THE BLACKFEET REZ PUZZLE

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

Why are reservations so hard to understand?

As the years have gone by, each era and its assumptions have left marks, if only in our images.  The mental picture of people in tipis, traveling on horseback, wearing buckskin, killing buffalo by chasing them over cliffs, is so potent and familiar -- we SEE them in the movies -- that even the Indians themselves are sort of hypnotized.

The idea of “tribes,” distinct groups of people who shared a way of life, ceremonial connection, and a lot of genetic webbing, was translated into “nations,” and therefore was treated like the European nations that emerged from kingdoms after centuries of war.  (See Game of Thrones.)  But tribes were not based on boundaries, except those that the ecology imposed -- mostly rivers and mountain ranges, variation in weather patterns like where it rained, and temperature.  These were the same as the constraints on animals and plants.

by Karl Bodmer (1809 - 1893)

Neither were tribes institutional in the way of densely populated and writing-based people of Europe.  “First encounter” by Europeans tended to be recorded and frozen as the “real” way tribes were. (One wonders what would have happened if the first encounters were between indigenous vs. Asian or African people.) This was complicated since the first indigenous contact was followed by waves of epidemics of all sorts (not just smallpox).  Africans had been imported as slaves and their best bet if they escaped was to fade into the indigenous world with their genetic contributions.  After the Civil War when black soldiers moved West as buffalo soldiers in the Indian wars, individuals were absorbed into tribes.  Some of them think that the reference to “black” feet makes them relations, but the verbal pathways are different.  The “way” was French: negro meaning black.  They would have been "ped negro" and are "pied noir."

When the breakaway revolutions against the British Empire came, with North America roughly breaking into thirds, each of the areas had different indigenous populations and each of the governments that formed (British/French in Canada, Spanish in Mexico, and English in the States) had different ideas about how governments should operate, including how they should treat indigenous people.  Some Indians are officially documented “Daughters of the American Revolution” because those tribes sided with the birthing US.

For a long time the line between Canada and the States didn’t exist and the way to travel long distances was by sea, so the country developed from both Atlantic and Pacific edges with a big prairie in the middle.  There were two boundaries that ran north to south -- one was the Rockies and the other was the Mississippi.  When the 49^th parallel was established, east to west, it was a surveyed line that didn’t accommodate actuality -- just political compromise.  

Waterton Lake -- Montana on the left, Alberta on the right

This had a strong impact on the Blackfeet/Blackfoot people, because it severed the four bands of the affiliated “tribes” who spoke the same language and shared the same ceremonies and calendars.  One band, smaller than the others, dwindled and dispersed.  The two bands on the Canadian side were separated from each other, organized communally, and sequestered from Euros.  

The Amskapi Pikuni, or Southern Piegan on the US side were plunged into chaos.  A number of factors reinforced the chaos.  The 49^th parallel itself attracted people who knew how to manage the “Medicine Line” opportunities by dodging back and forth between jurisdictions.  Since the reservation was an “island of jurisdiction” and the towns were seen as smaller internal islands of jurisdiction, this game had many variations.  Until recently, a white man who beat up an enrolled woman could not be prosecuted on the reservation.

Early economics were about fur traders and then devolved into the clearing of the buffalo, both as commodities (the hides made good conveyor belts for the new industrial machines) and as a strategy for eliminating the tribes.  Anyway, the communal and crucial effort of driving bison over a cliff or piskun, was a force for unity and cooperation.  With rifles and horses, the emphasis moved to competition against one's own tribesmen.  For a short interval the burst of plenty and prosperity was what is called “a climax culture”.  

But it only lasted a century or so before the industrialization of the plains crowded out bison and drove railroads across the country.  Since they were built east to west on both sides in an international competition to get there first, they drove through the Blackfeet lands hard and fast.  At the same time, the Mississippi/Missouri complex was injecting people and goods by steamboat into the heart of their territory.

Alcohol was as useful on the frontier as opium was in China or coca in Bolivia or khat in northern Africa.  It was not just the source of sensational orgies of violence, but also a way to survive a hard life with injuries and temp extremes.  Then as now, it was also addictive enough and such a source of exciting disruption, that it was a product that practically sold itself.  It was an entry wedge for other mischief like confusing land ownership, breaking up families, sexual favors, and theft of property, esp. livestock once they replaced buffalo. 

