THIS OLD NAPI YAKI

In 1961 when I came to Browning to teach English, I had no idea what I was doing.  Neither did anyone else.  We just blundered along, mostly dependent on textbooks meant for some other place.  One day I saw a high school senior in front of the school with a brush cut and heavy pair of IHS glasses.  It was Darrell Kipp.  (DRK)  He was discouraging a bully.  (I know who that was but I won't tell you.) We were told by the admin that if any student called us "Napi yaki" we were to send them to the office.  In those days teachers used force.

New story.  I had become a side-rider with Bob Scriver who was born on the rez in 1914.  He spoke "storekeep" Blckft because his dad came in 1903 and still operated the Browning Mercantile.  B used the Blkft lang as though it were French, a word or phrase here and there.  (His second wife was French Canadian.)  I picked up words.  One day we were in Cardston and I went to use the bathroom at a service station.  When I came out, there was a Blft grandma with a half-dozen little boys, all jittering because they needed to pee.  She thought I was slow and called me "Napi yaki."  I laughed.  I'd be angry and impatient in the same situation.  Some would not be civilized enough to use a bathroom but just teach the little boys to pee in a bush.

Another new story.  B. had the dream about becoming a Bundle Keeper.  The old people told him that was what it was.  He spent thousands for the object, the ceremony, and belonging to this group of people born in the 19th century.  We had to learn a prayer.  This was it.  More less.  I used it sometimes which made speakers do a doubletake.

Ki yo! Neena!  Na too see!

Spumokit.  Keemokit.

Ki mis nyok so kwan.

Un

yi yee!

Jack Holterman was rich, gay, and very well-educated.  While waiting to inherit his money, he taught in the many little one-room schoolhouses on the rez.  He protected and adopted indigenous children.  During B's second marriage, he bought land at St. Mary's next to the Scrivers and began building a stone cabin.  While building, he and his partner at the time lived in B's cabin.  This was partly to prevent B's second wife from hiding out there.  B's women were always hiding out.  When I knew Holterman, who was then living in West Glacier in retirement, he was writing history of the area and had prepared materials for teaching Blkft.  One of his books, "Place Names of Glacier/Waterton National Parks," was later augmented as "Let the Mountains Sing."  The names were in indigenous languages. He worked from the Flathead side and rarely came to the Blkft rez anymore, but DRK always stopped by when he crossed the Rockies.

I have a whole box of binders containing impeccably typed letters from DRK during the years he was trying to understand how to start language revitalization.  He and DSS were employed to do this by the local school system, but it was always blocked, mysteriously.  Finally he saw that the school didn't want this to happen.  But he and DSS had academic creds as well as local roots.  DRK had a Harvard degree, worked in Canada, made connections.  He was able to invent the Piegan Institute with help from Hawaiians, New Zealanders, and private foundations.  His rule was never to take federal money and never to let the state get involved.  Cuts Wood School was run as a charter school for elementary kids and they DID learn to speak Blkft. http://Pieganinstitute.org

Earlier, Marvin Weatherwax's mother, Elizabeth Lewis, (I may have the name wrong) collaborated with Terry Sherburne who was white from a family even earlier than the Scrivers.  https://blackfeetcommunitylanguageprogram.com/courses/  Weatherwax people are exceptionally bright and focused.  After years at BCC, Marvin Senior now teaches for this program linked above that comes from the Montana Historical Society.  The vid at that site where he describes a beginning program for basics is cleverly mocked in a vid of someone speaking Blkft eloquently while the print captions list the colors, numbers, days of the week.  Baby steps.  But it taught people that they could say the words without dissolving or turning green or being beaten by administrators.

The University of Lethbridge has made itself into a center of Blkft knowledge.   Two books come from there.  https://www.uleth.ca/ross/courses/blackfoot  "Blackfoot Grammar" . D. G. Frantz (1991) ·"Toward a Generative Grammar of Blackfoot" (with particular attention to selected stem formation processes) . D. G. Frantz (1970) ·I've had these books for years and sometimes can even figure out what Blkft words mean by using them.  The college level knowledge based on linguistics, morphology, syntax is difficult to learn.

