INDIAN RELAY RACING

Part of the Native American renaissance on reservations has been due to “re-birthing” the past, bringing back once traditional practices that were suppressed by white overseers.  One of the most stirring returns has been the revival of Indian Relay Racing.  The proof is in the video linked below:

http://www.pbs.org/video/2365111911/

There is personal meaning for me in this phenomenon through a peripheral relationship in the Sixties.  Pairing up with Bob Scriver meant that I needed a horse, so I bought one for $100 from Don MacRae who had used it for pack trips, since it was an old horse with a scabby problem on its head that looked like mange but wasn’t.  It was an old Bullshoe relay race horse, a tall brown gelding probably descended from cavalry mounts.  Diverting cavalry horses and railroad horses accounted for the origins of many horses on the rez, even into the Sixties.

Bob provided a saddle. He wanted me to ride with him early in the morning.  The first morning I woke up in Browning in my little apartment where the windows looked across an alley and then an empty lot at the Catholic Church, I heard the thunder of hooves.  Before I was quite awake, the white legs of a galloping horse — and boots in stirrups — rushed past that window.  I had no idea who it was.  Later I realized it was Bob  By the next summer, when I was still living there, he would lead my horse up to my window and I would rush out --tucking in my shirttail -- to mount up.

The old brown horse’s improbable name was Skeeter.  He was my “learning horse” and would not do anything he thought was unwise or not according to horse protocol.  You could ride him in any direction as far as you wanted and when you turned around for home, he was there in fifteen minutes.  Bob’s policy was only two words:  “Keep up.”  His horse was broke for bull-dogging and had two speeds:  greased lightning and stop.  Skeeter could and would keep up with Gunsmoke, Bob’s beloved white horse.  Skeeter also stopped abruptly, with the goal of throwing off the rider.

My biggest problem was getting on the horse, even though in those days I was skinnier and had more muscle.  If I used an overturned bucket as a step, Skeeter knew just the right time to kick it out from under me so I’d plant my face instead of my keister in the saddle.  I’d line him up with the corral rail fence, and he’d go perpendicular just as I threw my leg out.  But I didn’t have to whip him to make him go faster.  He’d been quirted in races so thoroughly that all I had to do was hold a twig out to the side far enough for him to see it, and he’d go for miles, rocking along.  There were fewer fences then.

I never did fall off (it was a long way to the ground) but I had no pride about how I stayed on, gripping the horn or whatever else came to hand.  I had no thigh muscles and not much balance.  Bob had two pieces of riding advice: “lean back” and “keep your heels down.”  I bought some boots but the first time I wore them in snow, they disintegrated.  Cheap.

In the early Sixties, the one-time fairgrounds were nothing but a short row of a few stalls in a weathered little tumble of shed.  That’s where I kept my horse: no rent, no permission, total ignorance.  I went out daily with water and I must have taken hay, though I picketed him sometimes which was hopeless because he became mercilessly entangled. and then I tried hobbling, which rubbed his thin thoroughbred ankle skin raw.  He wanted to go back to Trombley’s field where the other horses were.  Once at dawn I met him on the highway, intent on going forward with his front legs tied together, sort of rowing along.  People looked at me sideways and shook their heads.  Clueless Napi-ahki.

It was nothing like today’s sophisticated horse culture where people take lessons and ride in circles in big covered arenas.  Today the Browning fairgrounds are a proper regulation racetrack with well-built stands and respectable stables.  I’ve never attended anything there.  It seems like a foreign country to me.

Nor did I understand anything about Bob’s motives and practices.  He was old enough to be my father and trying to reach back to his youth, which was in the 1920’s.  He needed me to be along in case someone had to go for help and because I was so impressed that I trusted him entirely and that gave him confidence.  If he lost his nerve, he got mad at me and that brought it back.  There was little talking.

This PBS video about Indian Relays impressed me in part because these young guys (no female riders) are just like the Blackfeet, Metis, Cree, and mixed tribe (why isn’t there a word for them yet?) kids I was teaching in the Sixties, except these riders are focused and they have strong male mentors, who are handling them as much as the horses.  There’s just enough chaos and chance involved to offer good lessons about how to manage oneself in a world that’s always going cattywampus.  Like a rez, for instance.

Dutch Lunak

An interesting development was the connection of relay racing with stunt riding for the movies during a little spurt of Westerns in the Nineties.  The competitors were longhairs so they didn’t have to worry about their wigs falling off, and they were rodeo hands and ranchers who weren’t afraid of livestock or getting hurt.  The local story was recounted by John Gill in this linked article:   http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/glacier_reporter/news/article_5b039cad-f685-58dd-affc-f9c2d74f3461.html  

Jobs were not just stunt riding, but also caring for the horses and teaching the actors how to ride.  Then there were spin-offs, like classes in horsemanship for tourists on the rez or training how to be a stunt double.  When a film is being shot on location, the demand for housing and food are high.  The good part is that the quality of the final product doesn’t matter so much as that the producers, cast and crew have good experiences, which locals know how to do.  A sense of humor is crucial.

