An accumulated stockpile of “Montana, the Magazine of Western History” is invaluable. One of my most useful issues is Vol. XXII, Number One, Winter, 1972. Originally I bought it for $1.75 because it included an homage to Lone Wolf, also known as Hart Schultz, the half-Blackfeet son of James Willard Schultz. Paul Dyck, Hart Schultz’ adopted son, interweaves his comments with stories from Lone Wolf.
Doing some rearranging on my shelves, I see that there is another intriguing article in the same issue, this one by Howard L. Harrod, who wrote the definitive history of the Methodists on the Blackfeet Reservation. The article is about a nineteenth century presidential experiment with “faith-based” management of the reservation. President Grant was fed up with the constant graft, drunkenness, and incompetence of Indian agents and thought that if the churches supplied the agents, this would no longer be a problem, because all churchmen abided by the principles of Jesus Christ. Right?
The Blackfeet were arbitrarily assigned to the Methodists, though the Jesuits had been active on the reservation for decades. Who knows why? Fear of papists? Maybe Irish papists lurking across the Canadian border, disguised as Metis and waiting for their chance to invade the US? Agent Young, ordained, was sent along to “civilize and Christianize” the “savages.”
It was a policy of the US Government to put tribes who were traditional enemies on the same reservation, in hopes that they would fight each other rather than collaborating to resist their white administrators. This worked pretty well other places, but on the Blackfeet reservation the idea of sending a Methodist to supervise a people used to Catholics succeeded in pitching the white folks against each other. In a civilized and Christian manner, of course. Which meant a lot of politics and letter writing, and bitter suspicion that still persists.
Part of the problem was that when the reservation was shrunk north of Birch Creek, it left high and dry St. Peter’s Church and school, the center of Jesuit works. This meant that the clientele, which was not to leave the reservation, was separated from their teachers and St. Peter’s had no reason for existence. Undaunted, the priests came by wagon to gather students they already knew and to find new ones, which they transported on grounds that their parents wished it.
On page 49 is a photo of those students, seventeen of them, ranging from near-adult girls (possibly matrons) to a little pre-school tyke who is wiggly enough to be blurred, even though Montana’s first Catholic Bishop, John B. Brondel, is holding him by his shoulders. The next small boy over is clearly too cold -- he has bare feet and his shoulders are hunched, his hands clenched. There is only one boy with braids and a blanket. The year was 1885, so when I came in 1961, these children -- those who survived -- were the elders in Browning. They are not named in the caption. Neither are the two men with mustaches and white foreheads -- probably drivers.
Agent Young argued that these children were his wards and that his authority over them was greater than than that of their own parents, who were also wards. On page 43 is a photo of children at the Blackfeet Agency School, probably the infamous Willow Creek school just outside Browning. The boys wear small three piece suits, bandannas and round hats. All are shod. (Many dressed this way the rest of their lives.) The girls wear pinafore dresses, with many petticoats, and stand with their hands together. One wears moccasins. No one looks happy. I don’t see a year in the caption. The Agency School didn’t have enough space to accommodate all the students who were supposed to attend.
Young’s favorite thing was handing out candy on Christmas Eve, which he claimed warmed his heart, though there is no precedent in the New Testament. In fact, this is the infamous period when the buffalo disappeared and somehow so did the government commodities, so that people were starving. It is claimed that Young fed corn meant for the people to his chickens.
When he arrived on Little Badger in mid-December, 1876, where the agency was, Young did not like the location. “I don’t believe a more unsuitable place in every respect could be selected on the reservation.” Three-fourths of the tribe had gone hunting buffalo to the southeast. A few chiefs came to see their new agent, looked him over, shrugged, and went back to hunting. Young should have realized right then that he was not going to make obedient peasants of them.
The well-known and beloved “Brother Van” Van Orsdel sized up the situation and got as far away from it as he could, concentrating on the many small white communities who were open to Protestant services. The Methodist denomination sent no money, though President Grant had hoped they would. Appeals from Catholic officials to Washington, D.C., officials would be seen as reasonable, but then referred back to Young for his opinion, which ended the matter. John Imoda, S.J. tried to bring in the Montana courts through a writ of habeas corpus, but it didn’t work.
Young finally threw the Jesuits off the reservation in 1882, but Father Prando simply built a chapel in the infamous town of Robaire, across the Birch Creek boundary, where the bootleggers plied their trade. Many Indians came to attend mass: there were nearly 700 baptisms and 55 marriages.
St. Peter’s Church remains near Great Falls where it is ceremonially opened once a year for services. A much fuller account of all this back-and-forth is in Howard Harrod’s book, “Mission Among the Blackfeet.” (University of Oklahoma Press, Copyright 1971. ISBN 0-8061-1301-4) Harrod himself has passed on.
Today Methodists all along the Montana High-Line are finding their congregations shrinking, but the Catholics are booming. Maybe it’s that Blackfeet like ceremony. Maybe that original antagonism is still alive, reinforced by some political reason that is now forgotten.
Even though I’m a Unitarian-Universalist, I served the Blackfeet Methodists for one year when their normal supply channels failed. Though I preached from the conventional lectionary, I didn’t shy away from my own sort of Taoism/process theology point of view and no one had trouble with that. Many people have recognized the political component of religion -- the force that causes those who profess peace and love to act out turmoil and punishment in the pursuit of resources. “Faith-based” bureaucracy turned out not to be a very good idea, which Bush advisors would do well to notice.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Art in the Churches of Browning, Montana
Catholic churches are traditionally open to art and even in small reservation parishes of Montana there have been some spectacular accomplishments, particularly the work of Brother Joseph Carignano, the cook and handyman, primarily, but also a gifted artist in his ability to recreate European-style paintings. Sixty-one religious paintings cover the walls and ceilings in the historic St. Ignatius Catholic Church. One painting on the little roof over the pulpit which is meant to bounce preaching out to the congregation was commissioned to be done by Ace Powell. It is a sky with clouds and I seem to remember a dove, but maybe not. I remember Ace debating about it with Bob Scriver.
The Catholic church in Browning, Montana, is not so elaborate, but has classical church statuary meant to celebrate the namesake of the church, Theresa, the Little Flower, as well as Takawitha, the Native American saint. Also the sanctuary enfolds striking creations by local artists. The stained glass windows in the style of Roault are by King Kuka. Glowing chunks of thick glass illustrate the Stations of the Cross. One of several websites for King Kuka is http://www.nativeamericanartshow.com/Kingkuka/Kukabook.shtml
A more-than-lifesized Jesus on the Cross is the work of Gordon Monroe, who was Bob Scriver’s fiberglass artisan and who styled the figure after Scriver’s small crucifix called, “Eli, Eli.” Gordon is a committed evangelical Christian who has been secretary-treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. He’s especially active in charity work, bringing in truckloads of donations for poor people from a network of contacts throughout the United States.
The combination of the windows, which includes a “Sacred Heart” image in the round “rose” window over the altar and the huge bronze-colored figure on the Cross, which sometimes wears a gold lamé robe, is quite powerful. This church was built of field stones collected and brought in by the members of the tribe by horse and wagon and then mortared together by Blackfeet workers. The stones are round, tumbled by ancient glaciers, and often pink or turquoise argyllite. (The first Indian Health Service hospital was built in the same manner.)
A small side-chapel of the Catholic Church, where Mass is said on Thursdays, has an “Indian” theme in its decorations. The grounds have several “medicine stones,” which were brought from the prairie, to the distress of some elders who thought they should not be moved. Geologically called “boulder erratics,” they were carried in and dropped by the ancient glaciers that shaped so much of this land, and often became “itching rocks” for buffalo who had no trees to scrape against, reconnaissance posts for prairie hawks and cougars, and altar stones where offerings could be left as gifts for Natoosie, the Sun.
The Heart Butte Catholic Church, St. Anne’s, has given up its small emerald-doored log cabin and rebuilt as a capacious building with modern facilities, including a residence for the priest. The front wall, behind the altar, is a broad mural of the Heart Butte area in the old days.
The Methodist church, the trademark flame-and-cross on its bell-tower which was originally the entrance, has stained glass windows by Brent Warburton. Warburton, once a teacher at the Blackfeet Free School and often a cook like Brother Carignano, also did the stained glass windows at the Holy Family Mission Catholic Church in the Two Medicine Valley. The larger mission school buildings once operated by the Jesuits have been demolished. Warburton was not a church-goer.
In the Holy Family windows the main motif is doves for peace. In the Methodist church in Browning, the pattern is more ambitious and involves all the windows of the sanctuary in a wrap-around mural of a stream that arises at Chief Mountain behind the altar, then continues around the side, passing foothills wildlife, and ends in a prairie rainbow, God’s promise not to destroy the world again. Warburton’s style is realistic, slightly stylized. Neither he nor Kuka used paint to add detail.
A recent pastor had a Pentecostal bent and enlisted others to put stained glass windows in the bell tower. Hard to notice unless the light is right, the most striking of these is a pastor in clerical garb. He also added an icon of Mary in the sanctuary and banners in bright colors.
This once very modest church was built outside of Browning along Willow Creek where the parsonage is now located. It was moved to town long ago and resituated in a different orientation to the compass. Build-ons were a response to a large Sunday School operation in the Fifties, but now the church mainly uses its space for community support.
The oldest art in this church is the carving on the fronts of the Communion Table and the pulpit. These are the work of Al Racine, some of his earliest wood-carvings. Later he would be acclaimed for these bas reliefs, and also his well-loved Napi cartoon character, who flees riding on a cougar which he whips with a rattlesnake, saying, “I’m gettin’ outta here! This place is too tough for me!” The only remaining public example of Al’s cartoon character in his big black hat is on the side of Ick’s Place, an emporium of gambling and intoxication, where it was altered to hold playing cards and a bottle. Originally the character was eating flapjacks.
Even so does art wind in and out of our religious lives, even when the religion is that of Lucifer rather than Jesus, Natoosie or the Virgin Mary rather than Jehovah. A reservation is only a microcosm of everyplace.
The Catholic church in Browning, Montana, is not so elaborate, but has classical church statuary meant to celebrate the namesake of the church, Theresa, the Little Flower, as well as Takawitha, the Native American saint. Also the sanctuary enfolds striking creations by local artists. The stained glass windows in the style of Roault are by King Kuka. Glowing chunks of thick glass illustrate the Stations of the Cross. One of several websites for King Kuka is http://www.nativeamericanartshow.com/Kingkuka/Kukabook.shtml
A more-than-lifesized Jesus on the Cross is the work of Gordon Monroe, who was Bob Scriver’s fiberglass artisan and who styled the figure after Scriver’s small crucifix called, “Eli, Eli.” Gordon is a committed evangelical Christian who has been secretary-treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. He’s especially active in charity work, bringing in truckloads of donations for poor people from a network of contacts throughout the United States.
The combination of the windows, which includes a “Sacred Heart” image in the round “rose” window over the altar and the huge bronze-colored figure on the Cross, which sometimes wears a gold lamé robe, is quite powerful. This church was built of field stones collected and brought in by the members of the tribe by horse and wagon and then mortared together by Blackfeet workers. The stones are round, tumbled by ancient glaciers, and often pink or turquoise argyllite. (The first Indian Health Service hospital was built in the same manner.)
A small side-chapel of the Catholic Church, where Mass is said on Thursdays, has an “Indian” theme in its decorations. The grounds have several “medicine stones,” which were brought from the prairie, to the distress of some elders who thought they should not be moved. Geologically called “boulder erratics,” they were carried in and dropped by the ancient glaciers that shaped so much of this land, and often became “itching rocks” for buffalo who had no trees to scrape against, reconnaissance posts for prairie hawks and cougars, and altar stones where offerings could be left as gifts for Natoosie, the Sun.
The Heart Butte Catholic Church, St. Anne’s, has given up its small emerald-doored log cabin and rebuilt as a capacious building with modern facilities, including a residence for the priest. The front wall, behind the altar, is a broad mural of the Heart Butte area in the old days.
The Methodist church, the trademark flame-and-cross on its bell-tower which was originally the entrance, has stained glass windows by Brent Warburton. Warburton, once a teacher at the Blackfeet Free School and often a cook like Brother Carignano, also did the stained glass windows at the Holy Family Mission Catholic Church in the Two Medicine Valley. The larger mission school buildings once operated by the Jesuits have been demolished. Warburton was not a church-goer.
In the Holy Family windows the main motif is doves for peace. In the Methodist church in Browning, the pattern is more ambitious and involves all the windows of the sanctuary in a wrap-around mural of a stream that arises at Chief Mountain behind the altar, then continues around the side, passing foothills wildlife, and ends in a prairie rainbow, God’s promise not to destroy the world again. Warburton’s style is realistic, slightly stylized. Neither he nor Kuka used paint to add detail.
A recent pastor had a Pentecostal bent and enlisted others to put stained glass windows in the bell tower. Hard to notice unless the light is right, the most striking of these is a pastor in clerical garb. He also added an icon of Mary in the sanctuary and banners in bright colors.
This once very modest church was built outside of Browning along Willow Creek where the parsonage is now located. It was moved to town long ago and resituated in a different orientation to the compass. Build-ons were a response to a large Sunday School operation in the Fifties, but now the church mainly uses its space for community support.
The oldest art in this church is the carving on the fronts of the Communion Table and the pulpit. These are the work of Al Racine, some of his earliest wood-carvings. Later he would be acclaimed for these bas reliefs, and also his well-loved Napi cartoon character, who flees riding on a cougar which he whips with a rattlesnake, saying, “I’m gettin’ outta here! This place is too tough for me!” The only remaining public example of Al’s cartoon character in his big black hat is on the side of Ick’s Place, an emporium of gambling and intoxication, where it was altered to hold playing cards and a bottle. Originally the character was eating flapjacks.
Even so does art wind in and out of our religious lives, even when the religion is that of Lucifer rather than Jesus, Natoosie or the Virgin Mary rather than Jehovah. A reservation is only a microcosm of everyplace.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
"El Rancho Gumbo"
“El Rancho Gumbo: Five Thousand Days in Montana’s Piegan Country” by Abner M. Wagner. Copyright 1983. ISBN 0-930704-15-0. Only 750 copies designed and printed by the Sagebrush Press, Morongo Valley, CA.
El Rancho Gumbo was a couple dozen miles north of here and a few miles south of the little ranch Bob and I had on the Two Medicine River, but not long enough to give the place a name. The gumbo, which is a very fine sticky clay (Bentonite, some call it) descended on the wind from prehistoric volcanic dust. It’s good for some industrial uses if you can find it in a pure enough state in a place where you can get it out. Our "rancho" was two miles from the highway, but the little van regularly got stuck, usually at night on the way home. I’d take my shoes off, so I could tell whether I was on the road, and leave the van behind until morning. By then, usually a neighbor, like Bob Wellman, had roped it and dragged it to a grassy place. As soon as the road was dry again, it was passable. Now it's paved.
But Wagner’s family was there much earlier, arriving in 1921, the era of irrigation ditches being dug with fresnoes and patrolled daily on horseback. Wagner’s dad, Watermaster on the
Badger-Fisher Division of the Blackfeet Project, bought the 320 acres from No Bear’s estate. It cost $1600 and the patent deed was signed by President Calvin Coolidge. There was nothing but buffalo grass until the family pitched a tent, then upgraded to a 12X16 shack, and finally built a proper log house with logs from the west side. The well had clear, cold water but was so loaded with Epsom and Glauber’s salts that the effects of it on people were -- salutory. The house was wired, but electricity never came. Neither did plumbing, so they used that room as a closet. About the time it was finished, the author’s mother died, his brother married and left the state, and his father was transferred. When he got lonesome enough, Abner, too, went on his way.
Much of what he tells about concerns horses, which were everywhere in wandering bands. The BIA had brought in huge Percheron and Devon “cold-blooded” horses which were set loose on the prairie and soon became snaky pashas intent on preserving their harems, even if it meant snapping the necks of colts that got in the way. Many horses were rounded up and sold to the east and much time was devoted to keeping them from breaking through the three strand wires that protected wheat fields.
The shopping towns were Valier (18 miles away) and Cut Bank (20 miles). If rancho denizens stayed the night, their greatest pleasure was a real soak in the bathtub at the Valier Hotel. There was only one. Wagner figures probably everyone in the west end of Montana had been in it at one time or another. The Cut Bank livery was run by two “austere” old ladies, the Miller sisters, who lit the way to the proper stalls by carrying an elegant kerosene parlor lamp with painted flowers on it. When they had a horse in residence, one sister would take a wheelbarrow up to the grain elevator to buy a bale of hay for it -- they never had enough ahead to lay in a stockpile of hay.
The wind blew so hard that he was literally blown off his horse once and his mother, after the house had been lifted and dropped back on the foundation, insisted that a system of props and cables be installed to keep it down on the ground.
Here’s what he says about his horse, Zambeezie: “Zam was a ridgeling, which means that he came into this world with a birth defect a little hard to explain to an urban society sprinkled with fair young ladies. The truth was that he adored the fillies but he could never be a papa. And for that reason he was so ornery that we never could get together without first having a tall argument about who was going to be the boss that day. It usually took about 45 miles to get his steam gauge down from the red mark and if he ever got a little bit of oats stuck betweeen his ribs it would take another 10 or 15 to do the trick.”
This talk is illustrated by the author with art work that is certainly vigorous, but probably more impressive when seen in color. There are photos, including photos of old Piegans themselves. He says, “They were men of high moral character who lived by a strict code of ethics,” and he mentions by name Eli Guardipee, Heavy Breast, Ironeater, Running Crane, Two Guns Whitecalf, Grandma Eagle Calf, Wades in the Water, and Chases after Buffalo. Wagner’s father had lost a hand on the railroad and used a hook, so he was Ironhand, “Muckskimyucksi.” Often he would mediate Indian family quarrels since he wasn’t related to anyone, and even became an honorary Crazy Dog, the Indian order-keeping group.
The author says, “My first winter at El Rancho Gumbo was punctuated by a stay at Mrs. Angel’s rooming house in Valier. Here at the Montana House I batched in a back room, near the sink in the hallway. The room had a two-burner kerosene cook stove and a single cot. This arrangement was so I could attend high school. However, it was interrupted at Christmas time because there had been insufficient income from the ranch the first summer, and Dad’s wages which were staking the operation did not stretch far enough to maintain my residency away from home. Therefore I became a jerkout...”
