Eats Alone

The second story in this series takes its name from the head of a real Amskapi Pikuni band whose leader did like to eat alone. He was evidently a thoughtful man. Continuing my idea of coming in slantwise, I thought the story should be about someone who was NOT anxious to be a big-shot Bundle Keeper and who was aware of the responsibility of it.

The next element was the Minipoka, a name for a special -- even spoiled -- child. Once I tried to slow down a rather arrogant but gifted young woman by calling her a minipoka. The word came back around to me that among the Amskapi Pikuni, ALL children are special and ALL are minipoka! But I got the concept from Beverly Hungry Wolf, who described her sister getting her face painted every morning. I was looking for quietly special relationships between people: the father and daughter, the two buddies, and the main character and his second-hand wife.

The object from Bob Scriver's book, "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains," started out to be the small green parrot on the Bundle that was transferred to us, but then, to drive home the concept that Bundles are dangerous, I put in the Bear Knife Bundle.

This "generation" was the first to have horses and to find their lives much expanded in terms of what they could do and how far they could go.


THE COMING OF PROSPERITY

1767-1791 Historical Time-Line

1769: WHEN WE TOOK THE SNAKE INDIANS WIVES AND CHILDREN
1769: First recorded contact between Blackfeet and white men: de le Verendrye.
1770: WHEN THE BERRIES STAYED ON THE TREES ALL WINTER
1771: WHEN THE OLD WOMEN WENT ASTRAY
1772: WHEN THE BEARS CAME INTO CAMP
1772: Mathew Cocking of Hudson Bay Co. describes Blackfeet and their allies.
1773: WHEN MANY HORSES WERE DROWNED
1774: Cumberland House trading post established on the lower Saskatchewan River.
1774: THUNDERED IN WINTER
1775: WHEN THE BABY WAS LOST
1776: WHEN THE ELKS WENT THROUGH THE ICE
1777: WHEN "PRETTY WEASEL WOMAN" COMMITTED MURDER
1778: Continental Congress signs the first Indian treaty. It is with the Delaware Nation. The Articles of Confederation state as one purpose to regulate trade with the Indians.
1778: THE GREAT WIND
1779: WHEN IT HAILED IN WINTER
1780: The population of the Blackfeet is estimated to be 15,000. They occupy a broad area that stretches over the top half of Montana and the bottom halves of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
1780: COUGH DISEASE OR FIRST APPEARANCE OF CONSUMPTION
1781: Devastating epidemic of smallpox. The Shoshoni's flee their country. Smallpox spreads to the Blackfeet after they raid a Shoshoni camp.
1781: WHEN "HOLY ELK" WON THE BATTLE
1782: Snakes and Shoshoni tribes leave Bow River area. Major smallpox epidemic among the Pikuni. Possibly 50% mortality.
1782: WHEN THEY TOOK THE SHIELD
1783: ECLIPSE OF THE SUN IN WINTER
1784: Congress grants the War Department rule over Indian Affairs. Hudson Bay and NorthWest Fur Co. are competing for Blackfeet.
1784: WHEN WHITEMEN WITH SHORT HAIR FIRST CAME
1785: WHEN "YOUNG MAN" WAS KILLED
1786: WHEN THE WOMAN WAS KILLED OUTSIDE
1787: David Thompson winters with the Blackfeet on the Bow River. "Dog Days" old men (those who remember pre-horse) say they came from the Northwest. Blackfeet war party goes south to Santa Fe. Steals horses from Spanish miners.
1787: DISEASE AMONGST THE ANTELOPE
1788: THE WINTER WHEN THE STARS FELL
1789: WHEN "RINGING SMOKING PIPE" STOLE MANY HORSES
1790: Duncan McGillviray is in the area. First Trade and Intercourse Act passed to license Indian traders.
1790: TOOK EIGHT CREE TIPIS IN BATTLE
1791: WHEN LOG HOUSES WERE FIRST BUILT





Eats Alone

The old man had gotten in the habit of rising early, before the camp crier, in order to have time alone to watch the sun come up before having to listen to a lot of chatter. He liked to eat alone, taking a bit of meat from the pot by the fire as he went out and chewing it slowly as he walked to the closest hilltop. It was good to meet the Sun alone and understand what the day would be like. His wives thought that since he was chief he ought to rise late, so as to come out of his lodge with people around to admire him. But he had not wanted to be a chief -- though he tried to guide his people wisely -- and he preferred to simply get up alone. On this morning he had not been to bed at all.

All night he had sat on the hill on his buffalo robe, looking down at the small camp. He knew that some of the older religious men of the tribe meant to choose him to become a Medicine Pipe Keeper, but he did not feel ready to accept and therefore did not sleep in his lodge where they could come and obligate him with their ceremonies. It was not just the expense of providing feasts, which the Keeper of the Pipe had to bear; nor was it the many rules of behavior, though they were pesky enough. He just didn't feel worthy. He felt he was not virtuous enough for others to consider him a religious leader. Maybe he was not ready to admit he had grown that old. Most of the time he felt no different from the boy he had been long ago when he renamed himself Spring Bear. But the truth was that the world was changing and he wasn’t sure he understood.

In the night a breeze had brought him the familiar smell of the horses he could see grazing out on the prairie, away from the coulee along the creek where they camped. Now it was barely light enough to see that the smoke from the lodges had fallen with the cooler air and was lying among the lodges. The fires would need stirring up and feeding soon. This was what life was like, he thought: always a need for food.

Through the darkness, under the wheeling stars, he had sat smoking his own personal pipe with its red Sioux stone bowl, and thought over memories he had put away for a long time. They made him uneasy. His life had been a rich one. Even his childhood did not seem hard or deprived to him, though he was aware of how much easier everything was since the horses came.

Now, as the light came up over the eastern line of hills, gradually putting the buckskin color back into the land, he saw a small figure coming up the hill from his lodge. His heart lifted. He was always glad when his smallest daughter got up. He had named her "Splits his Head" because the men of the tribe like to name their daughters for their best battle exploits and his had been like that--he'd split a man's head with the first metal hatchet he'd ever owned. Normally he didn't brag, but this small fierce girl needed a strong name.

The sky was red as blood now because the sun was coming up in a veil of smoke from prairie fires. It was early spring and time to clear away the dry grass. Thunderstorms set some and the People set blazes in the places they knew, so that green grass would come quickly. The small figure trailed up the hill, rubbing her hands on her face, yawning and shaking back her rumpled hair. "Come, my daughter! Sit by me and sing the song for the sun as it comes up."

She was puffing and a bit sweaty when she flung herself on the ground between his knees. "Why are you always going off by yourself?" she demanded. "I need to have my hair combed and you are the only one who can do it right."

"First I comb your hair. Then I paint your face to bless your day." She gave a short nod, her stubborn chin firm under a red mouth. Spoiled she was, a minipoka and it was his fault. She had come very late in his life.

He took a long time putting away his pipe and getting out the comb he had brought home as a youth and kept ever since in his bag. It was better than the porcupine quill brushes the others used. No one else had a comb like this one, made of white stuff that was smooth like bone but more dense. He looked at his gnarled, dark hands on the comb and thought of other hands, a young woman's hands long ago.

"Ow! Be careful! You are pulling my hair out." He began to sing in order to keep his mind on what he was doing. "Stubborn one, even your hair is stubborn," he sang. His big hands went gently over the little girl's shining head. He parted it different ways and combed it over and over for the pleasure of the heavy black strands against the smooth white comb. "Enough, enough! You will wear my hair out!" Carefully and slowly he parted it in the middle and made two plaits to hang over her shoulders. He took bits of buckskin from fringe on his sleeves to tie them.

"Don't do that!" said the bossy one. "Soon you will have no fringe at all and someone will have to make you a new shirt. I won't do it. I don't have time." She scowled at him, but it was a mock scowl and they both knew it.

He changed his song. "Brave little girl, your face is fierce!" From his bag he drew a lump of fat and a bit of red pigment. Using his palm as a palette, he mixed just enough paint and drew the brightness down the part he had made in her hair. Then he thought of something and made a new mark.

"You're not painting me right! This is not what you always do." He had wondered if she would notice the difference and was glad that she did.

"No, this is a new way to paint your face. It is the way my grandmother used to paint." Not quite his grandmother.

"What grandmother? You said everyone in your family died." She wrinkled up her face at the tickling of the grease.

"Well, she was an old woman that I travelled with for years. You remind me of her. She was also bossy." But he had already thought of that old woman too much, so he began a prayer to make his daughter quiet. "Keepitaki....Old Woman! Napi....Old Man! Kimmis! Kenahtepewah!.... Have mercy upon us!" The daughter squirmed between his knees and he had to grab her so he could make the blessing gesture over her head and down her shoulders and arms. She had seen that someone was coming out of the lodge and she would wait no longer. Running straight and hard, she went down the hill.

He shook his head. "Perhaps this one should have been a boy." He turned the comb over in his hands.


When the old woman had gone off after that bad Sun Dance celebration, he had fitted rather easily into the ragged band of boys who came and went among their relatives, eating from lodge to lodge and sleeping wherever they were. But even then he knew that he had formed the habit of being alone. Before the others were ready to do their Coming of Age Vision Fast, he had already spent many long hours watching from high places. He didn't pray much in those days, but he watched his own mind, trying to make it as strong and controlled as his body. When he did his fast, it took a long time before he had a vision.


He was grateful when at last his eyes saw another world, but he didn't understand what he saw. It was a small green bird with a crooked nose. The old people couldn't interpret, partly because he couldn't explain it and partly because he didn't really want them commenting and speculating anyway. It was his own vision and he would understand in good time. At least he understood horses. His whole life circled around horses. He herded them more than the other boys did. Even at night he enjoyed being out with them. To him they were persons and he understood the way they thought, though few horses are ever loners.


The old brown horse was his best friend even after he had begun to acquire a small herd, sometimes buying them with skins he had trapped and hunted, sometimes earning them by helping a rich man, sometimes stealing them from another tribe, and occasionally receiving one as a gift. His calm independence and air of mystery made people admire him and want him for a friend. By now the People had many horses. But when the herds were spread out to graze, he was always conscious of where that old brown horse was.