These folks far outclass me or even Bob.  But more importantly, the contact with professionals who come to the area, the experiences when locals go on location in other places, and the sudden awareness of the whole realm of film in a place where there was no television in the Sixties and the “show house” burned down in the Seventies, has thrown open local people’s lives to the world.  Horses were the unexpected key.  Now we need scripts with horses in them -- but there’s no need for stereotypical 19th century battles.  You don’t need feathers to be an Indian.  But you might need a horse.  A horse can teach you things.  Like tenacity.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/indian-relay-qa-filmmaker-charles-dye/

WRITERS ARE PARASITES

Leaning on lions

I am a parasite.  I try not to call attention to it, but the evidence is clear.

My father told me that’s what I was when I was about eight.  He threw his checkbook down on the table between us.  “Ten dollars!  That’s all the money there is, because of your teeth!  The dentist is taking all our money because of your teeth!”  I didn’t know whether there was more money coming or other bank accounts or even whether ten dollars was much money.  I hadn’t made the decision to go to the dentist -- it always terrified and humiliated me.

In fourth grade Mr. Garnet wrote our schedule on the blackboard, which could be pushed up in the air so as to use the one underneath, told us we’d better copy it fast and did indeed push the blackboard up where I couldn’t see it.  I leaned over to copy my friend’s paper and he caught me.  Said I should do my own work.  I burst into tears.  He looked at me for a minute, then went to the file cabinet to take out an eye chart.    I was near-sighted -- VERY near-sighted.  My mother was chagrined but I had glasses.  My father didn’t say anything.  My mother had always said she had married him for his excellent eyesight.  Those were the days when we all thought about genes but in a very different way from now.

In high school it was my female dramatics teacher who kept on eye on me.  I had good grades.  I was in or worked on every play.  When she and her husband went someplace, I took care of their house and read all their high-end interior decorating magazines.  They kept a cage of birds as big as a room in the backyard and a gentle doberman pinscher indoors.

My mother paid for my college by going back to teaching.  I had a full-tuition scholarship.  I attached myself to my biology partner, a brilliant and careful man destined to be a professor of education law. . . before he died of brain cancer.  He had married his high school sweetheart.  My theatre department friends have stayed friends but we live far apart.  One would call me to act as family vicar for weddings and births.  I did my best but all that luxury made me sick, literally.  And they didn’t want to talk -- they talked to each other about me in front of me.  They were Hollywood people, used to talking about casting.

Browning was my major attachment.  Scriver was my game and Scriver became my name.  It was a world, a foreign country.  For ten years I tucked in behind this dynamo as though I were a VW beetle in the slipstream of an 18-wheeler.  We ate in cafes, he picked up the cheque, I dressed up for shows, and dressed triple-thickness to work pouring bronze.  I helped chase buffalo, skin bears, change tires, and on the side wrote letters, composed catalogues and all that stuff.  We were learn-as-you-go, not like these youngsters who take courses and know the formula for everything.  We just grabbed it in the middle, watched what happened, talked about what that did, and got better at it next time.  A lot of other people helped us.  Everything we earned went back into the business.

Then I began to disappear into the business, too.  I had no identity of my own, no time to myself, no space that was mine, and now that he had fame, other women were lining up, assuming he was rich.  I TRIED hard to do what my mother did: whatever my father wanted and needed.  But he was a traveling man and when he was gone we did what WE wanted.  I would never put all my eggs in one basket again.  And I would never be anyone’s angel.  There were days he thought I was a devil anyway.  Sometimes I ran away, but he never did, because how could he?  Everything was his.  All that work had to be done.  Depression threw a bag over my head.  It made me angry.

When I became the first female animal control officer for Portland, my boss sort of fell in love with me because, he said, I had balls.  I’d walk into all sorts of unknown.  But I wanted brains.  All the time I was taking theatre at NU, I was wishing I were taking something at the U of Chicago.  I wanted to be a “brain.”   I got involved with First Unitarian Church of Portland and their dynamic minister. (Now retired.)  Every book my minister read, I read.  I read the complete works of Ernie Gann, all that airplane stuff.  Jacques Ellul was big and I read his books, but didn’t understand “Christian Anarchy”.  I decided I should go to seminary in Chicago.  He thought I should go to Berkeley, smoke pot, and get laid.  Loosen up.  He was probably right.

The three years I rode circuit for the Montana UU Fellowships were a devotion and a self-fulfillment -- very selfish in the most literal sense.  I lived in that cargo van with no heat, hours of driving on what were sometimes terrifying roads, watched the sky and thought about the Ultimate.  I was no one’s special buddy.  I felt real.

