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.

BLACKFEET JUST UNDER THE SURFACE

This post is a suggested list of the various forces at work on the Blackfeet Tribe that have caused the present “perfect storm” and keep it going on despite the price being paid and the efforts to intervene.

All indigenous populations, by definition, are creatures of their environment.  The East Slope of the Rockies was never an easy place to live but in the day of the herds of buffalo, it was a balanced and sustaining human place to live.  There was plenty of food, there were “rules” for managing how to get it, how to store it, how to share it, and so on.  Times of hardship still happened, but the great bulk of the population went forward.

However, there were edges and interfaces with other populations: those of the far north, those of the woodlands to the east, those that were partly guarded by the Rockies, and there must have been an ambiguous relationship with peoples to the south, particularly after the Spanish began to arrive, bringing the horse.

There is some evidence that from a planetary point of view, esp. if you look at it from the north pole, there was penetration of the area by various means from people with roots in Asia (I’m not just talking about the Bering Straits, but also about dog-sledders and kayak paddlers) and people from the Norse areas, stepping from Greenland to Iceland to North America.  Climate change had a lot to do with this, since sometimes the Arctic Sea was open (as it is becoming now.) 

Also, there were clearly boat people who managed to cross the Pacific much earlier than anyone has thought.  There were circum-Pacific trade routes that are hinted at by artifacts.  Kon-Tiki showed how primitive those boats could be, functioning on ocean currents and prevailing winds.

For the Blackfeet, the early penetration of explorers came up the Mississippi and then the Missouri.  Lewis and Clark were not the first whites in the area.  But there were not many whites until late and then mostly from “Canada.”

The Blackfoot Confederation was bisected by the 49^th parallel, which very much confused relationships and resources, and continues to do so.  The Hudson’s Bay Company injected a population of tough Brits and venture capital that demanded profit.  Then rival French and American companies also began to compete, which meant introducing trade goods of dangerous high value like gunpowder and guns, and esp. alcohol.  The Red River Metis/Cree Chippewa culture formed out of all this.  The occasional Mohawk or Polynesian passed through.

The Euro idea that “tribes” were “races” of people with clear edges who could be detached from their ecological location and treated as units was a distortion.  Various people came and went from small bands who had family relationships at their core, plus a ceremonial unity reinforced by summer rituals.  The intrusion of missionaries disrupted all this.  Then, after the buffalo were gone, the priests become a means of survival.  For the Red River Metis, the Catholic missionaries were easier to accept.

Washington, D.C. has always been a problem -- too far away, too beholden to other people.  Right now they are simply a national version of the same deadlock as the tribal council.  Money, virtue, precedent, status, and coping with international corporations are forces that deserve whole books of analysis.  The main point I want to make here is that MUCH is covert.  Even the legislators who take an interest and try to pass helpful laws have no grasp of how much underground action there is.  Two things to watch: water and the private ownership of rez land -- both limited commodities that will increase in value.  Sovereignty means moving ownership into private and sometimes inexperienced hands just as the Dawes Act was a trust buster.  Very mixed consequences.  And yet we know what happens when the government is the trustee.

Some of this is criminal (both from inside the tribe and from the larger society, including both Montana elements and international networks), but some is law enforcement that represents itself as being against criminal activity and justifies bad behavior that way (which always leads to goals that serve the persons involved, i.e. cops).  Murders, DUI accidents, violence and sexual abuse have gone unaddressed and unresolved.  This serves the interests of some people.  We know what the history of casinos is and who they attract.  Alcohol is only one drug.

Old grudges about jobs, family conflicts, various sorting and subsidies for education or investment, are not forgiven.  Again, the rez justice system is stymied because there is no ultimate "outside" superior court that everyone trusts.   But also there are illicit handshake deals about rez business: contracts, sweet agreements, definitions, stipulated and secret consequences, penalties, evasion of oversight and regulation.  Government desk-riders do NOT want to risk coming to the rez, esp. in winter.  Indians play cats-paw's for whites.

Outsiders depend on personalities more than systems.  In fact, many needed systems don’t exist.  Outsiders can’t figure out how to get statistics or names and addresses.  Addresses don’t mean much when people float around.  Often one needs to know family relationships to locate someone and the relationships will not be tagged by names.  Land line phones don’t work well (the bills run up too easily, the distances are too long) and cell phones have no directories.  Reporters call Earl Old Person because they saw his dancers at the Russell Auction and the media thinks of him as a “chief” as in the movies.  His great strength is personal history with many people over decades.

Schools are state creatures: they run on state law.  In the last decades they have become more hierarchical, more controlling, and more prescriptive. This is the context for Willie Sharp, as a former principal in a time when disobedient kids are sometimes arrested by police.  I’ve taught with two of the former teachers on one version or another of this council.  They have not changed.