When, one day, it wasn't there anymore, he had an idea where to look for it and found its carcass before any predators had reached it. Not even any birds had pecked its eyes and it looked peaceful in the sweetgrass and mint. It was like a very old sleeping horse. He took a bit of horsehair from the tail and braided it into a little coil which he put on his wrist. "This was my friend, this horse," he sang as we walked away.


Now the sun was coming farther up and his wives and children began to move around the lodges, fixing meals, shaking out the night robes, going to bring more wood. His wives were sturdy and competent. He had not wasted the horses they cost him. He had married sisters, so that they would have already decided who was the boss and how things ought to be done. Now their mother lived with the band and he sometimes wished there were no taboo on talking to her, because she was a thoughtful and calm person.

But there was one wife, the most recent, who was not her daughter and so she was not treated as well by the other women. She had been the wife of his best war partner, Wolf Going Away. She had had no brothers to take her in when her husband was killed and she was pock-faced so no one else wanted her. He took her. She cost him nothing and he would have been obligated to provide her with meat anyway. The youngest child, the minipoka, was her only child by him. His war partner had never had children with her, which had been hard on them. They had thought it was her fault, from when her face was pocked.

Some had wondered why his friend kept her. She had come from a band far to the north -- some thought she was part Cree and talked of the powerful Cree Medicine, love potions. His mother-in-law had not wanted him to take her in, for fear that he would stop caring about her daughters. But it hadn't been that way. She brought her own lodge and he spent much of his time in it now, but he was fair to his earlier wives.

Still, he had never talked to his early wives like he could talk to this woman. Somehow she thought like Wolf Going Away and she knew the stories Wolf had told. Maybe it was just her strangeness that had made him passionate, younger again for a while. Perhaps she reminded him of someone else long ago. She was soon pregnant. But there had not been more children since. By now she had become his Sits Beside wife, the one he wanted closest to him. The other women tossed their heads and stayed in their other lodges, helping her only grudgingly. But they had many sons and daughters, nearly grown, and now there were beginning to be grandchildren, even great-grandchildren.

As he thought about this, Pock Face stepped out of their doorway and shaded her eyes to see what he was doing up on that hill. From the distance he could not see the pocks on her face. He saw the straightness of her shoulders and back, the grace in her walk. She was not strange to him now.


Not too long after the brown horse died, he had gone apart to sit on a hill and think. He was just about grown and good at all the things he should be able to do. But others remarked that he thought too much, that it would make trouble for him. On this day a long line of geese went overhead, heading south. They yelped as they went in their vee, like an arrowhead that pointed south. By now he had been west over the mountains to steal horses, he had been north to visit the Siksika tribes who lived up there, and he had been far east of the Sweetgrass Hills when the buffalo went that way. But he had not been far to the south, though he had heard stories about smoking earth and strange people.

That night when he was herding horses with Wolf Goes Away, he proposed an expedition to the south -- not a war party, but a long trip. They had not understood how very long the trip would be. Before it ended, they had soaked in the hot water by the smoking earth. His friend had been nearly killed when his horse fell. He himself would be nearly killed by a bear. They would have had various accidents that caused them to camp for a while to heal up. But they grew tough and used to travelling until they had gone farther south than anyone they had ever known. There had been no trees, only sagebrush, and not enough water. Too many snakes and not enough game.


His daughter, the minipoka, was coming up the hill and she had something in her hands: his own personal bundle. Normally it hung at the back of the lodge, directly across the fire from the door, so that he sat next to it. Made of rawhide and decorated with his own design, it contained the things that meant the most to him. His wife sometimes set it on a tripod outside the lodge so that the sun shone on it and warmed it.

"Pockface sent this up to you. She says it would be good for you to sing over it and let the sun into it. You never open this bundle!" She dumped the bundle onto his robe beside him. "Kika! Wait now!" she shouted over her shoulder as she started back down. "I'm going to get new tobacco and sweetgrass to put inside." The grassy hill drew her into a run. Sure-footed, she did not trip on the clumps of arrowleaf balsamroot, their big yellow many-petalled flowers like suns.

He didn't really want his bundle. Thoughts were crowding onto him already, more than he could manage. His life had been full: many exploits, many sons, always enough food. He had been careful to keep his family away from anyone who might be carrying the pockface disease. His horse herd was legendary. But some things were painful to remember--not because they were hurtful but because they made him yearn for what might have been.


That long ago woman had smelled differently than any other woman: she smelled of corn. Parts of her smelled sharp and green like the tassels and parts of her were warm and rich like the cornmeal she ground out on her stone daily. Her hair was not in a braid, nor loose, but in a carefully arranged way he never really understood. It made him feel respectful but he secretly liked her a little better when she came to him at night with her hair loose. Her strangeness attracted him, but it also aroused a kind of over-awareness, a feeling of danger, of not being able to predict what would happen next. This must be partly why he still thought of her so many years later.

Her house was of earth, in the earth but up high in a cleft in a sheer cliff, and with all the others of her kin. They did not move around but caused the corn to grow where they wanted it, along with squash and beans. This food was strange to him. Sometimes he yearned for buffalo meat and thought he would become sick without it. He was thinner than he had been on the prairie and something else he couldn't identify. His dreams were different -- maybe that was it. He dreamt of the dangerous rolling boulders that used to chase Napi in the stories and he dreamt that the earth shook and opened into deep spaces with drawings on them. It was partly real and partly not like anything he had seen.

The day he came into her house and saw the bird from his youthful fasting dream, he had been deeply shocked. He knew now his dreams were coming through the small green bird with a crooked nose. It was her pet and it talked like a person, so powerful was this bird. Green was the thunder color--he should have expected that the small creature would have power. But it scared him.


The minipoka came back up the hill, her forehead glistening in the warming day so that the paint ran. Her dress was pouched up in front of her to hold the tobacco and sweetgrass. "All right. Now we are ready to open your bundle."

"Saaah. No."

Her jaw dropped. "What?"

"This is my bundle and I am not ready."

Minipoka stood up. She was between the sun and her father, so he could not see her face but only her dark silhouette. Then she careened down off the hill again, this time tripping once or twice.

His mind returned to that place far south, the corn woman and the baby he had never known. It was she who gave him the comb he had used on the minipoka's hair, a comb of something smooth and white that had come to those Corn People from much farther away through strange pale people who had always had horses. He thought of the shapes of the cornstalks, not just a flat pattern, but dynamically as they thrust up and drooped their long leaves over like the long ears of the burro. And then grew cobs of corn, so smooth and orderly. From his bag he drew out a corncob pipe and a little string of colored corn kernels that had been pierced when they were still soft.

The grass around him rustled in the wind. Down below, the minipoka came out from the lodge and marched off towards the horses with a rope wound around her waist. He had been just like when he was her age -- if his feelings were hurt he went off to the horses. Horse, actually. For a long time there had only been the old brown horse.

Since then he had had many horses, lost them to thieves and accidents, and then gained them back through his own raids and through his mares, until he needed a lot of space around his clan in order to graze them. He was not conscious of trying to become rich, but he had indeed gradually become a person of wealth in property and family. He had been generous to the poor and hungry, which meant that he also became wealthy in esteem and gratitude. In this way he became a chief -- not a war chief or a holy chief -- but rather a man who could settle feuds and keep order among the people. A civil chief. But he never lost the sense of danger the small green bird gave him.

It was only recently that certain old men had decided he must be a Pipe Keeper, to carry and protect the calumet and other accountrements until it was time to give the feast when the first thunder was heard in the spring. It would cost him a lot, but that wasn't the reason he resisted. The old woman had set such store by the summer festival ceremonies, but he had always seen that their value was simply in the socializing. The rest -- the Sun Vows, the secret Society doings, the show-off dancing and giveaways -- they were good -- he would not mean to scoff at them, but they rang hollow to him. Only a bit of women's quarrelling and the Old Dog Woman had run away to live and die alone with her dog pack.

Yet he felt his own personal Bundle was too sacred even for the eyes and prying questions of his daughter. Contact with it might endanger her, call her spirit away.


The enemies of Corn Woman's tribe came unexpectedly. There was not time to pull up the ladder that made their high-up house safe. They came, not many, sneaking in until they blocked the sunlight at the entrance. Corn Woman, the baby and the little green bird were in the next room. She squeezed into a small space in the wall, holding her hand over the baby's face to keep her from crying out, while Spring Bear, like his namesake, roared and charged the invaders. There was an explosion and then he didn't remember anything.

When he woke, they had gone. He had a terrible wound, unlike any he had ever seen before. His wife and baby were dead. He had failed to protect them. The small green bird with the crooked nose was walking around on the floor, talking, but it spoke Corn Woman's language and he couldn't understand it. He took it and left. When Wolf Going Away found him, he was walking north and in his hand was the small green bird, dead, squeezed to death. It was Wolf Going Away who nursed him and got them both home in the next few months.


By afternoon it was getting hot and thunderheads were gathering on the horizon, mounting up into the sky. He had moved his robe up the hill farther until he was in the shade of a jack pine. The heat felt good on his legs, which ached sometimes now, but he wanted his head cool.

Pockface came up the hill to sit beside him and work on some moccasins. She didn't say anything. In a while Spring Bear took more things from his bundle. He didn’t think the Bundle would hurt her. She was a part of him, hardly a separate person. There was a small wrapped-up package that he unwound slowly. It was the remains of the small green bird. Pockface looked at it. Wolf Going Away told me about that bird," she said. "He said it talked."

"Yes. It did."

"What did it say?"

"Don't know. It spoke her language only."

"Aaaaah," she said.

He turned the bird over in his hands, delicately so as not to let feathers fall off. "It's not as big as I thought a thunderbird would be, but it is certainly green."

"A buffalo stone is not big either, but it brings a very large animal."

"This is true," he said, as he opened his little packet of buffalo stones, red and polished from years of being rubbed with fat and paint. Some of the fossils were spirals and others looked like buffalo with four legs and a head. He looked at her, blinking and squinting. "You are my Buffalo Woman!"

