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

OKI, NAPIKWAN!

Local poet with Sid's little brother

Sid’s response to my rather relentless review of his “Smallpox” story is so interesting that I thought I would write him a response as a post.  If you want to join the conversation, feel welcome.  Sid’s words are in blue.

Who knows why we write the stories we do. As you suggest, my writing is limbic.

Maybe all poetry is “limbic.”  Joe LeDoux claims that “limbic” isn’t accurate anymore, nor is “three brains theory” in which the modern prefrontal cortex is supposed to be mediated by the limbic middle “emotional” brain so it can communicate with the primal “lizard” brain.  But as a rough term for thinking about poetry, it works.  It turns out there are likely a hundred different brain parts, all interacting, and therefore there are certainly a hundred reasons and ways for poetry and narrative, both voluntary and unconscious.

Indians always fascinated me, their plight, their lost glory, their subjugation, and how they have persevered so beautifully. I never know what others are going to think of my stories, so I send them out there and see what happens. 

My little homestead economy is full of time, all day every day, which is why I’m “productive”: it is a deliberate decision and has meant clearing out a lot of other things like income and social events.  Now that the cost of sending a paper manuscript is gone, many publishers and agents require “reading fees.”  Always an angle.  I still cannot afford to send writing even as email.  Anyway they won’t accept anything that doesn’t arrive through an agent.  And the "slush pile" is incredibly big but doesn't even take up space, so no one cares.

As it turned out with this story, two different publishers latched on to it simultaneously.

I’m glad for that but suspicious of their motives.  So many publishers are pandering to what they think is public interest that they seize and control writing.  I’ve had enviro essays frankly changed by the editor because she wanted it to agree with her opinion rather than my reality.  

Anyone writing anywhere is going to have to be a bit defensive, both against inflated praise and unjustified attacks.  But this is aggravated around the rez because there have been so many different stances over time and cultures.  Political consequences can be major.  Last night I was talking to someone (enrolled) about how Kipp and Cobell knew where all the "Baker Massacre" camps were -- not so much because they were army scouts, which they were, but because they were whisky peddlers and made regular rounds.  The soldiers were also drunk.  Baker was a notorious alcoholic.

In that novel I did explore drinking and some of the other tribulations encountered on the reservation. 

So far only Hugh Dempsey’s “Firewater” really confronts moonshine as an economic issue.  It supported the Glacier Park Hotels during Prohibition and saved many a ranch.  The rez ranchers who quietly ran illegal stills were known by locals who had no fondness for Fed anything.  The plutocrats who owned the resorts had no motive to discourage bootlegging.  It was an attractive asset, enhanced by the sense of privilege that's in secrecy. 
  

I’d like to see some enterprising journalist uncover the contemporary “alcohol flow” onto the rez, its sources and consequences.  It all comes from off-rez, which makes me think that maybe the tribe itself ought to go into the whisky or beer business, eliminating the gradient created by the rez boundary.  So far everyone has attributed Indian drunks to bad genomes and broken cultures, but maybe there are mercenary forces “enabling” the continuing addictions.  The profits at Town Pump alone must be huge and they are drained off the rez.   I see former drunks and even hard drug users who have kicked, dried out, found other lives.  It’s possible.  Is gambling any less addictive?  Is basketball?  Missionary do-goodery and moral scolding often triggers sin, defines it, makes it more attractive, esp. since in so much of the media it defines power and masculinity.  Always the cut crystal tumbler with the fine aged single malt.

Trouble is nothing new to me. Much of my writing, especially my New York Times horseracing journalism, has garnered its share of scorn. If one writes, and puts things out there, let the writer beware. 

The infamous "bute."

I admire what little I know about your crusade on behalf of race horses.  Most of the animal welfare national organizations that I know are corrupt money-making operations and, of course, there are people who will make horses suffer and die if it means money for them.  It’s good to know you are on-the-ground and speaking out with quite a bit of good results -- from the horse’s point of view.  Of course, they don’t write letters to the editor.  HSUS is relentless in its attacks on anyone who challenges them.  They have little to do with actual animals -- just atrocity stories that will raise money.

