite a lot.  This is the flip of “Windwalker” since the people are all evidently white except for the mystical alpha Indian Russell Means.  In real life no one ever takes on Means, the real life American Indian Movement activist since 1968, who began acting in 1992.  He was a violent man with little restraint.  He published his autobiography “Where White Men Fear to Tread “in 1995.  His wiki is at variance with any notions of him being a wise and peaceful old man, but he was prominent enough to get a movie funded and very willing to participate in a glamorous version of himself as the wise ghost of Jim Thorpe.  It’s almost a version of “The Indian in the Cupboard” except that Means was no toy and he had no use for cupboards.  

Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder, an activist and good friend of Means, plays the mother in the film.  She’s also one who has struggled with stability.  In Montana we know her as part of the community around Peter Fonda and Tom McGuane in Livingston.  Her wiki is rather sensational but she remains appealing.The same is true of Amanda Peterson, the vanilla heroine of “Windrunner.”  After much tumult, including religiousity, she died young of an overdose of a prescribed drug.  The plot of this movie includes two fathers in prison, which is what draws the hero and his girl together.  Jason Wiles seems to have done well in real life, turning his hand to production and other backstage roles.

These two movies, so very different, address the conflicted and confusing lives of people who truly suffer and deserve both understanding and reparation, though their experience has sometimes made them so difficult to deal with that their actual careers -- outside the edited and idealized plots of movies -- have been roller coaster rides.  Those who are outside the communities of reservations and Hollywood, apart from political movements that are sometimes violent, can get very much misled about realities.  These two movies will not disillusion anyone, but neither are they disturbingly extreme.

Dutch Lunak, at left, with Bud Connelly, JC Augare and Scotty Augare 

on location north of Santa Fe, working on "Appaloosa"

This reservation has supplied stunt riders, notably Dutch Lunak and his crew.  This story in a local paper is a good reality check.  

http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/glacier_reporter/news/article_5b039cad-f685-58dd-affc-f9c2d74f3461.html?mode=story   These are people I know: practical, hard-working, raising families.  They’re only famous among the people who count -- friends, employers, co-workers.  I’ve known them a long time.  Maybe one of Dutch’s daughters will write a book.  People who work with large animals like horses can’t fake what they do and must know their limits. 

During the AIM years one of my Blackfeet students did a summer internship in Minneapolis with the main office.  That fall I asked her what Means was really like.  “Oh, he’s just a big old street Indian,” she said.  But he still needs to be part of the story because it’s about EVERYBODY.  Not just Indians, not just idealized heroes.

MOUSETRAP BANKS AND THE GOTCHA ECONOMY

When I did my bills this month, I discovered that I’d pushed back my Great Falls Tribune subscription to the next month for the third or fourth time this year. This always triggers phone calls and smarmy insincere letters about missing my favorite stories. In fact, the paper is more and more a paper for high school kids. No real news, just who’s “in” or “out.” I decided I didn’t need the sports news, recipes and funnies anymore and canceled my subscription. When the woman called to nag me, I told her what I’d done. “Oh,” she said, and hung up.

Later in the week I got a high pressure salesman trying to talk me into just subscribing to Sunday or Sunday-and-Wednesday. Locals refer to those for advertising, mostly food, otherwise, by the time I get the Tribune, everything has already happened and the events have moved on. In fact, they rarely cover this area of the state (high-line and rez) and when they do, they generally get it wrong. The reporter turnover is high and most of them are too young to have perspective. The editor and publisher are way behind the times and wary of offending advertisers, like the mega-hospital.

Portlandia Building, Portland, OR

My billing cycle is in monthly increments. Since all my brain power goes into words —  literacy —  I am innumerate. At one point in my checkered career I was the cashier for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings, which showed how much they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, though I wasn’t quite as bad as the person I replaced. (“The Texas Mermaid” who took assignations on her lunch break and then ate at the cashier’s wicket so there splashes of soup on everything.) Also, the B of B was being converted to a new computer database and it was long enough ago that NO ONE knew what they were doing or even had the equipment they needed. For one day we literally had piles of money with little notes fastened to them. Hundreds and thousands of dollars.

