ENTERING VIA THE HUMANITIES

The Humanities world, at least the academic part of it, is highly patterned.  The idea originally was the university and that’s still the purported base.  At least the norm is for scholars to be generally people who produce and consume books, which determines their status in the institution.  Native Americans from a rural setting, whether or not it is on a reservation, are not always readers because it’s hard to get books.  But these days if they have access to school and library computers, they can become scholars.  They have to think of it, and they will need a strong guide in the form of a person or persons who can scout territory for them.

A helper for people who are doing “ethnohistory” or working in other Native American related fields is H-Net, which is a loosely organized communication web divided into disciplines.  They announce conferences, which institutions pay for their scholars to attend, but usually they will allow independent scholars to also attend at their own expense.  Part of their distinction is jargon, multi-syllabic words with specialized meanings, carefully organized into sentences trying to evade sandtraps presented by past scholars.  This will make it hard for the uninitiated, but if you keep at it, you can pick up the vocabulary.

There are two barriers to an innocent Native American person wishing to find out more about his own people and wanting to join the conversation among informed people.  One is having a guide and the other is —predictably — money for travel and a place to stay. 

Terri Castaneda

Terri Castaneda is in Sacramento, on the faculty for CSU, and looking for a person to join a panel.  The announcement is below.  To give you a notion of who Terri is and therefore what kind of panel contents might be wanted, here’s the introductory precis of a paper she has presented elsewhere.  Her words:

California Indian Land Claims Activism and Urban Indian Place-Making

TERRI A. CASTANEDA,  California State University, Sacramento

ABSTRACT Peoplehood and cultural belonging have long been primordialized through reference to land and place. The de-territorialization of identity may be a critical hallmark of the 21st century, but ancestral territories and homelands continue to be implicated in a host of cultural conditions and sociopolitical statuses—perhaps especially those that refer- ence being out of, or without, place—whether as immigrant, refugee, alien or expat. This was certainly the case for the Federated Indians of California who mobilized, in the late 1940s, in order to pursue land claims against the federal government for expropriation of their ancestral territory. One unanticipated outcome of their political activism was California Indian place-making and cultural revivification among urban, landless Indians in the greater Sacramento region.

Now I’ll paraphrase as simply as I can.  “People have for a long time identified themselves by a certain location.  Now people float anywhere.  But they remember and are defined according to where they came from.  Much of law and boundaries is about this.  In the late 1940’s the Federated Indians of California sued the Federal Government for taking their territory.  They didn’t expect that the political result would be that Sacramento city Indians would suddenly take an interest, becoming activists.

Here’s a photo of four ethnohistory presenters.

Farina King, Terri Castaneda, Jessa Growing Thunder, and Karin Huebner

What if you were a person with no degrees, but some background in your own tribe?  Suppose you weren’t the usual youngster starting out.  Should you go?  I doubt that anyone would try to stop you.  You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at first you have to know that such an event is even happening.  

Below is a call for a panelist.  The heading is linked to H-Net and the original announcement.

Call for Panelist: 2016 Ethnohistory Conference, Nashville TN

by Terri Castaneda

We are seeking a 4th panelist whose work complements and expands upon themes and papers outlined below:

Engaging with Empire: Mapping Cosmopolitan Lives and Visions—This panel examines individual lives, subjectivities and visions forged at the crossroads of imperial institutions and Indigenous opportunity. Looking beyond narratives that frame elite, bicultural and/or cosmopolitan Indigenous figures and experiences as embodiments of colonial surrogacy, accommodation or means for sheer survival, it takes up the very intentional choices of some individuals to leave home; to venture into—rather than away from—empire. In so doing, it aims to shed light not only on the diverse motivations and pathways by which common individuals crafted uncommon—perhaps even extraordinary—lives, but also upon the methodological and interpretive constraints posed by the challenges of recovering and situating such sojourns and stories within the wider historical context of the overwhelmingly violent and involuntary removals of Indigenous people and nations from ancestral territories, homes and families.

Two papers address these themes by focusing upon cross-country travel, off-reservation boarding schools, and outing experiences as real and imagined sites for the fulfillment of intellectual curiosity, discovery and personal ambition: 

1.  Terri Castaneda explores articulations with empire embodied in the life of Marie Potts, a Mountain Maidu activist, newspaper editor, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School alumna. 

2.  John Gram examines Pueblo engagement with federal boarding schools in New Mexico through the lens of Indigenous values and desires for social, political, and economic mobility during the Progressive Era. 

3.  Nicholas Barron’s paper explores the relationship between applied anthropologists and Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona during the early 20th century, illustrating how individuals and their movements through imperial entanglements contribute to the construction and representation of distinctly Indigenous places in the present. 

David Dinwoodie will serve as discussant. 

Interested parties should contact Terri Castaneda via email (tac@csus.edu) by May 15.

Surprisingly, this is NOT about the injustice and compensatory claims for displaced peoples, nor a harangue about imperial abuses.  Rather, this is about how you get back into the dominant system of the country while remaining tribal.  Amazing!  And absolutely crucial!

For a kind of example, here’s the title of a previous paper by Castaneda — NOT about being a shaman, but about how to work with  the foundations and philanthropies who help Indians.  (“Piegan Institute” in Browning is an outstanding example of how well it can work.)  Castenada wrote it in 

1987, but didn’t publish it.  “Families and Foundations: Explorations in Philanthropy and Patronage as Dynastic Phenomena”  Unpublished paper, Dept of Anthro, Rice U.  

Darrell Kipp and that DesRosier Kid

The major insight of Darrell Kipp and Dorothy Still Smoking was that they should avoid both government and tribal sources of support because both of those were invested in control and maintaining the status quo, a deadly combination.  The Latham Foundation was a major contributor to the success of the Cuts Wood School that was part of the Institute.  Individuals often called “trust fund babies,” because they had family money handed down the generations, also helped.  Nowadays movie stars and tech moguls get involved, but their efforts may amount to advertising for themselves.  One must be cautious.  And it pays to keep looking for other resources.

JUSTIN MANY FINGERS: KAINAI

Justin Many Fingers

Narcisse Blood was killed in a car accident not long ago.  He was a center post for many innovations and creations and it has taken a while for people to begin to pick up the threads and begin again.  Justin Many Fingers is a performance artist and dancer from the Blood Reserve of the Kainai, north of Montana in Alberta.  It is a place that has been sheltered from whites, which has protected the aboriginal heritage but also given the People a secure base from which to operate in the larger world.  Justin is an example of that.