In Kirkland, across the lake from Seattle, everyone was my special buddy and we had a blast.  They didn’t want to grow and change, but I was only an interim minister -- it was against the rules for me to be permanently called, so it was an affair, not a marriage.  It was the way to go, at least for me.  But a little too easy, a little too luxurious.

Saskatoon was too hard, too cold, too involved with being good and right and in control.  I ran away.  I’m no angel.  This time I wasn’t depressed, just determined to protect myself.

One man, a geologist, claimed he needed me to comfort him.  I laughed and got him to talk about isotopes.  Another man, a loser, said he knew all middle-aged female ministers were needy, so he was prepared to comfort me.  I said I was not the temple whore and he said he paid for a car for the last female minister and she was pleased.  She's still in the ministry.

The hell with all that.  I had enough material for a shelf of books.  Back in Portland I did data entry and freaked out my female supervisor, but at the end of the day was too tired to write, so I’d go down to Powell’s where all the Native American Renaissance authors would come through to read.  I settled in with the little group of City of Portland soils engineers and watched.  The cat’s choice, watching.

Then the unexpected: my mother left me $30,000.  It was 1999.  I headed right here, where I am now, bought this collapsing house, sat down at the keyboard and began to write.  You only see the foam, not the beer.  I’m not very sure how I have enough money, or even whether I do.  What’s money?  Nothing.  Foam.

The good thing about not fitting the system is that no one understands you.  After a while they get bored and leave you alone.  They say,  “Oh, she’s a character,” and in Montana that means you get a free pass.  Up to a point.  They get scared if I blog about them.  If I came into a lot of money, they would take back my free pass.  But I’m really writing.  I’m no angel.

This is the famous Angel of Evil

THE CIRCLE REPERTORY COMPANY

in order to escape all this mind-squashing tech stuff, I’m reading “The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years” by Mary S. Ryzuk  .  I’m embarrassed to have discovered this book so late, because I went to undergrad school with half of the group of four who started this company, which is the kind of group one calls “seminal,” because they can begin new gestations.  (That’s a metaphor, kids.)

The theatre department was a sub-group of the School of Speech at NU, the Class of 1961 was a sub-group of that, and Marshall Mason and Richard Thirkield were part of a tight elite related to Alvina Krause and her summer repertory at Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.  I was the cat.  I mean, I made the cat’s choice -- to sit and watch -- and no one paid much attention to me.  I made costumes and stuff like that.

Wilson, Nelson, and Mason

At the time there seemed to be three possible contexts for theatre people: Hollywood, Broadway and Academia.  Each attracted a different type and had quite different consequences.  My closest friend in theatre was Stu Hagmann, who went to Hollywood, directed “The Strawberry Statement,” and went on to direct “Mannix” and a lot of prize-winning commercials.  As I become more socially radicalized, I have less in common with him, though he has always been very generous to me.

My very best friend was Bill Shaw, who also related to a little group that included Thirkield and Mason.  They called him “Hume” because of his skeptical questions about human nature.   He was not a theatre student. Shaw’s father, a doctor, wanted him to follow suit, so he was in pre-med but dubious about it, thinking of psychiatry.  Shaw died young from brain cancer, old enough to have established a family and a reputation for excellence as a professor.  He and I used to sit in the back of the auditorium during acting classes taught by Krause, passing notes.  Quite a few people did, including rival professors.

But I made a fourth choice, which was related to the Peace Corps movement at the time of our graduation in 1961.  It had dawned on me that I didn’t need to go to Africa -- I could go to a reservation on my own.  In fact, I was thinking Navajo, but since at graduation my folks drove me home through the Blackfeet rez and there was a job, that’s where I ended up.  It has been part of my internal psyche ever since.  As far as the theatre department was concerned, I disappeared into a void.

Browning, MT

Long before that, in high school, an archetype had emerged from Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.”  When I wrote a book report on it, my teacher asked,  “Do you understand this play?”  She meant sex, but I knew better.  Alma (soul) was forever in tension with John (who could easily have been called "Dick" or "Peter"), the doctor’s son, representing the body.  Part of my relationship with the NU people was mediated through this play, this binary.  Most of my classroom acting scenes were based on this play. Alma’s idealism has been the battered and barely surviving part of my psyche, but it persists in spite of both ministry and teaching and, finally, Scriver.  Montana and smoke.

Recently, there has been no counterpoint of a male representing the concerns of the body until the relationship with Cinematheque and the Smash Street Boys.   These are young men whose bodies have been so misused that their psyches are hard to access.  It took a person who was intensely physical and tortured to match that side of the Tennessee Williams script.  The message is that the two sides -- idealism and self-exploitation -- cannot meet.  Tim gets it.  He lives it.