The new cashier who joined me and then replaced me was terrific. Married into the military, she had been trained by a bank in Germany. Discovering how much trouble I had balancing the till at the end of my shift, she made us a little form to fill out. Using that, I could do it. So now I make me a form for the month for myself. It helps. I list all checks and mark them with a highlighter fibertip when they clear the bank — NOT when I write them. Then I write “paid” on the original bill and file it. It is not natural for me to be so tightly monitored, but it is the only way to keep from running up overdrawn fees, late fees, and all the other ingenious fees banks impose. What it shows is that the cost of living has roughly doubled since I moved back here. 

Valier Wells Fargo Bank

The little cement-block bank that is in the town of Valier is a branch of Wells Fargo, which the City of Portland dumped because of mistakes and overcharges. When I came in 1999, it would cheerfully change bills to quarters for a laundromat (Valier had a laundromat then), convert Canadian money, maintain little mail boxes for utility payments to save postage, and so on, but all that is gone now. The cashiers like Christmas because it gives them something to do: decorating.

I’ve always used a credit union and have kept my account in Portland. A few years ago it merged with a bank serving the hispanic community and for a while things were shaky because the union needed cashiers who spoke Spanish, but the cashiers were short on experience. I was grumbly until I discovered that these women were watching out for me. If they saw a transaction that didn’t make sense to them, they called me up. Long distance. Even the women who were down in the basement posting checks.

In the Sixties in Browning the bank was kind of free-form. At first it was a “white” bank with a mostly white clientele. Bob’s second wife worked there and she claimed that the $5 bills were forever sticking together so her till wouldn’t balance. In my time the bank would call up and say they needed Bob to come over and put more money in. They didn’t call it an overdraft. He’d drive the five blocks, if necessary stopping by his mom’s because she kept a safe with cash from the Browning Merc, and that was the end of it.

Then one day the bank came up short so they called Bob and said that they were missing a few hundred dollars and since he’d made the biggest deposit that day, they were deducting it from his account. They couldn’t find the mistake, but they were sure he was the problem. Anyway, he was white. He could afford it.

National American Indian Bank, Browning, MT

Finally the bank collapsed and for years all the merchants had to drive forty miles back and forth to Cut Bank, the closest banks. The banks didn’t mind. Neither did highway robbers. Finally, Eloise Cobell pioneered the first Indian-owned bank, which was her window into the world of money and eventually brought U.S. reparation for all the mismanaged trust funds of the tribe.

I notice articles now discussing the global ways of handling money and criticizing our 19th century methods. Electronics work for the people who handle big amounts of money that are checked several times and managed with computers anyway. They just correct the error and move on. But the little guy is back to the jar under the mattress, because coming up short at the end of the month means no food, no gas, no pills. Experts talk about banking in Africa, but not in the US.

Anyway, much of the economy is “under the mattress” or under the radar, because it is illegal — unrecorded and untaxed. Maybe offshore. But the mainstream economy is playing “gotcha” games with hidden costs and mousetrap fees. One of the writing platforms I’ve been using is debating whether it is “legal” not to notify users of the terms of service when the corporation changes them. Maybe retroactively. So why agree to them except for the triggering springs in the legal system.

Notably, Google — after trying to tempt everyone into a complicated little game called “Google Plus” in which users were supposed to arrange all their friends and acquaintances into circles, a strategy for junior high kids — went ahead without permission and consolidated everyone’s various blogs and email accounts into one big blob with implications for privacy, strategy, and simply keeping order. The idea seems to be to imitate the “omics” of biological research that try to find all the little connections among particles of the system so they can model the impact of events. Like sudden arrests or the advent of new products or the machinations of some country. The goal seems to be control — but not by the users.