Another factor is readiness to work with worldwide indigenous peoples.  Darrell Kipp, also gone now, was much empowered by this force since the Hawaiians and the New Zealand Maori had done a lot of work with language restoration and were happy to share.  I first met Narcisse at a Piegan Institute sponsored conference.  These People are “reconciliation” People who wish to preserve and energize the old ways, but not punish the present.  Inclusion and transformation are the values.

Beverly's book is key.  (This is an historic photo -- not Beverly.)

Justin appeared at the Valier library with a posse of Blackfoot folks that included Beverly Hungry Wolf whom I know from the Sixties when she was married to Adolf Hungry Wolf.  Their daughter Star had recommended that they stop on a research visit to the location of the “Baker Massacre.”  The couple raised their children 19th century style in a log cabin with a creek for a water source and a photovoltaic sheet for electricity to run Adolf’s laptop.  Their children, now adult, have moved on to good jobs in the cities.  The Hungry Wolfs divorced and Beverly is remarried, teaching at one of the tribal colleges.  Everything moves on.

Justin Many Fingers

Justin has been active in many contexts and now is about to take on management duties.  This is his self-description on “Linked-in”:

“I’m 28 years 5 months.  My address is my suitcase and a back pack.

I live for the arts, as long as I have food in my tummy, a pillow under my head, and a studio to create, I'm all good. 

“I love traveling and making new friends and family.

“I am I bit crazy because I like to live life without any limitations, I live to push beyond them.”

Troy Emery Twigg and Cherish Violet Blood were with this group.  They had worked together on a production called “Making Treaty 7,” a previous key work.  (Treaty 7 is the Canadian Blackfoot treaty.)  I’m quoting from the website, "makingtreaty7.com".

“The board and staff of Making Treaty 7 are deeply mourning the tragic loss of ELK SHADOW / PONA KO’TAKSI, also known as Michael Green, and MIDDLE BULL / TATSIKIISTAMIK, also known as Narcisse Blood.  Elk Shadow was the founder and visionary behind the Making Treaty 7 project.  We celebrate his commitment to a shared belief that “WE ARE ALL TREATY PEOPLE”.  We are committed to ensuring that his spirit will live on.  Elk Shadow, One of Long Vision, had no boundaries and could not see color.  He was an inspiration to everyone he touched.  “This is the most rewarding and electrified piece of art that I have ever created in over 30 years,” he told us, “and to have, through this process, through the Sundance, been blessed with a spiritual awakening is a gift I could never have expected.”  Middle Bull was the Cultural and Spiritual Advisor to Making Treaty 7.  He was the Grandfather to the cast and crew;  he was the walking encyclopedia of our language, our culture and our history.  Together, Middle Bull and Elk Shadow brought First Nations and non-First Nations together.  They were the heart and soul of Making Treaty 7.  Narcisse will be truly missed within our spiritual circles.”

From "Wisakedjak"

Justin played the historical character Champlain in a production called Wisakedjak, which “is not just entertainment, it is the embodiment of sacred teachings.”  “To get to the essence of this half human, half spirit being, whose escapades  have been passed on through an oral and nomadic tradition, is like being played by the trickster himself. He is a shapeshifter, the original rebel without a cause, a stranger in a strange land, the manifestation of our hubris as well as its antidote.”

In terms of comparative religion, Wisakedjak is NOT Napi or Jesus or Starboy, but he occupies the same niche as an interlocutor between realms, including those of cultures. Champlain with his 17th century big hat, long jacket, and writing plume is clueless. (For more, go to “Troutinplaid.com.”)

As clueless as the drunken Major Baker of the US Cavalry who bore down on the peace camp of HeavyRunner and massacred women, old people, and children -- the men had gone to hunt.  One can read similar stories in the newspaper every day, but the people -- who are roughly the same color as American indigenous folks -- are in Eurasia.  Carol Murray, local Blackfeet historian, was the guide.  For many years since the location of the camp she and her husband, John, have organized annual commemorations.  If the road is passable, that is, since it happened in the middle of winter.

Baker Massacre commemoration on site

There are many accounts, some written and many more told by survivors only in their families.  There was great fear of retaliation on both sides.  In fact, it was used to justify the suppression of ceremonies, the language, and newly forming organizations of every kind, including the young educated men who wanted only discussion of ideas.

Carol Murray, Amskapi Pikuni

Now the discussion can happen freely and this group is leading it.  So much is just beneath the surface if we aren’t afraid to access it.  Canada has been much better about funding and supporting the arts and they are the better for it.  Many of our best Native American actors, like Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal were trained by Canadian companies.  They have resisted the commercialized entitlement wars that try to “own” cultures, wasting energy on suppressing others, American style.

Justin dancing in Iitahpoyii

Iitahpoyii de Troy Emery Twigg @ Studio 303  on Vimeo.  This is Justin dancing on vid.  I hope you can find it.  Yosemite hides links, at least from me.  vimeo.com › Studio 303 › Studio 303’s VideosVimeo

DARRELL KIPP'S FUNERAL MASS

The day dawned clear and golden with dry highways.  On the way to Browning a coyote crossed the road, searching the willow brush along Two Med creek.  A golden eagle -- I am not making this up -- flew along with me for a few miles at Antenna Hill and, just before I got to Browning, a raven was lingering along the way.  In Browning the dog people -- all of them variations on huskies and shepherds if not wolves -- rushed out to challenge my little pickiup and then finally a Newfoundland the same size as the vehicle.  The rest of the animal life was the same old groups of cows and horses.

Near Cuts Wood School, where Darrell’s body had been through Sunday, cars were everywhere, some of them probably parked overnight after the Nanamska (Bundle Keepers) ceremonies on Sunday that GG Kipp guided.  The Catholic mass was scheduled for eleven AM but people were taking seats by ten AM.  The basement held a megascreen relay for the overflow.  

I sat in my usual place: the back pew.  On one side was Sandra Watts, tribal attorney who got her law education in Oregon with my cousins' husbands, and on the other was an extremely ancient woman who explained that her name was “Bubbles” by pantomiming the juggling of balloon-sized bubbles.  In front of me was Dorothy Still Smoking, who teamed with Darrell to create the Piegan Institute, even kept Darrell moving through some tough times.  (He was not the only one with ideas.)  And on the other hand, Donna Douglas (I don’t know her married name), the cheerful and competent granddaughter of Vina Chattin for whom one of the elementary schools is named.  Donna’s hair is white now, but she does not dye it fire-engine red as her grandmother did.

