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Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
GEORGE & PHYLLIS JOHANSON
“Black Cat--Mountain is characteristic of the work of George Johanson in its capacity to engross us in its range of imagery and implication, of questions asked but not entirely answered. The human form, the animals, the vista of reimagined Portland, and the image of fire and volcano are all “familiar” and yet mysterious and in flux; the world is transformed and transforming. It is a world of shadows and fitful light. It is a world of perilous still life-- the arrangement of things that will fall, break, or start burning in a moment or two. The egg balanced on the yardstick extending off the edge of the table is such a still life -- tiny, precarious. Johanson’s work, one could say, is combustible. Tensions build to the breaking point and sometimes are released: cats launch, volcanoes erupt, eggs will surely topple and break.
“Johanson is the painter of inside and outside; of rooms and porches overlooking the city and its natural environs. His perspective, in the various meanings of the term, is urban. His home and studio are near the Vista Bridge in the West Hills of Portland, and many of his views are more or less from there, down over the Rose City and out toward the Cascades. In numerous paintings, certainly in Black Cat-- Mountain, Johanson refers to the Renaissance convention of the window -- the surface of the painting as a window opening onto a room as well as the rendering of a window within the painting in order to separate foreground domesticity (with women and men, cats, tables, cigarettes, fruit) from the world at large (with cities, mountains, catastrophes). Johanson’s work is magical (at times related specifically to American Magic Realist painting), Surreal (in the manner of European Surrealism), “neo-regional” though not regionalist in the traditional sense. Drawing on many sources, most importantly his own imaginative interior, Johanson fuses image and idea in ways that are ambiguous, “edgy” (a word Johanson often uses in talking about his work), provocative, frequently thrilling.”
-- “George Johanson, Image and Idea” by Roger Hull. Published by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University and distributed by the University of Washington Press. 2006.
The above material is from a book meant to accompany a major retrospective exhibit of George’s work. I admire Roger Hull’s very high quality writing in this book since I’m interested in writing about art, though not this kind of art. Part of my intense pleasure in reading about George and his wife Phyllis, is that they embody the kind of life I once thought I could live: stable, focused, embedded in a community, contributing service, constantly delighted and engrossed in work of value. I never really found my way to that community, but it was through my short animal control career that I became friends with Phyllis and was drawn into the borders of their life. By that time the Western art world had become a hunting ground.
The painting above is on the cover of the book and the subjects are known to me. Mt. St. Helens blew up the year I was in seminary and Bob’s granddaughter died in a car accident. They seem related somehow, so I understand that George is finding equivalences and relationships among the things in the painting: ecological disaster, the city along the river, his own house porch as both a refuge and a vantage point, “woman” (Phyllis, possibly) as a dependable guardian and anchor, the many cats she rescues -- always passing through.
Phyllis was so earnest and diligent about “responsible pet ownership” that we (a small community of dedicated common-sense people) really made a difference in Portland. She invited me to dinner at that house just up the arroyo from the Vista Bridge, and the events were always like the kind of artists’ gatherings one reads about in books: brainy talk, hairy jokes, much wine and food, friendships that stretched back to the Mexican Quaker work camp where George and Phyllis first met and recognized each other as kindred spirits, marrying in a matter of weeks. When the table had cleared at the end, they brought out a container of odd-shaped wooden blocks and we took turns adding them to a tower on the tablecloth with the only goal being height and the eventual excitement of collapse. When it was dark, a family of raccoons came, looking for leftovers.
Sometimes I was a lone guest, eating “Diet for a Small Planet” style, which is the sort of eating to which I’ve returned. There were so many small ways that I think about now, not the least being Phyllis’ early morning habit of walking up into the West Hills along a trail. The cats-in-residence always formed a line behind her -- I remember as many as a dozen of them -- all trotting along in single file with tails high as banners. I’ve never known anyone else who had an entourage like that except a mother cat.
George, I might have known, is Swedish and Finn, which gives him a kind of practical openness to experience that is often disconcerting to others. For instance, one morning early the phone rang while they were still abed. Phyllis answered. It was a dirty phone call. The fellow breathed, “I’m going to tell you exactly what your husband ought to do to you...” All Phyllis heard was “husband.” “It’s for you, George,” she said and handed him the receiver.
George listened carefully and asked, “Does that really work? Have you had success with it?” Click.
For the past decades the two of them have been rising early and going down to the Willamette River to scull. Frosty-headed and rosy-cheeked, there they are down at the docks in the mist with the gulls shrieking at them. They claim to be doing it for their good health, but I think they do it because it is beautiful and an adventure, and because they love being where they are, doing what they can to keep it all alive.
Their son Aaron lives just a bit along the hill with his wife Van Le and small daughter Sonja, who has her own easel next to George’s. The family life is so vital, so mutual, so related to other lives and places while being rooted in one place, that it cannot help but produce fine work, deep value, and joyful rewards. This CAN be done. It needs demonstrating, since we see so many opposite examples, so much art as an excuse for chaos and opportunism. This is not something George and Phyllis deny. They simply create an alternative. I'm hoisting my tail and following up the path.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
NEWLY WED PARENTS
My friend Jim Stebbings has been recovering memories of working in the East St. Louis stockyards when he was a kid. He’s not much older than me, but he got me thinking about earlier times. Here are my mother -- except she wasn’t even married yet -- and my father’s cherished youngest brother, Seth, who was clearly “born to fly.” He began with the earliest fabric and bamboo little moths on the prairie and -- parallel with flying -- became a unicycle operator with a thirty foot tall unicycle! (Well, maybe only ten.)
My father, Bruce, and Seth were a lot alike physically but not at all beyond that. I’m not sure exactly how they differed or why except that my father carried an enormous burden of responsibility, partly because he was the oldest -- save for another little boy who died days after birth. Seth was the youngest.
Because Bruce was the oldest and this was a Scots prairie family, it was taken for granted that Bruce would go to college. He was kind of bookish anyway -- in fact, the family thought he was brilliant. Unsaid was the idea that, once graduated, he would pull the family along into enough prosperity for the others to go to school. In fact, they all earned post-secondary certificates paid for by their parents, but only Bruce got a Master’s degree -- in agriculture at Oregon State University. The Depression changed everyone's plans. His thesis was on the price of potatoes -- what patterns the prices followed and which hopefully would be predictive. He was motivated from experience -- the family went broke growing potatoes up in Manitoba.
But an MS in Ag, which is what he earned, didn’t mean a desk job. He worked for the Oregon Wool Growers as a buyer and was grateful since he was getting the only paycheck in the family for a while. In these two photos, he’s sorting wool. It got him exempted from WWII. By then he was married with kids and a little too old.
When he was courting my mother, he was cruising eastern Oregon to look at wool and sheep. She was working in Roseburg and he -- the self-declared atheist -- went to church so he could gaze at her while she sang in the choir. (So he claimed.) Early in the marriage my mother went along on the trips, taking her needlework in the car. I have a quilt on my couch this very moment that she started as individual blocks with iris appliqued onto them in 1937 and never put together into a quilt until very late in life. (1982)
Bruce is the farthest to the right.
Now Bruce is the farthest in the rear.
When I was very small, I went with him to the warehouse. I announced that I needed to “go”, but there were no women’s bathrooms in the building -- indeed, no women! One of the men said he would guard the door, I suspect, while my father took me into the only bathroom, but I was so distracted by several big white shiny installations that I’d never seen before that I almost forgot why I was there. I asked what they were, but got nothing but doubletalk and changed subjects. This, of course, alerted me that they of great and mysterious importance to adults. It was many years before I realized they must have been urinals. Until then I think I had the idea that they were sheep monuments of some kind.
Jim remarks on how decent and mannerly men were in those days. They showed up for work on time, didn’t loaf, and checked out a little AFTER quitting time. No cussing except a little mild stuff if no women were around. Older men here, both red and white, are still like that. They tip their hats and hold doors and say, “Ma’am.” The kids don’t. They just growl and prowl. Unless there are none of their peers around -- then they are quite capable of being decent human beings.
Late in life my father worked with Future Farmers of America a bit. For instance, he composed and judged competitions. One of his favorite questions was “if you see a flock of sheep spread out through a fenced pasture, would you expect the wool to be higher or lower quality?” Of course, it would be likely better wool because sheep that are fenced have been bred for wool quality, but sheep in a flock favor the survival of those who stay in the bunch, which might not mean the best wool. One could say better wool is evolution guided by profit but tighter flocks are evolution guided by survival.
I suppose this is true of people, too. So what is it that shapes our young people into growling prowlers, I wonder?
My father, Bruce, and Seth were a lot alike physically but not at all beyond that. I’m not sure exactly how they differed or why except that my father carried an enormous burden of responsibility, partly because he was the oldest -- save for another little boy who died days after birth. Seth was the youngest.
Because Bruce was the oldest and this was a Scots prairie family, it was taken for granted that Bruce would go to college. He was kind of bookish anyway -- in fact, the family thought he was brilliant. Unsaid was the idea that, once graduated, he would pull the family along into enough prosperity for the others to go to school. In fact, they all earned post-secondary certificates paid for by their parents, but only Bruce got a Master’s degree -- in agriculture at Oregon State University. The Depression changed everyone's plans. His thesis was on the price of potatoes -- what patterns the prices followed and which hopefully would be predictive. He was motivated from experience -- the family went broke growing potatoes up in Manitoba.
But an MS in Ag, which is what he earned, didn’t mean a desk job. He worked for the Oregon Wool Growers as a buyer and was grateful since he was getting the only paycheck in the family for a while. In these two photos, he’s sorting wool. It got him exempted from WWII. By then he was married with kids and a little too old.
When he was courting my mother, he was cruising eastern Oregon to look at wool and sheep. She was working in Roseburg and he -- the self-declared atheist -- went to church so he could gaze at her while she sang in the choir. (So he claimed.) Early in the marriage my mother went along on the trips, taking her needlework in the car. I have a quilt on my couch this very moment that she started as individual blocks with iris appliqued onto them in 1937 and never put together into a quilt until very late in life. (1982)
Bruce is the farthest to the right.
Now Bruce is the farthest in the rear.
When I was very small, I went with him to the warehouse. I announced that I needed to “go”, but there were no women’s bathrooms in the building -- indeed, no women! One of the men said he would guard the door, I suspect, while my father took me into the only bathroom, but I was so distracted by several big white shiny installations that I’d never seen before that I almost forgot why I was there. I asked what they were, but got nothing but doubletalk and changed subjects. This, of course, alerted me that they of great and mysterious importance to adults. It was many years before I realized they must have been urinals. Until then I think I had the idea that they were sheep monuments of some kind.
Jim remarks on how decent and mannerly men were in those days. They showed up for work on time, didn’t loaf, and checked out a little AFTER quitting time. No cussing except a little mild stuff if no women were around. Older men here, both red and white, are still like that. They tip their hats and hold doors and say, “Ma’am.” The kids don’t. They just growl and prowl. Unless there are none of their peers around -- then they are quite capable of being decent human beings.
Late in life my father worked with Future Farmers of America a bit. For instance, he composed and judged competitions. One of his favorite questions was “if you see a flock of sheep spread out through a fenced pasture, would you expect the wool to be higher or lower quality?” Of course, it would be likely better wool because sheep that are fenced have been bred for wool quality, but sheep in a flock favor the survival of those who stay in the bunch, which might not mean the best wool. One could say better wool is evolution guided by profit but tighter flocks are evolution guided by survival.
I suppose this is true of people, too. So what is it that shapes our young people into growling prowlers, I wonder?
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
SPRING SAFARI
It was Shopping Safari Day but I didn’t get up early and I forgot my list. In spite of that, it was an auspicious adventure in Great Falls. First on my list was stovepipe from Big R ranch supplies, which has moved into an abandoned K-Mart. A big sign on the front door asks customers to please check their firearms at the front desk before shopping. I asked several clerks how many times a week that happened. “Oh, couple dozen in the summer.” Around here a gun is a sort of ranching implement. Coyotes, gophers.
The store has acres of everything except the little fly traps I wanted. They are simplicity itself: a plastic bag with a plastic baffle at the top where flies go in and never come out. The bait is an old horse turd soaked with something so repulsive that one cannot use the trap indoors or even in the garage. They said, “It’s not fly season yet.” But I’ve had flies for a week. “Huh,” I scoffed. “You haven’t caught up with global warming!”
But what I really wanted was stovepipe so I could hook up my little cast iron bunkhouse stove and sit by it in the morning while I drink my coffee. We found the pipe, which is remarkable since I’ve discovered that none of the little farm supply places can carry it because they don’t order in big enough quantity and the people who make the pipe consider them a nuisance. Then we found three kinds: “blue,” black (the standard) and galvanized -- but nothing had prices so the clerk did battle with the computer until we found out that the galvanized was so cheap that I could have bought it last winter if I had known!
I had an interesting conversation with another clerk who was wearing a cowboy hat, which made me mistake him for a customer. He’d been a saddlemaker over in Eastern Montana (he didn’t want to tell me where) until he’d gotten bucked off a horse and stove up enough that the only pitiful excuse for an indoor job he could find was clerking for Big R. He was embarrassed. But actually morale seems to be high at Big R.
Then I went over to the CMRussell Museum to look at the Scriver bronzes they’ve just been gifted, but I’ll tell about that on my other blog: scriverart.blogspot.com.
Next stop was the new Pacific Antiques Mall: one of those places where there are stalls rented to individuals as well as the main guy’s merchandise. I was blown away. It’s a huge place and absolutely crammed with stuff -- not necessarily what you might expect as “antiques” back east or on the coast because a lot of it is cowboy gear: hair chaps, rawhide ropes, bridle bits, big hats, leather cuffs. In the individual booths were everything from black golliwog dolls and homemade rough tool boxes to elaborately carved cabinets costing plenty. There were some Scriver bronzes. Lots of glassware and figurines. A tender Royal Copenhagen female nude with a cat. A jaguar’s head as a bowl. I’d have bought both if I’d had the bucks and/or any space for them.
But what almost made me weep, given what I’ve been reading, was a frail wicker rocking chair from St. Peter’s Mission near Fort Shaw, one of the early Jesuit Missions. I daresay it had been sat in by Father Philip Rappagliossi himself, about whom I will tell you more later. (I’m reading his letters home, in which he assures them that his health is improving, though we know he died in the end.) It wasn’t even expensive. I hovered and dithered over whether to buy it. I’d have to borrow money... But where would I put it?
I’m not entirely sure the man running this vast operation (the building is so huge that he could have indoor parking in the winter if he wanted to) really understands what that chair is. He’s from North Dakota. Leased his ranch to his son and came over here to see what he could do with this idea. He said he’d wear his cowboy boots except that the concrete floors were already too hard on his feet. He says there’s tons of all this stuff in the country around and he’s selling most of it to Canucks.
Then along came another big tall older fellow who looked vaguely familiar and turned out to be someone I’ve seen around art premises over the years. They began talking freely in front of me about evaluating a Leonard Lopp painting someone wanted to sell. Leonard Lopp! He was a big name in the Sixties among people who like scenery that has a lot of pretty colors in it and who think a BIG oil on canvas is what a painting really ought to be like. We began naming others from that period: Les Peters who did lovely subtle paintings of wildlife, Leo Beaulaurier who did Indian portraits on black velvet which sounds awful but were actually rather sublime when lit properly. They’re both in big demand according to these guys. And so on. Ghosts in the room. (If you can call a space roughly the size of an airplane hanger a room!)
Then the most surprising event of the day! This guy offered me a job! He wants to install a high-end gallery in one corner and needs someone to take weekends. I was so startled I almost accepted! But then I had to say, Oh no! I’m just too pure! It would spoil my moral stance to be buying and selling. Anyway, I don’t know the prices of anything these days. I just knew the artists half-a-century ago! But my head echoed with what Alan Deale said when I quit the ministry: “Who are you going to be, Ginger Renner?” (She’s a big expert on Russell in case you didn’t know. Lives very well.)
This guy was relieved, I think. After all, he knew nothing about me, although his friend recognized me. I WAS dressed-up, since I put my preaching togs back on because they were hanging at the front of the closet.
Barnes&Noble and the grocery store were normal and uneventful. I scored some Jack Daniels Mustard and bought much-too-expensive cat food because that’s all that’s on the shelves now. (Melamine is showing up in the food pigs, because the cat food makers sold all their contaminated cat food to the hog farmers. Maybe those cultures who stigmatize pork have a good idea.) Meadowlarks are singing now and it was warm enough to open the pickup window and stick my elbow out. Sunday it’s supposed to hit eighty.
The store has acres of everything except the little fly traps I wanted. They are simplicity itself: a plastic bag with a plastic baffle at the top where flies go in and never come out. The bait is an old horse turd soaked with something so repulsive that one cannot use the trap indoors or even in the garage. They said, “It’s not fly season yet.” But I’ve had flies for a week. “Huh,” I scoffed. “You haven’t caught up with global warming!”
But what I really wanted was stovepipe so I could hook up my little cast iron bunkhouse stove and sit by it in the morning while I drink my coffee. We found the pipe, which is remarkable since I’ve discovered that none of the little farm supply places can carry it because they don’t order in big enough quantity and the people who make the pipe consider them a nuisance. Then we found three kinds: “blue,” black (the standard) and galvanized -- but nothing had prices so the clerk did battle with the computer until we found out that the galvanized was so cheap that I could have bought it last winter if I had known!
I had an interesting conversation with another clerk who was wearing a cowboy hat, which made me mistake him for a customer. He’d been a saddlemaker over in Eastern Montana (he didn’t want to tell me where) until he’d gotten bucked off a horse and stove up enough that the only pitiful excuse for an indoor job he could find was clerking for Big R. He was embarrassed. But actually morale seems to be high at Big R.
Then I went over to the CMRussell Museum to look at the Scriver bronzes they’ve just been gifted, but I’ll tell about that on my other blog: scriverart.blogspot.com.
Next stop was the new Pacific Antiques Mall: one of those places where there are stalls rented to individuals as well as the main guy’s merchandise. I was blown away. It’s a huge place and absolutely crammed with stuff -- not necessarily what you might expect as “antiques” back east or on the coast because a lot of it is cowboy gear: hair chaps, rawhide ropes, bridle bits, big hats, leather cuffs. In the individual booths were everything from black golliwog dolls and homemade rough tool boxes to elaborately carved cabinets costing plenty. There were some Scriver bronzes. Lots of glassware and figurines. A tender Royal Copenhagen female nude with a cat. A jaguar’s head as a bowl. I’d have bought both if I’d had the bucks and/or any space for them.