The idea of Tribal Councils came out of the time decades ago when “corporations” were being formed in business.  I had always thought of them as democracies controlled by their shareholders, but these days they have become oligarchies everywhere -- mostly because of the greed of the shareholders.  They want profit and will fire any board members who don’t take whatever measures are necessary, regardless of social damage or consequences displaced to the future.  The timeline is today-tomorrow, and no later.  Anyway, half the share-holders are ON the rez, taking the consequences of immediate decisions, and half the share-holders are OFF the rez, without being much involved except to cash their check.  The latter are more likely to be “fractionated” and low “quantum.”  Many have no attachment to the place in an emotional sensory way -- only the entitlement to a check.

Outside but parallel to the “corporation” structure of the reservation there remains a cultural system, partly the remnants of pre-existing ways and partly the product of literature, other media, anthropology, political bodies like AIM, Christian churches with strong pentecostal elements, charter schools based on culture, and university work, including both Montana state schools and elite places that give priority to Indians, like Harvard.  This “virtual” structure doesn’t always match reality.

Another competing but quiet network is that of the Cree Chippewa greater community, which is woven into the Blackfeet rez by history, marriage, and provenance.  Outsiders don’t grasp that a person can be fully indigenous without being enrolled in the Blackfeet tribe. Indeed, they might be without enough provenance quantum big enough for them to belong to any tribe at all, as fractionated as the land. This is because of government schools for people of courting age, the government’s bright idea of pushing the Cree Chippewa onto the Blackfeet rez, and the relocation movement that tried to disperse rez people into the cities but only created Indian ghettoes.  Maybe military service creates another network.

SHAUN TAYLOR-CORBETT ("Blackfeet")

In the opposite direction, both the change to Indian preference in government and tribal jobs and the coinciding “aging to failure” of white-owned small businesses and ranches that were established after WWII has removed a social element that was politically untenable but also stabilizing.  Their children have a sense of entitlement that is more family than tribe-based.  Some are easily able to “pass” and have good off-rez connections that allow them to leave, which is a loss of brains and energy.

In the end all these forces combine to create a “nation” of dissenters, who are invested in maintaining their identity and the status quo by BEING dissenters.  The point of difference simply moves from one resolution to the next problem without acknowledging that anything got done.  There’s a sense of righteousness, separation from the possibility of failure and denial of all experiments or advances.  It’s common in survivors, a reaction to trauma.

Some essential people have died.  We miss them deeply.  They were from a generation of idealists and doers.  Think what they would say.

_________

In addition to posting some things on this blog, I have a small email list to whom I forward selected posts.  I was startled to get this reaction from Sidner Larson.  If you don't know him, he's Jim Welch's cousin, grew up on the High Line where he acquired and managed a successful bar, then became a lawyer, and finally now is a professor of Native American literature.  He is the author of a fine memoir called "Catch Colt," which was published by U of Nebraska Press before they caught the French philosophy fever, and "Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing" from the University of Washington Press.  For the past decade he has noted that the boom-time Indian Studies programs of the '70's and 80's have been eroding by underfunding.

Hi Mary, thanks for this, which, in my view, is very significant.

There is much talk and some effort to open discussion of cultural and environmental sustainablility in some areas of Contemporary American Indian Studies, but it often fails to get beyond perpetuation of  old stereotypes of the Noble Savage rather than address actual issues of living communities.

The what-goes-without saying, which is most everything, again in my view, is driven by late-stage capitalism, which cares for nothing except immediate profits.

The profit motive is also systematically eliminating and neutralizing those capable of understanding and articulating essential cultural and environmental issues, such as some scholars formerly protected by academic freedom.

Your post has enormous potential; I hope you develop it fully and that others see the possibility of incorporating it into their own work.

Meanwhile, the weather is just plain weird around here, and, quite excruciating again this morning.

With Best Regards,

Sid

"THE RED AND THE WHITE: A FAMILY'S SAGA OF THE AMERICAN WEST" by Andrew Graybill

The Clarke family, beginning with Malcolm Clarke (1817-1869) attending West Point by pulling strings only to be thrown back out, and ending equally ambiguously with Joyce Clark Turvey (1928-2013) who was an adopted child, is a genealogical trail that leads through complex territory composed of “memes,” the term for culturally transmitted behaviors and beliefs.  From the early marriages “in the fashion of the country,” which is to say partnerships formed (as they often are today) without benefit of any institutional certification, either religious or governmental, to more recent events that living people don't want known, the task of a historian is not easy.