She laughed, but she liked it, he knew. What he didn't know was how much she worried about him. "He is getting old," she thought. "And he is still not at peace." He was looking far off where Chief Mountain was at the end of the arc of mountains. "Wolf Going Away always said you really loved that Corn Woman."

"That was then. This is now."

"He said you blamed yourself that she was killed."

"And the baby."

There was a long pause. They sat not moving except to shoo flies away. Pock face asked, "What if they had lived?"


"What do you mean?"

"Would you have stayed down there forever?"

"I would have become homesick."

"Would she have come back with you, then?"

He thought for a moment and looked at the bird. "She would have become homesick. And her bird could not have lived here."

"So one of you would always have been unhappy." He said nothing. "I want you to know that I am happy with you," she said.

“Even though I killed your husband?” Everyone knew (except the minipoka) but no one spoke of it. Spring Bear had once been the Keeper of a Bear Knife Bundle. It was very powerful and dangerous. Wolf Going Away asked Spring Bear to transfer it to him. The way one transfers a Bear Knife Bundle is to throw the Knife, which is heavy and sharp, burdened with brass falconry bells, directly at the recipient, who must catch it to complete the tranfer. Wolf Going Away had failed to catch the knife. That was how he died. Spring Bear took his wife and supported her. She did not blame him, because Wolf Going Away was the one who had failed. They had grieved together.

“It was not your fault,” she said. She had said it many times before. “Wolf Going Away wanted that knife, he wanted something beyond him. Human beings cannot always control what happens. It is too proud of us to pretend that we do. We must be humble and accept what happens to us. All we can do is pray and help each other.” Then she gathered up her materials and went back down the hill to the lodge. Clearly he was mulling over matters he had already considered.


Towards evening, when the land was shadowing and the thundershowers grumbled along far away, the minipoka came back up the hill to her father, once more excited. He could see what was exciting her, for her grown-up brothers were coming in on horseback from a horse-raiding trip and it looked as though they had done well. Overhead they waved the trophies they had managed to capture: warshirts and feathered lances and buffalo neck-hide shields. He and the minipoka sat together as they came swirling and yelping to the camp, on through and up the hill to dismount in front of him with their chests heaving, their eyes glittering, and their horses foaming. The wives came running up the hill with their dresses hiked up and children came from everywhere.

He stood to praise them, raised his arms to bless them, and sang in celebration of the great spirit who had protected and guided them. "We are fortunate people! My sons are strong and brave!"


It was dark by the time the excitement had died down. Pockface was cutting more meat to make more stew when Spring Bear came into camp towing his robe and carrying his Bundle. She looked up expectantly and he stopped beside her.

"I will accept the Thunder Pipe," he said. "And I will put this small green bird on it."

She smiled and acknowledged his idea, but he held up his hand to keep her from saying anything.

"That's not all. I intend to put a second smaller pipe in that bundle, because a man needs a Sits Beside. The second pipe will be called the Woman's Pipe. I have spoken. This comes to me through my dreams. No one shall question it." He went inside the lodge. She knew he had found the way to resolve his old regrets.

When the moon rose and the oldest men came to capture him by its light to be a Thunder Pipe Bundle Keeper, he waited for them quietly in front of the lodge with Splits His Head on one side and Pockface on the other. In his hand was the little green bird who spoke, and he wept as he waited. The moon was a thin crescent. The Wolf Path went off across the sky and down behind the horizon.

In the darkest part of the night, Eats Alone rolled over to see what was moving. It was Splits His Head, sticking her head out from under the lodgeskin to look at the sky. "What is there, daughter?" he asked softly.

"Stars are falling out of the sky."

He stuck his head out beside hers. There were many more falling stars than usual. "They will make puff-ball children on the prairie. It is a good sign. We will grow and thrive and paint the puff-balls onto our lodgeskins. Our children will be many."

Side by side they lay in the dark, watching the stars come to the earth.

Introducing "Blackfeet Bundle Book" by Mary Scriver

Today I’m beginning to post a sequence of short stories about Blackft. I call it the Blackfeet Bundle Book, each story being like a Bundle to unroll and contemplate. Not necessarily sacred.

The first impulse to write this sequence came from reading reviews of a book called “American Generations.” The premise was that every twenty years is a “generation” -- roughly the time it takes a person to grow up -- and that each generation has its problem to solve, its style, its context, and so on. Each of these American generations was given a name. The first one took place at the time of the American Revolution, when it separated from England.

I wondered what a parallel book about just the Blackft Nation might look like, esp. since the horse got to the Blackft about the same time as the American Revolution. So I got out my time-line, divided it into twenty year sections, and looked at what happened in each. Of course, I had to begin with the coming of the horse.

Several other principles and little “hooks” kept my plots lined up. No one person can be in every story -- they’d have to live for more than two hundred years! But I did manage to at least refer to the people in the previous story so that one gets the idea of an on-going group, a tribe. At the same time, I thought I’d try to pick up the oddballs -- the individuals who were against type and rarely even thought of in “normal” Indian stories: those outside modern gender dualities, those who traveled far, those who were of mixed blood, and so on.

And I had one more little trick. Bob Scriver published a book of photos of his artifact collection (“Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains”) so I thought I would include one artifact from the collection in each story. Most of the objects in that book were things I’ve handled and knew well. In the first story, the object is the copper tea billy, a little pot with a tight lid and a bail for hanging over a fire.

One more thing: Some of these stories reminded me of real people -- not that they are portraits, but somehow the spirit of the person got into the story. I’d kind of forgotten that this first story brings to mind a character we called “Fonzie” when he was in my classes at Heart Butte in 1990. Something about his energy level and his willingness to meet the future. Yesterday I ran into him at the grocery store. Now he has a wife and three kids and he’s about twice the size he used to be, but he’s still that bright, high-energy person.

Maybe that’s why I’m posting these stories now. They’re about 8,000 words long, so they count for a week of shorter entries. (My goal is 1,000 words a day.) I’ll post the whole story at once so you don’t have to read it backwards, but the next story will be after this one in terms of generations. When all twelve are posted, you’ll have to get into the archives to start at the beginning.

Some on the rez will object that I shouldn’t write these stories because I’m white. I’ll say to them what I said to the Fonz: write your stories and give them to me. I’ll put them on my blog. This is not a case of me displacing other writers.

The First Hard Frost

Many things things are pegged to the “first hard frost.” The end of skeeter season. The time when chokecherries turn sweet enough to pick. The time to lift potatoes. And the time when I switch from salads to casseroles. Corned beef hash becomes my favorite breakfast and sausage with cheese replaces cottage cheese. The flannel sheets go on the bed and big woolly nighties replace the thin cotton one with tucks and embroidery. I can’t think what I did before size 3X men’s fleece shirts, because now I wear them over everything, around the clock, though they come off in the afternoon if I’m working and the sun is shining. All the poplar leaves have turned and dropped. That’s my work for a week or so.

This morning I drove to Cut Bank for a little grocery booster -- not that I really needed anything particular except cat food (always) but that the day is the chill crystalline clarity of the first morning after a hard frost. The clouds of the recent snowstorm have gone, leaving the mountains white with snow. This could mean the recharging of the Valier municipal wells, but maybe not. By nightfall the mountains may be back to stony and the water in the wells no higher.

Women who garden are “putting their gardens to bed.” Mine has been sprawling and groaning all summer, so it will be glad to go. There was never quite enough sun, nor quite enough water though there was plenty enough at the right time to get the grass growing like mad -- “I am the grass; I cover all.” Just not enough for roses or hollyhocks. Maybe it was my fault -- maybe I didn’t do the right things at the right time. I’ve lived in apartments most of my life. Even with Bob there was no hope of a lawn or garden with horses and badgers at large.

Gutters are on my short list, the poplar leaves stacked into them like coins on edge. Gutters are one of the structural Achilles’ heels of this house. I’m sure water is going into the walls in several places, a desperately serious matter. I figure that when I sell a book I’ll rebuild one side at a time, replacing the asbestos shingles with stucco as I go. On the last coat of stucco I’ll make big Celtic spirals.

Last night I watched my ancient tape of “Excalibur,” which I acquired when I was teaching “Idylls of the King” in Heart Butte. The senior class, which traditionally is the year one studies English lit, consisted of four or five young men -- no longer children, and selective about the days they chose to come to school. On a day like this one, I would not hope to see any of them. But the day I had scheduled “Excalibur,” a sort of adult precursor to “The Lord of the Rings” and maybe “Gladiator,” one showed up. Surprisingly, he was VERY excited to finally see “Excalibur,” said he’d been yearning to see this movie! It is full of violence and nudity, dire threats and terrifying sights -- for years afterwards I dreamt of the tree where the failed knights hung and an eerie child in golden armor laughed mockingly. Some might criticize me for showing the movie, but this boy in particular already had his own child, was mourning his best friend’s death in a trailer fire, had been in near fatal car accidents.

The movie was full of fires and fog. I thought of them this morning as I topped Buffalo Ridge and saw that Cut Bank was entirely obscured by a blue roll of fog. “The Dragon’s Breath,” Merlin kept calling it in the movie. I entered the fog bank just past where Lewis and his small scouting party killed two Blackfeet about the age of that Heart Butte senior class and stopped at the info kiosk to see if I could recognize the exact spot. We went there in the Sixties when it was first located. The kiosk features a photo of the fatal spot but FROM the spot, not AT the spot. The location is on private property and the rancher doesn’t welcome visitors so... a bit of sleight of hand.

The huge straw bales are still spaced in the fields up north, as though waiting to be arranged into a Stonehenge, but they are only drying. If the right combination of dampness seizes them, they burst into spontaneous combustion. I saw one once, merrily burning away out there in the field, a bale that refused to meet its fate in a cow, a bale intent on the dramatic, the exceptional. No rancher or fireman had arrived to deal with the renegade.