I still remember visiting you and Bob in his studio. My Dad, Rib, and I stopped by at my pleading. We entered the room and all the lights were off, and then you switched them on, and that was the scene in the story, and indeed, the boy was me.

Indians have always sheltered me from the white world I have been spit out of from time to time, and I will forever be grateful to the Blackfeet. Mary Mad Plume bestowed me with an iniskim for defending her children at a Two Medicine River party.  Billy Big Spring held me in a horseback trance for weeks, riding that the south fork of the Two Medicine where he was born. His skin was black.

Black skin down to his collar anyway.  Blackfeet are a sun-responding people who lived mostly outside and shirtless in the old days.  Kids lament that they are pale and I tell them that’s because they sit in front of the TV all day -- the light is turning them green!  Maybe a lot of addiction and diabetes is due to lack of Vitamin D.

Indigenous people and places have always been a refuge for the eccentric, the super-sensitive, the misfit, the hell-raiser, the bankrupt.  And many places like this rez have allowed outside people to at last find themselves and drop some of the energy-sapping defenses.  I include myself.  And yet the tribe itself has to find its own way and some intruders are Evil in their motives and their methods.

My strategy has been to widen out, go down deeper.  I listen to Blackfeet primarily -- both sides of the Canadian border -- but try to remain conscious of the other peoples like Cree/Metis, ex-patriot Sioux and Cherokee, wannabe and “born-here” whites, the people who bring in new skills, and increasingly South Americans.  I think about the Blackfeet in cities.  Most of all I try to see the underlying forces that have changed everyone over the last fifty years.  Like our friends, many have “gone on ahead”.  Their descendants are not the same and know it.  They ask you and I:  “What was my grandma like?”  Because often we knew her.  They no longer ask with Schultz "Why gone those times?" because they never knew them.

Martin Grelle painting

When I tell people away from here about things and stories I know, they often frankly disbelieve me.  They have seen Indians wearing feathers on horseback all their lives and are not about to give that up.  Nor are even the Blackfeet going to let Harry Barnes wear his captured cavalry hat.  

I’m eager to read Vollmann’s book about the Nez Perce flight, interpreted as a war, since I have been to the hills where Joseph finally surrendered and have seen the depressions left from digging foxholes for the women and children, walked among the brass surveyor’s pins that show where each warrior’s body lay.  The reality of that cold wind, dry grass, sagey dirt, distant border hills -- seems vital to me.  And now, dammit, I’ve talked myself into buying another book!  It’s not supposed to be out until summer.  "The Dying Grass."

The Bear Paw Mountains where Joseph and Looking Glass finally surrendered.

My Netherlands poet and philosopher friend keeps telling me that I’ve absorbed French Algerian post-modern philosophy.  Indigenous people, embattled against cultural hegemony, claiming our own reality, sitting around a campfire telling stories.  A Blackfeet friend cautions me that the really dangerous ones shouldn’t be told until the fire is nearly burned out and faces are dark.  That’s when you can see the stars.

100th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ROBERT MACFIE SCRIVER

Bob Scriver, Photo by Butch DeSmet about 1960.

ROBERT MACFIE SCRIVER was born on August 15, 1914, in Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackfeet Reservation where his father was a government licensed Indian agent.  Educated in the Browning schools, and then receiving a teaching degree from Dickinson State College in North Dakota, he focused tightly on music at Vandercook School of Music in Chicago and quickly became famous for the Browning school system bands, the Blackfeet Indian Band, local jazz and club bands, and the Malta school system bands.  He said that even junior high students could be fine players once they learned to play one note in tune with the rest of the orchestra, a harder thing to do than some expect.

Jeanette Couette Scriver Chase, Bob's second wife (about 2005)

After service in the Army Air Force Band assigned to Edmonton and Alaska, he left teaching and started a taxidermy business in Browning, accurately predicting that a stream of big game hunters would be traveling the new Al-Can highway to Alaska.  The Scriver Studio was the farthest north taxidermy business on the US side of the highway.  His second wife, Jeanette, was a major participant in his work through the Fifties.

The next stage of that career was the collection and mounting of one example of each of the Montana big game species, presented in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife which was a neighbor of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning.  The full-mounts were joined by a room of miniature inch-to-a-foot dioramas of each species in its habitat.  This building now houses the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  The full-mounts have been dispersed but the miniature dioramas are in storage in Helena.

Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

The museum was meant to be a resource for artists who needed to study the animals and it did attract major figures, mostly illustrators:  Ralph Crosby Smith, John Clymer, Robert Kuhn, and Warren Baumgartner were friends and teachers.  The sculpture began modestly enough as small portraits of the animals, often designed to be useful, like ashtrays or lamps.  In the late Fifties the sculpture came to maturity in portraits of actual animals and people as well as groups.  By the early Sixties the more serious art was being cast in bronze and Scriver built his own foundry, the Bighorn Foundry, which guaranteed high quality casting with the classic Roman Block form of lost wax casting.  

Though his reputation and value grew quickly, he never left Browning and did not build the palatial studio and grounds that some recently successful cowboy artists have enjoyed.  Instead he bought a small ranch on Two Medicine River and later a ranch on Flatiron Creek west of Browning.  In the early years of his married life before WWII, he had built a little cabin near St. Mary’s, living in a tipi with his first wife, Alice Prestmo Scriver Skogen, and their newborn daughter, Margaret, while building.  The total cost of that cabin was $350, mostly for a big picture window on the lake side.

The Badger Tipi

In the Sixties, when a few old Buffalo people were still living, he and Mary Strachan Scriver (third wife) became Bundle Keepers and continued the protocols until a great scandal when he sold the family artifact collection to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton.  He did not sell the Thunder Pipe Bundle that he guarded and kept active.  In fact, according to Blackfeet ways (which does not recognize governmentally legal marriage and divorce) I am technically the remaining keeper of both the Long Time Thunder Pipe Bundle transferred to us by Richard Little Dog, as well as the Badger Tipi and its bundle.  No one knows where they actually are.

At his death in 1999 his estate was quickly dispersed by his fourth wife, Lorraine Caldwell Scriver.  The bulk of the collection and all his papers went to the Montana Historical Society.  Today the sculptures of Blackfeet are protected and displayed in Fort Benton at the reconstructed fort.  His ranch on Flatiron Creek was converted to a nature reserve jointly owned by the Blackfeet Tribe and Nature Conservancy, an arrangement negotiated by Eloise Cobell.  Lorraine returned to her hometown of Vancouver, B.C. where she died in 2003.  Her ashes were dispersed in the Pacific Ocean.  The bulk of Bob's wealth disappeared mysteriously.

Alice, the first wife, is buried in the grave of the oldest daughter in Anacortes.  Bob was sometimes accused of being “bad seed,” but as it turned out it was Alice who was carrying a genetic vulnerability to cancer which killed her, her mother, and both her children by Bob.  I don’t know about her children from later marriages.  Bob’s death at 85 was probably due to heart and lung problems, partly from the materials he handled. 

Now that it’s a hundred years since Bob Scriver was born, it’s interesting to try to understand what we were thinking in the Sixties, the key years when his reputation as an outstanding sculptor of Western subjects was being formed.  Fame and fortune are something like the drive in a dog to chase a car, trying to catch it without understanding what to do with it once you’ve got it.  

While Bob’s collateral relatives from Canada were here, I rustled up the DVD that the lawyers made of Bob talking about himself when he was eighty.  It’s a 30 minute disc that includes both Bob and some “mood” images of the Blackfeet sculptures included in the book “No More Buffalo,” which Bob paid to have printed.  You can find it on the used book markets on the Internet.

Bob's cousin, watching the DVD, asked whether he was a drunk.  He’d had a stroke and he has trouble with his teeth, but also he has adopted a defiant, boasting, false humility about his place in history.  Actually, I agree with him.  His claim is based on being in a certain place (the Blackfeet rez) at a particular time (the booming popularity of Western art) and taking advantage of it with the skills and drive he had developed since his earliest years.  He shows the tiny figures he made as a first grader, developed into his basic skills by the time he was in high school.  He puts considerable force and eloquence into explaining why he took the detour into music, describing “foul” years.  Actually, they were considered quite brilliant at the time, with his school bands winning prizes and praise.