Andrew R. Graybill, the author of “The Red and the White: A Family’s Saga of the American West” is an academic historian and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has returned to his Texas roots after his education at prestigious Yale and Princeton and some years at the University of Nebraska, which has been one of the major publishers of Western history.  His book is diplomatic and documented whenever possible, but this is a paper history based on paper records.  He is wary of personal testimony and with good reason.  The “memes” in question are sometimes racist, vengeful, full of emotion and family defensiveness.  Yet they need to be examined, but patiently against a background thrown into chaos by the War Between the States, which is what Graybill provides.

Only a few days ago I was contacted by a woman trying to understand her grandmother, who loved the St. Mary’s valley on the Blackfeet reservation and returned there every summer even in old age, and yet when asked about possible “Indian blood” froze into denial.  The quite “New Age” granddaughter found this incomprehensible.  She told me she had read “every book” about the Blackfeet, but she had not.  What she had read was the conventional, constantly quoted, taught-at-universities books which had not captured reality beyond anthropology and a few facts.  They are circular, like bios of celebrities that repeat old lies because they are colorful.

“The Red and the White” had to be written by an outsider because people saturated with the memes of massacre, blame, trauma, and family loyalty would have been blind even in the face of careful library research.  They would have been forced to take sides and use incendiary adjectives.  Instead, this account is a useful road map of the interlaced trails of economics, temperament, and alliances.  Even just the bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.

I don’t much follow the more traditional histories of this area, mostly white-written and with a big romantic thumb on the scales, meant to defend the reputations of white men, or at least those in power.  (Exceptions might be “Ghost Hunting in Montana” by Barnaby Conrad III -- which does for the Conrads what Graybill does for the Clarkes -- and the quiet work of Jack Holterman, never valued properly, possibly because he was gay.) Mrs. Grundy, the prissy censor, has suppressed the wives of Malcolm Clarke all except Coth-co-co-na, and the Blackfeet themselves have not wanted to see her as a broken victim of her husband’s death, which she was.   I never understood the status of Bill and Nora Spanish until I saw in this book that the first wife of Horace was Margaret Spanish (First Kill). Horace, Malcolm’s son by Coth-co-co-na, was a lifelong tribal politics player -- see Paul Rosier’s primary research in “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation”.  

This is a simplified version, for which you should be grateful.

Two of the most mysterious and yet omnipresent characters among the recent traditional Blackfeet were “Chief Bull” in Heart Butte and “Kyi-yo” (Bobcat) in Starr School, bilingual brokers in the political struggles.  It turns out they are descended from one of Malcolm Clarke’s earlier wives, “Good Singing” (Akseniski) who was a daughter of Isidoro Sandoval, major frontier figure.  She and Malcolm Clarke had four surviving children, Isidoro the 2nd (b.1856/57) being the first son and the ancestor of both “Chief Bull” and “Kyi-yo.”  There is no room here to explore this, but it’s clear that the Clarke family, like Thomas Jefferson, had a shadow set of siblings.  The drive to power, pride verging on arrogance, a strain of creativity and verbal skill, and tumbling economic fortunes mark all of these generational lines.

Yet Graybill emphasizes, partly I’m sure because of Joyce Turvey’s concerns, that Helen and John, respectively Horace Clarke’s sister and son, were quiet, respectable, achieving people.  If it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, no history would ever be written.  But no history could capture John Clarke’s complete disregard for social considerations and his single-minded pursuit of his artistic vision, which was sometimes celebrated and other times brushed aside.  This book does not address his many lifelong friendships with other artists in the area, including Bob Scriver.  They’ve been photoshopped out, which might be a good thing, because it leaves room for another book, probably not written by a formal historian.  Joyce Turvey’s daughters emphasized that she was adopted, NOT Indian, very much Californian which is where they grew up.  Joyce had a career as a makeup company executive and that’s what they value.  No Indians were present at Joyce’s funeral.  Her gallery did not represent Indian artists.

Graybill is not an expert on the contentious field of contemporary Western art or even the checkered practices of the Montana Historical Society nor is he particularly informed about the memes of the Blackfeet.  One of them, the practice of a powerful man making a daughter into a specially cherished child (minipoka), often recurs in this narrative.  The violent names of some of the women were a compliment to their father’s exploits.  But these considerations were not vital to the forming of this narrative, which is exceptionally pleasant to read, clear and graceful in its phrasing.