But he was always a good steady reader of practical magazines and high-falutin’ books. Nearly self-educated, he “landed a job with the Seattle District Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There was no way I was going to be incarcerated in a gas filled office or caught tossing cans of beans over a counter after all of the cool air I had enjoyed on Fisher Flats.” He stayed in that job for thirty-one years and found what he’d really wanted all along: a wife. Not that different from the big stud horses or even Tarzan, the blue tomcat, who sharpened his claws on the hairy ankles of his favorite Shire and spent cold days asleep on its back.
El Rancho Gumbo was a couple dozen miles north of here and a few miles south of the little ranch Bob and I had on the Two Medicine River, but not long enough to give the place a name. The gumbo, which is a very fine sticky clay (Bentonite, some call it) descended on the wind from prehistoric volcanic dust. It’s good for some industrial uses if you can find it in a pure enough state in a place where you can get it out. Our "rancho" was two miles from the highway, but the little van regularly got stuck, usually at night on the way home. I’d take my shoes off, so I could tell whether I was on the road, and leave the van behind until morning. By then, usually a neighbor, like Bob Wellman, had roped it and dragged it to a grassy place. As soon as the road was dry again, it was passable. Now it's paved.
But Wagner’s family was there much earlier, arriving in 1921, the era of irrigation ditches being dug with fresnoes and patrolled daily on horseback. Wagner’s dad, Watermaster on the
Badger-Fisher Division of the Blackfeet Project, bought the 320 acres from No Bear’s estate. It cost $1600 and the patent deed was signed by President Calvin Coolidge. There was nothing but buffalo grass until the family pitched a tent, then upgraded to a 12X16 shack, and finally built a proper log house with logs from the west side. The well had clear, cold water but was so loaded with Epsom and Glauber’s salts that the effects of it on people were -- salutory. The house was wired, but electricity never came. Neither did plumbing, so they used that room as a closet. About the time it was finished, the author’s mother died, his brother married and left the state, and his father was transferred. When he got lonesome enough, Abner, too, went on his way.
Much of what he tells about concerns horses, which were everywhere in wandering bands. The BIA had brought in huge Percheron and Devon “cold-blooded” horses which were set loose on the prairie and soon became snaky pashas intent on preserving their harems, even if it meant snapping the necks of colts that got in the way. Many horses were rounded up and sold to the east and much time was devoted to keeping them from breaking through the three strand wires that protected wheat fields.
The shopping towns were Valier (18 miles away) and Cut Bank (20 miles). If rancho denizens stayed the night, their greatest pleasure was a real soak in the bathtub at the Valier Hotel. There was only one. Wagner figures probably everyone in the west end of Montana had been in it at one time or another. The Cut Bank livery was run by two “austere” old ladies, the Miller sisters, who lit the way to the proper stalls by carrying an elegant kerosene parlor lamp with painted flowers on it. When they had a horse in residence, one sister would take a wheelbarrow up to the grain elevator to buy a bale of hay for it -- they never had enough ahead to lay in a stockpile of hay.
The wind blew so hard that he was literally blown off his horse once and his mother, after the house had been lifted and dropped back on the foundation, insisted that a system of props and cables be installed to keep it down on the ground.
Here’s what he says about his horse, Zambeezie: “Zam was a ridgeling, which means that he came into this world with a birth defect a little hard to explain to an urban society sprinkled with fair young ladies. The truth was that he adored the fillies but he could never be a papa. And for that reason he was so ornery that we never could get together without first having a tall argument about who was going to be the boss that day. It usually took about 45 miles to get his steam gauge down from the red mark and if he ever got a little bit of oats stuck betweeen his ribs it would take another 10 or 15 to do the trick.”
This talk is illustrated by the author with art work that is certainly vigorous, but probably more impressive when seen in color. There are photos, including photos of old Piegans themselves. He says, “They were men of high moral character who lived by a strict code of ethics,” and he mentions by name Eli Guardipee, Heavy Breast, Ironeater, Running Crane, Two Guns Whitecalf, Grandma Eagle Calf, Wades in the Water, and Chases after Buffalo. Wagner’s father had lost a hand on the railroad and used a hook, so he was Ironhand, “Muckskimyucksi.” Often he would mediate Indian family quarrels since he wasn’t related to anyone, and even became an honorary Crazy Dog, the Indian order-keeping group.
The author says, “My first winter at El Rancho Gumbo was punctuated by a stay at Mrs. Angel’s rooming house in Valier. Here at the Montana House I batched in a back room, near the sink in the hallway. The room had a two-burner kerosene cook stove and a single cot. This arrangement was so I could attend high school. However, it was interrupted at Christmas time because there had been insufficient income from the ranch the first summer, and Dad’s wages which were staking the operation did not stretch far enough to maintain my residency away from home. Therefore I became a jerkout...”
But he was always a good steady reader of practical magazines and high-falutin’ books. Nearly self-educated, he “landed a job with the Seattle District Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There was no way I was going to be incarcerated in a gas filled office or caught tossing cans of beans over a counter after all of the cool air I had enjoyed on Fisher Flats.” He stayed in that job for thirty-one years and found what he’d really wanted all along: a wife. Not that different from the big stud horses or even Tarzan, the blue tomcat, who sharpened his claws on the hairy ankles of his favorite Shire and spent cold days asleep on its back.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Bill Haw and the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop
We hear a lot about the boarding schools for Native Americans run by religions. Books have been written and the consequences have been debated. But in the Aquarian Era, roughly the end of the Sixties and first part of the Seventies, there was an entirely different kind of school happening: “free schools,” called that because they were free to do things their own way.
In Browning the Free School movement was embodied by William T. Haw, who came straight from a Rogerian MA in counselling in Detroit. Carl Rogers, in case you’ve forgotten, was part of the Third Force psychology movement, which said, “How come we keep studying people who are hurt and bent (neurotics, psychotics) when what we’re trying to achieve is people who are functioning at their best? What do we know about about happy, achieving people?” Rogers was famous for sitting down with the truly damaged and simply trying to “mind meld” until he kind of got a “vibe” or clue. This was revolutionary.
So Bill Haw showed up in Browning, where the idea had always been to power down your enemies, and his favorite case from Detroit was about a little black girl who had been seriously traumatized. He got down on the floor with this nearly pre-verbal child and they colored and drew pictures together until she let him into her world. Counselling was a success. One of his other proud moments was being arrested in Detroit for some traffic offense, but then organizing the prisoners into a soulful singalong.
At this time young people were really into power and Browning High School was highly excited by AIM and college-level revolts and occupations. They staged a revolution at BHS, freaking out just about everyone over thirty (who couldn’t be trusted anyway) but Haw went into the auditorium with them and did his Rogerian thing until the kids settled down and went back to classes as usual. The school was crowded even then, so Haw’s office was in a converted boys’ bathroom. Phone calls to him had a strange echo because of the ceramic tile. But it WAS on the corner with a good view of the Rockies.
Teachers were just beginning to live in East Glacier, for lack of housing in Browning, but the school board felt hard-line about it and told us we’d be docked if we didn’t make it to school As it turned out, the winter of 1972 was one of the worst on record and for one ten day period no one could make it through the twelve miles except on a snowmobile, a vehicle just coming into use. The effect was to bond the teachers a bit closer than usual as we snowshoed the days and sang folksongs through the evenings. Three of us big heavy ladies hitched rides to town with Bill in his van and with us situated over the back axle, we never got stuck. We called ourselves the “Three Graces.”
The Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop was housed in the old commodity warehouse, which had stood empty for years. Nowadays activists sneer at being offered such old leftovers, but Haw’s ethic was one of recycling, pioneering, inventing and pushing the limits. The students helped with the conversion necessary to create a Sandwich Shop. They were drop-outs, thrown-outs, and where-did-HE-come from kids and the faculty was also at least a little bit hippie. The idea of the Sandwich Shop was partly to feed the kids and partly to run a little business that casually brought in adults and gave the kids experience.
In the middle of winter, an old school bus was found somewhere and the whole school went south. The adventures were scary and mildly risky, but at the end everyone felt as though they’d really done something extraordinary -- no longer did they feel trapped by the rez.
I loved hanging around, but I was really an outsider except for one summer workshop held at the Cut Bank Boarding School which normally stood empty all summer. The government grant was to help Montana kindergarten teachers who were dealing with Indian kids understand what was going on with them. Bill’s basic plan was to arrange for something to happen to the fifty or so participants, and then to spend time in small groups reacting to what had happened and what they had learned.
These were all “nice” white people plus some local Indian folks. One of his first strategies was a paper and pencil test that revealed prejudice. It was always a surprise because those who were most rigid and uncompromising often considered themselves the most tolerant! Many of the Indians were far more opinionated than the whites.
But the biggest success was an afternoon when Bill divided the class into three groups for some real life experiences. One was taken out by Starr School and dumped out on foot. Their instructions were to get back however they could. A second group was sent up to Moccasin Flats on a scavenger hunt: some coffee grounds, an old newspaper, a beer bottle cap, etc. Moccasin Flats was then the oldest and scariest part of town. The third group was arrested and thrown into the notorious jail. Among their numbers was Mary Spotted Wolf, a tribal judge!
In these violent meth-driven days, I’m not sure this sort of thing should be done, and even Bill was a little worried. But the pedestrians returned in the backs of pickups with kids and dogs, the scavenger hunt got a little delayed because they kept being asked to stay for tea in the shabby but scrubbed kitchens of the old cabins where they knocked, and the jail-birds had an uproarious time with the local drunks -- all well-acquainted with Mary Spotted Wolf. The experience was a tipping-point for a lot of nice white ladies who had been forced to attend because their principals made them and they needed the education credits. They gave up their fantasies.
Bill went to Alaska where he was an administrator and then “retired” back to Kalispell where he and his second wife ran a pet store. Life was exciting as always. He told about installing a burglar alarm that called him at home if there were any unusual noises in the pet store at night. At 3AM his phone rang and he was connected with a speaker phone in the store. “Who’s there?” he asked. A short conversation later he realized he was interrogating the pet store parrot instead of a burglar.
Today Bill is not coherent and lives in a nursing home. I’m not sure who could write a formal account of his impact on the Blackfeet Reservation school system, but someone ought to do it. Maybe Terry McMasters, who taught English and learned ceramics in those turning-point years. Maybe Russ Pannoni. It seems to me important to have that model of mild and good-natured revolution in front of us.
In Browning the Free School movement was embodied by William T. Haw, who came straight from a Rogerian MA in counselling in Detroit. Carl Rogers, in case you’ve forgotten, was part of the Third Force psychology movement, which said, “How come we keep studying people who are hurt and bent (neurotics, psychotics) when what we’re trying to achieve is people who are functioning at their best? What do we know about about happy, achieving people?” Rogers was famous for sitting down with the truly damaged and simply trying to “mind meld” until he kind of got a “vibe” or clue. This was revolutionary.
So Bill Haw showed up in Browning, where the idea had always been to power down your enemies, and his favorite case from Detroit was about a little black girl who had been seriously traumatized. He got down on the floor with this nearly pre-verbal child and they colored and drew pictures together until she let him into her world. Counselling was a success. One of his other proud moments was being arrested in Detroit for some traffic offense, but then organizing the prisoners into a soulful singalong.
At this time young people were really into power and Browning High School was highly excited by AIM and college-level revolts and occupations. They staged a revolution at BHS, freaking out just about everyone over thirty (who couldn’t be trusted anyway) but Haw went into the auditorium with them and did his Rogerian thing until the kids settled down and went back to classes as usual. The school was crowded even then, so Haw’s office was in a converted boys’ bathroom. Phone calls to him had a strange echo because of the ceramic tile. But it WAS on the corner with a good view of the Rockies.
Teachers were just beginning to live in East Glacier, for lack of housing in Browning, but the school board felt hard-line about it and told us we’d be docked if we didn’t make it to school As it turned out, the winter of 1972 was one of the worst on record and for one ten day period no one could make it through the twelve miles except on a snowmobile, a vehicle just coming into use. The effect was to bond the teachers a bit closer than usual as we snowshoed the days and sang folksongs through the evenings. Three of us big heavy ladies hitched rides to town with Bill in his van and with us situated over the back axle, we never got stuck. We called ourselves the “Three Graces.”
The Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop was housed in the old commodity warehouse, which had stood empty for years. Nowadays activists sneer at being offered such old leftovers, but Haw’s ethic was one of recycling, pioneering, inventing and pushing the limits. The students helped with the conversion necessary to create a Sandwich Shop. They were drop-outs, thrown-outs, and where-did-HE-come from kids and the faculty was also at least a little bit hippie. The idea of the Sandwich Shop was partly to feed the kids and partly to run a little business that casually brought in adults and gave the kids experience.
In the middle of winter, an old school bus was found somewhere and the whole school went south. The adventures were scary and mildly risky, but at the end everyone felt as though they’d really done something extraordinary -- no longer did they feel trapped by the rez.
I loved hanging around, but I was really an outsider except for one summer workshop held at the Cut Bank Boarding School which normally stood empty all summer. The government grant was to help Montana kindergarten teachers who were dealing with Indian kids understand what was going on with them. Bill’s basic plan was to arrange for something to happen to the fifty or so participants, and then to spend time in small groups reacting to what had happened and what they had learned.
These were all “nice” white people plus some local Indian folks. One of his first strategies was a paper and pencil test that revealed prejudice. It was always a surprise because those who were most rigid and uncompromising often considered themselves the most tolerant! Many of the Indians were far more opinionated than the whites.
But the biggest success was an afternoon when Bill divided the class into three groups for some real life experiences. One was taken out by Starr School and dumped out on foot. Their instructions were to get back however they could. A second group was sent up to Moccasin Flats on a scavenger hunt: some coffee grounds, an old newspaper, a beer bottle cap, etc. Moccasin Flats was then the oldest and scariest part of town. The third group was arrested and thrown into the notorious jail. Among their numbers was Mary Spotted Wolf, a tribal judge!
In these violent meth-driven days, I’m not sure this sort of thing should be done, and even Bill was a little worried. But the pedestrians returned in the backs of pickups with kids and dogs, the scavenger hunt got a little delayed because they kept being asked to stay for tea in the shabby but scrubbed kitchens of the old cabins where they knocked, and the jail-birds had an uproarious time with the local drunks -- all well-acquainted with Mary Spotted Wolf. The experience was a tipping-point for a lot of nice white ladies who had been forced to attend because their principals made them and they needed the education credits. They gave up their fantasies.
Bill went to Alaska where he was an administrator and then “retired” back to Kalispell where he and his second wife ran a pet store. Life was exciting as always. He told about installing a burglar alarm that called him at home if there were any unusual noises in the pet store at night. At 3AM his phone rang and he was connected with a speaker phone in the store. “Who’s there?” he asked. A short conversation later he realized he was interrogating the pet store parrot instead of a burglar.
Today Bill is not coherent and lives in a nursing home. I’m not sure who could write a formal account of his impact on the Blackfeet Reservation school system, but someone ought to do it. Maybe Terry McMasters, who taught English and learned ceramics in those turning-point years. Maybe Russ Pannoni. It seems to me important to have that model of mild and good-natured revolution in front of us.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
"Daughters of the Buffalo Women" by Beverly Hungry Wolf
It’s natural to think of Blackfeet in generations for some reason. Beverly is of my generation or a bit younger. (She was born in 1950. I was born in 1939.) We’ve known each other about forty years, since she first showed up in Browning as the wife of Adolf Hungry Wolf. The last time I talked to her she was just leaving a teaching job at Piegan Institute. Her mother was not well and Beverly herself had been badly hurt in a car crash. I think this 1996 book was written after that. Her mother is gone, but so far as I know, Beverly has recovered. Adolf was in town last week, but I didn’t see him. He and Beverly are divorced now.
This book, “Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith” (Canadian Caboose Press, 1996. ISBN 0-920698-45-5) is self-published but high quality. The cover is graced by a wonderful double portrait done by Winold Reiss, reproduced through the courtesy of Winold’s son, W. Tjark Reiss. (Tjark was the same generation as Bob Scriver, born in 1914. Both are gone.) A title for the portrait is “Picunnie Pemmikan Makers” and the models are Cecile Boy, daughter of Bird Rattler and an aunt of Beverly’s mother, and an older woman, “Ragged Woman,” who was “the wife of a warrior and buffalo hunter named Bear Medicine.” Cecile Boy was the second wife of Theodore Last Star. The couple were in the movie I spoke of in the last post about a Sun Lodge ceremony.
Since this book is about “the tribal faith,” I will tell more. Theodore Last Star was the Keeper of a Beaver Bundle of considerable importance. Some time after his death and then Cecile’s death, Bob Scriver acquired that Bundle -- I think by purchase instead of transfer. When the Scriver Artifact Collection was sold to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton, that Bundle went with it. After the death of Bob Scriver, Ralph Klein -- the premier of Alberta -- returned this Bundle (with others) to the custody of the Blackfoot Old People on the Alberta side. He could not send it across the Canadian/American border. But the Blackfoot Confederacy is an international body and the Canadian elders gave this same Beaver Bundle to Bobbie Burns, a restaurateur and rancher in Babb. He paid them a high price and accepted the Bundle in a transfer. So far as I know, he is handling it in the traditional way. In the Fifties Bobbie Burns was employed by Bob Scriver and lived in his house.
The rest of the story is that this Beaver Bundle is claimed both by Theodore Last Star’s family from his first wife and his family from his second wife. There is a good deal of rancor over all this. But if you look at the cover of Beverly’s book, where Cecile is wearing a bright red dress and peacefully making pemmican, none of all that has happened yet. I knew Cecile late in life -- she was still poised and attentive in the Sixties.
This small book has 144 pages and seems at first reading to be a simple telling of the stories of her mother, mostly, as well as other older female relatives, and Molly Kicking Woman, the last of the old-time Montana Blackfoot Bundle Keepers. (There is a portrait of Molly in Bob Scriver’s sculpture of “The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle.” She and her husband, George, were the same age as Bob Scriver.)
Beverly’s mother was a child in the 1920’s and remembers her grandmother, First-to-Kill, who was married to White Elk (Heavy Head), an old time warrior who was pierced in a Sun Lodge ceremony. The buffalo ended about 1880, and First-to-Kill (women were often given names according to their father’s war exploits) was ancient in the Twenties, so she was probably born about 1840 and grew up in a lodge made of buffalo hides. In the 20’s she would gather her grandchildren, paint their faces, pray over them and teach them to take their oldest clothes to sacrifice to the Sun by leaving them at a Sun Worship boulder. In the Twenties everyone thought that such practices were dying out and would soon be gone.