Bob Scriver and the Rodeo Cowboys Association monument

He wanted to be a star.  Not a high school band conductor but first chair in a major orchestra.  Of course, that would have meant leaving Browning.  Much of the guidance and energy in his life came from his mother who was determined that Robert would be outstanding but also that he would NEVER leave her.  His father had no use for art, but understood brass bands from his own years with a cadet band in rural Quebec.  His father’s idea of a proper man was Bob’s older brother, Harold, who ran the Browning Merc when his father was too old but still wasn’t trusted with the key to the rolltop manager’s desk.  

Both parents had made a huge leap -- across the continent -- away from their own families.  They had not gotten rich nor become famous, except that Thad’s brother had indeed become enormously rich, but by chance.  He owned land that turned out to be in the center of Minneapolis.  No other Scriver, MacFie, Creller, or Hawley became rich or famous, but Wessie’s mother, maiden name Creller, had a cousin who became “Lady Kemp” (her husband owned a machinery business that was of service to the crown) which gave them all that confounded Brit Gentry complex that the BBC has been wrestling with in series after series.

Nothing short of a knighthood would have satisfied Bob’s mother.  This is part of the reason he focused his efforts on Alberta instead of the American SW where the other cowboy artists were getting rich.  Also, he was as interested in animals as people (also characteristic of his mother) so that the Connecticut illustrators and the Society of Animal Artists were personal friends.  Those artists didn’t get pulled into the “cowboy” obsession until the demand began to boom and more work was needed.  Also at that point, the “other” Western artists, including those who were interested in Indians (Joseph Sharp, Winold Reiss, Hart Schultz, Charlie Beil, John Clarke) and subsidized to visit Glacier National Park by the advertising campaigns of the Great Northern, began to sell big.  Bob knew many of them personally, learned from them.  The Carberry family was friends with both the Scrivers and the arts community of the park.  Their collection of Blackfeet artifacts is in the Field Museum in Chicago.

When Bob went to Chicago to study at the Vandercook School of Music, he haunted the Field Museum and connected with Leon Walters, a major diorama taxidermist, who taught him many things as well as causing him to take a serious scientific approach to animal preservation.  Also at the Field Museum there was a room called the Hall of Man that contained a series of life-sized portraits of what were then considered “races,” each individual carefully portrayed.    Malvina Hoffman had been subsidized to undertake this massive project as an aspect of anthropology.  This whole concept has since been attacked as a source of racism and hatred.  The bronzes have been put into storage except for the judicious use of a few with other exhibits.  But for Bob, Malvina was his Muse Mother.

Malvina Hoffman's "Hall of Man" at the Field Museum

Because of Bob’s devotion to these bronzes, both the geography dimension and the skill of the work, we went to see Malvina Hoffman and also became friends with Joy Buba, her friend.  The two women proposed him for the National Sculpture Society.  Warren Baumgartner, another illustrator friend, proposed him for the National Academy of Design, and these were key connections to the certifiers of value in realistic art.  Because I had been a theatre student and accustomed to read The New York Times, which I purchased in Great Falls at Val’s Cigar Store, I prompted Bob to send his work to the major Manhattan shows of realistic sculpture, where they were accepted.  The scrapbook of these honors was reassuring to novice art buyers.  

But his father always demanded “Are you making any money, Robert?”  He didn’t until the Calgary Stampede, backed by Colonel Harvie who had made a fortune in the equivalent to a Bakken strike between Calgary and Banff, bought the entire set of rodeo bronzes.  When Bob divorced me in 1970, he had just finished those bronzes.  The sale was completed just after I was gone.  I don’t know what his dad said then, but I suspect he found some way to undercut his son’s pride.  His mother was delighted and told all her friends.  This was her audience, not the art world, which she didn’t grasp anyway -- not the in-state promotions nor the big Manhattan scene.  None of my praise meant anything because we had agreed from the beginning to merge egos -- I’d just be praising myself.

Contemporary art writing is often contemptuous, mocking, and intent on finding the cracks in the golden bowl of fame and fortune.  It’s always easy to do, since anyone with a hard drive to achieve is going to expose an underside and trampled bodies love to rise up to make accusations.  That's just realistic.  So why do it?  If family doesn’t get it, if the professional world is oblivious, if the money means nothing in terms of improving the quality of one’s life, if friends turn to competitors, if all anyone what to know is "how much is it worth?" -- what’s the point?