But what almost made me weep, given what I’ve been reading, was a frail wicker rocking chair from St. Peter’s Mission near Fort Shaw, one of the early Jesuit Missions. I daresay it had been sat in by Father Philip Rappagliossi himself, about whom I will tell you more later. (I’m reading his letters home, in which he assures them that his health is improving, though we know he died in the end.) It wasn’t even expensive. I hovered and dithered over whether to buy it. I’d have to borrow money... But where would I put it?
I’m not entirely sure the man running this vast operation (the building is so huge that he could have indoor parking in the winter if he wanted to) really understands what that chair is. He’s from North Dakota. Leased his ranch to his son and came over here to see what he could do with this idea. He said he’d wear his cowboy boots except that the concrete floors were already too hard on his feet. He says there’s tons of all this stuff in the country around and he’s selling most of it to Canucks.
Then along came another big tall older fellow who looked vaguely familiar and turned out to be someone I’ve seen around art premises over the years. They began talking freely in front of me about evaluating a Leonard Lopp painting someone wanted to sell. Leonard Lopp! He was a big name in the Sixties among people who like scenery that has a lot of pretty colors in it and who think a BIG oil on canvas is what a painting really ought to be like. We began naming others from that period: Les Peters who did lovely subtle paintings of wildlife, Leo Beaulaurier who did Indian portraits on black velvet which sounds awful but were actually rather sublime when lit properly. They’re both in big demand according to these guys. And so on. Ghosts in the room. (If you can call a space roughly the size of an airplane hanger a room!)
Then the most surprising event of the day! This guy offered me a job! He wants to install a high-end gallery in one corner and needs someone to take weekends. I was so startled I almost accepted! But then I had to say, Oh no! I’m just too pure! It would spoil my moral stance to be buying and selling. Anyway, I don’t know the prices of anything these days. I just knew the artists half-a-century ago! But my head echoed with what Alan Deale said when I quit the ministry: “Who are you going to be, Ginger Renner?” (She’s a big expert on Russell in case you didn’t know. Lives very well.)
This guy was relieved, I think. After all, he knew nothing about me, although his friend recognized me. I WAS dressed-up, since I put my preaching togs back on because they were hanging at the front of the closet.
Barnes&Noble and the grocery store were normal and uneventful. I scored some Jack Daniels Mustard and bought much-too-expensive cat food because that’s all that’s on the shelves now. (Melamine is showing up in the food pigs, because the cat food makers sold all their contaminated cat food to the hog farmers. Maybe those cultures who stigmatize pork have a good idea.) Meadowlarks are singing now and it was warm enough to open the pickup window and stick my elbow out. Sunday it’s supposed to hit eighty.
Monday, April 23, 2007
SATURDAY NIGHT TRAGEDY
Since I was scheduled to preach on Sunday, I was spending my Saturday evening in an effort to work myself into a suitably benevolent and nurturing mood. As an aid and prompter, I’d been reading emergency med tech and ambulance driver blogs and trying to picture the insertion of breathing tubes down throats and IV lines into veins. Then, just after dark, the village siren began to blow.
The siren blows every Tuesday at 7PM to remind the firemen (so far as I know we have no firewomen) to come to the monthly meeting where they all study how to save people and do a bit of bonding. If pizza and beer seems natural afterwards, well, that’s good for business. But this was Saturday. It was great weather -- had been good weather for the entire day, which is a little unusual since our weather tends to pass through at a high speed and you have to catch it on the fly, so to speak.
By now the robins are back and I even heard a meadowlark today, but the poplars haven’t gotten past those little purple twiddly things full of pollen and the prairie looks green only where it is overgrazed enough that there is no dry grass to hide it. Very often in this season someone gets carried away with the Spring ambiance and the human equivalent of little purple twiddlers by overindulging in beer when they should have stuck to pizza.
Then the lights went out. Stuttered back on, went out and stayed out. The last time this happened a house burned up. Though I had been in my nightgown and a jacket, I went out in front of my house to see if I could spot the fire, which was pretty easy since the whole town is only a few blocks wide and the fire was on the main highway two blocks away. Loretta, my neighbor, was out in her yard as well, also in night attire.
“Wanna go check it out in the pickup?” I asked her. She did. So we two matrons of heft and girth climbed into the pickup, drove over and sat in our nighties at a respectful distance to watch what was a vigorous conflagration that had engulfed the attached garage. “At least it’s only the garage,” I said. We knew the old lady who had lived there alone had died the week before, so we assumed that the house was empty, but still...
Loretta looked sad. She always knows the inside story. “The family went over to sort through furniture and valuables yesterday,” she said. “They put all the good stuff in the garage where it would be easy to load up after they emptied the trash out of their farm truck.” The farm truck was parked far enough down the driveway that it wasn’t even singed. All the trash was in good shape.
This Saturday I was also in my nightgown but judiciously put my jeans back on to go look for the fire. I could hear sirens in the distance. I’m just a block from the fire truck garage but the door was down. Then a couple of law enforcement vehicles came swirling around the corner with lights flashing, parked with a screech and went on-the-double into the garage. In a minute the fire door shot up and the truck was rolling. It stopped for another few minutes while pickups drew up quickly on both sides of the street, doused their lights and ran for the truck. Their equipment was hanging ready for them to struggle into as the truck took off.
With the door open, I could see that the ambulance had already left earlier. I wondered whether the driver had been electrocuted when he (must be “he,” right?) hit the power pole. I followed the truck at a respectful and -- I hoped -- legal distance. When I got to the livestock corrals, I was about a half-mile from the scene of the accident where the truck had stopped in the middle of the highway. I couldn’t see any flames or smoke. Maybe they needed the truck for the Jaws of Life.
I watched a while and went on home to get to bed so I could get up at 5AM. The lights were back on and with them the electric alarm clock which has a battery backup in case of power failure, but I never have bothered to put a battery in. How often do I have to get up these days? I reset the clock, took an aspirin and went to sleep. At 1AM my carbon monoxide monitor shrieked. It’s on the house circuit and if there’s a power failure (or restoration) it shrieks. The power was off again. When I took a peek outside, there were a million stars and a completely black village.
So I found my flashlight first and then rooted around in drawers until I finally located my travel alarm, which winds up. I bought it when I used to sleep in the pickup while on the road. I got it set and wound. At 2AM the power came back on and the monitor shrieked to let me know. I got the electric alarm set up again.
At 5AM both alarms went off, but I was already awake. Both cats had been walking up and down on me to let me know this would be an excellent time to go out and look for mice or, failing that, for me to open up a can of cat food, hopefully not poisonous. Then the paper came. Nothing in it about the accident, but it was too soon. I got out the door at 7AM, on schedule for the hour and a half drive to Babb. At both services we were careful to pray for the driver of the car and any passengers that might have been involved.
When I came back, I drove up the highway to see if I could tell where the vehicle hit the power pole, but I couldn’t see any signs of charring or splinters. I was really too tired to care very much, so I came home and took a long nap until 5PM when the cats started their routine again.
The next morning the paper didn’t mention the accident but when I went to the post office, I knew I’d find out what had happened.
“Oh, some goose ran into a power line and brought it down. Shorted out the whole town.” Just as I suspected. “What was the guy’s name?” A silence while the postmaster thought and then smiled.
“It was a goose.”
Then I had to “shift my paradigm,” so to speak. “A goose?”
“Yup, a Canada goose. Wings just wide enough to touch two lines at the same time. Electrocuted itself. Started a little fire but the guys put it out almost instantly.”
No EMT necessary, I guess. “The goose?”
“Too cooked to eat. Totally charred.”
There are a dozen stories every weekend in this little village. You’ve just heard one of them.
The siren blows every Tuesday at 7PM to remind the firemen (so far as I know we have no firewomen) to come to the monthly meeting where they all study how to save people and do a bit of bonding. If pizza and beer seems natural afterwards, well, that’s good for business. But this was Saturday. It was great weather -- had been good weather for the entire day, which is a little unusual since our weather tends to pass through at a high speed and you have to catch it on the fly, so to speak.
By now the robins are back and I even heard a meadowlark today, but the poplars haven’t gotten past those little purple twiddly things full of pollen and the prairie looks green only where it is overgrazed enough that there is no dry grass to hide it. Very often in this season someone gets carried away with the Spring ambiance and the human equivalent of little purple twiddlers by overindulging in beer when they should have stuck to pizza.
Then the lights went out. Stuttered back on, went out and stayed out. The last time this happened a house burned up. Though I had been in my nightgown and a jacket, I went out in front of my house to see if I could spot the fire, which was pretty easy since the whole town is only a few blocks wide and the fire was on the main highway two blocks away. Loretta, my neighbor, was out in her yard as well, also in night attire.
“Wanna go check it out in the pickup?” I asked her. She did. So we two matrons of heft and girth climbed into the pickup, drove over and sat in our nighties at a respectful distance to watch what was a vigorous conflagration that had engulfed the attached garage. “At least it’s only the garage,” I said. We knew the old lady who had lived there alone had died the week before, so we assumed that the house was empty, but still...
Loretta looked sad. She always knows the inside story. “The family went over to sort through furniture and valuables yesterday,” she said. “They put all the good stuff in the garage where it would be easy to load up after they emptied the trash out of their farm truck.” The farm truck was parked far enough down the driveway that it wasn’t even singed. All the trash was in good shape.
This Saturday I was also in my nightgown but judiciously put my jeans back on to go look for the fire. I could hear sirens in the distance. I’m just a block from the fire truck garage but the door was down. Then a couple of law enforcement vehicles came swirling around the corner with lights flashing, parked with a screech and went on-the-double into the garage. In a minute the fire door shot up and the truck was rolling. It stopped for another few minutes while pickups drew up quickly on both sides of the street, doused their lights and ran for the truck. Their equipment was hanging ready for them to struggle into as the truck took off.
With the door open, I could see that the ambulance had already left earlier. I wondered whether the driver had been electrocuted when he (must be “he,” right?) hit the power pole. I followed the truck at a respectful and -- I hoped -- legal distance. When I got to the livestock corrals, I was about a half-mile from the scene of the accident where the truck had stopped in the middle of the highway. I couldn’t see any flames or smoke. Maybe they needed the truck for the Jaws of Life.
I watched a while and went on home to get to bed so I could get up at 5AM. The lights were back on and with them the electric alarm clock which has a battery backup in case of power failure, but I never have bothered to put a battery in. How often do I have to get up these days? I reset the clock, took an aspirin and went to sleep. At 1AM my carbon monoxide monitor shrieked. It’s on the house circuit and if there’s a power failure (or restoration) it shrieks. The power was off again. When I took a peek outside, there were a million stars and a completely black village.
So I found my flashlight first and then rooted around in drawers until I finally located my travel alarm, which winds up. I bought it when I used to sleep in the pickup while on the road. I got it set and wound. At 2AM the power came back on and the monitor shrieked to let me know. I got the electric alarm set up again.
At 5AM both alarms went off, but I was already awake. Both cats had been walking up and down on me to let me know this would be an excellent time to go out and look for mice or, failing that, for me to open up a can of cat food, hopefully not poisonous. Then the paper came. Nothing in it about the accident, but it was too soon. I got out the door at 7AM, on schedule for the hour and a half drive to Babb. At both services we were careful to pray for the driver of the car and any passengers that might have been involved.
When I came back, I drove up the highway to see if I could tell where the vehicle hit the power pole, but I couldn’t see any signs of charring or splinters. I was really too tired to care very much, so I came home and took a long nap until 5PM when the cats started their routine again.
The next morning the paper didn’t mention the accident but when I went to the post office, I knew I’d find out what had happened.
“Oh, some goose ran into a power line and brought it down. Shorted out the whole town.” Just as I suspected. “What was the guy’s name?” A silence while the postmaster thought and then smiled.
“It was a goose.”
Then I had to “shift my paradigm,” so to speak. “A goose?”
“Yup, a Canada goose. Wings just wide enough to touch two lines at the same time. Electrocuted itself. Started a little fire but the guys put it out almost instantly.”
No EMT necessary, I guess. “The goose?”
“Too cooked to eat. Totally charred.”
There are a dozen stories every weekend in this little village. You’ve just heard one of them.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
AN EARTH DAY LIST
This morning I went to preach in Babb and Browning. Along the way today I saw (in order).
1. In the first daylight a silver boat out on Lake Francis, which was like blue silk with a little tint of pink. (The early worm catches the fish.)
2. Lots of calves bucking and cranking their tails over their rears. A few stilt-walking colts right close to their mothers in case of needing warm milk.
3. The Rockies white with fresh snowfall so that they shone against a background of dark cloud lurking just the other side, waiting to come over and rain on us in the morning (we hope).
4. A band of mustangs in designer colors like taupe, mauve, claybank, mouse, buckskin -- all with long tails and trailing bangs that hung over their eyes so they looked through like shy girls.
5. Boyd and Lila's new batch of buffaloes, young 'uns all clean and fleecy, propped on their elbows in the green grass looking like buffalo always do on the prairie.
6. (Back in Browning) Two sets of tall Blackfeet teens on two tall brown horses, riding double. On one horse the girl was "steering" and on the other the boy had the reins. Just as I came along, they broke into a run but no one lost their seat. They say that in the old days young couples would ride double like that, circling around and around the camp lodges while they sang love song duets.
Must be spring. Earth day, too!
My prayer tagline was “We thank God for allowing us to walk in grandeur merely by stepping out the front door. People here really do feel like that.
Well, when the wind isn’t blowing, it’s not fifty below nor a hundred and ten above, and we’re not up to our Alice B. Toklas in snow.
1. In the first daylight a silver boat out on Lake Francis, which was like blue silk with a little tint of pink. (The early worm catches the fish.)
2. Lots of calves bucking and cranking their tails over their rears. A few stilt-walking colts right close to their mothers in case of needing warm milk.
3. The Rockies white with fresh snowfall so that they shone against a background of dark cloud lurking just the other side, waiting to come over and rain on us in the morning (we hope).
4. A band of mustangs in designer colors like taupe, mauve, claybank, mouse, buckskin -- all with long tails and trailing bangs that hung over their eyes so they looked through like shy girls.
5. Boyd and Lila's new batch of buffaloes, young 'uns all clean and fleecy, propped on their elbows in the green grass looking like buffalo always do on the prairie.
6. (Back in Browning) Two sets of tall Blackfeet teens on two tall brown horses, riding double. On one horse the girl was "steering" and on the other the boy had the reins. Just as I came along, they broke into a run but no one lost their seat. They say that in the old days young couples would ride double like that, circling around and around the camp lodges while they sang love song duets.
Must be spring. Earth day, too!
My prayer tagline was “We thank God for allowing us to walk in grandeur merely by stepping out the front door. People here really do feel like that.
Well, when the wind isn’t blowing, it’s not fifty below nor a hundred and ten above, and we’re not up to our Alice B. Toklas in snow.
Friday, April 20, 2007
CHO/LIVIU LIBRESCU
I’ve been missing some blogging, partly because I’m trying to figure out some technical stuff (I finally managed to get a cover on my “Reservation Blackfeet” reference book on Lulu.com/prairiem.) and partly because I’m having too many thoughts too quickly to get them organized and posted.
They say that faculty are talking about Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting all over the country. The conversation I’ve been monitoring has been on the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, which includes nature writers but also a great many people enamored of theory, especially the victim-is-blameless post-crit sort of ideas. The comments there have ranged from the out-of-it (“How dare Nikki Giovanni say Cho is evil?” versus “How dare you criticize Nikki Giovanni who is a woman of color, sensitive and insightful?”) to the highly sophisticated.
EXAMPLE:
As a poet who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, who worked for civil rights, who militantly opposed white racism, and who continues to excoriate the oppressions of racism still pervasive in our society, she has an undeniable perspective on evil: its machinations, its embodiments, its transmission. Consider one of her best known poems, "For Saundra" (1968):
i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping
then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked--do you ever write
tree poems--i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green--no trees grow
in manhattan
then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected
so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all.
SECOND EXAMPLE:
The roots of this narrative go deep, much deeper than American culture. Should anyone wonder about Cho's use of the name Ishmael, be sure to look up Genesis 16:12: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him." This is why Abraham's maid Haggar gave her child that name. And it fits Cho all too well. This is an ancient narrative indeed.
This murderer, an English major, was no dope. Melville used the name for the same reason. It signifies the loner, the outsider, suicidal and homocidal, the one who is in Melville's term, "wolfish" and against the world. Melville's Ishmael is redeemed by Queequeg, that noble savage and type of the natural romantic man. Too bad Cho never met a Queequeg on his campus. I doubt any of these mental health professionals could have done as well. I suspect he would have run screaming from their psychobabble, even more angry than before.
Some commentators have noted the similarity between Cho's taped statement and those of many Palestinian suicide bombers. THe narrative circle draws tighter. For Ishmael was the son of Abraham cast off into the desert while his brother Isaac got his inheritance. And Ishmael is said to have been the father of the Arabs. So today's Arabs see themselves still as the children of "Ismael." In the Koran, it is Ishmael, not Isaac, whom God tells Abraham to sacrifice. And today in Palestine, the children of Ishmael still battle with the children of Isaac over who is the true son of Abraham, beloved of the Lord, and the rightful inheritor of the land.
Cho too seems to have felt disinherited. He rants against the rich and powerful, clearly himself feeling outside and powerless and propertyless, an Ishmael, like the Arabs, like Abraham's son, like the narrator of MOBY DICK.
He is, unfortunately, not unique, but a type we have had always with us. Solomon was right: THere is nothing new under the sun. The narrative here is our human inheritance; the alienation, our original sin.
Cho is that wolf within us that is indeed evil.
-Preacher Dave
Personally, I think that the cracks in Cho’s psyche happened to line up with the anniversary of Columbine, impending graduation, and a considerable number of our cultural fault lines: love of violence, transgression as retribution, the entitlement of rectitude, gun access, and a lot of other things so that they coincided just right. The experts in the field of mass shooting say to expect several more in the coming weeks, copycats. They say they have averted 12,000 similar incidents through security measures.
I was interested in the counter-Cho, Liviu Librescu, the heroic engineering professor born in 1930 in Romania. He was Jewish and therefore in 1941 he was banished with his family to the equivalent of an Indian Reservation called “Transnistria” where thousands suffered, starved and died. (He was not much older than Cho when Cho's family immigrated.) He survived and his life is posted on Wikipedia. He was rational and math-savvy, knew well the odds when he held the door shut to let his students escape, but he had a strong cultural dedication to resisting danger. He died on the Day of Holocaust Remembrance.