It’s bird hunting season: at dawn a few days ago when there was shooting by the lake, the cats and I raised our heads. Befuddled by dreams, we went back to sleep. First hard frost. Expected and yet shocking, transformative and yet paralyzing. An ambiguous event but one that demands definite preparations: bring in the latex paint from the garage, cover the outdoor hose bib with insulation instead of detaching it from the house plumbing because it might be possible to give the trees one more soaking. If the Black Willow doesn’t get enough water at bedtime, it won’t drop its leaves -- just let them dry in place. But I depend on those leaves coming down so I get sunshine on the south side all winter. One year I threatened to just climb up there and pick off the leaves one by one!

I’m reading “Warriors of the Wasteland: A Quest for the Pagan Sacrificial Cult behind the Grail Legend,” by John Grigsby. King Arthur, the wounded “thigh,” the search for the healing chalice -- and the answer to the question is “the king and the land are one.” At the “Round Table” of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment they’re arguing about whether discussions of nature ought to be sexy. They need a good hard frost.

Newspapers and First Snow

During the first snow, the first fallen leaves lie sodden on the uncut grass, and the cats go crazy from boredom. I’m saving my usual trick (drawers of junk pulled just open enough for a cat to get her arm into it) for later when the deep snow comes. This is only Oregon-type snow -- though in Oregon it falls in January -- and the temp is just above freezing, so that if one walks around outside (I’m not that bored!) one steps from snow to puddle to slush. The cats intermittently go out, crouching under the pickup and dashing to cover under the tall fir trees, which have limbs down to the ground and never really get wet underneath.

The reason I’m not bored is that two newspapers -- utterly dissimilar -- arrived in my post office box this morning. They often come together. One is the “Prairie Star,” an ag newspaper for which I worked briefly (that’s another story) and the New York Times Book Review. When I lived in Helena in the Eighties, I sometimes met new friends when their NYTimes Book Review got folded into mine and jammed into my PO Box. Although I simply remailed their copy, later at some event I would recognize the person’s name and introduce myself. After all, we tended to travel in the same circles.

Here in Valier I doubt that anyone else subscribes to the Book Review, but many count on the tabloid-sized “Prairie Star.” It doesn’t have news in it, per se, but accumulates enough copy “above the fold” to justify the many ads that fill the rest of the page and pay for the paper. It is free to the reader and was started by simply mailing copies to a state master list of farmers. On the basis of that readership, ads were solicited from the infrastructure ag businesses: machinery, insurance, fertilizer, and a host of indispensable “stuff.”

Pretty soon small ads came in from farmers wanting to sell or buy machinery. Often they were scribbled almost unintelligibly on scrap paper, with a signed blank check for us to fill in. These people were old-timers, often not too good at speaking English but scrupulous about economic matters and confident that others were, too. Their small ad “ventures” -- an inch or two in a column -- were a great source of interest to their kind and others. A sort of card game, with a blind draw element to it. Women told us that their husbands would sit in recliners all evening, reading these little ads and wondering what was really involved, speculating if they ought to make a phone call.

The copy, I was a little surprised to discover, was simply down-loaded from state ag agents’ websites, of which there are many. One of the constant controversies at the paper was whether information from the Dakotas could be included as helpful or whether it was too far east to be relevant for our area. (I kept one memorable long article about how to raise peonies for an income. State ag agents are a good source of info for gardeners, esp. if you’re more interested in healthy plants than buying the latest in garden ornaments.)

Once, when I was living in Saskatoon, I went off to a conference back East and acquired a copy of the Village Voice to read on the plane. It was when singles ads were blooming and I got a lot of chuckles from cutting out VV ads, as well as a representative group of a Saskatchewan ag paper’s singles ads, and pasting them side-by-side on one sheet of paper, which I xeroxed and sent to friends to demonstrate cultural width. The VV ads had a lot of references to “rubber goods” and exotic preferences. The Saskatchewan preferences were good teeth, strong backs, and compliant dispositions.

The Great Falls Tribune, which is delivered in Valier, belongs to a big publishing corporation. They have a formula: front page about local stuff unless something really BIG nationally is happening. Two next pages about international stuff. A page of editorial. A page of continuations of stories. Back page with the weather. Montana section. Sports section with a back page of business. “Living” section, two pages folded with the classifieds. A weekly insert on “Outdoors,” another on entertainment. The newspapers in Montana used to be dominated by Anaconda Copper. The impression I have now is that they are gripped by the big hospitals. Medicine is money: equipment impossibly expensive, meds supposedly miraculous, and always the hovering presence of the insurance industry. INDUSTRY. Many ads for doctors, clinics, research institutes, and hospitals.

If I had to choose only one of the above, it would naturally be the New York Times Book Review. That’s where I really live -- in that land of ideas and time-travel. I save far too many of the reviews, put them in boxes and files, and years later -- trying to throw them away -- once again rereading become enthralled and can’t give them up. In the end I’m intensely aroused to write -- but thoroughly confused about WHAT to write, HOW to write, WHOM to write for, where to send it anyway.

The news one gets from a newspaper is never about oneself, even the NY Times stories of brilliant psychological theories. The NY Times rarely writes about the Rocky Mountain east slope anyway -- except sometimes in the Book Review section there will be a review of a book about this place, these lives. Generally the review is either patronizing or gushing. But once in a while there will be something so illuminating, so tender, so tough-minded, that I have to save it. Then I want so much to be in some kind of relationship with people who say those things. But I have no phone number. They do not place small blind ads.

Tall Piece of Cake: Scotty Zion

Scotty Zion is the Crocodile Dundee of structures. “Structures? I’ll show you structures! How about a grain elevator? How about a three-story stone house? How about a steel bridge? Where do ya want ‘em?”

I’m the Wimpy of Structures. I’ve spent all day trying to nail extruded woodwork around my two bathroom windows. It’ll look great eventually -- when I figure out what to do about the bent nails and gaps.

I wrote about Scotty’s first book earlier and sent him a copy, so he sent me a copy of his second book. This is where the Wimp and the Croc meet happily -- writing stories. This one is called “Piece of Cake, Scotty, Piece of Cake!” That’s something the crew always said, but it’s also a bit of literary irony. Of course, as the author reminds us, 99% of the time everything goes smoothly with house-moving: the permit comes through, the crew that’s supposed to raise the lines is there on time, the Zion crew is not hung over, there are no risky corners but good solid fords on the rivers (bridges are usually too low or weak for hauling houses across), and so on. That 1% is where the stories come from. With tales as good as these, that counts as a silver lining. (And Scotty never skimped on good insurance policies.)

Here’s his account of something that was not house-moving: a rabbit hunt as done in Australia. The rabbits were entirely out of hand and eating “all the farmer’s grain that the grasshoppers and worms didn’t get. A rabbit committee was formed and built a rabbit corral, complete with wings to funnel those pesky bunnies into the gated killing arena.

“Well, it worked pretty good. Hundreds and hundreds of jackrabbits gathered in front of advancing people who beat the ground, bushes and tumbleweeds. Most everyone had baseball bats, or clubs of some kind, but no guns.

“Somehow the ‘rabbit bosses’ forgot to delegate who was to murder all those rabbits. So, everyone ran in amongst the bunnies, whacking in every direction trying to do some killing. But those rabbits were experts in dodging, running between the killer’s legs, and jumping over the top of others. All the rabbits headed for the gate where they came in.

“By this time, those hysterical killers were beating escaping rabbits, mostly misses, and each other, screaming all the while like mad. Anywhere you looked, rabbits were running like hell for home. The paper reported only forty-two rabbits killed, and most of the rabbit killers wounded. From the rabbit’s point of view, it was a very successful drive.”

Some of the funnier incidents came about when the house being moved wasn’t moving. Once the crew ran into a parade and refused to go on without seeing the whole thing, so they parked the house in an empty lot and sat on the curb to watch. Another crew, more mature, were moving a house on Sunday, came to a church with services in progress, and parked the house in order to attend.

When they moved the Fairfield Bank, everything inside stayed where it was and the customers went up and down a gangplank to do their business. One irate fellow came racing up, yelling, “This is an outrage! I’ve heard of bank robberies but you guys are stealing my whole damn bank!” The kicker to the story is that when they took hold of the vault, which had been left anchored behind, it disintegrated into sand, pebbles and cement dust. Valuables went scattering all over the street and officials and citizens had to quickly gather papers and objects. Evidently everything was eventually found.

Scotty belongs to the Hipshot Ricochet (the gunslinger in the comic strip drawn by Stan Lynde) school of religious thought. He tells about two graveyards at Gold Butte in the Sweetgrass Hills. One is fenced and commodious: “A great place to be buried, if you really have to be buried, with a view that goes on forever. The other graveyard obscurely overlooks the big cemetary from the hillside towards the mine... It is the last resting place of the ‘women of the evening.’ There is a pipe rail enclosure to keep the cows from tipping the one small headstone over, and the epitaph reads: Miss Jessie Rowe, born March 9, 1887, died Sept 30, 1902...

“Eight graves, none with headstones, cluster around the one small one and seem to hover in a protective manner as they did in life. These ladies of ill repute cared for the fifteen year old orphan girl until she died of pneumonia and buried her in their private little graveyard. If I were to be buried in Gold Butte, put me alongside of the girls, as it is probably several hundred feet closer to heaven than the other graveyard.”

Amen.

“Piece of Cake, Scotty, Piece of Cake,” by Scotty Zion. (ISBN 0-9771808-008) Order from Scotty and Claire Zion, 460 McIver Road, Great Falls, MT 59404. 406-454-3394.

Structure, Construction, Deconstruction Pt. 2

Here are the rules I thought of overnight about structure. Actually, it was more like remembering them from a hundred workshops, including one with Starhawk. (www.starhawk.org):

1. Structure should be based on real experience and natural structure as much as possible. (This is where the Neocons go badly wrong. George Bush has less experience of reality than Louis the Fourteenth.)

2. Structure should be enabling, not suppressing. Of course, one person’s suppression (dams) is another’s enabling (irrigation). But de-struction is a form of con-struction. (Knocking out the dams to let the salmon through.)

3. Structure IS, whether we like it or not, fluid, time-bound, going somewhere. Rivers, power lines, the land, ecologies, households -- no matter how well organized and maintained they are, they are deteriorating, flowering, bringing forth, interacting. (I’m thinking about my little old house. Gutters are the structures to be addressed today. The rain is coming.) Even the Rockies are wearing away. Animal skeletons are not permanent: the structure is there, but the cells are constantly dying and being replaced and in that process, slight changes to the whole skeleton develop.

