HAROLD REED & THOMAS WALL

The earliest classes one teaches remain vivid in the mind. At age 72 moments from the early Sixties are easier to remember than classes I taught in the Nineties. I never get used to my students turning up in obituaries. Today there were two: Thomas Wall, 68, and Harold “Big Beaver” Reed, Sr., 66. They were ordinary guys -- albeit a little more handsome than most -- and not the most colorful among their sibs. Francis Wall, for instance, is a noted abstract painter. Thomas liked to tease him about “painting like a kindergarten kid” -- which is a quality that some people value enough to pay for! And I don’t think Harold was the reckless adventure-hound that his brother Volley could be. Harold and Thomas are pretty much of my own generation though I was their English teacher. They were steady, never really in the news for being either very good or very bad.

But these were typical Blackfeet enrolled members. Probably you’d not recognize them as Indians, though Harold’s brother Volley was in the movie version of “Last of the Mohicans.” Thomas Wall, born in 1943, was a wartime baby. Harold Reed, two years younger, must have been a “welcome home” baby. His mother was the enrolled Blackfeet, while his step-father, Bill Reed, was blonde and, if I were to guess, once a sailor. I’d also guess that since Harold’s sister Minnie is in Georgia now, that’s where Bill came from. When Bill was finally ill, getting ready to join his gone-on-ahead wife, I sat on his couch visiting with him for a while, but don’t remember much we said. I think we talked about his kids.

What I remember about both Harold and Thomas was how tall they were, how lean, and how wide their flashing grins. That was the era of ducktail hairdos. They both finished high school, I’m pretty sure, and probably both played sports of some kind. Basketball is King on the rez. I don’t think I ever saw either one on a horse. To the naked eye Harold and Thomas were All-American middle-class, make-the-world-go-round family men. I never knew that Harold’s blood father was a Big Beaver, though Eddie Big Beaver was the model for Bob’s bronze called “No More Buffalo.”

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Harold Big Beaver Francis Reed Sr., 66, passed away Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012.

He was born on Dec. 18, 1945, in Browning to George Big Beaver Sr., and Ruth Walter, and was later adopted by William Paul Reed Sr. He was raised in Browning, served in the Army during the Vietnam War and returned to the Blackfeet Reservation, where he worked as a park ranger, police officer, ranch hand, firefighter, and as a mechanic in numerous service stations, eventually owning Big Sky Standard. He liked to hunt and fish, stock car races and restoring cars.

He was preceded in death by his birth father; his parents; three brothers, William P. Reed, Aaron T. Reed and George Big Beaver Jr.; and a niece, Mandy. He married twice, first to Linda Johnson, and then to Bonnie Bongey.

He had three children, Harold F. and Sherri Reed, Jr., Lynn L. and Jason Stott, and Kaitlin R. Reed. He is also survived by his siblings, Minnie and William Elmore of Georgia, Volley Reed and Opal Boggs of Babb, and Lawrence and Yvette Reed, Nellie Whitford, Llona and Verlin Wippert, and Lillian Reed, all of Browning, and Willow and Richard Ell of Conrad; and five grandchildren, Taylor, Marc, Taryn, Thomas and Madeline; as well as numerous aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins.

A wake began Saturday in Browning at the Old Eagle Shield Center and moves to the Starr School on Monday, where a rosary will be recited at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Funeral Services will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday in the Starr School, with burial following in the Willow Creek Cemetery.

Memorials may be made to the Vietnam Veteran Treatment Facilities in Walla Walla, Wash., or the Wounded Warriors Fund.

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Thomas William Wall, 68, of Browning, a retired barber and meat cutter, died of natural causes Jan. 4 at his home.

Prayer service is 7PM Monday at Glacier Home Center. His funeral is 11 AM Tuesday at Four Winds Assembly of God Church, followed by burial in Whitegrass Cemetery. Pondera Funeral Home is handling arrangements.

Survivors include daughters Rose Ann Wall of Ferndale, WA; Virginia Boe Tom of Bellingham, WA; Melissa Wall of Ferndale; and Mary Jo Wall of Browning; sons Clayton Whitegrass of Billings; and Jesse Wall of Bellingham, WA; sisters Irene Old Chief, Angeline Wall; Bernadette Wall; and Roslyn Azure, all of Browning; brother Francis Wall, Jr. of Browning; 17 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Thelma Whitegrass Wall.