People often think of the reservation here as a place where there might be violence, mass shootings. There are bomb threats every spring, which the administration takes so seriously that they move the students out to sit in school buses while the school is swept. (I always think that a serious bomber would put the bomb under the buses.) We’ve had a series of fatal stabbings, usually in a context of parties, drinking and drugging, sexual competition, class jealousy. High school students of mine have written about beating up, raping, and killing people. (Some of them have actually done it.) Some were startled when they were instantly marched to the counselor. (As was the counselor!) I always got into trouble with the administration for reporting the incidents.
But the most chilling memory comes from the small white high school where I quit after a few months. One boy was fixated on the possibility of an explosion or gunman. He was definitely an oddball who got no respect. The other students said that the administration was always calling him in as a suspect, but in fact he was always innocent. He was brilliant and I tried to assure him that many of his problems would fall away when he got to college.
I had a class that had become notorious for being out of control. They were star athletes, they would tell you, and could do what they wanted. In fact the only reason I was hired was that no one else would take the job. I talked to them, I reviewed all their files, I separated them from the rest of the class and kept them after school, etc. etc. One day I was having lunch with other teachers and asked what they thought I ought to do.
“Kill them,” they said. “Murder the bastards.” One of these teachers was an aggressive Christian. Another was a recovering alcoholic. I wouldn’t be very much surprised if they became shooters.
They say that faculty are talking about Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting all over the country. The conversation I’ve been monitoring has been on the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, which includes nature writers but also a great many people enamored of theory, especially the victim-is-blameless post-crit sort of ideas. The comments there have ranged from the out-of-it (“How dare Nikki Giovanni say Cho is evil?” versus “How dare you criticize Nikki Giovanni who is a woman of color, sensitive and insightful?”) to the highly sophisticated.
EXAMPLE:
As a poet who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, who worked for civil rights, who militantly opposed white racism, and who continues to excoriate the oppressions of racism still pervasive in our society, she has an undeniable perspective on evil: its machinations, its embodiments, its transmission. Consider one of her best known poems, "For Saundra" (1968):
i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping
then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked--do you ever write
tree poems--i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green--no trees grow
in manhattan
then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected
so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all.
SECOND EXAMPLE:
The roots of this narrative go deep, much deeper than American culture. Should anyone wonder about Cho's use of the name Ishmael, be sure to look up Genesis 16:12: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him." This is why Abraham's maid Haggar gave her child that name. And it fits Cho all too well. This is an ancient narrative indeed.
This murderer, an English major, was no dope. Melville used the name for the same reason. It signifies the loner, the outsider, suicidal and homocidal, the one who is in Melville's term, "wolfish" and against the world. Melville's Ishmael is redeemed by Queequeg, that noble savage and type of the natural romantic man. Too bad Cho never met a Queequeg on his campus. I doubt any of these mental health professionals could have done as well. I suspect he would have run screaming from their psychobabble, even more angry than before.
Some commentators have noted the similarity between Cho's taped statement and those of many Palestinian suicide bombers. THe narrative circle draws tighter. For Ishmael was the son of Abraham cast off into the desert while his brother Isaac got his inheritance. And Ishmael is said to have been the father of the Arabs. So today's Arabs see themselves still as the children of "Ismael." In the Koran, it is Ishmael, not Isaac, whom God tells Abraham to sacrifice. And today in Palestine, the children of Ishmael still battle with the children of Isaac over who is the true son of Abraham, beloved of the Lord, and the rightful inheritor of the land.
Cho too seems to have felt disinherited. He rants against the rich and powerful, clearly himself feeling outside and powerless and propertyless, an Ishmael, like the Arabs, like Abraham's son, like the narrator of MOBY DICK.
He is, unfortunately, not unique, but a type we have had always with us. Solomon was right: THere is nothing new under the sun. The narrative here is our human inheritance; the alienation, our original sin.
Cho is that wolf within us that is indeed evil.
-Preacher Dave
Personally, I think that the cracks in Cho’s psyche happened to line up with the anniversary of Columbine, impending graduation, and a considerable number of our cultural fault lines: love of violence, transgression as retribution, the entitlement of rectitude, gun access, and a lot of other things so that they coincided just right. The experts in the field of mass shooting say to expect several more in the coming weeks, copycats. They say they have averted 12,000 similar incidents through security measures.
I was interested in the counter-Cho, Liviu Librescu, the heroic engineering professor born in 1930 in Romania. He was Jewish and therefore in 1941 he was banished with his family to the equivalent of an Indian Reservation called “Transnistria” where thousands suffered, starved and died. (He was not much older than Cho when Cho's family immigrated.) He survived and his life is posted on Wikipedia. He was rational and math-savvy, knew well the odds when he held the door shut to let his students escape, but he had a strong cultural dedication to resisting danger. He died on the Day of Holocaust Remembrance.
People often think of the reservation here as a place where there might be violence, mass shootings. There are bomb threats every spring, which the administration takes so seriously that they move the students out to sit in school buses while the school is swept. (I always think that a serious bomber would put the bomb under the buses.) We’ve had a series of fatal stabbings, usually in a context of parties, drinking and drugging, sexual competition, class jealousy. High school students of mine have written about beating up, raping, and killing people. (Some of them have actually done it.) Some were startled when they were instantly marched to the counselor. (As was the counselor!) I always got into trouble with the administration for reporting the incidents.
But the most chilling memory comes from the small white high school where I quit after a few months. One boy was fixated on the possibility of an explosion or gunman. He was definitely an oddball who got no respect. The other students said that the administration was always calling him in as a suspect, but in fact he was always innocent. He was brilliant and I tried to assure him that many of his problems would fall away when he got to college.
I had a class that had become notorious for being out of control. They were star athletes, they would tell you, and could do what they wanted. In fact the only reason I was hired was that no one else would take the job. I talked to them, I reviewed all their files, I separated them from the rest of the class and kept them after school, etc. etc. One day I was having lunch with other teachers and asked what they thought I ought to do.
“Kill them,” they said. “Murder the bastards.” One of these teachers was an aggressive Christian. Another was a recovering alcoholic. I wouldn’t be very much surprised if they became shooters.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
PRINT ON DEMAND MEETS TEXTBOOKS
Someone told me that there is a person in town who is proofing textbooks as a job. So far, I don’t know who that person is or what kind of textbooks are meant or even what “proofing” means in this context, but I’d like to find out for several reasons.
Textbooks as an issue -- as compared with POD as an issue -- have preoccupied me for quite a while, so now that it occurs to me to think of the two issues at the same time, the lightbulbs pop. For one thing, I just Googled <“print-on-demand”+textbooks> and got a fascinating list of citations, including the website entry below:
http://www.fonerbooks.com/2005/09/college-textbook-sales-and-internet.html
Some quotes:
"According to the NACS 2004 College Store Industry Financial Report, college bookstore sales of new textbooks reached $4.956 Billion. Used textbooks added another $1.751 Billion. By contrast, the combined North American sales of Amazon, Barnes&Noble (stores and website) and Borders for 2004, including music and DVD sales, was $10.83 Billion. Deduct something for those non-book items and allow for the fact that Amazon et al also sell some number of college textbooks, and you see that college bookstores with their captive audiences make up a good third of the U.S. bookstore market.
"The textbook situation is one of those problems that could easily be solved by a combination of internet publication and print-on-demand. Just imagine, professors could write their own textbooks without selling their souls to the editors at the NY trades who insist on the inclusion of needless color illustrations and bizarre formatting just to run up the price. The cream would rise to the top, when students wanted (or were required) to purchase the texts, they could be printed on demand, as a whole text or in sections, and students would see their textbook costs drop to under $20 per course. Thanks to the print on demand publishing model, an Internet textbook co-op could pay for its overhead and still pay professors royalties on par with what they would have earned on a $150 paperweight."
If one goes to the website itself, http://www.fonerbooks.com, one finds charming and essential sources for material on how to fix one’s computer and how to build oneself a timber frame house! If I were younger than forty, I’d begin both projects immediately! But since I’m “coming on for seventy” as the English say, I reckon I’ll stick to self-publishing.
Here’s my issue with textbooks. When I first began to teach in 1961, there was generally a key text that everyone used in some fields. For instance, all the high school speech & drama teachers used “The Stage and the School” and “Rehearsal.” This meant that publishers could do mass printing and keep prices low. The books were teacher-written, illustrated with photos from their work (I’m in some editions of “S&S” as a student.), and not flashily bound. In fact, “Rehearsal” was an early example of plastic comb-binding and not entirely satisfactory. Then came the big post-canonical explosion of approaches and materials in all fields.
Much of that was a reaction to poorly prepared teachers who simply started on page one and taught their way through the English books, hoping to get to the halfway point of the book at the same time as the halfway point of the course. Usually what happened was that students dropped off the map along the way, doing more and more poorly if the material was cumulative, or the teacher slowed down to reteach until they caught up, which meant that the better students muttered and sighed -- and the back end of the book rarely got taught at all. Maybe the last week the teacher would crash-teach gerunds and participles for the college-bound.
More of it came from “streaming” or “tracking” or sorting kids into what our Fifties chorus teacher in elementary grades and reading teachers in primary grades used to call “song thrushes,” “canaries” and “crows.” (One chorus teacher had a category she called “listeners.”) The idea was to group the kids according to ability, achievement and style of learning so that one teacher could use multiple methods. The fact was often that the stigmas of race, poverty, and disability nudged out other criteria. Over the years this has been abolished and then crept back in (usually with a new name) repeatedly. On a reservation this has enormous political implications. The inability to find a good solution means constantly vacillating between grouping and not-grouping, enormously expensive and hard on morale.
At its best I once had a reading comprehension series in paperback that had four tracks, but all of them focused on one paragraph. The “lowest” track concentrated on what happened and vocabulary. The “highest” track addressed symbols and cultural context. The examples that worked the best were Steinbeck. I myself learned a great deal from preparing to teach from these materials, but they disintegrated easily and were hard to manage in terms of handing out, checking in, and all that dumb stuff.
Nevertheless, one could put one’s hand on Warriner’s and know what was there. The last time I tried to teach (Cut Bank) there were simply no textbooks for English except an idiosyncratic collection of ragged paperbacks in insufficient number for the class sizes or anthologies that suited the prejudices of the one dominant English teacher. The principal (who had been an English teacher) said she would buy English texts “next year.”
Part of the reason she was putting off the acquisition was that the books have become incredibly expensive, due to the slick, bright covers and illustrations, even as the contents have deteriorated into error, politically skewed facts and omissions, and lousy editing. Since they were a horror to teach from (and had the opposite difficulties from my little paperback series -- e.g. they were huge, heavy, slippery, and the loss of one meant a $50 or more hit to the inventory), everyone went to duplicated materials. This meant that the poor copying machine fairly smoked in the morning and “monitors” were sent to make extra copies all day. At the end of the day sheets of papers strewed the floor -- impossible to re-use. Teachers had elaborate filing systems and new teachers were handicapped by the need to spend their evenings inventing these materials. (Death to trees!)
California and Texas are huge school constituencies, so most commercial textbooks are aimed at them. Since they either have or are believed to have high proportions of “Creationists” and other ante-diluvians, that’s what goes into the texts. They are not friendly to people who are not “mainstream” Americans (meaning mostly Germanic and white) and tend to skip history that’s not flattering.
A few years ago the state of Montana passed a law (pushed hard by Native Americans) requiring the teaching of “Indian history” in the state. Most people interpreted this to be anthropological discussion of artifacts plus -- if a person were bold -- a bit of material about how white people pushed the Indians aside. I don’t know of any textbook that discusses in any detail the creation and development of reservations. So -- heigh-ho! Here I am a’doin’ it!
This morning I’ll proof a book I’m calling “Reservation Blackfeet” so that Google and Amazon will pick it up from my blog. It’s not original writing by myself except for some transitions, explanations and definitions. Instead I’m including a few documents specific to the Blackfeet that are otherwise inaccessible because they are unpublished, or too academic for high school kids and teachers.
This NOT what some Native American people wanted. They had fancied a counter-equivalent to white mainstream triumphalism by the inclusion of romantic ideas about greater entitlement and the natural nobility of their bloodlines. They didn’t want to have to wrestle with such immediate and painful issues as water rights. To my mind, this is what makes a POD project valuable: for an outside party -- though sympathetic -- to attempt to provide objective materials. But I didn’t try to include water rights in this first attempt.
For now, I think my old eyes would be better off not “proofing” textbooks, but that my old mind and library might be valuable in terms of thinking about textbooks and providing materials. Fonerbooks may be a little over-optimistic about cream rising to the top, but optimism is a valuable commodity. Anyway, this attempt to provide materials should be available in a week or two from Lulu.com/prairiem.
Textbooks as an issue -- as compared with POD as an issue -- have preoccupied me for quite a while, so now that it occurs to me to think of the two issues at the same time, the lightbulbs pop. For one thing, I just Googled <“print-on-demand”+textbooks> and got a fascinating list of citations, including the website entry below:
http://www.fonerbooks.com/2005/09/college-textbook-sales-and-internet.html
Some quotes:
"According to the NACS 2004 College Store Industry Financial Report, college bookstore sales of new textbooks reached $4.956 Billion. Used textbooks added another $1.751 Billion. By contrast, the combined North American sales of Amazon, Barnes&Noble (stores and website) and Borders for 2004, including music and DVD sales, was $10.83 Billion. Deduct something for those non-book items and allow for the fact that Amazon et al also sell some number of college textbooks, and you see that college bookstores with their captive audiences make up a good third of the U.S. bookstore market.
"The textbook situation is one of those problems that could easily be solved by a combination of internet publication and print-on-demand. Just imagine, professors could write their own textbooks without selling their souls to the editors at the NY trades who insist on the inclusion of needless color illustrations and bizarre formatting just to run up the price. The cream would rise to the top, when students wanted (or were required) to purchase the texts, they could be printed on demand, as a whole text or in sections, and students would see their textbook costs drop to under $20 per course. Thanks to the print on demand publishing model, an Internet textbook co-op could pay for its overhead and still pay professors royalties on par with what they would have earned on a $150 paperweight."
If one goes to the website itself, http://www.fonerbooks.com, one finds charming and essential sources for material on how to fix one’s computer and how to build oneself a timber frame house! If I were younger than forty, I’d begin both projects immediately! But since I’m “coming on for seventy” as the English say, I reckon I’ll stick to self-publishing.
Here’s my issue with textbooks. When I first began to teach in 1961, there was generally a key text that everyone used in some fields. For instance, all the high school speech & drama teachers used “The Stage and the School” and “Rehearsal.” This meant that publishers could do mass printing and keep prices low. The books were teacher-written, illustrated with photos from their work (I’m in some editions of “S&S” as a student.), and not flashily bound. In fact, “Rehearsal” was an early example of plastic comb-binding and not entirely satisfactory. Then came the big post-canonical explosion of approaches and materials in all fields.
Much of that was a reaction to poorly prepared teachers who simply started on page one and taught their way through the English books, hoping to get to the halfway point of the book at the same time as the halfway point of the course. Usually what happened was that students dropped off the map along the way, doing more and more poorly if the material was cumulative, or the teacher slowed down to reteach until they caught up, which meant that the better students muttered and sighed -- and the back end of the book rarely got taught at all. Maybe the last week the teacher would crash-teach gerunds and participles for the college-bound.
More of it came from “streaming” or “tracking” or sorting kids into what our Fifties chorus teacher in elementary grades and reading teachers in primary grades used to call “song thrushes,” “canaries” and “crows.” (One chorus teacher had a category she called “listeners.”) The idea was to group the kids according to ability, achievement and style of learning so that one teacher could use multiple methods. The fact was often that the stigmas of race, poverty, and disability nudged out other criteria. Over the years this has been abolished and then crept back in (usually with a new name) repeatedly. On a reservation this has enormous political implications. The inability to find a good solution means constantly vacillating between grouping and not-grouping, enormously expensive and hard on morale.
At its best I once had a reading comprehension series in paperback that had four tracks, but all of them focused on one paragraph. The “lowest” track concentrated on what happened and vocabulary. The “highest” track addressed symbols and cultural context. The examples that worked the best were Steinbeck. I myself learned a great deal from preparing to teach from these materials, but they disintegrated easily and were hard to manage in terms of handing out, checking in, and all that dumb stuff.
Nevertheless, one could put one’s hand on Warriner’s and know what was there. The last time I tried to teach (Cut Bank) there were simply no textbooks for English except an idiosyncratic collection of ragged paperbacks in insufficient number for the class sizes or anthologies that suited the prejudices of the one dominant English teacher. The principal (who had been an English teacher) said she would buy English texts “next year.”
Part of the reason she was putting off the acquisition was that the books have become incredibly expensive, due to the slick, bright covers and illustrations, even as the contents have deteriorated into error, politically skewed facts and omissions, and lousy editing. Since they were a horror to teach from (and had the opposite difficulties from my little paperback series -- e.g. they were huge, heavy, slippery, and the loss of one meant a $50 or more hit to the inventory), everyone went to duplicated materials. This meant that the poor copying machine fairly smoked in the morning and “monitors” were sent to make extra copies all day. At the end of the day sheets of papers strewed the floor -- impossible to re-use. Teachers had elaborate filing systems and new teachers were handicapped by the need to spend their evenings inventing these materials. (Death to trees!)
California and Texas are huge school constituencies, so most commercial textbooks are aimed at them. Since they either have or are believed to have high proportions of “Creationists” and other ante-diluvians, that’s what goes into the texts. They are not friendly to people who are not “mainstream” Americans (meaning mostly Germanic and white) and tend to skip history that’s not flattering.
A few years ago the state of Montana passed a law (pushed hard by Native Americans) requiring the teaching of “Indian history” in the state. Most people interpreted this to be anthropological discussion of artifacts plus -- if a person were bold -- a bit of material about how white people pushed the Indians aside. I don’t know of any textbook that discusses in any detail the creation and development of reservations. So -- heigh-ho! Here I am a’doin’ it!
This morning I’ll proof a book I’m calling “Reservation Blackfeet” so that Google and Amazon will pick it up from my blog. It’s not original writing by myself except for some transitions, explanations and definitions. Instead I’m including a few documents specific to the Blackfeet that are otherwise inaccessible because they are unpublished, or too academic for high school kids and teachers.
This NOT what some Native American people wanted. They had fancied a counter-equivalent to white mainstream triumphalism by the inclusion of romantic ideas about greater entitlement and the natural nobility of their bloodlines. They didn’t want to have to wrestle with such immediate and painful issues as water rights. To my mind, this is what makes a POD project valuable: for an outside party -- though sympathetic -- to attempt to provide objective materials. But I didn’t try to include water rights in this first attempt.