4. All structure is part of a larger structure, right on out into space and through the cosmos. When considering the impact of a structure, this must be considered or one risks creating changes never intended at all. (CRP, the payment of farmers not to grow any crops in order to avoid surpluses, has wiped out many small towns because the farmers took their money someplace else.)

5. Every structure must have feedback corrections in it. In our democracy, the main feedback loop is elections. When we have gone one direction too long, the next election should restore balance. At present it appears that some people have managed to abort and subvert elections here in the US (consider the controversy over the Ohio presidential election), on the reservation (That old lady I mentioned yesterday maintains that the ballots they count are all marked up before the election, and then switched with the ones the people actually vote on, so the previously prepared ones can be counted publicly, creating the illusion of honesty. “It’s because they know who will be on the ballot,” she suggested. “If no one knew who was going to be on the ballot, then they couldn’t mark those ballots in advance.”), and in Iraq. Someone needs to do some very serious systems analysis about elections, and I think someone probably is. The old Blackfeet way was simply to vote with feet by walking off. Won’t work now.

Reservations have a very hard time with elections, laws, and all the paraphenalia of government structure, because in their case so much is constructed and so little comes out of the natural order that was so recent. Just setting up a reservation is a fiction. It’s only a legal category, though the mountains and rivers help to set borders.

Once the legal category is created, people start sliding it around to their own advantage. If you look at a map of Glacier County and check the eastern edge, you’ll see that all the oil wells are just barely over on county side -- that’s because they quietly moved that border as soon as oil was suspected. Recently the City of Cut Bank built two large, expensive reservoirs on reservation land which had been patented and therefore could be bought and sold. However, it was still on the reservation and therefore subject to tribal law, which included a requirement that all big construction projects hire a certain percentage of Indians. The tribe shut Cut Bank’s project down while this was sorted out.

Cut Bank claimed ignorance, which is equivalent to arguing that a law is not a law unless you know it’s a law. (Do you know all the laws there are? I don’t. But lawyers are supposed to know how to find out.) They did not argue that when land is owned by non-Indians, it is no longer part of the reservation, but that HAS been argued. Also, no one defined Indian. (The problem is not that there is no definition, but that there are too many.) Cynics interpreted the situation as a ploy to get bribes. Others felt it was due to Cut Bank failing to see Tribal constructed laws as “real.”

Many people have been assailing one of the biggest and most powerful constructs of our modern society: the multi-national corporation. Corporations are organizations (constructs) that we pretend are people (corporate has the same root as corpse) and treat in law that way. But corporations are NOT people and have now used their definitional privileges to reach back and control the governments that granted them this fantasy status, because they can see that otherwise they will be limited. After all, nothing about this is natural -- it’s all invented on paper.

And the results are now beginning to be deeply destructive. If the alternative media is correct, our own internal citizen army -- the national guard -- was kept away from New Orleans while Blackwater soldiers of fortune, hired guns, were sent in to keep order. They are a private army with no allegiance except to whomever meets the payroll. Think about it. (Not TOO much or you won’t be able to sleep.)

In fact, some observers think that the multi-national corporations that control governments have abandoned their own checks and balances and grown to such proportions that they will destroy themselves. One example was Dell, which doesn’t make computers but only assembles them from parts for which they contract. They hadn’t realized that one small SE Asia supplier was the only source of a vital chip they had to have. That little supplier hit problems and SMASH falls Dell. Sounds like our war effort in Iraq to me. Except the tiny vital part of the construct that they assume is in endless supply is the soldiers.

Davidson Loehr’s book is “America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher.” (Copyright 2005. Chelsea Green Publishing Co., White River Junction, Vermont. www.chelseagreen.com) He recommends “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” by Joel Bakan. (Copyright 2004 by the Free Press.)

David is the senior minister at the Austin Unitarian Universalist Church in Texas. Their website is down: either it is swept up in the storm chaos or overwhelmed by something else.

construction/deconstruction/instruction/destruction/infrastructure

STRUCTURE:
1. “That which is constructed, as a building.”
2. “Something organized or organized according to a plan or design: the political ‘structure’ of a republic.”
3. “The manner of such organization: a hierarchical ‘structure.’”
4. “The arrangement and relationship of the parts of a whole, as organs in a plant or animal, atoms in a molecule, etc.”

Construction/Deconstruction, Infrastructure, Instruction, destruction.

I have a storm, a chaos, of concepts having to do with structure. In an effort to “order” them, I’ll try an essay here.

First, I want to mention that someone whose name I didn’t catch was on NPR noting how different cultures are, both in their tolerance for disorder and their approaches to keeping or restoring or creating order. This was in reference to the recent major hurricanes. He spoke of the orderly Germans, who will impose order by force if necessary. And he spoke of the orderly Japanese who will appeal to the greater good of the whole and the honor of one’s family. But, he suggested, there is something in American character that loves chaos and that’s what showed up in our response to the disasters. We hate reading instructions. We like to wing it by the seat of our pants. (A mixed metaphor that suggests rotors on our britches.)

Partly our mental picture of a disaster is heroes rising above the bothersome restrictions to save the victims. But this specific disaster stripped the covers off of an economic structure that no heroes had risen above -- the poverty of often-black people not supported by political “will” on any level and an infrastructure so fragile that it was bound to collapse, just like their little houses.

Let me start over. When I went to seminary in 1978, I got there in the middle of a huge discussion about “deconstruction.” The idea was that if you ignore the predictable surface meanings of books, you can look deeper into them and see the pentimento of class and education. In the assumptions of the author, you can make out their prejudices, which are often self-serving and not always very nice. Take for example the little story called “The Indian in the Cupboard,” which many whites consider charming. Then ask yourself what’s charming about a white child who can entrap a real human being, miniaturized, for a toy and keep him away from the Indian’s real life. Why are Indians, real human beings, so often seen as children’s toys?

People got so good at this deconstruction business that they could find faults and blame everywhere. A presumably intelligent local Indian woman recently told me that Bob Scriver copied because all his sculptures of Blackfeet look like Blackfeet. She’s evidently never heard of portraits.

Let’s start over again. Yesterday I drove to Great Falls for my monthly load of groceries. On the way I was thinking about a book I thought would be a good idea: “What Are You Looking At?” It would describe and explain both the built and the natural infrastructure of the land. “Natural” being streams, soil, wind, temperature, and underground configurations from ages past. “Built” being the roads, power lines, underground pipelines, above ground fences, communication towers, shelter belts and fence rows, rocker pumps and then the towns clustered along the way -- most of them gradually deconstructing. The way of the Native peoples here was to adapt to the natural infrastructure with one huge exception: they used fire to maintain the prairie. Probably our major recent unnatural structuring has been dams and pumping things out of the interior of the earth.

Let’s start over again. I talked about this theory of how Americans love chaos with a Native American lit professor. He pointed out how chaos allows thieves and oppressors to get away with lots of bad stuff, because the confusion means that no one really sees it and all monitoring agencies are missing or disabled. I thought of Eric Berne’s ideas about “Games People Play,” like “Uproar,” which is like upsetting the table when you can see you’re going to lose at chess, or “NIGYSOB” which written out is “Now I’ve Got You, you SOB,” and plays out as a form of entrapment -- provoke someone until they strike out at you, then claim to be attacked. Does this remind you of tribal politics? Or maybe DeLay? But on the other hand, sometimes so much chaos manages to keep the foot of the oppressor off the neck of the vulnerable.

David Loehr, a friend of mine from seminary, has written a book; actually it’s a collection of sermons, like my “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke.” David’s book is “America, Fascism and God” and came about when one of his sermons along these lines -- which is very hard on politicians -- caught fire on the Internet and swept across the country. More about that in a minute. First I have to justify how I can talk about David down in Austin, Texas, can appear in this “place-based” blog.

Actually, he came to visit me in 1989. Down on his luck and out of money, he badly needed to escape from the church scene, so he bought a See America ticket and traveled among friends along the railway. I had just been hired to teach English in Heart Butte Actually, I was darned lucky it turned out that way -- the superintendent had told me I had the job but he “couldn’t find the contract” for me to sign -- while he continued trying to find the young man he really wanted to hire because he could coach basketball. Luckily for me, the young man had gone off on an adventure and couldn’t be found. His disorder saved me from being stranded with no teaching job in September.

I picked up David at the train station in East Glacier and took him cross-country out to my new teachage apartment in Heart Butte where the hot water heater was broken and he had to sleep on a mattress in the front room. He said it was like being back in the army. On the way in the dark we came around a corner and almost hit a colt in the road. David was very concerned and thought we should take it along with us -- where was its mother? So we can grant that he doesn’t know much about Montana.

But he’s been doing a lot of reading and thinking about fascism. Also, he has a sort of pocket version of the final report of Martin Marty project on Fundamentalism, which was just firing up when we left. (Martin Marty was one of our most beloved and powerful professors, though a very humble, pastoral sort of person. Someone gave him millions of dollars which he used to fund grad students going all over the world to study the “fundamentalist” version of the religions there --ALL the religions. Incredibly, when they all came back together after years of study all over the globe, their accounts of what drives fundamentalism were eerily similar. What was under it, the pentimento of fundamentalism, is biology, they suggested.

Our species evolved in beings gathered into bands with big strong men who could fight or hunt and nurturing protective small women who could keep a camp and raise children. They protected their territory, resisted “others,” and maintained an infrastructure of ceremonies. All this is still in place. Not just on reservations, but also in cities, in the Superdome.

More later. Gotta think some more.

Montana Festival of the Book 2005

Bookfest ‘05

This was quite a different Bookfest than any I’ve attended before, because, I think, of a lot of subtle but interacting factors. One was the weather: a Canadian cold front was coming through so it was a wetter, chillier experience. I left late, about 5:30 AM, and the Big Dipper accompanied me as far as the Highway 200 exit, but from then on driving worsened until I was going through Rogers Pass (5,610) in a snow storm with big goose feather flakes. I was happy to get to Lincoln where the waitress met me at the door with the news she had just taken a quiche out of the oven. It was spinach and dried tomato, and it turned out she had evidently just thrown a handful of spinach and big slices of tomato into the mix instead of cutting and stirring. I didn’t complain.