"Some general aspects of Blackfoot Morphology" . C. C. Uhlenbeck (1914) · Verhandelingen van het Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen: Afdeeling Letterkunde: Reeks 2 · Vol. 14 · Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen.  This work was brought back to life in translation by Mary Eggermont-Molenar and entitled "Montana 1911", the year Uhlenbeck was on the rez.  He transcribed many oral stories from speakers but I don't know where one would find them to read.

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/1677/bibliography   

This resource lists "Blackfoot for Beginners". E. Tailfeathers (1993) · Edmonton: Alberta Department for Education.  Maybe Terrill Tailfeathers, who posts on Twitter, has some comment.  There are other books on this list that I never knew about until just now.

Relearning oral languages and integrating them into today's lives is a sputtering fire.  Various attempts and versions are scattered embers, partly because of barriers between nations (you CANNOT learn Blkft without Canadians), because of competition between persons who constantly dump the past in case it undermines them, and because of economics.  White people (academics and philanthropists) like to make themselves look good by claiming special affinity to tribes.  Montana academic entities do not help, not even the several university programs.

I don't speak Blackft.  I have a long history here.  Therefore, my prejudice as well as my philosophy is that language is cultural and cultures are ecological.  Therefore, to really learn a language, one must first learn the ecology, build a relationship with the land.  In the Sixties no one we asked even knew the word for "buffalo" or bison.  Today a lot of people own them on the rez and companies and programs use the word iinii in their names.  But I admit I'm a napi-yaki.

A FEATHERED ICON

The most recent science is confounding and terrifying as it tries to completely rewrite what we know about the world.  The 19th century people were so confident that they had found and named most of the living beings and had them all sorted into boxes.  Then the boxes exploded.  All the stuff we thought was unique and assigned turned out to be processes, not even objects with predictable known qualities.  We already knew that the American animals were often misnamed because the Europeans called them according to the Euro experiences, not least being the "Indians" who are not from India.

But the biggest mistake is not understanding that all these categories are processes, even "Indians".  We have to come up with new names for them.  They are time-streams, edited and moved as things unfold.  As individuals, native Americans in the indigenous sense, change as they mature.  We can accept that mostly, though some essentialists want to make early identities permanent.  What's much more difficult is the idea of communities changing.  And more difficult than that is the idea of the planet changing, because the time frames are long. 

Let's take an explosive sub-category of a hot topic: "Indian artifacts."  One of the most interesting books I read when I was researching Sacred Bundles was an old (1904) ethnological research paper reprinted and published by the U of Nebraska Press.  It's called "The Hako: Song, Pipe, and Unity in a Pawnee Calumet Ceremony."  The original was written by Alice C. Fletcher, assisted by James R. Murie.  Both of them were old-fashioned anthropologists and meddlers in governing of "Indians."  Few "disciplines" -- the name-box for kinds of thoughts -- are changing as quickly as anthropology, partly because of scientific reinterpretation of humans and partly because of political points of view.  The book is about the development of Pipe Bundles, how they were first designed, and how they spread.

The story is parallel to the development of the present Catholic Mass when the Judaic idea of studying text while praying was joined to Jesus' directions for Communion.  As the years passed, the natural shape of liminal space for deep meaning developed, taking in new ideas (the Passing of the Peace, genuflecting) and dropping out less important ones.  As the People moved, they picked up some practices and forgot others.

DRK used to speak of the "hydraulics of the tribes" which referred to the named groups of people (identified at first contact by Euros or by "nicknames" from adjacent tribes, not always flattering).  The term meant that as outsiders pushed in from the East Coast, they forced the original people to move West, which bumped other people out of their own territories, and when disease or war decimated a tribe, they sometimes threw in with another.  But if things went well and a tribe expanded, it might split and separate to slightly different territories.  This is true of animals as well.  The "Hako" or calumet, a sacred long pipe with a feathered shaft, was a response to this, spreading through time and space from one tribe to another. 