For now, I think my old eyes would be better off not “proofing” textbooks, but that my old mind and library might be valuable in terms of thinking about textbooks and providing materials. Fonerbooks may be a little over-optimistic about cream rising to the top, but optimism is a valuable commodity. Anyway, this attempt to provide materials should be available in a week or two from Lulu.com/prairiem.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
SORROW
This is a world seeded with sorrow today, even as the tractors are out in the fields seeding something better. It’s not just the shooting in Virginia. A few weeks ago I was in the grocery store when the manager asked the clerk who was checking me out to leave the counter and go do something else. She protested that it was not her job, that she didn’t know how to do it, and that it would make her late leaving for home. The manager insisted.
She was plainly exhausted and her eyes brimmed. It tipped over into anger. “If I have to do that, I’ll walk out of this store.”
“If you walk out of this store, don’t come back.” She is a woman with kids. She went to do what the manager said.
More recently I was in Great Falls in the grocery store behind a woman whose husband just got back from Iraq. He’s clearly suffering from trauma -- has to sleep in a separate room, is on temporary leave. Drinking. There is no counselor available. The marriage is in danger. The clerk was a young man who knew this woman and somehow was part of the Malmstrom Air Force Base family -- maybe he was moonlighting, maybe he was a veteran, maybe he was married to a soldier. He was counseling her gently: “Take care of yourself. Confide in others. Go to his commanding officer.” I was in no hurry and wouldn’t have wanted to hurry this exchange anyway. His best piece of advice was “Believe in the future.”
I preached Sunday in Babb and Browning, always a pleasure to see people and to drive up to the mountains. But I was very conscious of how much the people had aged since I was their minister for a year in 1988-89. Smitty turned 89 on Sunday and we sang “Happy Birthday,” which made his hearing aid squeal. He grinned but was impatient because he wanted to go ice fishing after church. (He’s been fishing almost every day that I’ve known him, but the ice is about gone for the season.) Clara, his wife, is on oxygen now and carries a portable unit. She moves slowly but still valiantly does her job making coffee and folding orders of service.
That was in Babb. In Browning were the grandparents of one of a recent sequence of boys who have been knifed to death at parties. These were not bad boys, not drunks. The uninsured auto parts and repair business that the family has run for many decades burned to the ground not long ago. Their grown daughter plays the incredibly clever and complex digital organ for services. On the first day of school that she was in my English class long ago, she looked me up and down and said, “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for an English teacher!” I liked her from that moment. Now she runs the Succeed in School program.
Both congregations are even smaller than they were before.
Yesterday was sixty degrees, no wind, comfortably overcast, and I went out to work in the yard. Not much debris blows around in Valier, but in my flowerbed I found a piece of paper with what appeared to be answers to catechism questions, carefully printed in pencil. I don’t know what the last question was, but it may have been “what do you pray for?” The answer was “Give us something to look forward to!”
Then I came in the house, checked the email, and got the news that they think they’ve discovered what has killed all the bees: cell phones. The cell phone messages destroy the bees’ ability to tell where they are and get back home again. If we give this country a choice between bees and cell phones, what do YOU think they’ll choose? It’s an easy choice for me. BEES.
Not that I’m surprised. I’m still grieving over the fungus that’s killing all the frogs. It’s a little early for frogs here, but soon it will be warm enough for them to begin to sing. Will I dare drive around the lake, trying to hear them before they are gone?
There’s a missile silo only a mile away, but I don’t worry about it much. Others are worrying that it will be decommissioned, because that will mean fewer customers for the stores and cafes, fewer jobs, fewer taxes. No one obsesses over annihilation in a mushroom cloud the way we used to when I was the age of that South Korean shooter in Virginia today. All we worry about is money and drugs -- some worry that they’re around and some worry when they’re NOT around.
Last night I almost overdosed on Helen MIrren, which I thought was impossible. It was “Elizabeth I.” 211 minutes of scenery chewing. Some drawing and quartering -- quite vivid and detailed. So tonight I turned to Sigourney Weaver: “Imaginary Heroes,” a slow stupid tour of the faults of suburbias with Sigourney looking and acting pretty ugly. (It only cost $4. I might just throw it away. That’s what I did with the last Val Whatsis murder mystery, which was just a little too horrible.)
My last attempt to keep from sinking was the blog called “A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver” If anyone can say something about a campus shooting, he can. But why? Instead, he told about delivering a premature baby in the back of the ambu while it struggled through an ice storm. (The vehicle, not the infant.) Heroism on the parts of all involved, including the baby. He couldn’t talk her into naming the baby for him. She said “Ambulance Driver” was too generic.
Now I’m okay. “Believe in the future.” “Give us something to look forward to.” Babies and all that. The daffies in the front yard are up about five inches.
She was plainly exhausted and her eyes brimmed. It tipped over into anger. “If I have to do that, I’ll walk out of this store.”
“If you walk out of this store, don’t come back.” She is a woman with kids. She went to do what the manager said.
More recently I was in Great Falls in the grocery store behind a woman whose husband just got back from Iraq. He’s clearly suffering from trauma -- has to sleep in a separate room, is on temporary leave. Drinking. There is no counselor available. The marriage is in danger. The clerk was a young man who knew this woman and somehow was part of the Malmstrom Air Force Base family -- maybe he was moonlighting, maybe he was a veteran, maybe he was married to a soldier. He was counseling her gently: “Take care of yourself. Confide in others. Go to his commanding officer.” I was in no hurry and wouldn’t have wanted to hurry this exchange anyway. His best piece of advice was “Believe in the future.”
I preached Sunday in Babb and Browning, always a pleasure to see people and to drive up to the mountains. But I was very conscious of how much the people had aged since I was their minister for a year in 1988-89. Smitty turned 89 on Sunday and we sang “Happy Birthday,” which made his hearing aid squeal. He grinned but was impatient because he wanted to go ice fishing after church. (He’s been fishing almost every day that I’ve known him, but the ice is about gone for the season.) Clara, his wife, is on oxygen now and carries a portable unit. She moves slowly but still valiantly does her job making coffee and folding orders of service.
That was in Babb. In Browning were the grandparents of one of a recent sequence of boys who have been knifed to death at parties. These were not bad boys, not drunks. The uninsured auto parts and repair business that the family has run for many decades burned to the ground not long ago. Their grown daughter plays the incredibly clever and complex digital organ for services. On the first day of school that she was in my English class long ago, she looked me up and down and said, “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for an English teacher!” I liked her from that moment. Now she runs the Succeed in School program.
Both congregations are even smaller than they were before.
Yesterday was sixty degrees, no wind, comfortably overcast, and I went out to work in the yard. Not much debris blows around in Valier, but in my flowerbed I found a piece of paper with what appeared to be answers to catechism questions, carefully printed in pencil. I don’t know what the last question was, but it may have been “what do you pray for?” The answer was “Give us something to look forward to!”
Then I came in the house, checked the email, and got the news that they think they’ve discovered what has killed all the bees: cell phones. The cell phone messages destroy the bees’ ability to tell where they are and get back home again. If we give this country a choice between bees and cell phones, what do YOU think they’ll choose? It’s an easy choice for me. BEES.
Not that I’m surprised. I’m still grieving over the fungus that’s killing all the frogs. It’s a little early for frogs here, but soon it will be warm enough for them to begin to sing. Will I dare drive around the lake, trying to hear them before they are gone?
There’s a missile silo only a mile away, but I don’t worry about it much. Others are worrying that it will be decommissioned, because that will mean fewer customers for the stores and cafes, fewer jobs, fewer taxes. No one obsesses over annihilation in a mushroom cloud the way we used to when I was the age of that South Korean shooter in Virginia today. All we worry about is money and drugs -- some worry that they’re around and some worry when they’re NOT around.
Last night I almost overdosed on Helen MIrren, which I thought was impossible. It was “Elizabeth I.” 211 minutes of scenery chewing. Some drawing and quartering -- quite vivid and detailed. So tonight I turned to Sigourney Weaver: “Imaginary Heroes,” a slow stupid tour of the faults of suburbias with Sigourney looking and acting pretty ugly. (It only cost $4. I might just throw it away. That’s what I did with the last Val Whatsis murder mystery, which was just a little too horrible.)
My last attempt to keep from sinking was the blog called “A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver” If anyone can say something about a campus shooting, he can. But why? Instead, he told about delivering a premature baby in the back of the ambu while it struggled through an ice storm. (The vehicle, not the infant.) Heroism on the parts of all involved, including the baby. He couldn’t talk her into naming the baby for him. She said “Ambulance Driver” was too generic.
Now I’m okay. “Believe in the future.” “Give us something to look forward to.” Babies and all that. The daffies in the front yard are up about five inches.
Friday, April 13, 2007
HOLY FAMILY MISSION by Hugh Black (notes)
“THE HISTORY OF THE HOLY FAMILY MISSION, FAMILY, MONTANA. FROM 1890 TO 1935”
by Hugh M. Black, B.A.
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Saint Paul Seminary in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1960.
The Preface mostly lists sources and gratitude to helpers. Sources include:
1. Unclassified material in the archives of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus made available by the Rev. Wilfred Schoenberg, S.J., Oregon Province Archivist. Two principal accounts are the “Litterae Annuae” and “Historia Domas,” which Black had to translate from Latin.
2. The Archives of the Diocese of Helena, which contains financial reports and baptismal records of the mission.
3. Montana Historical Society, esp. the microfilm copies of “Woodstock Letters,” a Jesuit publication.
4. “Indian and White in the Northwest” by the Rev. Lawrence Palladino, S.J., a book. This is available for download on the Internet.
5. “Catholic Activity among the Blackfeet Indians” by Sister Mary Dorothy Sullivan, F.C.S.P.
6. Personal interviews with people who were there.
CHAPTER I: HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
[This material takes a conventional white point of view “pre-post-modern”. The Blackfeet are seen as pitiful when they only had dogs, lifted to savage and warlike dominance with horses and guns (little discussion of hunting, much of war) but inclined to be dependent on great men -- at first chiefs and then white men. Historical facts come from Ewers.]
Blackfeet religion is “a mixture of pantheism and animism,” and involves a “Sun cult.” The people are seen as superstitious and attached to polygamy and whiskey. The tension between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Fur Companies is discussed and then the withdrawal of Hudson’s Bay in 1869 which left the Canadian prairies open to American whiskey traders until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police restored order in 1874. The word “squaw” is used, not as a compliment. Smallpox and the end of the buffalo are listed, followed by a period in which traders were welcome but not settlers.
First Blackfeet treaties and agreements are noted in 1853 and 1855. Major Alfred J. Vaughan is said to be one of the few decent Indian agents, but the fact that he was a Southerner meant that he left at the beginning of the Civil War. Then the Montana gold rush was on. Brother Van Orsdel arrived intending to be a missionary to the Indians but “the conduct of these whites was so detrimental that he felt compelled to turn his attention to them.” (Stella W. Brummit, Brother Van. (NY: Missionary Education Movement of the U.S. and Canada, 1919).
Though Black is sympathetic to the innocent victims of the Baker Massacre, he defines the actions of the young defiant Indians as “guerilla war,” which ended with the massacre. An intriguing side-note is that Malcolm Clark’s “niece, Mother Angela Lincoln, O.S.U., dedicated her life to the conversion of the Montana Indians shortly after she received the news of the death of her uncle, and became the first delegated Mother Superior of Holy Family Mission among the Blackfeet.” Her cousin, Helen Clark, was famous in her own right and “revered on the Blackfoot Reservation for her holiness and kindness.”
In 1870, in an attempt to prevent corruption, President Grant went to “faith-based” management of reservations and assigned the Blackfeet to Methodists, which they didn’t like. The idea didn’t work and in 1892 was abandoned.
After 1865 the Blackfeet reservation was diminished again and again, the borders constantly being moved inward, because of the greed of incoming ranchers and miners, with the compensation being uncertain annuities. Black discusses Agent Campbell with approval but notes the ultimate failure of his farming efforts. He says, “After the middle of the century, one can no longer speak of the Blackfeet as a nation, since in 1950 eighty-five percent of them were of mixed blood.” [Of course, the US “nation” was probably more “mixed blood” than that.]
The missionary found “that he had to clothe, feed and house the children without remuneration, that he had to estimate the reliability of each Indian promise, and that he had to oversee and often do much of the physical labor at the Mission.” Father Prando said, “After all the Indians are but children.”
CHAPTER II: CATHOLIC MISSIONARY ACTIVITY AMONG THE BLACKFEET
Some time shortly after 1820, the first Catholic missionaries were converted Iroquois who came from the St. Lawrence River to the Flathead. The Flatheads made four expeditions to St. Louis between 1830 and 1840 to beg for more missionaries. Protestants volunteered to come but were turned down because “they married, and...had neither black gowns nor crosses nor the great prayer (the Mass).” In 1833 the evangelization of the US Indians was assigned to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Father Peter DeSmet came to the Flatheads in 1840 and established St. Mary’s Mission, which was occasionally raided by Blackfeet, who took horses and “Christian Indian maidens.”
[Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet was born in 1801 in Belgium and died in 1873 at St. Louis. He was ordained in 1827 during a stay at St. Regis Seminary (1824-1830) but had to return to Belgium between 1833-1837 because of poor health. From then on he trekked all across the northwest, both the US and Canada, until by 1846, after an ordeal ending at Fort Edmonton, he could no longer. Then he concentrated on raising money and organizing support from St. Louis. In 1868 he went into the camp of Sitting Bull and talked him into the treaty of Fort Rice.]
The Blackfeet softened when an old chief was converted while staying with the Flatheads and also by noticing that the Flathead did much better in battle with a “blackrobe” along. In 1846 Fathers DeSmet and Point, S.J. went to Fort Lewis to negotiate peace between the mountain tribes and the Blackfeet.
[Father Point was born in France in 1799 and came to the U.S. in 1834, founding the College of St. Charles at Grand Coteau in Louisiana before beginning missionary work in 1841. In the fall of 1846 he came to the Blackfeet, staying over the winter, and then was sent north to Canadian Missions. He died in Quebec in 1868. He wrote and sketched throughout his life.]
By erecting a large lodge in the middle of the Blackfeet camp circle where he could teach classes and lead Mass, Father Point converted 27 adults and 640 children. He felt that all were respectful but balked at giving up polygamy. [This is before anthropology was able to explore the economics of having many wives, a benefit to both the women and the men who depended on their labor.] He was near Fort Lewis and had better luck getting the white men there to marry their Native wives.
“There was no priest among the Blackfeet from May 1847 to Summer 1859.” It was agent Vaughn who requested missionaries. Father Adrian Hoeken, S.J., and a Jesuit lay brother came to look over the situation in the summer of 1869. This was the period when the agency kept moving and the “Piegan War,” a guerilla war, was confusing everything. The Blackfeet were resisting the Jesuits.
The tide was turned by a young priest, Father Philip Rappagliosi, S.J., [Born in Rome in 1841. He spoke Blackfeet and was stationed at St. Peter’s.] a strikingly handsome young man who welcomed martyrdom in the service of conversion and partly died because of starvation with the Indians in 1877. He deeply impressed the Blackfeet.
Also inspired were three Roman Jesuits, Fathers Philip Canestrelli, Joseph Damiani, and Peter Prando, who were at St. Peter’s. Damiani and Prando were among the founders of the Holy Family MIssion. Prando managed to talk White Calf into repudiating three of his wives in order to convert. [Prando was born in Italy in 1845. He came to St. Peter’s in 1880, was with the Blackfeet for a while, but was sent to the Cheyenne and Crows with whom he is more identified. He died in 1906, which would be three years after White Calf.] He was optimistic and funny, very popular.
But he was locked into battle with John Young, the Methodist agent, “stiff, blunt and unbending, formal and abstemious, a type not likely to endear himself to the Indians...” [Helen West's description.] He was a reformer. [It has occurred to me that if he’d been able to morph the original Wesleyan Methodists “method” of group revival and support, he might have had better luck, but he was from a later period of the denomination imbued with middle-class American and Victorian standards.] Young’s career was ended -- in spite of his best efforts -- by the Starvation Winter when the buffalo disappeared and 600 Blackfeet starved. He was transferred out and, tactfully, Prando -- who had been an enemy of Young, was sent to the Crow reservation.
CHAPTER III: HOLY FAMILY MISSION IS FOUNDED
Some of the religious persons in this part of the story are:
Father Cataldo, who had much experience, was made superior general of the Rocky Mountain Missions in 1877. He is the founder of St. Aloysius Gonzaga University in Spokane. He resigned in 1893 and took charge of the Alaskan Missions. He died in Oregon in 1928.
Father Bougis, born in the Ardennes, France, in 1860. Came to the US to study philosophy at Woodstock College, Maryland, and then to St. Peter’s in 1885 to teach boys and learn Indian languages. He was at Holy Family between 1891 and 1895, then did mission work in Alaska and California. He came back as superior for the year 1911-1912), returned to California and died there in 1920.
Bishop Brondel, born in Belgium, was a pastor and Bishop in Washiington State before becoming Bishop of Helena on March 7, 1884. He died in 1903.
Father Damiani was single-handedly the superior of St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s (Gros Ventre and Assiniboines) and of Holy Family. Understandably he wore out and was sent for a rest to California until 1893 when he returned to Holy Family only.
Mother Catherine Drexel, born in Philadelphia in 1858 to a banking family, inherited five million dollars in 1885 (along with her sister Elizabeth) and devoted much of it to Indian MIssions. In 1889 Catharine joined the Sisters of Mercy and in 1891 founded her own order, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament devoted to Indians and Colored People. She died in 1955.
St. Peter’s was the earlier mission. Louis Riel, leader of the Red River Metis Rebellion taught there some time between 1875 and 1885, the year of the Rebellion. When he left, Father Bougis took his class: “seventeen Indian boys and eighteen half-breed boys.” They were taught catechism in Blackfeet and also received lessons in English, French and Latin.
In 1885 Father Cataldo asked permission to build a mission on the Blackfeet Reservation as well as others. Damiani came, persuaded many, and built a “quite ample” log church and a “rude building” for the religious to occupy. This was on Two Medicine River, not too far from the location of the Government Agency at that time. White Calf gave him part of his allotment so there would be land for a farm and school. In 1889, a grant of $14,000 came from the Drexel sisters, but it was necessary to wait another year until federal funds could be added, over the objections of the Indian Commissioner, T.J. Morgan, who thought there should be secular government boarding schools.
A long two-story frame building in two sections was constructed. (Boys were to be on one side, girls on the other.) Total capacity was one hundred students. In August 22, Father Damiani trekked by wagon from St. Peter’s to Holy Family, with provisions and three Ursuline nuns, to begin the classes in September. Father Tornielli came in a month to act as superior so Father Damiani could travel. Father Bougis described going on to the reservation to collect students, who returned crying. If children ran away, which many did, the agent cut off the family’s rations (the only source of food for many) until the student was returned. Father Bougis reported that the school “was considered the best Indian school in Montana.”