The road was slow enough that I got there at ten, missing the panel on “Publishing in the West.” I’m tired of the subject anyway. I’ve attended that panel twice. Russell Chatham is the only one I’d care to hear from at this point and he’d “testified” on Friday. But I had a nice chat with Pat Burk, wife of Dale Burk. We probably hadn’t talked since the Sixties when Dale was the only writer/photographer chronicling the new phenomenon of Western artists. His two books are the subjects of one of my blogs.

The Burks, who are about my age, confirmed that aging is affecting us, affecting the way we see the world. We were such idealists -- we dreamed so big. I ran into Don Marble, a county commissioner in Chester, and one of the “good” lawyers -- now retired and no wonder -- and again hit the theme of “the world is changing,” with his concern for the way economics and politics are going -- far too entwined, far too vicious, far too hard on the little guy and the land. Iraq and the Gulf Coast disasters are wearing hard on us, bringing back semi-subconscious memories of WWII or even the Depression. We resisted the impulse (more or less) to count the number of fine writers missing in action here -- dead, aged, involved in other matters.

The first panel I attended was moderated by a veteran (even founder) who was NOT missing in action: Annick Smith. The topic was “A Boy’s Life -- Male Memoir.” Annick raised four boys so she felt competent to urge on this set of four men. Her approach was structured, with an introduction, and she had interviewed each of the men in the lobby of the Wilma just before, so they were warmed up and confident.

Greg Keeler is someone I don’t really know, but feel as though I do because the Bozeman Unitarians were so fond of him when I was there. A scruffy guy, he says his whole strategy is being the butt of his own jokes -- he says it turns out that way most of the time anyway, so he just uses it. A poet and musician (he composed the conference theme song) he has most recently been a memoirist of Richard Brautigan. Suddenly everyone is curious about Brautigan again, and Keeler was a neighbor and tolerant but protective buddy through some of Brautigan’s wild excesses in Bozeman. Now Greg turns to his own life. Fishing and fish have been the non-mega-charismatic totem of his life, so his coming memoir is called “Trash Fish.”

Doug Peacock, now bald but with short chin whiskers, flowered on this panel. Annick has known him “forever” and her warmth kindled his sense of humor. He said with his poor eyesight (his glasses go on and off all the time) he misread the original panel title and thought it said, “Male Member.” Acting out what that might be like, he narrated, “Dick stood up and went to the door. It was cold outside.” He thought it should be Hemingwayesque, of course.

Fred Haefele, author of “Rebuilding the Indian,” was on one of the panels at the first Montana Festival of the Book I attended. He is considerably mellowed, softened, and more attentive, although once he claimed to be “off task.” He’s a lifelong arborist and I daresay it’s only in this unaccustomed setting that he goes “off task.”

Jonathan Johnson, a much younger man, told how he and his wife had made a plan for finishing college, then holing up in a cabin near the ranch where he grew up, so he could write. He’s a poet, now turning to a memoir invaded by a surprise: a baby daughter. His memoir turned to something more the journal of a pregnancy and birth.

The startling fact of the “Male Memoir” was that Peacock and Haefele -- both in forty/fifty mode -- were also new fathers of baby daughters. What can it mean? None of the babies were the fashionable adopted Chinese females, but full-fledged biological creations in which the fathers took an almost maternal pleasure.


The second panel was “Men and Beast -- Writing Responsibly About the Wild.” The panelists were totally incompatible in method though they all care greatly about the grizzly. Mike Lapinski, an engineer who thinks in bullet lists, diagrams and slogans, preaches “Science,” and whose book is “The Grizzly Maze,” about Timothy Treadwell who tried to become a bear, was the organizer. He alloted everyone their ten minutes and put himself last, so he could run long. He had a few main points: bears are not the dangerous monsters portrayed, leave bears alone, and -- if necessary -- bear spray really works. A handsome rawboned man, he’s clearly a type not often seen at Book Festivals and we’re poorer for it. But it’s easy to understand why he wouldn’t come. He writes hunting books: he’s old-fashioned, right-wing, an effective escapee from the system who won’t vote unless his wife MAKES him.

Gary Ferguson lost his wife tragically in a river rafting expedition last summer. Another handsome man (in a different way) he speaks eloquently about wilderness in the way liberals do, alert to conservative control of the agenda and its weird phobia about science.

Doug Peacock locked his brakes. He’s the romantic who sees the “mythic” bear and understands the deranged war veteran Treadwell. Retreating by reading from his manuscript, he recommended Paul Shepard. I’ve got to get back to Paul Shepard. Is Doug Peacock handsome? For me, a burly bald man in an undershirt holding his cat in his arms -- as depicted in the Festival flier -- is nearly irresistible. He terribly misses Ed Abbey and says there is no contemporary equivalent or replacement.

Andrea Peacock, Doug’s wife, was nothing like I expected and with her analytic journalists’ outlook came closest to providing some kind of overview. She seems young, flexible, and sympathetic, but -- as she reported -- she is capable of spending the entire last summer reviewing written records, hardly going outside.


One of the problems I found with this year’s festival was that there was no time between sessions for meals, schmoozing, taking a quick shopping break and so on. I guess it’s my own fault for not wanting to miss anything, but Richard Wheeler and Sue Hart (the star of last night’s premiere showing of her movie on Dorothy Johnson) invited me to lunch and I had to turn it down since there was only a forty-five minute interval. It’s hard to be in Missoula and not have a little time to prowl.

I “do” the festival all in one day because I don’t want to leave my cats overnight, but there were several small dogs at the festival. One lady sighed, “We’ve already had four dog fights this morning!” Since they were all dogs that weighed less than maybe five pounds (One vet I know claims that dogs that weigh that little are no longer dogs, but rodents.) the biggest damage was to eardrums.


On an empty stomach and at my usual naptime, I got into trouble at the next panel by sitting in the back with Mary Clearman Blew -- whispering, we thought -- until a very nice librarian-type lady came back and rebuked us severely for damaging the event. Mary went into administrator mode and apologized. I personally felt defiant. If you ask me, there are too many “nice ladies” at this event. They’ve grown gray-haired over the years, but they still worship “culture.”

The panel was “The New Novel” and was moderated by the blonde Festival Goddess herself, Kim Anderson. Everyone on the panel was young enough to be my offspring. I recognized Kevin Canty (whose daughter is ten years old) and he spoke about going to the computer and listening for voices from some other place. (There was a great deal of emphasis on “how do you get your ideas?” Rather like the lady who told me she loved to blog but had a hard time coming up with ideas.) He’s funny and easy, but that’s surface.

Claire Davis was quite different than I expected from reading “Winter Range.” I thought she’d be less huggable, less mordant. I guess it’s the tension between those contradictions that makes her interesting. Her new book, “Season of the Snake,” is about a woman married to a sexual predator who doesn’t see it. Claire, Mary and Kim Barnes belong to the outpost of Missoula literary society in Moscow, Idaho, which these days accomplishes more and better stuff than the Mother Fort. Next on the horizon is an anthology women over forty. (Frankly, I don’t care about that. Where’s the anthology for women over sixty?)

Jess Walter, of Spokane, was almost like a white version of Sherman Alexie. His most recent novel is about a guy in a witness protection plan, sent to Spokane, where rubbing elbows with good citizens makes him rethink (or maybe for the first time “think”) about what a democratic society ought to be. Jess played poker with two of these-type guys, and seems fully capable of rendering them as they are. One re-offended and is back in the slammer.

Dean Bakopoulos is the token import, the exec. director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council. His recent novel was “Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon.” He was a high energy, funny guy but I don’t remember anything specific. Garth Stein is a similar type guy who’s from Seattle. The truth is that I don’t know these books, don’t really know what the authors are talking about, and am not motivated to read of them -- oh, maybe Claire’s. The theme of this panel was about being an “outsider,” but it appeared to me to be about something like personal blogging, an exploration of one’s own internal world and the voices that come from “someplace else,” other people’s lives. I must be getting old and cranky.

Luckily, Kirby Lambert, art curator at the Montana Historical Society, had just been to the blogging panel when the next panel started and said that my name had come up in a defense of how blogging is just a lot of interior rambling -- the moderator there said that what I posted was well-written and obviously I’d spent a lot of time on them. I hope I’m an influence instead of an anomaly.


The last panel was “Forged in Fire.” The fire-jumper, Lori Messenger, had been whisked off to respond to water: she is running an emergency response center in the Gulf of Mexico states. Mary Clearman Blew read her essay about fighting wildfire while suspecting she was pregnant. On a quick break in a small town after hours, she appeared at the only drugstore just as they were closing -- smoke-smeared and weighed down with her Nomex garments and other gear. The women of the town sympathetically found her a pregnancy test and gave her advice about a time and place to take the test. Negative. But later she had a daughter. (Where are all these girl babies coming from? That “other place” the writers kept insisting was an inspiration?)

Kim Barnes’ essay was about the terror of being the one left at home while her family went out to risk their lives. A tall, beautiful woman, Kim is newly gray in front and it becomes her. The only moment in which the terror returned to her was when she spoke of her daughter wanting to fight fire.

Phil Drucker wrote a story he claimed was named for “one of my earlier ex-wives.” It was a cliff-hanger but he assured us he didn’t burn up in the end. The plot hinged on two fire-fighting readiness groups who got into a water fight on a hot afternoon and then had nothing left for fighting the fire that broke out. Mary earlier had organized an anthology of Idaho writers on “water,” and jokesters like Phil suggested, “Well, now you need to do fire, earth and air!” Okay, responded Mary. And Phil could co-edit! The earth anthology is now being organized and air after that. Mary is reading submissions for “air” and says they’re good.

One of the most valuable parts of the schedule is the thumbnail bios of the writers, which I use all the year long to try to keep track of developments. I’d like to see this bunch of bios posted on the Montana Arts Council website, or maybe the Montana Festival of the Book website. WITHOUT noting how much money they make for the glory of the Montana economy.