Bob and Mary Scriver, 1965

It’s the doing of it.  “Art is the expression of the relationship between a person and the universe.”  I think I’ll change that definition again.  I think it should be “art is the expression of the universe through a person.”

IT WENT SWIMMINGLY

Juniper Old Person (middle)

We were nearly out of cat food, so off I went to the discount store in Cut Bank where it’s only fifty cents a can, except that they had raised the price to sixty-nine cents.  So I went over to Albertsons and found their catfood was fifty cents a can, though they are not a discount store.  I once overheard the manager explain to some regional suit that the key to sales next to a rez is low prices, and he meant it.  Esp. now that the tribe has its own store.  So I stocked up.

The checker was a very big Blackfeet with a vaguely familiar face, so I asked and he turned out to be the great-grandson of Juniper Old Person, a major figure who was Earl Old Person’s father.  When this clerk was a small boy, he used to come to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife with Earl when Earl came on business to confer with Bob.  

He told me about how he could barely see over the edge of the stone waterfall pool at the museum entrance and how fascinated he was by the trout.  They were really hatchery trout who ate trout chow, but it was always fun to find dead flies along the windowsills and throw them in so the fish would rise to snatch them.  One tourist lady held onto her fly too long and a trout rose out of the water to grab the end of her fingers.  She discovered trout have teeth and screamed.  By August the fishes were tired of all foods and began to eat each other.  By September there was only one great big fish, burping.  The checker said he remembered it well, that big satisfied fish.  We could have fried it up for supper, but Bob was allergic to fish.

illustration from "The Sword in the Stone"

When I got home, I took a nap because these days driving always makes me sleepy and because old ladies should nap in the afternoon.  This nap was lovely because there’s a cold front coming through so the temp is down to seventy and one doesn’t mind the smoke scrim so much when its cool.  I had been reading “The Sword in the Stone” which somehow mixed in dreams with memories of summer in the Sixties when Bob’s grandson Lane was six and I would have called him “Wart” if I’d had this book then.  Instead I read him the book about “Stuart Little” by E.B. White.  And Bob called him “Jimmy” which was the name of his son when he used to keep him for the summer, when he was six.

Bob Scriver and Eegy

It was the summer that Lane helped with everything, fearlessly, walking right under the horse’s bellies to grease their hooves -- they didn’t kick him though he must have tickled -- helping to shoot a gopher every morning to feed to the eagle.  The Old Person grocery checker said he used to bring gophers for Bob to store in the freezer for winter.  The boy loved the eagle and never teased her, though others did.  If we caught those others, we threatened to throw them into the cage with the screaming bird and made as if to open the door while we held them by the neck.  We were never PC.  We weren’t even always sensible.

Sucker

“The Sword In the Stone” is not a sensible book.  It is as much Monty Python as it is Camelot.  It is the ancestor of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.  I just read the part of the "S in the S" where Merlyn and Wart became fish in the moat of the castle and Wart had to learn how to swim all over again with totally different surroundings and body.  (Comparative consciousness!)  I remembered how we all went swimming in the reservation creeks and how there were always suckers in the bottom -- great big dark fish who moved around in schools, staying in the deeper pockets of water and tasting the bottom with their round mouths.  Once we took a very rich lady with us.  She had no suit to wear but said no matter, she’d swim in her underwear.  She had not quite realized that the water would turn her underwear transparent and we would all know that she was not really a redhead by birth.  We tried to be polite and not look.

Another time in much faster, colder water, we were sliding over a rock ledge into a truly deep and wide pool that hardly slowed the current.  I went over it sideways and slid under the water, forgetting how to swim which I didn’t do well anyway.  I came up, gasped, went down, came up, gasped and went down.  Finally when I was up Bob grabbed me by the hair and asked,  “Are you doing that on purpose?”  “NO.”  So he towed me over to the side.

Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

I suppose that even grownups felt a little bit enchanted when they went into the museum where the lights were dim and soft music played.  None of the animals were behind glass and they were all pretty convincingly mounted, esp. when the pets were in there playing:  badgers and bobcats and the occasional fox.  The bobcat was particularly fond of sleeping on the moose’s head where the horns made a nice nest.  Of course, they were all sub-adult, because we only fed them and slept with them and let them do what they pleased because we were pretty much sub-adult ourselves.  In the fall they left.  Mostly people killed them.  They would come back to tell us they did, looking closely to see how we reacted.  We were stony.  Most people are adults.  But they don’t come to their senses, as one would expect.  Instead they leave them.

Not that we had any idea what we were doing.  We just grabbed life, tried as hard as we could and hoped we wouldn’t kill anyone we cared about.  If we had to duck the law, we did, even though Bob WAS the law -- at least City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace.  Some youngsters explored the building after Bob had died and, prying around in the corners, found a false wall and behind it a whole bevy of mounted birds.  They were the ones that the officious Federal Game Warden had said were illegal enough to justify padlocking the museum and take Bob off to prison.  He was going blind at the time. (1962)  They had been collected by kids in a sudden spring cold snap that left too early migrating songbirds stiff on the ground.  Bob paid a quarter each.

Christophermartinphotography.com

Like T.H. White’s attempt to tame a hawk, we made a lot of brutal mistakes, mostly hurting ourselves but sometimes the animals.  There was darkness hidden in the famously vast landscapes under endlessly glowing sky.  Love braided with hate but rarely indifference.  Gradually the skills accrued in our muscles more than in our brains.

The Blackfeet watched all this, some of them angry that we weren’t proper adults who would make them famous so everyone could be rich.  Some of them wistful because they wanted to be included -- some of them were.  Some were far too preoccupied by survival to pay much attention.  Some counted coup whenever they got the chance.  Some were secret friends.  Not everyone was Blackfeet, nor white neither.  Outsiders never get it.  It is so much more complex than they think.

Ariel DeSmet

I left in 1973 which is slightly more than forty years ago.  Bob wasn’t Merlyn and I wasn’t Wart or Kay.  Lane, the grandson, grew up to be a sensible man of great stability with a son who is a world-class fencing champion.  (Ariel DeSmet)  But there was a fish in my heart, one with teeth rather than a sucker-mouth, and I swam back, upstream against the current.  I was doing it on purpose.  I was born a redhead.  I still might drown.

POPCORN AND MOTHS

The following is from Paul Wheeler, who grew up along the High-Line and in Great Falls, but now lives near Bonners Ferry, ID.  This interested me, not just because memoir is always interesting, but also because it is a reminder how how “survival class” families manage to keep eating by inventing small entrepreneurial enterprises at the interstices of the “big business” or “high pay wages” that most people aim for these days.  This is about a string of popcorn wagons and dispensing machines.

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I don’t know how much I can remember. I must have been pretty young. The only stepping stone I have is the earthquake that formed Quake Lake for a time reference I can date at Aug. ‘59, meaning I was only three. I don’t know how long they’d had the concessions prior to that, but my sense is at least a few years because of the numbers of stored empty pop bottles in the house and various sheds about the place. I grew up climbing sticky bottle mountain.

Seems like it was almost a part time family operation. My mom, dad and a teen gal named Vickie were the main operators, but Uncle Glen and Aunt Joyce apparently got pressed into service from time to time as well. Even my mom’s sister Elsbeth has popcorn wagon memories.

The main base of operations seemed to be an old garage/shop right behind the old fish hatchery in Giant Springs. That’s where the popcorn wagon lived when not in use, along with a couple various soda pop dispensers. Heh, I think I was most fond of that shop because it was right next to an old backwater slough that was chock full of big carp I liked to throw rocks at. They’d roll out weekends to work functions between Giant Springs and Glacier. Besides popcorn and soda, there must have been hot dogs. Heh, I didn’t eat a hot dog until I was well into my 40’s because my mother’s dire warnings about what the things were made of.

In addition to the wagon, there was a route of coin operated popcorn dispensers scattered all over the country with the big glass dome cover. You’d stick your nickel in grab a bag and stick it under the dispenser for filling. The machines didn’t actually make the corn, just kept it hot, so they needed constant filling. There’s probably a few still in a shed behind the old mercantile in E. Glacier.

