1870: Baker Massacre. A pre-emptive strike is urged against Mountain Chief by Lt. Col. Alfred Sully, now Superintendent of Indian Affairs and charged with stopping the whiskey trade. At the same time General Sheridan had “initiated a campaign” against the Blackft through orders to General Philip de Trobriand, the commander at Fort Shaw. He sent Colonel E.M Baker to intercept Mountain Chief and keep him from escaping into Canada. Instead Baker mistakenly struck the Heavyrunner band. Heavyrunner was a “peace” chief. 37 loddges. 173 Blackft killed. 140 captured. Lt. William Pease, Indian Agent for the Gros Ventre, reported only 15 of the dead were men of fighting age. The rest were old men and women except 50 were children under 12. Sully criticized Baker and Baker was removed from his command in September of 1870.
Still in 1870: Blackft reservation assigned to the Methodists. Whiskey trade flourishing. Alfred Healy, Joe Kipp, etc. fronted for Martin Maginnis, Isaac G. Baker, Charles Conrad, William Conrad, T.C. Power, John Power, C. A. Broadwater, Samuel T. Hauser. R.S. Ford (inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame) illegally drove several thousand head of cattle into the Sun River area. He was not alone. Lemon’s prospectors cross Marias Pass.
1871: More prospectors in Marias Pass. Congress ends treaty-making with Indians as sovereign nations. Hereforward, all covenants will be called “agreements.”
1872: Cattle drives begin to arrive in “Blackfeet territory.” Joshua or Jess Armitage, agent, dismissed for drunkenness. William Ensign, next agent, dismissed for embezzlement.
1873: Men from Fort Benton massacre Assiniboines in Cypress Hills. Duncan McDonald and some Kalipells cross Marias Pass on snowshoes that winter. Executive order moves the boundary of Blackft lands to the Sun River. Dan Floweree’s ranch was thus made legal. There remained ranchers farther north on what was still legally reservation.
1874: Royal Canadian Mounties arrive. Set up supply line to McLeod via Fort Benton. They mean to intercept the booze being supplied by Montana people who move from Fort Benton through the Blackfeet Reservation to Canada. Second boundary survey of the reservation. St. Peter MIssion established. Executive order moves reservation boundary to Birch Creek, which opens lands between Sun and Marias Rivers to homesteading. Agency goes to the northern side of Birch Creek, alongside Badger Creek at Running Crane’s place.
1875: Executive order of April 13. Blackft lose more land. William Ensign replaces John Wood as agent because Wood sides with the Blackft for their land and is criticized by state newspapers.
1870-83: The Methodists had been expected to put money into the Blackft but they make no financial contribution at all. Their agents are not an improvement.
1876: Wm. Veach and prospectors in Glacier. John Young, agent, gives jobs to his sons and daughters and is accused of putting tribal funds in his personal account. Still buffalo to hunt. Old people are the main occupants of the agency. Their rations are supplementary. When Agent John Young arrives, he is appalled by conditions. He is the first to give candy to Indian children at Christmas services afer reading the story of the First Christmas. He has a special concern for education. His daughters are put on the payroll as teachers.
1877: The Nez Perce exodus. U.S. scraps the Sioux Treaty of 1868 but this isn’t ratified by the tribe. Broadwater’s commodity goods are rejected as not good enough.
1879: Duncan McDonald, railroad man, crosses Marias Pass with a party. Fort Assiniboine is established. Lower court rules in the case of Standing Bear vs. Crook that an individual Indian has the same constitutional rights as a non-Indian. On Sept. 8 the first formal education begins at St. Peter’s mission on Sun River.
1880: Decision of Ex Parte Crow Dog establishes federal jurisdiction on the Indian reservations in cases of the seven major crimes: e.g. murder, rape, burglary, et al. Indian police are formed by the BIA. Old Agency on Badger Creek lasts from 1880-95. There is no more hunting north of the border. Serious mange epidemic kills many Blackft horses.
1881: Serious decline in the number of buffalo. Young asks for more food. Kipp is operating from Robaire. T.C. Power fails to deliver flour in full.
1882: Common knowledge that the buffalo are about gone. Bloods and N. Blackfoot from Canada are coming south in search of buffalo. Whitecalf is baptised by Father Prando. 1,600 Blackft are near the agency. The nomadic days are ending. Young is trying to get trespassing cattle off the rez, trying to buy more beef, and is accused of mismanagement by the government inspector. Young asks that no more money be put into goods -- just food. The people are starving. Four Blackfeet arrested for killing white man’s cattle.
1883: In February Young says his people are starving and the local cattlemen will not sell him beef. In April he tells the Indians to go ahead and eat any cattle on the rez. He is indicted by a grand jury for this. He is 72 years old, but the cattlemen accuse him of “keeping a Harem of young Indian girls.” Chair of the jury is William Conrad. His Circle outfit is running over 12,000 head of cattle on the rez without paying any fees. T.C. Power defends Young. He has the transportation contract for the annuity goods, which got destroyed this year in a steamboat fire. All wild game is gone. Inspectors and military confirm Blackft deaths by starvation.
1884: No more buffalo. Severe winter. 600 died. Blackfeet disarmed and living on meager and unfit rations. Many dead laid in the snow. Caskets charged to annuities. Some say the unsuccessful hunts of this November mark the end of Blackfeet culture.
Now we’re past Afghanistan and talking about the equivalent of famine in Somalia, except that these are American citizens on American soil in the presence of American beef. Now we’re talking hard-core genocide. Doubters should read John C. Ewers’ “The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains,” pages 290 to 296. Keep in mind that Ewers is a conservative man who often tactfully understates the case. The only reason he can offer for the Blackft not attacking the nearby whites is that the “shock and awe” campaign of the Massacre on the Marias by Baker was all too effective.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
1839 - 1870
1839: Kutenai War
1840: DeSmet visits the Small Robes Band of Blackft.
1841: DeSmet founds St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley. Point and Manuel visit the Blackft. December 25 the first five Blackft are baptized by Father DeSmet.
1844: Harvey et al massacred Blackft at Piegan post and ruined trade. 50 lodges of Small robe band destroyed by invasion of Crow. 160 women and children captures. Small Robes down to 20 lodges. Smallpox strikes again.
1845: Culbertson makes a new peace with the Blackft. Monroe camps with the Kutenai at St. Mary. DeSmet approaches Waterton/Glacier area from the north.
1846: DeSmet and Point (Jesuit missionaries) visit Piegan. Jesuit map made. Chief Victor (Flathead) helps the Small Robes (now 12 lodges) defeat a superior force of Crow in retaliation for 1944. In September 2,000 lodges of Blackft, Blood, North Blackft, Gros Ventre, Flathead, Nez Perce attend a mass by Father DeSmet. All wish to learn the “Black Robe” medicine.
1847: Fort Benton is built. Paul Kane hears the Big Horn battle story.
1849: BIA transferred from the War Department to the newly formed Department of the Interior. Blackft wipe out a 52-man Assiniboine horse raiding party.
1850: Treaty. Negotiations begun by Isaac Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, to provide for a transcontinental railroad route. One outcome considered is moving the Blackfeet off their reservation. Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Indian Affairs Superintendency in St. Louis, came to incorporate the Blackft and Gros Ventre into the “Peace of the Plains” becaues they were not in Fort Laramie in 1851 when the others signed. Part of this treaty was the allotment of $15,000 for the instruction of Indians in proper agricultural skills. Annuity goods delivered through the Chouteau Company (successor to the American Fur Company).
1851: Cholera epidemic on the upper Missouri. Laramie Treaty Council defines the hunting grounds of the various plains Indians.
1853: Isaac Stevens meets with the Blackft to prepare a treaty. He remarks that the “quantity of buffaloes is unbelieveable.”
1854: Lieutenant Doty and Monroe explore eastern Glacier Park area. Crow forego Laramie Treaty annuities for fear of the Blackft.
1855: Isaac Stevens makes Judith Treaty (AKA “Lame Bull Treaty”). $15,000 gift. First treaty between Blackft and U.S. Government. No more Small Robes band left.
1856: Edwin Hatch appointed first agent for the Blackfeet Agency. He was present for five out of the next nine months.
1856: Lame Bull, chief signer of the Judith Treaty, is killed when his horse is run over by a large bull during a hunt.
1857: “The Slipping Year.” Area is covered with ice. Agent Vaughn establishes the Sun River Farm. Alfred Vaughn came as a replacement. He was married to an Indian and had worked for the Office of Indian Affairs for fifteen years. Complained constantly to the government about the quality of annuity goods. Smallpox strikes again.
1858: Thomas Blakiston explores Waterton and northern Glacier. Estimate 7,000 Blackft.
1859: Jesuits accept Alfred J. Vaughn’s invitation to build a mission among the Blackft.
1860: Boundaries of the reservation surveyed. Bull Society (for the big powerful men) dies out. First steamship makes it to For Benton.
1861: Henry Reed is the next agent. Described as “weak and inept.” That same year the Blackft annuities supposedly burned with the steamboat Chippewa. Chouteau offered to replace them from his own stock. Reed put Malcolm Clarke in charge of the problem. Suggestions of graft.
1862: The Mullan Road is in progress. The annuities came with no proper bills of lading and 20 boxes were missing.
1863: Reed goes home to Iowa. 18-month gap with no agent. James Vail is the supervising farmer, evidently not a good one. There is an eclipse in summer. Smallpox again.
1864: Montana Territory created. Gad E. Upson is next agent. He is inexperienced and into private mining. Whiskey trade booming. Goods arrived late, damaged and incomplete. ◊Vail is still hired.
1865: Meagher attempts unauthorized treaty with Blackft which precipitates hostilities at Fort Benton. Fighting between Blackfeet and white settlers. Another reservation push-back of boundaries: never ratified, signed by a minor chief passing by. Residents of Fort Benton, where the agency is, attack Bloods who retaliate against woodcutters. (They sold the wood to steamships.) Upson negotiated a treaty, but died on the way to Washington, D.C. Deputy Agent Hirum Upham became a clerk to Indian Trader T.C. Power & Co. Whiskey trade flourishes.
1866: Little Dog and son assassinated. George B. Wright becomes agent. He rents warehouse space from William J. Clarke, a business partner of the late Gad Upson. Wright does a lot of traveling. He is accused of selling annuity goods.
1861 to 1866: War between Blackft and Gros Ventre, who are now starving.
1887: Acting governor Thomas Francis Meagher issues a proclamation for volunteers to join the war against the Blackft. Idea terminated when Meagher takes a dive in the night from a steamboat at Fort Benton and is never seen again. (For a novelized biography of the fiery Irish Meagher, try “The Exile” by Richard S. Wheeler.) The new governor, Green Clay Smith, is ex-officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Montana. He asks for the Indian goods money in cash to his own account, but can’t keep track of it. Uses Indian money to pay his own debts and gambles some of it. Agency is moved to Teton river and then Milk River. Special Agent Nathaniel Pope finds the situation corrupt and recommends reform.
1868: Sioux Treaty of 1868 gives the Teton Sioux the Black Hills. Special Agent William J. Cullen recommends reform.
1869: First rebellion of Riel in Canada. Prospectors are arriving. Three Persons Agency is established at Choteau and headquarters are moved there. Site picked by chiefs. (Now marked with huge stones. An excellent video of kids visiting the site is available through Piegan Institute, PO Box 909, Browning, MT. 59417)
1869-70: Years of hunger and smallpox, violence and whiskey trade. Much interference from the “merchant princes” I.G. Baker and T.C. Power.
1870: The Baker Massacre
The whole situation cries out for comparison with today’s Afghanistan and Iraq.
1840: DeSmet visits the Small Robes Band of Blackft.
1841: DeSmet founds St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley. Point and Manuel visit the Blackft. December 25 the first five Blackft are baptized by Father DeSmet.
1844: Harvey et al massacred Blackft at Piegan post and ruined trade. 50 lodges of Small robe band destroyed by invasion of Crow. 160 women and children captures. Small Robes down to 20 lodges. Smallpox strikes again.
1845: Culbertson makes a new peace with the Blackft. Monroe camps with the Kutenai at St. Mary. DeSmet approaches Waterton/Glacier area from the north.
1846: DeSmet and Point (Jesuit missionaries) visit Piegan. Jesuit map made. Chief Victor (Flathead) helps the Small Robes (now 12 lodges) defeat a superior force of Crow in retaliation for 1944. In September 2,000 lodges of Blackft, Blood, North Blackft, Gros Ventre, Flathead, Nez Perce attend a mass by Father DeSmet. All wish to learn the “Black Robe” medicine.
1847: Fort Benton is built. Paul Kane hears the Big Horn battle story.
1849: BIA transferred from the War Department to the newly formed Department of the Interior. Blackft wipe out a 52-man Assiniboine horse raiding party.
1850: Treaty. Negotiations begun by Isaac Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, to provide for a transcontinental railroad route. One outcome considered is moving the Blackfeet off their reservation. Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Indian Affairs Superintendency in St. Louis, came to incorporate the Blackft and Gros Ventre into the “Peace of the Plains” becaues they were not in Fort Laramie in 1851 when the others signed. Part of this treaty was the allotment of $15,000 for the instruction of Indians in proper agricultural skills. Annuity goods delivered through the Chouteau Company (successor to the American Fur Company).
1851: Cholera epidemic on the upper Missouri. Laramie Treaty Council defines the hunting grounds of the various plains Indians.
1853: Isaac Stevens meets with the Blackft to prepare a treaty. He remarks that the “quantity of buffaloes is unbelieveable.”
1854: Lieutenant Doty and Monroe explore eastern Glacier Park area. Crow forego Laramie Treaty annuities for fear of the Blackft.
1855: Isaac Stevens makes Judith Treaty (AKA “Lame Bull Treaty”). $15,000 gift. First treaty between Blackft and U.S. Government. No more Small Robes band left.
1856: Edwin Hatch appointed first agent for the Blackfeet Agency. He was present for five out of the next nine months.
1856: Lame Bull, chief signer of the Judith Treaty, is killed when his horse is run over by a large bull during a hunt.
1857: “The Slipping Year.” Area is covered with ice. Agent Vaughn establishes the Sun River Farm. Alfred Vaughn came as a replacement. He was married to an Indian and had worked for the Office of Indian Affairs for fifteen years. Complained constantly to the government about the quality of annuity goods. Smallpox strikes again.
1858: Thomas Blakiston explores Waterton and northern Glacier. Estimate 7,000 Blackft.
1859: Jesuits accept Alfred J. Vaughn’s invitation to build a mission among the Blackft.
1860: Boundaries of the reservation surveyed. Bull Society (for the big powerful men) dies out. First steamship makes it to For Benton.
1861: Henry Reed is the next agent. Described as “weak and inept.” That same year the Blackft annuities supposedly burned with the steamboat Chippewa. Chouteau offered to replace them from his own stock. Reed put Malcolm Clarke in charge of the problem. Suggestions of graft.
1862: The Mullan Road is in progress. The annuities came with no proper bills of lading and 20 boxes were missing.
1863: Reed goes home to Iowa. 18-month gap with no agent. James Vail is the supervising farmer, evidently not a good one. There is an eclipse in summer. Smallpox again.
1864: Montana Territory created. Gad E. Upson is next agent. He is inexperienced and into private mining. Whiskey trade booming. Goods arrived late, damaged and incomplete. ◊Vail is still hired.
1865: Meagher attempts unauthorized treaty with Blackft which precipitates hostilities at Fort Benton. Fighting between Blackfeet and white settlers. Another reservation push-back of boundaries: never ratified, signed by a minor chief passing by. Residents of Fort Benton, where the agency is, attack Bloods who retaliate against woodcutters. (They sold the wood to steamships.) Upson negotiated a treaty, but died on the way to Washington, D.C. Deputy Agent Hirum Upham became a clerk to Indian Trader T.C. Power & Co. Whiskey trade flourishes.
1866: Little Dog and son assassinated. George B. Wright becomes agent. He rents warehouse space from William J. Clarke, a business partner of the late Gad Upson. Wright does a lot of traveling. He is accused of selling annuity goods.
1861 to 1866: War between Blackft and Gros Ventre, who are now starving.
1887: Acting governor Thomas Francis Meagher issues a proclamation for volunteers to join the war against the Blackft. Idea terminated when Meagher takes a dive in the night from a steamboat at Fort Benton and is never seen again. (For a novelized biography of the fiery Irish Meagher, try “The Exile” by Richard S. Wheeler.) The new governor, Green Clay Smith, is ex-officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Montana. He asks for the Indian goods money in cash to his own account, but can’t keep track of it. Uses Indian money to pay his own debts and gambles some of it. Agency is moved to Teton river and then Milk River. Special Agent Nathaniel Pope finds the situation corrupt and recommends reform.
1868: Sioux Treaty of 1868 gives the Teton Sioux the Black Hills. Special Agent William J. Cullen recommends reform.
1869: First rebellion of Riel in Canada. Prospectors are arriving. Three Persons Agency is established at Choteau and headquarters are moved there. Site picked by chiefs. (Now marked with huge stones. An excellent video of kids visiting the site is available through Piegan Institute, PO Box 909, Browning, MT. 59417)
1869-70: Years of hunger and smallpox, violence and whiskey trade. Much interference from the “merchant princes” I.G. Baker and T.C. Power.
1870: The Baker Massacre
The whole situation cries out for comparison with today’s Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
TIME-LINE 1806 - 1837
1806: Captain Lewis and companions skirmish on the Marias after leaving Camp Disappointment at the junction of the Two Medicine and Badger Creek. He-That-Looks-at-the-Calf and another are shot.
1806: John Colter makes his famous stripped “race for life.”
1808: Finan McDonald builds a post at Kutenai Falls.
1809: David Thompson founds a post at Thompson Falls, visits Flathead Lake. Henry submits a population count: Piegan, 350 lodges and 700 warriors; Blackfoot, 200 lodges and 520 warriors; Blood, 100 lodges and 200 warriors. Whites in trading posts: 200.
1810: Thompson sends McDonald, Michel Bourdeaux and Batiste Boucher with many Indians over Marias Pass. They battle the Blackfeet near Skyland Siding on Bear Creek. Andrew Henry and Pierre Menard are driven out of Three Forks by Blackft. Joseph Howse may have post near present Kalispell. Blackft have first contact with US Soldiers. Robert Stewart skirts Blackft territory and charts the Oregon Trail.
1811: Empty Kutenai lodges still standing near Rocky Mountain House.
1818: 49th parallel becomes US/Canada border.
1820: Hugh Monroe is living with the Blackfeet.
1823: Blackfeet attack Henry near Great Falls.
1828: Kenneth McKenzie and James Kipp found Fort Union.