Worrying about the pass, I left straightaway, but it was cleared and graveled. Enough snow along the way to track elk. On the west side the snow became dark rain Thin pewter rents tore the low indigo clouds into long silvery streams with a star here and there like a fish. The streams formed an estuary, and by the time I was north of Choteau, the Big Dipper was sailing along with me and the sky was a huge net of glittering stars.

Blackfeet Harvest Moon Ball

In 1961 when I arrived on the rez, the Big Hotel in East Glacier Park didn’t even like local whites to come around, much less Indians. The place was entirely staffed by blonde and obedient Minnesota kids, usually with a connection to Great Northern Railway. But times change and even Minnesota kids aren’t what they used to be -- the Great Northern, of course, no longer exists.

This last weekend the Harvest Moon Ball was held in the Big Hotel, completely organized, attended and funded by Blackfeet. Not all were local: one was Greek, and one lives off-rez with whites and paints like a white man because he was entirely educated in big city white art schools -- but that’s beside the point and mean-spirited anyway. The featured artist, Leonda Fast Buffalo Horse, had the highest selling piece: “Celestial Bear Shield,” a mirror and stained-glass round shield with a bear paw and two eagle feathers. It sold for $2,800 in the live auction. Total sales were $39,000.

Four artists -- Valentina LaPier, Brett Wagner, David Dragonfly, and Gary Schildt -- created “quickdraw” art for silent auction. The “quickdraw” deal was invented in Helena at the Rendezvous of Art and consists of the artists creating their work right on the spot with an arbitrary time limit. The model was an Indian woman in a shawl and braids with an eagle feather stuck in her hair and an eagle wing fan. (Evidently no one made a fuss about stereotypes.)

Professional chefs -- many of them Blackfeet restauranteurs -- supplied a feast of prime rib and salmon. Quite different from what used to be the norm at pow-wows and ceremonies, which tended to be boiled ribs, boiled eggs, fry bread, and oranges you peeled yourself. And different from the big “feeds” that serve Indian Tacos. Pretty Indian girls in Academy Award-type fancy dresses undertook the traffic control and serving. There once was a time you’d have had to hold a gun on young Blackfeet women to get them into such dresses!

This year was meant to honor two of the most beloved Blackfeet artists: King Kuka and Ernie Pepion. Both recently passed on. Kuka had a strong spiritual component to his work and often painted riders in a spatter of white “snow.” He was educated at the University of Montana, earning a BA and worked in many different media. He said, “Dreams are invisible voices calling me, sustaining me, carrying me in difficult times.”

After a car accident iin 1971, Ernie Pepion was confined to a wheelchair but his imagination and mordant humor were never confined. He said, “Since I am a firm believer in dreams, I believe that one of these days I’ll dance right out of this chair, maybe not at this lifetime, but maybe in the end when I go to the Sand Hills. I am trying to show that even though we handicapped people may have physical limitations, we can conquer anything mentally.” Engineering students in Bozeman rigged an easel for him that could be lowered into the floor or pivoted around the middle so there were no limits to the size of canvas he could use.

The money goes to the Blackfeet Community Development Fund, directed by Eloise Cobell, whose lawsuit against the US Government (did you catch the last scandal: the records found in the garbage behind the Archives building in Washington, D.C.?) has taught her to think outside the box and to think BIG. So here are tribal people using creativity and glamour to create an event that makes them proud and builds up funds for a community people always used to say would prevent any such thing.

The Big Hotel comes along meekly, having checked their own financial books and realized that this money was made in a season when the place used to be shuttered, though it’s one of the sweetest parts of the year. (Not least because all the tourists disappear after Labor Day.)

(I’m indebted for the facts above to John McGill, the editor of the “Glacier Reporter.” www.glacierreporter.com)

In the Sixties it used to be that “Indian art” was when you (rarely Indian) bought some photographic portraits of old-time Indians (often rigged up with stuff out of the photographer’s trunk) and either painted them or carved the likenesses -- then sold them to tourists. We’ve come a long ways since then. The entire August, 2005, issue of “Southwest Art” was devoted to what they call “Native Art,” and it is almost entirely conceived by Indians, drawn from their own world, often contemporary or in a medium entirely unexpected, maybe experimental. Fabulous glowing bowls of glass with “sand-carved” geometric patterns. Elegant jewelry cast from leggos. Startling abstracts in colors never seen in nature. Shamans (shamen?) with the heads of animals. Then it all swings around the other way and here’s work by a self-taught Indian admirer of Charlie Russell or a surreal trompe l’oeil by an Indian admirer of European old masters.

When one looks at the subject matter, the “traditional” portraits of romantic Indians are almost all by the new wave of Chinese artists or maybe a leftover from the “pretty girl” tradition of Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post.

They say that the famous Santa Fe Indian Market is so high dollar now that the Mafia is beginning to muscle in. Hillerman hasn’t gotten a plot out of that yet, but surely it’s worth a murder mystery.

My favorite work in this issue belongs to “bird art” and shows ravens and crows walking around in big red high-top tennies. Except for their feet, the birds are realistic, esp their attitude.

Maybe attitude is the key to the whole thing: an attitude of “sure I can!” and “look at that!” and a willingness to be personal, to mix up the categories and taxonomies, but not to lose civility, beauty, and solidarity. This is the real fund that’s being built up by the Harvest Moon Ball at the Big Hotel. Community and personal meaning.

Indian DNA and Paradigm Shift

Brian Dippie’s famous book, “The Vanishing Indian,” managed to convince us that Indians hadn’t vanished at all -- but now we find that our understanding of what to call “indians” and what Indians “are” -- even what human beings are -- is up for grabs. It’s the definitions that are vanishing. We are deeply challenged by how to think about the people who were on this continent before Euros arrived.

Let’s work backwards. It was quite a discovery to know that we could actually write out the recipe for a human being: a DNA map of each individual, a list of the main genes, even the ability to identify the genes we share with other animals -- which turns out to be 99% of the genes we have. It is even possible to “build” a a simple worm by creating the right molecules and getting them to adhere to each other in the right order, which is NOT a simple task. About a zillion times more difficult than exploring outer space.

THEN it turned out that every gene (which we had learned to think of as a sort of round billiard ball with an eye color or nose length written on it) is really a little factory, a jig, a template for molecules and it is these molecules, proteins, floating around in a body that determine what that body is like. BUT whatever happens to that body also affects both the template for the molecule AND the molecule as it floats. The factory turns off and on, and it retools to fit the situation. Ever more complex than we thought. Some genes turn others off and on -- maybe on a time schedule, maybe in response to the environment, maybe in response to something like sunlight (like vitamin D).

So now we have the exponentially more huge task of identifying those molecules, giving them names, figuring out what they do, what atoms are in them, how they are “folded.” This last turns out to be crucial as a proteome (a molecule made in the jig of a gene), if it’s folded wrong, becomes a “prion,” and that will kill you. It won’t fit with the other molecules the way it ought to and will gum up the works until you have Alzheimers or something else bad.

If you don’t eat the substances your system needs to make your proteomes, you will be deficient. Can’t digest food quite. Won’t have energy. Can’t think straight. Get rickets or pelagra or scurvy. But substances vary. The iron atoms in one place are slightly different (isotopes) from the iron atoms in another place. Maybe that makes no difference -- maybe it does.

I understand “race” as being fitted to an environment so exquisitely that one’s very molecules are made of local isotopes, one’s metabolism is adjusted for the specific climate, one’s physical structure is adapted to the necessary tasks, and one’s religion is drawn to and shaped around one’s life. How poetic. What good is an outlook like that when there’s money involved? Legal definitions? Social relatonships? One’s self image?

I dunno. I just thought it ought to be on the table.

Here are other ideas:

1. Anyone who FEELS like an Indian or what they think an Indian feels like, IS an Indian.

2. An Indian is however his or her home tribes defines it.

3. An Indian is whatever the government says, but the government says different things for different purposes: land ownership, scholarships, loans and subsidies. And all these lines can be rearranged if there’s not enough money to go around -- just make the definition a little tighter or looser and the number of Indians becomes greater or lesser.

4. An Indian is a reservation dweller and cannot properly be an Indian any other place.

5. An Indian is a matter of blood heritage and their pedigree is their proof. Did you know Heather Locklear is a Lumbee Indian? Did you know that Ward Churchill is NOT by this measure? (His tribal membership is a complimentary membership given by a tribe he knew so that he could sell art at Indian Art Fairs without being arrested because it’s against the federal law to sell Indian Art if you’re not an Indian according to your own tribe.)

6. The Duck Test -- does the person walk like a... talk like a...
act like a... and so on. Except that most times the duck is straight out of the movies.

7. A white person can be adopted into a tribe and then becomes a kind of blood brother which is a Real Thing.

7. Since you can define Indians so many different ways, they are simply not a coherent entity and it is hopeless to try to define them.

Recently the Cree-Chippewa in Havre got into such a ruckus about how their tribe would define Indian (Some wanted to move the line to qualify their grandchildren who were whiter than the rule allowed) that they got embarrassed and threw the local reporter out of the meeting.

There’s a scientific point of view that “Indians” are only a phenomenon defined by what was here when Columbus arrived. If you find bones that are old enough (like the Kennewick man) to precede known tribes, they aren’t Indian, can’t belong to an existing tribe, but belong to an even more ambiguous category like “early man.”

Back East some tribes are trying to reconstitute from a diasphora that has been passing for white for decades, because they want to have the legal right to buy land and build casinoes. Some of those people think that if their blood were analyzed, there would be markers of tribe in there -- genes that only that tribe carried. Some businesses are analyzing African-Americans’ blood and claim to be able to tell individuals what African tribe they came from. (To me some faces are certainly Somali and so on.) But what if they come from several tribes? Once they got to the States, they would not have been sorted by tribes.

Certifying Indian people as certain tribes according to their blood doesn’t at all allow for the amount of adoption, kidnapping, child sharing, and other genetic mixing that must have gone on across the continent.