King Kuka’s Roualt-style chunked-stained-glass Stations of the Cross glowed dramatically in the bright sun, tinting the people primary colors.  We were startled to realize that one young woman with green hair that we assumed was stained by colored light, really DID have green hair!  Most of the people were adults.  Maybe the babies were downstairs.  

Many boys, some pre-teens, all dignified, scrubbed, braided and attentive, were standing to spare more seats for older folks.  A few of them were drummers for an honor song.  I suspect they all had close ties to Cuts Wood School, all devoted to Darrell Kipp if not related.  (Darrell always joked Kipps were numerous as tin cans on the landscape.)  They acted as orderlies in the ceremony, bringing forward the wine and  communion wafers.

Father Ed had an emotionally tough job because over the past years Darrell and his wife, Roberta, had become more and more closely dedicated to church matters, a support to this priest who once lamented,  “I came here hoping to lead the people to renewal and instead all I do is bury teenagers.”  Today he commemorated a 69-year-old man who had cut trail for decades, renewal after renewal.  At many points in Darrell’s life he barely squeaked through, but very few people had much awareness of that.  He used a quiet network of people he thought of as educated and aware, as well as several circles of people who were great jokers, sometimes in rough ways. 

Charlie Farmer, for instance, visited Darrell in hospital during the last days, pretending to ask to inherit his pickup.  When Darrell improved a few days later, Charlie pretended to be disappointed that he would have to give the pickup back.  Darrell used Charlie as a kind of lieutenant and co-conspirator, giving him various titles and responsibilities.  There was a swimming pool they could see from the original Moccasin Flats school but it was full of blown-in dirt and a couple of dead dogs.  Charlie nagged to re-activate it until finally they hired a backhoe, gave the dogs proper burial (since all Browning dogs are enrolled in the tribe), and brought in a squad of boys with borrowed shovels to shift the dirt out from corners.  In their practical nepotistic way, they hired a couple of Kipps who could swim to be lifeguards and called a plumber to see about water.  (Alas, no Kipp is a plumber.) 

The water treatment shed turned out to have been used to store 200 pounds of “Cap’n Crunch” breakfast food that had been donated by the company because the boxes were mislabeled.  (One of Darrell’s peeves was the practice of giving aged-out, broken, useless things in “charity.”  Another of the stories about him was that once when he went to Blackfeet Community College to teach, he found most of the desks damaged -- they had been that way for months -- and simply pitched them all out the door.)  Charlie finally gave the Cap’n Crunch to Vic Connelly and the rumor was that he used it to wean his calves.  They act as though they’re on a sugar high anyway.  Charlie talked a long time, telling one story after another. 

The second speaker was a man from the Flathead whom I didn’t know.  He was a fine speaker and part of the global academic context.  Hawaiian indigenous language speakers were deeply involved with Piegan Institute.  Over and over they reassured Cuts Wood teachers faced with crisis that they had confronted the same thing and told them what would work.  One of the recurrent problems was people who tried to exploit the school for their own uses and even poisoned relationships.  The Hawaiians said,  “Be tough.  Throw ‘em out!”  So they did.   Jim Thorpe’s daughter was an advisor.  The Canadian Blackfoot people were vital, esp. Shirley Crow Shoe.

Darrell’s father was a hard worker on the railroad who in advanced age sat by the window all day looking at the Rockies.   Darrell wrote a poem about it.  When he was a soldier in Korea, he used his free time to learn Korean and startled a South Korean trade group that came to visit the rez by greeting them in their language.  Words were his weapons.  Make that “tools.”

Mothers, esp. ones mindful of massacre and world war, tend to spoil their sons in order to keep them close and safe. Darrell broke away early, but then in late adulthood came back to help his parents.  He promised he would never put his mother in a nursing home and he didn’t.  Roberta and he talked for a long time to understand what they were doing, which was one of the secrets of their success as a relationship.  Both took care of their parents right up to death.  Darrell never made a secret of his three brothers who died of alcoholism and violence.  Donald remains, the lone brother.  Geraldine, his quiet conscientious sister, was the office manager at Cuts Wood.  There was never a pretense that Piegan Institute was federal or tribal, neither in terms of funding or of control.

Darren is following that pattern.  He has all the legal control and training experience he needs to keep the school operating.  The restraint and equanimity may be a little harder to come by for a young man who succeeded in keeping himself separate from a powerful father by becoming a videographer in his own right.  Roberta is relatively young, still beautiful, and has a strong support group she earned as her own when she formed a study circle focused on earning distance-learning master’s degrees.  They'll be okay.

At one time Darrell had a commune-style fantasy about all his beloved friends and family living in an old-time village where they could visit each other in the classic sit-by-the-fire way to smoke and drink a little.  This picture didn’t include movie stars or Montana big shots and I didn’t spot any at the Mass.  We don’t need them.

The thing of it is, Darrell just doesn’t feel dead.  I found myself talking to him as I drove back across the dun fields.  The railroad was pausing for some reason -- first a string of coal cars, then a string of oil tankers, and finally a line of Christmas presents from China.   The frozen sloughs along the road show extra-tall muskrat midden-houses.  The waterfowl have gone on ahead. It will be years, if ever, for those who knew Darrell to stop turning, expecting to see him right alongside.

Tom Saubert is the artist.

CIRCLES ON THE PRAIRIE

“Circle of the Sun”  http://www.nfb.ca/film/circle-of-the-sun/  was made in 1960 by Colin Low, a Mormon who grew up in Cardston, Alberta, near the border.  Later he was a convert to Catholicism.  Plainly he is a religiously anchored man.  His point of view in this film is “salvage” mentality, meaning that he believed himself to be recording something that was disappearing, that should be saved because it was valuable and meaningful.  (He was quite right except for the part about disappearing -- it persisted but transformed.)  This short film is one of the earliest about life on the high prairie in the Blackfoot Nation, the most truthful of films and the most intimate, though what Low called “Sun Dance” was what I know as “Horn Society.”  He went on to make many anthropological films and now lives in Montreal.