Malcolm Clarke

The crucial issue is not just the struggle of individuals to matter in the world, but the painful and sometimes deadly dynamics of two juggernaut cultures producing humans born into turbulence.  Described as “races,” they were often more similar than different -- warriors and wives on both sides, hard-pressed to find safe and peaceful places, believing that violence was the only way, often deeply damaged when alcohol became an alternative.  Sorting this all out is tough when Malcolm’s birth year (1817), isn’t quite two centuries ago yet.  I’m waiting for the Uphams, Kipps, Tatseys, and Weatherwaxes to get their books into print.  Woody Kipp is the only one so far.  Jimmy Welch’s father was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, but Jimmy Welch, Jr. was not, except for summer visits.  His family line doesn’t go back far in Browning -- in fact, the father, who was mostly Cherokee on his father’s side, was Bob Scriver’s playmate.  (Both born in 1914 in Browning.)  The grandfather was from the Carolinas.

Emotions still swirl on the rez, still affect who goes to college and how they are received when they come back, what possible ways there are to survive after returning.  The roots of being Blackfeet are on this high east slope of the Rockies and their survival as a cultural people depends upon keeping the relationship to the land alive -- NOT blood quantum or descent.  

It’s self-serving for me to say so, but many white people have felt the mystical magnetism of this land and have quietly visited whenever they could.  Walter McClintock, for instance.  Me, for instance.  A small array of scholars, more and more include the Blackfeet themselves, the Cree and other strands mixed into them, and the assimilated outliers like Tom Dawson, who married Malcolm’s daughter, and whose family descendant was the “registrar” for the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls.  Where’s THAT book?  

I hungered and thirsted for “The Red and the White” because there were so many questions.  But it’s like studying the cosmos:  the more questions are answered, the more the answers raise even more crucial questions.  I think this will not be the last post about this book, either by me or by others -- particularly the descendants, even the ones in California.

LEVI JULIAN BURD

LEVI J. BURD, BROWNING, RANCHER AND OILMAN, DIES

Great Falls Tribune, Vol.69, No 357, Sunday, May 6, 1956

Levi Julian Burd, 78, Browning rancher and oilman, died Saturday morning at a Great Falls hospital.

Private funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Monday at the George Co. with Rev. Vernon Hanks officiating.  Cremation will follow.

Burd, a Montana native, had been active until he was hospitalized two weeks ago after suffering a stroke.  He suffered another stroke Thursday night.  Five years ago he underwent brain surgery.

Burd was born Sept. 7, 1877, at Sun River, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Burd.

His father came to Virginia City from Michigan in 1864 in search of gold and stayed to establish a ranching empire that extended from the Sun River north to Canada.

The family later moved to Choteau where Burd, the last survivor of a family of six children, received his education.  He also attended Gonzaga University at Spokane.

At the age of 12, Burd’s father made him a representative in charge of his outfit which joined with wagons and wranglers of other ranches in finding and branding cattle on the range.

These roundup teams would leave Choteau in March and travel to the Sun River, Great Falls and into the Sweetgrass Hills seeking cattle.  They usually ended their job in November.  At that time there were no fences or homestead farms in the region.

Following his father’s death, Burd managed the vast estate.

He married Daisy Francis Wetzel of Fort Benton Dec. 1, 1897, at Holy Family Mission near Browning and the couple ranched in that area until Burd’s death.  They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary here in 1947.

Burd served two terms on the Montana livestock board.  He had been active in promoting the oil industry in Glacier county and managed the Levi Burd Trustee Oil Interests in association with a son-in-law, B.P. McNair.

Survivors include the widow; two daughters, Mrs. Ben P. McNair, formerly of Great Falls, now of Laguna Beach, CA., and Mrs. Dorothy Cassutt, Detroit, and a grandson, Richard Cassutt, Browning rancher.

____________________________

Levi Burd, who was thirty when the 1907-08 census was taken, married Daisy Wetzel, who was a sister of Pearl Wetzel Hagerty.  Levi Burd and Wright Hagerty were the two richest tribal men on the Blackfeet reservation, worth $100,000 in the Thirties.  They ranched five miles apart along the Milk River.  Both were active in tribal politics, oil development, sheep and cattle.  One of Bob Scriver’s prized possessions was Wright Hagerty’s custom saddle.  It was one of his markers of success.

Levi Burd’s mother, Susan Two Guns, was married three times:  first, to Sam Burd, who was white; then to Anthony Austin; and third to Two Guns Whitecalf “in the custom of the country,” for 35 years.  Her father was Good Medicine.  Her half-sister, Gretchen, (same father) was the wife of David Duvall, the informant for Clarke Wissler, the first anthropologist to seriously study the Blackfeet.  Susan was well-connected.  