It’s all questions with no answers. Every question has three answers: yes, no, and I don’t know yet-- tell me more. Mostly the last.

Faith-based Reservation Management

An accumulated stockpile of “Montana, the Magazine of Western History” is invaluable. One of my most useful issues is Vol. XXII, Number One, Winter, 1972. Originally I bought it for $1.75 because it included an homage to Lone Wolf, also known as Hart Schultz, the half-Blackfeet son of James Willard Schultz. Paul Dyck, Hart Schultz’ adopted son, interweaves his comments with stories from Lone Wolf.

Doing some rearranging on my shelves, I see that there is another intriguing article in the same issue, this one by Howard L. Harrod, who wrote the definitive history of the Methodists on the Blackfeet Reservation. The article is about a nineteenth century presidential experiment with “faith-based” management of the reservation. President Grant was fed up with the constant graft, drunkenness, and incompetence of Indian agents and thought that if the churches supplied the agents, this would no longer be a problem, because all churchmen abided by the principles of Jesus Christ. Right?

The Blackfeet were arbitrarily assigned to the Methodists, though the Jesuits had been active on the reservation for decades. Who knows why? Fear of papists? Maybe Irish papists lurking across the Canadian border, disguised as Metis and waiting for their chance to invade the US? Agent Young, ordained, was sent along to “civilize and Christianize” the “savages.”

It was a policy of the US Government to put tribes who were traditional enemies on the same reservation, in hopes that they would fight each other rather than collaborating to resist their white administrators. This worked pretty well other places, but on the Blackfeet reservation the idea of sending a Methodist to supervise a people used to Catholics succeeded in pitching the white folks against each other. In a civilized and Christian manner, of course. Which meant a lot of politics and letter writing, and bitter suspicion that still persists.

Part of the problem was that when the reservation was shrunk north of Birch Creek, it left high and dry St. Peter’s Church and school, the center of Jesuit works. This meant that the clientele, which was not to leave the reservation, was separated from their teachers and St. Peter’s had no reason for existence. Undaunted, the priests came by wagon to gather students they already knew and to find new ones, which they transported on grounds that their parents wished it.

On page 49 is a photo of those students, seventeen of them, ranging from near-adult girls (possibly matrons) to a little pre-school tyke who is wiggly enough to be blurred, even though Montana’s first Catholic Bishop, John B. Brondel, is holding him by his shoulders. The next small boy over is clearly too cold -- he has bare feet and his shoulders are hunched, his hands clenched. There is only one boy with braids and a blanket. The year was 1885, so when I came in 1961, these children -- those who survived -- were the elders in Browning. They are not named in the caption. Neither are the two men with mustaches and white foreheads -- probably drivers.

Agent Young argued that these children were his wards and that his authority over them was greater than than that of their own parents, who were also wards. On page 43 is a photo of children at the Blackfeet Agency School, probably the infamous Willow Creek school just outside Browning. The boys wear small three piece suits, bandannas and round hats. All are shod. (Many dressed this way the rest of their lives.) The girls wear pinafore dresses, with many petticoats, and stand with their hands together. One wears moccasins. No one looks happy. I don’t see a year in the caption. The Agency School didn’t have enough space to accommodate all the students who were supposed to attend.

Young’s favorite thing was handing out candy on Christmas Eve, which he claimed warmed his heart, though there is no precedent in the New Testament. In fact, this is the infamous period when the buffalo disappeared and somehow so did the government commodities, so that people were starving. It is claimed that Young fed corn meant for the people to his chickens.

When he arrived on Little Badger in mid-December, 1876, where the agency was, Young did not like the location. “I don’t believe a more unsuitable place in every respect could be selected on the reservation.” Three-fourths of the tribe had gone hunting buffalo to the southeast. A few chiefs came to see their new agent, looked him over, shrugged, and went back to hunting. Young should have realized right then that he was not going to make obedient peasants of them.

The well-known and beloved “Brother Van” Van Orsdel sized up the situation and got as far away from it as he could, concentrating on the many small white communities who were open to Protestant services. The Methodist denomination sent no money, though President Grant had hoped they would. Appeals from Catholic officials to Washington, D.C., officials would be seen as reasonable, but then referred back to Young for his opinion, which ended the matter. John Imoda, S.J. tried to bring in the Montana courts through a writ of habeas corpus, but it didn’t work.

Young finally threw the Jesuits off the reservation in 1882, but Father Prando simply built a chapel in the infamous town of Robaire, across the Birch Creek boundary, where the bootleggers plied their trade. Many Indians came to attend mass: there were nearly 700 baptisms and 55 marriages.

St. Peter’s Church remains near Great Falls where it is ceremonially opened once a year for services. A much fuller account of all this back-and-forth is in Howard Harrod’s book, “Mission Among the Blackfeet.” (University of Oklahoma Press, Copyright 1971. ISBN 0-8061-1301-4) Harrod himself has passed on.

Today Methodists all along the Montana High-Line are finding their congregations shrinking, but the Catholics are booming. Maybe it’s that Blackfeet like ceremony. Maybe that original antagonism is still alive, reinforced by some political reason that is now forgotten.

Even though I’m a Unitarian-Universalist, I served the Blackfeet Methodists for one year when their normal supply channels failed. Though I preached from the conventional lectionary, I didn’t shy away from my own sort of Taoism/process theology point of view and no one had trouble with that. Many people have recognized the political component of religion -- the force that causes those who profess peace and love to act out turmoil and punishment in the pursuit of resources. “Faith-based” bureaucracy turned out not to be a very good idea, which Bush advisors would do well to notice.

Art in the Churches of Browning, Montana

Catholic churches are traditionally open to art and even in small reservation parishes of Montana there have been some spectacular accomplishments, particularly the work of Brother Joseph Carignano, the cook and handyman, primarily, but also a gifted artist in his ability to recreate European-style paintings. Sixty-one religious paintings cover the walls and ceilings in the historic St. Ignatius Catholic Church. One painting on the little roof over the pulpit which is meant to bounce preaching out to the congregation was commissioned to be done by Ace Powell. It is a sky with clouds and I seem to remember a dove, but maybe not. I remember Ace debating about it with Bob Scriver.

The Catholic church in Browning, Montana, is not so elaborate, but has classical church statuary meant to celebrate the namesake of the church, Theresa, the Little Flower, as well as Takawitha, the Native American saint. Also the sanctuary enfolds striking creations by local artists. The stained glass windows in the style of Roault are by King Kuka. Glowing chunks of thick glass illustrate the Stations of the Cross. One of several websites for King Kuka is http://www.nativeamericanartshow.com/Kingkuka/Kukabook.shtml

A more-than-lifesized Jesus on the Cross is the work of Gordon Monroe, who was Bob Scriver’s fiberglass artisan and who styled the figure after Scriver’s small crucifix called, “Eli, Eli.” Gordon is a committed evangelical Christian who has been secretary-treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. He’s especially active in charity work, bringing in truckloads of donations for poor people from a network of contacts throughout the United States.

The combination of the windows, which includes a “Sacred Heart” image in the round “rose” window over the altar and the huge bronze-colored figure on the Cross, which sometimes wears a gold lamé robe, is quite powerful. This church was built of field stones collected and brought in by the members of the tribe by horse and wagon and then mortared together by Blackfeet workers. The stones are round, tumbled by ancient glaciers, and often pink or turquoise argyllite. (The first Indian Health Service hospital was built in the same manner.)

A small side-chapel of the Catholic Church, where Mass is said on Thursdays, has an “Indian” theme in its decorations. The grounds have several “medicine stones,” which were brought from the prairie, to the distress of some elders who thought they should not be moved. Geologically called “boulder erratics,” they were carried in and dropped by the ancient glaciers that shaped so much of this land, and often became “itching rocks” for buffalo who had no trees to scrape against, reconnaissance posts for prairie hawks and cougars, and altar stones where offerings could be left as gifts for Natoosie, the Sun.

The Heart Butte Catholic Church, St. Anne’s, has given up its small emerald-doored log cabin and rebuilt as a capacious building with modern facilities, including a residence for the priest. The front wall, behind the altar, is a broad mural of the Heart Butte area in the old days.

The Methodist church, the trademark flame-and-cross on its bell-tower which was originally the entrance, has stained glass windows by Brent Warburton. Warburton, once a teacher at the Blackfeet Free School and often a cook like Brother Carignano, also did the stained glass windows at the Holy Family Mission Catholic Church in the Two Medicine Valley. The larger mission school buildings once operated by the Jesuits have been demolished. Warburton was not a church-goer.

In the Holy Family windows the main motif is doves for peace. In the Methodist church in Browning, the pattern is more ambitious and involves all the windows of the sanctuary in a wrap-around mural of a stream that arises at Chief Mountain behind the altar, then continues around the side, passing foothills wildlife, and ends in a prairie rainbow, God’s promise not to destroy the world again. Warburton’s style is realistic, slightly stylized. Neither he nor Kuka used paint to add detail.

A recent pastor had a Pentecostal bent and enlisted others to put stained glass windows in the bell tower. Hard to notice unless the light is right, the most striking of these is a pastor in clerical garb. He also added an icon of Mary in the sanctuary and banners in bright colors.

This once very modest church was built outside of Browning along Willow Creek where the parsonage is now located. It was moved to town long ago and resituated in a different orientation to the compass. Build-ons were a response to a large Sunday School operation in the Fifties, but now the church mainly uses its space for community support.

The oldest art in this church is the carving on the fronts of the Communion Table and the pulpit. These are the work of Al Racine, some of his earliest wood-carvings. Later he would be acclaimed for these bas reliefs, and also his well-loved Napi cartoon character, who flees riding on a cougar which he whips with a rattlesnake, saying, “I’m gettin’ outta here! This place is too tough for me!” The only remaining public example of Al’s cartoon character in his big black hat is on the side of Ick’s Place, an emporium of gambling and intoxication, where it was altered to hold playing cards and a bottle. Originally the character was eating flapjacks.

Even so does art wind in and out of our religious lives, even when the religion is that of Lucifer rather than Jesus, Natoosie or the Virgin Mary rather than Jehovah. A reservation is only a microcosm of everyplace.