1830: McKenzie sends Jacob Berger to win over Blackft for trade. Berger meets Blackft on Badger Creek. Blackft agree to traders but NOT trappers. Worcester vs. Georgia: U.S. Supreme Court rules Indian tribes must be recognized as foreign nations with the right to govern their own internal affairs. Severe winter. Many Blackft perish and the warriors go on the warpath the next summer to capture women and children to recoup losses.
1831: McKenzie arranges a peace between Blackft and Assiniboine.
1832: First steamboat reaches Fort Union, bringing George Catlin, who says the Blackft are “perhaps the most powerful tribe on the continent: 16,500 people.”
1833: Prince Maximilian and Alexander Culbertson arrive upriver. Maximilian estimates 18,000 to 20,000 Blackfeet. A MAJOR meteor shower, taken as bad luck. On August 28, 600 Sioux and Assiniboine attack 20 Blackft lodges outside Fort MacKenzie. Bodmer witnesses and depicts it. Blackft push Sioux and Assiniboine back to the Marias River and east past the Bear’s Paw. There is a total eclipse of the sun.
1834: Bureau of Indian Affairs is formed in the War Department. First government official designated to meet with the Blackft. Fort McKenzie lists their intake thus: 9,000 buffalo hides; 1,020 beaver; 180 wolf; 19 bear; 390 buffalo tongues; 40 otter; 2,800 muskrat; 200 red fox; 1,500 prairie dogs.
1836: Hugh Monroe sees the St. Mary Lakes. Smallpox pandemic along the Missouri. Mandan exterminated. Pikuni Blkft suffer grave losses. 6,000 Blood and North Blackfeet perish. Estimated 7 - 12 thousand Blackft perish in the U.S. No life from Fort Benton to Three Forks. Horses and dogs dead. Some evidence of deliberate infection.
1837: Smallpox in Blackft and all tribes north of the Sioux. Caused by clothes infected with smallpox. Alfred Jacob Miller estimated forty to fifty trappers killed by the Blackft. Americans blame the British for inciting killings.
By now trappers, traders, adventurers and artists are milling around in Blackft country, infecting the locals with deadly disease. The modern parallel might be Africa or South American frontiers where humans act as vectors, both carrying disease in and carrying them out. HIV/AIDS is the long slow modern pandemic and Ebola Fever is the disease so violent that it usually kills the vectors before they can pass it on. Smallpox was in between.
It’s clear now that though at first whites didn’t think of infecting Indians deliberately, they soon realized the potential, and though Lewis & Clark carried smallpox vaccine with them, they didn’t vaccinate enough people to do much good. Of course, it is widely speculated that syphillis caught in the NW killed Lewis. He had thought it was safe to seek a little comfort since they were so far from whites -- but it hadn’t occurred to him that sailors had been accessing the Pacific Coast for a long time and he wasn’t so far from that coast. (A fictionalized history of Lewis’ fate is “Eclipse: A Novel of Lewis and Clark” Forge, 0-312-87846-X.) When explorers start out nowadays, they take a lot of condoms.
Long, long ago I took a history class in which the professor gave us some pointers on how to read journals and other sequential document records of chronological events. What he pointed out was that even the gaps will tell you something. There is one conscientious accounting of births and deaths in Europe that comes to a thirty year blank. Puzzling until you realize that the gap covers the Black Plague pandemic that decimated Europe. It was brought back from Mongolia by the silk trader caravans -- Marco Polo and all that. What’s amazing that the recording book starts back up again.
Lately I’ve been seeing reinterpretations of the European plague as a kind of social harrowing that broke up rigid controls by small kingdoms and religious orders. New religious orders appeared. (I’ve always loved the Cistercians, who formed at this time to put land back into crops and always built their monasteries right on top of mountain streams so that they could channel clean water in and filth out. A rigorous bunch.) There is even the suggestion that the plague indirectly caused the Renaissance by making people anxious to find new ways, to learn new things. It took a century or so to flower.
A Blackft renaissance may be on the way now. It doesn’t happen overnight. One of the most interesting phenomena is that so many youngsters see the value of college and their goal, when they finish school, is to return to the reservation to help their people. It’s not lip service. They’re doing it. Some did it twenty years ago. They don’t make a big fuss -- they just get to work.
1806: John Colter makes his famous stripped “race for life.”
1808: Finan McDonald builds a post at Kutenai Falls.
1809: David Thompson founds a post at Thompson Falls, visits Flathead Lake. Henry submits a population count: Piegan, 350 lodges and 700 warriors; Blackfoot, 200 lodges and 520 warriors; Blood, 100 lodges and 200 warriors. Whites in trading posts: 200.
1810: Thompson sends McDonald, Michel Bourdeaux and Batiste Boucher with many Indians over Marias Pass. They battle the Blackfeet near Skyland Siding on Bear Creek. Andrew Henry and Pierre Menard are driven out of Three Forks by Blackft. Joseph Howse may have post near present Kalispell. Blackft have first contact with US Soldiers. Robert Stewart skirts Blackft territory and charts the Oregon Trail.
1811: Empty Kutenai lodges still standing near Rocky Mountain House.
1818: 49th parallel becomes US/Canada border.
1820: Hugh Monroe is living with the Blackfeet.
1823: Blackfeet attack Henry near Great Falls.
1828: Kenneth McKenzie and James Kipp found Fort Union.
1830: McKenzie sends Jacob Berger to win over Blackft for trade. Berger meets Blackft on Badger Creek. Blackft agree to traders but NOT trappers. Worcester vs. Georgia: U.S. Supreme Court rules Indian tribes must be recognized as foreign nations with the right to govern their own internal affairs. Severe winter. Many Blackft perish and the warriors go on the warpath the next summer to capture women and children to recoup losses.
1831: McKenzie arranges a peace between Blackft and Assiniboine.
1832: First steamboat reaches Fort Union, bringing George Catlin, who says the Blackft are “perhaps the most powerful tribe on the continent: 16,500 people.”
1833: Prince Maximilian and Alexander Culbertson arrive upriver. Maximilian estimates 18,000 to 20,000 Blackfeet. A MAJOR meteor shower, taken as bad luck. On August 28, 600 Sioux and Assiniboine attack 20 Blackft lodges outside Fort MacKenzie. Bodmer witnesses and depicts it. Blackft push Sioux and Assiniboine back to the Marias River and east past the Bear’s Paw. There is a total eclipse of the sun.
1834: Bureau of Indian Affairs is formed in the War Department. First government official designated to meet with the Blackft. Fort McKenzie lists their intake thus: 9,000 buffalo hides; 1,020 beaver; 180 wolf; 19 bear; 390 buffalo tongues; 40 otter; 2,800 muskrat; 200 red fox; 1,500 prairie dogs.
1836: Hugh Monroe sees the St. Mary Lakes. Smallpox pandemic along the Missouri. Mandan exterminated. Pikuni Blkft suffer grave losses. 6,000 Blood and North Blackfeet perish. Estimated 7 - 12 thousand Blackft perish in the U.S. No life from Fort Benton to Three Forks. Horses and dogs dead. Some evidence of deliberate infection.
1837: Smallpox in Blackft and all tribes north of the Sioux. Caused by clothes infected with smallpox. Alfred Jacob Miller estimated forty to fifty trappers killed by the Blackft. Americans blame the British for inciting killings.
By now trappers, traders, adventurers and artists are milling around in Blackft country, infecting the locals with deadly disease. The modern parallel might be Africa or South American frontiers where humans act as vectors, both carrying disease in and carrying them out. HIV/AIDS is the long slow modern pandemic and Ebola Fever is the disease so violent that it usually kills the vectors before they can pass it on. Smallpox was in between.
It’s clear now that though at first whites didn’t think of infecting Indians deliberately, they soon realized the potential, and though Lewis & Clark carried smallpox vaccine with them, they didn’t vaccinate enough people to do much good. Of course, it is widely speculated that syphillis caught in the NW killed Lewis. He had thought it was safe to seek a little comfort since they were so far from whites -- but it hadn’t occurred to him that sailors had been accessing the Pacific Coast for a long time and he wasn’t so far from that coast. (A fictionalized history of Lewis’ fate is “Eclipse: A Novel of Lewis and Clark” Forge, 0-312-87846-X.) When explorers start out nowadays, they take a lot of condoms.
Long, long ago I took a history class in which the professor gave us some pointers on how to read journals and other sequential document records of chronological events. What he pointed out was that even the gaps will tell you something. There is one conscientious accounting of births and deaths in Europe that comes to a thirty year blank. Puzzling until you realize that the gap covers the Black Plague pandemic that decimated Europe. It was brought back from Mongolia by the silk trader caravans -- Marco Polo and all that. What’s amazing that the recording book starts back up again.
Lately I’ve been seeing reinterpretations of the European plague as a kind of social harrowing that broke up rigid controls by small kingdoms and religious orders. New religious orders appeared. (I’ve always loved the Cistercians, who formed at this time to put land back into crops and always built their monasteries right on top of mountain streams so that they could channel clean water in and filth out. A rigorous bunch.) There is even the suggestion that the plague indirectly caused the Renaissance by making people anxious to find new ways, to learn new things. It took a century or so to flower.
A Blackft renaissance may be on the way now. It doesn’t happen overnight. One of the most interesting phenomena is that so many youngsters see the value of college and their goal, when they finish school, is to return to the reservation to help their people. It’s not lip service. They’re doing it. Some did it twenty years ago. They don’t make a big fuss -- they just get to work.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Family Photo Album
Another resource that I keep close beside my computer is a photo book edited by William E. Farr and with a foreword by James Welch. “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival.” (U. of Washington Press, @1984 is held by Browning Public School District #9.) Besides writing the excellent text, Farr often makes available the images to other scholars. He is a history professor at the University of Montana in Missoula.
In the most humble old log cabin on the reservation, people could always pull open a drawer or trunk and show you wonderful photos The earliest in this collection are by Walter McClintock. Photos of their own world evoked two contradictory impulses in people: to clutch them close, wrapped in memories, and hide them to keep them safe -- or to show them to everyone with pride, evidence of the family lookin’ good. I especially treasure the photos of marriage partners, sometimes seemingly a mismatch, others so young you worry for them.
Farr and Gary Schmautz, a history teacher at Browning High School, were probably the only people who could have done this because any local Blackft would have aroused suspicion and jealousy on the part of rivals. These white men were outsiders. By the time Farr and Schmautz had examined these photos over and over, discussed them with owners, organized patterns, reflected, and reconsidered, they were no longer outsiders.
My father-in-law’s mercantile store (1904) is on page 41. Many of the old people in Adolf Hungry Wolf’s stories are here. I’m especially fond of a portrait of Malenda Wren, resplendent in an elegant sequin Victorian yoke. With her hair up and small drop earrings, she could pass for an Italian or Spanish beauty. On the page across from her is Tom Dawson, raised and educated in Scotland because of his white trader father, Tom made a beeline back home as soon as he could. He’s shown with a big old billy mountain goat, worthy of the Great Northern railroad symbol.
Every photo has a story, but one that always absorbs me is on page 60. It’s the school J.H. Sherburne started in his upstairs for the town kids. The teacher is Sherburne’s nephew. The two white boys are the children of Thad Scriver’s partner at the Browning Mercantile. By chance, someone ran across the teacher’s report on this 1913-14 class that the nephew sent to the Denver central BIA office and sent it to me. He had listed each child and indicated what their weak and strong points were. The girls came off pretty well, but you can imagine the boys. We all knew these same people as middle-aged adults When I showed the comments (the usual things, like “so-and-so must learn to govern his temper,” or “so-and-so is very lazy” or maybe “cooperative” or maybe “quick to learn”) to friends, they would say, “Oh, that’s just what he was like his whole life!” But sometimes it would be their grandpa and they didn’t like the comments. In the Sixties there was a fire in that classroom and I helped carry out the desks and maps to the Scriver lawn next door. It had been untouched all those years.
On page 130 is a posed photo of “Moonlight School at Browning” where “citizens” were taught to read. Everyone is sitting up straight and holding an open book. Two-Guns Whitecalf is front and center -- he is NOT looking at his book! They are in the new building -- more about it later -- that is one of the oldest now. The teachers stand along the walls. These are not Curtis photos of people wearing borrowed finery, but rather people who a little earlier had stamped snow or mud off their boots so they could come in.
One of the overarching convictions, “tropes” or metaphors has been “The Vanishing Indian.” Brian Dippie wrote the definitive book. (“The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy” by Brian W. Dippie, University Press of Kansas. @1982. ISBN 0-7006-0507-X) At first the idea was that Native Americans were vanishing and soon there would be no “old-time Indians” left. Much of the interest in them was heartbreak over their presumed “doom.” People will say with great authority, even around here, “Well, all the old full-bloods are gone now.” But they aren’t gone. They are just a little different, not that much.
Indians put on Frodo’s “disappearing” cloak in order to stay safe. They slip among us all the time, ghosting in and out of our very bodies. If everyone who has Indian blood stood up at once, few of us would still be seated. Winston Churchill was part-Indian through his American mother. Heather Locklear is Indian. Someone should write a book about “The Reappearing Indian.”
The people in this book are the people mentioned by Grinnell, Schultz, Wissler, Hungry Wolf, the people who posed for Charlie Russell. See for yourself the slaughterhouse, the boarding school, the encampments, the log houses, On page 121 is Louis Plenty Treaty, whom Hungry Wolf calls Bear Child -- he’s “outstanding in his field.” On page 134 is the W.P.A. sewing club from Two Medicine, seven young women who were powerful all their lives, like the seven sisters in the Big Dipper. Mae Williamson, second from the left, was the first woman on the Tribal Council. On page 133 is the Heart Butte painting club, three guys who appear to be taking scenery as their subject. Tom Dog Gun, Aloysius Evans and Sam Calf Robe. Where are their paintings? Maybe out in the old bunkhouse? Maybe sold to a tourist? The photos raise about as many questions as they answer.
We’ve moved on to recording the moment with video now (no mercy for politicians) but also we’ve learned how to falsify images so that people are erased or added. We can make it look as though a couple of cowboys are herding a hundred cats. But these photos are from an innocent time before World War II. Maybe someone went in and put on their ceremonial dress, but that was about it. And it’s plenty.
In the most humble old log cabin on the reservation, people could always pull open a drawer or trunk and show you wonderful photos The earliest in this collection are by Walter McClintock. Photos of their own world evoked two contradictory impulses in people: to clutch them close, wrapped in memories, and hide them to keep them safe -- or to show them to everyone with pride, evidence of the family lookin’ good. I especially treasure the photos of marriage partners, sometimes seemingly a mismatch, others so young you worry for them.
Farr and Gary Schmautz, a history teacher at Browning High School, were probably the only people who could have done this because any local Blackft would have aroused suspicion and jealousy on the part of rivals. These white men were outsiders. By the time Farr and Schmautz had examined these photos over and over, discussed them with owners, organized patterns, reflected, and reconsidered, they were no longer outsiders.
My father-in-law’s mercantile store (1904) is on page 41. Many of the old people in Adolf Hungry Wolf’s stories are here. I’m especially fond of a portrait of Malenda Wren, resplendent in an elegant sequin Victorian yoke. With her hair up and small drop earrings, she could pass for an Italian or Spanish beauty. On the page across from her is Tom Dawson, raised and educated in Scotland because of his white trader father, Tom made a beeline back home as soon as he could. He’s shown with a big old billy mountain goat, worthy of the Great Northern railroad symbol.
Every photo has a story, but one that always absorbs me is on page 60. It’s the school J.H. Sherburne started in his upstairs for the town kids. The teacher is Sherburne’s nephew. The two white boys are the children of Thad Scriver’s partner at the Browning Mercantile. By chance, someone ran across the teacher’s report on this 1913-14 class that the nephew sent to the Denver central BIA office and sent it to me. He had listed each child and indicated what their weak and strong points were. The girls came off pretty well, but you can imagine the boys. We all knew these same people as middle-aged adults When I showed the comments (the usual things, like “so-and-so must learn to govern his temper,” or “so-and-so is very lazy” or maybe “cooperative” or maybe “quick to learn”) to friends, they would say, “Oh, that’s just what he was like his whole life!” But sometimes it would be their grandpa and they didn’t like the comments. In the Sixties there was a fire in that classroom and I helped carry out the desks and maps to the Scriver lawn next door. It had been untouched all those years.
On page 130 is a posed photo of “Moonlight School at Browning” where “citizens” were taught to read. Everyone is sitting up straight and holding an open book. Two-Guns Whitecalf is front and center -- he is NOT looking at his book! They are in the new building -- more about it later -- that is one of the oldest now. The teachers stand along the walls. These are not Curtis photos of people wearing borrowed finery, but rather people who a little earlier had stamped snow or mud off their boots so they could come in.
One of the overarching convictions, “tropes” or metaphors has been “The Vanishing Indian.” Brian Dippie wrote the definitive book. (“The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy” by Brian W. Dippie, University Press of Kansas. @1982. ISBN 0-7006-0507-X) At first the idea was that Native Americans were vanishing and soon there would be no “old-time Indians” left. Much of the interest in them was heartbreak over their presumed “doom.” People will say with great authority, even around here, “Well, all the old full-bloods are gone now.” But they aren’t gone. They are just a little different, not that much.
Indians put on Frodo’s “disappearing” cloak in order to stay safe. They slip among us all the time, ghosting in and out of our very bodies. If everyone who has Indian blood stood up at once, few of us would still be seated. Winston Churchill was part-Indian through his American mother. Heather Locklear is Indian. Someone should write a book about “The Reappearing Indian.”
The people in this book are the people mentioned by Grinnell, Schultz, Wissler, Hungry Wolf, the people who posed for Charlie Russell. See for yourself the slaughterhouse, the boarding school, the encampments, the log houses, On page 121 is Louis Plenty Treaty, whom Hungry Wolf calls Bear Child -- he’s “outstanding in his field.” On page 134 is the W.P.A. sewing club from Two Medicine, seven young women who were powerful all their lives, like the seven sisters in the Big Dipper. Mae Williamson, second from the left, was the first woman on the Tribal Council. On page 133 is the Heart Butte painting club, three guys who appear to be taking scenery as their subject. Tom Dog Gun, Aloysius Evans and Sam Calf Robe. Where are their paintings? Maybe out in the old bunkhouse? Maybe sold to a tourist? The photos raise about as many questions as they answer.
We’ve moved on to recording the moment with video now (no mercy for politicians) but also we’ve learned how to falsify images so that people are erased or added. We can make it look as though a couple of cowboys are herding a hundred cats. But these photos are from an innocent time before World War II. Maybe someone went in and put on their ceremonial dress, but that was about it. And it’s plenty.
Monday, April 11, 2005
One Man's Family
April 14, 2005
One Man’s Family
Back in the Sixties, when hippies finally began to show up at Browning Indian Days, scandalizing the old mission-raised ladies who ran their lodges in traditional ways, a man named Adolf Gutohrlein showed up with a blonde wife and a little baby, traveling in a camper converted from an armored car. This Swiss/Austrian/Hungarian man from California was devoted to Blackft and hoped to be assimilated. The next time he arrived, he was with Beverly Little Bear, a Canadian Blackft, and was called Hungry Wolf.