I doubt there are two or three people around here who know “Summer and Smoke” or even who Tennessee Williams is.  When I told my English teacher (an old maid with a great puff of white hair) I understood the play, I wasn’t talking about sex.  I meant intensity, the meaning of life. Unfulfilled yearning.  Painful life.  In this play Alma takes drugs (opium) as an evasion of life, and I vowed never to do that.  In fact, my determination rather interfered with my intention to write, since it is far more meaningful to really live the issues.  And books have turned out to be more transient than anyone guessed, serious thought lost in triviality.

Marshall W. Mason explains the magic.

So, Marshall W. Mason and his group have not just been performing plays -- they have been shaping real lives.  Theatre is only a needle-width from church, as Alma knew.  Prostitution is very close to doctoring.  Humans are always making little distinctions that will allow a bit of dignity and status.  But they break down.  

For instance, teaching is nothing like it was in a class with Alvina Krause.  She was relentlessly focused on the goal she had in mind and you just had to figure out how to cope with that.  I watched -- the cat’s choice.  I hoard my lives, though I’m down to the last one and it’s getting shorter.  Don’t worry -- all of the other eight went to good use.  

But this one has been a flowering, a song, though a sad one.  The counterpoint now is between suffering and creation.  Tim doesn’t know how much time he has either.  Nor do these boys.  But we have all been part of communities of synergy, groups who shared goals and accomplished more than they ever could as individual “geniuses,” which was the Fifties ideal.  The Sixties broke that open; maybe in 1961 when Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.  That year I graduated from college and came to the rez.  Tim was eleven, fighting to survive his family.  He can tell you himself.  It’s always so different than the movies.

Through the Sixties Mason and Thirkield were building the Circle Rep theatre company into a remarkable force off-off-Broadway.  In those years I was absorbed into the Blackfeet world which, pre-contact, had structured itself in bands genetically related at the core, but then open to the inclinations of those who joined or left that fluid, moving world as it traveled over the prairie.  The difference from the urban clusters of rep theatre was that onstage the genetics were ideology, and like -- genetics -- variation was the source of progress.  The rest of the book (I assume, since I haven’t read it all yet) traces the forces affecting the Circle Rep group.

Lanford Wilson, author of "Hot l Baltimore"

The only one of them who probably would understand my high prairie life was Sam Shepard, who never settled into any specific company for long.  During the early years of Circle Rep, on the opposite coast Tim’s parallel but transgressive SF world was smashed by a virus.  Circle Rep ended in 1996 after 27 years. At that point I was back in Portland, all prospects ended.  As soon as I could, I came back here to begin again from where I left off in 1973.

Marshall W. Mason, American Theatre Hall of Fame

The point is that humans are meant to be in small groups, fluid, permeable, sharing, and -- on both scales -- living out their gifts until the environment forecloses them.   If they are terrified by change, they will freeze, which is a form of suicide, but if they can accept new ideas, they will survive.  Not every revelation is comfortable.  It is, after all, a kind of birth.  Ask Justin Many Fingers.

Marshall tells me:  "My new book, THE TRANSCENDENT YEARS, covers the same time-period, but I doubt we'll see it in print before January, 2017."  He feels Ryzuk sometimes went off on a tangent.

HOW MUCH CAN WE KNOW EACH OTHER?

Browning, MT

In the Nineties beginnings of "bulletin board" internet sharing communities, I was subscribed to "RezNet," which was for Native Americans only.   I’m not an Indian.   A former student, now retired from a successful career as a management person in a think tank, was supposed to monitor it but didn't have time, so he used me as a scout.  He said, "When they ask whether you are Indian, just tell them you’re from Browning.”  (Browning is the headquarters of the Blackfeet Tribe.)  It worked and that was the birth of “prairiemary.”  I was on RezNet for several years.  In the end I confessed I was white and resigned.  Some asked me to stay because they already knew me.  Others said they had recognized me early but since they knew me, they didn’t blow my cover.  Recently I asked if I could rejoin and they said,  “Nonononono!”  and laughed a long time.  They weren’t angry.  Neither was I.

At one point there had been a ferocious argument between me and some other women because I claimed I knew what it was like to be Native American because I’d lived in Browning a long time.  It took them days to convince me that my experience of place was not like theirs, that I didn’t have the internal “feelings” of a related and included person, and that they EXPERIENCED things that I didn’t even guess.  It’s not about knowing the names of stuff.  Nor was it just about surviving a holocaust.

On the other hand, I defended my position by saying that I’d participated in Bundle Opening ceremonies that they didn’t know about, since even in the Sixties they were kept very secret, esp. from children, since when it was forbidden -- even criminal -- activity even children would be punished by white authorities.  They imagined that I was just there like a tourist, ritual-cruising, or an anthro looking for article material, but I was there sincerely as a “keeper” doing everything I was supposed to except that I didn’t know the songs.  Mary Ground, an ancient, sat next to me and prodded me with a sharp finger if I went wrong.  But I knew the land and the animals.