BLACKFEET MYTHS AND LEGENDS

When the Empire Builders . . . (Did you know that’s the name of the main Amtrack that serves the High Line, because Empire Building is at the core of the industrial conquering of the West and the railroads were major industries?)   Where was I?  Oh, yes!  When the Empire Builders come into a new land (to them), one of their strategies is to infantilize and sterilize the sacred stories.  Uncle Remus, Aesop, and the Native American tales of origin.  Another is to claim all the main characters and show they are really just other versions of Xian main characters.  Starboy is “really” Jesus and so on.  But then those nosy social scientists came along and started pointing out that the African trickster, who is a rabbit, is the same as Br’er Rabbit, and so is Napi.  Pretty soon, along comes Joe Campbell and shows us that all these are Hero cycles and Freud also points out that Oedipus is a force in many boys.  In the end all stories are human and constantly re-enacted.  Culture tells us which ones to believe.

When I talk to young Blackfeet who want to write, they all tell me that they’re going to write a book of Blackfeet myths.  When I point out that there must be at least a half-dozen versions out there already, they quickly say that THEIR family’s version was the authentic one, or -- if they’re really enlightened -- they say there are many versions so maybe they’d better also explain their family.

People who read myths and legends seem to think they’ve escaped controversy and troubles that abound in immersive genre or literary narratives -- even in histories.  But NOT.

Some of the compilations around here in Blackfeet country include:

George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938)  “Blackfeet Indian Stories”

Frank Bird Linderman  (1869- 1938) “Indian Why Stories”

James Willard Schultz (1859- 1947)  “Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park”

DC Duval (unk) and Clarke Wissler (1870 - 1947)  “Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians”

Walter McClintock  (1870-1949) “The Old North Trail”

Percy Bullchild (1916 -1985)  “The Sun Came Down”

Hugh Dempsey  (1929 - ?)  “The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories”

Beverly Hungry Wolf (1950 - ?)  “The Ways of my Grandmothers”

It’s easy to see that the first set of writers were popular between the World Wars when German romanticism was trying to find a new “home” for the stories about nature.  The Germans themselves were always madly in love with American Indians.  These are all white writers.  Schultz was married to an Indian woman and Duval was the Metis informant for Wissler.  If you remember the post about linguists, Uhlenbeck and his wife were staying at the Kipp Hotel in Blackfoot (the terminus of the Empire Builder at the time) when Duval killed himself.

The second set is of writers I have known.  Dempsey is white but married to a Blood woman.  They’re Canadian.  So is Beverly but she and friends traveled through here only a few weeks ago.  The 49th parallel is an inconvenience, not the wall some would like built.

http://www.native-languages.org/blackfoot-legends.htm

An index to recurring characters.

Lisa Mitten and her compatriots have worked hard to get non-tribal people to understand the latent and explicit racism in books like “The Education of Little Tree” (written by a Nazi sympathizer) or “The Indian in the Closet.”  This struggle seems to have passed by now.  The critique of “Indian in the Cupboard” has been removed from JSTOR.  I’m sorry, because I finally understood that sentimental writers were making grizzly bears into teddy bears and that it was a step towards flattening the environment into mere scenery.  When condors are made equivalent to little sparkly pink butterflies then monstrous jungle emperors who kidnap girls are just to horrible to contemplate -- and so most of us don’t.  You won’t find much about all this stuff on Wikipedia.  In fact, if someone up at the Blackfeet Community College wanted to do something worthy, they could research and write up the writers on my short list above and post their biographies.  They don’t need permission.  Making them think they have to please some faraway white authority is part of the infantilizing.  

The movie sold very well.

But there’s more to the old stories than that.  Greg Hirst, lifelong educator and currently superintendent at Heart Butte on the Blackfeet rez, explains that some stories are fine to just recount because they are funny and sometimes informative.  Others are more serious and have sacred meanings, so the actual vocabulary in Siksika language has to be kept the same, as though one were an early Jewish or Christian student or -- even now -- Islamist.  Oral stories can be accurate when they are carefully remembered like this.