Unexpectedly the trend reversed and now all the Bundles that had been collected and stored in museums have been repatriated and Spring is full of ceremonies. One of the subjects Beverly is qualified to address is that of whether they are authentic ceremonies, whether they should be changed (as they are), whether the old people would approve. She emphasizes how intricate, rigid, and fraught with hazards the old standards were.
This is a family that has been very involved with natural medicine, old ways of doctoring and so on, but then was able to translate that so that Beverly’s mother, Pretty Crow Woman spent many years nursing.
As is usual in all the Hungry Wolf books, there are many photos but they are family photos -- not romanticized with props; just snaps of exceedingly handsome young men and shy women. Some of the most interesting are boarding school photos where the nuns wear full medieval regalia.
One of the funniest stories in the book is two trickster boys who stole nun outfits, dressed in them, and went out to walk back and forth in the yard, reverently reading from prayer books. The principal, a priest, became curious and went out to let them walk past him. He spoke to them in French. (One of the many ironies was that most of the Catholic religious were French-speakers from Quebec who had to learn English the same as their Blackfeet speaking students.) The nuns inclined their heads and said, “Oui, Monsieur.”
Again the priest spoke to them in French and they repeated, “Oui, Monsieur.” But it wasn’t the right answer this time. He looked closer and recognized the two boys, who hiked up their habits and ran for it. The priest pursued them, but the story goes that he was laughing so hard himself that he didn’t catch them.
This book isn’t high ethnographics nor is it a polemic. It is an earnest, sincere, and graceful memoir of and by real women in their real lives. Beverly was careful to read what she had composed here (since it’s drawn from many different interviews, letters, remarks, and even library research) back to the women she is quoting so they made sure she got it right.
There are two more generations after Beverly: one is fortyish and maybe going back to school as the house empties out -- just becoming a grandmother. The other is twentyish and just starting a family or maybe a career -- maybe college. And the next is still babies, coming into a world we can’t describe. But the two generations before Beverly have many good things to tell them and, thanks to Beverly, those things are here.
This book, “Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith” (Canadian Caboose Press, 1996. ISBN 0-920698-45-5) is self-published but high quality. The cover is graced by a wonderful double portrait done by Winold Reiss, reproduced through the courtesy of Winold’s son, W. Tjark Reiss. (Tjark was the same generation as Bob Scriver, born in 1914. Both are gone.) A title for the portrait is “Picunnie Pemmikan Makers” and the models are Cecile Boy, daughter of Bird Rattler and an aunt of Beverly’s mother, and an older woman, “Ragged Woman,” who was “the wife of a warrior and buffalo hunter named Bear Medicine.” Cecile Boy was the second wife of Theodore Last Star. The couple were in the movie I spoke of in the last post about a Sun Lodge ceremony.
Since this book is about “the tribal faith,” I will tell more. Theodore Last Star was the Keeper of a Beaver Bundle of considerable importance. Some time after his death and then Cecile’s death, Bob Scriver acquired that Bundle -- I think by purchase instead of transfer. When the Scriver Artifact Collection was sold to the Provincial Museum in Edmonton, that Bundle went with it. After the death of Bob Scriver, Ralph Klein -- the premier of Alberta -- returned this Bundle (with others) to the custody of the Blackfoot Old People on the Alberta side. He could not send it across the Canadian/American border. But the Blackfoot Confederacy is an international body and the Canadian elders gave this same Beaver Bundle to Bobbie Burns, a restaurateur and rancher in Babb. He paid them a high price and accepted the Bundle in a transfer. So far as I know, he is handling it in the traditional way. In the Fifties Bobbie Burns was employed by Bob Scriver and lived in his house.
The rest of the story is that this Beaver Bundle is claimed both by Theodore Last Star’s family from his first wife and his family from his second wife. There is a good deal of rancor over all this. But if you look at the cover of Beverly’s book, where Cecile is wearing a bright red dress and peacefully making pemmican, none of all that has happened yet. I knew Cecile late in life -- she was still poised and attentive in the Sixties.
This small book has 144 pages and seems at first reading to be a simple telling of the stories of her mother, mostly, as well as other older female relatives, and Molly Kicking Woman, the last of the old-time Montana Blackfoot Bundle Keepers. (There is a portrait of Molly in Bob Scriver’s sculpture of “The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle.” She and her husband, George, were the same age as Bob Scriver.)
Beverly’s mother was a child in the 1920’s and remembers her grandmother, First-to-Kill, who was married to White Elk (Heavy Head), an old time warrior who was pierced in a Sun Lodge ceremony. The buffalo ended about 1880, and First-to-Kill (women were often given names according to their father’s war exploits) was ancient in the Twenties, so she was probably born about 1840 and grew up in a lodge made of buffalo hides. In the 20’s she would gather her grandchildren, paint their faces, pray over them and teach them to take their oldest clothes to sacrifice to the Sun by leaving them at a Sun Worship boulder. In the Twenties everyone thought that such practices were dying out and would soon be gone.
Unexpectedly the trend reversed and now all the Bundles that had been collected and stored in museums have been repatriated and Spring is full of ceremonies. One of the subjects Beverly is qualified to address is that of whether they are authentic ceremonies, whether they should be changed (as they are), whether the old people would approve. She emphasizes how intricate, rigid, and fraught with hazards the old standards were.
This is a family that has been very involved with natural medicine, old ways of doctoring and so on, but then was able to translate that so that Beverly’s mother, Pretty Crow Woman spent many years nursing.
As is usual in all the Hungry Wolf books, there are many photos but they are family photos -- not romanticized with props; just snaps of exceedingly handsome young men and shy women. Some of the most interesting are boarding school photos where the nuns wear full medieval regalia.
One of the funniest stories in the book is two trickster boys who stole nun outfits, dressed in them, and went out to walk back and forth in the yard, reverently reading from prayer books. The principal, a priest, became curious and went out to let them walk past him. He spoke to them in French. (One of the many ironies was that most of the Catholic religious were French-speakers from Quebec who had to learn English the same as their Blackfeet speaking students.) The nuns inclined their heads and said, “Oui, Monsieur.”
Again the priest spoke to them in French and they repeated, “Oui, Monsieur.” But it wasn’t the right answer this time. He looked closer and recognized the two boys, who hiked up their habits and ran for it. The priest pursued them, but the story goes that he was laughing so hard himself that he didn’t catch them.
This book isn’t high ethnographics nor is it a polemic. It is an earnest, sincere, and graceful memoir of and by real women in their real lives. Beverly was careful to read what she had composed here (since it’s drawn from many different interviews, letters, remarks, and even library research) back to the women she is quoting so they made sure she got it right.
There are two more generations after Beverly: one is fortyish and maybe going back to school as the house empties out -- just becoming a grandmother. The other is twentyish and just starting a family or maybe a career -- maybe college. And the next is still babies, coming into a world we can’t describe. But the two generations before Beverly have many good things to tell them and, thanks to Beverly, those things are here.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
"The Piegan Medicine Lodge -- a film
This tiny movie was filmed in 1956 in Heart Butte by the Montana Office of Public Instruction and the Fish and Wildlife Bureau. The ceremony itself is quite modest and the film quality is bad: early color with nearly black shadows. The Medicine Woman was Maggie Swims Under and she pledged for her grandson, Joseph, who was in the grip of polio, a plague of the Fifties on and off the reservation -- even striking the President of the US.
Narration is by Knute W. Bergan, for whom the primary school in Browning is named because he was superintendent there at one time. I have no idea what made him so outstanding that a school would be named for him -- maybe it was only his Indian-friendliness. (I personally would rename the school for Greengrass Bull, who was an early outstanding warrior. In later years he earned a living by hauling wash water in a rickety wagon with a pack of assorted dogs behind him.) Bergan’s narration is rather “Bushian,” that is, long “a’s” and every consonant carefully pronounced. One short sentence slowly announced after another. There is a bit of Blackfeet language here and there in the background.
The most prominent characters, aside from the Medicine Woman, is Jim Whitecalf Sr. who at this period was relatively vigorous and actively supervising, going back and forth in his capote. (A capote is a coat with a hood made from a Hudson’s Bay blanket.) Once the dancing begins, the camera loves Theodore Last Star and his second wife, Cecile née Boy. Both have modeled for many artists, both painters and sculptors. I can recognize Fish Wolf Robe and Louis Plenty Treaty.
The older men wear white buckskin, rather plain, and new Sioux-type eagle feather headdresses. One carries a full otter hide with small round mirrors on it. The younger men’s costumes are much more somber and spare than now, and their dancing is more restrained, stylized -- none of the wild contemporary flinging. I saw no younger women dancing, no jingle dresses.
Heart Butte rises in the background. There are not many lodges, maybe half a dozen to a dozen, and not a huge crowd. The men who bring in the center-post tree wear cowboy clothes and ride their horses of which there are many, mostly brown, including the well-trained team that pulls the running gear on which the tree is transported. People are sober and careful. Older folks are in charge. There is no self-torture with thongs through breast muscle. There is ceremonial fasting, broken by a kind of communion of thin-sliced boiled buffalo tongue. Everything is done four times, in contrast to the magical Christian Three.
The only legend mentioned is that of Scarface, who goes off to see the Sun so that he can be made handsome and marry well. But it’s my understanding (and feminists will like this) that there is another legend that is equally or more pertinent -- that of the woman who falls in love with the Evening Star and goes to live with him in the Sky World. She is told there is only one restriction on her in that world -- she may dig as she is used to doing on the prairie in order to find food and she may keep her digging stick, but she should never try to dig up one huge “turnip” or something very bad will happen to her.
Everything is fine for a long time and she has a child, a boy, but she gets restless and like Pandora, starts obsessing about that “turnip.” When she can no longer resist and yanks up that big root, it makes a hole in the sky and through it she can see her old village and family. She is stricken with homesickness. Sent back to earth with her baby, she must never let his feet touch the ground. He must be kept on a buffalo robe. Of course, eventually his feet touch the ground and he vanishes.
The Medicine Woman in this movie is plainly carrying a digging stick on her back -- this is the true holy object. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to have a long-used tool, an extension of one’s hand, that is a connection to the earth and food. I’ve also thought about the wives who were captured, bought or romanced away from their families, maybe very young, and who might always have a quiet longing to go home. Babies who grow up, put their feet on the ground and walk off. Sacajawea and "Pomp" are a case in point.
The great emphasis of old-timers who talk about the Medicine Woman is that she must be irreproachable, totally virtuous. If she is not and dares to be the central figure in this ceremony, the results will be death and disaster for the tribe. Everyone likes the wild warrior stories, but it is the “little mother” who is really the key to the good life. One woman who overreached was struck by lightning in the middle of the ceremony.
The Heart Butte ceremonies are held in berry season, August, unlike the Browning Indian Days which were scheduled by the Indian Agent to fall between cuttings of hay. The Browning ceremony is now a huge, flashy Pan-Indian Pow-Wow accompanied by rock concerts, horse races, rodeo and blackjack tents. Neither event would be complete without stick game, which is so old that game “bones,” made of stone, have been found in Africa that date to tens of thousands of years B.C.
This rather crude little movie was made early enough that people must have still been a little nervous about being possibly suppressed or punished by the Indian Agent. On the other hand, they are probably not happy about cameras either. Bergan says, “This is the first time in history that a Medicine Woman has been photographed in her lodge,” but Walter McClintock took an earlier photo in “The Old North Trail,” maybe. Those were still photos, though. Bad things for the next year will be blamed on photographers.
Those were the days when Indians were still seen as performing ethnic spectacles that white people could visit in order to admire. There’s a little note of patronizing indulgence. But the boy, Joseph, did recover from the polio.
Narration is by Knute W. Bergan, for whom the primary school in Browning is named because he was superintendent there at one time. I have no idea what made him so outstanding that a school would be named for him -- maybe it was only his Indian-friendliness. (I personally would rename the school for Greengrass Bull, who was an early outstanding warrior. In later years he earned a living by hauling wash water in a rickety wagon with a pack of assorted dogs behind him.) Bergan’s narration is rather “Bushian,” that is, long “a’s” and every consonant carefully pronounced. One short sentence slowly announced after another. There is a bit of Blackfeet language here and there in the background.
The most prominent characters, aside from the Medicine Woman, is Jim Whitecalf Sr. who at this period was relatively vigorous and actively supervising, going back and forth in his capote. (A capote is a coat with a hood made from a Hudson’s Bay blanket.) Once the dancing begins, the camera loves Theodore Last Star and his second wife, Cecile née Boy. Both have modeled for many artists, both painters and sculptors. I can recognize Fish Wolf Robe and Louis Plenty Treaty.
The older men wear white buckskin, rather plain, and new Sioux-type eagle feather headdresses. One carries a full otter hide with small round mirrors on it. The younger men’s costumes are much more somber and spare than now, and their dancing is more restrained, stylized -- none of the wild contemporary flinging. I saw no younger women dancing, no jingle dresses.
Heart Butte rises in the background. There are not many lodges, maybe half a dozen to a dozen, and not a huge crowd. The men who bring in the center-post tree wear cowboy clothes and ride their horses of which there are many, mostly brown, including the well-trained team that pulls the running gear on which the tree is transported. People are sober and careful. Older folks are in charge. There is no self-torture with thongs through breast muscle. There is ceremonial fasting, broken by a kind of communion of thin-sliced boiled buffalo tongue. Everything is done four times, in contrast to the magical Christian Three.
The only legend mentioned is that of Scarface, who goes off to see the Sun so that he can be made handsome and marry well. But it’s my understanding (and feminists will like this) that there is another legend that is equally or more pertinent -- that of the woman who falls in love with the Evening Star and goes to live with him in the Sky World. She is told there is only one restriction on her in that world -- she may dig as she is used to doing on the prairie in order to find food and she may keep her digging stick, but she should never try to dig up one huge “turnip” or something very bad will happen to her.
Everything is fine for a long time and she has a child, a boy, but she gets restless and like Pandora, starts obsessing about that “turnip.” When she can no longer resist and yanks up that big root, it makes a hole in the sky and through it she can see her old village and family. She is stricken with homesickness. Sent back to earth with her baby, she must never let his feet touch the ground. He must be kept on a buffalo robe. Of course, eventually his feet touch the ground and he vanishes.
The Medicine Woman in this movie is plainly carrying a digging stick on her back -- this is the true holy object. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to have a long-used tool, an extension of one’s hand, that is a connection to the earth and food. I’ve also thought about the wives who were captured, bought or romanced away from their families, maybe very young, and who might always have a quiet longing to go home. Babies who grow up, put their feet on the ground and walk off. Sacajawea and "Pomp" are a case in point.
The great emphasis of old-timers who talk about the Medicine Woman is that she must be irreproachable, totally virtuous. If she is not and dares to be the central figure in this ceremony, the results will be death and disaster for the tribe. Everyone likes the wild warrior stories, but it is the “little mother” who is really the key to the good life. One woman who overreached was struck by lightning in the middle of the ceremony.
The Heart Butte ceremonies are held in berry season, August, unlike the Browning Indian Days which were scheduled by the Indian Agent to fall between cuttings of hay. The Browning ceremony is now a huge, flashy Pan-Indian Pow-Wow accompanied by rock concerts, horse races, rodeo and blackjack tents. Neither event would be complete without stick game, which is so old that game “bones,” made of stone, have been found in Africa that date to tens of thousands of years B.C.
This rather crude little movie was made early enough that people must have still been a little nervous about being possibly suppressed or punished by the Indian Agent. On the other hand, they are probably not happy about cameras either. Bergan says, “This is the first time in history that a Medicine Woman has been photographed in her lodge,” but Walter McClintock took an earlier photo in “The Old North Trail,” maybe. Those were still photos, though. Bad things for the next year will be blamed on photographers.
Those were the days when Indians were still seen as performing ethnic spectacles that white people could visit in order to admire. There’s a little note of patronizing indulgence. But the boy, Joseph, did recover from the polio.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
"Blackfoot/Whitehand," a Bulgarian movie
“Blackfoot/Whitehand” is one of the strangest and most reassuring little movies I know. It’s a half-hour documentary about Darrell Kipp walking around in Bulgaria -- that’s it. He meets people, he gives some short speeches, he learns a bit of Bulgarian and offers Blackfoot words. You get this from the Parnas House Film Agency in Sofia. The director/producer was Vlado Trifonov. The film has gone the rounds of the festivals.
Darrell, whose Blackfoot name is “Apinakwe Peta” or “Morning Eagle,” was invited by a friend from college, Vern Peterson, who teaches at the American University of Bulgaria. Kipp wanders casually among Bulgarians, Croatians, Turks, Sunni and Shiite Muslims in tiny villages in the Rhodope Mountains. They are baffled about who he is in his Harvard garb: khakis and Oxford cloth blue shirts. He’s huge, wears a pony tail -- no feathers -- at first they get the idea that he might be from India -- but wait, no, from the USA where the Indians are going extinct. They know that much. Darrell has to tell them that Indians are far from extinct, but the government likes to keep them invisible, which turns out not to be that different from Bulgarian peasants. They give him a sausage, a loaf of bread. Big smiles. When he stays at the house of a professor, which is a stone house where the bedroom is furnished with a one-legged bed built into a corner and one peg on the wall, he is given brandy, eggs that come from the hens in the yard, and bread toasted for him by the old professor on the top of the wood stove. The effect on Darrell was intense: it threw him back to his childhood in the little town of Blackfoot on the Montana reservation. His grandfather made him toast that way.
The bits of his speech that he re-enacts for the camera make three points: 1) All people are equal, but that does not mean that everyone should be the same. 2) Indians were nearly destroyed but they managed to survive, just like Bulgarians who even now are dependent on a cow, burros who do impossible labor to create crops, small businesses like coffee shops. 3) We cannot go back from the polluted world but we cannot trust it either. We must solve this problem but it is everybody’s problem.
The last point seems impossible: the water in the ancient stone spring basins is clear and clean. Darrell splashes it on his face and drinks it with no fear. Then the camera takes us to the village dump, where the wind-blown plastic catches on the bushes and fences just as it does on the rez. When he asks a group of men if they have questions, they say, “What brandy do you drink?” The men -- and the more privileged women -- drink rakia and tea constantly.