Part of my array of sense memories has ever since been those ceremonies with their packed circle of old people, the smell, the rhythm of the hand drums, the taste of the ceremonial sarvisberry soup, and the sound of Blackfeet words and songs.  As a keeper I took the wrapped animals in my hands and prayed with each while holding them to each shoulder.  I do not attend the contemporary ceremonies that use the same materials.  The participants now are middle-class, wearing new versions of the clothes of their great-grandparents.  Many are attached to the tribal college.

Bob Scriver's portrayal of the opening of a Beaver Bundle

When I was teaching at Heart Butte, one of the more remote communities, the girls complained that I didn’t understand them.  That night I wrote a first-person essay inhabiting the world of the girls.  Next day I took it to class and gave them each a copy, asking them whether it were accurate.  Reluctantly they said, "Well . . . it was close."  Then their assignment was to write their own version.  They did well, though I couldn’t grade someone’s experience and didn’t want to distract us by correcting grammar, etc.  At some point I sent the essays to the state education officials.  Accidentally, my essay got in there, too, which is why I have no copy now.

The state officials picked out my essay and assumed one of the kids had written it, so they praised it highly and suggested we should try to get this child a scholarship for college.  I confessed.  They then rejected the entire pack of essays.  They had not only rewarded the most “white” piece but also punished the others for not conforming to grammar rules.  (All is not lost.  The present state superintendent of education in Montana is tribal, though quite assimilated.  Her father was a student of mine and has served as the superintendent in Heart Butte.)  

No one inquires what it is like to be me, though lots of people assume they know -- not just Indians.  “Indians” are a vivid, romantic, often fantastic category that unified a wide array of people.  Old white English teachers are -- to use a Blackfeet locution, “nothing people.”  (They call themselves the “real people.”)   Anyway, as one tribal woman in the community pointed out, white teachers only drifted through -- there was no use in getting to know them.

Jackie Parsons is a force in the Montana humanities, 

a tribal judge, and a casting director for movies.

I am very much gripped by the media culture’s template of the reliable, earnest, loving woman who finds a brilliant and promising but flawed man and through her love and support redeems him, allowing him to flower into true genius.  This was the motor in my marriage, easily recognized by people who knew us both and accepted as explanation and justification.  I knew that man “inside and out.”  (My published biography of him is called “Bronze Inside and Out.”)  Better than he knew himself, since so much of himself was unconscious, in the limbic “dark” brain.  

He said to me once,  “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!”  How does one know until they try and fail?  In his inner world all failures were simply blanked out, shameful.  His fourth wife was well-known as a drunk, but he protested,  “I asked her if she was an alcoholic and she said she wasn’t.”  So, to him, she was not.  He was a great believer in will power, not insight nor unconscious motives.  The world when he was maturing was the same.

But I grew up in “know thyself” times and took Method acting training as well, which is all about searching one’s self and others.  The classes I took from Alvina Krause at Northwestern in the late Fifties were intense, rather like the more passionate religious devotions that insist on discernment and vocation.  But acting was taught as a “tool of the trade,” not a narcissistic indulgence, for the purpose was always what the CHARACTER was about, not the actor.  Art can be religious.

My preaching years

Thus, when I did actually go to seminary and enter the UU ministry, I was surprisingly unsuitable.  It was about masking, cheerleading, entitlement, and being comfortable.  People, both colleagues and parishioners, were constantly trying to figure me out while hiding who they were.  People who were dying or in emotional anguish or considering suicide, didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to not like them anymore.  They were ashamed of "having cancer."   (They didn’t see my taste -- sometimes preference -- for the dark and crazy.)  If they would accept any help at all, it would be from a shrink or doctor, because to them “church” was Sunday morning dress-ups.  Maybe a little social action.  Being accepted and praised.

So now I’ve disclosed a lot about myself, but you still know “nothing.”  And I have no way of knowing my readers.  I could pay money for analysis of my blog readers, and since they are global, I would probably be surprised and interested.  But it would only tell me algorithms
Anyway, I’m too busy writing.  Maybe you want to come along, maybe not.

Blackfeet Country

WAYS TO WRITE ABOUT PALOOKAVILLE

Some people are always saying that the youngsters need “grammar.”  That’s not really what they mean -- they are talking about usage, the local conventions of expression that don’t conform to mainstream American/English (which doesn’t conform to mainstream European English).  In trying to enforce usage, they end up killing all the energy, color and motivation of writing.  So, by example, I’m writing here ways to look at writing by CONTENT. 

Just before spring green-up

GEOGRAPHICAL

The Blackfeet reservation is about the same size as the Serengeti but it is on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains with the Canadian border also serving as the northern rez border.  Because it is a slope, there is a long incline of land that is foothills and escarpments at the west end and flat wheat fields with a few badlands on the east end.  This means that the difference in altitude and kinds of soil has sorted out the members of the tribe into different kinds of folks, with the old timey people choosing their place up high where there is still game and the grizzlies still prowl, while the modern and prosperous folks settled on the flat land where a person can raise grain and it's close enough to off-rez communities to get jobs there.