Then there are stories that are only told among the old women late at night.  They have consequences, secrets, maybe shameful or guilty aspects.  No children or men should listen.  In fact, when anthropologists realized these existed and managed (usually by paying) to get hold of them, they put the ones that shocked Euros into Latin.  Of course, along comes an iconoclast like Alice Kehoe and translates them!  I won’t tell you.  Buy the book.

When Piegan Institute was sent early recordings that required special machinery to play, they rerecorded them on CD’s, hoping that medium would be more permanent.  (Probably not.)  So a Blackfoot speaker sat listening, writing down what she could.  Pretty soon she began laughing.  Men were telling the stories, but the women were sitting along the wall, listening, correcting and urging them on.  They were getting paid by the hour and the women would say,  “Tell them another one!  We need the money!!”  Who knows what variations and inventions were introduced for the sake of the dollar.

There must have been water bulls -- we find their bones!

And so the myth arose that if one were Native American, one could tell an “Indian” story and make a lot of money.  Making a lot of money would mean life would be easy from then on.  To demonstrate that this is a myth, consult the family of Misty Upham.  It is the usual labyrinth, with the usual Minotaurs (suits) waiting to consume you, but in the end it is the “Water Bull” of mythology and dinosaur bones that will endure.

TWO NATIVE AMERICAN TROUBADOURS: Gladstone and Bruchac

In modern times there have been two Native Americans one could call troubadors on a mission:  Jack Gladstone and Joseph Bruchac.  Both have been effective and, to use an old-fashioned term, are “beloved.”  Thanks to YouTube, we can all have access to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od488aTt-vM&list=PLEwP9xOfEYpVVyRCEDR88MwL9JhFFmspc

Jack Gladstone

Gladstone (www.jackgladstone.com) lives in both Browning and on the Flathead and is often found there telling stories or singing or just hanging out.  He has been with the series in Glacier National Park called “Native America Speaks” since its beginning in 1985.  Formally, he says, “I am a Storysmith, forging ancient, historical, and contemporary narratives into accessible lyrical art. My work promotes the collaborative revitalization of ‘kinship centered’ traditions.”  If you can’t get to Glacier Park, not to worry:  you can buy CD’s on his website.  Technically, he could be called “Metis” (mixed) but he’s enrolled with the Blackfeet of Montana.  His family is part of the diaspora created by WWII labor on the Pacific coast,  family that is now returning.

Here’s a coup worth counting:   “National Aeronautics and Space Administration, (2002) chose Jack’s original work Buffalo Cafe to board space shuttle ENDEAVOR on November 23rd. The disc accompanied CMDR John B. Herrington, USN, NASA’s First American Indian astronaut, (Chickasaw). Buffalo Cafe - and this mission - landed safely.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfQGgCPhrlo

Joseph Bruchac

Gladstone is a Plains Indian, familiar from movies and stories.  Bruchac is a kind of Indian much less known: the Eastern Woodland peoples.  He is also mixed and celebrates his other ethnicity, which is Czech, using story, song and costumes the same as he does with his tribal heritage.  He’s an includer and a supporter, shepherding many younger writers and students.

This is the publisher’s blurb for “Returning the Gift,” a book and continuing event.

 http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid72.htm

“Returning the Gift:  Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers' Festival” edited by Joseph Bruchac, was a game-changer --  shifting from the PC vengeance against whites to the promotion of specifically Native American writers.  A person who is serious about the reality of Native American writing, as opposed to the glamorous sub-categories that publishers demand, could do worse than to start with this book.

"Returning the Gift", edited by Joe Bruchac

“An unprecedented gathering of more than 300 Native writers was held in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1992. The Returning the Gift Festival brought more Native writers together in one place than at any other time in history. "Returning the Gift," observes co-organizer Joseph Bruchac, "both demonstrated and validated our literature and our devotion to it, not just to the public, but to ourselves." In compiling this volume, Bruchac invited every writer who attended the festival to submit new, unpublished work; he then selected the best of the more than 200 submissions to create a collection that includes established writers like Duane Niatum, Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Elizabeth Woody, Linda Hogan, and Jeanette Armstrong, and also introduces such lesser-known or new voices as Tracy Bonneau, Jeanetta Calhoun, Kim Blaeser, and Chris Fleet. The anthology includes works from every corner of the continent, representing a wide range of tribal affiliations, languages, and cultures. By taking their peoples' literature back to them in the form of stories and songs, these writers see themselves as returning the gift of storytelling, culture, and continuance to the source from which it came. In addition to contributions by 92 writers are two introductory chapters: Joseph Bruchac comments on the current state of Native literature and the significance of the festival, and Geary Hobson traces the evolution of the event itself.” 