When I was looking into them a few years ago, I found that people collect and restore the things and you can even buy new precut labels for them.

I have no direct memory of it, but apparently the popcorn wagon blew up and burnt. I think it was either my mom or aunt that got burned in the accident, but it must not have been really serious. A few years ago Uncle Glen mentioned that Aunt Joyce had run across a current article in the paper about the popcorn fire, but by the time word got to me, she wasn’t able to recall where or when she’d seen it. I did archival searches through the GF Tribune without success.

That must have been the end of the popcorn empire. I think my mom was thankful in a way because her memories mostly surround tripping over me in the narrow confines.

I’m pretty sure that I told you about my mother’s method for chasing off my nightmares at that age, where all those stored pop bottles in my bedroom played a part. I wrote it down and kept it after my mom fell off her chair laughing about that and putting our two memories together all these years later.

I woke terrified one night to fluttering ghosts trying to get up my nose and in my ears. My mom came into the room with a broom and opened the window and swept all my ghosts into the night, yelling at the beasts to NEVER come back and promptly slamming the window. She was my hero!

I used the same method successfully with my own children when they had the occasional bad dream and have shared the technique with lots of other parents over the years.

When my mom was here for Christmas several years ago, I was relating to her how I'd spread her method far and wide...She looked at me and couldn't believe that I remembered the story since I was not much more than two years old, although it seems that I didn't have all the information.

My dad used to run a popcorn and soda concession at a national park on weekends and there were always empty bottles stored in odd places around the house. It seems that they were the perfect breeding ground for a large variety of moth that hatch out at night en-mass.

My mother's tale is far different from the time of my remembering... She heard my screaming, walked into my room to be confronted with huge moths she initially thought were bats. Screaming in horror she grabbed a nearby broom and frantically beat the livin' heck out of the moths and flailed the rest out the window.

She said she would have stayed around to comfort me, but she had to go calm herself down with a bottle of adult beverage.

Apparently, folks had to do without their popcorn fix for the next couple weekends, 'cause dad was busy building a new shed to house the empty bottles in.

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I met Paul Wheeler in the Sixties when he was a small boy and brought money into the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife where I was the receptionist.  I’d convert his dollar bills to change so he could operate the mounted rattlesnake in a glass case that had an aquarium aerator in its tail so it would rattle.  The money slot was originally to cut down on uses so the mechanism wouldn’t wear out too quickly, but then it turned out to be a pretty good little money maker.  The last time I saw it, the machine was in the storage warehouse of the Montana Historical Society.  Over the years there were experts among the many visitors who informed us that it was NOT a Montana rattler but a Texas rattler and that its eyes were in sideways.  No one but the experts ever noticed because they only looked at the tail end.

The problem with a “homegrown” museum like the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife is that it’s sensational stuff that brings in the customers, but credibility is lost if the place fills up with albino skunks and two-headed calves.  Bob’s purpose was in part to provide excellent models for artists who portray animals.  But the real kernel of the museum was a mount of a huge grizzly bear rearing up with claws out.  The tourists loved to pose in front of it as though being attacked.  Paul and many others vividly recall the rattlesnake and the grizzly bear -- even have nightmares about it!

WHAT IS AN ACCREDITED MUSEUM?

When I was serving the Saskatoon Unitarian Congregation, one of the families went on a holiday trip to the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and came back raving.  “It is a temple to Life itself!” they declared, and when I finally got there myself, I saw that they were right.  www.tyrrellmuseum.com/    Other Canadian museums are just as grand and inspiring.  The secret is that most of the “object focused” earlier collections had the good stuff, so the Canadians had to rely on ingenious presentation.  Of course, at Drumheller the fossils wash out of the ground after every rainstorm.  But “Head-Smashed-In” buffalo jump required careful thought.  Check it out here:  www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137 

I’m not naive about museums.  I grew up in a museum-worshipping family and traveled across the US and Canada, stopping at every roadside attraction, so that I saw many a basement or garage collection as well as the great institutions of the cities, esp. the ones in Chicago where I went to university.  One of my early favs was the case of rocks at the Portland Children’s Museum which looked like nothing until the room lights were off and the black light in the case was on -- then they were spectacular.