The original "Hako" of 1904 which is pictured on the original cover of the first book is relatively simple with fewer embellishments and no talk of a Bundle.  The Blackfeet "Thunder Pipe Bundle" in the Sixties was much more elaborate and included skins of animals, each indicating a song and dance.  Materials include the full tail of a Golden Eagle, brass falconry bells, the ribbons, and the skin of a remarkable bird.  The Sacred Pipe we cared for had the green skin of a parrot that had been prepared by a taxidermist.  You can see it in the book Bob Scriver self-published, "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains."  The major part of the book does not discuss materials but rather is interested in the structure and content of the ceremonies that went with the Hako.

Scriver's book includes other smaller and simpler Bundles with special significance.  One was full of surgical hemostats that looked like scissors except that they had a clamp at the point that opened and shut.  We were puzzled until a person came along who did quill work and explained that they were very useful for doing quill work.  They were bundled to keep them together.  But since everything creative has spiritual significance, it was legitimately called "Sacred."  Blackfeet had always carried their materials in bundles and parfleches rather than boxes.  Humans have always saved objects with special meaning for them.  

Scriver tried to claim the process of making Sacred Bundles when he made a lodge of his own, the one on the cover of his book. (above)  The theme was the badger and most of the content of the Bundle came from a dream he had, undoubtedly his subconscious as poet.  I wrote a paper about it.  So had he become a Blackfeet?  He was born on the rez, raised on the rez, lived there all his life except for military service and college, but was buried in Cut Bank, just off the rez, when he had asked to be buried about where this Badger Lodge is pitched in the photo.  Was he a pretendian?  His parents had no indigenous genes, if you believe there is such a thing.  Euro-style rather than heart-style, he was buried with his family.

When I was serving as Unitarian clergy, I tried organizing a bundle and asked the people to bring precious things to use in the way Blackfeet used animal skins of various species, forming a kind of hymnal reminder since each species had a dancing song.  My experiment didn't work, because this aspect of religion is a community function, not from individuals.  What did work, almost to the point of overwhelming everything else, was lighting candles dedicated to important issues, people, events.  At first it was the idea of lighting something inside the chalice, a candle or small fire because of the metaphor adopted from John Hus' martyrdom in defence of free speech.  That was our "Bundle."

I'm saying that community-shared religious positions (which only occasionally include "faith" in the sense of commitment) are often centered on an image, a poetic representation with immense emotional power.  Both the Blackfeet Bundle and the flame in the chalice are examples.  Despite morphing over time and space, they are simple and vital enough to survive as long as their meaning is remembered.  They are processes based on place markers, the icons that to some people become sacred themselves.  The objects changed around a core meaning.  The religious task of our time is to find that focus again.

"WHY DIDN'T I KNOW THIS," SHE ASKED.

Someone tribal asked on Twitter, "Why did no one tell me about the Baker Massacre?"  True enough, this event was kept quiet in terms of the oral literature of the Blackfeet.  But it was always present in the written literature that was rarely read by Blackfeet or Blackfoot, each in their own version of Siksika.  James Willard Schultz was said to be married to Natahki, a survivor of the dawn raid.  I attended the burial of his son's ashes.  Lone Wolf's burial is not far from his father on a bluff near the Mad Plume allotment.  Veterinarian and author Sid Gustafson keeps on eye on the place.

Possibly the most impassioned book about this event is "Death, Too,for the Heavy Runner," by Ben Bennett (1982).  At the same time, it is carefully researched, helped by the Montana Historical Society and published by Mountain Press.  It was not read across the country but sometimes turns up on the rez.

"Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown  (1970) was a summary of all the major massacres of indigenous people in the USA.  This book came late in the Peace Corps era and made people suddenly aware of how much work there was to do "at home."  Some dedicated careers in response to the book.  It includes the Baker Massacre, as it was called at the time, and only has a few points of argument.  There were so many massacres.  The book was a true tour d'force.

"Fools Crow"by  James Welch (1986) was the popular book version that caught on widely.  It was the first written by a well-known enrolled person.  It was Welch and friends who researched and provisionally located the actual location of the pre-dawn attack on vulnerable people.  The annual memorial service is based on this place, the reality of it.

