FABULIZED, MONETIZED

We had no special expertise about "Indians" or "Cowboys" or even the West as a climate and geology phenomenon.  We were right in the middle of it, threw our arms around it, felt it as much as thought about it.  This was not the typical approach.  Underlying all the buy/sell furor of the time, there was a huge sea of information that defied suppression and in it swam all kinds of people, almost all of them white, most of them city folks -- possibly educated in some field quite different.  

Universally, they believed in this made-up, fabulized, monetized version of what had been a real and functioning culture.  What they liked best was the glamour of the period just at white contact when the People were struggling to please whites, knowing that their survival as individuals depended upon it.  In order to get guns and knives, they had to hang around the forts. In order to eat after the buffalo were gone, they had to stand in commodity lines and accept substandard food.  They soon learned what would sell to white men and what kind of line would motivate them to do it.

Calvin Boy had a set of colored pencils and a stack of cardboards that are put into the foldings of shirts in a laundry.  He drew what he called genuine tipi designs onto the cardboard and sold them -- to white people where ever he found them-- on the sidewalk, in stores, in front of the Museum of the Plains Indian.  He didn't make a lot of money but it kept him in booze.  They were nice designs but they were far from authentic.

When I arrived in 1961, I was operating on the basis of theatre: life is performance -- do your best to understand.  But I didn't do anything.  I listened, I watched, I did what I was told.  As well as the local People, I was absorbing a 47 year old white man who grew up with "Indians"of many kinds.  And also -- daily -- classroom kids who were born just after WWII, baby boomers.  JFK had just discovered the rez need for housing.  Television had just discovered cowboys, who looked a lot like GI Joe.  I only say this because to talk about Native American artifacts that were worth a lot of money, one thread of influence is justifying war, taking trophies, enjoying having won.  It carries over into sports.  This is one reason I began to differ from Bob Scriver.

Another thread was spiritual, but to Bob the spiritual was an aspect of community.  When he was a respected music teacher, he became a Mason, like his father and brother.  In fact, he was the chaplain of this Browning white man secret society until he became a taxidermist and then a sculptor, and got divorced.  Then he was asked to leave the Masonic Lodge.  He was humiliated.  The book with all the secrets in it (!) was kept in his sock drawer, wrapped in a silk scarf, and when I looked to see what it was when I put socks in the drawer, he was enraged.  To him, being a Bundle Keeper was restoring him to the chaplaincy in the Masonic Lodge, although the community was alternative and kept out of the Masons.  

I don't think Bob really realized the above.  Yet it was this factor that made him different from the other collectors.  It was this that made him vulnerable to the pitch about Bundle Spirituality that John Hellson made for purposes of sales.  The actual becoming Keeper was a matter of knowing the People and them needing the money.  The aspect that was a bit harder to grasp at the time was that the People had been forbidden and shamed about their religious understanding, so they had gone underground.  The "new" People among them, as well as whites, didn't know they still existed.  Hellson had discovered that what he knew from marrying into the Canadian tribes was not much known on the Montana rez.  The Queen understood ceremony and cultural inclusion.  The officials of the USA knew only conformity.  

The People at the time who had converted to Christianity tried to stigmatize the old ways, even going into houses to seize Bundles off the wall and throw them into a fire.  It was considered down-scale, old-fashioned, dumb.  Or more accurately, they tried not to think about it.   At that time the People were afraid to speak their language because they had been punished for it so severely and didn't want their children to be penalized.  For a white man to become a Bundle Keeper, pay big money -- that began the tide turning in barely perceptible ways.

John Hellson and Bob Scriver work with the figures from "The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle" arranging them on the carpet.  Both men are dead now.

Indigenous religion is pluralistic and non-exclusive.  We took the Kicking Woman marital pair as our guide.  They were cross-boundary since Molly was Canadian.  Other little nuclei were unknown to us, for instance, Mike Swims Under out by Heart Butte who became important later.  Curley Bear Wagner was a high school kid.  Buster Yellow Kidney was a town cop.  Cecile Horn owned a piece of land used for Cree Sun Lodge ceremonies.  Certain places north of East Glacier had trees full of fabric, sometimes just swatches and sometimes tied into little knots of sweet pine (balsam).  If we asked, sometimes people said Cree but other times they said Pentecostal.  We visited a stone cairn near Starr School that was said to be a Sun Worship Altar -- the nearby trees had many small attachments.

What seemed most determinative was not dogma or institutions, but rather family custom and personal temperament.  We attended a Horn Society ceremony in Canada and saw Louis Plenty Treaty, who was always dignified and progressive in old age, running with the Sacred Staff around the encampment to bless it.  Tripping would have endangered everything.  He did not trip, but he went to his limit.

I feel that my duty now is to note moments, to name people, to recall the people born when there were still buffalo.  I do read the books, but find them outdated or simply about one small part of a scene as broad as the land.  I don't aspire to be an expert or to write books about the Sixties.  But I'm old, so I'm telling you what I remember.