Lay brothers Thomas Devlin (Irish?) and Jerome Caldos, spent 1892 working at the mission, the same year Miss Drexel sent a herd of cows and steers and an irrigation ditch was dug from Two Medicine River in order to grow grain and vegetables.
In 1895 a new building for the boys was built of sandstone quarried from the adjacent cliffs, which had previously been used for buffalo jumps. The building was forty by sixty feet, three floors and a basement, and beautifully paneled inside with sliding doors so that classrooms could be consolidated into larger spaces. The high windows looked out on the Two Medicine flood plain, which ultimately undermined the foundations of the empty budling in 1964. Two scholastics, John Carroll and Augustine Dimier, came to care for the boys and live with them. By now there were five nuns who lived with the female students in the earlier building. In 1891 the wind blew the roof off. In 1895 a runaway boy froze to death.
Financially the mission was barely surviving. Sympathy for religious-based schools was fading and the school took a twenty percent cut in government money in 1896. The Willow Creek School near Browning had been built in 1892 as a Government boarding school. Fifty children who wanted to attend Holy Family were rejected and only sixty-seven accepted.
At the end of 1897 a fire destroyed the girls’ building. Mother Drexel financed a new sandstone building. Pneumonia and measles swept the students. The basement floor of the boys’ building flooded. Father Bandini, younger than Father Damiani, came as Superior to oversee the construction of the building. When he had finished the job and gone to Spokane, he died in three months, worn out. The two scholastics also declared a need to be transferred out “to recover their strength.”
In 1900 government aid was discontinued. Father Achilles Vasta, S.J., came for the summer of 1899, but in fall of 1900 Father Prando went to the Crow Reservation. The word picture painted by Mother Mary Amata Dunne, O.S.U., was of a horde of shocked, dirty and infested children brought into a situation of poverty almost equal to that in their homes, except that it was “civilized” poverty where they were asked to scrub in soapy water carried from the irrigation ditch and heated, and made to eat vegetables. According to her, hair was not cut and parents hovered to make sure. But if dirty buckskin could be smuggled out of sight, it was burned and replaced with “white man’s clothing.” One problem was persuading children to sleep in beds with sheets, though a shortage of furniture often meant sitting on the floor for classes. Her position is that the music (Jesuits “always had an organ and kept it in tune.”), the art and the beauty of the sacraments comforted both the students and the mostly Italian teachers for the hard work and poverty. She claims they were mostly warm enough but it was hard to dry clothes in the winter.
Chapter IV: “LIFE AT THE MISSION”
This chapter is rich with particulars. It is a vivid illustration of the determination of the Italian Jesuits to continue the old battle of the agriculturists (equated with civilization) versus the hunters without resorting to fratricide as in the case of Cain and Abel. They were acting out of confidence born of 10,000 years of inventing farming, which ironically was not much different at the mission from that in Biblical times. But this was not a Biblical climate.
Hugh Black quotes at length Father Prando’s description of the weather. (Translated from the Italian in the Jan. 6, 1900, “Letters of the Province of Turin,” by Dr. Anthony Chiuminatto, College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.) I shall requote, partly to convey what the weather was like and partly to illustrate that Father Prando was an educated, eloquent, and sophisticated man.
“The climate in the country inhabited by the Piegans is rather severe, and for him who does not have good lungs it is better that he stay away from it. The Summer is short, and the passage from the latter to Winter and from Winter to Summer is almost without Autumn or Spring. The land lends itself but little to agriculture; hay is cut once a year and the maintenance of life is in raising cattle.
“The winter is severe and the cold often reaches 25 or 30 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit thermometer; sometimes it goes to 40 degrees and once it went to 50 degrees below. From the end of December to the end of April the ground is almost always covered with snow. The North wind is generally accompanied by snow in Winter and by rain in Summer; sometimes the West winds are so strong that they impede travel, and in Summer they bring big storms with lightning, thunder and hail, and in Winter, the blizzard...
“When it has ceased to snow and the sky has cleared, the West wind rises and sweeps the snow away in a curious phenomenon. The wind begins up in the mountains and one first sees it come down the mountains in long waves of white foam, then becoming one billow after another, two or three meters high; the mountains seem to be rejoicing...
“As the wind continues to gather strength, the snow rises on high and forms huge clouds which rise higher than the mountains, and in the distance one sees that the wind is blowing on the mountain tops; as the wind comes down, the tops of the hills are the first to be swept clean, and in the valleys, when the wind is not too violent, one sees the snow move along the ground at from a half to a whole meter in height.
“As the whirlwind increases, the snow is carried away in a horizontal line to a greater height, and traveling against the wind, one experiences much difficulty because one’s face and eyes are struck by these very minute crystals which hurt in the manner of punctures by needles. Too, when the wind is a fury, it is impossible to travel because it blinds one; and even though the sun is shining, one cannot see the road. And this is a kind of blizzard with clear sky.
“These blizzards sometimes come up so suddenly that many people are caught on the road and everyone runs for the nearest shelter, if any is to be found. And it is a thing of absolute necessity to have strong horses, and a buggy equally strong, otherwise accidents of a serious nature can occur.”
The nuns and girls maintained forty stoves in their building. They were kindled at 4AM. There were times that the wood nearly ran out. During Communion Mass in Heart Butte one morning, the cold metal chalice froze to the lips of Father Egon Mallman.
Boys were separated from girls in dormitories, dining rooms, classes, and at Mass, with the exception of school programs or all-school picnics. Someone supervised the children at all times. Some of the students were over fifteen. In Spring things could get “effervescent.” Students constantly ran away, were whipped for it, or expelled.
Two classes for boys, older and younger, and two classes for girls were taught. After school there were chores on this working model farm. For recreation the boys took to baseball after a slow start, and the girls fell in love with the phonograph, dancing to “Wild Irish Rose” until, says Black, “even the Irish nuns were satiated.” The boys had a good band, directed by Brother Nicolaus Fox and later by Mr. Dittner, until about 1927. The girls had a small string orchestra.
The community attended programs. If anyone objected to the constant instruction, catechism, devotions, Masses, feasts and so on, it was certainly not recorded here. Blackfeet love and respect religion of all sorts.
Three Jesuit fathers stand out in this period.
Father Aloysius Soer was born in Holland in 1853. Inspired by Father DeSmet’s letters, he came in 1887 and served Nez Perce for nineteen years, rising to Superior. He was at Holy Family from 1905 until 1932, the year of his death and about the time the mission closed, and all the whole time he yearned for the Nez Perce! No one could easily understand his words because of his heavy Dutch accent, but it was said that “just to see him preach was sermon enough.” He was noted for invariably visiting the sick, even on one occasion when he had to cross a stream with his clothes and religious materials on his head. He was the historian of the mission and left many letters.
Father Thomas Grant was born in NYC in 1870. He was orphaned and much of the time grew up in Jesuit boarding schools. He began as a missionary to the North Cheyenne, then spent time on the Crow reservation -- his favorite -- and came to Holy Family as superior from 1915 to 1929, when he returned to the Crow until his death in 1929. He is credited with averting a Cheyenne war in 1894. He had “wry neck” which forced him to hold his head on one side, like a bird taking a closer look. He could be very strict but was also a good story teller.
Father Jerome Galdos came for a year in 1892, then returned in 1909 and stayed for 25 years. More than any of the others he fits the idea of the wise, white-bearded, gentle and self-sacrificing priest. Once when pneumonia flattened the teachers and most of the students, he both taught classes and nursed the ill, sleepless and cheerful. He was the primary manager of the farm, along with a hired farmer and half-a-dozen local helpers.
CHAPTER V: EDUCATIONAL GOALS
The big paradigm for Holy Family, as explicitly stated by Father DeSmet, was to repeat the success of the Jesuits in Paraguay, where they had managed (with huge subsidies from Spain and Portugal) to separate the Indians and completely reshape them, right down to dictating their marriage partners. The US did not work out the same. Reasons included lack of government money, inability to separate the children from the families and communities who denied and mocked what they learned, and the general low quality of the floating opportunistic white men all around them. [These factors persist.]
The Flatheads were converted with less trouble and forced into assimilation anyway because their reservation was a checkerboard with white land. Commissioner Morgan proposed college preparation for Indians, saying education should “lift the Indian students into so high a plane of thought and aspiration as to render the life of the camp intolerable to them... There is urgent need among them for a class a leaders of thought, lawyers, physicians, etc...” [This is just now happening.] But the government position settled on the idea of educating Indians to be good wage-earners in an industrial world. [Well, a rural version of industrialism, maybe.]
Since the government decided to build its own schools and not subsidize the Jesuits, they were free to go their own way, which was exemplified by St. Ignatius:
1. to save the child’s soul by instruction and formation
2. to make available to the tribe the sacraments and Christian instruction
3. to make the students capable of rearing a good Christian family on the reservation
4. to raise the moral and intellectual level of Blackfeet life to that of a civilized Christian country.
[The devilishness of these goals has been the Jesuit conviction -- and they were not the only ones to think this way -- that they were right and thus entitled to throttle all other less-sanctified systems of thought. Post-modern, post-colonial criticism has exploited that blind spot into a world-wide philosophical system with major impact on Native Americans. The fury of the criticism has captured many of the NA intellectuals.]
Special attention was given to the “refinement” of the girls with much value given to neatness, cleanliness, maintenance of the home in cooking, laundry, and needlework including beading and working with buckskin. [These lessons went deep. The old mission-educated Blackfeet ladies that I knew in the Sixties insisted on high standards in their homes and person, according to nun’s ideas of what those were.]
Classroom standards for the basics were high enough that after the first state tests in 1928, the Superintendent of Education wrote them a letter of congratulation. The classrooms were primarily English-speaking but hymns and prayers might be translated to Blackfeet.
The Ursuline nuns were financed entirely by the Jesuits, but the nuns had exclusive authority over their own affairs and classroom practices. The exception was that the superior could ask a nun to leave or request another to be sent. The Reverend Mother Amadeus was governor of the Ursulines until 1900. She loved and believed in Indians.
An underlying assumption not often considered is that the religious persons considered the mission to be a real home, and wanted to include the children in that. Patronizing but nurturing, this assumption leaned heavily on moral rules which included hard work, being on time, keeping one’s word, and so on. The teachers felt they had the entitlement of actual parents, and therefore were vulnerable to all rejection, anger, and failure to perform in the same way as biological parents. When the students went to their biological homes, even for a month, and were pulled back into the original orbit, the religious persons were wracked over the need to punish the behavior without rejecting the individual, especially in the case of girls.
Father Soer wrote to a Superior that if the mission closed “the doors of protection to them” it would “occasion future sins of the flesh; in fact, in many cases to allow their eternal ruin.
“For what happens if they stay home? Scandalized by sin and feeling themselves abandoned, they surrender to the passions of the flesh and seek to enter marriage. Meanwhile, having lost purity, they will have relations with many, because temptations, unfortunately, abound on the Reservation, between those married as well as those unmarried. Very quickly, in the manner of children... governed by the devil, they finally contract marriage. Such marriages are easily upset by the devil, and consequently there are many adulterous unions and cohabitations on the Reservation.” [And that was before cable TV.]
By 1930 things had settled down and vacations were more frequent.
Here’s the beginning of a story relevant to Father Soer’s opinion. It’s told by Mary Ground in “Grass Woman Stories” which is available through the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Mary was always a defender of the Holy Family Mission, though she was also an active practitioner of the old-time religious ways. The book is one sponsored by the schools, a small stapled pamphlet with original drawings and a photo of Mary.
“This happened in June of 1896. I was at Holy Family Mission and it was just before vacation. I used to interpret for the Indians who couldn’t speak English. First thing, old Brocky came in to the Sister. He had on an old blanket coat and he was crying, so the Mother Superior called me. She brought the old man into the sitting room where I was and he could hardly talk, the way he was crying.
“She asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’"
It turns out that the old man’s daughter, who was married, had attracted a lover who killed the husband and took the wife. The old man wanted the mission carpenters to make a casket for the husband, his son-in-law.
“Father Damiani and Father Prando were at the Mission then. The fathers had their own carpenter.
“She [Mother Superior] told us to take him [the old man] over to Father Damiani. I told the father, “Old Brocky here wants to know if you could help him out and fix a coffin for his son-in-law, who got killed. Frank Double Runner killed him.” Frank’s two brothers were attending Holy Family Mission and Frank had one of them called out to help him, using the ruse of rounding up horses. The three of them hung around in the cliffs by the mission and finally went up towards Browning, by Willow Creek School. The brother pretended that he was going down there to get food, but betrayed the adulterer and the woman, who were finally shot and buried in one big coffin together.
It’s clear that schools were centers of action, places with resources, family members and authority figures. (The Methodist missionary Matson went out to reason with Frank Double Runner but after his hat was shot off, he withdrew.) I expect one could find similar stories in Iraq today or even in urban ghettoes. In times and places of disorder and transition, religious schools offer limited refuge.
CHAPTER VI: MISSIONARY ACTIVITY
Parallel and interwoven with the mission school was the work of converting and sustaining the Blackfeet to Catholicism. Two big forces worked against the diligent priests:
1. The practice of attributing every subsequent tragedy and misbehavior to the conversion -- and there were ALWAYS tragedies and transgressions in those tumultuous days.
2. The idea that if a priest were to be called to a deathbed, he would pray for the death of the person. [This is not too different from the media-created notion that if the priest arrives to give last rites, that means there is no hope.] In 1914 Paul Calf-Looking Senior waited a little too long and died without rites.
The tangles of marriage -- stranded between old-time patterns and Catholic modern morality -- ended in confusion and rationalization for bad behavior. If one family began to get ahead, all the ne’er do wells showed up to live with them, which was hard on the children. Then there were the predatory whites who circled the reservation like coyotes, offering whisky.
Here’s an interesting quote, a footnote in the manuscript: “In 1876, Father Constantine Scollen, O.M.I., a Canadian missionary among the Blackfeet, wrote: “The Crees have always looked upon the white man as a friend, or, to use their own language, as a brother. They have never been afraid of him, nor have they given him any cause to be afraid of them. The Blackfeet have acted somewhat differently; they have regarded the white man as a demi-god, far superior to themselves in intelligence, capable of doing them good or evil, according as he might be well or ill-disposed towards them, unscrupulous in his dealings with others, and consequently a person to be flattered, feared and shunned, and even injured, whenever this could be done with impunity.” This is from Alexander Morris, “The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, and Keewa-tin.” Toronto: Belfords, Clark and Co., 1880, p. 248.
Efforts to preach and offer mass really rather demanded demi-god strength. Distances were long, weather was extreme, horsepower was from real horses, places to stay were uncomfortable, and the priest had to have learned to speak Blackfeet. Father Bougis visited seven camps: “Big Nose, Under Mink,Many (Merry) People, Three Suns, Three Bears, Wolf Tail, Fast Buffalo Horse” and netted twelve baptisms.
In 1895 Prando replaced Bougis and fared a bit better. He had a little cart and gave out holy cards and medals. Attending every distribution of rations, he took the opportunity for confessions, baptisms, blessing of marriages. One day he was walking along the Two Medicine road when a wagon came along driven by a half-breed woman with a baby. Taking the initiative, he persuaded her to bring the baby over to the river so it could be baptized. When they returned to the wagon, there turned out to be a second mother and child hiding in the wagon, so he escorted her back down for a second baptism.
In addition to the 2,000 Indians spread over 3,000 miles, Bougis and Prando served the white settlers iin Dupuyer and Choteau. Prando built a church in Dupuyer. Bishop Brendel, having mercy, sent a diocesan priest for the towns.
In 1901 Father Prando wore out and the Rev. John B. Carroll, S.J. took his place. Then Father Soer served until 1932 when Father Robert Kane came. When there was an automobile, Sam Choate would drive Father Soer around.
Father Kane learned to drive the car himself. He had many adventures, including one with Ted Pendergrass -- a bodacious cowboy -- who got him stalled in the middle of a Two Medicine river crossing. Nevertheless, at the destination was such a large number of Indians that Father Kane founded a mission station he called “Upper Two Medicine Mission.” On his way there one winter day he was caught in a blizzard bad enough to paralyze travel. He had two boys with him. The Mission authorities were so worried that they sent out the Mission truck, but it got stuck, too. Then they sent the tractor but even that was soon stuck. Two days later the Indian Agent sent out fifty riders to find Father Kane and the boys, who were located in a cabin where they had taken shelter. No people were there, but wood and provisions.
Eventually congregations were formed in Heart Butte and Browning. Mr. Brown began to solicit contributions to build a church. People gave him animal furs, livestock and other valuables which he auctioned for $1,200. In 1904 the new St. Michael’s Church was constructed for $1,500. Father Carroll was sent to Alaska, so Father Soer served Heart Butte and Browning. As more government schools were built, Father Carrolll was recalled from Alaska to live in Browning. He built a lean-to onto the church where he cut his own wood, did his own cooking, and walked five miles out to Boarding School to give Mass and instruction. Progress was inch-by-inch.
When the first Protestant minister, Edward Dutchen, came in 1895 he bluntly told Father Bougis to get out. The boarding school became the scene of a wrestling match over who would instruct the children. By 1912 the Catholics won. The Jesuits asked the Provincial Superior to take over the northern part of the reservation. The Rev. Thomas A. Daley came, but didn’t speak Blackfeet, so had to help from Father Soer until 1920.
In Heart Butte, more traditional, a church was built and blown down by the high winds twice. In 1910, someone who read an appeal for funds in The Indian Sentinel sent $500 which was enough to get the church of St. Peter Clavaer built. The first Mass was celebrated on August 13, 1911, and the church became the center of a cluster of cabins. In 1933 Father Hannon came. Then in 1935 the Reverend Egon Mallman, S.J., who had to pick up the slack for the whole south half of the reservation when Holy Family closed in 1938. He was helped somewhat by two lay catechists, Eli Guardipee and Sam Choate who taught and acted as interpreters. Children were taught in the day schools scattered around the reservation.
Sometimes Father Soer was invited to Havre where the Reverend Francis Sansone, S.J., served three classic German and Bohemian congregations. He was always delighted and enjoyed speaking German again. In 1932 Civilian Conservation Corps camps were set up at Many Glacier, Babb, on Sherburne Lake and at St. Mary. Father Kane served them.
A few supernatural apparitions were recorded. Helen Clark, daughter of Malcolm Clark, appeared to Florence Magee who lay dying. Florence didn’t know that Helen had just died, but described her clothing, which was exactly the same as what Helen Clark wore in her coffin.