I came to Browning, Montana, the next year (1961) and the movie shows the culture I stepped into.  Because I partnered with a white sculptor born in 1914 who had grown up here, and because he was so immersed in this culture himself that he began to dream, which the Browning old people interpreted as directions for becoming a Bundle Keeper, and because “the woman” is the practical protector of what goes on, I was in deep enough to be painted in one of those double lodges in the middle of the camp circle.  This film shows a Bundle Opening -- I think a Beaver Bundle because of the rattles on rawhide instead of hand drums.   Also, the film shows the last years of the previous oil drilling activity in the area which is now renewed by “frakking.”

The film uses as an anchor Pete Standing Alone, a handsome young man who spent ten years in the States to make a grubstake, then returned home to ranch and rodeo.  In the footage about the rodeo, watch for a puppy-pile of boys who seem to be petting a dog.  When they stand up, it turns out to be a colt.  These are intensely horse people.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/round_up/    This second film, "Round Up," is also about Pete Standing Alone, but now he’s old and selling off his horse herd.  This film was made by Narcisse Blood, a tribal member of the North Piegan.  I’ve never met Colin Low, but I’ve met Narcisse and heard him talk.  If all goes well, I’ll hear him talk again in Browning on Friday.  He’s speaking about Abraham Maslow’s brief but intense visit to the Blood Indians and some derived ideas called “Breath of Life”.  Narcisse is brilliant -- no one argues about it.  If you want to hear what he says, below are samples.  There are many more online, but my computer won’t open them so far.  If you are Blackfoot or are teaching about the Blackfoot confederacy, you will need to figure out how to watch them as they are an invaluable resource.  I’ll keep working on it myself.

http://www.galileo.org/initiatives/moka-meyo/moka/english/land.html

Writing on stone is the equivalent of cave art, except that it’s out in the open on cliff faces and therefore vulnerable.  Some of it is “pecked” into the surface.  None of the figures are as naturalistic as the cave paintings, but they are still interesting.

http://www.trailtribes.org/greatfalls/since-time-immemorial.htm

Great Falls is my shopping town, eighty miles to the south of Valier.

http://lc-triballegacy.org/video.php?backTo=0&source=tribe&tribe=3&vid=71

Lewis and Clark left their mark near here, both because it was the point from which they could see the northern limit of the Louisiana Purchase and because near here they killed the only Indians who were casualties of the expedition: boys herding horses camped overnight with them.

http://montanatribes.org/digital_archives/meet_the_speakers/NBl.html  This is a short video of Narcisse explaining his point of view.  He is a “code-switcher,” able to function in two worlds and aware of that.  What he may not be thinking about so far is how to find a universal “code” that can mediate between them.  That may not be necessary.  Humans may be able to handle several codes, switching as needed.  He finds his double understanding to be the answer for reconciling education with assimilation: two “kinds” of education, each on its own terms, depending on the setting.  In fact, the larger world already code-switches -- between humanities and “hard” science; or inside the “circle of believers” and outside the circle in the meta-thought world.

The Blackfeet in the US, the Amskapi Pikuni, have had the great advantage of staying in contact with the reservoir of the Blackfoot Confederacy across the arbitrary line of the 49^th parallel.  (A near-closed border, as at present, cripples them.)  As turbulence and greed have swept the Montana side, the Alberta reserves have kept more of the old ways.  Narcisse Blood gracefully accepts the obligation to renew the old ways of the land, reconcile them with the best of Euro-thought -- like Maslow’s Third Force psychology -- and express them in a voice precise and eloquent.  He sounds quite different from the activists on the Montana side.  He is calm and centered.

Piegan Institute is a formal institution meant to preserve and promote the speaking of Blackfeet and the accumulation of scholarly materials about the Blackfeet.  To understand the meaning of this, one must consider that during and after the AIM activism, Blackfeet tribal members were sometimes prevented from using the library of the federal Museum of the Plains Indian for fear that they might tear things up.  Then everything changed and the Museum itself “cleansed” the files of all things white, taking them to the dump.  When Darrell Kipp, on behalf of the Piegan Institute, took a college class of Blackfeet to Calgary to use the library of the Glenbow Institute, such a thing as a Blackfeet class visit had never happened before and the staff was worried to the point of alarm.  So when Rosalyn LaPier organized a series of annual August day-long academic lectures and invited Narcisse Blood and his teaching companion Ryan Heavy Head, it was a new thing to do.  They were late because the US side of the border had trouble understanding why they were coming.

When they entered, dark and lithe from a summer of walking in the sun to make GPS records of the old trails and camps on the east slope (many made in the days of the dog travois), it was as though they entered from another world and, in a sense, they did.  They had been walking in the past, for the sake of the future.  They knew what a day of walking was like and they knew how to translate that into a high tech medium, partly video and partly sophisticated map-making computers, that can be put on the Internet to escape the guards at libraries and museums.

Other indigenous people have also claimed identities developed in a specific place, later swamped or displaced by other cultures from elsewhere.  Now we see that somehow we’ve got to reconcile the mosaic of many people, all searching for something on which to stake their lives.  Rather than stamping out what came before, rather than strong people strangling the weak people in order to feed off their resources, we’ve got to find high principles and daily ways of sharing. 

PIEGAN BLACKFEET HISTORY: 1930 - 1940

Remember that these are only notes for a book not yet written. Feel free to comment.

The story of the bronze footprints of the sign talkers neatly fits this decade. The conference that they commemorate was in 1930 and the building that was built in part to locate and protect that circle was the Museum of the Plains Indian. This filmed convention was meant to record the basic gestures of the last sign talkers from several tribes. Bits of it are on YouTube and Piegan Institute has put the whole thing on DVD but, as far as I know, it’s not commercially available. Ironically, it was organized by a general who had lost parts of his hands! When he made the sign for elk, making one’s hands into antlers, it was not a trophy head. In addition to the film, each man was asked to make an impression of his feet in plaster, which was then cast in bronze, now arranged in a circle in front of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana. The men were wearing their regalia, not the “citizens’ dress” of their daily lives, and so their toes show plainly through their moccasins. At first very formal, by the end of the film the men are having an hilarious time telling jokes and clowning.