In fact, the Burd/Hagerty/Two Guns Whitecalf complex is an excellent illustration of how power and wealth develops in a delineated hybrid group.  There are cross-overs that supply starter investment, a family conviction of superiority and entitlement that lends confidence, lines of private communication between Indian and White as well as among contingents of full-blood, mixed blood, and hardly-any-blood.  Levi Burd was capable of putting on a beaded white buckskin parade outfit plus Sioux eagle-feather bonnet in order to visit Washington, D.C.  But he normally wore a suit appropriate for visiting a bank.  In that guise one might assume he was Mexican or Mediterranean, a stocky man with sturdy features.

His most remarkable alliance has only recently come to light in the process of Joyce Smith sorting her aunt’s papers, which include correspondence with Clare Sheridan, Winston Churchill’s cousin, who was on the Blackfeet Reservation in the summer and fall of 1937.  Officially, Clare was there as an artist and did indeed learn from Hans Reiss how to carve a tree trunk, not into a totem pole, but into a vertical sculpture, often religious.  She also stayed with the family of Gerald Tail Feathers on the Alberta side.  But she spent enough time with Levi Burd that people talked.  Technically, she was staying with Norma Smith, who was teaching in the one-room school house near the Burd ranch.  

Naturally, given Clare’s frank ideas about intimacy and the public suspicion about what rich men do, the idea was that they were having an affair.  But after looking at the references to Levi Burd in Paul C. Rosier’s indispensable book,  “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954,” I suspect that was just a distraction -- sex is always a dependable distraction.  1937 was the early beginnings of WWII.  My premise is that Clare had been asked by Churchill to scout the territory between Alberta and Montana, which has always been a major oil-producing field.  No one understood the oil business better or was more deeply involved than Levi Burd.

Far from being a revenue-generating serendipity that only has to be pumped out of the ground and transported to market, the business of leases, price-setting, governmental regulation, profit-sharing was then-as-now very complex.  Properly handled, there was a lot of profit.  Without some expertise and restraint, the carpet-baggers got most of it.  Old-timer tribal leaders believed that the government was legally obligated to take care of them.  Mixed blood entrepreneurs just wanted the BIA out of the way.  There were times when Burd reached out to protect full-bloods, and other times when Two Guns Whitecalf bowed to the Middle Class mixed bloods.  It’s confusing enough to reconcile participation in mainstream America with the need to retain Blackfeet identity, without figuring out how some of these little surprises happen.  No doubt at least sometimes it was family loyalty, consciousness of a need, creating favors to be called in later.  

There is another reason for Churchill to want to know more about this region.  The Fenians, Irish independents, had a diaspora here descended from fur trading and the Red River metis community.  There must have been worry about how they would react to an English/German conflict since they had such a long history of conflict.  In the end they were neutral, but there would be the possibility of some “monkey-wrench gang” interdicting the access to oil that a nation needs in order to wage war.  Gerald Tail Feathers’ mother was half-Irish.  Clare and Churchill shared another cousin who was landed gentry in Ireland.

Earlier Clare had gone to Moscow to make portraits of the important Communist leaders.  She always insisted that she did not spy and did not go there to spy but simply as a sculptor of busts.  Churchill was very angry with her.  And yet her opinions and observations had to be valuable.

Levi Burd was not a lean and naked young man on a buffalo-running horse, but he was also an important figure in the history of his people as the globe became more connected and therefore more dangerous.  On the rez they call oil “the second buffalo.”  One goes out hunting for it while wearing a suit.

_______

I'm including this in the post instead of as a comment, because I think it is too important to overlook.  It's SO vital to look beyond just Montana.

Dear Mary:

Interesting article on Levi Burd, Clare Sheridan and oil wells.

Regarding your idea that Winston Churchill wanted Clare to scout the region, you may know that the burgeoning Turner Valley oilfield southwest of Calgary so interested Churchill that he visited the region in 1929 while in Calgary for a talk to the local branch of the Canadian Club.

To understand the importance of Turner Valley, note that by 1941 it was providing about one-quarter of all of Canada’s oil needs during the Second World War. Churchill is reported to have said during his 1929 visit: “There are unbounded possibilities both to Alberta and to the British Empire in this valuable oil-bearing structure.”

Churchill is further reported to have bought shares in three oil companies while in Canada. Maybe Churchill was also interested in Montana oil production.

As for any possible dalliance between Levi Burd and Clare Sheridan, I think it would have been unlikely – not impossible, just unlikely. I found an old report about the reservation (1914-15) in which loose morals are a center of discussion. The head of the police was living with a married woman, and it asked how he could enforce the Montana marriage code when he was breaking it himself. There was quite a discussion about native marriage and divorce customs, the citizenship status of natives and whether the rules of white men could apply to natives who weren’t then classified as U.S. citizens.

Given that sort of atmosphere, Burd’s mixed blood status and his rank in the community, it’s more likely he would have stayed clear of any hanky-panky that could have brought him unwanted scrutiny.

