THE TRAIL NARROWS

The urge to leave a record.

This morning I woke with a new plan for spring.  To discard many boxed things I’ve loaded into one You Haul after another, carrying them across the continent because I believed they were important, even valuable.  I come from two lines of hoarders, maternal and paternal, who believed in paper and saved the documentation of the family back far enough that letters from Andersonville have come down to my generation.  (For those who don’t know, Andersonville was the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia where Union soldiers were held under Auschwitz-like conditions.)  

So here’s a list of what I’m going to discard now.

My boxes of old Glacier Reporters, because bound books of them have been given to Blackfeet Community College.  When I started in 1961, there WAS no BCC with a library and the Museum of the Plains Indian had a limited archive that has been raided several times: once to weed out anything that wasn’t relevant to the material culture of the 19th century and once to weed out anything about white people.  In short, politics break through scholarship on the rez.  It's print stuff in an oral culture.  But the people themselves are capable of wrestling with that now.  The Millennials will decide.

I hope they value it as much as the people who constantly come in from outside, determined to squeeze more out of the 19th century.  It’s time for the rez folks to get into the BIA and FBI files.  The descendants of the demonized early whites have already destroyed much of their trader records which were mostly about buying and selling anyway.

I’m just now beginning to reorganize my library of books about Blackfeet and what we used to call “vertical files” of articles and tear-outs.  The death of Darrell Kipp has shaken some of my ideas.  At one point Piegan Institute was supposed to be an archive of scholarship as well as an immersion school.  

I’m putting a list of all my Blackfeet books on prairiemary.blogspot.com, which is taking a while as I add a dozen books at a time.  If you’re looking now, come back in a month.   I don’t think most Blackfeet scholars even know about all of them.  Like university classes, media pieces and published books go over and over the same old worn out stuff and ignore the cutting edges.  Of course, the post-colonial stuff is almost unintelligible and rarely digested.  There’s a great need for translation, esp. the things written in European languages.

I have one four-drawer cabinet and a few scrapbooks of materials about Bob Scriver, but I’ve already discharged my obligation to testify to his life.  The book is “Bronze Inside and Out, A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.”  The Montana Historical Society has tricked and ignored me, so I do not feel good about giving them anything.  We don’t live on the same planet.

Alvina Krause

A few materials remain in my possession about Alvina Krause (my B43 Acting Class journal, for instance) and have already been offered a home in the Northwestern University archives.  I managed to get an article about her published in the Stanislavsky Studies international journal, for whatever that’s worth.

The materials from my ministry (newsletters, correspondence, pamphlets) seem curiously irrelevant now.  The individual congregations turn over their membership and their focus much more than they realize, but esp. the Montana people — the most ephemeral — have no time, energy or central location interested in these materials.  I’m divided between stuffing them into mailing cartons and sending them to the individual groups or just taking them to the dump.  The denomination and districts are so absorbed by the need to “market” — meaning increase membership and income — that they see nothing of value in the little low-population edges far away from Boston.  They have become an urban phenomenon, or maybe the Unitarians always were.

Aside from that, I think that the UUA and the whole concept of denominations is on its way out — again.  They are luxuries and when low status populations like women and people of color manage to get into the leadership, they are no longer valuable to the old white men who have the money, since their idealism clings to Edwardian British values. 

For a while I saved a lot of material about Cut Bank High School which I intended to digest into a novel about how we destroy our children: the boys by encouraging violent sports, extreme street fighting for betting, and substance abuse; the girls by discarding any who don’t look like movie stars and put out like whores — except for a few destined to be moms sustaining the grudgingly necessary families.  By now none of these forces are undocumented by the media or even unstudied by sociologists.  The destructiveness of American schools is no secret, nor is it unconscious any longer.  Now what I have is redundant.  I liked the kids, so I’ll keep the yearbook.

The family archive on my father’s side rests with my cousins except for the little book I made from photos of all the places the Strachans lived, mostly pretty minimal rural prairie houses.  Everyone is much more comfortable now.  Even my house would count as pretty nice.  Beulah Strachan raised her children in a tarpaper shack.  But that much of the story is told and the other relatives are intent on silence.  I might do an end-run around them to the five emigrant Scots sisters who originally came to America, but it would have to be fiction.  Still, they had very suggestive divergent fates.  There is another writer among their descendants, Kathy Rouzie.

