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/

CHILDSCAPE

The Bullshoe Sisters: a force for education

when they grew up.

One of my chief pleasures and a driving reason for me to read is finding new ways to look at old things.  This is not widely shared around here.  People like to find the BP (“best practice” which is an interesting phrase linked to technologies, including health care and enforced by insurance) and then stick with it, even though new discoveries and goals develop.

Writing about historical indigenous people is often a matter of rehearsing the same old scripts and assumptions, some of them mistaken interpretations imposed by the oppressors of the times: missionaries, cavalry, railroad magnates, Euro adventurers and the like.  Even today the academics arrive with their heads full of romantic factoids which the local tribes are happy to exploit. 

So I’m pleased to be reading “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” by Clive Gamble.  Gamble is English and thinks about the two major “revolutions” in the three million year history of hominid evolution: one is the sudden (in archeology years) explosion of creativity that created art, music, religion, language — the whole realm of metaphor that some believe is the real beginning of modern humans — the second is the development of agriculture and the relation to sedentary life.  (Not sitting down but settling in one place and building an environment that can be defined as containers, like houses.)

For instance, there is a lot of difference between a hearth and a fire.  A hearth is a place specially occupied by the fire, a “fire place,” which is related to crucibles, blacksmithing, and other technologies of metal that demand high heat over a short period of time.  This is different from the “fire place” that is used for cooking, even baking, because a camp fire can be improvised and baking can be done in a hole with a fire built on top of it, the way Blackfeet prepared camas roots.  People who do metallurgy are sedentary and repetitious.  People who only use fire as they travel are improvisers.  

This is one major difference between tribes.  The people of the Pacific Northwest lived in cedar plank long houses and built hearths, erected totem poles, created shell middens of considerable size.  The people of the prairie used technologies of tanning, cording, flintknapping, and left evidence of camps along streams where cottonwoods grew in predictable favored spots according to the seasons.  Since most of their materials were biodegradable, they are invisible to us now.  

Blackfeet kids at Heart Butte used to complain about getting more light-skinned as though it were yet another incursion of “pale faces,” but it was clear that they don’t go outside much these days.  This is windy country so it is a temptation to stay indoors by the TV, a kind of hearth, and they keep the light out for the sake of viewing screens.  In the days of lodge-dwelling, people were mostly outdoors, even maintaining a separate cooking and smoking fire outside the lodge.  They were good at rigging shade with pieces of tipi or leaned together leafy branches, but it was bright shade.  Photos that record skin ordinarily covered by clothing reveal much paler areas.  So having an “indoor hearth” has changed the people and what they do and what they think of themselves.  

Gamble talks about what he calls “scapes”, the environment one is aware of and uses, so there is a landscape of habit which for early Blackfeet would have meant trails more than “bushwhacking” which on the prairie would mean something more like “grass crushing,” the social landscape meaning how the people are distributed and connected, and the task scape which might mean hunting patterns or might refer to special sources of materials like the yellow clay used for paint.  He discusses the “childscape” as the territory and the pattern of knowing it through travel and work that shapes and limits the raising of children.  This is one of the uses of story which always includes the sky for Blackfeet children. 

When I was still teaching on the rez, I took a photo of the Rockies and used it to learn the horizon line of the peaks until I could “write” it like a cursive sentence.  I’d walk to the blackboard and “write” it or put it at the top of a page.  The kids always recognized it, but were surprised that it could be learned, which means that they had lost the map-drawing skills of their ancestors.  But there was a fascination with “white man’s maps” in Atlases and highway guides.  

Reciprocally, whites who come to the rez get very frustrated with the lack of street signs because people here (even whites) go by the social landscape and the task landscape, which are learned and repetitive, often anchored by landmarks like the location of community dumpsters.  People whose garbage is invisibly collected don’t register such objects or the logic of their location.

The Rockies at sunset

Anyway, white man’s maps are drawn as though from a satellite, looking from the top down. Indian maps, especially along the Rockies, are from the side and mark distinctively shaped peaks as well as the erosion valleys and canyons with uses.  The criteria for most things is experience — reacting to what one has learned through living with the sensory characteristics that translate to usefulness.  But other things known have been arrived at by analysis or implication, more often recorded as narrative than as abstract ideas.  

“Fittingness” becomes the criteria for something persisting unless it is an exceptional or "counter" practice or object that grabs the imagination.  The wheel was not invented by Blackfeet because it is mostly useless without roads, esp. in gumbo country where a “stone boat” — a wooden sled — or a travois can go places where a wheel would soon be bogged down.  In some ways glassified stone that could be knapped to an edge was more useful than metal.  But mirrors were fascinating, unique.

A childscape doesn’t just provide knowledge of materials and territories.  It teaches how to do things, how to learn, how to tolerate failure or even pain.  Missionaries and other Euro-taught and now-teaching people have pressed most rez kids NOT to rely on themselves but to ask for the “proper” way to do things.  They are punished if they do the wrong thing, which teaches them to do nothing without permission.  Guided by social opinion from the very beginning, they can be crippled by confusion and double-binds.  Pretty soon there is rebellion.

Since the Sixties, living territory has become even more treacherous because of political counterculture resistance to “best practices.”  In fact, the generation breaks introduced by new technologies and coalitions of same-aged kids — supported by music waves, the internet, and the media’s fondness for labeling — mean that kids don’t look to adults anymore but depend on each other, even when it comes to risky stuff like mind-altering substances, sex and reproduction, criminal matters, and precautions in a dangerous environment.  These are all part of the childscape, which patterns the child's thought into adulthood.

Gamble demonstrating how to butcher a sheep.

Clive Gamble is hard to read, partly because of anthropological neologisms for concepts that are uncommon and partly because of more classic jargon.   But far more than having to learn vocabulary, it is necessary to reframe one’s childlike from-the-outside perceptions -- as though “Other” people were dolls -- into the world-as-perceived-with-the-senses and the assumptions about them that are experience-based.  We are used to filtering, skimming, reducing to materials that can be marketed.  We are not used to being submerged in a landscape.  Sub- merged.  Land- scape.  Judging from computer games and videos, we want these experiences, but don't know we're IN them.