If this approach appeals to you, go to the website for the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.  http://www.wordcraftcircle.org/event-1913343  I have neither motivation nor ability to separate out the people who qualify to present.  I assume anyone is welcome to attend.

Both Bruchac and Gladstone emphasize the rootedness of their lives in nature, connection to their place of identification but also “brown” people everywhere and the unifying image of the planet.  All of this is supported and encouraged by academic sponsorship.  Both men have college degrees, but they are not employed as professors.  Both travel the country, enjoy extensive networks, and each had strong male role models.  

Joe on the left, his grandfather on the right.

Bruchac’s autobiography “Bowman’s Store: A Journey To Myself” explains how and why his Abenaki grandfather presented himself as “French.”  His sister has a parallel career.

Marge Bruchac

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/people/bruchac    She is as intelligent, measured, and centered as Joe.

Living out the advice to “grow where you are planted,” Joe and his family are still living in Porter Corners.  "His work as an educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his late wife, Carol, he founded the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press."  This is the only publishing house I know of that was NA owned.  It is closed.  (The white parallel might be artist Russell Chatham’s Livingston, MT, “Clark City Press.”  Also closed.)

Pop and heavily promoted entrepreneurs of Native American writing -- even the AIM celebrities who have become movie stars -- have little relationship to many serious artists and musicians who cherish their reservation relatives and visit the young ones in schools.  It’s yet another imposition that media pandering prevents the expression of authenticity by the Original Peoples.  It is this pandering that leads publishers and Hollywood, who tend to have limited experience with reservations, to force their assumptions onto authors.  It’s particularly troublesome that they cling to the 19th century conflicts that cleared the prairie for homesteading and industry.  Even today we’re hearing about the oil industry trying to get into the pristine mountains of the Blackfeet and the coal industry actually persuading the US government to evict the Navajo from tribal lands.

Navajo country.

Nature in the background; coal mining in the foreground.

Gladstone and Bruchac are from my generation, early Boomers like Eloise Cobell, Darrell Kipp, Curly Bear Wagner, Jim Welch, Jr., to name effective Blackfeet leaders.  All four have “gone on ahead”.  Luckily there are younger people still living and working.  Bruchac was born in 1942, according to Wikipedia.  Gladstone is not in Wikipedia.  The point is not Wikipedia, which is notoriously unreliable when it comes to indigenous people, but that there is a time-horizon that the arrows take us toward.  They always move faster than we expected and that means we must make opportunities before it’s too late.

MARRYING INTO A TRIBE

This post is about men who wish to be tribal people, that is, indigenous, or for you disingenuous folks, “Indians.” Out of this love they married Blackfoot women.  They are John Hellson, Adolf Hungry Wolf, Ryan Heavyhead, and Grey Owl (1888- 1938), an Englishman who married Anahereo and raised beavers.  The couple even had a hole in their floor over water so the beavers could come and go.  They traveled far and wide, talking about conservation.

Grey Owl and beaver

From the earliest days, especially in the context of empire and colonies, some people have “gone native.”  Fur traders, writers, artists and adventurers have gone to some foreign place, found it to their liking and decided to join the People.  If they went as academic anthropologists, they were less likely to do this because their obligations as objective record-keepers and interpret the results in reports interfered with direct participation.  

The white folks back home greeted these people with a range of emotion: envy, contempt, longing, and curiosity.  They are accused of being fakes.  Women and children who had been captured by tribes -- and had become wholly committed to that way of life -- were thought to be insane when they were grief-stricken.  Today they are still accused of being hoaxes.  As though it were fake to grow to love people not your own color.