The exemplary members of the congregations included Percy DeWolfe, Joseph Tatsey, George Kipp and Eli Guardipee.
By 1934, when anthropology had advanced enough to explain Blackfeet religion a bit better, Father Jean Lessard, O.M.I., a well-known missiologist and missionary, said, “We should never have set aside all their pagan customs... And now, it is uphill work... We have to be careful because if we resurrect any of their paganism, it is so close to their heart, they will go all the way.” But the truth is that the Blackfeet simply embraced both ways.
Chapter VII: ADMINISTRATION OF HOLY FAMILY MISSION: 1900-1930.
The Jesuit Father Superior in charge of the Mission had absolute authority over nearly everything. The other side of that power was total responsibility for everything, including the weather -- at least in terms of preparation. He was the peacemaker, the personnel department, the fund raiser, and so on. Black notes “the extreme sensitivity of the Blackfeet...often too ready to listen to their children’s stories of mistreatment...necessitating the dismissal of the teacher in question.” [This is still common today.] The Father Superior was hard-pressed to find good teachers, esp. among lay people. [This is also common today, except for the increasing number of Blackfeet teachers.] The problem wasn’t just in the classroom. When the cook went off to become a religious, in the next year a series of eight cooks went through the kitchen -- including periods of time when the brothers or nuns had to pinch-hit.
The highest responsiblity was for the souls of the children, but then next was physical safety: enough warmth, clothes, food and health care. He also had to run interference with the government, the white community (tradesmen who might be asked for credit) and the tribe, both formally through the council and informally. Because the old-time band tradition was to depend upon the strongest leaders to help the weak and poor, the Father was interpreted as the “chief” and petitioned for all sorts of supplies and remedies for grievances. Sometimes he just didn’t have the means and then had to defend against the bitterness of the disappointed and thefts by those who took matters into their own hands. Besides everyday maintenance, a chief was expected to provide for feasts which traditionally involved gifts.
Maintenance of the property took much attention, energy and funds. Buying supplies and selling surplus crops or livestock were also his responsibility.
In 1904 France exiled the Brothers of Christian Instruction of Lamennsis, who offered Holy Family two teachers, Brothers Salvinus and Rene. Salvinus, who was especially gifted, stayed for seven years as teacher, choirmaster and sacristan. The two men left at the same time that Rocky Boy’s people were sent to the Blackfeet Reservation and Fort Shaw closed its school, creating an overpopulation crisis.
Charles Owens and his family came to Browning and made friends with Father Carroll, who felt Charles was God-sent. Charles’ father and brother were experienced farmers and took charge of the farm while Charles taught classes, but then he left to become a Jesuit.
Other teachers described include:
A nameless big fat German man who lost his temper all the time, refused to work in the fields and had no discipline.
Raymond Philibert from St. Louis who was an inexperienced teacher but proved to have a knack for it and who was especially devoted to the Sacraments.
William Mellen from Drummon, Montana.
William Van der Wansen, a former lay brother of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had done mission work in the Americas, gone back to Belgium, and then left the order so he could return. Described as “hard working and cheerful,” he was teacher, sacristan and choir director.
In 1920 William Shepherd, S.J., came from Alaska for a year.
In 1922 the Superior, Father Grant, had to teach.
In view of the current debate over water rights, I will quote at length the paragraphs about water rights:
“The superiors at Holy Family were involved in a dispute from time to time during these years with the Government over water rights. With permission of the Government, Holy Family had dug, at its own cost, an irrigation ditch in 1892. The first canal which the Government constructed in the Two Medicine Valley was a partial failure, and Holy Family granted the Government the use of its ditch for some distance down the valley. Then, in 1908, the Agency dug a new ditch whose intake was a short distance above that of the Mission canal. Since this lowered the river level below the Mission intake during the dry season, Holy Family at this time obtained permission to use water from the Government ditch. This agreement was not formalized in writing.
“In 1918, the United States Reclamation Service raised the question of mission water rights by billing Holy Family at a rate of $1.00 an acre per year. Father Grant replied with a vigorous protest. After recalling the history of the irrigation ditches, he argued that since the Indians were not charged for the use of Government water [sic], it was unjust to demand payment from an institution supporting their children. He prepared to defend his rights, and had gone to an irrigation meeting in Seville (near Cut Bank) to do so, when he received word from the Mission Bureau that Holy Family was exempt from charge.
“The problem came up again in 1931. At this time the Society assigned the matter of the water rights for its Montana missions to the Rev. Francis C. Dillon, S.J., a veteran ‘troubleshooter,’ and in a short time the question was settled in favor of the Mission.”
A major part of administration is the careful keeping of records [a part that both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Tribal Council notoriously shirked] and these religious folks conscientiously maintained a daily diary, an “Historia Domus” and yearly reports on the state of the Mission and its progress. Fund-raising was constant, much fortified by Mother Thomas, O.S.U, in charge of the food and personal needs of the priests themselves but devoting every spare minute to shameless begging letters.
Nevertheless, money kept shrinking. At first Mother Drexel could help. Almost nothing came from local parish funds. From 1895-1905 were identified as the “lean years,” when government support withdrew. Father Damiani was superior for most of this time except for ten months in Brazil (1899-1900) when Father Achilles Vasta, S.J. took charge. For a while Father Damiani was the only priest on the reservation. He left for Alaska in 1905.
At about that time some tribal resources began to be available and at the time of allotment, the Mission Bureau was given title to the 320 acres of mission land. In 1909 the land was exempted from taxes and back taxes were refunded, which was used to pay debts, make improvements, and buy a bit more land.
Between 1900 and 1907 Brother Thomas Campbell and Brother Roch Terragno took on the cooking and chores and the Lamennais Brothers provided teachers. Father Damiani retuned from Alaska in 1912 (now over seventy) and stayed until 1915, when Father Grant became Superior. Remarkably, it is reported that he “skillfully directed mission affairs through the fourteen years with scarcely a problem or extraordinary happening. He was careful to avoid all unnecessary conflicts with the Agency or white interests, and , despite the childishness of many of his parishioners, he maintained universal good will toward the Mission.”
Donations began to come in after 1915. $1,000 was used to add a laundry room to the girls’ school, build a small barn, paint the interiors of both schools, and construct an ice-house for meat. In 1918 Father Soer’s brother, Mr. Arnold Soer, sent enough money for a new Ford automobile and in 1919 he sent another $470 to keep it in repair on the rez roads. Father Grant bought 280 acres of grazing from Paul Calf Looking, and in 1922 another 280 acres for $840.
The winter of 1919-20 was unusually severe, following a drought. There was little hay and Father Grant had to borrow to pay for coal and feed. 86 of the mission cows died, as well as other livestock. Desperate ranchers around him helped themselves to the mission hay. Father’s neck, not improved by stress, forced him to go to Minnesota for treatment.
In the summer of 1921 the sills and walls of the church were raised and several farm buildings were renovated. Still, Father Grant reported that the mission assets were greater than the debts. Agent Campbell’s “Five Year Plan,” which emphasized farming and organized granges, was very helpful to the mission where the Superior was also the “president” of that grange. An electric light plant was installed for $2,000. Several “friends” of the mission gave enough money to put a bell in the church tower and paint the exterior. Other farm buildings were painted and spirits were up, but there was a steady small erosion of the Mission.
CH. VIII: THE YEARS OF DECISION: 1930-35
Father Ignatius Dumbeck, a young man, arrived in July, 1929, to give the Mission nuns their annual retreat in August, to take a look around, and (he rightly suspected) to become the next Superior, a task which he didn’t feel he was up to. Everything had gradually slid downhill: buildings were leaking and cracking, the kitchen stoves had been repaired to the limit, the well was condemned, and the agricultural machinery was worn out. In his report he used the word “ramshackle.” Ten years earlier Father Grant had seen that white men were moving in on the reservation and that the survival of the mission was a gamble.
What Black calls “tribal money” -- which may have been Bureau of Indian Affairs controlled money -- was dwindling. Bishop Finnigan of Helena preached back east and begged donations. An appeal was made to the tribe, but a government inspector used Catch 22: no money could be allotted until they had improved the place. In one last burst of optimism, Dumbeck was elected to make the “Hail Mary” pass. An appeal was made to the Marquette League for renovation funds, which supplied $11,000.
Father Grant figured the buildings of Holy Family were worth $20,000 and the land $6,320, but the running expenses that same year (1928-29) were $18,500. He spent the Marquette League funds thus:
1. A used power plant from the Browning School Board at $50.
2. Weather-proofing of doors and windows, begun by Brother Jacob McGuire and finished by a Browning carpenter: $975.
3. Lumber for farm buildings directly from Montana mills at $18 per 1,000 in carload lots delivered to Browning: moving the barn away from the river and adding to it; building hog and chicken houses, fencing for a dairy herd of six cows.
4. A new hay mower with a sickle attachment, a Caterpillar #15 tractor, and some other machinery purchased at discount for a total of $2,692. The Caterpillar alone cost $1,475 but paid for itself in three months of work.
5. Repair of the roof on the boys’ building at $664.
6. Insulation of the dormitories.
7. Repainting of the interiors.
8. A new Majestic cooking stove for $398.
9. A dish-washing machine, a new oven and a bread mixer.
10. A new well and 600 feet of 2 inch pipe at a depth of six feet to get below the frost line.
11. Sewer upgrade to meet government specs.
From other sources came funds for a “Magic Marvel” flour mill so whole wheat bread could be produced and sold. Produce, esp. cabbage and carrots, were sold as well as beef, the principal source of profit. Bishop Finnigan went out of his way to provide support by visiting, helping Father Dunbeck study plans, and soliciting money. They managed to cut expenses by $4,000 and to find $3,700 from the tribe and the Indian Commission. In 1931, Father Dunbeck figured that the stock and garden had yielded a profit of $5,700 as well as supplying the Mission kitchen.
Then trouble came from the Two Medicine River, which was eating away at the bottomland in spite of a retaining wall built by Father Grant. Using that new Caterpillar, an old riverbed was deepened and the river was diverted into it. Cost was $500. Dunbeck also constructed an underground water reservoir up the hill (in preference to a water tower, which could freeze) at a cost of $5,000, paid for through Bishop Finnigan. The worn out windmill that pumped the water into the tank had to be replaced.
All this was done by 1931, but then Bishop Finnigan died. Father Soer had also recently died. In 1930 Brother Caldos was permanently incapacitated by pneumonia. The auto also died. More land was needed, back wages needed payment, leases demanded money. Dunbeck mortgaged the mission livestock in 1933. Under the strain, he began to fail himself.
In early June, 1934, hail damaged the buildings and smashed the garden and grain fields. Most of the windows were broken out and the roofs were ruined. The Most Rev. Ralph Hayes, then Bishop of Helena wrote: “It was sad to see the ravaging force of the storm, which lasted but fifteen minutes. A large field of alfalfa would have been ready for the cutting within a week; ... large fields of wheat and oats and barley have simple disappeared from view; potato fields and truck gardens beaten flat to the ground and ruined for the year. All this is a most serious loss to the Mission. Under the most favorable conditions, the financial problem of the Mission is almost hopeless, and the only solution lies in the fact that the Mission is able to supply... all the flour and vegetables of the children, and the grain required for the cattle, from its own fields. With crops destroyed for the year, a very serious problem is presented.”
Bishop Hayes and the Marquette League helped to repair the roofs ($940) and replace 300 panes of glass, but Father Dunbeck collapsed in July. Bishop Hayes reorganized the classes so that all would be taught by nuns, a cheaper source of labor. The Department of the Interior promised $100 for each of 15 of the 35 orphans at the Mission, but then said the state of the buildings was not good enough to house students.
Father John Prange, S.J., came to be the new superior. Bishop Hughes died and was replaced by Joseph M. Gilmore. Reverend John B. Tennelly became the new head of the Mission Board. They were the last team to struggle to save the Mission and they lost.
Ch. IX. CONCLUSIONS
Black notes the style difference between the early priests who had such confidence in God and their own spirituality, as compared to the newer men who dealt with the practicalities of poverty and politics. It’s hard to know what factors in what proportions undermined and destroyed the Mission. But it’s even more impossible to know how much good was done in those arduous years of effort and self-denial.
What Black does NOT address is the accusation that J.L. Sherburne [NOT J.H., his father] -- possibly deliberately -- was the party who foreclosed on the Mission. This man has been so thoroughly attacked that his family is highly defensive and not all of them were in sympathy with what he did anyway.
Also, Black does not frame the end of the Mission with the worldwide Depression sweeping the globe. (In the Thirties all the Unitarian congregations in Montana collapsed.) As recorded in the Foley Report, the young, old and vulnerable of the reservation were starving again, as they had when the buffalo ended. People everywhere were dispersed and lost, especially in the West, and many High-Line communities were devastated.
The other personal observation I cannot resist contributing is that people like Mary Ground became anchors for the religious revival of the Old Time Blackfeet ways in spite of all those catechism lessons and Holy Masses. I don’t consider this a failure. After all, being Bundle Keepers never prevents anyone from attending Mass today. Conscientious men like Louis Plenty Treaty who responded to Campbell’s plans for farming were also active in the Horn Society long after others had forgotten there was such a thing.
Also, those old ladies the nuns intended to make “refined” as girls became order-keepers in their own families and their communities. It wasn’t until the reservation was opened to alcohol that many women began to drink with the consequent damage to their children, both physically and spiritually. In the Sixties the worst threat one could make to a child was “I’m going to tell your grandmother!” Very often, grandmother got their attention with a stick, just as the nuns had. Pride and discipline were kept alive.
Lately it has been fashionable to hate and blame the Mission schools, but perhaps that’s too easy.
by Hugh M. Black, B.A.
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Saint Paul Seminary in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1960.
The Preface mostly lists sources and gratitude to helpers. Sources include:
1. Unclassified material in the archives of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus made available by the Rev. Wilfred Schoenberg, S.J., Oregon Province Archivist. Two principal accounts are the “Litterae Annuae” and “Historia Domas,” which Black had to translate from Latin.
2. The Archives of the Diocese of Helena, which contains financial reports and baptismal records of the mission.
3. Montana Historical Society, esp. the microfilm copies of “Woodstock Letters,” a Jesuit publication.
4. “Indian and White in the Northwest” by the Rev. Lawrence Palladino, S.J., a book. This is available for download on the Internet.
5. “Catholic Activity among the Blackfeet Indians” by Sister Mary Dorothy Sullivan, F.C.S.P.
6. Personal interviews with people who were there.
CHAPTER I: HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
[This material takes a conventional white point of view “pre-post-modern”. The Blackfeet are seen as pitiful when they only had dogs, lifted to savage and warlike dominance with horses and guns (little discussion of hunting, much of war) but inclined to be dependent on great men -- at first chiefs and then white men. Historical facts come from Ewers.]
Blackfeet religion is “a mixture of pantheism and animism,” and involves a “Sun cult.” The people are seen as superstitious and attached to polygamy and whiskey. The tension between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Fur Companies is discussed and then the withdrawal of Hudson’s Bay in 1869 which left the Canadian prairies open to American whiskey traders until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police restored order in 1874. The word “squaw” is used, not as a compliment. Smallpox and the end of the buffalo are listed, followed by a period in which traders were welcome but not settlers.
First Blackfeet treaties and agreements are noted in 1853 and 1855. Major Alfred J. Vaughan is said to be one of the few decent Indian agents, but the fact that he was a Southerner meant that he left at the beginning of the Civil War. Then the Montana gold rush was on. Brother Van Orsdel arrived intending to be a missionary to the Indians but “the conduct of these whites was so detrimental that he felt compelled to turn his attention to them.” (Stella W. Brummit, Brother Van. (NY: Missionary Education Movement of the U.S. and Canada, 1919).
Though Black is sympathetic to the innocent victims of the Baker Massacre, he defines the actions of the young defiant Indians as “guerilla war,” which ended with the massacre. An intriguing side-note is that Malcolm Clark’s “niece, Mother Angela Lincoln, O.S.U., dedicated her life to the conversion of the Montana Indians shortly after she received the news of the death of her uncle, and became the first delegated Mother Superior of Holy Family Mission among the Blackfeet.” Her cousin, Helen Clark, was famous in her own right and “revered on the Blackfoot Reservation for her holiness and kindness.”
In 1870, in an attempt to prevent corruption, President Grant went to “faith-based” management of reservations and assigned the Blackfeet to Methodists, which they didn’t like. The idea didn’t work and in 1892 was abandoned.
After 1865 the Blackfeet reservation was diminished again and again, the borders constantly being moved inward, because of the greed of incoming ranchers and miners, with the compensation being uncertain annuities. Black discusses Agent Campbell with approval but notes the ultimate failure of his farming efforts. He says, “After the middle of the century, one can no longer speak of the Blackfeet as a nation, since in 1950 eighty-five percent of them were of mixed blood.” [Of course, the US “nation” was probably more “mixed blood” than that.]
The missionary found “that he had to clothe, feed and house the children without remuneration, that he had to estimate the reliability of each Indian promise, and that he had to oversee and often do much of the physical labor at the Mission.” Father Prando said, “After all the Indians are but children.”
CHAPTER II: CATHOLIC MISSIONARY ACTIVITY AMONG THE BLACKFEET
Some time shortly after 1820, the first Catholic missionaries were converted Iroquois who came from the St. Lawrence River to the Flathead. The Flatheads made four expeditions to St. Louis between 1830 and 1840 to beg for more missionaries. Protestants volunteered to come but were turned down because “they married, and...had neither black gowns nor crosses nor the great prayer (the Mass).” In 1833 the evangelization of the US Indians was assigned to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Father Peter DeSmet came to the Flatheads in 1840 and established St. Mary’s Mission, which was occasionally raided by Blackfeet, who took horses and “Christian Indian maidens.”
[Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet was born in 1801 in Belgium and died in 1873 at St. Louis. He was ordained in 1827 during a stay at St. Regis Seminary (1824-1830) but had to return to Belgium between 1833-1837 because of poor health. From then on he trekked all across the northwest, both the US and Canada, until by 1846, after an ordeal ending at Fort Edmonton, he could no longer. Then he concentrated on raising money and organizing support from St. Louis. In 1868 he went into the camp of Sitting Bull and talked him into the treaty of Fort Rice.]
The Blackfeet softened when an old chief was converted while staying with the Flatheads and also by noticing that the Flathead did much better in battle with a “blackrobe” along. In 1846 Fathers DeSmet and Point, S.J. went to Fort Lewis to negotiate peace between the mountain tribes and the Blackfeet.
