WAYS TO WRITE ABOUT PALOOKAVILLE

Some people are always saying that the youngsters need “grammar.”  That’s not really what they mean -- they are talking about usage, the local conventions of expression that don’t conform to mainstream American/English (which doesn’t conform to mainstream European English).  In trying to enforce usage, they end up killing all the energy, color and motivation of writing.  So, by example, I’m writing here ways to look at writing by CONTENT. 

Just before spring green-up

GEOGRAPHICAL

The Blackfeet reservation is about the same size as the Serengeti but it is on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains with the Canadian border also serving as the northern rez border.  Because it is a slope, there is a long incline of land that is foothills and escarpments at the west end and flat wheat fields with a few badlands on the east end.  This means that the difference in altitude and kinds of soil has sorted out the members of the tribe into different kinds of folks, with the old timey people choosing their place up high where there is still game and the grizzlies still prowl, while the modern and prosperous folks settled on the flat land where a person can raise grain and it's close enough to off-rez communities to get jobs there.

A road runs from Heart Butte to Browning.  Some call it “the inside road.”  A branch goes off towards the mountains to East Glacier and it is at that junction you will find Palookaville, except that it’s not there.  There were never any buildings but temporary tents.  It is essentially a campground.

HISTORICAL

The Blackfeet were fortunate in that their reservation was on the land they had occupied for a long time -- at least centuries and some say millennia -- but big as it is (fifty miles on a side) it is still only a scrap of the lands the Blackfeet once roamed.  In the early days it was clear to even those who tried to make farming peasants out of these tribal nomads that they were better suited to a pastoral life, that is, herding animals.  The Blackfeet themselves preferred sheep to cattle, maybe because sheep can be worked with dogs rather than horses.  The relationship between Blackfeet and dogs has always been interwoven.  

WWI had a huge need for wool uniforms, so there was an excellent market.  The Conrad brothers, early entrepreneurs, at first ran sheep close to Heart Butte, and, of course, they had to be sheared.  The place where the shearers came with tents to camp while they worked the sheep was called Palookaville because a palooka is a guy who shears sheep.  It’s hard work, harder than harvesting wheat which is also done similarly with moving custom cutters, because the sheep have to be manhandled and that can wreck backs.

The Navajo had taken to sheep on their high plateau, and added value to the raw wool by  setting up looms under the junipers in their dry windless country to weave blankets to use and sell in the way that Blackfeet had always treated bison robes.  The latter never tried weaving: their one-room cabins had no space for a loom and the outdoors in this part of the world is full of extreme weather.  

Considered one of the ten best memoirs of the West

LITERARY

Ivan Doig, whose parents contracted to herd sheep in various places, has written about the event that changed his life.  His mother had died when he was very young so he was raised by his father and grandmother.  In “This House of Sky” he and his father had a herd of sheep north of Birch Creek, not too far from the cliffs on the north edge of the valley which in the old days were used as piskuns, buffalo jumps, meant to kill the animals.  A major thunderstorm arose and the sheep panicked, heading straight for those high steep drop-offs.  

Doig describes vividly the desperation of running to head off these stupid animals and trying to steer them into brush where they’d have some shelter.  He fell on ground quickly turned to sticky gumbo in the heavy rain, and though they did succeed in saving the animals, he vowed while lying there on his face that he would never herd sheep again.  He quit, went back to the white ranching community, and cut hay the rest of the summer.  In fall he started school at Northwestern University, majoring in journalism.

Mary and Bob Scriver

PERSONAL

Bob Scriver’s father came to the Blackfeet Reservation in 1903 and hired on as a clerk at the Sherburne Mercantile.  He was a small man but very nimble and once won a race with a horse!  The secret was that the distance was short and it took a while for a big animal to build up momentum, but Thad was already on his way.  Within the decade he had founded the Browning Mercantile across the Town Square from the Sherburne Mercantile, with old Mr. Sherburne’s support and blessing.  (J.L. Sherburne was a different story.)  Bob was born in 1914.  I arrived to teach English in 1961 and soon attached to him.