In the Sixties two men who fit roughly into this pattern showed up in Browning and became a huge influence on Bob Scriver and, because I did what he did, on me.  One was Adolf Hungry Wolf and the other was John Hellson.  Next door to the Scriver studio was the federal Museum of the Plains Indian, established during WWII with the leadership of John Ewers, the first curator.  It was meant to encourage the Blackfeet to create artifacts for sale.  They were not seen as religious.  Ewers, Claude Schaeffer, and Tom and Alice Kehoe were curators there and friends of Scriver but he didn’t learn from them with the intensity and romance both Hungry Wolf and Hellson could convey.

Okan, Star, Adolf, Judy Armstrong, Iniskim, Wolf, Beverly

There are probably formal terms and descriptions of people who both participate in and explain a culture to which they were not born.  Both these two men are grandfathers now.  Sometimes I’m in contact with their families, both on the Canadian side and doing well with their own nearly grown families.  A person could call them “half-breeds” but I call them “double-breeds” and it would be better advised to call them “enrolled.”  For a while not so long ago Hellson's granddaughter, who was in high school, traded doggerel about the weather via email.  These were family relationships.  They brought their wives and kids and in summer we had Bob's grandkids.  I think rivalry kept Hellson and Hungry Wolf from being friends.  Their personal styles were quite different.

Adolf was Swiss/Hungarian, raised in California, educated in historical methods.   He is a careful, orderly man.  John was from Cornwall, England, and had been a pugilist.  He can get swept away.   Adolf and his wife, Beverly, composed and produced many books and booklets explaining Blackfoot culture from material objects to myths and legends.  John’s only written contribution was “Ethnobotany of the Blackfoot Indians.”  He was a man of oral culture, partly because of secrecy in religious matters, but also he is a trickster.

Adolf has a strong memory and knows ceremonies and songs that the People themselves have forgotten.  He began to collect old photos and to tote them around in a suitcase to pow-wows and villages, asking the old people what they could tell him.  Who were these people?  What were they doing?  Where are they in the photo?  He wrote it all on the backs of the photos, added much historical material, and produced four big books that included everything.  I call them the “Museum in a Box.”  I like to read the books late at night so the images and stories will enter my sleep.

Sleep-stories were crucial to the old Blackfoot People and much of their ceremonial life was guided by dreams  which is why there is a little Maltese cross representing the sleep moth at the back of the top of a lodge.  Messengers came to tell a person that going to war would be unlucky or that it was time for them to have a child or that they should become ceremonial leaders for the Thunder Pipe Bundles.  Sometimes they told a person to do what he wanted to do and sometimes they forbade it.  

Bob Scriver had a dream telling him to become a Thunder Pipe Bundle Keeper.  The result was chaotic, punishing, but fulfilling.  (The whole story is in “Bronze Inside and Out,” my memoir of Bob.  U of Calgary Press.  It's on Amazon.)  At his death that Pipe Bundle disappeared.  The old People say it will come back when it’s ready.  I agree.  There are a dozen Bundles active on the Blackfeet reservations today.  

John Hellson and Bob Scriver working on the individual portraits 

of Bundle Keepers for the composite circle of ceremonialists.

Adolf’s version of appropriation (much frowned on by educated indigenous people today) was to take on their “lifestyle.”  He and Beverly raised their children in a little cabin in the Rockies where the running water is a creek and a solar panel runs the computer as the only electricity.  He keeps the old-time regime of a morning cold water plunge and a several mile run, but Beverly, who is now divorced, went back to town and married a professor.  

Neither man grew rich.  But like Grey Owl early in the century and Ryan Heavyhead today, they spread indigenous knowledge, emphasizing the environmental attitudes of people like Bioneers.  These were men at the fundamental interface between the Real People and their ecologies, absorbing the sensory world as well as the “facts” (not always so factual) that would interest an ethnographer.  They became what they studied.