A road runs from Heart Butte to Browning.  Some call it “the inside road.”  A branch goes off towards the mountains to East Glacier and it is at that junction you will find Palookaville, except that it’s not there.  There were never any buildings but temporary tents.  It is essentially a campground.

HISTORICAL

The Blackfeet were fortunate in that their reservation was on the land they had occupied for a long time -- at least centuries and some say millennia -- but big as it is (fifty miles on a side) it is still only a scrap of the lands the Blackfeet once roamed.  In the early days it was clear to even those who tried to make farming peasants out of these tribal nomads that they were better suited to a pastoral life, that is, herding animals.  The Blackfeet themselves preferred sheep to cattle, maybe because sheep can be worked with dogs rather than horses.  The relationship between Blackfeet and dogs has always been interwoven.  

WWI had a huge need for wool uniforms, so there was an excellent market.  The Conrad brothers, early entrepreneurs, at first ran sheep close to Heart Butte, and, of course, they had to be sheared.  The place where the shearers came with tents to camp while they worked the sheep was called Palookaville because a palooka is a guy who shears sheep.  It’s hard work, harder than harvesting wheat which is also done similarly with moving custom cutters, because the sheep have to be manhandled and that can wreck backs.

The Navajo had taken to sheep on their high plateau, and added value to the raw wool by  setting up looms under the junipers in their dry windless country to weave blankets to use and sell in the way that Blackfeet had always treated bison robes.  The latter never tried weaving: their one-room cabins had no space for a loom and the outdoors in this part of the world is full of extreme weather.  

Considered one of the ten best memoirs of the West

LITERARY

Ivan Doig, whose parents contracted to herd sheep in various places, has written about the event that changed his life.  His mother had died when he was very young so he was raised by his father and grandmother.  In “This House of Sky” he and his father had a herd of sheep north of Birch Creek, not too far from the cliffs on the north edge of the valley which in the old days were used as piskuns, buffalo jumps, meant to kill the animals.  A major thunderstorm arose and the sheep panicked, heading straight for those high steep drop-offs.  

Doig describes vividly the desperation of running to head off these stupid animals and trying to steer them into brush where they’d have some shelter.  He fell on ground quickly turned to sticky gumbo in the heavy rain, and though they did succeed in saving the animals, he vowed while lying there on his face that he would never herd sheep again.  He quit, went back to the white ranching community, and cut hay the rest of the summer.  In fall he started school at Northwestern University, majoring in journalism.

Mary and Bob Scriver

PERSONAL

Bob Scriver’s father came to the Blackfeet Reservation in 1903 and hired on as a clerk at the Sherburne Mercantile.  He was a small man but very nimble and once won a race with a horse!  The secret was that the distance was short and it took a while for a big animal to build up momentum, but Thad was already on his way.  Within the decade he had founded the Browning Mercantile across the Town Square from the Sherburne Mercantile, with old Mr. Sherburne’s support and blessing.  (J.L. Sherburne was a different story.)  Bob was born in 1914.  I arrived to teach English in 1961 and soon attached to him.

The rez unfolded to me as I rode shotgun in the old Chevy pickup, sometimes on two-track ranch roads, sometimes on the as-yet-unpaved market roads, and sometimes just out across the prairie.  We went out to Heart Butte on some errand I don’t remember.  I had students from there, including someone with the family name of the character in the recent movie, “Jimmy P.” -- that is, “Everybody Talks About Him.”  School buses had a hard time getting out to that part of the rez because of the roads, so most kids came in to live at the boarding school for the school year.  They were shy and didn’t like it, so they had to be more or less caught and forced.  The boarding school itself was benign compared to some of the older mission and government schools.

Heart Butte was very small in those days, just a handful of cabins, on the hillside a little log church with emerald doors, and a log “roundhouse” built as an octagon where dances and other events could be held.  The elementary school was small but had tall windows because the electricity was undependable.  The post office and general store were combined, both run out of the home of Mrs. Thompson, a white woman with a Blackfeet husband, whose son became an educated leader.

We stopped at Palookaville to look around in case someone had dropped an artifact and just to enjoy the place.  We looked at the leaning remnants of the corrals, which were still occasionally used for something -- maybe catching horses.  I only drove out that road clear to East Glacier once, many years later and by myself in my little pickup.  Just exploring, I didn’t realize how much the road had washed out until it was nearly gone and I could barely keep from high-centering or being pitched into the creek that ran alongside.  Aspen groves and big brush patches of chokecherry, plus rough terrain, meant that I couldn’t travel parallel.  I never went that way again.