The rez unfolded to me as I rode shotgun in the old Chevy pickup, sometimes on two-track ranch roads, sometimes on the as-yet-unpaved market roads, and sometimes just out across the prairie.  We went out to Heart Butte on some errand I don’t remember.  I had students from there, including someone with the family name of the character in the recent movie, “Jimmy P.” -- that is, “Everybody Talks About Him.”  School buses had a hard time getting out to that part of the rez because of the roads, so most kids came in to live at the boarding school for the school year.  They were shy and didn’t like it, so they had to be more or less caught and forced.  The boarding school itself was benign compared to some of the older mission and government schools.

Heart Butte was very small in those days, just a handful of cabins, on the hillside a little log church with emerald doors, and a log “roundhouse” built as an octagon where dances and other events could be held.  The elementary school was small but had tall windows because the electricity was undependable.  The post office and general store were combined, both run out of the home of Mrs. Thompson, a white woman with a Blackfeet husband, whose son became an educated leader.

We stopped at Palookaville to look around in case someone had dropped an artifact and just to enjoy the place.  We looked at the leaning remnants of the corrals, which were still occasionally used for something -- maybe catching horses.  I only drove out that road clear to East Glacier once, many years later and by myself in my little pickup.  Just exploring, I didn’t realize how much the road had washed out until it was nearly gone and I could barely keep from high-centering or being pitched into the creek that ran alongside.  Aspen groves and big brush patches of chokecherry, plus rough terrain, meant that I couldn’t travel parallel.  I never went that way again.

Dawson Falls

SCENIC

The elevation along the inside road is just about at the most usual edge of spring and fall snowfalls, maybe 4,000 feet, with a lot of brightly glittering aspen in among the twisty dark bull pines that are tough enough to endure wind, like evergreens along a coast.  In the fall when the aspens turn to gold coins, the color is spectacular, but only the berry bushes -- both chokecherry and sarvisberry -- will show red.  The “inside road” is paved now but I don’t think the branch to East Glacier at Palookaville has been.  Still, many more people live out that way now and they would demand that the road be better maintained.  Cell phones might or might not work.

Keep an eye out for grizzlies who will be searching for berries dried onto the bushes or anything relatively high calorie like fat grubs.  There are unlikely to be elk or even deer because people out this way are likely to be unemployed and hungry.  In fact, if you hear shooting, move on.

MELODRAMA (fiction)

Usually my sheep-shearing crews were a peaceful bunch, too tired to do much but work and sleep.  But this year I had two younger men, Basques, working for me.  They were high energy, very productive, but they were emotional and competitive, so they got into arguments.  Worse, they were knife-men.  Words went to fists went to the drawing of knives and even some slashing of air.  So far there were no wounds, but I kept my .357 magnum pistol beside me even as I slept, just in case.  I had bought it for bears, but a person does what they must.

The emergency that arrived in the night was not from the men.  The dogs were going wild, the sheep were throwing themselves against the fence so that its creaking mixed with their desperate bleating, and I knew it was a bear, probably a grizzly.  We were all up, but the confusion was too great to understand what to do.  Shadows and movement swirled everywhere.  

I ran to the pickup and put on the headlights.  Yup.  A griz, standing, sweeping its great claws in arcs.   The dogs were darting in and out.  I cursed myself for not keeping the bear spray right with me -- I knew it was in the pickup, but where?  Glove box?  Under the seat?  I would have to use the gun, though it would mean a lot of trouble from game wardens.

Before I could get a focus, two big shadows converged on the bear, one from each side, their knives flashing.  The bear couldn't shrug them off, couldn't decide which way to swivel, and soon it was too late.  One brother cut the carotid artery under the bear's ear and the other reached around to get at its heart.  It was almost like a dance, as though they had practiced.  The bear dropped on its face and the brothers walked right up on top of it, as though it were already a rug.  Now they WERE dancing, awkwardly and hanging onto each other.  I could not resist shooting in the air in order to join the celebration.  Damn the authorities.

"SWEETGRASS" -- The Movie

"The Sheepherder" by Bob Scriver


“Sweetgrass,” is a simple but profound “documentary” -- more like visual poetry really. A record of the last high country summer trailing of more than a thousand sheep near Big Timber which is near Yellowstone. This movie is dead center on the cross-hairs of two of my high values: on the one hand, abstract near-literary analysis and on the other hand raw sensory experience. Watch this DVD twice, first with the commentary off. Watch it like music: just letting it come but watching for the themes and the chords. Then after a while or on another occasion, watch it with the commentary to see what the makers saw. This is NOT like the usual breathless witlessness of young people from back east who gasp, “How beautiful!” “How spiritual! How privileged I am to be here!” and completely miss the danger, the inhumanness, the desperate edge.