"The Red and the White, A Family Saga of the American West" by Andrew Graybill (2013) explores the basics of Malcolm Clarke's family.  It was as retaliation for his death that the massacre was ordered.  He was an overbearing, ambitious man who was murdered on his ranch by a relative of his Blackfeet wife.  Her family is hard to trace except for her daughter, Helen Clarke, who became a government representative, an actress, and an important Blackfeet who lived on her allotment behind the Big Hotel in East Glacier, on the Blackfeet rez.  Graybill is an academic historian.

The newest version of the event is "Blood on the Marias: The Baker Massacre" by Paul R.Wylie (2019).  Wylie is a Billings attorney.

Most of the people who write histories of the Blackfeet do not dwell on the tragedy because it is one bloody event in a long string of starvations, injustices, and irrationality.  The wish is to show the totality of a people who are far richer and more significant than just the bad stuff.  Besides, they are almost all written by white people.  Or lately written by enrolled people who have college degrees and may see themselves as victimized, but also as overcoming hardship.

The time of this attack in 1870 was much enabled by the dregs of the Civil War (1861-65), men who had been brutalized, had no place to go, were in the habit of drinking, and had seen ghastly bloodshed.  Baker was alcoholic, on the edge of disgrace and dismissal, and knew it.  These were not the handsome men of Hollywood depictions.  In the 1970's we were meeting one centennial of massacre after another, though the major prairie treaties were signed in 1850.

The two scouts for Baker were Kipp and Cobell, who had been an Italian sailor on sea-going ships until he came up the Mississippi/Missouri complex that guided many early explorers deep into Blackfeet country where the tribe's back was protected by the Rockies.  The camps along the Marias moved occasionally and they said that when they guided Baker's company the one that contained Clarke's murderers had left, replaced by the camp of Heavyrunner.  They tried to get that across to Baker, who was enflamed by this time, but  failed. Afterwards, they were so ashamed that they  went back to gather children and adopt them.

Distinguishing protections to separate bands who were peaceful from those who were troublemakers were ineffective.  Heavyrunner came out of his lodge waving his paper proving he was a peace chief.  He was carrying his daughter and it was said that the same bullet went through the paper, through the child, and into Heavyrunner's heart.  The soldiers could barely distinguish between who was Blackfeet and who was white.  They themselves undoubtedly included Blacks, the "Buffalo Soldiers".  Washington DC thought they were very clever to involve a different "race."  As far as I know, no Chinese were present.

In some ways, this event was a "perfect storm".  There was smallpox in the camp which scared whites and sometimes killed them as well as tribal people.  The armed men of the camp had gone hunting in the profound cold.  The US soldiers were convinced that this kind of ambush was an "Indian" invention, a kind of guerrilla warfare justified by an otherwise elusive enemy.  It was imitated in Vietnam, which was called "Indian Country."  This particular murder of Clarke was the climax of a long sequence of transgression, banditry, and unjust hangings that had persisted for years around Fort Benton, the main center of other scattered forts.

The pitiful sentimentality of "Wounded Knee" which was fought near enough to a town for the people to come out to witness the body-strewn battlefield, bringing cameras and discovering one baby beneath the protective body of her mother.  They raised her as something between a servant and a toy.  But the worst was when the first barrage had killed most of the surrendered and peaceful people, the soldiers called out to the children who had scattered into the brush to hide,  "It's all over now.  It's safe.  Come out and we'll feed you and protect you."  When the children came out, they killed them as well.

And then there is the Industrial Revolution which moved troupes by railroad and provided mortars and gatling guns to mow down the Nez Perce of Chief Joseph in the Bear's Paw Hills, just short of safety in Canada.

If only they had had predator drones, eh?  We haven't stopped doing it, We're still mafia. saying, "Take her out."  The fire and fury are just below the surface and some have always worshipped it.

THE BELOVED PEOPLE, THE PIIKUNI

From the beginning of time, before humans or mammals or reptiles or eukaryote one-celled "beings", one differentiated group has overrun another.  Maybe they took the other's "turf" or maybe they just ate them, but that's the fact of it.  But it is not only basic opportunism that affects our thinking about the Euro populations who invaded the Americas and profited so handsomely by capturing their resources.