The Rhodope Mountains and foothills look very much like the Blackfeet Reservation along the Rockies in Montana. It’s a stony place where the paths wind among stone walls and houses. An old woman with a long stick harries her sheep towards home. A dog, looking like any rez dog, shows up and proves it knows Blackfeet though it refuses to speak for food. A little boy appears and tracks along with Darrell, looking waaaaay up there at this man who talks all the time, but not Bulgarian.
Darrell is an observant Catholic and Blackfoot at once. In these mountains he prays Blackfeet prayers for the people and their mountain springs. In the Orthodox church, among all the icons, he lights a candle. In the Muslim mosque he sits silently as the men tip forward on their rugs in prayer. Worship is worship.
These are humble people, less well-off even than reservation Indians if one looks at material goods. Yet both cultures are rich with story and song. At the professor’s house the guests dance Greek style with hands held up high while a simple bagpipe whangs out the tune. There’s not much that can be explored in words except at the University, but much is conveyed with faces: curious, suspicious, skeptical, amazed. A legless man announces proudly that he is a journalist, and then goes on his way scooting a homemade cushion attached to his torso.
Darrell has only recently broken his rule against taking any official position, except for the development of the Piegan Institute which has run a Blackfeet Language Immersion School for twenty years. He’s descended from the “peace chief” Heavyrunner, who was massacred by mistake in what one could call a terrorist strike by the U.S. Cavalry. We’ve wondered how much he’s like Heavyrunner, because somehow he is able to turn away wrath. Not that he doesn’t get angry, even outraged, but somehow he doesn’t let it curdle him. Maybe it helps that he’s big but I remember him in high school, a little guy with big black glasses.
One of his secrets is his farflung network of friends: small town Montana classmates from when he went to Eastern Montana College; sophisticated and wealthy Harvard classmates from his graduate days there; nutty hippies from his MFA days at Goddard; army buddies and locals from Korea; Hawaiians from the indigenous language movement; and Canadian Blackfoots of every kind. Also, he relates well to women and isn’t afraid to learn from them, especially his wife, Roberta.
All the time Kipp goes all over the place, talking. His message is always something like: “Take hold of life. Decide what is good and then make it happen. Don’t ask anyone for permission. Just get to work.” This makes some people very angry. They want chapter and verse -- and guarantees. A workbook.
He said that when he was in Bulgaria, he had a kind of breakdown or breakthrough. It was suddenly clear that there are poor suffering people everywhere -- it is not just that Indians have had to endure so much, but that people everywhere must endure. He no longer felt that Indians were alone. Wisdom grabbed him.
Darrell, whose Blackfoot name is “Apinakwe Peta” or “Morning Eagle,” was invited by a friend from college, Vern Peterson, who teaches at the American University of Bulgaria. Kipp wanders casually among Bulgarians, Croatians, Turks, Sunni and Shiite Muslims in tiny villages in the Rhodope Mountains. They are baffled about who he is in his Harvard garb: khakis and Oxford cloth blue shirts. He’s huge, wears a pony tail -- no feathers -- at first they get the idea that he might be from India -- but wait, no, from the USA where the Indians are going extinct. They know that much. Darrell has to tell them that Indians are far from extinct, but the government likes to keep them invisible, which turns out not to be that different from Bulgarian peasants. They give him a sausage, a loaf of bread. Big smiles. When he stays at the house of a professor, which is a stone house where the bedroom is furnished with a one-legged bed built into a corner and one peg on the wall, he is given brandy, eggs that come from the hens in the yard, and bread toasted for him by the old professor on the top of the wood stove. The effect on Darrell was intense: it threw him back to his childhood in the little town of Blackfoot on the Montana reservation. His grandfather made him toast that way.
The bits of his speech that he re-enacts for the camera make three points: 1) All people are equal, but that does not mean that everyone should be the same. 2) Indians were nearly destroyed but they managed to survive, just like Bulgarians who even now are dependent on a cow, burros who do impossible labor to create crops, small businesses like coffee shops. 3) We cannot go back from the polluted world but we cannot trust it either. We must solve this problem but it is everybody’s problem.
The last point seems impossible: the water in the ancient stone spring basins is clear and clean. Darrell splashes it on his face and drinks it with no fear. Then the camera takes us to the village dump, where the wind-blown plastic catches on the bushes and fences just as it does on the rez. When he asks a group of men if they have questions, they say, “What brandy do you drink?” The men -- and the more privileged women -- drink rakia and tea constantly.
The Rhodope Mountains and foothills look very much like the Blackfeet Reservation along the Rockies in Montana. It’s a stony place where the paths wind among stone walls and houses. An old woman with a long stick harries her sheep towards home. A dog, looking like any rez dog, shows up and proves it knows Blackfeet though it refuses to speak for food. A little boy appears and tracks along with Darrell, looking waaaaay up there at this man who talks all the time, but not Bulgarian.
Darrell is an observant Catholic and Blackfoot at once. In these mountains he prays Blackfeet prayers for the people and their mountain springs. In the Orthodox church, among all the icons, he lights a candle. In the Muslim mosque he sits silently as the men tip forward on their rugs in prayer. Worship is worship.
These are humble people, less well-off even than reservation Indians if one looks at material goods. Yet both cultures are rich with story and song. At the professor’s house the guests dance Greek style with hands held up high while a simple bagpipe whangs out the tune. There’s not much that can be explored in words except at the University, but much is conveyed with faces: curious, suspicious, skeptical, amazed. A legless man announces proudly that he is a journalist, and then goes on his way scooting a homemade cushion attached to his torso.
Darrell has only recently broken his rule against taking any official position, except for the development of the Piegan Institute which has run a Blackfeet Language Immersion School for twenty years. He’s descended from the “peace chief” Heavyrunner, who was massacred by mistake in what one could call a terrorist strike by the U.S. Cavalry. We’ve wondered how much he’s like Heavyrunner, because somehow he is able to turn away wrath. Not that he doesn’t get angry, even outraged, but somehow he doesn’t let it curdle him. Maybe it helps that he’s big but I remember him in high school, a little guy with big black glasses.
One of his secrets is his farflung network of friends: small town Montana classmates from when he went to Eastern Montana College; sophisticated and wealthy Harvard classmates from his graduate days there; nutty hippies from his MFA days at Goddard; army buddies and locals from Korea; Hawaiians from the indigenous language movement; and Canadian Blackfoots of every kind. Also, he relates well to women and isn’t afraid to learn from them, especially his wife, Roberta.
All the time Kipp goes all over the place, talking. His message is always something like: “Take hold of life. Decide what is good and then make it happen. Don’t ask anyone for permission. Just get to work.” This makes some people very angry. They want chapter and verse -- and guarantees. A workbook.
He said that when he was in Bulgaria, he had a kind of breakdown or breakthrough. It was suddenly clear that there are poor suffering people everywhere -- it is not just that Indians have had to endure so much, but that people everywhere must endure. He no longer felt that Indians were alone. Wisdom grabbed him.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Rolland Nadjiwon Replies
[Rolland had a few things to set straight about the blog I posted yesterday about "The Backbone of the World." So, with his permission, here you go...]
_________________
Just a couple of things Mary...I think it is great, but, my last name is spelled "Nadjiwon". I emphasize this because there is a dispute in our family if the spelling is 'Nadjiwon' or 'Nadjiwan'. We just tell everyone the ones who use the 'a' never got past the first letter of the English alphabet.
Also, I am potowatomi. I have been a trapper but not for a number of years now. Educator...yes. I teach University Courses in English Composition and Rhetoric, Indigenous Literature, Native Literature, Culture Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory (I enjoy this the best) and Creative Writing (this is my second).
Potowatomi: I am a part of the potowatomi from the Western Indiana, Illinois, N. Missouri and E. Idaho. We are prairie potowatomi and lived peacefully in the designated Indian Territories until gold was discovered in the Black Hills. In the 1840's we were invited to relocate to Kansas and Oklahoma. What we called the 'mission indians' accepted relocation and were marched in what we call 'The Trail of Death' to Kansas and Oklahoma.
There were those of us who refused to relocate and stayed in our homelands until the United States sent the cavalry to issue a re-invitation. We managed to elude them for some time but we were quite a large group. Some of the kickapoo were with us also. We made the decision to split into two groups and one would move North into Canada and the other would move South into Mexico. We are the ones who came into Canada. We consider ourselves political refugees and our homeland as occupied territories. We are still trying to repatriate our lands or, at least, some part of them. Notre Dame University is on unsurrendered lands. They do, in recognition, give special considerations and scholarship waivers to potowatomi.
We still keep in touch with the potowatomi and kickapoo in Mexico. Some years ago, we had a large potowatomi gathering and a couple of potowatomi were sent from Mexico to bring us fire from the original fire in our homelands to build the fire for our gathering. I was not able to attend but a friend of mine took a charcoal from the fire, mounted it for me and gave it to me as a gift. Why the fire? Our name, potowatomi, means 'keepers of the sacred fire'. We kept the sacred fire for the 'council of the three fires', the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potowatomi. They had kept this original fire going in Mexico for now nigh onto 165 years now.
I thought I should explain all this so my alternate information would not offend and you would understand how important this is in the lives of our people and my own life personally, also.
I am not with my potowatomi community but with my mother's people, Ojibway, here at the head of the Great Lakes in Sault Ste. Marie. My Dad moved here when I was a child because the potowatomi, when they came into Canada, were in Ojibway territory and they did not appreciate that we would not become christians, go to school, or settle in permanent homes. We brought our tepees and horses with us. Must have been one 'hell' of a struggle to do that with all the lakes and rivers in this territory. I don't think we were ready for that. In response to these factors, the ojibway communities that did take us in put us on those lands the least conducive to survival. Survival: That is how I ended up here in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.
After 165 years, we are still not happy with the arrangement, individually or collectively. There are funds held in trust by the US gov't for the potowatomi in Canada but we refuse to take it. We want our lands. All they are offering us is 2.5 million dollars which in over 100 years has not increased or collected any king of interest. Strange eh.
So...that is a bit of who I am. Kind of a long response...hope it is worth it.
-------
wahjeh
rolland nadjiwon
"The prospect in a few hundred years of just one language per nation, and then just one language for the whole world ... is indeed real."
[Then I asked Rolland whether he uses “that French stuff” I can’t understand when he teaches Literary Theory. All that "post" and "de" stuff like postcolonial and deconstruction. Made him laugh. Then he had recommendations.]
Actually there is a lot of the postcolonial theory that is not french but out of india. If you think the french are convoluted try reading some of Homi Baba :) Two that I find quite good are Gomez - Moriana, Antonio. Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993. In particular his ninth chapter: The Emerging of a Discourse Instance: Columbus and the Invention of the "Indian". Also, the works of Ong. Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. Methuen: New York. 1982. All of the works of Walter J. Ong are, for my purposes, excellent and also exciting. I also use works and references from the writings of Joseph Campbell.
Usually, my theories do not follow the western pedagogical or canonical highways. I prefer "the path[s] not taken"... :)
____________
[What Rolland and I have in common is this preference for paths not taken -- oh, and Joe Campbell. I keep calling him Ol' Joe Campbell, but people rebuke me for being disrespectful. I thought being called "old" was a term of respect.]
_________________
Just a couple of things Mary...I think it is great, but, my last name is spelled "Nadjiwon". I emphasize this because there is a dispute in our family if the spelling is 'Nadjiwon' or 'Nadjiwan'. We just tell everyone the ones who use the 'a' never got past the first letter of the English alphabet.
Also, I am potowatomi. I have been a trapper but not for a number of years now. Educator...yes. I teach University Courses in English Composition and Rhetoric, Indigenous Literature, Native Literature, Culture Studies, Cross-Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory (I enjoy this the best) and Creative Writing (this is my second).
Potowatomi: I am a part of the potowatomi from the Western Indiana, Illinois, N. Missouri and E. Idaho. We are prairie potowatomi and lived peacefully in the designated Indian Territories until gold was discovered in the Black Hills. In the 1840's we were invited to relocate to Kansas and Oklahoma. What we called the 'mission indians' accepted relocation and were marched in what we call 'The Trail of Death' to Kansas and Oklahoma.
There were those of us who refused to relocate and stayed in our homelands until the United States sent the cavalry to issue a re-invitation. We managed to elude them for some time but we were quite a large group. Some of the kickapoo were with us also. We made the decision to split into two groups and one would move North into Canada and the other would move South into Mexico. We are the ones who came into Canada. We consider ourselves political refugees and our homeland as occupied territories. We are still trying to repatriate our lands or, at least, some part of them. Notre Dame University is on unsurrendered lands. They do, in recognition, give special considerations and scholarship waivers to potowatomi.
We still keep in touch with the potowatomi and kickapoo in Mexico. Some years ago, we had a large potowatomi gathering and a couple of potowatomi were sent from Mexico to bring us fire from the original fire in our homelands to build the fire for our gathering. I was not able to attend but a friend of mine took a charcoal from the fire, mounted it for me and gave it to me as a gift. Why the fire? Our name, potowatomi, means 'keepers of the sacred fire'. We kept the sacred fire for the 'council of the three fires', the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potowatomi. They had kept this original fire going in Mexico for now nigh onto 165 years now.
I thought I should explain all this so my alternate information would not offend and you would understand how important this is in the lives of our people and my own life personally, also.
I am not with my potowatomi community but with my mother's people, Ojibway, here at the head of the Great Lakes in Sault Ste. Marie. My Dad moved here when I was a child because the potowatomi, when they came into Canada, were in Ojibway territory and they did not appreciate that we would not become christians, go to school, or settle in permanent homes. We brought our tepees and horses with us. Must have been one 'hell' of a struggle to do that with all the lakes and rivers in this territory. I don't think we were ready for that. In response to these factors, the ojibway communities that did take us in put us on those lands the least conducive to survival. Survival: That is how I ended up here in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.
After 165 years, we are still not happy with the arrangement, individually or collectively. There are funds held in trust by the US gov't for the potowatomi in Canada but we refuse to take it. We want our lands. All they are offering us is 2.5 million dollars which in over 100 years has not increased or collected any king of interest. Strange eh.
So...that is a bit of who I am. Kind of a long response...hope it is worth it.
-------
wahjeh
rolland nadjiwon
"The prospect in a few hundred years of just one language per nation, and then just one language for the whole world ... is indeed real."
[Then I asked Rolland whether he uses “that French stuff” I can’t understand when he teaches Literary Theory. All that "post" and "de" stuff like postcolonial and deconstruction. Made him laugh. Then he had recommendations.]
Actually there is a lot of the postcolonial theory that is not french but out of india. If you think the french are convoluted try reading some of Homi Baba :) Two that I find quite good are Gomez - Moriana, Antonio. Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993. In particular his ninth chapter: The Emerging of a Discourse Instance: Columbus and the Invention of the "Indian". Also, the works of Ong. Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. Methuen: New York. 1982. All of the works of Walter J. Ong are, for my purposes, excellent and also exciting. I also use works and references from the writings of Joseph Campbell.
Usually, my theories do not follow the western pedagogical or canonical highways. I prefer "the path[s] not taken"... :)
____________
[What Rolland and I have in common is this preference for paths not taken -- oh, and Joe Campbell. I keep calling him Ol' Joe Campbell, but people rebuke me for being disrespectful. I thought being called "old" was a term of respect.]
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Backbone of the World -- The Amskapi Pikuni World
When you Google “The Backbone of the World,” you get a list of two things mixed: a book written by a white man who hiked down the mountains and a video shot by Blackfeet Indians about their own land. I’m discussing the second. You can get video clips and sources for the video called “Backbone of the World” (the Rocky Mountains) through Google.
When I complained about the lack of Native American literature lately, Rolland Nadjiwan -- a Cree trapper and educator from the far north -- said, “We’re doing this stuff for each other now. Not for whites. And we’re making videos instead of books.” This is a crucial illustration: it is a window, not a door. You can look, but you are outside: very hard on all those romantic white people who rush to be adopted into the tribe and given a name and initiated to the secret ceremonies. That includes me.
The first shot is Darren Kipp cleaning off the inside of your TV screen. As he works, the film goes from black and white to color, a pointed reminder that this vision will be clearer, more vivid. But you’ll have to do some thinking because this is a braided story with complex editing, professional quality because George Burdeau, a professional Blackfeet producer/director, did this project as way of coming home and also as a way of teaching his skills to others.
One of the things I like about it the most is the shooting in winter -- most professionals only come here in the summer when it’s all idyllic and wonderful and the tourist places are open. This one shows snow and ice. The cabin shown is either George’s or Darren’s, and they are there in St. Marys year round. Joe Fisher’s grandfather was a trapper who used to snowshoe from Babb to Browning in winter (five foot drifts in those days) to get the mail for everyone in the St. Mary’s valley, since there was no other way to get through. It’s probably thirty miles.
In a way this is a man’s video because an important layer is these young men discussing the difficulty of finding a new way without giving up the old one, and stumbling through the effort of making the movie they are in. Early, they show themselves circling in the brush, lost. They have a sense of humor about it and illustrate the problem by admitting they filmed a group of women talking, but botched the sound because they mixed up the tangle of cables.
The key “framing device” is the story of “Scarface,” who goes to visit the Sun. It’s told by Molly Kicking Woman in Blackfeet and then told in English by Curley Bear Wagner. Another theme is the future of the Badger-Two Med area where oil companies want to drill, destroying sacred ground and possibly the quality of the headwaters of the reservation. The film goes in and out of Blackfeet, back and forth between BIA Indians who aren’t afraid of drilling and old-timers who loath the prospect and say the mineral rights were never sold. In this respect, women are able to speak their minds eloquently.
Most people will respond to the panoramas and aerial shots of the Rockies along the west edge of the reservation though they probably won’t recognize Chief Mountain at the north and Heart Butte at the south, especially from the air. Backed by sonorous “splendour” music -- nearly organ music -- images of every season flow across the screen: tapestry, stained glass, chancel and altar, platen and chalice. The communion of mountain water and bugling elk. “This is our church,” say both Curley Bear and Buster Yellow Kidney. Carol Murray speaks of “The Creator.” The echo of Christian terms is always there. How can it not be? This is part of the complexity of being Blackfeet and American in a world where each claims dominance.