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As it happens my card file contains the obituary for Thomas’ mother, Annie Dorothy Mad Plume Wall, so I can add some genealogy for him. Born in 1914, Annie passed away in 2004. When she was a year and a half old, her mother Red Shell Woman (Minnie Mad Plume) died, so she was raised by her mother’s parents, Mary Spotted Bear (Not Real Beaver Woman) and Tim No Runner (Under Mink), and her great-grandmother, Big Mountain Lion Woman. She was given the name Yellow Fox Woman by her grandfather Middle Rider, and passed that name on to her granddaughter Rosalyn LaPier Beck, who is now finishing up her Ph.D. in Missoula. Annie was a fluent Blackfeet speaker and a plantswoman. She married Francis (Aimsback) Wall in 1936 and they remained married until his death in 1973. They were educated at Holy Family Mission and lived on the South Reservation until they bought a house near Willow Creek in Browning.

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It’s hard to grasp that to the school kids on the rez now, Harold and Thomas are old guys, not quite ancestors but the next generation after the last buffalo people, too early to be Headstart Kids. People want to romanticize Blackfeet, not see them as solid citizens like everyone else, but why can’t they be both? Why aren’t they just as much Indian in jeans and ducktails as they might be in buckskin and braids?

DON BROWNING: Memories

Don Browning was one of the first professors who made an impression on me at the U of Chicago Div School. In fact, that impression has remained so strongly that I used his ideas about what a family is when I was cowriting “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs.” He was my quintessential model for the “stays put” person who is totally reliable and faithful and yet will reach out a disciplined mind without limits.

That first class was about the ethics of pastoral care. I’m not sure we were even aware of what pastoral care WAS -- I don’t think many people are very aware of such a thing. In fact, I run across ministers who have very little consciousness of it. Preaching, obviously; community-building, right. But pastoral care -- it happens quietly and discretely because of its very nature dealing with private matters and it’s exceedingly difficult, sometimes pushing the pastor him or herself over into needing some care, or at least advice.

When people come to a minister for help -- and all the standard sources say, “Go your minister when you are in trouble,” will he or she have anything helpful to say? And what are the self-management rules, both in terms of good mental health and in terms of the specific faith context of that religious tradition? Secrets plague every church (sometimes deeply historical) and all ministers. Leaks, imagined leaks, unjustified rumors, sensitive information -- sometimes the most mundane facts like pledge amounts, but sometimes explosive material like pedophiles. The media uses the device of privileged confession even outside the Catholic context where it arose. It is a legal concept that’s not the same from one state to the next.

So the first lesson Browning had to give us was the difference between going by rules and going by principles. Rules: the Ten Commandments. Principles: the Golden Rule. It’s the diff between the Old Testament “Do as I say,” and the New Testament “Do as I do.” Once you internalize this difference, which some would say is the distinction between ethics (principles) and morality (rules), what’s next? Situation ethics. That is, looking at a dilemma from a plenitude of angles that gathers in many specific facts for consideration. Murder might be as evil an act as there is, or it might be a great mercy or even save the world. Woe to a mistake in judgment.

Too many people say they just “feel” what’s right. The famous English conscience. But it’s only habituation to a particular social context and what is “done” there. Sometimes “ethics” is just demanding what you want.

So we looked at reasoning out what should be done by beginning with original concepts: God is the creator. God is good. The world is a suffering and broken place. Why does God allow that? It’s called “theodicy,” an irresolvable contradiction with which any theist must find some kind of peace. (“You’ll get paid back in heaven.” “It’s only an illusion.” “You don’t have the big picture.”)

Or you can be teleological (it’s not the same as theological) by arguing towards what you think final outcomes will be or what you want them to be. (“This world will end and a better one will come.”) Then the problem is predestination -- the idea that God already knows everything that will happen and is making it be that way, so why struggle against what is wrong or painful? This point of view can lead to cynicism, fatalism.