Since one of the resources was other human beings different enough to either fear or oppress, that's what the invaders did.  Since most of the seafarers were men, themselves a human resource mercilessly used, they "took" the women.  So, let's imagine.  You're a woman who had no idea that there were other continents.  They were as unlikely as other planets.  A whole new people might be a good or bad thing, depending on one's personal situation, but some people, esp. women, are likely to be open to the mystery and adventure enough to get close.

So, in 1492 the first indigenous/Euro babies came 9 months after the landing.  Some people alive now can date and document themselves back to that.  Euro-style thinking gives it high priority, though in the subsequent generations from that first pair probably other proportions of indigenous/Euro people were involved, leaning to the more indigenous people sometimes and more Euro people later.  Eventually Africans and Asians began to mix in.  

If I were a better historian, I would try to write a series of stories to capture each generation -- born in 1492, born in 1515, born in 1535, and so on.  All the while the situation changed, two demographics expanding into a hundred variations.  All the while the story in Europe changed and the story in various parts of the Americas also developed.  It is a time-story and a space-story.  As more Euros were pushed out (the Highland clearances were a rehearsal for the prairie clearances), esp in the British colonies, they crowded into America and though many died in the process, at last figured out how to live here.  They came from parts of Britain packed with poor, suffering, starving, diseased people.  Many died before they ever reached America but their microbes did not.  Before they ever realized what a friend they had in germs, the pandemic was wiping communities off the continent.  

The strength of these communities was in their culture, calibrated to fit their place, shaped to sustain their generations, but the new danger was too abrupt and mysterious to be addressed, much less resisted.  The strength of the invaders came partly from their greed and partly from their desperation, so partly they came to get rich and partly they came because they had no where else to go.  Partly it was a story that unfolded over the next 500 years and partly it was a story of pushing people West, out, away.

So reservations, to some, were cages, wastelands, places where military force could keep the indigenous and the nonconforming in one place.  They would rather have had an island, like Australia or that island where lepers were confined, but in the meantime major spaces and forbidding geography would have to do.  How to do this varied over the years so some treaties were as "between countries" and others were just administrative rules like a company.  One of those was keeping a list and another was tying the provision of food and supplies to those on the list.  

When the Heart Butte kids were given new pencils because they were on the list, they immediately broke them in half and gave part to their friend who was not on the list.  When they grew up, they began to argue with the list.  The whole justification of reservations had to be rethought, not so much in terms of turf and time, but in terms of the people on the list.  The whole idea of self-determination came into it.  The subject was inflamed and expanded because the stories of the culture had made "Indians" into heroes and the last resource to be exploited was their theoretical nobility and embodiment of Nature, which some considered to be God.

So far there are these justifications for being part of a "tribe" which is only unevenly related to the concept of a "reservation."

• Provable descent from the original list made by the cavalry at early contact and conquest.  Proof is by provenance, which is continuous chain of documentation like baptism, mixing religion with government.  This is at most a couple of hundred years ago, unrelated to "blood" which is a metaphor for provenance, but so vivid that it overspills every attempt to clarify it.
• In the earliest days people looked different and composed their lives according to their ecosystem, whether salmon, buffalo, wild rice, or desert.  If today's youngsters wanted to look like the early prairie people, they would need to live mostly outdoors and on the move.  It's not a matter of clothing or even food, though that counts.
• Many people have assumed that DNA can prove a person belongs to a tribe.  This is a merchandizing gimmick for several reasons.  Tribes were defined and named as the groups came to consciousness but they never had rigid boundaries as Euros did.  As tribes were pushed West, they died out, merged, accepted stray people even if they were white, and lost much of their original culture and "fittingness" to the land because they were no longer on the land that formed them.
• As soon as today's located and confined tribes realized that "scientists" wanted their blood, they began refusing access.  This has greatly hampered transplant technology since there are no records for finding people whose parts "fit."  There is not enough data about the aboriginal people to indicate who was in a particular tribe.
• At the same time, the participation of "Indians" in World Wars drew them into the mystique of heroism and group allegiance with vivid justification, all tied to battlefield wounds and transfusions according to the four blood protein groups.  NOT DNA, which had not been known.
• Writers and artists have capitalized on the general population's hunger for identity and nostalgia to form genres and since we have come to value the creators more than the actual creations, the focus has been entitlement which the goal of narrowing those who are provably on the descendants of those cavalry lists.
• Women in particular have become entangled in the 1492 sailor's access to a new kind of woman that he can impose sex on, regardless of consequences.  One force has been the defining of women of color as undefended, fair game like slaves but better because slaves are "owned" and the owner is likely to object.  
• Also, poor have always been victimized by rich men or violent men. Many of those women and men have been resourceful enough to organize sexwork. Morality makes it easier to victimize them but also adds value because they are valuable in the way that the black market always is.
• Because of those to whom sex and death are interchangeable concepts, the toll of murdered women rises.  But another force has been that without the cultural shaping of protecting of indigenous women, being sexy and hot is a form of power, and because of today's convention of advertising such an identity, indigenous women take advantage of social media to show how desirable they are, attracting men.  But now that has become so outrageous that a backlash has formed and is becoming powerful.  The sexual revolution has muddled everything and, as usual, freedom without guidelines is deadly.