The Hungry Wolf marriage partnership lasted a long time and produced many handsome, intelligent, lovable children. The family business was producing artifacts and homemade books about how to make artifacts, plus much anthropological information and photographs from old books Adolf wore braids and spoke Blackft. The family lived like old-time Indians as much as they could. We admired Beverly who seemed able to manage all of this. And we were a little wary. “Wannabes” can be predatory.
Over time their book-making -- they called their booklets “Good Medicine” -- became more sophisticated and found publishers. The first “real” book was eighth in the Harper & Row Native American Publishing Program. (The other seven were “Seven Arrows” by Hyemeyohsts Storm; “Ascending Red Cedar Moon” and “Carriers of the Dream Wheel” by Duane Niatum; “Winter in the Blood” and “Riding the Earthboy 40: by James Welch; “Indians’ Summer” by Nas’Naga; and “Going for the Rain,” by Simon Ortiz.)
This Hungry Wolf book was called “The Blood People: a Division of the Blackfoot Confederacy, An Illustrated Interpretation of the Old Ways.” (Copyright 1977. ISBN 0-06-450600-2) It is exactly what the title says.
“The Ways of My Grandmothers,” the second book, is by Beverly Hungry Wolf alone and gives credit to Ruth Little Bear, Beverly’s mom. (William Morrow and Company, Inc. Copyright 1980. ISBN 0-688-03665-1)
The next book is “Shadows of the Buffalo: A Family Odyssey Among the Indians” by Adolf and Beverly Hungry Wolf. (William Morrow and Col, Inc. Copyright 1983. ISNB 0-688-01680-4) Political correctness has entered the context and it is a far more humble book, quite conscious that romantic notions overlook a lot of tough realities, and suddenly aware that lines are being drawn about who is entitled to write such books. I know the old people in this book and he does them justice.
The most recent book that I’ve seen is “Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith” by Beverly Hungry Wolf. The publisher is given as “Canadian Caboose Press,” which I take to be a second self-publishing imprint. By now Adolf was really into railroads and wrote books on them. The family was said to be living in a railroad car -- maybe a caboose. (Copyright 1996. ISBN 0-920698-56-5) Actually there were several cabooses and rail cars, amounting to a private museum. Adolf went to Cuba where ancient railways still exist, and acted as an engineer for a while.
I hear the Hungry Wolf marriage has broken apart for the usual reasons. Adolf made a trip back to Europe where he was much admired, especially by women. Beverly was badly hurt in a car accident and lost her mother. The kids were grown and established. Maybe they’ll team up again later.
Their writing is charming because it is personal, often direct accounts of their own experiences, and bridges several boundaries: between white and tribal, between the US and Canada, between the old days and now, and -- most endearingly, between their old selves and their new selves. They are not afraid to disclose that they grow and change.
Recently when Mike Swims Under, an important wise man and guide on the Amskapi Pikuni side, passed on to the Sand Hills, at the funeral (Methodist) Adolph Hungry Wolf sang every relevant Siksika song he knew -- maybe some that were irrelevant, grumbled those who didn’t know that many. It took a long time. For a while Beverly taught at Piegan Institute, an immersion Blackft language school in Browning. Also, at Blackfeet Community College. Since Bob Scriver died and his shop and museum were dispersed, it’s harder for me to keep track of them. They used to check in, now and then. Bob intended to give his Thunder Medicine Pipe to Okan Hungry Wolf but died too soon.
When I used to read to my high school classes, “The Ways of My Grandmothers” was always one of the favorites. I should reread all four books. I pick them up and get distracted by the photos. It was estimated that the “Good Medicine” archives held 20,000 ancient photos plus their own family snapshots.
The Blackft language incorporates a distinction that translates roughly as “real.” Grizzly bears are “real bears,” while black bears are “nothing bears.” Buffalo are “real meat” while elk, deer, cow are “nothing meat.” Siksika are “real people” and everyone else is “nothing people.” “Nothing” is not really meant to be pejorative, I think -- it just implies that whatever-it-is isn’t “primary.” It’s not the real thing. It doesn’t matter so much. All that nothing stuff is a default category -- not much is known about all that.
I hesitate to say that these four books and the others are “real books,” because those would be books written in the Blackft language, wouldn’t they? Is it possible to write a modern book about the “real people” since their language was never written, but represented by iconography?
But they are warmer and more real than collections of legends (which they often include) or anthro-rigarmarole. Bob and I were suspicious of Adolf at first. Was he running a con game of some kind? Certainly he has a few Napi/Trickster aspects. But gradually he became “real,” rather in the way that the velveteen rabbit in the child’s story became real. It just took four decades. Maybe he felt the same way about us.
One Man’s Family
Back in the Sixties, when hippies finally began to show up at Browning Indian Days, scandalizing the old mission-raised ladies who ran their lodges in traditional ways, a man named Adolf Gutohrlein showed up with a blonde wife and a little baby, traveling in a camper converted from an armored car. This Swiss/Austrian/Hungarian man from California was devoted to Blackft and hoped to be assimilated. The next time he arrived, he was with Beverly Little Bear, a Canadian Blackft, and was called Hungry Wolf.
The Hungry Wolf marriage partnership lasted a long time and produced many handsome, intelligent, lovable children. The family business was producing artifacts and homemade books about how to make artifacts, plus much anthropological information and photographs from old books Adolf wore braids and spoke Blackft. The family lived like old-time Indians as much as they could. We admired Beverly who seemed able to manage all of this. And we were a little wary. “Wannabes” can be predatory.
Over time their book-making -- they called their booklets “Good Medicine” -- became more sophisticated and found publishers. The first “real” book was eighth in the Harper & Row Native American Publishing Program. (The other seven were “Seven Arrows” by Hyemeyohsts Storm; “Ascending Red Cedar Moon” and “Carriers of the Dream Wheel” by Duane Niatum; “Winter in the Blood” and “Riding the Earthboy 40: by James Welch; “Indians’ Summer” by Nas’Naga; and “Going for the Rain,” by Simon Ortiz.)
This Hungry Wolf book was called “The Blood People: a Division of the Blackfoot Confederacy, An Illustrated Interpretation of the Old Ways.” (Copyright 1977. ISBN 0-06-450600-2) It is exactly what the title says.
“The Ways of My Grandmothers,” the second book, is by Beverly Hungry Wolf alone and gives credit to Ruth Little Bear, Beverly’s mom. (William Morrow and Company, Inc. Copyright 1980. ISBN 0-688-03665-1)
The next book is “Shadows of the Buffalo: A Family Odyssey Among the Indians” by Adolf and Beverly Hungry Wolf. (William Morrow and Col, Inc. Copyright 1983. ISNB 0-688-01680-4) Political correctness has entered the context and it is a far more humble book, quite conscious that romantic notions overlook a lot of tough realities, and suddenly aware that lines are being drawn about who is entitled to write such books. I know the old people in this book and he does them justice.
The most recent book that I’ve seen is “Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith” by Beverly Hungry Wolf. The publisher is given as “Canadian Caboose Press,” which I take to be a second self-publishing imprint. By now Adolf was really into railroads and wrote books on them. The family was said to be living in a railroad car -- maybe a caboose. (Copyright 1996. ISBN 0-920698-56-5) Actually there were several cabooses and rail cars, amounting to a private museum. Adolf went to Cuba where ancient railways still exist, and acted as an engineer for a while.
I hear the Hungry Wolf marriage has broken apart for the usual reasons. Adolf made a trip back to Europe where he was much admired, especially by women. Beverly was badly hurt in a car accident and lost her mother. The kids were grown and established. Maybe they’ll team up again later.
Their writing is charming because it is personal, often direct accounts of their own experiences, and bridges several boundaries: between white and tribal, between the US and Canada, between the old days and now, and -- most endearingly, between their old selves and their new selves. They are not afraid to disclose that they grow and change.
Recently when Mike Swims Under, an important wise man and guide on the Amskapi Pikuni side, passed on to the Sand Hills, at the funeral (Methodist) Adolph Hungry Wolf sang every relevant Siksika song he knew -- maybe some that were irrelevant, grumbled those who didn’t know that many. It took a long time. For a while Beverly taught at Piegan Institute, an immersion Blackft language school in Browning. Also, at Blackfeet Community College. Since Bob Scriver died and his shop and museum were dispersed, it’s harder for me to keep track of them. They used to check in, now and then. Bob intended to give his Thunder Medicine Pipe to Okan Hungry Wolf but died too soon.
When I used to read to my high school classes, “The Ways of My Grandmothers” was always one of the favorites. I should reread all four books. I pick them up and get distracted by the photos. It was estimated that the “Good Medicine” archives held 20,000 ancient photos plus their own family snapshots.
The Blackft language incorporates a distinction that translates roughly as “real.” Grizzly bears are “real bears,” while black bears are “nothing bears.” Buffalo are “real meat” while elk, deer, cow are “nothing meat.” Siksika are “real people” and everyone else is “nothing people.” “Nothing” is not really meant to be pejorative, I think -- it just implies that whatever-it-is isn’t “primary.” It’s not the real thing. It doesn’t matter so much. All that nothing stuff is a default category -- not much is known about all that.
I hesitate to say that these four books and the others are “real books,” because those would be books written in the Blackft language, wouldn’t they? Is it possible to write a modern book about the “real people” since their language was never written, but represented by iconography?
But they are warmer and more real than collections of legends (which they often include) or anthro-rigarmarole. Bob and I were suspicious of Adolf at first. Was he running a con game of some kind? Certainly he has a few Napi/Trickster aspects. But gradually he became “real,” rather in the way that the velveteen rabbit in the child’s story became real. It just took four decades. Maybe he felt the same way about us.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Halfbreed
April 10, 2005
Half-Breed
There’s been talk in certain circles about how hurtful and pejorative the word “halfbreed” is (something like “squaw,” but it is the title of a excellent book about George Bent: “Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent, Caught between the Worlds of the Indian and White Man.” (David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, @ 2004. DeCapo Press, Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-306-81320-3) The Indian half was Cheyenne and the little time-line below will explain how a SW person gets into a Montana blog.
These dates are from another bio: “Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist” by John Taliaferro. @ 1996. Little, Brown and Co. and then, I think, U of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-316-83190-5)
1638: John Bent arrives at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1789: Silas Bent, his great grandson (a Minuteman in the Revolution and maybe a participant in the Boston Tea Party) sells his farm in Massachusetts and moves to Ohio.
1806: Silas, Jr. moves to West Virginia where he studies law and became the Surveyor General of the US. He was charged with platting the Louisiana Purchase and witnessed the return of L&C.
1813: Silas, Jr. became judge of the Supreme Court of the Missouri Territory and had eleven children. Remember three: Lucy, Charles and William.
1817: Charles Bent joined the Missouri Fur Co. and traveled as far as the Dakotas and the Yellowstone River.
1827: William Bent (18 years old, ten years younger than Charles) joined his brother.
1829: The Bent brothers were helping to open the Santa Fe Trail.
1833: William established Bent’s Fort at the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers. In Taos, Charles married a Mexican woman. William took a Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman.
1846: The US seized NM and named Charles Bent as its first governor. In an uprising afterward, he was killed by a mob, mutilated, and his scalp tacked to a plank.
1849: Rather than give up Bent’s Fort to the US Army, William burned his fort to the ground. He had two sons: George and Charles. When the Civil War came, they enlisted on the Confederate side, but Charles (whose mother died giving birth to him) left the army and joined the Cheyenne, his mother’s people. George was captured by Union soldiers in Mississippi and imprisoned. When he was released, he joined Charles. For the next few years they lived as full-bloods.
1864: Charles and George fought as warriors at the Sand Creek Massacre on the Cheyenne side. Their brother, Robert, was a scout for Colonel John Chivington’s cavalry and watched from the other side.
1868: Charles, who became enough of a bloodthirsty renegade to be repudiated by his family, was wounded in a fight with Pawnee, caught malaria and died. George continued in the world wearing a Union officer’s jacket, a red breechcloth long enough to touch the ground, long black hair that flew in the wind, and an impressive metis mustache
Remember the sister of Charles and William -- Lucy? George Bent, who eventually settled into life as a “halfbreed,” and Charles the renegade were her nephews, right? She married James Russell when she was 21 and he was 41. She bore him four children: Julia, John, Charles Silas and Russella.
1850: James Russell died and Lucy took over the family business, a coal mine with a valuable clay mine underneath it, which they used to make ceramic tile and drain pipe. She called Charles Silas (her 18 year old son) back from college (maybe Yale) to help her.
1858: Charles Silas Russell married Mary Elizabeth Mead. Her father was a silversmith who made Indian trinkets for barter with tribes and also jewelry and watches for prosperous whites.
1864: Charles and Mary had a son, the third child, whom they named Charles Marion Russell. Yes, that one: the artist. With clay on one side of the family and metal casting on the other. George Bent, the “halfbreed,” would have been our Charlie’s cousin once-removed or second cousin -- however it goes. His grandmother’s nephew. They belonged to the same tribe. When Charles Bent died, Charlie Russell was four years old.
Taliaferro’s book is just simply terrific and draws generously from a book written by Charlie’s nephew, Austin Russell, a book which is hard to find but worth the effort. The above is a mere sketch compared to what Austin can tell you. (“CMR: Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist: A Biography” by Austin Russell. Twayne Publishers, NY. Copyright 1957. It ought to be reissued by someone.) It’s the story of a family that was almost a tribe, a crucial part of the development of the West.
We always think of Charlie as out there with his horse and his paintbrush, not as a kid in St. Louis with a dynamic businesswoman grandmother, much like Nancy Russell! It’s unclear how well Charlie knew George Bent, but surely the stories of battle and revenge were a part of his life from the very beginning. No wonder he was so sympathetic to Indians -- they were his cousins. It’s interesting to speculate on why he visited the Blackft but not the Cheyenne.
But being related to Indians was not good for business then. This material was not generally known until Taliaferro, an editor for Newsweek and other magazines, composed this book. There are other revelations. Charlie’s famous sash doubled as a truss for a hernia he was afraid to have surgically mended. His peculiar handwriting and spelling were the result of genuine dyslexia and disgraphia, a brain glitch that makes print nearly unintelligible to them. But how he could draw and how he could talk! He was like a blind man who develops incredible hearing as compensation for not seeing. The illusion that he was a simple man of the range with little education was a fine disguise.
George Bird Grinnell often used George Bent as an informant and so did George E. Hyde and James Mooney. George himself had a strong need to keep the record straight. He rode with Red Cloud, Tall Bull, and Roman Nose, and even knew the white heroes: Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Custer. He died in 1918. (Bob Scriver and the Blackft elder, George Kicking Woman, were four years old.)
Half-Breed
There’s been talk in certain circles about how hurtful and pejorative the word “halfbreed” is (something like “squaw,” but it is the title of a excellent book about George Bent: “Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent, Caught between the Worlds of the Indian and White Man.” (David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, @ 2004. DeCapo Press, Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-306-81320-3) The Indian half was Cheyenne and the little time-line below will explain how a SW person gets into a Montana blog.
These dates are from another bio: “Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist” by John Taliaferro. @ 1996. Little, Brown and Co. and then, I think, U of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-316-83190-5)
1638: John Bent arrives at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1789: Silas Bent, his great grandson (a Minuteman in the Revolution and maybe a participant in the Boston Tea Party) sells his farm in Massachusetts and moves to Ohio.
1806: Silas, Jr. moves to West Virginia where he studies law and became the Surveyor General of the US. He was charged with platting the Louisiana Purchase and witnessed the return of L&C.
1813: Silas, Jr. became judge of the Supreme Court of the Missouri Territory and had eleven children. Remember three: Lucy, Charles and William.
1817: Charles Bent joined the Missouri Fur Co. and traveled as far as the Dakotas and the Yellowstone River.
1827: William Bent (18 years old, ten years younger than Charles) joined his brother.
1829: The Bent brothers were helping to open the Santa Fe Trail.
1833: William established Bent’s Fort at the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers. In Taos, Charles married a Mexican woman. William took a Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman.
1846: The US seized NM and named Charles Bent as its first governor. In an uprising afterward, he was killed by a mob, mutilated, and his scalp tacked to a plank.
1849: Rather than give up Bent’s Fort to the US Army, William burned his fort to the ground. He had two sons: George and Charles. When the Civil War came, they enlisted on the Confederate side, but Charles (whose mother died giving birth to him) left the army and joined the Cheyenne, his mother’s people. George was captured by Union soldiers in Mississippi and imprisoned. When he was released, he joined Charles. For the next few years they lived as full-bloods.
1864: Charles and George fought as warriors at the Sand Creek Massacre on the Cheyenne side. Their brother, Robert, was a scout for Colonel John Chivington’s cavalry and watched from the other side.
1868: Charles, who became enough of a bloodthirsty renegade to be repudiated by his family, was wounded in a fight with Pawnee, caught malaria and died. George continued in the world wearing a Union officer’s jacket, a red breechcloth long enough to touch the ground, long black hair that flew in the wind, and an impressive metis mustache
Remember the sister of Charles and William -- Lucy? George Bent, who eventually settled into life as a “halfbreed,” and Charles the renegade were her nephews, right? She married James Russell when she was 21 and he was 41. She bore him four children: Julia, John, Charles Silas and Russella.
1850: James Russell died and Lucy took over the family business, a coal mine with a valuable clay mine underneath it, which they used to make ceramic tile and drain pipe. She called Charles Silas (her 18 year old son) back from college (maybe Yale) to help her.
1858: Charles Silas Russell married Mary Elizabeth Mead. Her father was a silversmith who made Indian trinkets for barter with tribes and also jewelry and watches for prosperous whites.
1864: Charles and Mary had a son, the third child, whom they named Charles Marion Russell. Yes, that one: the artist. With clay on one side of the family and metal casting on the other. George Bent, the “halfbreed,” would have been our Charlie’s cousin once-removed or second cousin -- however it goes. His grandmother’s nephew. They belonged to the same tribe. When Charles Bent died, Charlie Russell was four years old.
Taliaferro’s book is just simply terrific and draws generously from a book written by Charlie’s nephew, Austin Russell, a book which is hard to find but worth the effort. The above is a mere sketch compared to what Austin can tell you. (“CMR: Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist: A Biography” by Austin Russell. Twayne Publishers, NY. Copyright 1957. It ought to be reissued by someone.) It’s the story of a family that was almost a tribe, a crucial part of the development of the West.