Then the camera goes back to town but doesn’t linger on Indian poverty. No one will say, “Oh, how depressing.” There’s only one drunk and he’s as vigorous and full of ideas as anyone else. But there is sorrow. This movie was made in 1997 when the annual commemoration of the Baker Massacre was still new and those who cared went out in the coldest month to build a fire, remember, pray, name the people killed. Usually the grief around here is covered over with anger -- grieving seems dangerous.
The disguise of poverty is thrown off: these people are dressed well, they speak for themselves, and they know what they’re doing. Some have college degrees. Most are employed or prospering as entrepreneurs. Their faces echo the old photo images that slide through the video.
Molly Kicking Woman and Curley Bear Wagner’s voices are very familiar to me. Molly was one of our Bundle sponsors in the Sixties and we were very fond of her. She’s gone now. Curley Bear was one of my students in the Sixties and an adversary to us when Bob was alive, but now I consider him a friend. I visited with him at the discount warehouse store last week. He just finished another movie in Indiana.
When I watch a video like this, I’m always full of ideas of what they ought to do next, what the key is, what I remember, and so on. And all the Blackft quietly slide away. If they are going to find their OWN way, the Napi-yaki must stay out. I can applaud, I can recommend to others, I can offer resources and connections if I have them, but my job is to butt out.
A march to save the Badger-Two Med is shown. It includes whites and some Montana folks will spot Ripley Schemm, who grew up on the East Slope of the Rockies where it used to be reservation. Bob Vetter has been a dedicated defender of the area and he is much appreciated. Whites aren’t excluded, aren’t punished, aren’t even much harangued these days. They are just slid to the side so they’ll be out of the way. Make that Way -- as in Blackfeet Way. Amskapi Pikuni Aanist.
When I complained about the lack of Native American literature lately, Rolland Nadjiwan -- a Cree trapper and educator from the far north -- said, “We’re doing this stuff for each other now. Not for whites. And we’re making videos instead of books.” This is a crucial illustration: it is a window, not a door. You can look, but you are outside: very hard on all those romantic white people who rush to be adopted into the tribe and given a name and initiated to the secret ceremonies. That includes me.
The first shot is Darren Kipp cleaning off the inside of your TV screen. As he works, the film goes from black and white to color, a pointed reminder that this vision will be clearer, more vivid. But you’ll have to do some thinking because this is a braided story with complex editing, professional quality because George Burdeau, a professional Blackfeet producer/director, did this project as way of coming home and also as a way of teaching his skills to others.
One of the things I like about it the most is the shooting in winter -- most professionals only come here in the summer when it’s all idyllic and wonderful and the tourist places are open. This one shows snow and ice. The cabin shown is either George’s or Darren’s, and they are there in St. Marys year round. Joe Fisher’s grandfather was a trapper who used to snowshoe from Babb to Browning in winter (five foot drifts in those days) to get the mail for everyone in the St. Mary’s valley, since there was no other way to get through. It’s probably thirty miles.
In a way this is a man’s video because an important layer is these young men discussing the difficulty of finding a new way without giving up the old one, and stumbling through the effort of making the movie they are in. Early, they show themselves circling in the brush, lost. They have a sense of humor about it and illustrate the problem by admitting they filmed a group of women talking, but botched the sound because they mixed up the tangle of cables.
The key “framing device” is the story of “Scarface,” who goes to visit the Sun. It’s told by Molly Kicking Woman in Blackfeet and then told in English by Curley Bear Wagner. Another theme is the future of the Badger-Two Med area where oil companies want to drill, destroying sacred ground and possibly the quality of the headwaters of the reservation. The film goes in and out of Blackfeet, back and forth between BIA Indians who aren’t afraid of drilling and old-timers who loath the prospect and say the mineral rights were never sold. In this respect, women are able to speak their minds eloquently.
Most people will respond to the panoramas and aerial shots of the Rockies along the west edge of the reservation though they probably won’t recognize Chief Mountain at the north and Heart Butte at the south, especially from the air. Backed by sonorous “splendour” music -- nearly organ music -- images of every season flow across the screen: tapestry, stained glass, chancel and altar, platen and chalice. The communion of mountain water and bugling elk. “This is our church,” say both Curley Bear and Buster Yellow Kidney. Carol Murray speaks of “The Creator.” The echo of Christian terms is always there. How can it not be? This is part of the complexity of being Blackfeet and American in a world where each claims dominance.
Then the camera goes back to town but doesn’t linger on Indian poverty. No one will say, “Oh, how depressing.” There’s only one drunk and he’s as vigorous and full of ideas as anyone else. But there is sorrow. This movie was made in 1997 when the annual commemoration of the Baker Massacre was still new and those who cared went out in the coldest month to build a fire, remember, pray, name the people killed. Usually the grief around here is covered over with anger -- grieving seems dangerous.
The disguise of poverty is thrown off: these people are dressed well, they speak for themselves, and they know what they’re doing. Some have college degrees. Most are employed or prospering as entrepreneurs. Their faces echo the old photo images that slide through the video.
Molly Kicking Woman and Curley Bear Wagner’s voices are very familiar to me. Molly was one of our Bundle sponsors in the Sixties and we were very fond of her. She’s gone now. Curley Bear was one of my students in the Sixties and an adversary to us when Bob was alive, but now I consider him a friend. I visited with him at the discount warehouse store last week. He just finished another movie in Indiana.
When I watch a video like this, I’m always full of ideas of what they ought to do next, what the key is, what I remember, and so on. And all the Blackft quietly slide away. If they are going to find their OWN way, the Napi-yaki must stay out. I can applaud, I can recommend to others, I can offer resources and connections if I have them, but my job is to butt out.
A march to save the Badger-Two Med is shown. It includes whites and some Montana folks will spot Ripley Schemm, who grew up on the East Slope of the Rockies where it used to be reservation. Bob Vetter has been a dedicated defender of the area and he is much appreciated. Whites aren’t excluded, aren’t punished, aren’t even much harangued these days. They are just slid to the side so they’ll be out of the way. Make that Way -- as in Blackfeet Way. Amskapi Pikuni Aanist.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Keeping the Hours
After a minimal amount of Googling around, I found a list of the more-or-less official liturgical hours:
Lauds -- dawn
Terce -- breakfast
Sext -- 9 AM - mid-morning
None ---- Noon
Vespers -- nightfall
Compline -- bedtime
Matins -- midnight
Vigils -- 3 AM
Angelus is a separate bell that is rung three times a day when prayers commemorating the Annunciation of the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition, the idea being that God has made Mary pregnant but she is still a virgin -- someone has to tell her the plan. So you see, Jesus DID have a belly button because he was created as a blastosphere, attached to the uterine wall, and developing with a placenta. Mary had a normal pregnancy. (I think I’ll start a Cult of the Placenta and a tradition about where it was buried.)
What’s not clear is whether God used Mary’s ovum or simply planted His/Her own egg, which must have been a clone. I mean, presumably a god’s chromosomes would not match with human chromosomes. The Creationists would be reassured to know that human genes will not match with primate genes because the primate genes -- though very close to the same -- are arranged on a different number of chromosomes. The Trinitarians (three Gods in one) will love the clone idea.
Anyway, an angel was sent to announce the achievement to Mary and serious admirers of Mary say the appropriate prayer three times a day. The bell is to remind them to do that in case they have lost track of the time.
When time was a matter of dawn and dark, sun and moon, or even, for the sophisticated, a matter of stars wheeling through the night, one didn’t lose track of it except possibly on a day like this: overcast, uniformly gray and chilly, damp. I have a mental image of the Blackfeet women withdrawing into lodges to do something with their hands that didn’t require much light while they sat by the fire. If they’d had sheep, they might have invented knitting or crochet. The men this time of year were probably hunting, keeping warm with exercise.
Scholars tell us that in the early European days, hours were of uneven length because the sun rose and set at different times as the seasons passed. Staying up late was a matter of wealth, because it would be costly to provide candles or oil lamps. But around a fire, one could linger a bit with a musical instrument or a storyteller.
Finally, the clock was invented: a matter of wealth to buy one, so the church or city hall supplied a bell for the others. Nicholas Whyte, who supplied this information and a lot more on his remarkable website http://explorers.whyte.com/default.htm
supplies this poem:
L’Orloge est, au vray considerer,
Un instrument tres bel et tres notable,
Et s’est aussy plaisant et pourfitable,
Car nuict et iour les heures nous aprent
Par la soubtilite qu’ell comprent
En l’absence meisme dou soleil.
The clock is, when you think about it,
A very beautiful and remarkable instrument,
And it’s also pleasant and useful,
Because night and day it tells the hours
By the subtlety of its mechanism
Even when there’s no sun.
___ Froissart
I have a clock in every room. That might seem silly for an old retired woman, but I still have to set a timer to get my muffins out of the oven unscorched. Most of the time I go by the radio, NPR, not just the time of day but what day of the week. I listen to Yellowstone Public Radio, which can be streamed. (yellowstonepublicradio.org or ypradio.org) My favorite weekday is Thursday when “From the Top” features young classical musicians of phenomenal talent, along with a little friendly teasing by Chris O’Reilly. (There’s a website: Fromthetop.org.) and at 9PM Lennie Holliman plays her redactions of the various book festivals around Montana -- sometimes bringing order to rather scrambled spontaneous panel discussions at the events.
It is important to keep a schedule, even on overcast days indoors, and to do the same things at about the same times. The mail is up at 9AM and the same regular Valerians are there at the same time. We are old and if one of us is missing, others will inquire, and if no one knows whether you are out of town or your pickup is still in the driveway, someone might drop by -- casually. They say that for purposes of digestion, one should eat about the same things at about the same times every day. For purposes of sleep, one should retire and arise at about the same time every day. And for purposes of thought, one should sit down at the keyboard at about the same hour.
For various reasons, including delivering the newspaper for a month and using the Internet for a reduced rate in the middle of the night -- like 3 AM (Vigils) -- I’ve grown used to getting up at that hour. It’s a mysterious hour that I always connect with a photograph I saw of a Cistercian monastery. The Cistercians date back to the recovery from the Black Plague when much land lay fallow for lack of cultivation and people were hungry. The photo was black and white, of the “night stairs” which led directly from the dormitory to the chapel for prayer at Vigils. Hence, “vigilance.” They prayed for plagues to be kept away. And they built their monasteries over tumbling mountain streams, bringing clean water in and discharging dirtied water out, to preserve sanitation. (The opposite of a cistern!) They ought to be called to New Orleans.
But my real guides to time are the cats. They’ve learned to wake at 3AM or maybe 4AM (Lauds in summer, so laudable), because then I open the cat flap to outdoors. We have a night door rather than night stairs. I feed them a bite, make coffee, read the paper, go back to bed. At 9AM they are back, time to get up and feed them a bite, go to the post office. At Terce or Sext, they are ready to sleep. I do None (noon) alone. Mid-afternoon they reappear for a little something to eat and a long vigil outside through vespers, their favorite hour. They are diurnal. At Compline I find one cat in my bed and the other curled in the window next to my computer. Liturgical cats acting out a litugy based on their biology and my culture. Christians do that, too.
Lauds -- dawn
Terce -- breakfast
Sext -- 9 AM - mid-morning
None ---- Noon
Vespers -- nightfall
Compline -- bedtime
Matins -- midnight
Vigils -- 3 AM
Angelus is a separate bell that is rung three times a day when prayers commemorating the Annunciation of the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition, the idea being that God has made Mary pregnant but she is still a virgin -- someone has to tell her the plan. So you see, Jesus DID have a belly button because he was created as a blastosphere, attached to the uterine wall, and developing with a placenta. Mary had a normal pregnancy. (I think I’ll start a Cult of the Placenta and a tradition about where it was buried.)
What’s not clear is whether God used Mary’s ovum or simply planted His/Her own egg, which must have been a clone. I mean, presumably a god’s chromosomes would not match with human chromosomes. The Creationists would be reassured to know that human genes will not match with primate genes because the primate genes -- though very close to the same -- are arranged on a different number of chromosomes. The Trinitarians (three Gods in one) will love the clone idea.
Anyway, an angel was sent to announce the achievement to Mary and serious admirers of Mary say the appropriate prayer three times a day. The bell is to remind them to do that in case they have lost track of the time.
When time was a matter of dawn and dark, sun and moon, or even, for the sophisticated, a matter of stars wheeling through the night, one didn’t lose track of it except possibly on a day like this: overcast, uniformly gray and chilly, damp. I have a mental image of the Blackfeet women withdrawing into lodges to do something with their hands that didn’t require much light while they sat by the fire. If they’d had sheep, they might have invented knitting or crochet. The men this time of year were probably hunting, keeping warm with exercise.
Scholars tell us that in the early European days, hours were of uneven length because the sun rose and set at different times as the seasons passed. Staying up late was a matter of wealth, because it would be costly to provide candles or oil lamps. But around a fire, one could linger a bit with a musical instrument or a storyteller.
Finally, the clock was invented: a matter of wealth to buy one, so the church or city hall supplied a bell for the others. Nicholas Whyte, who supplied this information and a lot more on his remarkable website http://explorers.whyte.com/default.htm
supplies this poem:
L’Orloge est, au vray considerer,
Un instrument tres bel et tres notable,
Et s’est aussy plaisant et pourfitable,
Car nuict et iour les heures nous aprent
Par la soubtilite qu’ell comprent
En l’absence meisme dou soleil.
The clock is, when you think about it,
A very beautiful and remarkable instrument,
And it’s also pleasant and useful,
Because night and day it tells the hours
By the subtlety of its mechanism
Even when there’s no sun.
___ Froissart
I have a clock in every room. That might seem silly for an old retired woman, but I still have to set a timer to get my muffins out of the oven unscorched. Most of the time I go by the radio, NPR, not just the time of day but what day of the week. I listen to Yellowstone Public Radio, which can be streamed. (yellowstonepublicradio.org or ypradio.org) My favorite weekday is Thursday when “From the Top” features young classical musicians of phenomenal talent, along with a little friendly teasing by Chris O’Reilly. (There’s a website: Fromthetop.org.) and at 9PM Lennie Holliman plays her redactions of the various book festivals around Montana -- sometimes bringing order to rather scrambled spontaneous panel discussions at the events.
It is important to keep a schedule, even on overcast days indoors, and to do the same things at about the same times. The mail is up at 9AM and the same regular Valerians are there at the same time. We are old and if one of us is missing, others will inquire, and if no one knows whether you are out of town or your pickup is still in the driveway, someone might drop by -- casually. They say that for purposes of digestion, one should eat about the same things at about the same times every day. For purposes of sleep, one should retire and arise at about the same time every day. And for purposes of thought, one should sit down at the keyboard at about the same hour.
For various reasons, including delivering the newspaper for a month and using the Internet for a reduced rate in the middle of the night -- like 3 AM (Vigils) -- I’ve grown used to getting up at that hour. It’s a mysterious hour that I always connect with a photograph I saw of a Cistercian monastery. The Cistercians date back to the recovery from the Black Plague when much land lay fallow for lack of cultivation and people were hungry. The photo was black and white, of the “night stairs” which led directly from the dormitory to the chapel for prayer at Vigils. Hence, “vigilance.” They prayed for plagues to be kept away. And they built their monasteries over tumbling mountain streams, bringing clean water in and discharging dirtied water out, to preserve sanitation. (The opposite of a cistern!) They ought to be called to New Orleans.
But my real guides to time are the cats. They’ve learned to wake at 3AM or maybe 4AM (Lauds in summer, so laudable), because then I open the cat flap to outdoors. We have a night door rather than night stairs. I feed them a bite, make coffee, read the paper, go back to bed. At 9AM they are back, time to get up and feed them a bite, go to the post office. At Terce or Sext, they are ready to sleep. I do None (noon) alone. Mid-afternoon they reappear for a little something to eat and a long vigil outside through vespers, their favorite hour. They are diurnal. At Compline I find one cat in my bed and the other curled in the window next to my computer. Liturgical cats acting out a litugy based on their biology and my culture. Christians do that, too.
Friday, September 09, 2005
September Song
This is my sixth September in the little village of Valier, retired to the little green house I bought with my mother’s bequest. The patchwork that hid rotten wood and hornets’ nests in the wall has worn off now. I have a clearer idea of where there is not enough insulation and where the plumbing is dubious. My lists of repairs is as long as my list of improvements.
Smoke is rolling up from the Bob Marshall over in the Rockies. The air is yellow, even apricot, and smells of wood burning. Some of it is being allowed to burn -- the edge closer to towns is being doused by helicopter.
The village wells are down so low that we’re asked not to water if we can help it. I quit a month ago. I also quit mowing the lawn. One neighbor asked another, “How can you stand next to that raggedy lawn?” I tell them I’m going for “the meadow look” and assure them it’s very trendy in the cities.
The inches of rain we’ve received this year were about average, but it all fell in June. The authorities say they’ve had twice as many prairie fires as usual and half as many forest fires, because the early rain encouraged the grass to grow tall, then dried it, but much of the moisture hit the mountains as snow and kept the trees damp until late.
My task -- which is stretching out over days and weeks -- is putting new rolled roofing on top of my flat-roofed garage. Last year I waited too long and ended up with a big sheet of plastic, held down with nailed lath. This year I’ll fold that sheet in half and put it on my bunkhouse. This is the way you plan and squeeze if you have little money.
I also have not much muscle or even energy. Just going up the ladder is an adventure. There are thunderstorms passing through and I come down to keep from being a lightning rod. So far there has been no rain in the storm cells. The ground up whateveritis stuck into the tarred paper has a lot of sharp edges. Soon my hand heels feel grated. I brought up a foam pad for my knees. I work until my arm is too tired to make a nail go in straight. The secret of success is a lot of black tarry stuff on all joints, seams and edges.
When I was down, waiting for storm cells to go over, I checked my email. Most people unplug their computers on days like this, but I live dangerously. We’re arguing over what it means to be a Westerner or a newcomer and why the two kinds are always after each other and just where are the boundaries anyway? We do that all the time. I was loath to get tar all over my keyboard and had not worn my disposable gloves up to the roof, so I put on the gloves with the tar on the inside, then discovered that my hands were stuck in there.
In the middle of the day I stopped hammering for a funeral next door, the widow of the former mayor, both of them elderly long time residents of Valier. The Baptist congregation is very small and aged. This village was once a major town with hotels, livery stables, and a surrounding webwork of dryland farmers who supported the stores and formed an irrigation company. Early Jesuit priests in the vicinity found the land beautiful and persuaded whole Belgian villages to come.