Another option is finding someone you really admire: Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Gandhi, Thoreau, et al and then reflecting on what they would do, given their life evidence. Note that their final consequences were not always pleasant.

Browning especially focused on hospital issues: birth and death. Ethical decisions in hospitals have dire and immediate consequences. One cannot simply retreat to the idea that the least expensive option should be activated, though that’s what actually happens in many cases. And what about the comforting and invigilating of the actual medical staff? What happens to their faith?

Overlapping my years (‘78-’82) Browning (‘77-’83) was the Dean of the U of Chicago Disciples House. His denomination was the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The word was that he got to know each student individually and well. There weren’t many of them, but when you add that to his constant writing, teaching and participation in panels and conferences, it was rather remarkable. Not all professors take an interest. Not all can cope with that much work, but he had a steady dedication to what needed to be done.

I didn’t have a personal relationship with Browning, who was only five years older than myself. (He died of cancer, but I don’t know what kind.) He was close to Martin Marty who remembered me years later at a conference in Helena, but a little more formal. He had a “gimlet gaze” that was intimidating and maybe he was more dedicated to the definitively Christian context. As far as I know, he never served a congregation (Marty did.) but he consciously took the Div School as his congregation and extended concern to all of them. He didn’t condemn or exclude or label -- he was simply circumspect. One of his obits says he was a major movie fan. That’s one subject area where I could have engaged him.

Such a person comes along in one’s mind, a wise adviser for life. I hadn’t been launched on my first ministry more than a few weeks when the first person came to me with a nearly unsolvable problem: his sexual abuse of his own child. His solution was suicide, so what good was my advice? From some angles he might have done the right thing. The family -- which had long been shattered -- was not my problem: I was my problem. Browning rarely addressed sexual matters in class, concentrating more on the nature of marriage, parenting, and human growth. (He was fond of Erikson’s stage theory of maturation.) And yet his calm, meticulous sorting of every angle was invaluable to me.

In a scattered, shattered, contradictory world Browning wasn’t just a theorist: he lived his work by providing an example. No one who has attended a major university like the U of Chicago would think he was able to duck out on crisis or human tragedies. Some of his work was at the attached hospital where the casualties of Hyde Park and environs were brought: a ghetto rife with violence and inequity. The murder rate right in Hyde Park is high, Third World people preying on the privileged intellectuals, which is in itself an uncomfortable situation mostly solved by gentrifying, a whole other category of ethical problems. It’s not an accident that this environment produced President Obama, who reminds me of Browning.

Over the years I’ve often sold books that I thought weren’t useful any more. I have never sold a book by Don Browning.

HARVEY LITTLE DOG (1946 - 2010)

“Harve’ Little Dog, 64, the East Glacier Park Postmaster, passed away Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at a Kalispell hospital due to cancer.

Survivors include his brothers, Forest Little Dog and Floyd Middle Rider, both of Browning, Donald Little Dog of East Glacier, Howard Little Dog of Heart Butte, and Wheeler Little Dog of Kalispell; Germaine Little Dog and Lee Ann Hoyt as well as numerous other nieces and nephews.

Harve’ is preceded in death by his parents, Richard and Louise Little Dog; sisters, Germaine Little Dog, Lorraine Little Dog and Hazel Anderson; and brother, George Little Dog.

He was born in Browning, March 12, 1946, to Richard and Louise (Spotted Bear) Little Dog where he grew up and graduated from high school.

He had worked with the US Postal Service for the past 20 years and served as the East Glacier Park Postmaster for the past many years.

Harve’ was an avid art and antique collector.

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Yesterday was the funeral mass of Harvey Little Dog, my former student, my postmaster for several years and my friend. There’s another dimension: because Richard Little Dog’s father was a Bundle Keeper and transferred that Bundle to Bob Scriver and me in the Sixties, I am in the Old Way a member of that family. Bob was given the Blackfeet name of Middle Rider (Sik-pokes-si-mah which translates to “He Who Likes His Backfat Burnt Black.”) In the old way, of course, I would have picked up the obligation of helping to support and serve that family. I didn’t. Partly because I moved away and partly because the other members of the family went in very different directions. Harve’, for instance, was a faithful member of the Church of the Little Flower in Browning with a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. However, Forest Little Dog gave an eloquent prayer in Blackfeet and Father Ed emphasized that there was no contradiction between the two Ways.