We always think of Charlie as out there with his horse and his paintbrush, not as a kid in St. Louis with a dynamic businesswoman grandmother, much like Nancy Russell! It’s unclear how well Charlie knew George Bent, but surely the stories of battle and revenge were a part of his life from the very beginning. No wonder he was so sympathetic to Indians -- they were his cousins. It’s interesting to speculate on why he visited the Blackft but not the Cheyenne.
But being related to Indians was not good for business then. This material was not generally known until Taliaferro, an editor for Newsweek and other magazines, composed this book. There are other revelations. Charlie’s famous sash doubled as a truss for a hernia he was afraid to have surgically mended. His peculiar handwriting and spelling were the result of genuine dyslexia and disgraphia, a brain glitch that makes print nearly unintelligible to them. But how he could draw and how he could talk! He was like a blind man who develops incredible hearing as compensation for not seeing. The illusion that he was a simple man of the range with little education was a fine disguise.
George Bird Grinnell often used George Bent as an informant and so did George E. Hyde and James Mooney. George himself had a strong need to keep the record straight. He rode with Red Cloud, Tall Bull, and Roman Nose, and even knew the white heroes: Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Custer. He died in 1918. (Bob Scriver and the Blackft elder, George Kicking Woman, were four years old.)
Saturday, April 09, 2005
All My Relations
All My Relations
Some years back someone found a shoebox with a lot of cards in it, each with the names and family of a Blackfeet. Instead of just throwing it out, this careful person kept the box until it was figured out that it was a record of commodities issued in 1907-08. Some cards had notes on the back about where members of the family were, what their marital status was, and sometimes where they lived. The cards were typed together into a book, “Blackfeet Heritage” which can be bought from the Blackfeet Heritage Center and Crafts Shop, (333 Central, Browning, MT 59417. Phone is 1-406-338-5661. Website: http://www.siyehdevelopment.com/heritage.html) I keep my copy of this genealogy reference right alongside my homemade time-line book.
The Europeans thought ownership of land (often that’s what defined citizenship) and provable descent (because that’s the definition of inheritance) were two of the most important order-keeping systems in the world. Native Americans didn’t value either principle, because no one “owned” land and what mattered was the personal allegiance you chose. But when food is the issue, if your membership in the tribe has to be proven, and then the government has allotted you a certain piece of land which is your only resource -- then it was necessary to pay attention.
Since then, everyone has been struggling with the problem of who’s IN and who’s OUT. Which counts? Being raised on the rez with rez ways or being a blood relation to the people in the original “tribe” as defined when the first Euros arrived? Recently I heard a way of defining who is an Indian that surprised me into new insight. This person -- at a NA language immersion school conference in Minneapolis (I wasn’t there -- this is second hand) -- said that in his tribe, all personally known older women were mother/aunts, all personally known older men were father/uncles, and all other familiar people were simply cousins. Others weren’t relations. The “tribe” is relations -- as in relationship. (Familiar from family.) What struck me was that this is a definition of being Indian that comes from INSIDE the Indian rather than being imposed from the outside by someone else’s criteria. It’s a self-determination issue.
When I’m teaching (only subbing now) or meeting new younger people around here, both red and white, I ask them, “Who are your grandmothers?” Indian kids and homesteader-descended kids can always tell me. (In fact, I’m a little chagrined at how often I taught the grandparents of the Indian kids.) It’s the kids who have moved here more recently who often have no idea who their grandparents are, have never met them, don’t know where they came from, might not know their names.
On this reservation and in this small village, families are the social structure . When you know someone’s family, you know quite a lot about them, including what their personality is likely to be. In the old days extended families were your connection to life itself. A person could not survive alone. (I kept hearing the principal in Red Rock saying “extended families” -- I think he meant broken families -- OVER-extended families -- rather than families that are a web of love, competence and support.) After a year or two of teaching, I began to recognize the physiognomies of families -- a characteristic nose shape, a forehead height, an eyebrow style.
In a tribe, family loyalty is an absolute rule -- it trumps any legal requirement, it cannot be put down without resigning membership, and it saves many a scalawag. It works great if the people involved are in a fairly stable environment and are pretty much the same kind of people. Rule of law becomes necessary as soon as the people involved are from different places, different customs, and have no genetic or affectional families present, which is the case with many reservation residents now.
From the affectional point of view, the most crucial question to ask is not “who’s your genetic grandmother?” but “Who loves ya, baby?” And the most important principle is to always act in a way that will cause people to love you, or at least feel that they want to be connected. But who will put “who loves you” on a commodity-issuing index card in a shoebox?
Many legal definitions of who is Indian depend on the source of the definition. Part of the reason the situation is so confusing is that the Indian Health Service law might define an Indian one way while an education program might define an Indian another way. Often the definitions were composed to suit some goal or limitation, so the definition can be adjusted if, for instance, defining “Indian” a particular way qualifies too many people for the money available for scholarships.
I suspect that the first time “one-quarter Indian blood” was set as a definition, it came from a white man thinking that if one of a person’s grandparents was a full-blood Indian, then that person was likely to feel at least partly Indian. “Half-breed” had to be included because often they were the link to the white world. One-eighth would be great-grandchildren -- surely close to assimilated. No one thought of what would happen if two half-breeds married -- wouldn’t they still have half-breed children?
The goal was that as time went on, people would feel less and less Indian -- they would be assimilated. There were some flaws in this reasoning. It didn’t allow for the strong affectional bonding of adoption, or for the cultural allegiance of white people raised as or in close proximity to Indians. And there was an unforeseen outcome of residential Indian schools: when students were of an age to fall in love, marriages often happened between people of different tribes -- full bloods, but not the same tribe.
Euros had a hard time with the concept of tribe, treating it like “nation” which is a land-based concept with physical boundaries. If you look at a tribe as a group unfolding out of family and out of people who know and defend each other, then one must grant that only a tribe can define itself and that the boundaries might be kind of flexible. Even overlapping. The point of law is to write things down so they won’t change, even though circumstances and desire might test the limits. The Euros wrote laws that assumed that tribes were always as they found them on first contact and would stay that way. But tribes are almost like religious denominations -- in a state of gradual but continuous transformation as they adapt to new times.
Indians who love Ward Churchill, clap your hands! Maybe you can save him yet!
Some years back someone found a shoebox with a lot of cards in it, each with the names and family of a Blackfeet. Instead of just throwing it out, this careful person kept the box until it was figured out that it was a record of commodities issued in 1907-08. Some cards had notes on the back about where members of the family were, what their marital status was, and sometimes where they lived. The cards were typed together into a book, “Blackfeet Heritage” which can be bought from the Blackfeet Heritage Center and Crafts Shop, (333 Central, Browning, MT 59417. Phone is 1-406-338-5661. Website: http://www.siyehdevelopment.com/heritage.html) I keep my copy of this genealogy reference right alongside my homemade time-line book.
The Europeans thought ownership of land (often that’s what defined citizenship) and provable descent (because that’s the definition of inheritance) were two of the most important order-keeping systems in the world. Native Americans didn’t value either principle, because no one “owned” land and what mattered was the personal allegiance you chose. But when food is the issue, if your membership in the tribe has to be proven, and then the government has allotted you a certain piece of land which is your only resource -- then it was necessary to pay attention.
Since then, everyone has been struggling with the problem of who’s IN and who’s OUT. Which counts? Being raised on the rez with rez ways or being a blood relation to the people in the original “tribe” as defined when the first Euros arrived? Recently I heard a way of defining who is an Indian that surprised me into new insight. This person -- at a NA language immersion school conference in Minneapolis (I wasn’t there -- this is second hand) -- said that in his tribe, all personally known older women were mother/aunts, all personally known older men were father/uncles, and all other familiar people were simply cousins. Others weren’t relations. The “tribe” is relations -- as in relationship. (Familiar from family.) What struck me was that this is a definition of being Indian that comes from INSIDE the Indian rather than being imposed from the outside by someone else’s criteria. It’s a self-determination issue.
When I’m teaching (only subbing now) or meeting new younger people around here, both red and white, I ask them, “Who are your grandmothers?” Indian kids and homesteader-descended kids can always tell me. (In fact, I’m a little chagrined at how often I taught the grandparents of the Indian kids.) It’s the kids who have moved here more recently who often have no idea who their grandparents are, have never met them, don’t know where they came from, might not know their names.
On this reservation and in this small village, families are the social structure . When you know someone’s family, you know quite a lot about them, including what their personality is likely to be. In the old days extended families were your connection to life itself. A person could not survive alone. (I kept hearing the principal in Red Rock saying “extended families” -- I think he meant broken families -- OVER-extended families -- rather than families that are a web of love, competence and support.) After a year or two of teaching, I began to recognize the physiognomies of families -- a characteristic nose shape, a forehead height, an eyebrow style.
In a tribe, family loyalty is an absolute rule -- it trumps any legal requirement, it cannot be put down without resigning membership, and it saves many a scalawag. It works great if the people involved are in a fairly stable environment and are pretty much the same kind of people. Rule of law becomes necessary as soon as the people involved are from different places, different customs, and have no genetic or affectional families present, which is the case with many reservation residents now.
From the affectional point of view, the most crucial question to ask is not “who’s your genetic grandmother?” but “Who loves ya, baby?” And the most important principle is to always act in a way that will cause people to love you, or at least feel that they want to be connected. But who will put “who loves you” on a commodity-issuing index card in a shoebox?
Many legal definitions of who is Indian depend on the source of the definition. Part of the reason the situation is so confusing is that the Indian Health Service law might define an Indian one way while an education program might define an Indian another way. Often the definitions were composed to suit some goal or limitation, so the definition can be adjusted if, for instance, defining “Indian” a particular way qualifies too many people for the money available for scholarships.
I suspect that the first time “one-quarter Indian blood” was set as a definition, it came from a white man thinking that if one of a person’s grandparents was a full-blood Indian, then that person was likely to feel at least partly Indian. “Half-breed” had to be included because often they were the link to the white world. One-eighth would be great-grandchildren -- surely close to assimilated. No one thought of what would happen if two half-breeds married -- wouldn’t they still have half-breed children?
The goal was that as time went on, people would feel less and less Indian -- they would be assimilated. There were some flaws in this reasoning. It didn’t allow for the strong affectional bonding of adoption, or for the cultural allegiance of white people raised as or in close proximity to Indians. And there was an unforeseen outcome of residential Indian schools: when students were of an age to fall in love, marriages often happened between people of different tribes -- full bloods, but not the same tribe.
Euros had a hard time with the concept of tribe, treating it like “nation” which is a land-based concept with physical boundaries. If you look at a tribe as a group unfolding out of family and out of people who know and defend each other, then one must grant that only a tribe can define itself and that the boundaries might be kind of flexible. Even overlapping. The point of law is to write things down so they won’t change, even though circumstances and desire might test the limits. The Euros wrote laws that assumed that tribes were always as they found them on first contact and would stay that way. But tribes are almost like religious denominations -- in a state of gradual but continuous transformation as they adapt to new times.
Indians who love Ward Churchill, clap your hands! Maybe you can save him yet!
Friday, April 08, 2005
Time-Line
April 8, 2005
Time-lines
When I went back to teaching high school English on the Blackft Reservation in 1971, the school board (always Indian) had made it a rule that all new teachers in the district would have to take a class in Blackft history. Great! At the same time, an Indian in a Boston detective’s trenchcoat had returned to the reservation and they figured he was the perfect guy for the job. They were right.
Darrell Kipp had been a senior at Browning High School the first year I taught in Browning, which was junior high so I was never Darrell’s teacher. But I saw him one of the first days I went up to the school buildings. A kid was being teased by a big high school guy and another smaller high school guy in government-issue eyeglasses made him stop. The guy with the glasses was Darrell and that was pretty typical of him. He attended Eastern Montana College because it was free and his teachers (especially his senior English teacher, Mrs. Holloway, who had a face like an old-fashioned rose) thought he should. Then, after serving in Korea in the military so that he had the GI Bill, he went to Harvard to get a master’s in sociology and then went to Goddard in the hippy years for an MFA.
The first problem he faced was that no one in the class could agree on “Blackft History” because to them it meant “reality” and no two people -- even those who grew up right there -- could agree on the reality of what happened. Darrell’s Harvard solution was to rename the course “Blackft Philosophy.” Everyone understood that philosophy is a matter of opinion and argument, so then it was okay to go ahead and argue without getting so mad.
The new teachers were an odd assortment -- from whites who’d never been there before, to locals -- and even some of Darrell’s old classmates. He started us off with a time-line. This was before computers, but I put my time-line in a card-file, one card per year, so I wouldn’t have to retype the whole thing every time I added something, and I added a lot -- even after the class had been over for a long time. We got our dates from reading, from sharing and swapping, and from just guessing -- especially the dates for the coming of the horse and guns. Sometimes I’d pull a card or sequence of cards and lay them out on a table top to think about.
My time-line is now in the computer, 26 pages long. When I run it out, I put a wire spine on the back, add covers I also print on my computer, and have a handy reference book. It’s never put away, because I use it so often. In fact, as I work on this blog, I often make a little three-by-five penciled card with an index of things like the births and deaths of famous people I’m discussing. Otherwise it’s sometimes hard to see that their differences are due to the times they were in -- their relative ages.
I’ll give you a sample to start you off on your own time-line.
1720: Blackft get guns and horses.
1739 First trading posts at forks of Saskatchewan River.
1754: Anthony Henry meets Blackft along present Alberta/Saskatchewan border. Guided by Cree, he visits the “archithune” which is Cree for strange/enemy/slave, likely Blackfeet.
1769: Contact between Blackft and de le Verendrye
1772: Mathew Cocking of Hudson’s Bay Co. describes Blackft.
1774: Cumberland House trading post established on the lower Saskatchewan River.
1778: Continental Congress signs the first Indian treaty -- with the Delaware Nation. At this time the US Articles of Confederation say that one purpose of the Articles is to regulate trade with the Indians.
1780: Blkft population estimated at 15,000, distributed over the top half of Montana and bottom half of Alberta & Saskatchewan but only east of the Rockies.
1781: Devastating epidemic of smallpox, evidently caught from raiding the Shoshone.
1782: Snake and Shoshoni tribes flee the Bow River area. Smallpx mortality among the Blackft is about half the population.
1784: Congress grants the War Department rule over Indian Affairs. Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Fur Co. are competing for Blackft trade.
1787 David Thompson winters with the Blackft on the Bow river. “Dog Days” old men (those who remember pre-horse) say they came from the NE. Blackft war party goes south to Santa Fe and steals horses from Spanish miners.
1790 Duncan McGilviray is in the area. Trade and Inercourse Act passed to license Indian traders.
1792 Peter Fidler approaches Chief Mountain.
1794: Blackft trade at Fort George on the Saskatchewan River.
1795: Kutenai tribe offers horses to the Blackft to get passage to Fort George, but Blackft say NO for fear of them getting guns as well.
1796: On July 14 Chief Mountain is identified and given the English version of its Indian name.
1799: Northwest Fur Co. builds Rocky Mountain House at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River.
1800 Trappers LeBlanc & La Grosse of Northwest Fur Co. come to live with the Kutenai. Pikuni group is master of the plains.
1801: McKenzie, explorer, estimates the Blackfeet warrior class as 9,000 men.
1802: The Louisiana Purchase
1803: Disease among the buffalo
1804: On March 10 formal ceremonies in St. Louis finalize the Louisiana Purchase. In May Lewis & Clark start west.
The actual time-line that I use includes a lot of material from a Canadian winter-count book that is copyrighted, so I don’t include it here. (” Winter Count: A History of the Blackfoot People” Paul M. Raczka. Oldman River Cultural Centre: Brocket Alberta, 1979)
I’ll post more time-line later. What’s clear from this excerpt is that the Blackft were first approached by white people from the north. They were Hudson’s Bay employees because Canada was not a separate country and the Canadian prairie was only a mercantile franchise. The Blackft got right with the program and were soon organized to sell dry meat, pemmican, and tanned buffalo hides to the new people. They were NOT inclined to wade around in a lot of icy water to catch beaver -- let the Cree and the Metis do that. (Discussion in “Anthropological Esssays” by Oscar Lewis. Random House, @ 1946, 1949, 1953, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970. So many years because these are articles written and published separately, then anthologized. There were no ISBN numbers then but the Library of Congress Cat. Card # is 79-85586. The article is called “The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, 1942.”)
Time-lines
When I went back to teaching high school English on the Blackft Reservation in 1971, the school board (always Indian) had made it a rule that all new teachers in the district would have to take a class in Blackft history. Great! At the same time, an Indian in a Boston detective’s trenchcoat had returned to the reservation and they figured he was the perfect guy for the job. They were right.
Darrell Kipp had been a senior at Browning High School the first year I taught in Browning, which was junior high so I was never Darrell’s teacher. But I saw him one of the first days I went up to the school buildings. A kid was being teased by a big high school guy and another smaller high school guy in government-issue eyeglasses made him stop. The guy with the glasses was Darrell and that was pretty typical of him. He attended Eastern Montana College because it was free and his teachers (especially his senior English teacher, Mrs. Holloway, who had a face like an old-fashioned rose) thought he should. Then, after serving in Korea in the military so that he had the GI Bill, he went to Harvard to get a master’s in sociology and then went to Goddard in the hippy years for an MFA.
The first problem he faced was that no one in the class could agree on “Blackft History” because to them it meant “reality” and no two people -- even those who grew up right there -- could agree on the reality of what happened. Darrell’s Harvard solution was to rename the course “Blackft Philosophy.” Everyone understood that philosophy is a matter of opinion and argument, so then it was okay to go ahead and argue without getting so mad.
The new teachers were an odd assortment -- from whites who’d never been there before, to locals -- and even some of Darrell’s old classmates. He started us off with a time-line. This was before computers, but I put my time-line in a card-file, one card per year, so I wouldn’t have to retype the whole thing every time I added something, and I added a lot -- even after the class had been over for a long time. We got our dates from reading, from sharing and swapping, and from just guessing -- especially the dates for the coming of the horse and guns. Sometimes I’d pull a card or sequence of cards and lay them out on a table top to think about.
My time-line is now in the computer, 26 pages long. When I run it out, I put a wire spine on the back, add covers I also print on my computer, and have a handy reference book. It’s never put away, because I use it so often. In fact, as I work on this blog, I often make a little three-by-five penciled card with an index of things like the births and deaths of famous people I’m discussing. Otherwise it’s sometimes hard to see that their differences are due to the times they were in -- their relative ages.
I’ll give you a sample to start you off on your own time-line.
1720: Blackft get guns and horses.
1739 First trading posts at forks of Saskatchewan River.
1754: Anthony Henry meets Blackft along present Alberta/Saskatchewan border. Guided by Cree, he visits the “archithune” which is Cree for strange/enemy/slave, likely Blackfeet.
1769: Contact between Blackft and de le Verendrye
1772: Mathew Cocking of Hudson’s Bay Co. describes Blackft.