I'll come back to DNA later, but the idea that it is "beads on a string" has been traced to a scientist early in the 20th century.  It is not a fact.  The true nature of the swirl of mixed and barely distinguishable organic chemistry is still being discovered.  But as David Quammen explained, it is a sheet of instructions passed on by atoms, molecules, parasites, chromosome organization -- continuously shared among all living beings and mostly organized within "skins" of one kind or another.  "Skins" is a synonym for indigenous people in America, not as the people who watched the Euros come ashore from their huge white-winged ships, carrying microbes and war, but as the People who have persisted across the continent, however was necessary and barely possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzlnpMFv6iM&app=desktop

The people in this video are building the future, one poem at a time.  They will make "Indians" out of any white people who read their poems.  They are powerful.  I've known these names for generations and the faces are familiar.  They cannot be murdered.  They cannot be driven out.  They persist through both turf and time.

MAGGID REMNDED ME OF THIS SO I'M REPOSTING IT

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

SQUANTO DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Squanto, whose real name was Tisquantum, was the inventor of “tisquantum physics,” which premises that everything is relative, especially all one’s relatives, who are always around if there’s a feast but not so much in times of need.  (I’m kidding.)  He crossed the Atlantic four times without dying of a European disease which is better than usual.  He kept getting abducted by various Euros and at the end of his life was for sale for twenty pounds, which is about forty dollars today (unadjusted), which (also today) is about the price of a little boy on the world market.  I am not kidding.  Even the Great Falls Tribune admits it.  You could read all about it on that eminent source of information Wikipedia, although I have to admit that the Wikipedia is very weak on accurate Native American information since it’s mostly written by know-it-all youngish white men from the East Coast of America.

The clergy who sometimes owned Squanto assured him that Jesus loved him so long as he was obedient and they taught him English though few of them learned Patuxet.  (They still talk funny over there on the East Coast and in Europe.)  He lived to be thirty, acting as a peacemaker among tribes, and died rather mysteriously, possibly poisoned by Waupanoags but not with polonium.  (No one had an umbrella to poke him.)  At least he’s famous.

But I’m grateful not to be Squanto, not to be famous, and not to own an umbrella.  I’m grateful to be me, to be here, to have a lot of books and too many cats, but none of it was my doing, really.  It just happened.

I ran my limited knowledge of Squanto past the clerk at the gas station, who is actually an Amskapi Pikuni scholar.  He said he knew all about Squanto, so nevermind telling him anything, and anyway, there have only been two polonium deaths.  (I’m betting he doesn’t own an umbrella.)  We talked about a few other issues, too, like whether there is no word for goodbye in Blackfeet.  He says there is but it’s a bit of a circumlocution, like “not-hello.”  I really like this guy but I don’t buy much gas so I never get to talk to him as much as I want to.  He’s a type not much known or appreciated, but not unlike Squanto, except that he belongs to himself.

Yesterday a scholar referred to me another scholar’s question about a Sixties writer who won big prizes by writing a faux journal patronizing a local Amskapi Pikuni famous for being very old.  In those days it was very “cutting edge” to call the book about this old man “Piegan.”  (Some kids have been troubled because they thought it was the same as “pagan.”  Not.)  The writer, who is dead now, went mad, was confined for a while in Texas, then stumbled drunk through the streets of a minor city until he died.  Never wrote another book. He was a bad man in many ways.  When he came around, Bob Scriver locked himself in the shop and pretended he wasn’t there.  Yet people still think the book is reliable.  