James Willard Schultz and friend

James Willard Schultz, novelist, and Major Steele, the only agent to serve twice at separate intervals, were whitemen addicted to morphine and regular users of marijuana.  The dynamics of these substances have never been really investigated, just mentioned in passing.  Illicit drugs are still part of the economy.  See “Firewater,” by Hugh Dempsey.  Many Blackfeet/foot families are named in the book.

Much attention was given to water, since the Rockies are generators of streams of good water and the East Slope of the Rockies took it by gravity from the timber line down canals onto the grain-growing flats at the other side of the rez.  A lawyer named Foley was commissioned to write a thorough investigation of why this source of wealth was always diverted in some mysterious way.  His thick report went underground but since it was a legal document in a lawsuit, it has circulated as a very fat typescript and is crucial to the present negotiations.  It should be made public by transcription to the Internet, but that would be a major task.  Maybe a group could divvie it up, each person typing one section.

Foley describes families in which married couples and their older children dug canals by hand since the BIA was trying to force them to grow home gardens.  Hunger also drove the use of the people as indentured labor to dig the main canals which somehow never connected and sometimes collapsed over the years from lack of attention and use.  The only traditional digging among the old timers was by women with a digging stick, collecting food among prairie plants.  That digging stick is an icon in ceremonies, snubbed by anthros.

The original oil strike on the rez produced a wave of wealth that has recently echoed with frakking.  Many deals were made in both cases and there are many accusations about where that wealth went.  Gold was found in the volcanic Sweetgrass Hills, just as it was in the Cypress Hills and the Black Hills.

Chairman Barnes (center) awards a check to the Blackfeet veterans.

Since the Blackfeet considered themselves warriors, they were willing to fight, even on behalf of the government that had left them short-sheeted as much as supported.  WWI and WWII showed many locals the world, not just as fighters but also as fabricators of weaponry and munitions in major cities; not just as men in combat but also as female clerks and, as we began to realize in the “Sand Wars”, as truck drivers and other support roles.  Today they might be fighter jet pilots or operate drones.

But the war that affected the rez the most was the Civil War which ended about the time the reservations on the prairie were forming through the charade of treaties, sometimes signed by self-proclaimed chiefs in a system of self-governance that was not at all hierarchical in the bureaucratic way.  This released cavalry to war against Indians or raid as individuals.  The Conrad brothers are good examples.  

Over time each treaty was shaped by the thought of the time, first the military mindset so that the  tribes were assigned to the army and treated like captured nations.  When Progressives had more influence, each reservation was assigned to a denomination regardless of what missionaries, like the Jesuits, had been working with converts for decades.  The thought persists today that impoverished suffering people are the responsibility of religious bodies rather than governments.  Even so is Jesus perverted again.

Many of the mindsets of those times have come back to haunt us today in ill-considered documents, decisions based on the rapacity of powerful people in Washington DC.  Dwight Eisenhower’s policies created an off-rez diaspora of people as big as the main body in residence (about 8,000 on and another 8,000 off) connected only by descent and small checks deriving from the concept of the tribe as a corporation.  They need a much stronger unifying concept now.

Descent itself slipped away from being a record of the first persons to be recorded at a time when the American-side group was about 500 people, half of them children, which had been stripped of much culture when families scattered.  Direct relationship took as pattern the idea of animal breed inheritance, called “blood” though that was more about “bloodlines” like race horses than blood “types” which weren’t known until the wars.  Now we know about genetics but the people in the tribes will not allow studies of genomes for fear of being exploited (characteristics proving to be valuable enough to sell) or renewing the stigma of being Indian.  Thus it remains confused and mysterious.

Neal Warrington, Menominee, participates in an exercise program at the Chicago Indian Center.

This post is only a rough overview for what ought to be a far deeper and more detailed international consolidation of the story of the Blackfoot Nation and the many peoples who have come to join them: Cree/Chippewa, Metis, Brits of various kinds, Frenchies, outlaws, artists, Mexicans of several kinds (families and criminals), traffickers, refugees.  I use this blog to accumulate narrative about individuals.  The Siksika (their word) have plenty to record that used to be maintained by grandmothers.  Greg Hirst, who valued his own grands, tells me the stories are for everyone, but when the children have gone to bed, the grands begin to share deeper knowledge and by 3AM are telling the things that are normally hidden.  No anthro or journalist is ever there.