1774: Cumberland House trading post established on the lower Saskatchewan River.
1778: Continental Congress signs the first Indian treaty -- with the Delaware Nation. At this time the US Articles of Confederation say that one purpose of the Articles is to regulate trade with the Indians.
1780: Blkft population estimated at 15,000, distributed over the top half of Montana and bottom half of Alberta & Saskatchewan but only east of the Rockies.
1781: Devastating epidemic of smallpox, evidently caught from raiding the Shoshone.
1782: Snake and Shoshoni tribes flee the Bow River area. Smallpx mortality among the Blackft is about half the population.
1784: Congress grants the War Department rule over Indian Affairs. Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Fur Co. are competing for Blackft trade.
1787 David Thompson winters with the Blackft on the Bow river. “Dog Days” old men (those who remember pre-horse) say they came from the NE. Blackft war party goes south to Santa Fe and steals horses from Spanish miners.
1790 Duncan McGilviray is in the area. Trade and Inercourse Act passed to license Indian traders.
1792 Peter Fidler approaches Chief Mountain.
1794: Blackft trade at Fort George on the Saskatchewan River.
1795: Kutenai tribe offers horses to the Blackft to get passage to Fort George, but Blackft say NO for fear of them getting guns as well.
1796: On July 14 Chief Mountain is identified and given the English version of its Indian name.
1799: Northwest Fur Co. builds Rocky Mountain House at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River.
1800 Trappers LeBlanc & La Grosse of Northwest Fur Co. come to live with the Kutenai. Pikuni group is master of the plains.
1801: McKenzie, explorer, estimates the Blackfeet warrior class as 9,000 men.
1802: The Louisiana Purchase
1803: Disease among the buffalo
1804: On March 10 formal ceremonies in St. Louis finalize the Louisiana Purchase. In May Lewis & Clark start west.
The actual time-line that I use includes a lot of material from a Canadian winter-count book that is copyrighted, so I don’t include it here. (” Winter Count: A History of the Blackfoot People” Paul M. Raczka. Oldman River Cultural Centre: Brocket Alberta, 1979)
I’ll post more time-line later. What’s clear from this excerpt is that the Blackft were first approached by white people from the north. They were Hudson’s Bay employees because Canada was not a separate country and the Canadian prairie was only a mercantile franchise. The Blackft got right with the program and were soon organized to sell dry meat, pemmican, and tanned buffalo hides to the new people. They were NOT inclined to wade around in a lot of icy water to catch beaver -- let the Cree and the Metis do that. (Discussion in “Anthropological Esssays” by Oscar Lewis. Random House, @ 1946, 1949, 1953, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970. So many years because these are articles written and published separately, then anthologized. There were no ISBN numbers then but the Library of Congress Cat. Card # is 79-85586. The article is called “The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, 1942.”)
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Around the Campfire
April 7, 2005
Around the Campfire
Many people relate best to Indians in the old boy scout way. They may feel no discomfiting politics will be involved. No such luck. This posting will discuss three books of Blackfeet myths and stories.
“Blackfoot Lodge Tales, The Story of a Prairie People” by George Bird Grinnell. Bison Book. University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962. My copy is too old to have an ISBN. My mother paid $1.50 for it some time in the deep past.
“The Sun Came Down: The History of the Wold as My Blackfeet Elders Told It” by Percy Bullchild. Harper & Row. Copyright 1985. ISBN 0-06-250107-0.
“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall with an introduction by Alice Beck Kehoe. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8032-9762-9
George Bird Grinnell (b. 1849) slightly preceded McClintock. He was the stock broker of Cornelius Vanderbilt, father of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who was the sculptor of the big Buffalo Bill equestrian monument in Cody, Wyoming. Her son endowed the Whitney Gallery of Western Art which became part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. When the stock market hit bad times, Grinnell became the editor of “Field and Stream” magazine. He accompanied Custer and the 7th Cavalry to the Black Hills in hopes of finding fossils but had so little luck that he bowed out when Custer went back to the West and ended at Greasy Grass.
Perhaps if a movie is made, Grinnell could be played by Daniel Day-Lewis to capture that strange “neurasthenic” but callisthenic sort of personality that seems to have rather circulated around Teddy Roosevelt, but Teddy married and had lots of children -- George Grinnell Bird did not marry until he was 52. Make of it what you like. He was certainly part of the upper-class group of people, mostly men, who had access to the West and also the means to write about it. Sherry Smith seems to like Grinnell better than McClintock, who also recorded many myths and stories in “The Old North Trail.” Both were friends of Siyeh, Mad Wolf.
(In case you lost the last citation: “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, Oxford University Press. This book has a good chapter on Grinnell.)
“The Sun Came Down” is written by a genuine Blackft, though there are those who mutter than he was pretty assimilated and put Christian content into the old time stories. Could be. But it’s an engaging, respected set of the tales and it needs always to be acknowledged. I don’t know much about Percy Bullchild, though I’ve taught many of his descendents. They are very proud of him.
“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Wissler and Duvall is the reissue of another old book. Wissler (1870-1947) was the first anthro of the Blackft, a classmate of Alfred Kroeber (protector of Ishi and father of Ursula LeGuin). Duvall WAS a Blackft (though he had enough French in him to be called “The Frenchman,” and Kehoe is a feminist, a staunch defender of post-colonial theory, and the former wife of Tom Kehoe, whom she married when he was the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. Note that Bullchild (or his editors) uses BlackFEET, but both Grinnell and Kehoe (or their editors) use BlackFOOT in the titles. This has implications. Generally, Blackfeet is the South Piegan choice and, therefore, taken to refer just to them. Blackfoot is the choice of the Blackft Confederacy as a whole, which is 2/3rds in Canada, so this implies that the Grinnell and Kehoe versions are more inclusive. There’s not a great deal of difference in the actual stories, though if one looks closely, there are always small variations. Hard to know what they mean: faulty memory or significant variation?
If I could only buy one of these three books, I would buy the Wissler/Duvall/Kehoe for two reasons: I love the painting on the cover (“Kills Night” by Paul Pletka”) and the Kehoe introduction packs more information into a small space than you could possibly find anyplace else. It is an excellent map to the sequence of anthropologists visiting the Blackfeet and supplies a thorough bibliography.
There is another problem (which you won’t meet in these books) when dealing with raw, collected-in-the-field stories by writers who believe they should be reporters rather than interpreters. I refer to the obscenity problem. Blackft were quite innocently frank about sexual matters and their trickster figure, Napi, has a penis worthy of “Elasto-man” and a libido that never rests. One set of translators agreed that they would use the euphemism “lariat” when they meant penis, and it turned out to be quite a remarkable lariat. Sometimes anthropologists wrote about ceremonies having to do with (ahem) birth and death in Latin to save the sensibilities of the masses. More about the issue later, but it is still -- even in our raunchy age -- unresolved and likely to set people’s hair on fire, especially Indians with strong mission backgrounds or conservative Christian commitments.
The stories are endearingly universal. At Heart Butte I taught Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” by analyzing “Star Wars,” the movie. In 1990-91 the movie was not much in circulation and it was mostly new to the 7th and 8th graders. Some had demon fathers and understood exactly what it meant to discover that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. I should go look those former students up after the “Revenge of the Sith” is released and see what they think. But the point is that when we looked at the Blackft mythology after that, we could see the story patterns that so fascinate Campbell, Eliade, and Jung. (Don’t mention Eliade to Alice Beck Kehoe or her hair will burst into flames! Feminists are on the outs with Eliade. No escape from politics, whereever you turn.)
Around the Campfire
Many people relate best to Indians in the old boy scout way. They may feel no discomfiting politics will be involved. No such luck. This posting will discuss three books of Blackfeet myths and stories.
“Blackfoot Lodge Tales, The Story of a Prairie People” by George Bird Grinnell. Bison Book. University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962. My copy is too old to have an ISBN. My mother paid $1.50 for it some time in the deep past.
“The Sun Came Down: The History of the Wold as My Blackfeet Elders Told It” by Percy Bullchild. Harper & Row. Copyright 1985. ISBN 0-06-250107-0.
“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall with an introduction by Alice Beck Kehoe. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8032-9762-9
George Bird Grinnell (b. 1849) slightly preceded McClintock. He was the stock broker of Cornelius Vanderbilt, father of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who was the sculptor of the big Buffalo Bill equestrian monument in Cody, Wyoming. Her son endowed the Whitney Gallery of Western Art which became part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. When the stock market hit bad times, Grinnell became the editor of “Field and Stream” magazine. He accompanied Custer and the 7th Cavalry to the Black Hills in hopes of finding fossils but had so little luck that he bowed out when Custer went back to the West and ended at Greasy Grass.
Perhaps if a movie is made, Grinnell could be played by Daniel Day-Lewis to capture that strange “neurasthenic” but callisthenic sort of personality that seems to have rather circulated around Teddy Roosevelt, but Teddy married and had lots of children -- George Grinnell Bird did not marry until he was 52. Make of it what you like. He was certainly part of the upper-class group of people, mostly men, who had access to the West and also the means to write about it. Sherry Smith seems to like Grinnell better than McClintock, who also recorded many myths and stories in “The Old North Trail.” Both were friends of Siyeh, Mad Wolf.
(In case you lost the last citation: “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, Oxford University Press. This book has a good chapter on Grinnell.)
“The Sun Came Down” is written by a genuine Blackft, though there are those who mutter than he was pretty assimilated and put Christian content into the old time stories. Could be. But it’s an engaging, respected set of the tales and it needs always to be acknowledged. I don’t know much about Percy Bullchild, though I’ve taught many of his descendents. They are very proud of him.
“Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians” by Wissler and Duvall is the reissue of another old book. Wissler (1870-1947) was the first anthro of the Blackft, a classmate of Alfred Kroeber (protector of Ishi and father of Ursula LeGuin). Duvall WAS a Blackft (though he had enough French in him to be called “The Frenchman,” and Kehoe is a feminist, a staunch defender of post-colonial theory, and the former wife of Tom Kehoe, whom she married when he was the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. Note that Bullchild (or his editors) uses BlackFEET, but both Grinnell and Kehoe (or their editors) use BlackFOOT in the titles. This has implications. Generally, Blackfeet is the South Piegan choice and, therefore, taken to refer just to them. Blackfoot is the choice of the Blackft Confederacy as a whole, which is 2/3rds in Canada, so this implies that the Grinnell and Kehoe versions are more inclusive. There’s not a great deal of difference in the actual stories, though if one looks closely, there are always small variations. Hard to know what they mean: faulty memory or significant variation?
If I could only buy one of these three books, I would buy the Wissler/Duvall/Kehoe for two reasons: I love the painting on the cover (“Kills Night” by Paul Pletka”) and the Kehoe introduction packs more information into a small space than you could possibly find anyplace else. It is an excellent map to the sequence of anthropologists visiting the Blackfeet and supplies a thorough bibliography.
There is another problem (which you won’t meet in these books) when dealing with raw, collected-in-the-field stories by writers who believe they should be reporters rather than interpreters. I refer to the obscenity problem. Blackft were quite innocently frank about sexual matters and their trickster figure, Napi, has a penis worthy of “Elasto-man” and a libido that never rests. One set of translators agreed that they would use the euphemism “lariat” when they meant penis, and it turned out to be quite a remarkable lariat. Sometimes anthropologists wrote about ceremonies having to do with (ahem) birth and death in Latin to save the sensibilities of the masses. More about the issue later, but it is still -- even in our raunchy age -- unresolved and likely to set people’s hair on fire, especially Indians with strong mission backgrounds or conservative Christian commitments.
The stories are endearingly universal. At Heart Butte I taught Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” by analyzing “Star Wars,” the movie. In 1990-91 the movie was not much in circulation and it was mostly new to the 7th and 8th graders. Some had demon fathers and understood exactly what it meant to discover that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. I should go look those former students up after the “Revenge of the Sith” is released and see what they think. But the point is that when we looked at the Blackft mythology after that, we could see the story patterns that so fascinate Campbell, Eliade, and Jung. (Don’t mention Eliade to Alice Beck Kehoe or her hair will burst into flames! Feminists are on the outs with Eliade. No escape from politics, whereever you turn.)
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Long Time Ago
April 6, 2005
Long Time Ago
Everybody likes to hear the stories about “long time ago” Blackft. Fewer are interested in right now, except the Blackft, who are living in the Now -- most of them hustling hard, feeling that they see the New World coming over the horizon. Gotta keep up the payments on the new pickup and the old lady won’t put up with no second-hand sofa no more. Kids want college. Anyway, plenty of work to do since the Blackft began to take the management jobs in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to manage their own land and its resources.
Two books exist about the olden days, both worth reading. One is “The Blackfeet, Raiders on the Northwestern Plains” by John Ewers. University of Oklahoma Press, Copyright 1958. ISBN 0-8061-1836-9) Ewers was the curator and creator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. He was a trained and expert anthropologist who interviewed a lot of old-timers and went on to be an important person in Washington, D.C.
The other is “The Old North Trail: Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians” by Walter McClintock. (Copyright by University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book printing 1968. ISBN 0-8032-5130-0 McClintock (1870-1949) came to the rez as a young man with a Forestry Expedition under Gifford Pinchot in 1896. He was a botanist and a photographer and was swept into the friendship of Mad Wolf (“Siyeh” -- which is also the name of the wholly-owned subsidiary that runs the tribal businesses: bottled water, casinoes, cable TV, and other things.)
The two books are quite different. The old timers that Ewers was interviewing in the Forties were still young when McClintock came earlier. The very-old-timers of McClintock’s arrival dated back to Lewis & Clark. Ewers’ discipline was anthropology, while McClintock, equally scientific, was focused on botany -- he didn’t look on his friends scientifically but rather more as Ned Jacob did on Moccasin Flats: as equals and friends. Ewers would have been watched by colleagues to see if he might be “going native,” but McClintock just did it. Although he felt a little sad when he spent an evening playing with a pup who turned up in an old lady’s stewpot the next day, he took a photo of her stirring the pot.
McClintock was given rather a bad rap by Sherry L. Smith in her book, “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes: 1880 - 1940.” (Oxford University Press, copyright 2000.) Her emphasis is on early white friends of Indians who were not quite politically correct (often patronizing) and whose stories had consequences in terms of how people thought about Indians. She felt that McClintock, whose family was well-connected, didn’t do enough for his Indian friends politically and didn’t come around much after he made a splash with his book. But the newspapers in Browning carefully note his arrival by railroad every summer with crated presents for Mad Wolf and his family.
Bob Scriver (1914-1999) asked his dad once, “Pop, did you ever know a guy named McClintock?” T.E. Scriver (1879 - 1971) came to Browning in 1903 and had run a mercantile store there his whole life. “Oh, yes, he was around here quite a lot in the old days.” Bob knew John Ewers well and built a “homemade museum” under the influence of the example of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. But he was not a buddy of Ewers. He would have been a great friend of McClintock’s if he hadn’t been out of time-sync with him.
About 1990 when I was teaching at Heart Butte during the first year of a high school there, I tried to think of a book that this all-Blackft student body could read at the same time. I chose “The Old North Trail,” though it was politically incorrect because of being by a white man. (This political stuff can be a big nuisance.) The book is full of explanations, adventures, natural history, and fuzzy reproductions of the photos Walter took. It was an immediate experience of the reservation, not objective reflection like Ewers’ book. I squeezed the budget hard and got enough copies out of it for one classroom of kids. So I didn’t check them out to individuals -- just handed them out and then collected them. They were supposed to read a chapter a week and then do a worksheet. They could not play basketball until they finished that worksheet.
One smart aleck protested, “Hey, this isn’t English. It’s history.” I asked, “What language is it in?” “Um, English.” “Get back to me when you have a book written in Blackft.” It will happen some day.
Of course, they all copied off each other, but they had to be careful because the worksheets were not just a list of questions but a hodge-podge of drawings, circles, squares, numberings -- all pointed in different directions. I had to make myself a template for correcting -- a piece of tagboard with strategic holes over the places where answers should be. I heard them explaining to each other. The theory to which I was responding was that Indian kids don’t think linearly, but rather in spatial relationships. (Me, too. And I’m Scots-Irish.)
The theory that actually made it work had nothing to do with all that, but rather with horizontal/lateral learning rather than hierarchical/authoritative learning. I saw this recently when I subbed for a very small class of junior high kids. I told them what the grammar rule was and gave examples. Then the brightest kid in the group turned to the others and explained what I’d said. He did a good job and didn’t mind repeating. The boys did this more than the girls. They clearly wanted to know what I was telling them, but they didn’t trust me and didn’t want to learn from me. I’m still thinking about this.
Though I was white and they were Indian, I don’t think it’s Indian -- I think it’s generational. Young people now just don’t believe that adults really know anything -- they don’t WANT to believe that. If adults are so smart, why isn’t it a better world? On the other hand, in the post-colonial era, no minority wants to be told anything by someone from the dominant culture for much the same reason.
Anyway, Ewers and Smith are TELLING YOU and McClintock is just sharing. He’s all caught up in the stuff himself. When we started reading “The Old North Trail” together, in homes all around Heart Butte people went to trunks and chests and boxes and drew out the copies of “The Old North Trail” they had had all the time without the kids even knowing it. I never heard of anyone having a stashed copy of “The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains.” Maybe. (Darrell Kipp even has a copy of that book about Ned Jacob, “Sacred Paint.”)
Long Time Ago
Everybody likes to hear the stories about “long time ago” Blackft. Fewer are interested in right now, except the Blackft, who are living in the Now -- most of them hustling hard, feeling that they see the New World coming over the horizon. Gotta keep up the payments on the new pickup and the old lady won’t put up with no second-hand sofa no more. Kids want college. Anyway, plenty of work to do since the Blackft began to take the management jobs in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to manage their own land and its resources.
Two books exist about the olden days, both worth reading. One is “The Blackfeet, Raiders on the Northwestern Plains” by John Ewers. University of Oklahoma Press, Copyright 1958. ISBN 0-8061-1836-9) Ewers was the curator and creator of the Museum of the Plains Indian. He was a trained and expert anthropologist who interviewed a lot of old-timers and went on to be an important person in Washington, D.C.
The other is “The Old North Trail: Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians” by Walter McClintock. (Copyright by University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book printing 1968. ISBN 0-8032-5130-0 McClintock (1870-1949) came to the rez as a young man with a Forestry Expedition under Gifford Pinchot in 1896. He was a botanist and a photographer and was swept into the friendship of Mad Wolf (“Siyeh” -- which is also the name of the wholly-owned subsidiary that runs the tribal businesses: bottled water, casinoes, cable TV, and other things.)