[Father Point was born in France in 1799 and came to the U.S. in 1834, founding the College of St. Charles at Grand Coteau in Louisiana before beginning missionary work in 1841. In the fall of 1846 he came to the Blackfeet, staying over the winter, and then was sent north to Canadian Missions. He died in Quebec in 1868. He wrote and sketched throughout his life.]
By erecting a large lodge in the middle of the Blackfeet camp circle where he could teach classes and lead Mass, Father Point converted 27 adults and 640 children. He felt that all were respectful but balked at giving up polygamy. [This is before anthropology was able to explore the economics of having many wives, a benefit to both the women and the men who depended on their labor.] He was near Fort Lewis and had better luck getting the white men there to marry their Native wives.
“There was no priest among the Blackfeet from May 1847 to Summer 1859.” It was agent Vaughn who requested missionaries. Father Adrian Hoeken, S.J., and a Jesuit lay brother came to look over the situation in the summer of 1869. This was the period when the agency kept moving and the “Piegan War,” a guerilla war, was confusing everything. The Blackfeet were resisting the Jesuits.
The tide was turned by a young priest, Father Philip Rappagliosi, S.J., [Born in Rome in 1841. He spoke Blackfeet and was stationed at St. Peter’s.] a strikingly handsome young man who welcomed martyrdom in the service of conversion and partly died because of starvation with the Indians in 1877. He deeply impressed the Blackfeet.
Also inspired were three Roman Jesuits, Fathers Philip Canestrelli, Joseph Damiani, and Peter Prando, who were at St. Peter’s. Damiani and Prando were among the founders of the Holy Family MIssion. Prando managed to talk White Calf into repudiating three of his wives in order to convert. [Prando was born in Italy in 1845. He came to St. Peter’s in 1880, was with the Blackfeet for a while, but was sent to the Cheyenne and Crows with whom he is more identified. He died in 1906, which would be three years after White Calf.] He was optimistic and funny, very popular.
But he was locked into battle with John Young, the Methodist agent, “stiff, blunt and unbending, formal and abstemious, a type not likely to endear himself to the Indians...” [Helen West's description.] He was a reformer. [It has occurred to me that if he’d been able to morph the original Wesleyan Methodists “method” of group revival and support, he might have had better luck, but he was from a later period of the denomination imbued with middle-class American and Victorian standards.] Young’s career was ended -- in spite of his best efforts -- by the Starvation Winter when the buffalo disappeared and 600 Blackfeet starved. He was transferred out and, tactfully, Prando -- who had been an enemy of Young, was sent to the Crow reservation.
CHAPTER III: HOLY FAMILY MISSION IS FOUNDED
Some of the religious persons in this part of the story are:
Father Cataldo, who had much experience, was made superior general of the Rocky Mountain Missions in 1877. He is the founder of St. Aloysius Gonzaga University in Spokane. He resigned in 1893 and took charge of the Alaskan Missions. He died in Oregon in 1928.
Father Bougis, born in the Ardennes, France, in 1860. Came to the US to study philosophy at Woodstock College, Maryland, and then to St. Peter’s in 1885 to teach boys and learn Indian languages. He was at Holy Family between 1891 and 1895, then did mission work in Alaska and California. He came back as superior for the year 1911-1912), returned to California and died there in 1920.
Bishop Brondel, born in Belgium, was a pastor and Bishop in Washiington State before becoming Bishop of Helena on March 7, 1884. He died in 1903.
Father Damiani was single-handedly the superior of St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s (Gros Ventre and Assiniboines) and of Holy Family. Understandably he wore out and was sent for a rest to California until 1893 when he returned to Holy Family only.
Mother Catherine Drexel, born in Philadelphia in 1858 to a banking family, inherited five million dollars in 1885 (along with her sister Elizabeth) and devoted much of it to Indian MIssions. In 1889 Catharine joined the Sisters of Mercy and in 1891 founded her own order, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament devoted to Indians and Colored People. She died in 1955.
St. Peter’s was the earlier mission. Louis Riel, leader of the Red River Metis Rebellion taught there some time between 1875 and 1885, the year of the Rebellion. When he left, Father Bougis took his class: “seventeen Indian boys and eighteen half-breed boys.” They were taught catechism in Blackfeet and also received lessons in English, French and Latin.
In 1885 Father Cataldo asked permission to build a mission on the Blackfeet Reservation as well as others. Damiani came, persuaded many, and built a “quite ample” log church and a “rude building” for the religious to occupy. This was on Two Medicine River, not too far from the location of the Government Agency at that time. White Calf gave him part of his allotment so there would be land for a farm and school. In 1889, a grant of $14,000 came from the Drexel sisters, but it was necessary to wait another year until federal funds could be added, over the objections of the Indian Commissioner, T.J. Morgan, who thought there should be secular government boarding schools.
A long two-story frame building in two sections was constructed. (Boys were to be on one side, girls on the other.) Total capacity was one hundred students. In August 22, Father Damiani trekked by wagon from St. Peter’s to Holy Family, with provisions and three Ursuline nuns, to begin the classes in September. Father Tornielli came in a month to act as superior so Father Damiani could travel. Father Bougis described going on to the reservation to collect students, who returned crying. If children ran away, which many did, the agent cut off the family’s rations (the only source of food for many) until the student was returned. Father Bougis reported that the school “was considered the best Indian school in Montana.”
Lay brothers Thomas Devlin (Irish?) and Jerome Caldos, spent 1892 working at the mission, the same year Miss Drexel sent a herd of cows and steers and an irrigation ditch was dug from Two Medicine River in order to grow grain and vegetables.
In 1895 a new building for the boys was built of sandstone quarried from the adjacent cliffs, which had previously been used for buffalo jumps. The building was forty by sixty feet, three floors and a basement, and beautifully paneled inside with sliding doors so that classrooms could be consolidated into larger spaces. The high windows looked out on the Two Medicine flood plain, which ultimately undermined the foundations of the empty budling in 1964. Two scholastics, John Carroll and Augustine Dimier, came to care for the boys and live with them. By now there were five nuns who lived with the female students in the earlier building. In 1891 the wind blew the roof off. In 1895 a runaway boy froze to death.
Financially the mission was barely surviving. Sympathy for religious-based schools was fading and the school took a twenty percent cut in government money in 1896. The Willow Creek School near Browning had been built in 1892 as a Government boarding school. Fifty children who wanted to attend Holy Family were rejected and only sixty-seven accepted.
At the end of 1897 a fire destroyed the girls’ building. Mother Drexel financed a new sandstone building. Pneumonia and measles swept the students. The basement floor of the boys’ building flooded. Father Bandini, younger than Father Damiani, came as Superior to oversee the construction of the building. When he had finished the job and gone to Spokane, he died in three months, worn out. The two scholastics also declared a need to be transferred out “to recover their strength.”
In 1900 government aid was discontinued. Father Achilles Vasta, S.J., came for the summer of 1899, but in fall of 1900 Father Prando went to the Crow Reservation. The word picture painted by Mother Mary Amata Dunne, O.S.U., was of a horde of shocked, dirty and infested children brought into a situation of poverty almost equal to that in their homes, except that it was “civilized” poverty where they were asked to scrub in soapy water carried from the irrigation ditch and heated, and made to eat vegetables. According to her, hair was not cut and parents hovered to make sure. But if dirty buckskin could be smuggled out of sight, it was burned and replaced with “white man’s clothing.” One problem was persuading children to sleep in beds with sheets, though a shortage of furniture often meant sitting on the floor for classes. Her position is that the music (Jesuits “always had an organ and kept it in tune.”), the art and the beauty of the sacraments comforted both the students and the mostly Italian teachers for the hard work and poverty. She claims they were mostly warm enough but it was hard to dry clothes in the winter.
Chapter IV: “LIFE AT THE MISSION”
This chapter is rich with particulars. It is a vivid illustration of the determination of the Italian Jesuits to continue the old battle of the agriculturists (equated with civilization) versus the hunters without resorting to fratricide as in the case of Cain and Abel. They were acting out of confidence born of 10,000 years of inventing farming, which ironically was not much different at the mission from that in Biblical times. But this was not a Biblical climate.
Hugh Black quotes at length Father Prando’s description of the weather. (Translated from the Italian in the Jan. 6, 1900, “Letters of the Province of Turin,” by Dr. Anthony Chiuminatto, College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.) I shall requote, partly to convey what the weather was like and partly to illustrate that Father Prando was an educated, eloquent, and sophisticated man.
“The climate in the country inhabited by the Piegans is rather severe, and for him who does not have good lungs it is better that he stay away from it. The Summer is short, and the passage from the latter to Winter and from Winter to Summer is almost without Autumn or Spring. The land lends itself but little to agriculture; hay is cut once a year and the maintenance of life is in raising cattle.
“The winter is severe and the cold often reaches 25 or 30 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit thermometer; sometimes it goes to 40 degrees and once it went to 50 degrees below. From the end of December to the end of April the ground is almost always covered with snow. The North wind is generally accompanied by snow in Winter and by rain in Summer; sometimes the West winds are so strong that they impede travel, and in Summer they bring big storms with lightning, thunder and hail, and in Winter, the blizzard...
“When it has ceased to snow and the sky has cleared, the West wind rises and sweeps the snow away in a curious phenomenon. The wind begins up in the mountains and one first sees it come down the mountains in long waves of white foam, then becoming one billow after another, two or three meters high; the mountains seem to be rejoicing...
“As the wind continues to gather strength, the snow rises on high and forms huge clouds which rise higher than the mountains, and in the distance one sees that the wind is blowing on the mountain tops; as the wind comes down, the tops of the hills are the first to be swept clean, and in the valleys, when the wind is not too violent, one sees the snow move along the ground at from a half to a whole meter in height.
“As the whirlwind increases, the snow is carried away in a horizontal line to a greater height, and traveling against the wind, one experiences much difficulty because one’s face and eyes are struck by these very minute crystals which hurt in the manner of punctures by needles. Too, when the wind is a fury, it is impossible to travel because it blinds one; and even though the sun is shining, one cannot see the road. And this is a kind of blizzard with clear sky.
“These blizzards sometimes come up so suddenly that many people are caught on the road and everyone runs for the nearest shelter, if any is to be found. And it is a thing of absolute necessity to have strong horses, and a buggy equally strong, otherwise accidents of a serious nature can occur.”
The nuns and girls maintained forty stoves in their building. They were kindled at 4AM. There were times that the wood nearly ran out. During Communion Mass in Heart Butte one morning, the cold metal chalice froze to the lips of Father Egon Mallman.
Boys were separated from girls in dormitories, dining rooms, classes, and at Mass, with the exception of school programs or all-school picnics. Someone supervised the children at all times. Some of the students were over fifteen. In Spring things could get “effervescent.” Students constantly ran away, were whipped for it, or expelled.
Two classes for boys, older and younger, and two classes for girls were taught. After school there were chores on this working model farm. For recreation the boys took to baseball after a slow start, and the girls fell in love with the phonograph, dancing to “Wild Irish Rose” until, says Black, “even the Irish nuns were satiated.” The boys had a good band, directed by Brother Nicolaus Fox and later by Mr. Dittner, until about 1927. The girls had a small string orchestra.
The community attended programs. If anyone objected to the constant instruction, catechism, devotions, Masses, feasts and so on, it was certainly not recorded here. Blackfeet love and respect religion of all sorts.
Three Jesuit fathers stand out in this period.
Father Aloysius Soer was born in Holland in 1853. Inspired by Father DeSmet’s letters, he came in 1887 and served Nez Perce for nineteen years, rising to Superior. He was at Holy Family from 1905 until 1932, the year of his death and about the time the mission closed, and all the whole time he yearned for the Nez Perce! No one could easily understand his words because of his heavy Dutch accent, but it was said that “just to see him preach was sermon enough.” He was noted for invariably visiting the sick, even on one occasion when he had to cross a stream with his clothes and religious materials on his head. He was the historian of the mission and left many letters.
Father Thomas Grant was born in NYC in 1870. He was orphaned and much of the time grew up in Jesuit boarding schools. He began as a missionary to the North Cheyenne, then spent time on the Crow reservation -- his favorite -- and came to Holy Family as superior from 1915 to 1929, when he returned to the Crow until his death in 1929. He is credited with averting a Cheyenne war in 1894. He had “wry neck” which forced him to hold his head on one side, like a bird taking a closer look. He could be very strict but was also a good story teller.
Father Jerome Galdos came for a year in 1892, then returned in 1909 and stayed for 25 years. More than any of the others he fits the idea of the wise, white-bearded, gentle and self-sacrificing priest. Once when pneumonia flattened the teachers and most of the students, he both taught classes and nursed the ill, sleepless and cheerful. He was the primary manager of the farm, along with a hired farmer and half-a-dozen local helpers.
CHAPTER V: EDUCATIONAL GOALS
The big paradigm for Holy Family, as explicitly stated by Father DeSmet, was to repeat the success of the Jesuits in Paraguay, where they had managed (with huge subsidies from Spain and Portugal) to separate the Indians and completely reshape them, right down to dictating their marriage partners. The US did not work out the same. Reasons included lack of government money, inability to separate the children from the families and communities who denied and mocked what they learned, and the general low quality of the floating opportunistic white men all around them. [These factors persist.]
The Flatheads were converted with less trouble and forced into assimilation anyway because their reservation was a checkerboard with white land. Commissioner Morgan proposed college preparation for Indians, saying education should “lift the Indian students into so high a plane of thought and aspiration as to render the life of the camp intolerable to them... There is urgent need among them for a class a leaders of thought, lawyers, physicians, etc...” [This is just now happening.] But the government position settled on the idea of educating Indians to be good wage-earners in an industrial world. [Well, a rural version of industrialism, maybe.]
Since the government decided to build its own schools and not subsidize the Jesuits, they were free to go their own way, which was exemplified by St. Ignatius:
1. to save the child’s soul by instruction and formation
2. to make available to the tribe the sacraments and Christian instruction
3. to make the students capable of rearing a good Christian family on the reservation
4. to raise the moral and intellectual level of Blackfeet life to that of a civilized Christian country.
[The devilishness of these goals has been the Jesuit conviction -- and they were not the only ones to think this way -- that they were right and thus entitled to throttle all other less-sanctified systems of thought. Post-modern, post-colonial criticism has exploited that blind spot into a world-wide philosophical system with major impact on Native Americans. The fury of the criticism has captured many of the NA intellectuals.]
Special attention was given to the “refinement” of the girls with much value given to neatness, cleanliness, maintenance of the home in cooking, laundry, and needlework including beading and working with buckskin. [These lessons went deep. The old mission-educated Blackfeet ladies that I knew in the Sixties insisted on high standards in their homes and person, according to nun’s ideas of what those were.]
Classroom standards for the basics were high enough that after the first state tests in 1928, the Superintendent of Education wrote them a letter of congratulation. The classrooms were primarily English-speaking but hymns and prayers might be translated to Blackfeet.
The Ursuline nuns were financed entirely by the Jesuits, but the nuns had exclusive authority over their own affairs and classroom practices. The exception was that the superior could ask a nun to leave or request another to be sent. The Reverend Mother Amadeus was governor of the Ursulines until 1900. She loved and believed in Indians.
An underlying assumption not often considered is that the religious persons considered the mission to be a real home, and wanted to include the children in that. Patronizing but nurturing, this assumption leaned heavily on moral rules which included hard work, being on time, keeping one’s word, and so on. The teachers felt they had the entitlement of actual parents, and therefore were vulnerable to all rejection, anger, and failure to perform in the same way as biological parents. When the students went to their biological homes, even for a month, and were pulled back into the original orbit, the religious persons were wracked over the need to punish the behavior without rejecting the individual, especially in the case of girls.
Father Soer wrote to a Superior that if the mission closed “the doors of protection to them” it would “occasion future sins of the flesh; in fact, in many cases to allow their eternal ruin.
“For what happens if they stay home? Scandalized by sin and feeling themselves abandoned, they surrender to the passions of the flesh and seek to enter marriage. Meanwhile, having lost purity, they will have relations with many, because temptations, unfortunately, abound on the Reservation, between those married as well as those unmarried. Very quickly, in the manner of children... governed by the devil, they finally contract marriage. Such marriages are easily upset by the devil, and consequently there are many adulterous unions and cohabitations on the Reservation.” [And that was before cable TV.]
By 1930 things had settled down and vacations were more frequent.
Here’s the beginning of a story relevant to Father Soer’s opinion. It’s told by Mary Ground in “Grass Woman Stories” which is available through the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Mary was always a defender of the Holy Family Mission, though she was also an active practitioner of the old-time religious ways. The book is one sponsored by the schools, a small stapled pamphlet with original drawings and a photo of Mary.
“This happened in June of 1896. I was at Holy Family Mission and it was just before vacation. I used to interpret for the Indians who couldn’t speak English. First thing, old Brocky came in to the Sister. He had on an old blanket coat and he was crying, so the Mother Superior called me. She brought the old man into the sitting room where I was and he could hardly talk, the way he was crying.
“She asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’"
It turns out that the old man’s daughter, who was married, had attracted a lover who killed the husband and took the wife. The old man wanted the mission carpenters to make a casket for the husband, his son-in-law.
“Father Damiani and Father Prando were at the Mission then. The fathers had their own carpenter.
“She [Mother Superior] told us to take him [the old man] over to Father Damiani. I told the father, “Old Brocky here wants to know if you could help him out and fix a coffin for his son-in-law, who got killed. Frank Double Runner killed him.” Frank’s two brothers were attending Holy Family Mission and Frank had one of them called out to help him, using the ruse of rounding up horses. The three of them hung around in the cliffs by the mission and finally went up towards Browning, by Willow Creek School. The brother pretended that he was going down there to get food, but betrayed the adulterer and the woman, who were finally shot and buried in one big coffin together.
It’s clear that schools were centers of action, places with resources, family members and authority figures. (The Methodist missionary Matson went out to reason with Frank Double Runner but after his hat was shot off, he withdrew.) I expect one could find similar stories in Iraq today or even in urban ghettoes. In times and places of disorder and transition, religious schools offer limited refuge.
CHAPTER VI: MISSIONARY ACTIVITY
Parallel and interwoven with the mission school was the work of converting and sustaining the Blackfeet to Catholicism. Two big forces worked against the diligent priests:
1. The practice of attributing every subsequent tragedy and misbehavior to the conversion -- and there were ALWAYS tragedies and transgressions in those tumultuous days.
2. The idea that if a priest were to be called to a deathbed, he would pray for the death of the person. [This is not too different from the media-created notion that if the priest arrives to give last rites, that means there is no hope.] In 1914 Paul Calf-Looking Senior waited a little too long and died without rites.