This NPR story is about a museum in the Blue Ridge mountains and is worth opening just for the photo, but the radio story is there as well.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135442423/in-shuttered-museum-appalachian-history-boxed-up  The link description tells the story.  Everything packed in boxes.  People wanting their family history returned to them.  No room.  No money.  And as one lady said tartly, “It doesn’t rhyme with football.”

That story is being repeated all over many countries as the notion of what a museum “is” gets reappraised.  And the museums themselves are appraised as well.  www.aam-us.org/   There are 6 accredited museums in Montana:  the C.M. Russell Museum, the Montana Historical Society Museum, the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, the Missoula Art Museum, the Museum of the Rockies, and the Western Heritage Center in Billings.  Maybe your fav is not on the list.  What would it mean?  Only 4.5 % of the 17,500 US museums are accredited.  

The CM Russell Museum spokeswoman said the inspectors checked “lighting, heating and air conditioning, sound systems and everything from the way the collection looks, and things such as the temperature pieces are kept.”  I expect they also looked at the endowment.  I do not know whether they investigated the quality of curation, security, inventory control, education programs and the like, but I would guess they did.

The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife personally constructed by Bob Scriver would never have qualified.  It had no fire suppression system, though it was built of old wood from a dis-assembled warehouse.  I once overheard a little gaggle of college girls dis-assembling the captions.  They didn’t knock the content, but they thought that typing words on cards with an old primary school typewriter and thumbtacking them onto homemade stands was too, too primitive.  They deplored the fact that the animals weren’t under glass, and a lot of other stuff.  I put my fingers in my ears.  One of the things they found truly shocking was an old sofa where I snuck in for naps.  After all, I was there at 6AM sweeping the floor and polishing the glass and couldn’t lock up until the last tourists were through petting the moose.  There was also a matched pair of asymmetrical coral-colored boudoir chairs left behind by Bob’s second wife.  The sapphire velveteen drapes behind the bronzes were an early Christmas gift from myself.  This was a very "personal" place.

When the museum was dispersed after Bob’s death, the bronzes of Blackfeet went north to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton because they had already bought the legendary “million dollar” Scriver collection of Blackfeet artifacts.  But they had to leave everything in storage for lack of space.  Thanks to the tar sands income, they are now able to rebuild, as you can see at http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/  But the bronzes are scheduled to be transferred to the Fort Benton, Montana, museum, which is developing quickly and with standards that will probably qualify them for accreditation soon.

We tend to think of museums as fusty, unchanging repositories of inscrutable objects, which becomes a problem in two ways.  One is when changing times and knowledge make the previous incarnation of business and presentation so out of sync that it becomes irrelevant, even though its whole purpose may be the preservation of the past, and the other is when it comes time to raise money for the funds to renew the museum.  The Montana legislature has just approved authority to borrow to build a new Montana Historical Society Museum.  There will be a struggle between those whose prestige rests on the status quo and those who will want to proceed on a new paradigm of presentation.

Bob Scriver’s entire estate was given to the Montana Historical Society, though the funds that had been included to provide for building had mysteriously evaporated.  The C.M. Russell Museum, somehow snubbed in what started out to be a partnership, is now busily stripping all references to Bob Scriver.  I watch all this from the sidelines, legally defined as having no “standing” to advise and without any funds or clout to contribute.  What I have is knowledge.

So what I commend to the Powers-That-Be is that though they are nearly overwhelmed with objects, including Bob’s collections along with the many beloved possessions of other Montanans around the state, is that they take a Canadian approach -- that is, emphasis on curation.  I don’t mean just “how much is it worth” which is the focus of many people in our greed-based world, but WHY is it valuable, what does it mean, what can we learn from it?  These are the values that made the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife so beloved.  

The Blackfeet artifacts were never exhibited there so as not to compete with the Museum of the Plains Indian next door.  You can buy a book that includes everything:  “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” if one turns up -- maybe on eBay or Abebooks or Alibris.  Amazon sometimes.  And you can buy my account of Bob’s life, “Bronze Inside and Out” which includes the story of the creation of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and how the pet bobcat napped in the horns of the mounted moose, which is NOT an accredited practice.