The two books are quite different. The old timers that Ewers was interviewing in the Forties were still young when McClintock came earlier. The very-old-timers of McClintock’s arrival dated back to Lewis & Clark. Ewers’ discipline was anthropology, while McClintock, equally scientific, was focused on botany -- he didn’t look on his friends scientifically but rather more as Ned Jacob did on Moccasin Flats: as equals and friends. Ewers would have been watched by colleagues to see if he might be “going native,” but McClintock just did it. Although he felt a little sad when he spent an evening playing with a pup who turned up in an old lady’s stewpot the next day, he took a photo of her stirring the pot.
McClintock was given rather a bad rap by Sherry L. Smith in her book, “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes: 1880 - 1940.” (Oxford University Press, copyright 2000.) Her emphasis is on early white friends of Indians who were not quite politically correct (often patronizing) and whose stories had consequences in terms of how people thought about Indians. She felt that McClintock, whose family was well-connected, didn’t do enough for his Indian friends politically and didn’t come around much after he made a splash with his book. But the newspapers in Browning carefully note his arrival by railroad every summer with crated presents for Mad Wolf and his family.
Bob Scriver (1914-1999) asked his dad once, “Pop, did you ever know a guy named McClintock?” T.E. Scriver (1879 - 1971) came to Browning in 1903 and had run a mercantile store there his whole life. “Oh, yes, he was around here quite a lot in the old days.” Bob knew John Ewers well and built a “homemade museum” under the influence of the example of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. But he was not a buddy of Ewers. He would have been a great friend of McClintock’s if he hadn’t been out of time-sync with him.
About 1990 when I was teaching at Heart Butte during the first year of a high school there, I tried to think of a book that this all-Blackft student body could read at the same time. I chose “The Old North Trail,” though it was politically incorrect because of being by a white man. (This political stuff can be a big nuisance.) The book is full of explanations, adventures, natural history, and fuzzy reproductions of the photos Walter took. It was an immediate experience of the reservation, not objective reflection like Ewers’ book. I squeezed the budget hard and got enough copies out of it for one classroom of kids. So I didn’t check them out to individuals -- just handed them out and then collected them. They were supposed to read a chapter a week and then do a worksheet. They could not play basketball until they finished that worksheet.
One smart aleck protested, “Hey, this isn’t English. It’s history.” I asked, “What language is it in?” “Um, English.” “Get back to me when you have a book written in Blackft.” It will happen some day.
Of course, they all copied off each other, but they had to be careful because the worksheets were not just a list of questions but a hodge-podge of drawings, circles, squares, numberings -- all pointed in different directions. I had to make myself a template for correcting -- a piece of tagboard with strategic holes over the places where answers should be. I heard them explaining to each other. The theory to which I was responding was that Indian kids don’t think linearly, but rather in spatial relationships. (Me, too. And I’m Scots-Irish.)
The theory that actually made it work had nothing to do with all that, but rather with horizontal/lateral learning rather than hierarchical/authoritative learning. I saw this recently when I subbed for a very small class of junior high kids. I told them what the grammar rule was and gave examples. Then the brightest kid in the group turned to the others and explained what I’d said. He did a good job and didn’t mind repeating. The boys did this more than the girls. They clearly wanted to know what I was telling them, but they didn’t trust me and didn’t want to learn from me. I’m still thinking about this.
Though I was white and they were Indian, I don’t think it’s Indian -- I think it’s generational. Young people now just don’t believe that adults really know anything -- they don’t WANT to believe that. If adults are so smart, why isn’t it a better world? On the other hand, in the post-colonial era, no minority wants to be told anything by someone from the dominant culture for much the same reason.
Anyway, Ewers and Smith are TELLING YOU and McClintock is just sharing. He’s all caught up in the stuff himself. When we started reading “The Old North Trail” together, in homes all around Heart Butte people went to trunks and chests and boxes and drew out the copies of “The Old North Trail” they had had all the time without the kids even knowing it. I never heard of anyone having a stashed copy of “The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains.” Maybe. (Darrell Kipp even has a copy of that book about Ned Jacob, “Sacred Paint.”)
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Browning, Montana
April 5, 2005
Browning, Montana
Not everyone is fond of Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackft Reservation which belongs to the Amskapi Pikuni Siksika (otherwise known as the South Piegan Blackft). Sandra Dallas, who wrote the copy for Ned Jacob’s art book described the town thus: probably quoting Ned, she says it was “a tough, squalid Indian town. Set at the edge of the awesome grandeur of Glacier National Park, Browning had all the beauty of a prairie chicken squatting in the grass. It was treeless, cold, drab as its name, with unadorned, raw board buildings, many of them bars. But for Ned Jacob, Browning was the real West.” I felt pretty much the same way. Ned was there straight out of high school, between 1956 and 1960. I was there straight out of college (I’m a year younger.) between 1957 and 1973. Both of us, though we’ve never met in person, were deeply shaped by our experience and, in fact, I came back. Ned went to Denver to become a famous artist, especially known for his fine drawing. Now he’s in Santa Fe, in theory, but he’s quite a “fiddlefoot.”
[Ned’s book is called “Sacred Paint,” by Sandra Dallas, copyright 1979, Published by Fenn Galleries Publishing Co. ISBN 0-913504-50-5. It’s a beautiful book, prize-winning, with a silver dust jacket. You can find it on the internet, though it’s expensive. My copy came via Abebooks from a bookseller in Australia.]
The prairie chicken squats along Willow Creek in what was originally a flood-plain swale. Once the daughter of the man whose Indian-allotted land it was told me she used to love to wake up in the spring mornings and gaze out at the sheets of wildflowers: buttercups, wild iris, glacier lilies, shooting stars. They say the location was chosen for the agency because of this beauty.
At the chicken’s head (north) is the ridge with the hospital on it (inevitably “pill hill”) and at the chicken’s tail (south) is the ridge with the row of schools on it. The town’s real main street is stretched along the chicken’s spine and bisected on the perpendicular by Willow Creek. The creek runs underground in a culvert now, but it used to be bordered on the hospital side by Government Square, a big grassy area suitable for horseback cavalry drill (Originally the town was Fort Browning and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was in the Department of War) and bordered by the government housing. On the south side of the creek was the town square, which used to have a pond suitable for watering horses, but now has a park. That’s where the bank, the post office, the bowling alley are, in the real center of town.
All the little creeks that used to wander through the townsite were gradually put into drain pipes and storm sewers under the streets and buildings, but when the year is wet, they come back. Few buildings have basements and those that do must keep their guard up. In the 1964 flood, the Museum of the Plains Indian that is on the west side of the west boundary road (which is in fact a dike) had part of the foundation pushed in and valuable artifacts destroyed in their preservation drawers. When the high school basketball court gymnasium was built just before I came, the pond under it returned and the floor became into a roller coaster. Some engineering was necessary. You can’t have Indians without a basketball court.
I’ll steal a story from Ned. When he first arrived, he fell in with a bunch of boys his age (eighteen) who were getting high on wine. He drank with them, even contributed money, until they moved on to drinking “rub.” (Rubbing alcohol.) Finally they crashed in a tent pitched in the yard of one boys’ house. Since Ned had refused rub, he woke first and stuck his head out of the tent to see where he was. He saw “an Indian man next door in a shapeless dark suit, a felt hat with an open crown on his head, and a red silk scarf around his neck.
“’Hungry?’ the Indian asked.
“’Yeah.’
“Well, come on over.’”
Breakfast was boiled coffee, frybread, and a big chunk of a boiled beef heart. They were on Moccasin Flats, which was a piece of land that ran along behind the schools. Once I looked out the classroom window in time to witness a drunken man flat in the dust while his equally drunk romantic interest tried to run their old car over him. Luckily the car had a lot of clearance and he mostly just bounced around under there, while his “old lady,” who recognized the problem, tried to get a wheel to go over him but was too drunk for proper calculations. Someone intervened before it became a murder.
Moccasin Flats had begun in about 1900 as an emergency project of log cabins for old people who were living in tattered tents, nothing like the felt-thick hides of oldtime lodges. Once the old folks moved in, their children could not be denied. By the time Ned and I got there, the place was a tangle of abandoned cars, trash, crazy TV antennas, and all the other Dogpatch paraphenalia you could think of. Many people think this is hilarious and the true preference of Indians, but in fact it amounted to abandonment by the Indian agent who should have been seeing to the tilted privies, sagging electrical wire, missing garbage service and widely spaced water spigots on the street. On winter mornings the place rang with the buzzing of chainsaws because everyone heated and cooked with wood. The people there were living a 19th century rural life because they had no choice. Shortly after I came, JFK stepped in and things began to change.
The school had been assuming that Moccasin Flats was trust land, held for protection by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and therefore not taxable. The law allowed for the federal government to pay the equivalent of property taxes for all land in trust or owned by the US Government, like military bases or reservations, and they had been doing that for Moccasin Flats and for the new border patrol homes up along the highway where the officers put up a sign that said “Moccasin Heights.” Then one day we discovered that Moccasin Flats had belonged to some white absentee landlord all along. All that federal money would have to be paid back. I don’t remember how it was resolved.
The Dawes Act, which split up reservations into allotments the same way homesteading did, had another very dark side. When the first owner died, his allotment was divvied up among his descendents. When they died, the land was divided again. By this time, some city lots are owned by more than a hundred people, some of whom hadn’t been seen or heard from for decades. Some of the land was put back into trust by regular owners, so they wouldn’t have to pay state or county taxes, but land with so many owners could only be handled by keeping it in trust and any profits sent to the various owners. Only there weren’t any profits. And if there were liabilities, everyone ducked.
Part of the reason Browning can look pretty derelict is that no one can get enough of a grip on the old buildings to do anything about them. But the present mayor has really bitten down on the problem and his constituency agrees with him, so this year fourteen rickety old firetraps were burned to the ground by the fire department. Legal instruments like condemnation were used, I think. Also, persuasion and threats. Few, if any, of the buildings had foundations. Strangely, people were sentimental over each shack -- myself included -- remembering how it had been, what had happened there, what the dreams about the place had been.
Getting back to the water problem, the present town supply has a strange characteristic. The manganese in it reacts with germ-killing chlorine to make a black sediment. The water can’t be used by the hospital dialysis unit, which is crucial because so many people have kidney failure from advanced diabetes. In fact, it turned out that this very wet place has the least water in its drainage of the other originally considered locations. Now a huge project that will pipe water down from Two Medicine River in Glacier Park is underway. It will serve several communities and supply lots of good quality water -- until the glaciers are all melted. Then Browning, like Katmandu and the cities of Peru, will have to think again.
COMMENT on 4-04-05:
A reply from Nancy Curtis (Wyoming author, editor and publisher): “A footnote to your review of Alvin Josephy's book. His daughter is Diane Josephy Peavey, who lives in Idaho with her husband John Peavey, a sheeprancher. Diane is a writer and a Idaho Public Radio commentator and she and John really got the Trailing of the Sheep Festival going.” She has been active in the Idaho Council on the Arts. “Diane's book of essays-- ‘Bitterbrush Country’ -- was published by Fulcrum, and I think her work is in all three of the anthologies Linda, Gaydell, and I edited.” (All those “wind and grass” anthologies of Western women’s writing.)
Idaho Arts Council on if she was a citizen board member.
Browning, Montana
Not everyone is fond of Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackft Reservation which belongs to the Amskapi Pikuni Siksika (otherwise known as the South Piegan Blackft). Sandra Dallas, who wrote the copy for Ned Jacob’s art book described the town thus: probably quoting Ned, she says it was “a tough, squalid Indian town. Set at the edge of the awesome grandeur of Glacier National Park, Browning had all the beauty of a prairie chicken squatting in the grass. It was treeless, cold, drab as its name, with unadorned, raw board buildings, many of them bars. But for Ned Jacob, Browning was the real West.” I felt pretty much the same way. Ned was there straight out of high school, between 1956 and 1960. I was there straight out of college (I’m a year younger.) between 1957 and 1973. Both of us, though we’ve never met in person, were deeply shaped by our experience and, in fact, I came back. Ned went to Denver to become a famous artist, especially known for his fine drawing. Now he’s in Santa Fe, in theory, but he’s quite a “fiddlefoot.”
[Ned’s book is called “Sacred Paint,” by Sandra Dallas, copyright 1979, Published by Fenn Galleries Publishing Co. ISBN 0-913504-50-5. It’s a beautiful book, prize-winning, with a silver dust jacket. You can find it on the internet, though it’s expensive. My copy came via Abebooks from a bookseller in Australia.]
The prairie chicken squats along Willow Creek in what was originally a flood-plain swale. Once the daughter of the man whose Indian-allotted land it was told me she used to love to wake up in the spring mornings and gaze out at the sheets of wildflowers: buttercups, wild iris, glacier lilies, shooting stars. They say the location was chosen for the agency because of this beauty.
At the chicken’s head (north) is the ridge with the hospital on it (inevitably “pill hill”) and at the chicken’s tail (south) is the ridge with the row of schools on it. The town’s real main street is stretched along the chicken’s spine and bisected on the perpendicular by Willow Creek. The creek runs underground in a culvert now, but it used to be bordered on the hospital side by Government Square, a big grassy area suitable for horseback cavalry drill (Originally the town was Fort Browning and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was in the Department of War) and bordered by the government housing. On the south side of the creek was the town square, which used to have a pond suitable for watering horses, but now has a park. That’s where the bank, the post office, the bowling alley are, in the real center of town.
All the little creeks that used to wander through the townsite were gradually put into drain pipes and storm sewers under the streets and buildings, but when the year is wet, they come back. Few buildings have basements and those that do must keep their guard up. In the 1964 flood, the Museum of the Plains Indian that is on the west side of the west boundary road (which is in fact a dike) had part of the foundation pushed in and valuable artifacts destroyed in their preservation drawers. When the high school basketball court gymnasium was built just before I came, the pond under it returned and the floor became into a roller coaster. Some engineering was necessary. You can’t have Indians without a basketball court.
I’ll steal a story from Ned. When he first arrived, he fell in with a bunch of boys his age (eighteen) who were getting high on wine. He drank with them, even contributed money, until they moved on to drinking “rub.” (Rubbing alcohol.) Finally they crashed in a tent pitched in the yard of one boys’ house. Since Ned had refused rub, he woke first and stuck his head out of the tent to see where he was. He saw “an Indian man next door in a shapeless dark suit, a felt hat with an open crown on his head, and a red silk scarf around his neck.
“’Hungry?’ the Indian asked.
“’Yeah.’
“Well, come on over.’”
Breakfast was boiled coffee, frybread, and a big chunk of a boiled beef heart. They were on Moccasin Flats, which was a piece of land that ran along behind the schools. Once I looked out the classroom window in time to witness a drunken man flat in the dust while his equally drunk romantic interest tried to run their old car over him. Luckily the car had a lot of clearance and he mostly just bounced around under there, while his “old lady,” who recognized the problem, tried to get a wheel to go over him but was too drunk for proper calculations. Someone intervened before it became a murder.
Moccasin Flats had begun in about 1900 as an emergency project of log cabins for old people who were living in tattered tents, nothing like the felt-thick hides of oldtime lodges. Once the old folks moved in, their children could not be denied. By the time Ned and I got there, the place was a tangle of abandoned cars, trash, crazy TV antennas, and all the other Dogpatch paraphenalia you could think of. Many people think this is hilarious and the true preference of Indians, but in fact it amounted to abandonment by the Indian agent who should have been seeing to the tilted privies, sagging electrical wire, missing garbage service and widely spaced water spigots on the street. On winter mornings the place rang with the buzzing of chainsaws because everyone heated and cooked with wood. The people there were living a 19th century rural life because they had no choice. Shortly after I came, JFK stepped in and things began to change.
The school had been assuming that Moccasin Flats was trust land, held for protection by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and therefore not taxable. The law allowed for the federal government to pay the equivalent of property taxes for all land in trust or owned by the US Government, like military bases or reservations, and they had been doing that for Moccasin Flats and for the new border patrol homes up along the highway where the officers put up a sign that said “Moccasin Heights.” Then one day we discovered that Moccasin Flats had belonged to some white absentee landlord all along. All that federal money would have to be paid back. I don’t remember how it was resolved.
The Dawes Act, which split up reservations into allotments the same way homesteading did, had another very dark side. When the first owner died, his allotment was divvied up among his descendents. When they died, the land was divided again. By this time, some city lots are owned by more than a hundred people, some of whom hadn’t been seen or heard from for decades. Some of the land was put back into trust by regular owners, so they wouldn’t have to pay state or county taxes, but land with so many owners could only be handled by keeping it in trust and any profits sent to the various owners. Only there weren’t any profits. And if there were liabilities, everyone ducked.
Part of the reason Browning can look pretty derelict is that no one can get enough of a grip on the old buildings to do anything about them. But the present mayor has really bitten down on the problem and his constituency agrees with him, so this year fourteen rickety old firetraps were burned to the ground by the fire department. Legal instruments like condemnation were used, I think. Also, persuasion and threats. Few, if any, of the buildings had foundations. Strangely, people were sentimental over each shack -- myself included -- remembering how it had been, what had happened there, what the dreams about the place had been.
Getting back to the water problem, the present town supply has a strange characteristic. The manganese in it reacts with germ-killing chlorine to make a black sediment. The water can’t be used by the hospital dialysis unit, which is crucial because so many people have kidney failure from advanced diabetes. In fact, it turned out that this very wet place has the least water in its drainage of the other originally considered locations. Now a huge project that will pipe water down from Two Medicine River in Glacier Park is underway. It will serve several communities and supply lots of good quality water -- until the glaciers are all melted. Then Browning, like Katmandu and the cities of Peru, will have to think again.
COMMENT on 4-04-05:
A reply from Nancy Curtis (Wyoming author, editor and publisher): “A footnote to your review of Alvin Josephy's book. His daughter is Diane Josephy Peavey, who lives in Idaho with her husband John Peavey, a sheeprancher. Diane is a writer and a Idaho Public Radio commentator and she and John really got the Trailing of the Sheep Festival going.” She has been active in the Idaho Council on the Arts. “Diane's book of essays-- ‘Bitterbrush Country’ -- was published by Fulcrum, and I think her work is in all three of the anthologies Linda, Gaydell, and I edited.” (All those “wind and grass” anthologies of Western women’s writing.)
Idaho Arts Council on if she was a citizen board member.
Monday, April 04, 2005
The River under the River
April 4, 2005
The River Under the River
My last job for salary was for the City of Portland, Bureau of Buildings, Site Development Team. There were five geological and soils engineers, one landscape architect crazed by bicycle crashes (head injuries) and myself. When I moved back to Montana, the engineers wanted to come with me, but their wives wouldn’t let them. I mean, the wives were invited as well, but they said they couldn’t survive in a Montana small town because there would be no culture there. The engineers looked very sad. I asked them who picked out these wives anyway -- their mothers?