Burd had seen what happened to Robert Hamilton, a mixed blood activist on the reservation, and took a lesson from it. I say that based on an investigation in 1915 of Hamilton that I turned up which contains some pretty nasty claims about Hamilton being a cattle thief, forging checks, abandoning his family and the like. Enough that there was a scuffle at the Browning post office involving Hamilton and others in which Hamilton says he was badly manhandled. The affidavits are fascinating reading – a who’s who of Browning and reservation society, including James White Calf, Dick Sanderville and Wades in the Water.

Burd, who was active in local politics, often opposing Hamilton’s efforts, would have wanted to avoid any situation (like having an affair) that would have compromised his influence and standing in the community.

Ray Djuff

Calgary

"NAPI'S LOOKOUT: THE STORY OF WILLOW ROUNDS"

Looking north across Birch Creek.

Willow Rounds likely just out of the frame to the right.

Over the years there have been many local historians who converted local history into small chapbooks.  Especially there were women who enjoyed this work of taking stories from talk to print, small cumulative interviews about the families who settled their area.  Among them were Helen West in Cut Bank, Dorothy Floerschinger in Conrad, and Olga Monkman in Choteau.  I knew all of them slightly, but didn’t really remember Dorothy Hamaker until Paul Wheeler sent me a copy of “Napi’s Lookout: The Story of Willow Rounds,”  (1967) which is just north-east of Valier and part of the Canal Company complex history, including the Conrad brothers’ ranch empire.  Seeing her photo jogged my memory.

Maybe a dozen or more of these historians of the local would regularly stop in at Scriver Studio to swap stories, rather like early trappers hanging around a trading post.  Some of them wrote about Indians, some wanted to check out details in stories formally published by George Bird Grinnell or James Willard Schultz, some had family histories entwined with Bob’s sojourn as a band teacher and justice of the peace or with the Browning Merc, and some wanted to write histories of their towns from founding to the present.  Charlie Russell had firmly established the relationship between story and art; Ace Powell never let us forget it.  The product of the talk-to-print impulse was self-publishing, usually printed by a local newspaper plant.  I suppose they were composed on a linotype and the photos were pasted in on layout sheets.

The concept of the Axis Mundi is that the location of the individual is a sort of picket pin around which the person organizes their understanding of life, both practical and spiritual, which is why these historians were clearly located where they wrote.  Usually that point is a town or ranch.  Not so common is what we might call “the Long Town,” which is built along a stream or possibly an important thoroughfare like the Old North Trail.  “Willow Rounds” is a place along Birch Creek, the southern boundary of the Southern Blackfeet or Piegan sub-group of the Blackfeet (Siksika) nation.  The Hamakers ranched there.

In terms of the history of the US, “town” as a compact settlement was a northern way of development, but “plantation” as a long shore-tracing string of locations was southern.  The Blackfeet reservation has three “resort” towns (East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb), two “old-timer” settlements (Heart Butte and Starr School) and one hub governmental town (Browning).  But there are also several important “Long Towns” (Badger, Two Medicine, and Birch, which is shared on the south shore with Pondera county settlers).  Because they are based on ranches along rivers, their histories include a series of floods.

Hamaker notes several major floods: 1908, 1948 and the Really Big Flood in 1964.  A 1948 aerial photo in the booklet surprised both Paul and I by vividly showing that the “rounds” that gave Hamaker’s ranch its name was not the many tipi rings that are in that valley, but rather round clearings formed by camp circles of the lodges pushing back the brush.  The ranch had a number of owners through the years and that continues to be true.  In the early days, when timber and lumber were both scarce, the practice was often to convert existing houses to new uses, which was made easier when the floods moved whole buildings along to new locations.

This part of the country is formed by ancient volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Northwest that covered the area with fine dust, a very ancient seabed made of limestone, and the scraped deposits of glaciers only ten thousand years old -- all of it eroded by the rush of  water when the glaciers melted.  Hamaker lived in an area called “Bullhead,” because it contained “soap holes,” something like quicksand, in which a bull could sink so far that only its head stuck out -- barely enough to throw a rope on to haul it out.   “In the one map reference from The USGS (United States Geological Survey) the soap holes are in a closed drainage system. The water flows in and does not flow out. This has caused the shales, sandstones and limestones under the bentonite beds to have eroded away, forming depressions in which bentonite from the surrounding area can accumulate.”