Beulah Swan Finney Strachan, my grandmother

What I will save, burdening my niece Adrienne Lulay who is my inheritor and executor, the family photo albums, partly because I still want to use them for my own memoir.  I need to learn more about layout and the kind of programs used to do tricky things like montages.  There is no video, but I’ll go to CD technology maybe.  None of the current cyber-technology can keep itself from transforming and updating.

On my mother's side I'm alienated enough to tell the double story of the Hatfields/Pinkertons with no restraint, maybe as fiction.  The Hatfields and McCoys are nothing compared to Hatfields against Hatfields with Pinkertons trapped in the middle.  (My mother was the only sib of the Pinkerton girls who didn't marry a Hatfield.)

Pinkertons - my grandfather on the right, seated

I may not have time to finish one small part of this project, but again a death hustles me along, this time the recent death of Mike Burgwin who did so much to professionalize animal control.  I did get a book self-published ("Dog Catching in America"  but I see that www.lulu.com/prairiemary is marketing it as a PDF instead of the Print On Demand that I expected.  Animal Control has developed much farther since our time, so maybe it’s just a collection of war stories by now.  In the background the study of the relationships among animals — including humans — has expanded and become more startling and absorbing than anything we expected.

My life has been a series of lives:  theatre, the Blackfeet reservation in all its aspects, animal control, Unitarian-Universalism both as scholarship and as practicum, a return to the reservation with special attention to geology which has persisted even after the forced return to Portland, OR, where the interest in geology — this time in regard to cities — grew deeper: the basic engine of ecology and therefore of mutation that drives evolution.

Now that I have the great privilege of living in a quiet, safe place where I can write, I’ve tried to do as much as I can towards developing skill.  Since 2005 blogging has replaced publishing (it IS today's publishing) and I’ve had a writing friend of great force and daring (Tim Barrus) who has pushed me along.  Now I’m looking for master concepts that can project a future I won’t share and don’t much want to.  We knew it was coming, this present quandary produced by too many people, the exhaustion of resources, technical shifts that get out ahead of our ability to assimilate them, global warming and so on.  But we had thought maybe 2025 was a good predicted onset.  We’d be gone.  Now we know a lot of people are likely to be underwater.

When I’ve fallen in love with a writer, I’ve expressed it by buying and reading all their works, so Peter Matthiessen is probably the next death that has prodded me.  Wendell Berry is still a bit in the future.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. died quite a while ago, also Norman McLean and Richard Stern.  The whole category of “Montana writers”— which was kind of invented anyway — is dented by the death of Jim Harrison.  Wallace Stegner and Jim Welch are gone.  I don't want to write like a lady.

The big secret about publishing is that it is the publishers who control the fates of writers and these days do it only in terms of sales.  No one cares about the quality of the writing. Publishers have concluded that Indians and women don’t sell except in romantic genre eBooks.  Of the major publishers of literature of the West based in universities, one is captured by self-aggrandizers and the other fell under the ax of the post-structuralists.  The real action is in Canada but even there it’s a bit of a struggle.  No one in the US knows their work, not even the tribes that are on both sides of the border.

My shelves of psych and communication insights have somehow become outdated.  Eric Fromm, though he was a death camp survivor, is not adequate to the AIDS pandemic, a country like North Korea where the whole nation is a death camp, or the total questioning of everything, even male/female or the nature of reality as managed in the brain.  Now I have shelves on neuron research, hominin evidence, revisionist long history (pre-human).  They are the only way I participate in the frenzy of acquisition around me.

There’s plenty to do and some of it will be muscle work like sorting and carrying books.  I’d better do it while I’m still only 76.

THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY

As acquired from Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary

I’m editing this quite a lot.  Persons wanting to know more about the Neubauer should use the link.

from the U of Chicago mag: 
Know no boundaries

BY CLAIRE ZULKEY |  DIALOGO—SPRING/SUMMER 2015

With a new director and 16,000 square feet of new space, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has grown a lot this academic year—and with ten new research initiatives starting in July, it is prepared for more.

Architects' plan.

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, was appointed the Neubauer Collegium’s Roman Family Director in October . . . “My interest is in bringing together ancient Greek traditions and ethics with contemporary thinking about psychoanalytic treatment and therapy,” Lear says. “I’m the guy who thinks of these as one thing rather than two.” . . .  One new project he is particularly eager about spans institutions as well as disciplines. Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Very Idea of a Natural History, Lear says, involves “not just an anthropologist from here and a professor of art from there, but the curator of the Field Museum, tribal elders from around the country, and young practicing native artists. “When it comes to certain kinds of research projects, we refuse to recognize boundaries.”