One of my best tools (I bought it myself -- the engineers didn’t know about it until I showed it to them) was “Dictionary of Geological Terms” prepared by the American Geological Institute. Anchor Books, Doubleday. Copyright 1957, 1960, 1962, 1976, 1984. ISBN 0-385-18101-9. The book is paperback and prepared “as a service of the American Geological Institute of geoscience societies united to provide information to the science community and the public.” Very much a part of the culture.
In fact, geology has had a HUGE impact on our culture, since it is one of the major narrations that explains the existence of the planet and was one of the forces that pried the fingers of European institutional religion off the way we act in the world. When religious “experts” had to resort to explaining the presence of fossils in the tops of mountains as God teasing us by making little seashells and tucking them in here and there, they were pretty much through.
This dictionary has wonderful tropes captured in words, often constructed or converted from other languages. (That’s culture.) One of my favorites is the word that means the river that runs under the rivers, parallel to it. Thalweg: from German meaning “valley way.” Not all the water is on the surface. Some of the water travels through the land underneath, especially if it’s gravel, but even on rock, water travels through the cracks. This is one of the keys to the prairie. Under the shale that sealed over the bed of the ancient inland sea on top of the ground remained another ancient inland sea, traveling through and trapped in limestone, which is nothing but the tiny shelly skeletons of sea creatures who died and sank. Tapping this underground water made irrigation possible.
These underground water ways rise and fall. Its level is called “the water horizon.” In my Saturday newspaper was a fixit article about a house built on a slab with heating vents in the ground under the slab. One morning the family heard sloshing in the vents and found them full of water -- the water horizon (they were in a valley) had risen until it had almost surfaced on the earth horizon. In the houses of this village of Valier, most people have sump pumps in their crawl spaces or basements because the water horizon, using ancient gravel moraines, can travel through the ground from the Rockies thirty miles away or from the little lake the irrigators made next to town.
My theological seminary in Hyde Park, Chicago, was also next to Lake Michigan. An underground stream/spring is directly under the massive buildiing, but the clever engineer -- who knew it would gradually destroy the building if it were resisted -- simply made a little concrete canal through the basement. The water comes in one side of the building, travels through, and exits on the other side. Water pressure, like culture, cannot be suppressed, but can be channeled.
The long gradual slant of the ancient seabed from the height of Glacier Park to the southeast corner of Montana means that all the snow water from the Rockies travels down and across to South Dakota. Some of it oozes along through the limestone under the state (popping up at Giant Springs, which is a leak in the cover) and some of it runs in streams that run more or less left to right on a map of Montana. Some of it probably gets shot into the air at Yellowstone.
The most southern stream on the Blackft reservation is Birch Creek which has Swift Dam at its head. In the 1964 flood the dam (and two others on the reservation) broke under the pressure of too much water and killed many people. While the dam was rebuilt, two temporary structures were thrown up alongside the site. One was a little shack for a watchman to live in and the other was a kind of garage-shop for working on equipment. Both of those structures are now in my backyard. They are not improving, but they are convenient. In this country wood is scarce and it paid to haul these frail buildings down out of the mountains.
When we used to fetch the grandkids from the airport in Great Falls when they came for the summer and they got impatient on the drive back to Browning (“Are we THERE yet?”), we taught them to count the creeks we crossed. First is Birch (which is the southern boundary), then the second stream is Badger Creek and the third one is Two Medicine. The farthest north is Milk River, which curves up into Canada and then comes back down, traveling east, to follow the High-Line just south of the border -- not because it wants to, but because of man-made interference (The only females involved, I’m guessing, were horses.) through flumes and canals which are now about to collapse. The thing about engineering is that you have to take into account the maintenance.
The three streams (Birch, Badger, and Two Medicine) flow through long valleys, broad enough for tipi villages to camp among the cottonwood groves that provided firewood and grassy meadows that invited grazing. These valleys were the secret of winter survival and the keeping of horses. They were not coulees enlarged over long stretches of time by erosion, but rather valleys formed by the melting of the glaciers that once covered the shoulders of the Rockies and pushed down from the north. The ice melted in huge amounts over thousands of years, repeatedly until ten thousand years ago, far more than the 1964 flood. The water pushed slush, loose rock, sediments and boulders as though in front of a bulldozer, all heading down to the southeast until the Missouri River intercepted them and carried the water to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico. The whole inland sea became a draining system that was also -- in reverse -- a highway for humans to ascend.
This “highway” had a great deal to do with the fate of the people who lived in Montana already and also those who came later. One didn’t have to walk to Blackft country once the steamboats were traveling up and down between New Orleans and Fort Benton, where they were stopped by the Great Falls. Brother Van, an inspired Methodist missionary not unlike Pope John-Paul in some ways, came to Fort Benton on a steamboat, stepped off into the gumbo, and struggled across the street to a plank sidewalk in front of a saloon. He estimated that by then each foot weighed fifty pounds. He went straight inside where the men were carousing and began to preach and organize hymn singing. I’ve always wondered whether he took the time to scrape the gumbo off his boots or whether he just began his mission in his sock feet. I’m betting on the latter.
The River Under the River
My last job for salary was for the City of Portland, Bureau of Buildings, Site Development Team. There were five geological and soils engineers, one landscape architect crazed by bicycle crashes (head injuries) and myself. When I moved back to Montana, the engineers wanted to come with me, but their wives wouldn’t let them. I mean, the wives were invited as well, but they said they couldn’t survive in a Montana small town because there would be no culture there. The engineers looked very sad. I asked them who picked out these wives anyway -- their mothers?
One of my best tools (I bought it myself -- the engineers didn’t know about it until I showed it to them) was “Dictionary of Geological Terms” prepared by the American Geological Institute. Anchor Books, Doubleday. Copyright 1957, 1960, 1962, 1976, 1984. ISBN 0-385-18101-9. The book is paperback and prepared “as a service of the American Geological Institute of geoscience societies united to provide information to the science community and the public.” Very much a part of the culture.
In fact, geology has had a HUGE impact on our culture, since it is one of the major narrations that explains the existence of the planet and was one of the forces that pried the fingers of European institutional religion off the way we act in the world. When religious “experts” had to resort to explaining the presence of fossils in the tops of mountains as God teasing us by making little seashells and tucking them in here and there, they were pretty much through.
This dictionary has wonderful tropes captured in words, often constructed or converted from other languages. (That’s culture.) One of my favorites is the word that means the river that runs under the rivers, parallel to it. Thalweg: from German meaning “valley way.” Not all the water is on the surface. Some of the water travels through the land underneath, especially if it’s gravel, but even on rock, water travels through the cracks. This is one of the keys to the prairie. Under the shale that sealed over the bed of the ancient inland sea on top of the ground remained another ancient inland sea, traveling through and trapped in limestone, which is nothing but the tiny shelly skeletons of sea creatures who died and sank. Tapping this underground water made irrigation possible.
These underground water ways rise and fall. Its level is called “the water horizon.” In my Saturday newspaper was a fixit article about a house built on a slab with heating vents in the ground under the slab. One morning the family heard sloshing in the vents and found them full of water -- the water horizon (they were in a valley) had risen until it had almost surfaced on the earth horizon. In the houses of this village of Valier, most people have sump pumps in their crawl spaces or basements because the water horizon, using ancient gravel moraines, can travel through the ground from the Rockies thirty miles away or from the little lake the irrigators made next to town.
My theological seminary in Hyde Park, Chicago, was also next to Lake Michigan. An underground stream/spring is directly under the massive buildiing, but the clever engineer -- who knew it would gradually destroy the building if it were resisted -- simply made a little concrete canal through the basement. The water comes in one side of the building, travels through, and exits on the other side. Water pressure, like culture, cannot be suppressed, but can be channeled.
The long gradual slant of the ancient seabed from the height of Glacier Park to the southeast corner of Montana means that all the snow water from the Rockies travels down and across to South Dakota. Some of it oozes along through the limestone under the state (popping up at Giant Springs, which is a leak in the cover) and some of it runs in streams that run more or less left to right on a map of Montana. Some of it probably gets shot into the air at Yellowstone.
The most southern stream on the Blackft reservation is Birch Creek which has Swift Dam at its head. In the 1964 flood the dam (and two others on the reservation) broke under the pressure of too much water and killed many people. While the dam was rebuilt, two temporary structures were thrown up alongside the site. One was a little shack for a watchman to live in and the other was a kind of garage-shop for working on equipment. Both of those structures are now in my backyard. They are not improving, but they are convenient. In this country wood is scarce and it paid to haul these frail buildings down out of the mountains.
When we used to fetch the grandkids from the airport in Great Falls when they came for the summer and they got impatient on the drive back to Browning (“Are we THERE yet?”), we taught them to count the creeks we crossed. First is Birch (which is the southern boundary), then the second stream is Badger Creek and the third one is Two Medicine. The farthest north is Milk River, which curves up into Canada and then comes back down, traveling east, to follow the High-Line just south of the border -- not because it wants to, but because of man-made interference (The only females involved, I’m guessing, were horses.) through flumes and canals which are now about to collapse. The thing about engineering is that you have to take into account the maintenance.
The three streams (Birch, Badger, and Two Medicine) flow through long valleys, broad enough for tipi villages to camp among the cottonwood groves that provided firewood and grassy meadows that invited grazing. These valleys were the secret of winter survival and the keeping of horses. They were not coulees enlarged over long stretches of time by erosion, but rather valleys formed by the melting of the glaciers that once covered the shoulders of the Rockies and pushed down from the north. The ice melted in huge amounts over thousands of years, repeatedly until ten thousand years ago, far more than the 1964 flood. The water pushed slush, loose rock, sediments and boulders as though in front of a bulldozer, all heading down to the southeast until the Missouri River intercepted them and carried the water to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico. The whole inland sea became a draining system that was also -- in reverse -- a highway for humans to ascend.
This “highway” had a great deal to do with the fate of the people who lived in Montana already and also those who came later. One didn’t have to walk to Blackft country once the steamboats were traveling up and down between New Orleans and Fort Benton, where they were stopped by the Great Falls. Brother Van, an inspired Methodist missionary not unlike Pope John-Paul in some ways, came to Fort Benton on a steamboat, stepped off into the gumbo, and struggled across the street to a plank sidewalk in front of a saloon. He estimated that by then each foot weighed fifty pounds. He went straight inside where the men were carousing and began to preach and organize hymn singing. I’ve always wondered whether he took the time to scrape the gumbo off his boots or whether he just began his mission in his sock feet. I’m betting on the latter.
BOOK REVIEW: "A Walk toward Oregon" by Josephy
“A Walk Toward Oregon: a Memoir” by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. Copyright 2000. Knopf, Borzoi Books, Random House. ISBN 0-375-40910-6
Though I had a vague notion that Alvin Josephy, Jr. had a connection to history and the Nez Perce, I had no idea how he got there, so I figured he was a history professor. Not. The Depression put him out of Harvard halfway through and he made a side trip to Hollywood where he tried to be a screen writer. Not. Back to New York City where his folks were recovering a bit of prosperity and still well connected. Then he went via newspapers and politics to radio, where he plainly had a hilarious time with the rough equivalent of the current steep learning curve of today’s internet world.
When WWII struck, he took his drive and ingenuity into the life of a war correspondent. In those days they WERE soldiers, carried rifles, fought AND carried their radio and recording equipment. Assigned to the Pacific Theater he met a couple of Navajo sign-talkers and liked them. The whole dramatic experience (he won a bronze star) profoundly changed his understanding of the world. Not only did he stop being ethnocentric, but also he came to love the very dirt of the world beneath him, and to cling to it.
After the war and a bit of staggering around reconvening himself, he began a second wife and a second life in the family business of publishing. (His mother was a sister to Alfred Knopf.) Besides writing his own books, he edited the beautiful and sophisticated hardback magazine called “American Heritage” for twenty years. His book “The Patriot Chiefs” drew him into the circle of rather elite people who tried to help Indians by organizing and influencing legislation. There he grew to know many Indian leaders, to nearly get involved in the AIM invasion of Washington, D.C., and even to help begin the organizing of the recently completed Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. At the other end of the spectrum, his family acquired a small ranch at Joseph, Oregon, historically Nez Perce country, and influenced that gorgeous Wallowa country -- which they deeply love -- to make a little room for Chief Joseph’s people to return.
I spend a lot of time musing over the break in academic thinking between the assumed order of things up to the Fifties and then in the Sixties the counter- and post-conventional challenging ideas that have developed out of French theory, Marxism, and other “question authority” contexts. Much of the more recent Native American Studies work has been from the latter point of view and has been very hard on old white men who tell their stories.
Josephy’s earnest and straightforward account of his own consciousness-raising and what he did about it is old fashioned “narrative” history but leaves out the white triumphalism. His dust-jacket blurbs are all by prosperous big-name white folks. (One woman: Terry Tempest Williams. They just can’t resist her! Dunno what happened to his “dear friend” Vine Deloria, Jr.) But the importance of this book is not in the writing so much as the recording of the real world actions taken by an intelligent man who “woke up” alive.
Though I had a vague notion that Alvin Josephy, Jr. had a connection to history and the Nez Perce, I had no idea how he got there, so I figured he was a history professor. Not. The Depression put him out of Harvard halfway through and he made a side trip to Hollywood where he tried to be a screen writer. Not. Back to New York City where his folks were recovering a bit of prosperity and still well connected. Then he went via newspapers and politics to radio, where he plainly had a hilarious time with the rough equivalent of the current steep learning curve of today’s internet world.
When WWII struck, he took his drive and ingenuity into the life of a war correspondent. In those days they WERE soldiers, carried rifles, fought AND carried their radio and recording equipment. Assigned to the Pacific Theater he met a couple of Navajo sign-talkers and liked them. The whole dramatic experience (he won a bronze star) profoundly changed his understanding of the world. Not only did he stop being ethnocentric, but also he came to love the very dirt of the world beneath him, and to cling to it.
After the war and a bit of staggering around reconvening himself, he began a second wife and a second life in the family business of publishing. (His mother was a sister to Alfred Knopf.) Besides writing his own books, he edited the beautiful and sophisticated hardback magazine called “American Heritage” for twenty years. His book “The Patriot Chiefs” drew him into the circle of rather elite people who tried to help Indians by organizing and influencing legislation. There he grew to know many Indian leaders, to nearly get involved in the AIM invasion of Washington, D.C., and even to help begin the organizing of the recently completed Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. At the other end of the spectrum, his family acquired a small ranch at Joseph, Oregon, historically Nez Perce country, and influenced that gorgeous Wallowa country -- which they deeply love -- to make a little room for Chief Joseph’s people to return.
I spend a lot of time musing over the break in academic thinking between the assumed order of things up to the Fifties and then in the Sixties the counter- and post-conventional challenging ideas that have developed out of French theory, Marxism, and other “question authority” contexts. Much of the more recent Native American Studies work has been from the latter point of view and has been very hard on old white men who tell their stories.
Josephy’s earnest and straightforward account of his own consciousness-raising and what he did about it is old fashioned “narrative” history but leaves out the white triumphalism. His dust-jacket blurbs are all by prosperous big-name white folks. (One woman: Terry Tempest Williams. They just can’t resist her! Dunno what happened to his “dear friend” Vine Deloria, Jr.) But the importance of this book is not in the writing so much as the recording of the real world actions taken by an intelligent man who “woke up” alive.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
The Lay of the Land
April 3, 2005
The Lay of the Land
By now almost everyone knows that the Rocky Mountains are the result of huge plates under the continent pushing the land together until it rumples up like a tablecloth. Few know that the Rocky Mountains we see today are the third mountain range raised by this rumpling -- the others are underneath, worn down by erosion over the millenia. I have no idea how the scientists figured out they were there.
Some have observed but don’t reflect on the differences along the present cordillera, so that the slabbed mountains up at Banff look different from the sharp peaks of the Grand Tetons. (And how come no one objects to female anatomy being so frankly used? Or is it time to get over the sexist implications of metaphor? Yesterday I drove past a new road sign, pointing the way to a locally notorious butte: “Molly’s Nipple.” You have to be an old-timer to know which Molly. She was white, I think.)
The mountains I’m looking at don’t really look like a rumpled tablecloth so much as they looked like a buckled sheet cake, especially if you can imagine the cake batter having been poured in layers of different colors. Because the other key aspect of this part of the high prairie is that the ground is deeply sedimentary, the result of millenia as seabed, millenial recipient of the valcanic dust from the volcanic uproar in the northwest Cascades, and more millenia as dried-up seabed with high winds sweeping it, just as they spent last night sweeping (ha -- pounding is more like it) my little shell of a house. These sedimentary strata broke and slid over each other so that we look at the edges, striped and corrogated and they are not in the right order. Precambrian layers may be on top of relatively new layers.
Some of those sedimentary strata were very slippery, which allowed the strata to separate and slide on top of adjacent layers. The resulting ramparts are huge and rugged, parts of them given names like “the Chinese Wall,” a place in the Bob Marshall Wilderness where the big game hunters go. The slippery strata are nothing more nor less than what we call “gumbo.” It’s the same stuff that made it possible for the Egyptian pyramids to be built because it almost eliminates friction, so those huge blocks of stone could be slid up ramps. Paradoxically it’s also sticky.
Probably it’s gumbo that helped keep the wheel from being invented by early people around here because wheeled vehicles driving on gumbo roads that have gotten wet will go noplace. The stuff sticks to wheels, and even feet, in huge clinging wads that will not keep you connected to enough friction to make progress.
For places to investigate further, try:
http://scidiv.bcc.ctc.edu/rv/208/links.html
http://www.3rivers.net/%7Edbaker/plate_tec/plate0.ht
or
Google “David Baker” geology (He often organizes tours.)
or
Montana geology
If you Google “gumbo,” you will get recipes and the names of music bands. Neither is a bad thing, but neither will help you with geology. There are commercial uses for gumbo (caleche) if it’s pure enough and there is enough of the stuff around here that at least one person has looked into starting a “gumbo mine,” but there was some reason why it wouldn’t work. Maybe shipping.
One of my pleasures is hunting among the books about Montana that are floating through the world in all directions now that libraries are about computers and people are as likely to self-publish as not and such amentities as www.alibris.com and www.abebooks.com make “real world” bookstores almost obsolete (if it weren’t for the coffeeshop attached). Abner M. Wagner wrote and probably self-published a book called “El Rancho Gumbo, Five Thousand Days in Montana’s Piegan Country.” The publisher is listed as “The Sagebrush Press,” PO Box 87, Morongo Valley, CA, 92256. Copyright 1983. ISBN 0-930704-15-0 If Abner is living, he’ll be pretty old by now.