This incident and the eventually ensuing edifice record some of the ambivalence about the Blackfeet at this time. On the one hand, “salvage anthropology” (the idea that anthros should gather up as much of vanishing cultures as they could) was important. Voisin, the sculptor, was in Browning about then, making portraits of outstanding people, though the real salvage was filming the sign talkers. Then the museum was built through the efforts of John Ewers, the first curator and author of the classic "The Blackfeet: Raiders of the Plains," The museum was meant to be a double institution: partly a repository of objects and partly a workshop where people would create modern versions of them to sell to tourists. They were not defined as “art” but as “crafts” but crafts were an elevated category.

This movement had started years earlier in the valuing of folk skills in Britain and across America, handwork like baskets, blankets, quilts, pots and the like. (At this same time, high art revolved around Paris and Manhattan, leaving representation behind, but Charlie Russell and others were engaged in what was essentially a pictorial version of salvage anthropology, painting the West that was gone by the Thirties.) The Museum was funded in part by the US Crafts Board, which was working desperately to help people make enough money that way to stay alive, and partly by the Lions Club.

Ironically, in 1930 just as the Depression gripped the nation by the throat, “Tip” O’Neill and Louis Hill hit the first big oil gusher on the Michael’s ranch near Cut Bank. Agent Stone asked for a geological survey of the reservation but was denied. This was a poker game and no one wanted to show their cards. In 1933 the Santa Rita well came in and there was much drilling in the Cut Bank area. There were many bids for leases, but they were hit-and-miss with no systematic criteria or process developed to keep track of them.

In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act, which was part of the New Deal, created the present form of tribal government. Out of roughly a thousand Indian families, 747 were receiving federal welfare assistance and 138 were making it on their own. By 1935, with Warren O’Hara as superintendent, the Blackfeet Tribal Constitution had been prepared and the Tribal Charter was approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1936 the superintendent is C.L. Graves. An inventory shows that the tribal goods and equipment have been quietly looted -- the value of the missing things is estimated at $100,000. In 1939 an attempt to balance the Council’s cashbook couldn’t succeed because entries between January first and September first had not been recorded, nor had Nancy Goss, the treasurer, been making receipts. Hazlett was the chair, a controversial figure as always. Brian Connolly, Wright Hagerty and Levi Burd are on the council.

Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912 - 1954” is a careful, detailed, evidence-based account of what was happening through this period. It may seem dry to those who don’t know the people involved, but for we who do recognize individuals -- might be related to them -- or for the individuals themselves who are still living, this book deserves careful reading and discussion. This is the time period when the idea of a reservation for a dying and essentially different people has to be replaced by the idea of people with a special heritage who are entitled citizens like everyone else. Denial dominates strategy. The larger world has never admitted this shift. They want ghost Indians, not real players.

Outsiders have very little understanding of the many factions or the depth of the schism between full-bloods and double-bloods. Blood quantum (really provenance rather than blood DNA) for enrollment is reduced and reduced again until it stands at roughly a quarter-inheritance from an enrolled ancestor, male or female, but it is always challenged. One parent’s family might have both enrolled and un-enrollable children, with consequences being fairly crucial for entitlement or subsidy. All of this, combined with the riches of oil, make the job of the Tribal Council overwhelming, to say nothing of the constant accusations of corruption.

The continuing intervention and supervision by the Agency Superintendent and the Bureau of Indian Affairs meant that three-handed games were inevitable. One entity plays the victim, the second plays the oppressor, and the third plays the rescuer. Everyone swaps roles as is convenient. Some of the organizational problems seem irresolvable. The reservation is separate, but wants to be sovereign, meaning decide its own affairs. But the people are not quite ready to negotiate the perils of Washington, D.C., nor do they have any way of supporting themselves except through oil and government dependence. This is when the land lease payments began to be diverted out of the hands of the owners assigned by the Dawes Act. In addition, the people are dependent on the US government for major law enforcement (murder, arson, etc.) but have no Supreme Court that can resolve locally rigged outcomes of lawsuits. To imagine what these times were like, think of Afghanistan without the explosions.

Education in this time period was functional on the reservation where Doug Gold, son of the Presbyterian minister, had organized and built the first public school in Browning. Many students were educated at the higher levels at regional Indian high schools and vocational schools. Then came international war and a new kind of education by experience. It was suddenly very important to be American.

ADDITIONAL IDEAS FROM RAY DJUFF BY EMAIL:

Some things you might want to add:

By 1931 the railway was feeling the pinch of the Depression, and cut
back almost entirely the road trips on which it used to send Blackfeet
delegations east to promote Glacier. Those trips were financially
important to those who were entertainers for the railway. Rather than
just three months of work, June 15 to September 15, at Glacier Park
Hotel, the trips east could add one to three months of additional wages.


Also, the group of Blackfeet who remained on hire to work at the hotel
was smaller, and starting in 1934 did so without front-man Two Guns, who
had died earlier in the year. His death along with the subsequent death
of Bird Rattle marked a further evolution in the lineup of entertainers,
with people like Mike Short Man and the Wades-in-the-Waters, among
others, becoming more prominent.

The promotional work the railway did, however, laid the groundwork
(raising the profile of the tribe) for the hiring of a group of
Blackfeet to appear with Shirley Temple in the Hollywood production of
Susannah of the Mounties.

You also don't mention the "Big Claim," the land claim compensation
issue left over from 1855, launched as a lawsuit about 1925. So many
people in the 1930s thought it would be the big payout, which it later
proved not to be. I think each person got about $85.

FORKED INDIAN HISTORY

A person who writes and speaks about Indians from the conventional Western History Association and Western Literature Association http://www.usu.edu/westlit/ point of view, meaning a basically white point of view (whether or not the originator is Indian), called to ask me for my notes from the Piegan Institute August history seminars over the years. I’ve tried to take careful notes because after I write them up I put them into the books I sell on Lulu.com/prairiemary. Because these seminars are organized by Rosalyn Lapier and Darrell Kipp and the scholars are also academic Blackfeet, usually from Canada, they draw from a body of knowledge that is quite different and mostly invisible to white aficionadoes who as teenagers fell in love with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” In short, the whites like being on the winning side but sympathizing with the noble victims, not that they mean to do anything practical about it. It’s the dream of a boy against adults, looking back, sadly reconciled to what “had to be.”

The same division is there in “cowboy” art versus “NA” art which is often abstract, maybe on objects like pots, blankets, jewelry. The NA or Aborginal view is best illustrated by a painting I saw that I wish I owned: buffalo going over a jump, tumbling to the scree below, then leaping to their feet unharmed and thundering up the cliff opposite, stampeding off across the prairie again. That is, Indians realize that the the prairie clearances were an interlude, a break in a long continuity that has a future.