Dawson Falls

SCENIC

The elevation along the inside road is just about at the most usual edge of spring and fall snowfalls, maybe 4,000 feet, with a lot of brightly glittering aspen in among the twisty dark bull pines that are tough enough to endure wind, like evergreens along a coast.  In the fall when the aspens turn to gold coins, the color is spectacular, but only the berry bushes -- both chokecherry and sarvisberry -- will show red.  The “inside road” is paved now but I don’t think the branch to East Glacier at Palookaville has been.  Still, many more people live out that way now and they would demand that the road be better maintained.  Cell phones might or might not work.

Keep an eye out for grizzlies who will be searching for berries dried onto the bushes or anything relatively high calorie like fat grubs.  There are unlikely to be elk or even deer because people out this way are likely to be unemployed and hungry.  In fact, if you hear shooting, move on.

MELODRAMA (fiction)

Usually my sheep-shearing crews were a peaceful bunch, too tired to do much but work and sleep.  But this year I had two younger men, Basques, working for me.  They were high energy, very productive, but they were emotional and competitive, so they got into arguments.  Worse, they were knife-men.  Words went to fists went to the drawing of knives and even some slashing of air.  So far there were no wounds, but I kept my .357 magnum pistol beside me even as I slept, just in case.  I had bought it for bears, but a person does what they must.

The emergency that arrived in the night was not from the men.  The dogs were going wild, the sheep were throwing themselves against the fence so that its creaking mixed with their desperate bleating, and I knew it was a bear, probably a grizzly.  We were all up, but the confusion was too great to understand what to do.  Shadows and movement swirled everywhere.  

I ran to the pickup and put on the headlights.  Yup.  A griz, standing, sweeping its great claws in arcs.   The dogs were darting in and out.  I cursed myself for not keeping the bear spray right with me -- I knew it was in the pickup, but where?  Glove box?  Under the seat?  I would have to use the gun, though it would mean a lot of trouble from game wardens.

Before I could get a focus, two big shadows converged on the bear, one from each side, their knives flashing.  The bear couldn't shrug them off, couldn't decide which way to swivel, and soon it was too late.  One brother cut the carotid artery under the bear's ear and the other reached around to get at its heart.  It was almost like a dance, as though they had practiced.  The bear dropped on its face and the brothers walked right up on top of it, as though it were already a rug.  Now they WERE dancing, awkwardly and hanging onto each other.  I could not resist shooting in the air in order to join the celebration.  Damn the authorities.

TOUGH ALL OVER

Heart Butte and Featherwoman

A couple of weeks ago a man in the Midwest asked me via email what I thought about him and his family coming to teach in Heart Butte on the Blackfeet Reservation.  I didn’t know what to tell him.  On the one hand, there were joyful times of real success.  Other times were full of despair.  It’s one of those “inkblot” things, except sometimes there’s real danger.

Rarely do I go up to Browning any more -- not much reason to, lots of work to do at home, pickiup is aging, and so on.  But I had a box of books to give someone and the best destination was the Blackfeet Community College’s “Medicine Spring Library.” I know Ginnie Weeks and she was happy to have the books, though some were duplicates she’ll pass on to someone else.

Medicine Springs Library

Last night there were thunder storms lingering over town so long I wondered whether I’d be able to post at 10PM.  The Baptist church next door attracts lightning strikes.  (Don’t ask me why.  I’ll tell you it’s the new metal roof.  Maybe.)  At dawn we had a pelting rain.  By the time I was headed out the door, the mountains were visible for the first time after weeks of smoke from the Northwest and from Alberta.  

This year is the second wet cool summer, which is both good and bad.  The mustard (rape) is just ripening its bright yellow geometry and each field has a stack of bee hives alongside.  They used to be white wooden boxes but now someone has suggested that since flowers are bright colors, the bees would like colored boxes.  Bees are endangered, but not by the color of bee boxes.  

Colors after a rain are so intense that they look as though they’ve been “enhanced” by a computer program.  Snow is gone from the mountains.  Hay fields are mostly cut and the roadsides are maybe half done.  The wheat is headed up, but still green.  Every time I pass chemical fallow fields the color of putty I feel sick.  They’re poisoned on the theory that it saves moisture, but this year there’s plenty of water.  The potholes still gleam, mirroring the big cumulus sailing the sky.

highway engineering for erosion

I was interested in the construction continuing on Highway 89 at Two Medicine river.  It was drastically recontoured last year, massive amounts of earth and stone moved from the descent over a bluff into a valley created by the melting of glaciers ten thousand years ago and used as buffalo jumps for millennia.  This year there is the same kind of close-detail earthwork as on the way to Bynum.  In Portland my clerical assignment was with the soil engineers who did site development, and when times were slow, I read their professional magazines.  