Since this guy used our shop phone to call his editor, always claiming to reverse the charges though I don’t think he ever did (this was before calling cards), I stuck my ears out to see what I could learn.  Mostly what I learned was that his editor (in those days people had editors instead of agents and the publisher paid them instead of the writer paying them) was demanding that he write things more like what people expected to know about Indians.  He had a tendency to write about himself in self-flattering ways, though the book opens with him forcing open a window and climbing into the old man's the empty house, on grounds that they were expecting him and would want him to do that.  I think they were trying to do the same thing Bob did, but forgot to lock that particular window.  Anyway, this semi-scholar wanted to know where this author’s papers were.  As if he HAD papers and as if a drunken madman would put them in a safe place.

Anyway, the point is that a white man forcing himself into the lives of tribal people -- whether or not they are expected -- is no longer a viable concept.  Even book editors sort of realize that.  But then what about my book, “Heartbreak Butte,” about the two years I spent teaching there?   (It’s online.  www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com )  What about my Blackfeet name and what about my teasing of the gas station cashier?

The other day I got an email asking for contact with a renegade anthropologist who was also around here in the Sixties.  This inquiry came from Cornwall, England, where the anthro (uncredentialed) grew up with the inquirer, who had some connections with Sioux country, entirely honorable, and assumed that his renegade friend was the same.  Not.  The renegade had become an artifact dealer/stealer and spent time incarcerated for it.  He even stole from white people.  Bob should have locked the door.

On the way to Darrell Kipp’s funeral mass, I stopped in at the Blackfeet Community College library which has come a looooong way, baby.  Most recently, they just finished cataloguing the acquisition of an outstanding collection of books about Indians that was given them by Bob Doerk, a deceased Air Force lieutenant colonel, who then became a banker, and, in addition, a Lewis and Clark and fur trapper aficionado, which led him into an admiration of the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet).  He was tall, intelligent, patient, and capable of managing a dignified interface with the tribe itself.  It’s a huge collection of books, all of them significant and timely.  Not enough of them by Blackfeet themselves.  It takes more time to build authors than it does to build structures.   http://library.bfcc.edu/resources.php  

Bob Doerk

Doerk was one of the most faithful attenders at Darrell Kipp’s and Rosalyn LaPier’s August Piegan Institute seminars.  He was always interested, comprehending, and diplomatic.  That was better than myself, who holds grudges, pays off old offenses, and pins people to the wall -- which defeated the purpose of the seminars.  The seminars were supposed to dissolve some of the local animosity and urge appreciation.  Doerk was in line with that goal.  His library was a valuable gift since a book these days (including the one I wrote about Bob Scriver) often sells for about forty dollars, or as much as a small trafficked boy, who would be a lot more trouble but a worthy recipient of care and affection.

Some people on Thanksgiving will express gratitude for living in a civilized country, for being good religious folk, for having a nice income and owning in a pleasant house, for living in an advanced technological world where one can visit with a man who is in Cornwall and have a scholarly discussion with a gas station attendant.  I don’t think about turkeys much.  I think about that little boy quite a lot.  And also the seven-year-old grandfather of Darrell Kipp who escaped a winter massacre with only his life but made Darrell possible as well as all the boys and girls inspired by Piegan Institute.  It’s not some romantic fantasy -- it’s reality.  Well, at least as real as I can manage today.

A RE-POST FROM AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY

American Indian Quarterly has earned its reputation as one of the dominant journals in American Indian studies by presenting the best and most thought-provoking scholarship in the field. AIQ is a forum for diverse voices and perspectives spanning a variety of academic disciplines. The common thread is AIQ’s commitment to publishing work that contributes to the development of American Indian studies as a field and to the sovereignty and continuance of American Indian nations and cultures. In addition to  peer-reviewed articles, AIQ features reviews of books, films, and exhibits.