There is another split that is within the WLA and WHA, not between red and white. This is between the professional historian within the academy and the amateur enthusiast who reads freely and widely, but “popularly.” As a possible illustration, consider James Willard Schultz who wrote for a popular audience with maximum whizbang, largely ignored by proper historians who work in an entirely different footnoted, peer-reviewed manner. Indians so far have not generated a very notable body of history books because publishers simply don’t believe in that point of view if they know it exists at all. In fact, much of what some local Indians tell interested inquirers comes from books written by whites, often the 19th and 20th century authors who really DID profit from raking off the Napi stories from the rez to sell in Manhattan.

This is why Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana, is so phenomenal, such an indicator of sea-change. Though their main focus has been restoring the Blackfeet language and though their immersion school has been running for twenty years and has successfully produced fluent speakers, one of their side activities has been finding and accumulating copies of all the master’s and doctoral theses that have been written about the Amskapi Pikuni without their writers ever bothering to return copies to the people who supplied the information. Only lately have people like Paul Rosier responsibly come back to explain what they learned doing research.

Partly the problem was finding a way to return the materials and to find a proper occasion and setting for discussing them. Recognizing this, Piegan Institute has for ten years organized a history seminar in August. The notes from the seminar have been posted on this blog as long as I’ve been writing it, but since I’m aggregating the notes by request, I’ll put them on lulu.com/prairiemary in book form, both separately and then as part of the book called “Blackfeet Trails.” I’ve taken notes every year that I’ve attended. The only year I missed was the History of the Women, which was too scary for me!

I attended these years and still might be able to locate notes, though I wasn’t blogging yet.

2001 “APATOHS-OHSOKOI” Blackfeet history and places along Apaatohs-ohsokoi. (The Old North Trail)

Ted Binnema, Scott Carlson, Sally Thompson, Bill Farr, Lori Falcon, Narcisse Blood.

2003 “Aakawattop’a” A Gathering

Darrell Robes Kipp, Dorothy Still Smoking, Paul Rosier, Richmond Clow, Bill Old Chief

2004 -- 2005 “Aki iaks” The History of Blackfeet Women

(One of those years was skipped and I didn’t attend the other.)

I attended the following years and have typed up notes that will appear in a “book” on www.lulu.com/prairiemary. They are also included in the book called “Blackfeet Time-lines,” which is also available on Lulu.com/prairiemary.

2006: “Innaihtsiiyi: Examining Blackfeet Concepts of Peace (and War)

Theodore Binnema, Hugh Dempsey, James Dempsey, Nicholas Vrooman, Narcisse Blood and Cynthia Chambers.

2007: “Aka” The Ancient Past

Hugh Dempsey, Eldon Yellowhorn, Wilena Old Person, Brian (Barney) Reeves

2008: “Sinaake” Images of the Blackfoot People

Dave Beck, Bill Farr, Darnell Rides at the Door, Valentina LaPier

2009: “Kiippippoistoyi” One Hundred Winters

Shawn Bailey, David R.M. Beck, Joe Gone, Louis S. Warren

2010: “Imitaiks” When the Spirit Moved with Us

Kaawa’pomaakaa Society, Martin Eagle Child, Eldon Yellowhorn, Tom Shawl

For much more information and background, go to http://www.saokioheritage.com

“Saokio is a Blackfeet term that describes the prairies as a space that is large, open and flat. At one time the Blackfeet called themselves the Saokio-tapi or the prairie people. On the prairies they used their creativity to change this wide open space into a unique place.

“Saokio Heritage was created to enhance the appreciation of the wealth of prairie peoples creativity. Our goal is to stimulate and preserve the history, language and traditional knowledge of prairie peoples.

“Saokio Heritage acknowledges the U.N. definition of traditional knowledge which encompasses cultural, technological, scientific, and artistic knowledge that originated from a connection to a specific territory or place which is transmitted from generation to generation within a group of people. “

Ironically, perhaps some of the most unaware Americans are some of the Native Americans themselves, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were forced into assimilation so harshly and thoroughly that they’ve felt that even learning the old languages was dangerous or “backward.” In contrast, the young ‘uns have become enthusiasts, hungry for information.

And then there are the bureaucrats, passing and sporadically enforcing legislation, trying to sort out claims and indignations and compensations against a great tide of re-assessments and realizations. Much of what seems highly theoretical turns out to have real-world consequences, sometimes unintended and unexpected. The tension between the abstract and concrete can be intense.

IMITAIKS: WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVED WITH US Part Two

Remember that the takeaway idea from this panel is not dogs but “THE RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY.” Often the audience laughed and nudged each other. Whenever I’ve spoken about dogs this has been true. It’s an automatic trigger like “commodity cheese.” So many dogs. A dog is an ongoing character in Bob Tailfeather’s cartoons in the Glacier Reporter. Often it’s the truth teller.

Darrell says we need the children because that is who takes us into the future. One of the things they do at Cuts Wood School is invent new words. They wanted a field trip to Pizza Hut in Cut Bank, so in order to convey that name, “Pizza hut,” they combined the name for rose hips (red berries), farina, and lodge. There has been a word for television for quite a while, but the word for computer hasn’t settled yet. New concepts as well as new objects demand new words.

The people move into the future as a tribe, revitalizing as it goes. They learn how to Google on their “Sarvisberries.” But they don’t discard the old ways. Yet when tourists come asking to see 19th century lodges and to meet elder ceremonialists, they don’t recognize what they see right in front of them: TODAY’s ceremonialists and homes. Darrell asks them, "Do you have a churn at your house?"

Those who really long to know more about the old days, should go to the website called: www.saokioheritage.com/ where much research is recorded. Rosalyn LaPier works hard on this as she earns her Ph.D. at the University of Montana. It can also be found by going to www.pieganinstitute.org

So the subject here is the value of relationship and reflection about what that relationship is and what it might mean. The first demonstration of this was that two speakers, who knew about historical traditonal life in this tribe had to come from Canada because the governmental structure up there was one that protected old ways and the remoteness meant that the language persisted. The other side of that was they had to cross the border, which meant they were made late.