This work is far more extensive than anything we’ve seen around here in the past, a combination of granite chunks laid into coulees as though they were fitted stone walls, coir pathways for run-off, spray planting on inclines, and work being done by hand with crews of men, small detailing.  It looks to me as though 89 is being prepared to be a highway suitable for industrial or military use -- as though there were any difference.  Some people continue to be convinced that there is as much oil under the East Slope in Montana as there was in Banff.  The Frakkers have boners for everything.

East Slope of the Rocky Mountains -- note pumpjack at the right

Along the way I got a whiff of sour gas and then worried that I hadn’t checked the oil this morning, so I pulled over to do that and add a quart.  I always carry oil.  The dash light hadn’t come on.  Though I was into a field and ranch access side road, the massive vehicles -- partly 18-wheelers and partly huge RV’s towing cars -- were coming so fast (I’d guess the speed limit, which is 75) and so close that I decided I’d better pull down into the field.  In the process the screw-on lid to the oil input fell into the motor somewhere.  It’s still there despite my search for it.  It didn’t fall onto the ground.  The case is not pressurized as the coolant is, so I finally stuffed the hole shut with paper towel and continued.

By this time the morning coffee had been processed, so as soon as I hit the BCC campus I stopped to use their facilities at the new science building.  This campus was mocked in the 1990’s as a loser mudhole, but now it is as grand and maintained as any high grade hotel -- far better materials, construction, and supplying than the U of Chicago.  Everything is polished, scented, carefully matched, and computerized.  Wave your hands under the faucet -- water.  Wave them under the towel dispenser -- down it comes.  The striking photovoltaic buildings stand in the midst of fields of white top, sweet clover, escapee alfalfa, tall weeds waving in the breeze.  The fabric of Montana.  

At the library Ginnie and I had a bit of a visit but a very polished upscale lady came to take Ginnie's photo for something promotional.  She was from a NGO called “Global” something.  Eco or Cultural or Peace -- some kind of volunteer do-gooder outfit.  I tried to give her a quick verbal map of the rez.  Wheat fields to the east, old-timers to the West (Heart Butte and some in Starr School) with housing projects imposed on them, and the three resort towns along the edge of the Park.  She disagreed that Babb was tourist businesses. (??)  I tried to tell her about Metis, but it didn’t register.  She’s from Moses Lake where she just sold her fine wines and art shop.  Now she just wanted this photo op for an article.

Quick tour around town.  Still graffiti on Bob’s little studio home.  Not many people circulating.  All quiet at the booze and white powder shop.  Piegan Institute buttoned up.  On to Cut Bank.  Many more horses with mustang blood, judging by colors: claybank, gray, dun, lined down the spine and striped on the back legs.  Kneehigh in grass and pothole water.

Charlie Reevis

I rarely go into Cut Bank past the little shopping village at the west edge.  Alco for 50¢ cat food.  Albertson’s -- which I have to think to remember it’s not Buttreys, which it hasn’t been for decades.  In the soup section I ran into a tall Blackfeet man and introductions revealed that we know each other on paper.  Larry Reevis is a descendant of Charlie Reevis, who is the Pipe Keeper in Bob’s sculpture of the ceremony.  His relative Gordon Reevis is one of the most gifted writers I ever taught.  He died young.  Larry is in his fifties, a graduate of U of Montana, and has studied water law.  He is a dedicated editorialist on the Glacier Reporter, always fighting for the righteous.  We haven’t talked much, so our talk was mostly exploration.

The rez, for those who are far away, has been in the midst of an emotional and damaging deadlock on the Tribal Council that has gutted any confidence in progress, while waiting on the money owing because of the Eloise Cobell lawsuit.  Larry puts a lot of emphasis on law and order and testifies to the lack of policing that lets criminals and the violent dominate everything.  I agree with him.  

In fact, earlier I had twittered in response to an article by Saul Elbein in The Texas Observer ( http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118675/child-migrants-guatemala-are-fleeing-m(ore-just-gang-violence ) that Elbein’s “take” on Guatemala also applied to the rez.  That is, resources have been devoted to the situation enough to maintain order and supplies for the more public parts of the rez, but that the back country has been allowed to run rampant.  Families and toughies (interpreted as gangs) do what they want without intervention.  That nice lady at the Medicine Spring library will not run into them.  If she did, she wouldn’t recognize what they were.  She would not be interested in figuring out the arcane laws, the fine social groupings, or the water entitlements of the rez.  Larry was trying to explain some national “Guardian” program to me, but I couldn’t get my head around it.  I'll try to follow up.

Somehow we have all everywhere managed to go from governments that protect everyone --including dissenters, the needy, and the minority -- to “winner take all.”   No rest for the wicked and no help for the poor.  This is global.  Thugs rule. “Game of Thrones.”   So I told this Midwestern man who was a potential teacher here to reflect on his appetite for adventure.  And suggested he read my book about teaching in Heart Butte:  http://www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com

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