The tangles of marriage -- stranded between old-time patterns and Catholic modern morality -- ended in confusion and rationalization for bad behavior. If one family began to get ahead, all the ne’er do wells showed up to live with them, which was hard on the children. Then there were the predatory whites who circled the reservation like coyotes, offering whisky.
Here’s an interesting quote, a footnote in the manuscript: “In 1876, Father Constantine Scollen, O.M.I., a Canadian missionary among the Blackfeet, wrote: “The Crees have always looked upon the white man as a friend, or, to use their own language, as a brother. They have never been afraid of him, nor have they given him any cause to be afraid of them. The Blackfeet have acted somewhat differently; they have regarded the white man as a demi-god, far superior to themselves in intelligence, capable of doing them good or evil, according as he might be well or ill-disposed towards them, unscrupulous in his dealings with others, and consequently a person to be flattered, feared and shunned, and even injured, whenever this could be done with impunity.” This is from Alexander Morris, “The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, and Keewa-tin.” Toronto: Belfords, Clark and Co., 1880, p. 248.
Efforts to preach and offer mass really rather demanded demi-god strength. Distances were long, weather was extreme, horsepower was from real horses, places to stay were uncomfortable, and the priest had to have learned to speak Blackfeet. Father Bougis visited seven camps: “Big Nose, Under Mink,Many (Merry) People, Three Suns, Three Bears, Wolf Tail, Fast Buffalo Horse” and netted twelve baptisms.
In 1895 Prando replaced Bougis and fared a bit better. He had a little cart and gave out holy cards and medals. Attending every distribution of rations, he took the opportunity for confessions, baptisms, blessing of marriages. One day he was walking along the Two Medicine road when a wagon came along driven by a half-breed woman with a baby. Taking the initiative, he persuaded her to bring the baby over to the river so it could be baptized. When they returned to the wagon, there turned out to be a second mother and child hiding in the wagon, so he escorted her back down for a second baptism.
In addition to the 2,000 Indians spread over 3,000 miles, Bougis and Prando served the white settlers iin Dupuyer and Choteau. Prando built a church in Dupuyer. Bishop Brendel, having mercy, sent a diocesan priest for the towns.
In 1901 Father Prando wore out and the Rev. John B. Carroll, S.J. took his place. Then Father Soer served until 1932 when Father Robert Kane came. When there was an automobile, Sam Choate would drive Father Soer around.
Father Kane learned to drive the car himself. He had many adventures, including one with Ted Pendergrass -- a bodacious cowboy -- who got him stalled in the middle of a Two Medicine river crossing. Nevertheless, at the destination was such a large number of Indians that Father Kane founded a mission station he called “Upper Two Medicine Mission.” On his way there one winter day he was caught in a blizzard bad enough to paralyze travel. He had two boys with him. The Mission authorities were so worried that they sent out the Mission truck, but it got stuck, too. Then they sent the tractor but even that was soon stuck. Two days later the Indian Agent sent out fifty riders to find Father Kane and the boys, who were located in a cabin where they had taken shelter. No people were there, but wood and provisions.
Eventually congregations were formed in Heart Butte and Browning. Mr. Brown began to solicit contributions to build a church. People gave him animal furs, livestock and other valuables which he auctioned for $1,200. In 1904 the new St. Michael’s Church was constructed for $1,500. Father Carroll was sent to Alaska, so Father Soer served Heart Butte and Browning. As more government schools were built, Father Carrolll was recalled from Alaska to live in Browning. He built a lean-to onto the church where he cut his own wood, did his own cooking, and walked five miles out to Boarding School to give Mass and instruction. Progress was inch-by-inch.
When the first Protestant minister, Edward Dutchen, came in 1895 he bluntly told Father Bougis to get out. The boarding school became the scene of a wrestling match over who would instruct the children. By 1912 the Catholics won. The Jesuits asked the Provincial Superior to take over the northern part of the reservation. The Rev. Thomas A. Daley came, but didn’t speak Blackfeet, so had to help from Father Soer until 1920.
In Heart Butte, more traditional, a church was built and blown down by the high winds twice. In 1910, someone who read an appeal for funds in The Indian Sentinel sent $500 which was enough to get the church of St. Peter Clavaer built. The first Mass was celebrated on August 13, 1911, and the church became the center of a cluster of cabins. In 1933 Father Hannon came. Then in 1935 the Reverend Egon Mallman, S.J., who had to pick up the slack for the whole south half of the reservation when Holy Family closed in 1938. He was helped somewhat by two lay catechists, Eli Guardipee and Sam Choate who taught and acted as interpreters. Children were taught in the day schools scattered around the reservation.
Sometimes Father Soer was invited to Havre where the Reverend Francis Sansone, S.J., served three classic German and Bohemian congregations. He was always delighted and enjoyed speaking German again. In 1932 Civilian Conservation Corps camps were set up at Many Glacier, Babb, on Sherburne Lake and at St. Mary. Father Kane served them.
A few supernatural apparitions were recorded. Helen Clark, daughter of Malcolm Clark, appeared to Florence Magee who lay dying. Florence didn’t know that Helen had just died, but described her clothing, which was exactly the same as what Helen Clark wore in her coffin.
The exemplary members of the congregations included Percy DeWolfe, Joseph Tatsey, George Kipp and Eli Guardipee.
By 1934, when anthropology had advanced enough to explain Blackfeet religion a bit better, Father Jean Lessard, O.M.I., a well-known missiologist and missionary, said, “We should never have set aside all their pagan customs... And now, it is uphill work... We have to be careful because if we resurrect any of their paganism, it is so close to their heart, they will go all the way.” But the truth is that the Blackfeet simply embraced both ways.
Chapter VII: ADMINISTRATION OF HOLY FAMILY MISSION: 1900-1930.
The Jesuit Father Superior in charge of the Mission had absolute authority over nearly everything. The other side of that power was total responsibility for everything, including the weather -- at least in terms of preparation. He was the peacemaker, the personnel department, the fund raiser, and so on. Black notes “the extreme sensitivity of the Blackfeet...often too ready to listen to their children’s stories of mistreatment...necessitating the dismissal of the teacher in question.” [This is still common today.] The Father Superior was hard-pressed to find good teachers, esp. among lay people. [This is also common today, except for the increasing number of Blackfeet teachers.] The problem wasn’t just in the classroom. When the cook went off to become a religious, in the next year a series of eight cooks went through the kitchen -- including periods of time when the brothers or nuns had to pinch-hit.
The highest responsiblity was for the souls of the children, but then next was physical safety: enough warmth, clothes, food and health care. He also had to run interference with the government, the white community (tradesmen who might be asked for credit) and the tribe, both formally through the council and informally. Because the old-time band tradition was to depend upon the strongest leaders to help the weak and poor, the Father was interpreted as the “chief” and petitioned for all sorts of supplies and remedies for grievances. Sometimes he just didn’t have the means and then had to defend against the bitterness of the disappointed and thefts by those who took matters into their own hands. Besides everyday maintenance, a chief was expected to provide for feasts which traditionally involved gifts.
Maintenance of the property took much attention, energy and funds. Buying supplies and selling surplus crops or livestock were also his responsibility.
In 1904 France exiled the Brothers of Christian Instruction of Lamennsis, who offered Holy Family two teachers, Brothers Salvinus and Rene. Salvinus, who was especially gifted, stayed for seven years as teacher, choirmaster and sacristan. The two men left at the same time that Rocky Boy’s people were sent to the Blackfeet Reservation and Fort Shaw closed its school, creating an overpopulation crisis.
Charles Owens and his family came to Browning and made friends with Father Carroll, who felt Charles was God-sent. Charles’ father and brother were experienced farmers and took charge of the farm while Charles taught classes, but then he left to become a Jesuit.
Other teachers described include:
A nameless big fat German man who lost his temper all the time, refused to work in the fields and had no discipline.
Raymond Philibert from St. Louis who was an inexperienced teacher but proved to have a knack for it and who was especially devoted to the Sacraments.
William Mellen from Drummon, Montana.
William Van der Wansen, a former lay brother of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had done mission work in the Americas, gone back to Belgium, and then left the order so he could return. Described as “hard working and cheerful,” he was teacher, sacristan and choir director.
In 1920 William Shepherd, S.J., came from Alaska for a year.
In 1922 the Superior, Father Grant, had to teach.
In view of the current debate over water rights, I will quote at length the paragraphs about water rights:
“The superiors at Holy Family were involved in a dispute from time to time during these years with the Government over water rights. With permission of the Government, Holy Family had dug, at its own cost, an irrigation ditch in 1892. The first canal which the Government constructed in the Two Medicine Valley was a partial failure, and Holy Family granted the Government the use of its ditch for some distance down the valley. Then, in 1908, the Agency dug a new ditch whose intake was a short distance above that of the Mission canal. Since this lowered the river level below the Mission intake during the dry season, Holy Family at this time obtained permission to use water from the Government ditch. This agreement was not formalized in writing.
“In 1918, the United States Reclamation Service raised the question of mission water rights by billing Holy Family at a rate of $1.00 an acre per year. Father Grant replied with a vigorous protest. After recalling the history of the irrigation ditches, he argued that since the Indians were not charged for the use of Government water [sic], it was unjust to demand payment from an institution supporting their children. He prepared to defend his rights, and had gone to an irrigation meeting in Seville (near Cut Bank) to do so, when he received word from the Mission Bureau that Holy Family was exempt from charge.
“The problem came up again in 1931. At this time the Society assigned the matter of the water rights for its Montana missions to the Rev. Francis C. Dillon, S.J., a veteran ‘troubleshooter,’ and in a short time the question was settled in favor of the Mission.”
A major part of administration is the careful keeping of records [a part that both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Tribal Council notoriously shirked] and these religious folks conscientiously maintained a daily diary, an “Historia Domus” and yearly reports on the state of the Mission and its progress. Fund-raising was constant, much fortified by Mother Thomas, O.S.U, in charge of the food and personal needs of the priests themselves but devoting every spare minute to shameless begging letters.
Nevertheless, money kept shrinking. At first Mother Drexel could help. Almost nothing came from local parish funds. From 1895-1905 were identified as the “lean years,” when government support withdrew. Father Damiani was superior for most of this time except for ten months in Brazil (1899-1900) when Father Achilles Vasta, S.J. took charge. For a while Father Damiani was the only priest on the reservation. He left for Alaska in 1905.
At about that time some tribal resources began to be available and at the time of allotment, the Mission Bureau was given title to the 320 acres of mission land. In 1909 the land was exempted from taxes and back taxes were refunded, which was used to pay debts, make improvements, and buy a bit more land.
Between 1900 and 1907 Brother Thomas Campbell and Brother Roch Terragno took on the cooking and chores and the Lamennais Brothers provided teachers. Father Damiani retuned from Alaska in 1912 (now over seventy) and stayed until 1915, when Father Grant became Superior. Remarkably, it is reported that he “skillfully directed mission affairs through the fourteen years with scarcely a problem or extraordinary happening. He was careful to avoid all unnecessary conflicts with the Agency or white interests, and , despite the childishness of many of his parishioners, he maintained universal good will toward the Mission.”
Donations began to come in after 1915. $1,000 was used to add a laundry room to the girls’ school, build a small barn, paint the interiors of both schools, and construct an ice-house for meat. In 1918 Father Soer’s brother, Mr. Arnold Soer, sent enough money for a new Ford automobile and in 1919 he sent another $470 to keep it in repair on the rez roads. Father Grant bought 280 acres of grazing from Paul Calf Looking, and in 1922 another 280 acres for $840.
The winter of 1919-20 was unusually severe, following a drought. There was little hay and Father Grant had to borrow to pay for coal and feed. 86 of the mission cows died, as well as other livestock. Desperate ranchers around him helped themselves to the mission hay. Father’s neck, not improved by stress, forced him to go to Minnesota for treatment.
In the summer of 1921 the sills and walls of the church were raised and several farm buildings were renovated. Still, Father Grant reported that the mission assets were greater than the debts. Agent Campbell’s “Five Year Plan,” which emphasized farming and organized granges, was very helpful to the mission where the Superior was also the “president” of that grange. An electric light plant was installed for $2,000. Several “friends” of the mission gave enough money to put a bell in the church tower and paint the exterior. Other farm buildings were painted and spirits were up, but there was a steady small erosion of the Mission.
CH. VIII: THE YEARS OF DECISION: 1930-35
Father Ignatius Dumbeck, a young man, arrived in July, 1929, to give the Mission nuns their annual retreat in August, to take a look around, and (he rightly suspected) to become the next Superior, a task which he didn’t feel he was up to. Everything had gradually slid downhill: buildings were leaking and cracking, the kitchen stoves had been repaired to the limit, the well was condemned, and the agricultural machinery was worn out. In his report he used the word “ramshackle.” Ten years earlier Father Grant had seen that white men were moving in on the reservation and that the survival of the mission was a gamble.
What Black calls “tribal money” -- which may have been Bureau of Indian Affairs controlled money -- was dwindling. Bishop Finnigan of Helena preached back east and begged donations. An appeal was made to the tribe, but a government inspector used Catch 22: no money could be allotted until they had improved the place. In one last burst of optimism, Dumbeck was elected to make the “Hail Mary” pass. An appeal was made to the Marquette League for renovation funds, which supplied $11,000.
Father Grant figured the buildings of Holy Family were worth $20,000 and the land $6,320, but the running expenses that same year (1928-29) were $18,500. He spent the Marquette League funds thus:
1. A used power plant from the Browning School Board at $50.
2. Weather-proofing of doors and windows, begun by Brother Jacob McGuire and finished by a Browning carpenter: $975.
3. Lumber for farm buildings directly from Montana mills at $18 per 1,000 in carload lots delivered to Browning: moving the barn away from the river and adding to it; building hog and chicken houses, fencing for a dairy herd of six cows.
4. A new hay mower with a sickle attachment, a Caterpillar #15 tractor, and some other machinery purchased at discount for a total of $2,692. The Caterpillar alone cost $1,475 but paid for itself in three months of work.
5. Repair of the roof on the boys’ building at $664.
6. Insulation of the dormitories.
7. Repainting of the interiors.
8. A new Majestic cooking stove for $398.
9. A dish-washing machine, a new oven and a bread mixer.
10. A new well and 600 feet of 2 inch pipe at a depth of six feet to get below the frost line.
11. Sewer upgrade to meet government specs.
From other sources came funds for a “Magic Marvel” flour mill so whole wheat bread could be produced and sold. Produce, esp. cabbage and carrots, were sold as well as beef, the principal source of profit. Bishop Finnigan went out of his way to provide support by visiting, helping Father Dunbeck study plans, and soliciting money. They managed to cut expenses by $4,000 and to find $3,700 from the tribe and the Indian Commission. In 1931, Father Dunbeck figured that the stock and garden had yielded a profit of $5,700 as well as supplying the Mission kitchen.
Then trouble came from the Two Medicine River, which was eating away at the bottomland in spite of a retaining wall built by Father Grant. Using that new Caterpillar, an old riverbed was deepened and the river was diverted into it. Cost was $500. Dunbeck also constructed an underground water reservoir up the hill (in preference to a water tower, which could freeze) at a cost of $5,000, paid for through Bishop Finnigan. The worn out windmill that pumped the water into the tank had to be replaced.
All this was done by 1931, but then Bishop Finnigan died. Father Soer had also recently died. In 1930 Brother Caldos was permanently incapacitated by pneumonia. The auto also died. More land was needed, back wages needed payment, leases demanded money. Dunbeck mortgaged the mission livestock in 1933. Under the strain, he began to fail himself.
In early June, 1934, hail damaged the buildings and smashed the garden and grain fields. Most of the windows were broken out and the roofs were ruined. The Most Rev. Ralph Hayes, then Bishop of Helena wrote: “It was sad to see the ravaging force of the storm, which lasted but fifteen minutes. A large field of alfalfa would have been ready for the cutting within a week; ... large fields of wheat and oats and barley have simple disappeared from view; potato fields and truck gardens beaten flat to the ground and ruined for the year. All this is a most serious loss to the Mission. Under the most favorable conditions, the financial problem of the Mission is almost hopeless, and the only solution lies in the fact that the Mission is able to supply... all the flour and vegetables of the children, and the grain required for the cattle, from its own fields. With crops destroyed for the year, a very serious problem is presented.”
Bishop Hayes and the Marquette League helped to repair the roofs ($940) and replace 300 panes of glass, but Father Dunbeck collapsed in July. Bishop Hayes reorganized the classes so that all would be taught by nuns, a cheaper source of labor. The Department of the Interior promised $100 for each of 15 of the 35 orphans at the Mission, but then said the state of the buildings was not good enough to house students.
Father John Prange, S.J., came to be the new superior. Bishop Hughes died and was replaced by Joseph M. Gilmore. Reverend John B. Tennelly became the new head of the Mission Board. They were the last team to struggle to save the Mission and they lost.
Ch. IX. CONCLUSIONS
Black notes the style difference between the early priests who had such confidence in God and their own spirituality, as compared to the newer men who dealt with the practicalities of poverty and politics. It’s hard to know what factors in what proportions undermined and destroyed the Mission. But it’s even more impossible to know how much good was done in those arduous years of effort and self-denial.
What Black does NOT address is the accusation that J.L. Sherburne [NOT J.H., his father] -- possibly deliberately -- was the party who foreclosed on the Mission. This man has been so thoroughly attacked that his family is highly defensive and not all of them were in sympathy with what he did anyway.
Also, Black does not frame the end of the Mission with the worldwide Depression sweeping the globe. (In the Thirties all the Unitarian congregations in Montana collapsed.) As recorded in the Foley Report, the young, old and vulnerable of the reservation were starving again, as they had when the buffalo ended. People everywhere were dispersed and lost, especially in the West, and many High-Line communities were devastated.
The other personal observation I cannot resist contributing is that people like Mary Ground became anchors for the religious revival of the Old Time Blackfeet ways in spite of all those catechism lessons and Holy Masses. I don’t consider this a failure. After all, being Bundle Keepers never prevents anyone from attending Mass today. Conscientious men like Louis Plenty Treaty who responded to Campbell’s plans for farming were also active in the Horn Society long after others had forgotten there was such a thing.
Also, those old ladies the nuns intended to make “refined” as girls became order-keepers in their own families and their communities. It wasn’t until the reservation was opened to alcohol that many women began to drink with the consequent damage to their children, both physically and spiritually. In the Sixties the worst threat one could make to a child was “I’m going to tell your grandmother!” Very often, grandmother got their attention with a stick, just as the nuns had. Pride and discipline were kept alive.
Lately it has been fashionable to hate and blame the Mission schools, but perhaps that’s too easy.
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