SPEAKER: MARTIN EAGLE CHILD, Kainai Elder and Cultural Leader
Martin says he does NOT like to be late! His practice is ALWAYS to be on time. He is a handsome older man carrying a big old-fashioned briefcase containing his papers. His iron-gray hair is in braids, his earrings are the big round shell kind, and his Burt Lancaster wraparound smile is brilliant.

Martin is both a Kainai (Many Chiefs) Elder and a Catholic server of communion. He is one of those Blackfeet men who naturally includes the spiritual of any kind in his life. (Joe Eagle Child, who has been gone a long time, was part of the original Pipe Bundle circle that Bob Scriver and I sat in.) His talk went back and forth between English sentences and Blackfeet sentences, each explaining the other. He often comes to Cuts Wood School to interact with the kids and is used to giving the audience questions to answer. But he also travels to other places and was recently with the Eskimo -- whom he confirms don’t like to be called Eskimo. Say Inuit or whatever else they want to be called. Sled dogs! His eyes lit up at the thought of them!

His own dog’s name is Apache. Apache is very fond of Chinese food, but needs to have sweet and sour sauce on it. He says he’s very good to Apache and makes sure he gets Chinese food twice a week. (In Alberta a good share of the restaurants are Chinese.) He remarks about the story about the dog who tattled on the unfaithful wife, that Apache would protect him from any harm, but Apache always sides with his wife! Apache would not tell about her lover, but she has none anyway.

He remarks on the many Blackfeet names that include “dog.” Dog Child (Imitahpoka), Richard Little Dog (that’s who gave Bob and I our names), Dog That Curls Up, and White Dog. (More about White Dog later.)

In his young days Martin drank. Every time he did and woke up throbbing and bleary with a hangover, he would pray to the Great Spirit, “Oh, get me through this! Help me out here and I’ll never drink again!” But he did anyway. One night he had a dream. He was sitting on a rock and a dog came towards him, intending to bite him and tried to tell him something. It took Martin a while to understand that the dog wanted to punish him for constantly making a vow and then breaking it. He realized what he was doing, that he deserved a dog bite, and he quit.

He mentioned the epithet “dog face” which means something like unreliable and deceptive. Imituskee. (One of the first Blackfeet words I learned!) And he said that dogs howling are unwelcome because the feeling is that they are announcing the coming of death, that they can sense it.

He spoke of a huge Okan or sacred event in Brockett this summer where there were eighty lodges and nine pipe smokes, all the people coming together to share their holy ways. He says “Sun Dance” is a wrong interpretation. His own sons took part in piercing (then his voice got low, because that was against the law for a long time). Quickly he changed the subject to the name of Darrell’s dog: “Destroyer.” It’s a female. (The India-Indian goddess of destruction is named Shiva, which means the same thing.)

For five years Martin worked with the police as an elder to get them to understand the people they were protecting. They used dogs as helpers and he told about a boy who ran away and how the dogs found his frozen body. He told about them figuring out murders, both finding who was killed and who did the killing. He went off on a short diversion about a friend of his who recently had a run-in with an insufficiently civilized cop when the friend was taking his Bundle back home. The policeman told him that all of his native religion was crap. The friend said he thought the officials would be surprised to hear that he thought that. The policeman said they were crap, too. Martin did not think this policeman’s prospects were very good in the future. Dogs might bite him.

If a dog dies, one should not grieve too much but rather be grateful to the dog, because sometimes dogs will die in order to take the place of one of your family members who was supposed to die.

Wolves are closely related. When one goes on the war trail, one sings a wolf song. He sang it for us. He told about a man-dog song in which a mother dog and her pups come to a man in a dream and ask to come into the lodge by the fire because it is very cold. The words are like “have pity on me, pity on my poor pups. Then I will help you sometime.” And Marvin sang us that song with the help of a drum. The beat was a quick trembling one.

Last summer the Piegan kids had a camp at Buffalo Lake so they could look for buffalo stones, or iniskim. Martin was there. Then he told us about a very earnest man who really wanted to sing Indian, so he learned all the words to a song and sang them alone at a ceremony. The only thing he got wrong is that he accidentally changed the last line slightly so that he sang, “I make babies!” That won't be forgotten!


SPEAKER: DR. ELDON YELLOWHORN, PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHEOLOGY, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Eldon brought along a slide show to illustrate his talk and used his own dog as an example but it was hard to imagine his dog pulling a travois: it’s a Yorkie! Eldon is a big guy. He says the dog was intended to keep his wife company while he out-of-town, but the dog decided to be his -- though he has to be careful not to step on it. His name is “Omi,” the Japanese word for rain.

He told us the story of the Lost Boys who had been put out of the tribe because there wasn’t enough food because of drought. (Eldon points out that this probably happened repeatedly. He did not say it was the boys who were put out because the girls could make new tribal members later and because boys are resourceful enough that they might survive on their own.) The dogs pitied the boys and they prayed to the Moon (howled) asking her to speak to her husband the Sun and persuade him to let the waters return. This strategy worked and the drought ended. He repeated that people don’t usually like to hear a dog howling because it means spirits coming to take someone away.

Eldon told a real life story about when he was a boy. (He’s sort of young adult now -- everyone looks young to me.) They lived out in the country and used soft sage plants as wipers in the outhouse. One day he, his mother, and their dogs were gathering more sage. He was very small, maybe four years old, and he had to move his bowels. So his mother got him properly arranged. When his droppings hit the ground, the dogs darted in and ate them, which surprised him very much. Why was that? Then his mother told him the old story about why dogs can’t talk. This time the wife’s lover was a man, whom the husband killed, but this time the wife shoved shit into the dog’s mouth as his punishment and that’s what he barks to cough out. And yet he got a taste for the stuff and eats it when he can. (This is one of the duties of “pye dogs” or pariah dogs in Third World countries -- to clean away excrement and dead things.)

Then Eldon shifted to formal archeology. The skeletal and material records of the direct association between people and dogs goes back 14,000 years. If you Google “Blue Fish Cave” on your Sarvisberry, you’ll find many valuable references. A dog skeleton 12,000 years old was found there.

He explained to us “DNA archeology,” which means working in the lab to analyze both nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, which is actually more useful because it doesn’t change except by mutation. (The whole point of nuclear DNA is to recombine during sex to create a new individual.) The current thinking is that dogs departed from whatever common ancestor was there between themselves and other canids probably 135,000 years ago. This means that dogs became a separate species before they took up with humans. Previously, humans thought that they caused the split into dogs. (Humans think they cause everything. This is a Napi quality.) Dingos, when looked at through DNA, turn out to have developed out of the dogs who went to Australia with humans and then turned feral.