Part of the wariness and blame with these "interface" men is that the tribal folks themselves don’t always know their own culture.  At one time the penalties were harsh.  It’s easily understandable that they resent outsiders knowing more than they do and that they go to blood quantum as an entitlement since, in the case of displaced diaspora, that’s about all they’ve got.  Now, of course, the academic world has taken up tribal culture and many universities have programs and departments focused on Indians.  (If money gets tight, they may be the first to go, along with the arts.)  It becomes proprietary information, intellectual property. 

Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavyhead

Ryan Heavyhead was a close friend of Narcisse Blood and often worked with him.  Narcisse was killed in a car crash, but Heavyhead, married to a tribal woman, goes on alone in the same context.  He is an oral culture presenter, posting many soliloquies on YouTube as he “repatriates” rattlesnakes and works out physical exercises.  His wife, Adrienne, maintains the Blackfoot Digital Library.com online, an exceptional source of information with a policy of inclusion, which was Narcisse’s way of doing things.

If we can get past the name-calling and gate-keeping, which I think some believe will increase their own value, the chances of preservation and renewal are much better.  

IT WAS CALLED "DENALI" -- NOW WE CALL IT "DENALI" AGAIN !

I FORGET WHICH PRESIDENT IT WAS CALLED IN BETWEEN.

A SAMPLE OF TONY BYNUM'S WORK.

EAST GLACIER, MT   

TonyBynum.com

REOPENING THE GOLD MINE

Yellow Kidney and Little Plume

Their descendants, whom I knew, were also religionists.

Photo by Curtis

Through the decades after the Civil War and maybe until WWII, a loose cohort of “white” writers, mostly in the West, wrote books about Indians in a faux historical romantic way based on the idea that they were disappearing.  Of course, they really meant the First Contact people, mostly on the prairie, whom we might call “buffalo people.” The US had deliberately eliminated most of the buffalo that were their life foundation, so then they had been blanket people and next in the 20th century wore “citizen’s dress.”  But it's been tough becoming actual citizens.

The quick way to understand what the early 20th century period was like might be to flip through old photos, many of them with glass negatives, as presented in Walter McClintock’s “The Old North Trail” or the photo books of Edward Curtis.  Then compare the photos with the immediately preceding art work of George Caitlin, pre-photo.  They are the rough equivalent of the books written by George Bird Grinnell, Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Marion Russell, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and James Willard Schultz.  (See Paul Seesequasis (@paulseesequa) on Twitter, who posts wonderful old photos.

These books were loved by my mother (b. 1909) and my husband (b. 1914).  Bob was born and grew up on the Blackfeet reservation; my mother was born and grew up in the Pacific NW when lingering historical Indian camps still supplied seasonal labor.  Writing about these people was recently re-examined by professors using post-colonial thought and Native American activists to explore the new reality (they thought) that was neglected by the sentimental and hegemonic books of what I called to myself, “the three-named authors.”  My own kid favorite was “Tangled Waters’ by Florence Crannell Means, written by a Navajo trader’s wife who wrote many books about NA’s for young people.  Sympathetic but accepting assimilation.

Sherry L. Smith

Lately it has been books like “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, an academic historian, that have reopened the exhausted mines of sentimental assumptions. Smith and company are white scholars of disillusionment and they spared no whites from their new interpretation.  Even McClintock and Curtis took a bashing, McClintock for not using family prestige to reform Washington DC and Curtis for posing his Indian subjects wearing his trunk full of costumes and artifacts.

Then there has been a generation of books lamenting the suffering of reservations and the city ghettos created by the effort to break up reservations through relocation.  Some call it “misery lit” and claim those stories are also exploitations rather than calls to reform.  When AIM took up the flag of revolution and led a new version of Indian Wars,  there was an accompanying new wave of “war” stories with the FBI taking the cavalry role and proud of it.  