This was the first time I’d attended a funeral mass after a cremation, which rather derailed the conventional mass in subtle ways. Since there was no coffin, a simple shrine included the cremains, photographical portraits, and flowers, which are not usually present as the same way as secular and protestant memorial services. Immediately after the service the cremains were taken to the Little Dog ranch and scattered, which is also unconventional. (I approve. Too many people have cremains in their closets, unable to part with the last traces of a loved one.) Father Ed confronted the ashes straight on: “This is what happens to the human body after death,” he told us. “We must see that fact and grieve for it, but Harve’ was a good Christian and lives on.”

Then he said something else. He said, “Some people think of heaven in which we eternally indulge in our favorite practice for the rest of eternity. Consider what it would be like if you loved fishing and continued to fish forever. You’d get tired of it.” But I know people who would not! Lofty mountains and rushing streams beat pearly gates and golden streets! I understand what Father Ed was trying to get across: the terms of Heaven and Eternity are not human terms, but utterly transformed into something we cannot conceive of on this side of the barrier death erects between this world and the other.

The Church of the Little Flower is in Browning, but Harve’ was part of the East Glacier community. I don’t know how to get an accent mark on the second syllable of his name and neither did the funeral chapel, so we’re both using an apostrophe instead. Harve’ was out of the closet. When someone teased him about his name by Frenchifying it, the same way that some pronounce “Tarjaa” to convey that Target is a high class big box store, Harve’ embraced the practice and put it on his official postmaster ID tag.

He was an EXCELLENT postmaster, in somewhat the same style as the beauty parlor operator in “The Ladies Number 1 Detective Agency” or the nurse/friend in “Angels in America.” That is, compassionate fact-facing and practical help. East Glacier is a resort town with a lot of young people living away from home, a lot of drifters, and -- esp. over the winter -- a tendency to get embroiled in small but hot feuds. A postmaster, like a hairdresser or bartender, does a lot of counseling and advising as well as a bit of detective work (to find out where to forward mail) and a certain amount of bending the rules. He received awards for excellence in service.

The congregation that gathered was far more eclectic than usual with no big shots or politicians. The three resort towns of the rez (East Glacier, St. Mary and Babb) have more year-round white people, so park rangers, shop-keepers, retirees, cooks, and teachers were there. Other gay people were not necessarily public. I caught up with several friends I hadn’t seen for a while. Dr. Dorothy Still Smoking, one of the founders of the Piegan Institute, drove all the way from Coeur d’Alene where she’d been attending a workshop on racism and tribal sovereignty and arrived just in time. Harve’s companion, guardian, and chauffeur (Harve’s feet had suffered amputations.) proudly offered his love and appreciation.

Because Highway 89 is being drastically rebuilt where it crosses Two Medicine, I went up the “inside road,” which pretty much stays close to the mountains and overlays the Old North Trail. Springtime in the Rockies means intense sunlight between and through massive clouds moving swiftly towards the east. Clouds on the ground crept through every high pass and cleft and gap in the mountains, coming like nebulous cats out onto the prairie where they sprang up into the sky, vaporizing. I’d allowed lots of extra time, just in case, so I got to Browning early and went on up to East Glacier for lunch and to look around. I lived there after Bob divorced me, trying to decide what to do next. For those who are bound to ask, I had a grilled cheese sandwich in the Little Diner at a table next to Joyce Clarke Turvey and her granddaughter, Chantell, who is a park ranger on the west side of the mountains, a botanist who moved a year ago. Joyce was also at the funeral mass. She has a Blackfeet name, since she was adopted by John Clarke, the famous woodcarver, but the grand-daughter has none. I would call her “Sweetgrass Woman.”

This sort of weather, this depth of history (many photos of the original Little Dog in Washington to discuss treaties -- the Clarke family deeply embedded in events) weave on the loom of time a transcendent tale of cross-purposes and deep friendships. Harve’ was one who understood that, even as he contributed his rich, proud strand. I think Heaven will look familiar to him.