It is an open question whether humans domesticated dogs or dogs domesticated humans. The relationship long predates the change from nomads to farms and villages (about 10,000 years ago) and many dogs still live on the boundary of that change, going back and forth, in and out.

SPEAKER: TOM SHAWL, PROFESSOR OF ASSINIBOINE LANGUAGE, FORT BELKNAP COLLEGE

Tom Shawl is a third handsome man who looks young to me. His father was Assiniboine (Crazy Bear) and his mother was Blackfeet (Lone Walker). He came to Browning to get to know his mother’s family and ended up falling in love with a Blackfeet woman and marrying her. He said he had asked Darrell to provide a couple of husky bodyguards for him because through history the Assiniboine and Blackfeet clashed hard. His specialty was accumulating stories about a real person named “White Dog.”

A number of people were at this seminar because they love the 19th century romantic horse-people stories and this was right down their alley. Tom sketched out the history behind it. The Assiniboine were actually a segment of the Sioux nation, in sign talk named by drawing one’s finger across one’s throat: “Cut Throat,” also called the Nakota because their dialect drifted in a way that substituted N for the D we are used to in Dakota states.

Indian warfare before the horse and even before the Euros, was patchy and band-on-band rather than tribe-on-tribe. At any given time probably seventy-per-cent of the people were not at war while the other thirty per cent busied themselves with daily work. War was with shields, arrows and spears and as much a ceremony as a destruction. He spoke of Assiniboine shields, very big, so many of them that every man had one to stand behind, and Assiniboine armor, several layers of leather with sand quilted in between. Heavy but effective. Assiniboine were related to and allied with Cree, in a similar way to the Gros Ventre, who are the buffer group between Blackfeet and Assiniboine, usually allied to the Blackfeet. For a long time the bands had worked out their boundaries, as though they were jigsaw pieces fit together.

When the Euros hit the east coast, they pushed the jigsaw pieces so that they buckled and disengaged all across the continent. Then they added the de-stabilizers of horses, guns, metal goods, fabric -- all things that kindled greed and created gradients between haves and have-nots, all of which started wars. The tribal histories tell of fighting the Iroquois, but then less than a hundred years later they had been pushed so far West that they were fighting the Sushwap tribe in British Columbia. Their relations are sometimes called Stoneys. (Shawl counts Hugh Monroe among his ancestors, as do more than a few Blackfeet.) The Assiniboine were so widespread that they became middlemen who disseminated material goods. Their territory extended from Texas to the Bow River. They fought Comanche/Shoshone whose sign was a snake, a wiggling motion across with the finger, going one way for Comanche and the other way for Shoshone.

At one point there were seven Assiniboine warriors and three Cree who came to help the Blackfeet because their backs were up against the Rockies and they needed to learn new techniques. Two Assiniboines stand out in more recent history (1820’s and 1830’s). One was “Left Hand,” noted for his military genius, to the point where whites called him “the Wild Bonaparte.” These men could muster huge forces of warriors, from 500 to 1,000 men at once time. In 1836 a huge force of 3,000 gathered to attack the Blackfeet, but the leader, “White Dog,” for some reason changed his mind and decided not to attack after all. The reason is not recorded. It was not typical because White Dog was one of the few who had a categorical vendetta against all Blackfeet. He would ride to a ridge overlooking camp and scream sexual insults at the men. In their own language!

White Dog was a shape-shifter who, when he was cornered, became a huge grizzly. He could reconstitute himself and there are many stories about how he was killed and who killed him (one can start a bar fight over whose great-grandfather managed the deed). He had a sweat lodge that he would go into, stay in for days, and emerge with fresh scalps dripping from his belt, brandishing captured weapons, all Blackfeet. Evidently it was a teleportation “worm hole.”

(My notes say that “David-Rodnick” is the source of this next, but I don’t think that’s the right name.) In 1935 “Returning Healer” went to war alongside White Dog. Two parties set out but “Returning Healer” had a dream that though horses would be succesfully stolen, someone would die, and he didn’t want that to happen so he turned around and went back home. But some of his warriors still wanted to go on, so they joined White Dog. He had the same dream, but his reaction was, “So? The dead person might be me and I want to continue.”

He decided to make medicine and sent someone out to find a buffalo skull on the prairie. He took a bit of this and powdered it. His medicine caused the skull to become a living bull bison that snorted and pawed the earth. He had an enchanted buffalo robe and a war shield both of which could repel bullets and arrows. One man swore that he saw a bullet bounce off White Dog’s forehead, leaving him unharmed. He specialized in stealing women right out of their lodges and also horses so valuable that at night they were tied to the owner’s wrist or ankle. (Tom said once he himself had a car so new and beautiful that he considered doing that, tying his ankle to his car with a rope out the window. But that then he realized that the consequence would probably be that he was dragged out the window behind the car the thief was driving away!)

Probably it was the Blackfeet who killed White Dog in the end, though they don’t agree on the place. Mary Ground says it was here but Schultz identified a place farther away. Shawl did find one Blackfeet elder and then again an Assiniboine elder who was a nephew of White Dog’s, and they told the same story. The night before he died, White Dog rode around the village on his horse, singing his war song, which went this way: “My relations, it is a hard thing to lose someone but only the earth lasts forever.” The Blackfeet took this song and they still sing it as a victory song when they take the state basketball championship.

Shawl is trying to establish whether White Dog was with Custer on the Greasy Grass and says he was with the band that surrendered with Sitting Bull. But that’s about the facts.

The more interesting story is that one of the features of White Dog's exploits with women was that many of them fell in love with him. He taught them the magic spells that would reconstitute him if he were chopped into parts, which those who tried to kill him were intent on doing. But he was mean to these women and sometimes beat them up. So the last time he was chopped into pieces, the women came together with their parts of the ceremony to reassemble him and then got to talking. They became jealous and angry and some refused to perform their part of the ritual. Therefore, parts of White Dog remained severed and he stayed dead. In fact, some time later, he was dug up and his corpse was mostly together, but parts were missing. (Do you know the Egyptian story of Osiris?)

Unyiyee.

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