Hamaker doesn’t take an anthropological approach to Indians and uses the old-fashioned terms “buck” and “squaw” that suggest they are a different species.  Also, to her all bears are fierce and must be shot.  She came to the territory in 1910 so this is not surprising.  She sees through the lens of local life, so the berries are described in terms of recipes:  “put rhubarb in your sarvisberry pie to give it a bit of tang.”  And yet she knows the Napi stories about buffalo berries, how Napi saw their reflection in water and kept trying to pick the mirrored fruit until frustration drove him to thrash the bushes and curse them with terrible thorns, which weren’t a curse at all, since then they protected small animals, tender plants and even a calving cow with a thick skin.

She describes “Napi’s Lookout” as a high point excellent for watching or flagging signals, and speaks eloquently of an old man who arrived up there without warning, sang mourning songs all day, then slipped away at nightfall.  She says that in the early days the trees were full of burials -- which were not buried but lifted up after being sewn into hide shrouds.  I always wondered what happened to them and she says they were poked down and cut open in search of artifacts, those emotion-laden and occasionally valuable bits of material culture.  She tells us that if you are looking for someone, you should go a little north into Canada and check the “guest book” at “Writing on Stone” where there are many pecked images as illustrated in the movie called “Meek’s Cutoff”.  Spopee (Turtle) was there, though no one is sure which Spopee.

Hamaker’s understanding of Blackfeet religion is as a sort of child’s version of Christianity, but then her understanding of Christianity is also the simplified and sentimental version of Edwardian times.  She writes poetry infused with it, careful to rhyme and scan.  Near the end of the book is a passage that illustrates her approach so I’ll quote it:

“It was on just such a mission [looking for a calf] that I had to tether my horse and creep into a thicket.  Stooping low beneath the thorns, I discovered a bed of glorious deep-blue violets, cleverly hidden in a silvery bed of leaf-mold.  “Cold Maker” had not yet completely left the valley, and it was delightful to see something bright, alive and cheerful.  One must bow humbly and very, very low sometimes if he would perceive God’s blessings and Nature’s wonders.”

Dorothy Hamaker has many heirs today.  Oddly, most of the ones I know are male singers.  Meeting the way the early trappers used to rendezvous, Jack Gladstone, Wiley Gustafson, Ken Overcast, and all the “cowboy poets”  travel through the “long towns” across the prairie.  They form temporary axles for the wheeling universe along the Long Road of Time.  How’s that for a metaphor?

BLACKFOOT REDEMPTION: The Story of Spopee

The mysterious century-old story of Spopee, the Blackfeet man who ended up mute in St. Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum in Washington, D.C. for more than thirty years, has now been carefully documented by William E. Farr in his book “Blackfoot Redemption, A Blood Indian’s Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice.”  Versions of the story have always floated around the rez, losing and gaining details according to the motives of the tale-teller.  I even imagined a version of my own in “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” (www.lulu.com/prairiemary) 

Spopee means turtle.  There have been several men in Blackfeet history who were called “Turtle” for one reason or another.  There are two kinds of Blackfeet faces:  round faces and blade faces.  The Spopee that this review is about had a round face, because he lived in a showcase institution in Washington, D.C., and ate very well.  The blade faced man stayed on the Blackfeet rez where the Canadian/US border draws a line through the territory of the People.  He was much younger, never hunted buffalo, but his image fits the romantic expectations of the world.  Winold Reiss and Clare Sheridan, among others, recorded his likeness in the Thirties.

The murder committed by the Spopee in this book occurred in 1879.  I have a useful chart of history reminding me that in Europe as well as North America in those days empire-building was the name of the game.  The Siege of Paris, in which 6,000 people starved to death, was in 1870.  The Red River Rebellion had just been put down and RC Mounted Police just founded.  Manitoba had newly formed in Canada, which itself had been established as a country in 1869.  Colorado and Nebraska were just becoming states.    The consciousness in Washington, D.C. of European opinion of American treatment of its native peoples is the only stone left unturned by Bill Farr, though he reminds us repeatedly of the shifting reputation of Indians from blood-thirsty monsters to a split between pitiful remnants and noble embodiments of the New World. He carefully explains the pre-cursors to the Starvation Winter of 1893-84 when 600 Blackfeet people starved to death because they were confined to the reservation where there were no more buffalo.  Sympathizers in the East were outraged and made no secret of it.  It might explain how Spopee got to St. Elizabeth’s.

The sources of this careful study (Farr is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Montana) are exhaustive and useful, even in such a “cold case,” not least because they are part of a recent general movement to search primary sources.  There are enough of these books now to begin to weave together.  Two referenced by Farr are “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954” by Paul C. Rosier and “Firewater, The Impact of the Whisky Trade on the Blackfoot Nation,” by Hugh A. Dempsey.  One begins to recognize names and see relationships.  Two books now being written, one about the Malcolm Clark family and one about the White Calf family, will add to this trove.  These refute the declaration of a Montana librarian who told me “Indians” have no history here.