I hope he maintains some rigor and scepticism if he’s going to deal with Native Americans because they are intensely political, which means smoke and mirrors.  But my connection to the Neubauer is not intellectual -- it’s the building, which was constructed specifically to be the Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary -- for the ages.  They assumed that a Unitarian tradition, with all its love of ancient Greeks and psychoanalysis, would last for all time.    

M/L now has no campus, using the money from the sale of the several buildings it owned to lease space for the library, classrooms, and offices in a Chicago Loop skyscraper.  The cynical among us, including me, refer to it as a mail order seminary.  It has pretty much abandoned the Classical world or the psychoanalytic world.  But all that is irrelevant here.

This is the remodeling plan the architects provided.  It’s not quite fulfilled.  It appears that the library stacks are simply removed.  In fact, the interior was simply rebuilt.  I think this is the same as was done to Chicago Theological Seminary some years ago.

Resuming the original article:

The renovated building provides a new space for scholars from around the world to collaborate, establishing the Neubauer Collegium as a locus for global engagement: 1. The building houses multiple suites for visiting fellows to set up office with adjacent versatile areas for collaboration. 2. The seminar room features advanced e-collaboration and videoconferencing capabilities. 3. The reading room, which showcases the building’s original wood paneling, is intended for informal engagement and reflection. 4. The exhibition gallery presents historical and contemporary art, films, and performances. (Illustration courtesy Kliment Halsband Architects)

. . . [the Neubauer’s] new home, which officially opened April 20 at 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue . . .  is a work of adaptive reuse, maintaining the spirit of the former Meadville Lombard Theological School while updating it for 21st century needs. 

Alumni will have an advance opportunity to see the building and witness the Neubauer Collegium in action . . . during an Alumni Weekend UnCommon Core session on the project Past for Sale, where researchers from anthropology, art history, economics, law, and policy will discuss the illicit antiquities market and how to combat it.

Anthropologist Justin Richland and a team that includes Field Museum curator Alaka Wali and tribal leaders from the Hopi and Crow Nations explore the use and misuse of Native American material culture with Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Very Idea of a Natural History.

Most recently, workers installed a sparkling new copper canopy over the main entrance on 57th street. Like the Neubauer Collegium's logo, the canopy's design mirrors the architectural motif found throughout the building's stonework.

So what does all this mean to me personally?  I won’t address the content of the symposiums here.  In the past "Native American Material Culture" has had me by the throat.  I think high intellectuals don’t get it.  They keep trying to convert a political and survival issue into a moral issue.  THEIR morality, not that of the Indians.

Buildings I’ve loved and lost include, from the beginning, some humble structures: a barely post-homestead farmhouse on South Deer Creek near Roseburg, Oregon, where my beloved aunt and her family lived.  The farmhouse was demolished to make way for a modern house three times the size and ten times as convenient.  The house where I grew up in Portland, OR, was both my mother’s bridal dowry and her deathbed.  It's still there, maintained and upgraded by young professionals starting families.  What saved it was location: near downtown, easy commute.

Interior:  Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

Museum of the Plains Indian

Interior: Starr Gallery, Fort Benton

Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, new major addition

The most painful change, quite relevant to “Open Fields”, was the conversion of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife to the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  It is next door to the Museum of the Plains Indian, which was built during WWII to encourage the Blackfeet to create materials for sale to tourists, parallel to the Appalachian quilting projects.  When Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, died of old age in 1999, his fourth wife cashed out his estate and left the country.  (Rumor suggests the amount she cleared was in the millions.)  The contents of the museum were full-mounts of all the Montana game animals, free-standing, not behind glass, and Bob’s own sculpture.  (Today the Scriver bronzes about Blackfeet are in Fort Benton, in a reproduction of a fur trade factor’s house that is in part the Starr Gallery.)  Bob’s museum never displayed NA artifacts -- though among Thad Scriver (who came in 1901) and his two sons, born there, they had a good collection.  The book cataloging them still circulates on the used book market.