The story begins in 1921 when Abner’s family bought 320 acres of government land which had previously belonged to “No Bear.” That was the owner’s name, not his attribute. The patent deed was signed by President Calvin Coolidge. The poles for the corrals were hauled from Heart Butte, which I can see from here. I taught there for a few years. The family stuck from 1923 to 1936, lasting such a long time because Abner’s father was the Watermaster on the Badger-Fisher Division of the Blackfeet Project, an irrigation deal that incurred a million dollar debt to pay for digging canals. The debt was not assumed by Calvin Coolidge, but rather by the Blackft Tribe, of which No Bear was a member. Abner says that when he left, it was not because of the money and hardship, but because he was in need of a wife. (It didn’t seem to occur to him to check out the women of the Blackft, but maybe he was just makiing an excuse or maybe they wouldn’t have him.)
(I am not misspelling Blackft. The word, being English, has to be either plural or singular but the Blackft word, “Siksika,” is neither and in its Siksika context has no rule for converting it. You can pick a pretty good fight about when to say Blackfeet and when to say Blackfoot. I’ll deal with the issues some other time, but my solution for the moment is just to leave out the last two vowels. I’m betting you can handle it.)
The Blackft reservation is bounded on the west by the Rockies, on the south by Birch Creek (I’m just south of Birch Creek.), on the north by the Canadian border, and on the east by Cut Bank Creek. These are general boundaries and there are small exceptions. The reservation is roughly the same size as the African Serengeti and, we all know, was once inhabited by bison and antelope in very much the manner of the Serengeti (which is an ancient and very big volcano crater -- about fifty miles on a side). The Blackft tribe keeps a herd of bison and tries to suggest to them that they ought to stay near the highway for the sake of the tourists, but bison do what they want to do. Watch for them between Browning and East Glacier. Especially if they are on the road.
The Lay of the Land
By now almost everyone knows that the Rocky Mountains are the result of huge plates under the continent pushing the land together until it rumples up like a tablecloth. Few know that the Rocky Mountains we see today are the third mountain range raised by this rumpling -- the others are underneath, worn down by erosion over the millenia. I have no idea how the scientists figured out they were there.
Some have observed but don’t reflect on the differences along the present cordillera, so that the slabbed mountains up at Banff look different from the sharp peaks of the Grand Tetons. (And how come no one objects to female anatomy being so frankly used? Or is it time to get over the sexist implications of metaphor? Yesterday I drove past a new road sign, pointing the way to a locally notorious butte: “Molly’s Nipple.” You have to be an old-timer to know which Molly. She was white, I think.)
The mountains I’m looking at don’t really look like a rumpled tablecloth so much as they looked like a buckled sheet cake, especially if you can imagine the cake batter having been poured in layers of different colors. Because the other key aspect of this part of the high prairie is that the ground is deeply sedimentary, the result of millenia as seabed, millenial recipient of the valcanic dust from the volcanic uproar in the northwest Cascades, and more millenia as dried-up seabed with high winds sweeping it, just as they spent last night sweeping (ha -- pounding is more like it) my little shell of a house. These sedimentary strata broke and slid over each other so that we look at the edges, striped and corrogated and they are not in the right order. Precambrian layers may be on top of relatively new layers.
Some of those sedimentary strata were very slippery, which allowed the strata to separate and slide on top of adjacent layers. The resulting ramparts are huge and rugged, parts of them given names like “the Chinese Wall,” a place in the Bob Marshall Wilderness where the big game hunters go. The slippery strata are nothing more nor less than what we call “gumbo.” It’s the same stuff that made it possible for the Egyptian pyramids to be built because it almost eliminates friction, so those huge blocks of stone could be slid up ramps. Paradoxically it’s also sticky.
Probably it’s gumbo that helped keep the wheel from being invented by early people around here because wheeled vehicles driving on gumbo roads that have gotten wet will go noplace. The stuff sticks to wheels, and even feet, in huge clinging wads that will not keep you connected to enough friction to make progress.
For places to investigate further, try:
http://scidiv.bcc.ctc.edu/rv/208/links.html
http://www.3rivers.net/%7Edbaker/plate_tec/plate0.ht
or
Google “David Baker” geology (He often organizes tours.)
or
Montana geology
If you Google “gumbo,” you will get recipes and the names of music bands. Neither is a bad thing, but neither will help you with geology. There are commercial uses for gumbo (caleche) if it’s pure enough and there is enough of the stuff around here that at least one person has looked into starting a “gumbo mine,” but there was some reason why it wouldn’t work. Maybe shipping.
One of my pleasures is hunting among the books about Montana that are floating through the world in all directions now that libraries are about computers and people are as likely to self-publish as not and such amentities as www.alibris.com and www.abebooks.com make “real world” bookstores almost obsolete (if it weren’t for the coffeeshop attached). Abner M. Wagner wrote and probably self-published a book called “El Rancho Gumbo, Five Thousand Days in Montana’s Piegan Country.” The publisher is listed as “The Sagebrush Press,” PO Box 87, Morongo Valley, CA, 92256. Copyright 1983. ISBN 0-930704-15-0 If Abner is living, he’ll be pretty old by now.
The story begins in 1921 when Abner’s family bought 320 acres of government land which had previously belonged to “No Bear.” That was the owner’s name, not his attribute. The patent deed was signed by President Calvin Coolidge. The poles for the corrals were hauled from Heart Butte, which I can see from here. I taught there for a few years. The family stuck from 1923 to 1936, lasting such a long time because Abner’s father was the Watermaster on the Badger-Fisher Division of the Blackfeet Project, an irrigation deal that incurred a million dollar debt to pay for digging canals. The debt was not assumed by Calvin Coolidge, but rather by the Blackft Tribe, of which No Bear was a member. Abner says that when he left, it was not because of the money and hardship, but because he was in need of a wife. (It didn’t seem to occur to him to check out the women of the Blackft, but maybe he was just makiing an excuse or maybe they wouldn’t have him.)
(I am not misspelling Blackft. The word, being English, has to be either plural or singular but the Blackft word, “Siksika,” is neither and in its Siksika context has no rule for converting it. You can pick a pretty good fight about when to say Blackfeet and when to say Blackfoot. I’ll deal with the issues some other time, but my solution for the moment is just to leave out the last two vowels. I’m betting you can handle it.)
The Blackft reservation is bounded on the west by the Rockies, on the south by Birch Creek (I’m just south of Birch Creek.), on the north by the Canadian border, and on the east by Cut Bank Creek. These are general boundaries and there are small exceptions. The reservation is roughly the same size as the African Serengeti and, we all know, was once inhabited by bison and antelope in very much the manner of the Serengeti (which is an ancient and very big volcano crater -- about fifty miles on a side). The Blackft tribe keeps a herd of bison and tries to suggest to them that they ought to stay near the highway for the sake of the tourists, but bison do what they want to do. Watch for them between Browning and East Glacier. Especially if they are on the road.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
This Is the Place
April 2, 2005
This is the Place
Why Prairie Mary? Well, once I was married to Bob Scriver, who is a famous sculptor in some circles, and though I kept his name, I don’t think I should trade on it, so I picked up this nickname which is easy to remember. (My precedent was the former wife of a much-loved Unitarian minister, a man named Raible. His first wife took the name DeeDee Rainbow. She was an art teacher and rather outrageous, so she wore rainbow-motif everything even before Jesse Jackson and all that.)
The prairie is my favorite metaphor and my conscious choice for a context. “My” prairie stretches from Edmonton to Yellowstone and from the Rockies to the Dakotas. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and earned my college degrees (one bachelor’s and two master’s) in Chicago, but I spent the Sixties here, anchored in Browning, Montana, capital of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When I retired in 1999, I came back.
To the uninitiated and those in too much of a hurry to really look, the prairie is just a blank. Cruise control. Sunglasses. Don’t worry about traffic. But traffic will begin soon, when the tourists come looking for some kind of connection with Lewis and Clark, or at least the locals who make their money from tourists are hoping they’ll come. For a while there, it looked like it was going to be one of those fire storm summers and we’d all have empty pockets. Tourists hate smoke, much less fire. (The governor notified President Bush that Montana wanted its National Guard and big helicopters back, so they can fight fire the way they do most years. They are a Montana entity. Bush stonewalled.) But now that we’ve had some weeks of rain, the calculations are confused. Calculations on the prairie are always complex, always a little more complex than you thought they were. Maybe on the wrong scale or not taking into account one of the dimensions, like time.
The Blackfeet who roved here for hundreds of years, on foot before they had horses, survived because they studied and remembered every small complexity of the terrain, both the coulees and, on the horizon, the peaks of the Rocky Mountain East Front. The area called “Glacier National Park” is called that because it was carved from the cordillera of upthrusts by glaciers -- not because it was full of glaciers, which are all melting anyway. The Park is a section of the cordillera that was bought from the Blackfeet in 1910 when they were starving. Originally the price proposed was three million dollars -- the white men said, “Oh, no.” So then the Blackfeet were pressed down and down and they got hungrier and hungrier (people were starving to death) until they finally agreed to halve that. When tourists come today, they get excited about Glacier National Park and want to know all about it, but they drive through the Blackfeet Reservation quickly, saying “oh-how-depressing.”
When I taught in the reservation high schools, I would draw the profile of the Rockies as seen from Browning. I drew it over and over again -- just a line with the proper peaks in it. Early, I drew it on the blackboards with chalk and then, after decades, I drew it on the whiteboards with erasable fibertips. The kids looked, recognized it, and said, “How did you do that?” They had lost the habit of attention that saved their ancestors, and not very long ago either. But a few said, “I can do that,” and they could. Maybe they’ll teach the others.
When there were still one-room scattered-site schools, another earlier teacher of Blackfeet was Jack Holterman, who wrote several history books. One of the most useful is “Place Names of Glacier/Waterton National Parks.” Published in 1985 by Glacier Natural History Association, copyright 1895. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-70523. ISBN 0-916792 Holterman says, “To someone standiing out on the prairie, the Rockies appear to form a great concave bow between Chief Mountain (Ninaistuki) in the north and Heart Butte (Moxkizippahp-istuki) to the south. Lewis and Clark marked on their maps, “The King” and “The Heart.” That “great bow” was Glacier Park. They also carefully described the place where they killed two Blackfeet -- with enough detail for people to find it in the Sixties. It’s only a few miles from me.
Where I live, I can see Ear Mountain which is by Choteau, where A.B. Guthrie, Jr., lived and wrote stories that refer to that mountain many times. He had a ranch not far from Ear Mountain. The farthest north peak of the Rockies I can see is Ninaistuki. Did you remember that means Chief Mountain? (Istuki is mountain.) Chief Mountain is on the Canadian border.
North of me along the Canadian border are the Sweetgrass Hills, once the only earth sticking up above the glaciers that repeatedly scraped their way down the continent and halfway into Montana. They are “refugia” where some plants and animals survived the glacier. Like great pale worms over a foot long that live three feet deep in the ground. They were also sacred places -- really properly called “the sweet PINE hills” since that’s where the balsam pine grows. There are sweet grass, sweet pine, and even sweet poplar, or balsam poplar. They say that the poplar trees smelled so good that rural ladies would gather the buds, soak them in water, and then dip their hankies in it to get the smell.
The Sweetgrass Hills are three separate buttes, one called “Gold Butte” for obvious reasons. It has a hard rock mine in it, which is said to be played out, but there are -- of course -- people who would love to grind up the whole butte and soak it in cyanide to get the last traces of gold out. Since the Sweetgrass Hills put water into the aquifer for many miles around, the idea of cyanide heap leach mining enraged the local ranchers. But a Canadian company had already started digging up the Canadian side. If this drought continues long enough, there won’t be any ranchers.
When gold was struck, the Sweetgrass Hills were simply overrun, though they were still on reservation land. I forget how much money the tribe finally got when they sued for compensation not too many years ago. Not enough.
Prairie Mary
This is the Place
Why Prairie Mary? Well, once I was married to Bob Scriver, who is a famous sculptor in some circles, and though I kept his name, I don’t think I should trade on it, so I picked up this nickname which is easy to remember. (My precedent was the former wife of a much-loved Unitarian minister, a man named Raible. His first wife took the name DeeDee Rainbow. She was an art teacher and rather outrageous, so she wore rainbow-motif everything even before Jesse Jackson and all that.)
The prairie is my favorite metaphor and my conscious choice for a context. “My” prairie stretches from Edmonton to Yellowstone and from the Rockies to the Dakotas. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and earned my college degrees (one bachelor’s and two master’s) in Chicago, but I spent the Sixties here, anchored in Browning, Montana, capital of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When I retired in 1999, I came back.
To the uninitiated and those in too much of a hurry to really look, the prairie is just a blank. Cruise control. Sunglasses. Don’t worry about traffic. But traffic will begin soon, when the tourists come looking for some kind of connection with Lewis and Clark, or at least the locals who make their money from tourists are hoping they’ll come. For a while there, it looked like it was going to be one of those fire storm summers and we’d all have empty pockets. Tourists hate smoke, much less fire. (The governor notified President Bush that Montana wanted its National Guard and big helicopters back, so they can fight fire the way they do most years. They are a Montana entity. Bush stonewalled.) But now that we’ve had some weeks of rain, the calculations are confused. Calculations on the prairie are always complex, always a little more complex than you thought they were. Maybe on the wrong scale or not taking into account one of the dimensions, like time.
The Blackfeet who roved here for hundreds of years, on foot before they had horses, survived because they studied and remembered every small complexity of the terrain, both the coulees and, on the horizon, the peaks of the Rocky Mountain East Front. The area called “Glacier National Park” is called that because it was carved from the cordillera of upthrusts by glaciers -- not because it was full of glaciers, which are all melting anyway. The Park is a section of the cordillera that was bought from the Blackfeet in 1910 when they were starving. Originally the price proposed was three million dollars -- the white men said, “Oh, no.” So then the Blackfeet were pressed down and down and they got hungrier and hungrier (people were starving to death) until they finally agreed to halve that. When tourists come today, they get excited about Glacier National Park and want to know all about it, but they drive through the Blackfeet Reservation quickly, saying “oh-how-depressing.”
When I taught in the reservation high schools, I would draw the profile of the Rockies as seen from Browning. I drew it over and over again -- just a line with the proper peaks in it. Early, I drew it on the blackboards with chalk and then, after decades, I drew it on the whiteboards with erasable fibertips. The kids looked, recognized it, and said, “How did you do that?” They had lost the habit of attention that saved their ancestors, and not very long ago either. But a few said, “I can do that,” and they could. Maybe they’ll teach the others.
When there were still one-room scattered-site schools, another earlier teacher of Blackfeet was Jack Holterman, who wrote several history books. One of the most useful is “Place Names of Glacier/Waterton National Parks.” Published in 1985 by Glacier Natural History Association, copyright 1895. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-70523. ISBN 0-916792 Holterman says, “To someone standiing out on the prairie, the Rockies appear to form a great concave bow between Chief Mountain (Ninaistuki) in the north and Heart Butte (Moxkizippahp-istuki) to the south. Lewis and Clark marked on their maps, “The King” and “The Heart.” That “great bow” was Glacier Park. They also carefully described the place where they killed two Blackfeet -- with enough detail for people to find it in the Sixties. It’s only a few miles from me.
Where I live, I can see Ear Mountain which is by Choteau, where A.B. Guthrie, Jr., lived and wrote stories that refer to that mountain many times. He had a ranch not far from Ear Mountain. The farthest north peak of the Rockies I can see is Ninaistuki. Did you remember that means Chief Mountain? (Istuki is mountain.) Chief Mountain is on the Canadian border.
North of me along the Canadian border are the Sweetgrass Hills, once the only earth sticking up above the glaciers that repeatedly scraped their way down the continent and halfway into Montana. They are “refugia” where some plants and animals survived the glacier. Like great pale worms over a foot long that live three feet deep in the ground. They were also sacred places -- really properly called “the sweet PINE hills” since that’s where the balsam pine grows. There are sweet grass, sweet pine, and even sweet poplar, or balsam poplar. They say that the poplar trees smelled so good that rural ladies would gather the buds, soak them in water, and then dip their hankies in it to get the smell.
The Sweetgrass Hills are three separate buttes, one called “Gold Butte” for obvious reasons. It has a hard rock mine in it, which is said to be played out, but there are -- of course -- people who would love to grind up the whole butte and soak it in cyanide to get the last traces of gold out. Since the Sweetgrass Hills put water into the aquifer for many miles around, the idea of cyanide heap leach mining enraged the local ranchers. But a Canadian company had already started digging up the Canadian side. If this drought continues long enough, there won’t be any ranchers.
When gold was struck, the Sweetgrass Hills were simply overrun, though they were still on reservation land. I forget how much money the tribe finally got when they sued for compensation not too many years ago. Not enough.
Prairie Mary
Friday, April 01, 2005
April Fools Day
What better date than April Fools’ Day to begin experimenting with something that has as goofy a name as a “blog?” Imagine a fat old lady in a tiny prairie village (pop. 300 plus), getting along on social security with two cats the size of ground hogs. Believe she has a fancy University of Chicago education, used to ride a horse well enough to herd buffalo, used to be a dog catcher, and is known by most people around here (at least on the Blackfeet reservation) as an English teacher. Make that a FORMER English teacher.
The real plan is to write a book. That’s easy. Trying to publish it -- that may turn out to be impossible. How to avoid panic? Join a DVD-by-mail club. Weed the flower beds. Get up in the night to post a blog and read the east coast newspapers which are posted online about 3AM.
Academic listservs were the original plan but they’ve gone from a high boil to simmer. People are guarding their jobs -- those who have tenure -- and hoping for jobs. Can’t afford to sound contentious or opinionated. Mustn’t let an obscenity or politically incorrect thought slip in.
But if you’re an old fat retired woman in a woolly nightgown and a 3X men’s fleece shirt out on the prairie where - if you go outside -- the stars still cram down tight around your shoulders, where coyotes can be heard and last summer two grizz cubs were playing on the irrigation dam at the supper club on the edge of town -- we WERE surprised! -- and if you have a futuristic egg-shaped white and crystal computer, well, then you have lots to say and the means to say it. Maybe even an obligation.
The joke is that this is all true. Believe it.
The real plan is to write a book. That’s easy. Trying to publish it -- that may turn out to be impossible. How to avoid panic? Join a DVD-by-mail club. Weed the flower beds. Get up in the night to post a blog and read the east coast newspapers which are posted online about 3AM.
Academic listservs were the original plan but they’ve gone from a high boil to simmer. People are guarding their jobs -- those who have tenure -- and hoping for jobs. Can’t afford to sound contentious or opinionated. Mustn’t let an obscenity or politically incorrect thought slip in.
But if you’re an old fat retired woman in a woolly nightgown and a 3X men’s fleece shirt out on the prairie where - if you go outside -- the stars still cram down tight around your shoulders, where coyotes can be heard and last summer two grizz cubs were playing on the irrigation dam at the supper club on the edge of town -- we WERE surprised! -- and if you have a futuristic egg-shaped white and crystal computer, well, then you have lots to say and the means to say it. Maybe even an obligation.
The joke is that this is all true. Believe it.
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