Now the town shrinks. Since I came here, we’ve lost the tow truck, the handyman, the laundromat, one grocery store, the last bar and a car dealer. The Baptist minister is related to most of his congregation and doesn’t depend on the church for a living. Some blame the shrinkage on economics, others the five years of drought, and still others CRP, the government program that pays farmers NOT to plant because there is too much grain.
The spring wheat is harvested now and the rarely heard whistle and ka-chunk of the grain hopper cars echoes through the night. Some are planting winter wheat. It will sprout, then die back, and regrow quickly in the spring. It’s time for me to take my experimental bunch of sweetgrass out of the pot where it doubled in size over summer and decide where to plant it so it will winter. Sweetgrass is the only plant I know that is “zone one.” It will grow whereever there is dirt, and is a sacred plant to peoples right around the north pole. I’m drying a bit of second-growth alfalfa for tea. It’s second growth because I didn’t think of it until the first growth was gone.
The cats think there is some kind of varmint living behind the bunkhouse and surely the brush and grass is thick enough there for a fox to hide. When the roof is done, my next chore will be taking the grasshog to the thicket. In the hot weather it was a good place for a cat to spend a summer afternoon, but now they come stalking to the house full of indignation and grumbling. After dark they scream.
During the funeral I checked email again: my cousin told me her brother just emailed to her that he is also roofing today, except that he has a three story house in Edmunds, Washington, where he can see all the way to the ocean. My view is of the grain elevator and the Sweetgrass Hills, but that’s good enough for me. The poplar leaves, the first to fall, are spinning yellow leaves onto the roof, gold coins stuck in the patent leather black tar.
The Baptist bells begin to toll the end of the funeral, steady clangs evenly spaced. Then in a bit it’s three o’clock and after striking the hour the carillon launches into its usual vigorous hymn. Since hundreds of years ago, since Belgium wasn’t even a country yet and Baptists hadn’t been invented, the bells in churches have marked the sacred hours: midnight, 3 AM, 6 AM, 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM. This one only begins at 9 AM and shuts down at 8 PM. I like it because it tells me the time even when I’m on the roof.
I went looking on the Internet to find the names for the bells -- vespers, compline, angelus -- which is which? What I found is a long essay that begins, “In the fourteenth century the ownership of time, the control of time-keeping, passed from the Church to the merchant classes.” The writer’s epigraph is:
"Gooth now youre wey", quod he, "al stille and softe,
And lat us dyne as soone as that ye may,
For by my chilyndre it is pryme of day
Gooth now, and beeth as trewe as I shal be"
--- Chaucer
Smoke is rolling up from the Bob Marshall over in the Rockies. The air is yellow, even apricot, and smells of wood burning. Some of it is being allowed to burn -- the edge closer to towns is being doused by helicopter.
The village wells are down so low that we’re asked not to water if we can help it. I quit a month ago. I also quit mowing the lawn. One neighbor asked another, “How can you stand next to that raggedy lawn?” I tell them I’m going for “the meadow look” and assure them it’s very trendy in the cities.
The inches of rain we’ve received this year were about average, but it all fell in June. The authorities say they’ve had twice as many prairie fires as usual and half as many forest fires, because the early rain encouraged the grass to grow tall, then dried it, but much of the moisture hit the mountains as snow and kept the trees damp until late.
My task -- which is stretching out over days and weeks -- is putting new rolled roofing on top of my flat-roofed garage. Last year I waited too long and ended up with a big sheet of plastic, held down with nailed lath. This year I’ll fold that sheet in half and put it on my bunkhouse. This is the way you plan and squeeze if you have little money.
I also have not much muscle or even energy. Just going up the ladder is an adventure. There are thunderstorms passing through and I come down to keep from being a lightning rod. So far there has been no rain in the storm cells. The ground up whateveritis stuck into the tarred paper has a lot of sharp edges. Soon my hand heels feel grated. I brought up a foam pad for my knees. I work until my arm is too tired to make a nail go in straight. The secret of success is a lot of black tarry stuff on all joints, seams and edges.
When I was down, waiting for storm cells to go over, I checked my email. Most people unplug their computers on days like this, but I live dangerously. We’re arguing over what it means to be a Westerner or a newcomer and why the two kinds are always after each other and just where are the boundaries anyway? We do that all the time. I was loath to get tar all over my keyboard and had not worn my disposable gloves up to the roof, so I put on the gloves with the tar on the inside, then discovered that my hands were stuck in there.
In the middle of the day I stopped hammering for a funeral next door, the widow of the former mayor, both of them elderly long time residents of Valier. The Baptist congregation is very small and aged. This village was once a major town with hotels, livery stables, and a surrounding webwork of dryland farmers who supported the stores and formed an irrigation company. Early Jesuit priests in the vicinity found the land beautiful and persuaded whole Belgian villages to come.
Now the town shrinks. Since I came here, we’ve lost the tow truck, the handyman, the laundromat, one grocery store, the last bar and a car dealer. The Baptist minister is related to most of his congregation and doesn’t depend on the church for a living. Some blame the shrinkage on economics, others the five years of drought, and still others CRP, the government program that pays farmers NOT to plant because there is too much grain.
The spring wheat is harvested now and the rarely heard whistle and ka-chunk of the grain hopper cars echoes through the night. Some are planting winter wheat. It will sprout, then die back, and regrow quickly in the spring. It’s time for me to take my experimental bunch of sweetgrass out of the pot where it doubled in size over summer and decide where to plant it so it will winter. Sweetgrass is the only plant I know that is “zone one.” It will grow whereever there is dirt, and is a sacred plant to peoples right around the north pole. I’m drying a bit of second-growth alfalfa for tea. It’s second growth because I didn’t think of it until the first growth was gone.
The cats think there is some kind of varmint living behind the bunkhouse and surely the brush and grass is thick enough there for a fox to hide. When the roof is done, my next chore will be taking the grasshog to the thicket. In the hot weather it was a good place for a cat to spend a summer afternoon, but now they come stalking to the house full of indignation and grumbling. After dark they scream.
During the funeral I checked email again: my cousin told me her brother just emailed to her that he is also roofing today, except that he has a three story house in Edmunds, Washington, where he can see all the way to the ocean. My view is of the grain elevator and the Sweetgrass Hills, but that’s good enough for me. The poplar leaves, the first to fall, are spinning yellow leaves onto the roof, gold coins stuck in the patent leather black tar.
The Baptist bells begin to toll the end of the funeral, steady clangs evenly spaced. Then in a bit it’s three o’clock and after striking the hour the carillon launches into its usual vigorous hymn. Since hundreds of years ago, since Belgium wasn’t even a country yet and Baptists hadn’t been invented, the bells in churches have marked the sacred hours: midnight, 3 AM, 6 AM, 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM. This one only begins at 9 AM and shuts down at 8 PM. I like it because it tells me the time even when I’m on the roof.
I went looking on the Internet to find the names for the bells -- vespers, compline, angelus -- which is which? What I found is a long essay that begins, “In the fourteenth century the ownership of time, the control of time-keeping, passed from the Church to the merchant classes.” The writer’s epigraph is:
"Gooth now youre wey", quod he, "al stille and softe,
And lat us dyne as soone as that ye may,
For by my chilyndre it is pryme of day
Gooth now, and beeth as trewe as I shal be"
--- Chaucer
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Big Bird: The Blackfeet and the Condor
When Claude Schaffer, curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian, began to investigate birds in the lives of Blackft, he easily learned the names for the golden eagle (pitau), bald eagle (ksixkikini) and turkey vulture (pikoki) but the informants said there was another bird, a reeeeaaaaaally big bird: omcxsapitau or “big pitau.” Schaffer became convinced this was “Gymnogyps californianus” or the California condor, the greatest of all flying birds of the north. This was unexpected for contemporary ornithologists and important in terms of understanding the ecology of the plains.
It had already been established that condors participated in the eagle feast of salmon migration in the early quarter of the 19th century. One lone ornithologist name J. Fannin saw two “fine birds” just west of Calgary on September 10, 1896. The wingspread of these birds is eleven feet -- no wonder many of the stories of strange doin’s include big birds.
Schaffer’s account of condor reports appeared in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Science, Vol. 41, No. 6, June, 1951. I xeroxed a copy in the Montana Historical Society Library in Helena. Here are some of the stories he included in his article.
George Bull Child and others saw them around the rez in 1908. An older Piegan identified it as omsxsapitau and supplied the word.
Dick Sanderville at age 82 reported that Raven, aka “Hairy Face” or “Big Crow,” was going along from Old Agency to Little Badger and saw a big creature in a coulee. It was immense, dark, and had a feathered ruff under a bald head. This was 1897 and the sighting became the year marker: “When Big Crow saw the Omaxsapitau.
Sanderville also remembered that Red Paint’s daughter Mary Jane, married to Phimister, made summer camp in Glacier National Park to hunt and fish. Four of the birds flew together, two seemed juvenile, and the nest appeared to be on Chief Mountain. This might have been 1879.
Chewing Black Bone (83) told about Brocky aka “Tail Feathers Coming Over a Hill” participating in a horse raiding party headed for the Crow in the 1860’s. The leader was Heavy Runner. They were at “Bear Creek” to the west of the present Crow reservation when the bird flew directly before them. It was so strange to Heavy Runner that he took it as a bad sign and turned back, which most did. Six continued with the raid but five of them were killed. When Heavy Runner was killed in 1870, some remembered that bird.
Dog Takes a Gun (age 85) was born on the Blood reserve but lived mostly in Montana. He said his parents saw omaxsapitau near Calgary shortly before he was born. He said that feathers had dropped from the bird and someone had killed one bird and had kept its wing.
There are reports from those who trapped eagles by baiting a pit in which they crouched, with some driving the condor off as too much to handle (the grandson of Harry Under Mouse said this happened to Harry), but Yellow Kidney reported that over the centuries occasional specimens were captured, sometimes by invading nests.
The bird went so far up in the sky that it seemed to reach the Sun and therefore was considered esp. powerful, so it was captured or killed carefully and with reverent awe. The seven wing primaries, fanned out into a circle, might be attached to a bison calf hide, dedicated by Bundle Keepers, and then sacrificed to the Sun. Sometimes the bird was skinned and put in a tree as a sacrifice. Choice food was put in its mouth.
A member of the Fat Roasters Band, Bird Flying High (Piksipodnsin), or Big Eagle, took the omaxisapitau as his protector and wore two tailfeathers attached to medals and then to his long braids. Yellow Kidney, who as a child saw Big Eagle make his magic, said that Big Eagle could cause sun dogs to appear. His song was “When I come up to the top of the hill, I shall see all about me.” Then he would motion with his condor feathers and the sundogs would appear.
A second and independent “Big Eagle” was told about by Harry Under Mouse who got the story from Small Eyes in Gleichen. This Big Eagle belonged to the All Short People Band. He carried a condor tail feather which had the power to make people invisible. Once he and his party were trapped on top of Devil’s Head Mountain but used to feather to escape invisibly. When the enemy closed in on the summit, a huge dark bird sprang away and flew off. This Big Eagle died in 1925, very old. His son Steven Fox (Short Crow or Thunder Chief) was called Big Eagle in his youth.
Harry Under Mouse claimed that in the Forties in Hobbema there was a Cree who danced wearing a costume made of the body, wings and tail of an omaxisapitau he had killed nearby. His dance was, naturally, an imitation of condor flight.
Shaeffer says there is a “roc legend” distributed through all Algonquian speakers. (A “roc” is a term used by Arabian or Persians in their stories about huge birds of prey, so this is an example of using something in Eurasian literary contexts to describe something Native American.) Omaxisapitau shows up in “power quest” tales. One tells about a hunter packing a deer on his back who is lifted into the air by the bird and deposited in a nest with chicks. He feeds his deer to the chicks and they help him down.
Jim Whitecalf Sr. was the only one of Schaeffer’s informants who referred to the condor as being a kind of vulture. (The Blackfeet country is a little far north for vultures, though there are a few places in southern Montana where they come.) The others thought of the bird as a giant eagle that often visited bison kill sites. Bald eagles will eat carrion, so they weren’t that misguided.
The giant condor is one of our most charismatic and endangered birds. It’s wonderful to find traces of its history woven into the lives and dreams of people of the prairies where the bison roamed. It’s satifying to think of real “thunderbirds” springing from their nests on top of Chief Mountain. It’s great to have a new word, omcxopitau, for an ancient bird. Maybe the name will help us call it back.
It had already been established that condors participated in the eagle feast of salmon migration in the early quarter of the 19th century. One lone ornithologist name J. Fannin saw two “fine birds” just west of Calgary on September 10, 1896. The wingspread of these birds is eleven feet -- no wonder many of the stories of strange doin’s include big birds.
Schaffer’s account of condor reports appeared in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Science, Vol. 41, No. 6, June, 1951. I xeroxed a copy in the Montana Historical Society Library in Helena. Here are some of the stories he included in his article.
George Bull Child and others saw them around the rez in 1908. An older Piegan identified it as omsxsapitau and supplied the word.
Dick Sanderville at age 82 reported that Raven, aka “Hairy Face” or “Big Crow,” was going along from Old Agency to Little Badger and saw a big creature in a coulee. It was immense, dark, and had a feathered ruff under a bald head. This was 1897 and the sighting became the year marker: “When Big Crow saw the Omaxsapitau.
Sanderville also remembered that Red Paint’s daughter Mary Jane, married to Phimister, made summer camp in Glacier National Park to hunt and fish. Four of the birds flew together, two seemed juvenile, and the nest appeared to be on Chief Mountain. This might have been 1879.
Chewing Black Bone (83) told about Brocky aka “Tail Feathers Coming Over a Hill” participating in a horse raiding party headed for the Crow in the 1860’s. The leader was Heavy Runner. They were at “Bear Creek” to the west of the present Crow reservation when the bird flew directly before them. It was so strange to Heavy Runner that he took it as a bad sign and turned back, which most did. Six continued with the raid but five of them were killed. When Heavy Runner was killed in 1870, some remembered that bird.
Dog Takes a Gun (age 85) was born on the Blood reserve but lived mostly in Montana. He said his parents saw omaxsapitau near Calgary shortly before he was born. He said that feathers had dropped from the bird and someone had killed one bird and had kept its wing.
There are reports from those who trapped eagles by baiting a pit in which they crouched, with some driving the condor off as too much to handle (the grandson of Harry Under Mouse said this happened to Harry), but Yellow Kidney reported that over the centuries occasional specimens were captured, sometimes by invading nests.
The bird went so far up in the sky that it seemed to reach the Sun and therefore was considered esp. powerful, so it was captured or killed carefully and with reverent awe. The seven wing primaries, fanned out into a circle, might be attached to a bison calf hide, dedicated by Bundle Keepers, and then sacrificed to the Sun. Sometimes the bird was skinned and put in a tree as a sacrifice. Choice food was put in its mouth.
A member of the Fat Roasters Band, Bird Flying High (Piksipodnsin), or Big Eagle, took the omaxisapitau as his protector and wore two tailfeathers attached to medals and then to his long braids. Yellow Kidney, who as a child saw Big Eagle make his magic, said that Big Eagle could cause sun dogs to appear. His song was “When I come up to the top of the hill, I shall see all about me.” Then he would motion with his condor feathers and the sundogs would appear.
A second and independent “Big Eagle” was told about by Harry Under Mouse who got the story from Small Eyes in Gleichen. This Big Eagle belonged to the All Short People Band. He carried a condor tail feather which had the power to make people invisible. Once he and his party were trapped on top of Devil’s Head Mountain but used to feather to escape invisibly. When the enemy closed in on the summit, a huge dark bird sprang away and flew off. This Big Eagle died in 1925, very old. His son Steven Fox (Short Crow or Thunder Chief) was called Big Eagle in his youth.
Harry Under Mouse claimed that in the Forties in Hobbema there was a Cree who danced wearing a costume made of the body, wings and tail of an omaxisapitau he had killed nearby. His dance was, naturally, an imitation of condor flight.
Shaeffer says there is a “roc legend” distributed through all Algonquian speakers. (A “roc” is a term used by Arabian or Persians in their stories about huge birds of prey, so this is an example of using something in Eurasian literary contexts to describe something Native American.) Omaxisapitau shows up in “power quest” tales. One tells about a hunter packing a deer on his back who is lifted into the air by the bird and deposited in a nest with chicks. He feeds his deer to the chicks and they help him down.
Jim Whitecalf Sr. was the only one of Schaeffer’s informants who referred to the condor as being a kind of vulture. (The Blackfeet country is a little far north for vultures, though there are a few places in southern Montana where they come.) The others thought of the bird as a giant eagle that often visited bison kill sites. Bald eagles will eat carrion, so they weren’t that misguided.
The giant condor is one of our most charismatic and endangered birds. It’s wonderful to find traces of its history woven into the lives and dreams of people of the prairies where the bison roamed. It’s satifying to think of real “thunderbirds” springing from their nests on top of Chief Mountain. It’s great to have a new word, omcxopitau, for an ancient bird. Maybe the name will help us call it back.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
"Blind Your Ponies" by Stanley Gordon West
Through this week of the New Orleans disaster, which I did not ignore, I was grateful to be reading “Blind Your Ponies” by Stanley Gordon West. Best sellers these days are often downers -- or else total escapist “bling romance.” But “Blind Your Ponies” is a warm, dramatic, pull-up-your-socks community story full of laughs. Happening in the real town of Willow Creek, which is a half-hour from Livingston (one of the major literary capitals in the state), this is a basketball story except that it’s not. The plot line is a basketball story about “going to state” with a tiny, motley team, but what’s important is what happens along the way -- typical of most pilgrimages. But this is not Canterbury Tales -- it’s safe to read to junior high school classes.
The “meta-story” about how the book came to be, in spite of all the contemporary obstacles to publishing, is also absorbing, though I know little about it so far. Stan West gave up on modern international publishing venues because they gave up on him. One of the important things he knows, as do all of us who fight uphill battles, is that when an organization gets so big and so focussed on share-holder profits, they become committed to a narrow track that makes them vulnerable in the end and leaves the field open to innovation. Someone said to me long ago, “if you see bars in your way, then look between the bars. The space is always there and the spaces belong to the free.” It’s like grass growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk. This is West’s message and method together. He has made self-publishing work, partly by the quality of the story and partly by energy and determination.