When the politics became belligerent (at one point there was a fire in the museum), Bob produced a book that recorded everything in detail and then sold the material culture collection to the Edmonton Royal Alberta Provincial Museum.  The Blackfeet in Browning were so angry that they drove up and cursed Philip Stepney, the acquiring curator.  In a few years he died of cancer.  The Provincial Museum gave all sacred Bundles back to the tribes, except that Bob’s personal materials mysteriously disappeared, including the Bundle he and I acquired ceremonially and kept “alive” over the years.  When things cooled a bit, the tribe -- which had bought the Scriver museum building -- hired William Grant, architect, to design a remodel.  It now sells the sort of products that the Museum of the Plains Indian was meant to promote, including the wealth of fine paintings by local artists, many trained by AIAI. 

Down at the heart of the Scriver Museum is an old warehouse, built in maybe 1900, which Scriver personally disassembled, hauled to the new site, and hammered back together.  There is still no fire protection, but no old valuable material objects either.  The Museum of the Plains Indian was damaged by the 1964 flood and objects were destroyed, but experts say the displays were damaged more from a scientific point of view by a project that “renewed” and “cleaned” them.  By now I am more philosophical about all this.

The scale of the remodeling of the Meadville/Lombard building and the ideas it shelters is remarkable.  When I was enrolled, 1978-82, Mircea Eliade was housed there.  He was our most valuable object.  The academic world was still on the upswing.  Once an arson fire broke out late in the evening in the stacks and I rushed over with my key just in time to save the doors from the firemen’s ax.  Long story.  Mixed.  Like all stories told about structures over time.  Time IS a fire.  It consumes buildings and people alike.

Where M/L rents space

ON AN IDYLLIC DAY IN METIS COUNTRY

"Many Tender Ties"  Women carry the heritage.

June 5, 2015, on the Montana East-Front High-Line was as idyllic as this place gets.  In fact, it was almost exactly like June 5, 1961, when my parents and I visited -- heading from my graduation at Northwestern University with a BS in Speech Education (actually theatre) back to home. We were on the way through Glacier Park and stopped at the Museum of the Plains Indian.  I got out of the car, where I’d been sulking the whole way, stood there in fragrance and said, “Just throw out my stuff.  I’m gonna live right here.”  And I did, at least for more than a decade.

In 2015, now old and living in Valier just off the rez, it was warm enough to drive with my elbow out the window and a big enough occasion to wear a silk shirt and a straw hat.  I was going to listen to a talk by Nicholas Vrooman who has just finished a study contracted by the Little Shell Tribe, which the US government refuses to recognize.  (The state of Montana does recognize them.) The talk was a redacted pictorial slide version of Nick's book, “The Whole Country was ‘One Robe’”: The Little Shell Tribe's America," funded by the State of Montana.  He is not an anthropologist but a folklorist.  The distinction is lost on me, but I wonder whether there is such a thing as salvage folklore.  Salvaging “folk” instead of ceremonial objects as in “salvage anthropology.”

blooming chokecherries

Going north up the Old North Trail, now called Highway 89, one travels along the the Rockies as people and animals have done for millennia, moving in swirls and cycles through the seasons.  I think that at the low altitude the berries of several sorts are blooming now.  The good thing about living on this long slope is that as the summer heightens, the berries develop a little higher and will bloom a little later, extending the season.  

There are two kinds of “refugia” in this country.  One is the volcanic mountains out in the middle of the prairie that were never entirely scraped by the glaciers and therefore still harbor pre-glacier species and a cool place for summer lodges.  The other is the many-fingered east slope where valleys reach back into the cordillera, offering shelter for hunted folk, esp. the Metis, the mixed people -- down south they might be called Meztizo or even Creole. 

Little Shell and his council.

Mostly they’ve been thought of as “white-and” -- Indian hyphenated French, Scots, African, Irish and English.  As they were pushed out of their previous places in a turbulent and greedy Europe, they wandered into the prairies inventing new things (the Red River carts with two giant wheels that could handle prairie travel -- Nick calls them the equivalent of pickups and showed a photo of Sitting Bull in front of his lodge with four “pickups” parked nearby, one for each of his wives.) and improvising to make up for losses, dressing in wool “citizen’s clothes” because there was no more buckskin or buffalo robes.