AVAILABLE

Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words, Rene Meshake with Kim Anderson

Retelling Trickster in Nappi’s Language, Nimachia Howe

Ojibwe Activist Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik, Tadeusz Lewandowski

These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912, Maurice Crandall

Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, Shannon Speed

Xurt’an: The End of the World and Other Myths, Songs, Charms, and Chants by the Northern Lacandones of Naha’, Suzanne Cook 

Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, Strother E. Roberts 

No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution, Rachel B. Herrmann

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, Céline Carayon 

Akulmiut Neqait: Fish and Food of the Akulmiut, Ann Fienup-Riordan, Marie Meade, and Alice Rearden

Authorized Agents: Publication and Diplomacy in the Era of Indian Removal, Frank Kelderman

When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California, Frank LaPena and Mark Dean Johnson, with Kristina Perea Gilmore

Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, Eli Meyerhof

Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa, T.J. Tallie

How ‘Indians’ Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory, Gonzalo Lamana

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy, Edited by Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hamalainen

Starring Red Wing: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star, Linda M. Waggoner

When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, Megan Burke

Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Christina Leza

This Wound Is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt

Oklahoma’s Atticus: An Innocent Man and the Lawyer Who Fought for Him, Hunter Howe Cates

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon 

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, Brianna Theobald

Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, edited by Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman, and Christopher C. LeBlanc

A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars, Carroll P. Kakel III

Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie School Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, edited by Natalie Diaz and Hannah Ensor (Associate Editor)

The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Matthew J. Clavin

Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy, Georges Sioui

Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization, Patrick Belanger

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge Protecting Environments and Regaining Health, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover

Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, edited by Gregory A. Waselkov

Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, Ed. by Jo-Ann Archibald, et al. 

Eastern Cherokee Stories: A Living Oral Tradition and Its Cultural Continuance, Sandra Muse Isaacs

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Tiffany Lethabo King

Black Indian: A Memoir, Shonda Buchanan 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese 

Cultural Resource Management in the Great Basin, 1986-2016, edited by Alice M. Baldrica, Patricia A.  DeBunch, and Don D. Flower

Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed, Alexandra Harmon

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hӓmӓlӓinen  

A Population History of the Missions of the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria, Robert H. Jackson

Clues to Lower Mississippi Valley Histories: Language, Archaeology, and Ethnography, David V. Kaufman

Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink

Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia, edited by Evelyn Flores and Emelihter Kihleng

Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement, David Martínez 

Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, Gerald Vizenor

George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch

Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, Hayes Peter Mauro

The Life & Art of Joseph Henry Sharp, Peter H. Hassrick 

The Legacy of Rulership in Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Historia de la nación chichimeca, Leisa A. Kauffmann

Chipped Stone Technological Organization: Central Place Foraging and Exchange on the Northern Great Plains, Craig M. Johnson

Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representation in the Américas, Quynh Nhu Le

Native American Mystery Writing: Indigenous Investigations, Mary Stoecklein

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves

Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhόta Oyáte, Christopher Pexa

Life at Swift Water Place (Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact), Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson 

Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma, Gunlög Fur

Spirals to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, Laura Harjo

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, Jeffrey Ostler

Understanding Northwest Coast Indigenous Jewelry, Alexander Dawkins

Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty, Courtney Lewis

In Defense of Loose Translations: An Indian Life in an Academic World, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country. Eds Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider

A New Continent of Liberty: Eunomia in Native American Literature from Occom to Erdrich, by Geoff Hamilton

Challenging Colonial Narratives: Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology, by Matthew A. Beaudoin

Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians, Clifford E. Trafzer

In the Night of Memory: A Novel, by Linda LeGarde Grover

Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia, edited by R. Aída Hernández Castillo, Suzi Hutchings, and Brian Noble

The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming, ed. by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel

Coming Full Circle: The Seneca Nation of Indians, 1848-1934, Laurence M. Hauptman

Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier, Ian Saxine

Waterlogged: Examples and Procedures for Northwest Coast Archaeologists, Kathryn Bernick

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation, by Martha Louise Hipp

The End of the Myth: From Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin

Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place. Kermoal and Altamirano-Jimenez.

Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America. Ed Frances Negron-Muntaner