Experienced authors and observers say that it is pretty easy to physically make a book -- companies will do that well, even design an excellent cover. All you need is a bit of money. Companies will also do distribution: some publishers now contract with other publishers to sort and mail orders. Distribution companies might have specialties, for instance, watching for excellent books about Native Americans and keeping them on hand because they know customers will be interested. Of course, now Amazon and the many used book distributors online (Abebooks.com and Alibris.com) make distribution even easier.
The hardest part is getting people to know the book exists so they can ask for it, to aspire to read it and own it. How are all those basketball-nut kids going to find out about “Blind Your Ponies?” and where to get it? When Vine Deloria, Jr. was talking to his publisher about one of his fabulously popular books defending Indian space (the BEST space between the bars is in your head) he asked, off-hand, how many copies they would be sending to his homeland Sioux reservations. “None!” replied the surprised publisher. “We don’t send books to reservations. They have no bookstores. Maybe they don’t read.” It’s a circle: if there are no books there, they can’t read them.
When Dale Burk came up against this attitude in regard to the hunting and fishing books he publishes, he saw the spaces and went for them: tackle shops, sporting goods stores, gas stations near hunting and fishing locations. That’s where his books sell dependably.
I don’t really understand basketball jargon, “pick and roll” and all that, so I hardly knew what was going on during the game-thick tournament last chapters, but I understand people and by late in the book they had become so real that I’d have struggled through -- um, geometry equations? -- to find out how it would end. Now that I’ve had such a great time with this story, I’m wanting to promote it. It’s a people’s book and word of mouth will probably carry it to success. What am I worrying about? They’ve had to make a new printing every year! There aren’t even any cheap used copies floating around.
The hardships that freeze and separate the people of Willow Creek are quite real -- I recognized a couple from the Montana newspapers. Someone makes a small mistake and suddenly the Abyss of Despair and Self-Hatred yawns at their feet -- children die, women are maimed, men sink into alcoholism, and so on. West handles these things with dignity but he is firm about the necessity and the reality of hard work. “Jump for it!” he urges us, through his surrogates.
Another element to the meta-story is the way Stan learned his craft. He began as a Lutheran pastor, the same as I observed an apprenticeship as a Unitarian Universalist minister. When one learns to write by preaching, the audience is right there reacting. I have a book about how Thoreau wrote: he went for long walks (check), he carried scraps of paper and wrote down little phrases to remind him of what he saw (check), when he got home he sat up late and wrote them into a journal, expanding the brief phrases (oh -- well, I come back sleepy...), then later when he chose a topic he returned to his journals and went through to find all references that were relevant (sounds like work), then he wrote his early drafts (okay) and went on the lecture circuit to deliver them to a paying audience (omigosh). THEN he came home to carefully revise according to those faces in the audience and comments afterwards (what?). That’s what was published. It was damn good.
Someone wrote a reaction to West’s book saying that he should drop the “writer’s classes” series of similies. First of all, writer’s workshops are death on similies. The ones I’ve been to are still into minimalism -- maybe there’s been a change. But part of this book’s charm is that it’s just a little bit over the top in a self-aware way. One of the gooney-bird youngsters on the team never understands the metaphors of basketball play. Yell “take it to the bank!” and he looks around for the bank. (There’s also a tall Norsky who talks like Yoda, but he catches on.)
The funniest similies have to do with the love affair between the coach, Sam, and the biology teacher who’s a bit of a hippie and certainly “green.” She’s an “orchard.” She’s a... Well, stuff about sex always sounds silly out of context. But then it struck me that this was the Song of Solomon, all those great fruit and flower images. This is not an unconscious writer.
The parallel growing intimacy is between a grandmother and her grandson, whom she barely knows in the beginning. This time the fun is in the goofy practical jokes they play on each other. The grandmother seems like a hill-billy eccentric character until the reader finds out what her tragedies were and we find them out as she reveals herself, little by little, to her grandson. That’s how intimacy and trust grow.
You can’t keep a good story down and this is a peach, an orchard, that I hope will take Stan West to the bank.
The “meta-story” about how the book came to be, in spite of all the contemporary obstacles to publishing, is also absorbing, though I know little about it so far. Stan West gave up on modern international publishing venues because they gave up on him. One of the important things he knows, as do all of us who fight uphill battles, is that when an organization gets so big and so focussed on share-holder profits, they become committed to a narrow track that makes them vulnerable in the end and leaves the field open to innovation. Someone said to me long ago, “if you see bars in your way, then look between the bars. The space is always there and the spaces belong to the free.” It’s like grass growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk. This is West’s message and method together. He has made self-publishing work, partly by the quality of the story and partly by energy and determination.
Experienced authors and observers say that it is pretty easy to physically make a book -- companies will do that well, even design an excellent cover. All you need is a bit of money. Companies will also do distribution: some publishers now contract with other publishers to sort and mail orders. Distribution companies might have specialties, for instance, watching for excellent books about Native Americans and keeping them on hand because they know customers will be interested. Of course, now Amazon and the many used book distributors online (Abebooks.com and Alibris.com) make distribution even easier.
The hardest part is getting people to know the book exists so they can ask for it, to aspire to read it and own it. How are all those basketball-nut kids going to find out about “Blind Your Ponies?” and where to get it? When Vine Deloria, Jr. was talking to his publisher about one of his fabulously popular books defending Indian space (the BEST space between the bars is in your head) he asked, off-hand, how many copies they would be sending to his homeland Sioux reservations. “None!” replied the surprised publisher. “We don’t send books to reservations. They have no bookstores. Maybe they don’t read.” It’s a circle: if there are no books there, they can’t read them.
When Dale Burk came up against this attitude in regard to the hunting and fishing books he publishes, he saw the spaces and went for them: tackle shops, sporting goods stores, gas stations near hunting and fishing locations. That’s where his books sell dependably.
I don’t really understand basketball jargon, “pick and roll” and all that, so I hardly knew what was going on during the game-thick tournament last chapters, but I understand people and by late in the book they had become so real that I’d have struggled through -- um, geometry equations? -- to find out how it would end. Now that I’ve had such a great time with this story, I’m wanting to promote it. It’s a people’s book and word of mouth will probably carry it to success. What am I worrying about? They’ve had to make a new printing every year! There aren’t even any cheap used copies floating around.
The hardships that freeze and separate the people of Willow Creek are quite real -- I recognized a couple from the Montana newspapers. Someone makes a small mistake and suddenly the Abyss of Despair and Self-Hatred yawns at their feet -- children die, women are maimed, men sink into alcoholism, and so on. West handles these things with dignity but he is firm about the necessity and the reality of hard work. “Jump for it!” he urges us, through his surrogates.
Another element to the meta-story is the way Stan learned his craft. He began as a Lutheran pastor, the same as I observed an apprenticeship as a Unitarian Universalist minister. When one learns to write by preaching, the audience is right there reacting. I have a book about how Thoreau wrote: he went for long walks (check), he carried scraps of paper and wrote down little phrases to remind him of what he saw (check), when he got home he sat up late and wrote them into a journal, expanding the brief phrases (oh -- well, I come back sleepy...), then later when he chose a topic he returned to his journals and went through to find all references that were relevant (sounds like work), then he wrote his early drafts (okay) and went on the lecture circuit to deliver them to a paying audience (omigosh). THEN he came home to carefully revise according to those faces in the audience and comments afterwards (what?). That’s what was published. It was damn good.
Someone wrote a reaction to West’s book saying that he should drop the “writer’s classes” series of similies. First of all, writer’s workshops are death on similies. The ones I’ve been to are still into minimalism -- maybe there’s been a change. But part of this book’s charm is that it’s just a little bit over the top in a self-aware way. One of the gooney-bird youngsters on the team never understands the metaphors of basketball play. Yell “take it to the bank!” and he looks around for the bank. (There’s also a tall Norsky who talks like Yoda, but he catches on.)
The funniest similies have to do with the love affair between the coach, Sam, and the biology teacher who’s a bit of a hippie and certainly “green.” She’s an “orchard.” She’s a... Well, stuff about sex always sounds silly out of context. But then it struck me that this was the Song of Solomon, all those great fruit and flower images. This is not an unconscious writer.
The parallel growing intimacy is between a grandmother and her grandson, whom she barely knows in the beginning. This time the fun is in the goofy practical jokes they play on each other. The grandmother seems like a hill-billy eccentric character until the reader finds out what her tragedies were and we find them out as she reveals herself, little by little, to her grandson. That’s how intimacy and trust grow.
You can’t keep a good story down and this is a peach, an orchard, that I hope will take Stan West to the bank.
Monday, September 05, 2005
The Other Man in the Bookstore: Scotty Zion
On another expedition to that Starbucks outpost in the wilderness, I was dumping my espresso remains in the trash. At a nearby table was a tall lank cowboy with a few years on him. He looked vaguely familiar -- I thought maybe he was even a movie star. A little like Randolph Scott -- you know, heroic but humorous. He was intently scribbling in a notebook. “Are you writing a book?”
“Yup. This is my second.”
“What was the first?”
“’Been Any Bigger I’d Have Said So!’” and he whipped out a copy. “Want to buy one?” I got out my checkbook.
It was Scotty Zion, housemover, and on the front of the book was an amazing photo of an entire grain elevator tilting along a Montana road. “We can move anything,” said Scotty, and I believed him. In fact, Bob Scriver had approached him once about moving the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife over to the West side of the Rockies. Scotty had already measured the overpasses and calculated the costs before the idea ran out of gas. He’d even approached the railroad about permission to travel on the tracks in one place. Never got reimbursed for all that either. But no matter. He generally managed to get by and have a lot of fun in the process. He enjoyed visiting Bob to see what critter would be hanging around this time. Bobcat? Eagle? Badger?
One little chore was moving the old Conrad Catholic Church up to Babb. I wondered who put it up there on top of a hill. In those days they didn’t worry about crossing bridges -- they just bull-dozed a ford in the stream. No environmental impact statements. The Zion patriarch immigrated to Montana in 1909 but the whole shebang feels as though they’ve been here even longer: old as Indians. Hell, old as boulders.
The reason he looked familiar is that the Kippsters had made a movie that I’d seen -- that was the only one he’s ever starred in. Well, so far. Scotty and his brother Bob are well-respected amateur historians around Choteau and experts on the Blackfeet Agency that was once there before the government once again shrank the reservation. A local ranching woman had decided that the history was too precious to lose and took the idea of a movie to Piegan Institute. The gimmick was that school bus loads of kids from both Piegan and Bynum schools would come down there one fine day and the Zion brothers would walk through through the site, pointing out the smallpox graves and the faint traces of agency buildings. The resulting film was placed in all the local small town libraries. Now that’s social action!
The Zions are East Front specials, out on horseback when not housemoving. They’ve been everywhere and done everything and I only wish I’d met them a whole lot sooner. Scotty tells wilder tales than Charlie Russell. After all, it was Nancy who wrote out Charlie’s tales and she took out the four essentials of cowboy stories: birth, death, shit and sex. Scotty doesn’t hold back on any of them. He reports that when his daughter, Sherry, was born and he was put in charge of the diapers, he just took ‘em out in the back and hosed them off good. I believe it. The second girl, Candy, drew the illustrations that are interspersed with photographic records of family, structures and animals.
He tells about a cowboy who sets out for town with a team and wagon and for various reasons doesn’t get anything to eat all day. Towards evening he loses his way on the braided prairie trails and late, in the dark, spots the lamplight of a little claim shack. The young couple are so starved for company that they say, “Wal, shore he can stay.” There’s only one bed but they shove over and the cowboy gets in on the husband’s side.
Now, the wife had whipped up a big batch of flapjack batter and the cowboy could see it across the room, fermenting its sour dough nicely on a shelf over the stove. But he was too shy to ask for food and the young wife never thought to ask whether he was hungry, so he just lay there obssessing over that bowl of batter.
Pretty soon, there was a ruckus out with the horses and the husband ran out in his longjohns to see what was going on. The young wife was left next to the cowboy. Not the nicest girl in the world, she poked the cowboy in the ribs. “Now’s your chance!” she whispered.
So the cowboy leapt out of bed and scarfed down that batter!
Scottie himself, when he married Claire, took his vows very seriously and why wouldn’t he, with a woman like that! Bob was the soldier because Scottie was deaf. Bob’s war trophies are proudly displayed in their house, even though Scottie accidentally shot a hole in Bob’s uniform once. And Darrell wondered, “Do I dare video these old guys with Hitler’s flag in the background? Will people think they’re Nazis?” Hardly. Not to worry.
Scotty took his stories down to a local printing outfit, explained what he wanted, and was pleased with the results. There’s not a bar code on the book and no ISBN number, which means that Barnes & Noble won’t carry it. This is self-publishing on the most basic level -- a just-do-it approach. It’s the best way to get things done around here.
Candy says in her “Editor’s Note” that their 1950’s house moving slogan was “We Like ‘Em Tough.” Me, too! But what’s even better is an outfit that isn’t puffed up or made smug by taking on the tough jobs and being tough and ingenious enough to get them done. Instead, Scotty and company are inclined by their success to be a little more tender and protective of the underdog. The proceeds of the book sales go to the Zion Scholarship Fund.
You’ll have to read the book to find out where he got the title, but I don’t know how you can get a copy except to call up Scotty and ask. The problem is that I don’t dare print his phone number. He lives in Great Falls. He’s pretty deaf, so you’ll have to shout real loud. He’s been on the board of the C.M. Russell Museum (moved Charlie’s house over one lot and did some repair on the studio), so if you call them up, maybe they’ve got some copies in their gift shop. If they don’t, they sure ought to.
“Yup. This is my second.”
“What was the first?”
“’Been Any Bigger I’d Have Said So!’” and he whipped out a copy. “Want to buy one?” I got out my checkbook.
It was Scotty Zion, housemover, and on the front of the book was an amazing photo of an entire grain elevator tilting along a Montana road. “We can move anything,” said Scotty, and I believed him. In fact, Bob Scriver had approached him once about moving the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife over to the West side of the Rockies. Scotty had already measured the overpasses and calculated the costs before the idea ran out of gas. He’d even approached the railroad about permission to travel on the tracks in one place. Never got reimbursed for all that either. But no matter. He generally managed to get by and have a lot of fun in the process. He enjoyed visiting Bob to see what critter would be hanging around this time. Bobcat? Eagle? Badger?
One little chore was moving the old Conrad Catholic Church up to Babb. I wondered who put it up there on top of a hill. In those days they didn’t worry about crossing bridges -- they just bull-dozed a ford in the stream. No environmental impact statements. The Zion patriarch immigrated to Montana in 1909 but the whole shebang feels as though they’ve been here even longer: old as Indians. Hell, old as boulders.
The reason he looked familiar is that the Kippsters had made a movie that I’d seen -- that was the only one he’s ever starred in. Well, so far. Scotty and his brother Bob are well-respected amateur historians around Choteau and experts on the Blackfeet Agency that was once there before the government once again shrank the reservation. A local ranching woman had decided that the history was too precious to lose and took the idea of a movie to Piegan Institute. The gimmick was that school bus loads of kids from both Piegan and Bynum schools would come down there one fine day and the Zion brothers would walk through through the site, pointing out the smallpox graves and the faint traces of agency buildings. The resulting film was placed in all the local small town libraries. Now that’s social action!
The Zions are East Front specials, out on horseback when not housemoving. They’ve been everywhere and done everything and I only wish I’d met them a whole lot sooner. Scotty tells wilder tales than Charlie Russell. After all, it was Nancy who wrote out Charlie’s tales and she took out the four essentials of cowboy stories: birth, death, shit and sex. Scotty doesn’t hold back on any of them. He reports that when his daughter, Sherry, was born and he was put in charge of the diapers, he just took ‘em out in the back and hosed them off good. I believe it. The second girl, Candy, drew the illustrations that are interspersed with photographic records of family, structures and animals.
He tells about a cowboy who sets out for town with a team and wagon and for various reasons doesn’t get anything to eat all day. Towards evening he loses his way on the braided prairie trails and late, in the dark, spots the lamplight of a little claim shack. The young couple are so starved for company that they say, “Wal, shore he can stay.” There’s only one bed but they shove over and the cowboy gets in on the husband’s side.
Now, the wife had whipped up a big batch of flapjack batter and the cowboy could see it across the room, fermenting its sour dough nicely on a shelf over the stove. But he was too shy to ask for food and the young wife never thought to ask whether he was hungry, so he just lay there obssessing over that bowl of batter.
Pretty soon, there was a ruckus out with the horses and the husband ran out in his longjohns to see what was going on. The young wife was left next to the cowboy. Not the nicest girl in the world, she poked the cowboy in the ribs. “Now’s your chance!” she whispered.
So the cowboy leapt out of bed and scarfed down that batter!
Scottie himself, when he married Claire, took his vows very seriously and why wouldn’t he, with a woman like that! Bob was the soldier because Scottie was deaf. Bob’s war trophies are proudly displayed in their house, even though Scottie accidentally shot a hole in Bob’s uniform once. And Darrell wondered, “Do I dare video these old guys with Hitler’s flag in the background? Will people think they’re Nazis?” Hardly. Not to worry.
Scotty took his stories down to a local printing outfit, explained what he wanted, and was pleased with the results. There’s not a bar code on the book and no ISBN number, which means that Barnes & Noble won’t carry it. This is self-publishing on the most basic level -- a just-do-it approach. It’s the best way to get things done around here.
Candy says in her “Editor’s Note” that their 1950’s house moving slogan was “We Like ‘Em Tough.” Me, too! But what’s even better is an outfit that isn’t puffed up or made smug by taking on the tough jobs and being tough and ingenious enough to get them done. Instead, Scotty and company are inclined by their success to be a little more tender and protective of the underdog. The proceeds of the book sales go to the Zion Scholarship Fund.
You’ll have to read the book to find out where he got the title, but I don’t know how you can get a copy except to call up Scotty and ask. The problem is that I don’t dare print his phone number. He lives in Great Falls. He’s pretty deaf, so you’ll have to shout real loud. He’s been on the board of the C.M. Russell Museum (moved Charlie’s house over one lot and did some repair on the studio), so if you call them up, maybe they’ve got some copies in their gift shop. If they don’t, they sure ought to.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
The Pastor in the Bookstore
The only Starbucks in Great Falls (which means the only one within three hundred miles) is in the Barnes & Noble bookstore -- or was. (A new one has opened.) So once a month, on my grocery run, I stop in for a latte before I head back eighty miles north. Sometimes there are intriguing characters.