Gradually they sorted themselves out along a continuum so that one photo showed three brothers, each at a different point between “Indian” and “white”.  The mixed people were inevitable because men came without wives and found females among the indigenous.  They brought fiddles and jigging, finger-woven sashes and beards, so that all those things are part of life in Heart Butte, near here and one of those valley refugia.  The smooth hairless full-blood Blackfeet called them “hairy noses.”

Charlie Russell wore one of these.

Pickup of the Plains

The spectrum of indigeneity was overlain by a spectrum of economic opportunity.  Nick’s talk explained the nature and self-declared identity of the small groups who traveled and settled together and why some settled into poverty that made dump grounds into a source of survival and some assimilated, building nice homes and dressing well.  Dominant whites judged them according to their prosperity.  They thought in categories: tribes, nations, affiliations, but not all these mixed people even considered such distinctions.  They were busy staying alive.

So the government decided on a strategy they have managed ever since to keep secret, knowing it was scandalous.  They sent out the “buffalo soldiers” (black cavalrymen produced by the Civil War) to circle through all Montana communities big enough to have dump grounds or shanty towns, to round up the people -- hundreds of them -- and push them into Canada at least as far as Lethbridge.  The money allocated for transportation was as usual not enough, so the People ended up on foot being herded across the vast land in the wind and sun.  It was a genocide.  No one knows how many died.

Hill 57 near Great Falls

Of course, many of them managed to escape and slip back “home,” fueling the resistance that became the Red River Rebellion and ended in the hanging of the leaders, including the extraordinary visionary named Louis Riel.  Many “Blackfeet” names are from those people.

Nick’s slides started way back at first contact with drawings of people and communities and worked forward through photographs until he was naming the grandparents of those in the room.

This museum is not a patronizing white institution teaching about the curiosities of the Red Man, though it was founded on assumptions about Blackfeet crafts.  Nor is it an AIM-powered demonstration of emotion.  Gregg Paisley is from the half of the tribe that lives in diaspora, pulled away by the World War II need for workers and much transformed by Internet technology.  http://www.americanindianpartnership.com/the-blackfeet.html is meant to support friendship.  One way to avoid the stigmatizing of “mixedness” is to keep on mixing, celebrating the richness of what is sometimes called “thick description.”  

Another way is by adding image to print.  This museum has specialized in lifting up Indian artists.  Below, I scanned-in the work of Louis Still Smoking, the current exhibitor.  The manager of the art scene in the museum is David Dragonfly, an artist himself.  I know these families though it’s been fifty years so I mix up individuals.  David’s mother, Dorothy Dragonfly, I confused with Delores Butterfly, whom I taught in 1961 when she was in the Seventh Grade.  She herself became a teacher.  But David recognized some of the names: Gerald Butterfly, Geraldine his twin.  He knew I felt real relationship.

After the talk Nick and I walked across to the “gambling den,” Glacier Peaks Casino, to sit in the sun and gossip.  Along came a “character” intent on sharing his part of the movement to revitalize the Blackfeet Language.  “Oki,” he said, and in Blackfeet welcomed us.  “You understand what I said?”  I did.  He was staggering drunk and transparently leading up to asking for money.

“What’s your name?” I asked.  He turned out to be the son of Alfred Guardipee and he’d mistaken us for strangers.  Alfred was also in my classes that first year, called “Small Fry” then, and part of a sort of spontaneous family out at boarding school.  They traveled together and protected each other.  There was adult “supervision” but that always turns into “us against them.”  They left their imprint on me in ways I didn’t even recognize.

Nick knows the family names and origins of almost everyone on the big prairie spread, not just the Blackfoot Nation but the one next to the east, mostly Chippewa/Cree/Assiniboine.  Plus the white settlers.  It’s a jigsaw puzzle except that the pieces don’t come to rest.  Darrell Kipp used to call the moving forces “the hydraulics of the prairie.”  Of course, they fit into the hydraulics of the planet, where we are all fish following currents.

It is to the credit of Montana Humanities that they have pulled Nick Vrooman into their speaker bureau and made him available to everyone across Montana.  Metis have always been moving out of consciousness, not like the scattered “sheep” cumulus that filled the sky yesterday -- more like the thin silk sliding shadows they make against the land.  The Metis learned to keep their heads down in order to survive.  But that’s over now.  Mostly.

The cover image of the boy is by Louis Still Smoking.  Dorothy Still Smoking was also in those first classes I taught.  Dorothy earned a doctorate 

and presented her thesis at a conference in London, England.