Many of us have the iconic world of the sheepherder in our minds as a marker for freedom and fiefdom alone with our dogs where we can be heroes, as though a sheep (or bear) cares. And some see it in a jokey way as “Brokeback Mountain” where men too good for sheep at least have each other.

I’m going to include some jargony high-concept quotes from the web here, because it will have meaning for some, but what it boils down to is an attempt to get at the actual experience of life, to go deeper, reach the core through all the fancy theory that has bogged us down in the last decades in order to get at what the theory is meant to clear your eyes for. Not romantic, not composed, not making a point. It just IS. It’s not a Western and it’s not an anti-Western, though the makers talk about it in those terms afterwards.

* * *

Quoting:

Ilisa Barbash is the wife of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences at Harvard and the 
Director, Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL)

I.

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone. SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic — that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems — and which may thus complement the human sciences’ and humanities’ traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.
Director, Film Study Center

II.

“Visual representations from all cultures, such as sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology. Human vision, its physiology, the properties of various media, the relationship of form to function, the evolution of visual representations within a culture are all within the province of visual anthropology.” What we make and what we see entwine.

III.


“Castaing-Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life.  He recently recorded Sweetgrass (2009), a film (produced by Ilisa Barbash) that is an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals. He is currently completing a related series of video and photographic Westerns that variously evoke the allure and ambivalence of the pastoral, including Hell Roaring Creek (2010) and The High Trail (2010). “ This is beyond idle tourism, penetrating into deep engagement.

If that’s too much for you, here’s a bit of more accessible interview.

IV.

An interview in the MARCH/APRIL 2010 issue of “Believer” magazine.

“I ALWAYS FOUND A CERTAIN IRONY IN THIS IDEA OF MEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO NURSE LAMBS.”

For nearly twenty years, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have sought to depict, as honestly as possible, the beauty and ache of actual lived experience. In their new film, Sweetgrass, the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based couple examine the world of raising sheep and sheepherding in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, in south-central Montana. This pointedly unsentimental and often startlingly intimate film provides, without commentary, an everyday view of life on a ranch and up in the mountains where three thousand sheep are being driven to feed—for the last time. Sheepherding is relentlessly grueling work, and the film, simply by getting out of the way, allows for viewers to experience this hard labor firsthand. Sweetgrass was an official selection at the 2009 New York and Berlin film festivals and opened theatrically at the Film Forum in New York City this January. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor met in film school at USC in the late 1980s. Barbash is a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. Barbash grew up in New York City; Castaing-Taylor in Liverpool, UK. The interview was conducted over email and the phone in December 2009.
—Peter Orner

THE BELIEVER: What I especially appreciate about Sweetgrass is that, like the best literature, it refrains from overexplaining. The film opens and we immediately descend into this world of sheep and sheepherding. But why sheep? How did you get started with this project?

ILISA BARBASH: We were teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in film and anthropology, and looking for local topics. When we found out that a Montana rancher was the last in the county to be driving his sheep up into the mountains, we thought it might make a great film topic. It was close enough to be feasible, in a beautiful area, and involved some drama. We also loved the fact that it was the last of something. It’s a hackneyed and by now totally discredited trope of ethnographic filmmakers to film cultures on the wane, or in their death throes—it’s called salvage ethnography. I don’t mean to sound callous about the tragedy of these disappearing life ways, nor to denigrate the importance of documenting them. I did, however, enjoy the irony of finding such a moment in such a modern setting in my own backyard.

LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR: I went up there in the spring of 2001 and stayed for a week, wondering if there might be a movie there. I wasn’t sure, but we decided to devote a summer to it as a family. It was an amazing experience for us all. I ended up falling in love with the people, just as I was falling in love with the West at the time. The landscape, the freedom, the aesthetics of the space—everything about it bowled me over. As a European, I could never get over the sheer scale of the Absaroka-Beartooths, the fact that there could be anywhere so remote in the lower forty-eight. It takes them four to five weeks to trail the sheep from the ranch to the basins—about eighty miles, on hoof the whole way. In the Alps and the Pyrenees these days, they’re trucked up to the pasture. And here we are in twenty-first-century USA.
To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.


“Salvage ethnography.” I live in the middle of it. Maybe I should be more intentional with a camera.