When I read these books, real people -- only a generation or two descended from Spopee -- rise in my mind’s eye.  Modern stories are not so different.  In the Nineties in Portland the police arrested a “Mexican drunk,” who didn’t speak either English or Spanish and remained mute until his buddy, facing up to consequences, came to explain that he was from far up in the Mexican mountains where people only spoke the local tribal language.  When I was teaching in Heart Butte, a pesky drunk went on a binge in a small nearby town.  He was pounding on the locked door of a local bar when the new owner, an old man who didn’t know Indians, came around the outside, propped his rifle on the board fence and shot the drunk dead.  The usual public “law firm,” Rumor, Malign & Obfuscation took over from there.  A tire iron materialized and the charge shifted from murder to self-defense.

The same forces didn’t help Spopee and his buddy, Good Rider, two young guys in a hungry time who came down from Canada and hitched a ride with a white man leaving for the States to become a wolfer, the oil field opportunity of the time.  What happened among the three, as far as the primitive CSI could ascertain, was that the wolfer (Walmsley, by name) ended up with a bullet in the back and a bashed-in skull.  Which of the near-teens did the deed, how much they collaborated in the ensuing cover-up, whether Walmsley had already attacked one of them with a shovel, and even on which side of the border the murder was committed, remained confused.   In the final act Good Rider became a state’s witness and Spopee was convicted, shuffled around, and ended up at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., the beneficiary of the wonderful belief that life in what were near-resort-quality buildings with good food, plenty of air and sunlight, would cure anything.  It certainly didn’t hurt Spopee, except that when he died a year and a half after being released and sent home -- now a dignified gent with a brush cut, a splendid mustache, and a three-piece suit.  His autopsy showed fatty heart, damaged liver, and nephritis.  Bad diet, no exercise.  The hospital docs had said he was in excellent health.  They had no reason to testify otherwise.

Actually, Spopee did occasionally say a few words, sort of in the spirit of the boy who never spoke until at the age of five he announced that there were lumps in his oatmeal.  When asked why he never spoke earlier, he said that everything had been fine until then.  At the time of Spopee’s conviction, another man escaped punishment by claiming he was crazy and Spopee took note.  When asked how he was, he said, “Crazy.”

There are two intriguing elements that Farr uncovered.  One was that when Spopee worked in the tailoring shop, he started a little side-business of repairing old clothes and selling them.  The other was his fascination with money, mostly in the form of checks.  When I first came to Browning in 1961, “counter-checks” were still viable -- that is, if one didn’t have personal checks, there was a pad of generic check forms on the counter.  So Spopee, understanding how important money is in Washington, D.C., simply made himself some money.  Someone gave him a little set of rubber movable type, plus he skillfully drew his own presidents, and then signed his name, “Purify Spopee,” which he understood as meaning “clean-hearted.”  His handwriting was elegant.  He could not understand why others didn’t think it was just as viable as the government’s version, so he repeated the practice over and over.   No one would cash them.   Anyone who could locate those hand-drawn bills now would find them FAR more valuable than the amounts written on them, which were only a few dollars.

Regarded quite dispassionately, the story of Spopee fits with books about Blackfeet caught in the forces of a changing culture.  Jim Welch’s “The Heartsong of Charging Elk,” (2000) about the fate of a man left behind in France by the Buffalo Bill Wild West show who gradually becomes a Frenchman; or “Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” by George Devereaux (1951) in which the psychotherapist helps a “Wolf” Indian (who was a Blackfeet known by his Indian name here) recover from PTSD.

In a peculiar contemporary reverse of Spopee’s case, Ronald A Smith, a Canadian white man hitchhiking through the reservation, is currently trying to get his capital sentence commuted.   He murdered Blackfeet men Harvey Mad Man Jr., 24, and Thomas Running Rabbit III, 20, shooting them in the backs of their heads, and has been in jail for 25 years while the political forces struggle with the issues.  He is not mute.  He does not draw currency.  There is no book.  So far.

One more list of ironies:  The woman who sang the lullaby that wakened Spopee  (Ella Clark) was Malcolm Clark’s daughter-in-law.  Her father was a lively character named Robert Hamilton who spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C.  (See Rosier.)  Malcolm Clark Sr. owned what is now the Baucus ranch and was murdered there by his wife’s Blackfeet relatives.  In retaliation, Baker was sent out to strike Mountain Chief’s band but massacred Heavy Runner’s band by mistake.  One version is that Spopee’s mother was killed in the attack and Spopee himself was “shot through the hips.”  Other accounts claim his mother escaped and Spopee was among the absent men, who were hunting.  Spopee was a relative of Natawista, the celebrated wife of Culbertson.