Returning again to the mine of drama has slowed because the People themselves have begun telling their own stories.  They recognize that white post-colonials are often just colonialists in disguise.  The result is two completely different approaches to writing about indigenous people.  The split between them exists in the fields of history, anthropology, art and religion.  What had originally been an ecologically-based People had been both feared and attacked by the industrializing forces that consumed land and resources.  These are now in the throes of legal and governmental struggles trying to control mighty international corporations with no perceptible heads except for insatiable mouths.  They leave piles of their dung behind him and crave access to sacred grounds.

The Scriver Collection in book form.

Self-published by Bob Scriver.

What had once been a folk understanding of curiosities to collect and hang on one’s parlor walls has now become a legal battle over entitlement and increasing monetary value that has led to suicide and sweat lodge deaths of whites as well as the stripping of the heritage of Native Americans.  That’s the reality and yet many people hang onto the idea of tribal lives as “child-like” and entirely separate.  After Montana state law was changed to REQUIRE Indian history (millennia-old) to be taught in the schools, an educated woman protested to me,  “Why should WE have to study THEIR history?”  She hadn’t noticed that the head of the Montana  state school system was tribal or that the history of her town dates to WWI.  Not WWII.  World War ONE.

The Scriver family’s memorabilia was sold to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum for a lot of money.   The Blackfeet felt that the items were acquired in a dishonorable way so demanded them back.  In fact, the items designated Ceremonial Bundles were returned -- not to Scriver but to the Canadian Blackfoot tribes.  This was a new source of pique though the original Blackfoot Nation was on both sides of the 49th parallel.  What IS a nation?  Who controls what?

Attributing high values to ancient and exotic materials is both understandable and a source of mischief, as the “ISIS” destruction of historic temples and statues has demonstrated.  When no one cared about them, they were safe.  As objects become more valuable and symbolic, their trade tends to go underground, disappearing from public access.  Maybe that’s just as well.

"Jimmy P."  Misty Upham is gone.

Both authenticity and spiritual/religious meaning of objects -- whether monumental or territorial (I’m thinking of Badger/Two Medicine) or contemporary books, film and art -- has become an aspect of great concern to worldwide people, attributes that affect practical commercial strategies and raise the question of compensation for presumed loss to the originators, the creators.  Suppression of those whose work is critical of power-mongers.

Is a book written about or by people who have been dead for decades or centuries more valuable if one can establish antiquity or authenticity?  Is a very early and maybe rather primitive Navajo rug more or less valuable than a sophisticated and refined later version?  Should intangibles affect concrete objects?  What is the value of speaking one’s language when the world to which it was fitted is now gone?  Or will the language teach us what we lost?  

Tony Bynum photo

Is something like the spiritual value of pristine mountain slopes quite real and perceptible, as well as “owned” by a People?  In terms of history, wasn't the Badger-Two Med originally the Ceded Strip, which was an ambiguously assigned part of the 1910 purchase of Glacier National Park (urged by Linderman) and therefore unavailable to development?  Wasn’t Glacier Park -- behind the scenes -- a boondoggle to create traffic for the Great Northern railroad at the expense of the Blackfeet tribe, just another industrialist exploitation of resources?  Even forcing dignified adults, through hunger, to perform dances and tell stories on the lawn in front of the Big Hotel?  Or did that honor them?

The fantasies of generations attach to the Real People who once occupied the various eco-niches of the continent, now flattened by resource industries.  The newest revisioning of the tribes focuses on this, trying to rediscover the principles of sustainable life.  We’ve traveled from museums across the spectrum to reburial of the skeletons recovered from museums, feeling our way -- which accounts for the very different paths.  There IS NO rational and logical strategy that will unify peoples on such different sides of viewing the Way or the destination.  UNLESS we face the inevitability of everything passing away no matter what we do.  It might take longer if we try to preserve what we know about.  It will be short if the only goal is commodification.

In truth, whether or not the identity of tribal peoples has been damaged fades when confronting the reality that the whole planet of living creatures is in danger.  Changes in air, water, and climate are affecting us all AS A SPECIES and muddling the ecologies, possibly beyond our ability to live in them.  The books are just now being written.  We thought the Indians were disappearing.  Now it looks like we might ALL be disappearing.  Certainly the glaciers are.