One of these was what I took to be a “Friar Tuck” type of jolly priest who sat there for hours in his dog collar, evidently translating Hebrew. He spoke to many people, didn’t seem to be meeting any deadlines. So I spoke to him, too. I was entirely wrong: he was a Lutheran pastor in his first charge. (A double charge: two small congregations who refused to merge though they were close enough together to have done that. But they wanted their own identities -- might as well ask their athletic teams to merge. Their identities were based on opposition to the other guy.)
Probably weighing three hundred pounds, with all his muscles between his ears, he was useless as a farm or ranch helper, which is a classic way for a rural minister to get credibility. He was following one of those energized men who can do everything, who had been there for thirty years, and who was much loved by everyone. He was their standard of comparison. This previous man preached out of his knowledge of his people, the stories he knew about them, and long experience with what sort of rhetoric worked for them.
“Tuck” came from the city. He was the youngest in a family of girls, all of them devoted to his well-being. He never spoke of his father. He had no idea what Montana Lutheran “squareheads” were about -- their work ethic, their value of neatness, reliability and not looking better than the other guy. His seminary had embraced him with warm, soft arms and told him Jesus loved him.
Over the months I worked on him a little bit from my vantage point as a late-in-life “retread” overweight female minister who had run aground in a Canadian city. It took ten years to convince me that I was NOT cut out for this job. I had to pry my fingers off, I so despised being a quitter -- I so hoped it would work. And then the next problem: where to go, what to do next. And what to do about my imploded pride.
I suggested that he must have a director of ministry who could give him good advice and books to read. (He wasn’t really translating that Hebrew -- just making a wall of it.) I proposed that his denomination might put out a bit of money for him to hire a therapist. I asked if there weren’t some senior ministers within driving distance who would be sympathetic? What about his Bishop? (His bishop was cold, he said.) I wondered who had placed him in this job that was, for him, quite impossible, and decided it was someone with a Montana “make or break” attitude, who had decided that Tuck would probably wash out and good riddance. It would buy a little time for those congregations.
Eventually he began to get hints from the more practical men and the more motherly women that he ought to think about his next step. The money wasn’t coming in. Some of the more powerful and moneyed members had stopped attending, saying that his preaching was too new-fangled and too hard to understand anyway. One day Tuck announced that he was allergic to wheat and that explained the whole thing: he was an invalid for life, he’d probably have to go back home now. His sisters thought he should.
By now I was annoyed. I know lots of people with wheat allergies. I suggested a Google search for a support group and recipes. On his plate was a sticky bun. He had applied for disability status with the State. The State didn’t seem to think his disease was disabling. It wouldn’t be for someone with discipline. THERE was the problem. And he admitted that, but he thought it disqualified him for the ministry.
I told him that coming into two small parishes, rivals, who had just lost a beloved long-time pastor was more than even an experienced and specially trained minister could manage easily. This was NOT what every ministry was like -- there are many niches and one was bound to fit him.
Then I played my last card. He was no longer wearing his clerical dog collar but a rather ragged old sweater. No more Hebrew: he simply sat and grieved into his espresso. Ever hear of a “dry alcoholic?” Real alcohol would kill him, but he wasn’t suicidal -- just pitiful. It was late winter. “Have you taken Clinical Pastoral Education?” It’s a program that puts you into a helping job and pushes you through it with a support group -- very effective and completely terrifying. When you come out, you know yourself.
Nope. Just as I suspected. I whipped out the details I’d found on the Internet: the name and address of the closest program, how to apply, another program close to his home town, etc. Quickly he pulled on his ministerial mask. “How kind of you to do this for me!”
Phooey on masks. This was real. “You’ve just about got enough time to apply for summer. Will you at least make contact?”
“Oh, ah, sure.” I could tell he had no intention. When I went out to get in my little pickup, I could see him mournfully staring after me with the papers in front of him. I never saw him again. He sorta haunts me.
One of these was what I took to be a “Friar Tuck” type of jolly priest who sat there for hours in his dog collar, evidently translating Hebrew. He spoke to many people, didn’t seem to be meeting any deadlines. So I spoke to him, too. I was entirely wrong: he was a Lutheran pastor in his first charge. (A double charge: two small congregations who refused to merge though they were close enough together to have done that. But they wanted their own identities -- might as well ask their athletic teams to merge. Their identities were based on opposition to the other guy.)
Probably weighing three hundred pounds, with all his muscles between his ears, he was useless as a farm or ranch helper, which is a classic way for a rural minister to get credibility. He was following one of those energized men who can do everything, who had been there for thirty years, and who was much loved by everyone. He was their standard of comparison. This previous man preached out of his knowledge of his people, the stories he knew about them, and long experience with what sort of rhetoric worked for them.
“Tuck” came from the city. He was the youngest in a family of girls, all of them devoted to his well-being. He never spoke of his father. He had no idea what Montana Lutheran “squareheads” were about -- their work ethic, their value of neatness, reliability and not looking better than the other guy. His seminary had embraced him with warm, soft arms and told him Jesus loved him.
Over the months I worked on him a little bit from my vantage point as a late-in-life “retread” overweight female minister who had run aground in a Canadian city. It took ten years to convince me that I was NOT cut out for this job. I had to pry my fingers off, I so despised being a quitter -- I so hoped it would work. And then the next problem: where to go, what to do next. And what to do about my imploded pride.
I suggested that he must have a director of ministry who could give him good advice and books to read. (He wasn’t really translating that Hebrew -- just making a wall of it.) I proposed that his denomination might put out a bit of money for him to hire a therapist. I asked if there weren’t some senior ministers within driving distance who would be sympathetic? What about his Bishop? (His bishop was cold, he said.) I wondered who had placed him in this job that was, for him, quite impossible, and decided it was someone with a Montana “make or break” attitude, who had decided that Tuck would probably wash out and good riddance. It would buy a little time for those congregations.
Eventually he began to get hints from the more practical men and the more motherly women that he ought to think about his next step. The money wasn’t coming in. Some of the more powerful and moneyed members had stopped attending, saying that his preaching was too new-fangled and too hard to understand anyway. One day Tuck announced that he was allergic to wheat and that explained the whole thing: he was an invalid for life, he’d probably have to go back home now. His sisters thought he should.
By now I was annoyed. I know lots of people with wheat allergies. I suggested a Google search for a support group and recipes. On his plate was a sticky bun. He had applied for disability status with the State. The State didn’t seem to think his disease was disabling. It wouldn’t be for someone with discipline. THERE was the problem. And he admitted that, but he thought it disqualified him for the ministry.
I told him that coming into two small parishes, rivals, who had just lost a beloved long-time pastor was more than even an experienced and specially trained minister could manage easily. This was NOT what every ministry was like -- there are many niches and one was bound to fit him.
Then I played my last card. He was no longer wearing his clerical dog collar but a rather ragged old sweater. No more Hebrew: he simply sat and grieved into his espresso. Ever hear of a “dry alcoholic?” Real alcohol would kill him, but he wasn’t suicidal -- just pitiful. It was late winter. “Have you taken Clinical Pastoral Education?” It’s a program that puts you into a helping job and pushes you through it with a support group -- very effective and completely terrifying. When you come out, you know yourself.
Nope. Just as I suspected. I whipped out the details I’d found on the Internet: the name and address of the closest program, how to apply, another program close to his home town, etc. Quickly he pulled on his ministerial mask. “How kind of you to do this for me!”
Phooey on masks. This was real. “You’ve just about got enough time to apply for summer. Will you at least make contact?”
“Oh, ah, sure.” I could tell he had no intention. When I went out to get in my little pickup, I could see him mournfully staring after me with the papers in front of him. I never saw him again. He sorta haunts me.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Native American List Servs
In 1993 I’d been thrown out of Heart Butte School. The superintendent said, “If you don’t resign, I’ll smear you so bad you’ll never teach anywhere again.” (He himself had been accused of stealing money and had to “cool off” as an insurance salesman before he got this job.) Since I couldn’t defend myself against smear without involving innocent students and their parents, students I had taught long ago, I left. The next eight months were spent on my mother’s sofa in Portland while I looked for a non-teaching job.
I had former students in Portland as well and sometimes we lunched. (You’re supposed to network while you look for work.) One’s job included monitoring Native American listservs, but he was overwhelmed with the simple quantity of posts. Why didn’t I subscribe and let him know if there was something relevant to his job? One list required that members be Indians. My student said, “When they ask you if you’re Indian, just say you’re from Browning. They’ll think you are.” When I dealt with the unemployment people and told them I was from Browning, they thought I was Indian, too, and their attitude went mean. “Are you even LOOKING for work?”
It was a hard time but being on the list servs was like being back in Browning again, which is where I wanted to be. That’s when I became “Prairie Mary.” Many posts were personal, even intimate, and many raged with paranoia and ghosts. Over and over again people said the equivalent of the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk: “Fee fie fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.” Finally I felt so guilty about being white that I resigned. It turned out that about four people had already figured out who I was, but didn’t rat me out. They must have liked my commodity cheese jokes.
On another list which was not closed to whites, I continued to post. That might have been Michael Wilson’s list. These were the years of the Native American Literature Renaissance and when I went downtown to Powell’s bookstore, I would find wonderful NA books for $5. When I had a job again, I began buying them in threes: one for the Browning public library, one for the Heart Butte School Library, and one for myself. On my first vacation, I hustled to Browning to see what they thought about the books. The Browning librarian, an Indian, had made a special shelf where she put them -- there were a few dozen by then -- but the Heart Butte librarian, a white person, had locked them all up in a storage closet so they wouldn’t be stolen.
At Powell’s and other bookstores in Portland the authors of these books would show up for readings. I shook hands with Sherman Alexie, watched Louise Erdrich read (brave but exhausted) in the middle of what had to be the worst trial of her life, laughed with Greg Sarris, and talked for a half-hour with the elegant Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Then Sidner Larson, who was teaching in Eugene, organized a conference of NA writers where I heard Joy Harjo play her sax, met in person folks from the list, and -- best of all -- was remembered by Jim Welch (Sidner’s cousin) whose father was Bob Scriver’s best childhood friend. I’d drive back to Portland, stuffed with ideas, and type them into a report for the listserv before I went to sleep. It was a fabulous experience, one of those key seedbeds -- to mix metaphors.
In 1994 my mother was diagnosed with a blood cancer that would kill her in five years at most. It was painless but exhausting. She just gradually faded until the last two weeks when she was clearly dying. The listserv -- oh, bless them! -- was by then a community and I even got cards from some of them, but often kind words online.
Maggie Dwyer was always there, and then her father died and her mother died. She stopped in Portland to meet me and we tried to support each other. It appeared that my mother would leave enough money for me to move back to Browning, but before it could get done, Bob Scriver died. Bob was a controversial figure because of selling his artifact collection to Edmonton. (Much of it has been repatriated now.)
Somewhere on the Carolina banks, an Indian woman lost her former husband. Privatedly we emailed about our dreams of these powerful and unresolved men from our pasts. She cut her hair to mourn -- mine was already short. She and her daughter sent me a braid of sweetgrass with a shorebird feather attached. I put it on the bronze crucifix that Bob had made and it’s still there. We would never have known each other if it hadn’t been for the list serv.
But sometimes the flames raged high and in the emotions stirred up by the retrial of the murder of Annie May Pictou, I had enough for a while. (I was back on the edge of the rez anyway.) I think that particular list collapsed. A few lists have been operating for a very long time with the same “owner” who is responsible for keeping them cleaned up and operational, though they are usually backed by university tech people. A few have gone on churning posts through even though the owners have disappeared and the techs have sort of forgotten them, partly because the present maintainers are four generations down the line. It’s an eerie sci-fi sort of phenomenon.
There are secret listservs, listservs that are strictly monitored against flaming, formal academic focussed listservs with high standards who want solid research. For a short time I was accidentally on one that was hunting “plastic shaman” types in order to bring them down. I withdrew but was a little afraid of being labeled a plastic shaman myself and attacked. Luckily, I’m not an academic -- don’t even teach high school now.
One of my favorite list encounters was with Rolland Nadjiwan. He was trying to make a point and told about his father coming in from running his trapline in the snow, then sitting down at the grand piano in his cabin to run through his favorite concertos. I took him seriously, and someday I’ll write a short story that comes from that. He thought I didn’t know about trapping, but Bob Scriver was a fur buyer, so I knew a lot of Indian trappers. We bantered back and forth until Carter Revard intervened, worrying that we were getting out of hand. But in fact, Rolland and I kinda bonded. Recently he contacted me again and I was glad to hear from him.
Also, Heather Devine popped up in Calgary. (Her new book on the Metis has been published by the U of Calgary Press!) Kris Groberg has been in contact pretty much all along. Now and then I think of Linden, who has “traveled the wolf trail.” Or Michael Two Horses.
As a genre NA literature is quiet right now. All American publishing and book sales are a real mess and even people who have made their living by writing for a long time are thrown for a loop. But at the same time, blogs, epubishing, self-publishing, on-demand publishing -- all of these have been blooming. The problem is discovery and sorting -- where are they? Which are the ones we can trust? Who’s reviewing all this stuff? It’s scary. But I think, like list servs, in the end this major morphing of NA lit will be another renaissance. Like being fired, it can be an unrecognized blessing.
I had former students in Portland as well and sometimes we lunched. (You’re supposed to network while you look for work.) One’s job included monitoring Native American listservs, but he was overwhelmed with the simple quantity of posts. Why didn’t I subscribe and let him know if there was something relevant to his job? One list required that members be Indians. My student said, “When they ask you if you’re Indian, just say you’re from Browning. They’ll think you are.” When I dealt with the unemployment people and told them I was from Browning, they thought I was Indian, too, and their attitude went mean. “Are you even LOOKING for work?”
It was a hard time but being on the list servs was like being back in Browning again, which is where I wanted to be. That’s when I became “Prairie Mary.” Many posts were personal, even intimate, and many raged with paranoia and ghosts. Over and over again people said the equivalent of the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk: “Fee fie fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.” Finally I felt so guilty about being white that I resigned. It turned out that about four people had already figured out who I was, but didn’t rat me out. They must have liked my commodity cheese jokes.
On another list which was not closed to whites, I continued to post. That might have been Michael Wilson’s list. These were the years of the Native American Literature Renaissance and when I went downtown to Powell’s bookstore, I would find wonderful NA books for $5. When I had a job again, I began buying them in threes: one for the Browning public library, one for the Heart Butte School Library, and one for myself. On my first vacation, I hustled to Browning to see what they thought about the books. The Browning librarian, an Indian, had made a special shelf where she put them -- there were a few dozen by then -- but the Heart Butte librarian, a white person, had locked them all up in a storage closet so they wouldn’t be stolen.
At Powell’s and other bookstores in Portland the authors of these books would show up for readings. I shook hands with Sherman Alexie, watched Louise Erdrich read (brave but exhausted) in the middle of what had to be the worst trial of her life, laughed with Greg Sarris, and talked for a half-hour with the elegant Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Then Sidner Larson, who was teaching in Eugene, organized a conference of NA writers where I heard Joy Harjo play her sax, met in person folks from the list, and -- best of all -- was remembered by Jim Welch (Sidner’s cousin) whose father was Bob Scriver’s best childhood friend. I’d drive back to Portland, stuffed with ideas, and type them into a report for the listserv before I went to sleep. It was a fabulous experience, one of those key seedbeds -- to mix metaphors.
In 1994 my mother was diagnosed with a blood cancer that would kill her in five years at most. It was painless but exhausting. She just gradually faded until the last two weeks when she was clearly dying. The listserv -- oh, bless them! -- was by then a community and I even got cards from some of them, but often kind words online.
Maggie Dwyer was always there, and then her father died and her mother died. She stopped in Portland to meet me and we tried to support each other. It appeared that my mother would leave enough money for me to move back to Browning, but before it could get done, Bob Scriver died. Bob was a controversial figure because of selling his artifact collection to Edmonton. (Much of it has been repatriated now.)
Somewhere on the Carolina banks, an Indian woman lost her former husband. Privatedly we emailed about our dreams of these powerful and unresolved men from our pasts. She cut her hair to mourn -- mine was already short. She and her daughter sent me a braid of sweetgrass with a shorebird feather attached. I put it on the bronze crucifix that Bob had made and it’s still there. We would never have known each other if it hadn’t been for the list serv.
But sometimes the flames raged high and in the emotions stirred up by the retrial of the murder of Annie May Pictou, I had enough for a while. (I was back on the edge of the rez anyway.) I think that particular list collapsed. A few lists have been operating for a very long time with the same “owner” who is responsible for keeping them cleaned up and operational, though they are usually backed by university tech people. A few have gone on churning posts through even though the owners have disappeared and the techs have sort of forgotten them, partly because the present maintainers are four generations down the line. It’s an eerie sci-fi sort of phenomenon.
There are secret listservs, listservs that are strictly monitored against flaming, formal academic focussed listservs with high standards who want solid research. For a short time I was accidentally on one that was hunting “plastic shaman” types in order to bring them down. I withdrew but was a little afraid of being labeled a plastic shaman myself and attacked. Luckily, I’m not an academic -- don’t even teach high school now.
One of my favorite list encounters was with Rolland Nadjiwan. He was trying to make a point and told about his father coming in from running his trapline in the snow, then sitting down at the grand piano in his cabin to run through his favorite concertos. I took him seriously, and someday I’ll write a short story that comes from that. He thought I didn’t know about trapping, but Bob Scriver was a fur buyer, so I knew a lot of Indian trappers. We bantered back and forth until Carter Revard intervened, worrying that we were getting out of hand. But in fact, Rolland and I kinda bonded. Recently he contacted me again and I was glad to hear from him.
Also, Heather Devine popped up in Calgary. (Her new book on the Metis has been published by the U of Calgary Press!) Kris Groberg has been in contact pretty much all along. Now and then I think of Linden, who has “traveled the wolf trail.” Or Michael Two Horses.
As a genre NA literature is quiet right now. All American publishing and book sales are a real mess and even people who have made their living by writing for a long time are thrown for a loop. But at the same time, blogs, epubishing, self-publishing, on-demand publishing -- all of these have been blooming. The problem is discovery and sorting -- where are they? Which are the ones we can trust? Who’s reviewing all this stuff? It’s scary. But I think, like list servs, in the end this major morphing of NA lit will be another renaissance. Like being fired, it can be an unrecognized blessing.
Friday, September 02, 2005
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