tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77262030944750142792024-03-19T05:50:45.095-06:00HEART BUTTE SCHOOL, MONTANAHeart Butte is in the foothills of the East Slope of the Rocky Mountains on the Blackfeet Reservation. Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-15780551553501369552015-02-08T18:27:00.002-07:002015-02-08T18:29:19.432-07:00HEART BUTTE: A BLACKFEET INDIAN COMMUNITY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSM0YnHnAn3hFeFTx5p_1c2lb7oDgnNJ4C-nYpu2Rou8K9JRo-78QDFC9GKTy-WKy7lNUyLsmdlLwfOcVyh1DIxoBN3lZBpbKVS7xYqbGeZ4hY69nDpItAD_-TSKzyP4_M6HHH6mZu4U/s1600/Scan+1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSM0YnHnAn3hFeFTx5p_1c2lb7oDgnNJ4C-nYpu2Rou8K9JRo-78QDFC9GKTy-WKy7lNUyLsmdlLwfOcVyh1DIxoBN3lZBpbKVS7xYqbGeZ4hY69nDpItAD_-TSKzyP4_M6HHH6mZu4U/s1600/Scan+1.jpeg" height="208" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhmlxu8wwlA6PELz-5ocudM4WmyfFIYuYtXKNRDcaeo2yFWz4rlIoqU3Sl7TWBvnKJR6IkkWpCXO1e98-nZd-ip4HwQN9BVFcoVgrvRzJl7s2f72yZt52YKymmY0U58g8eWf2dH71h_do/s1600/Scan+2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhmlxu8wwlA6PELz-5ocudM4WmyfFIYuYtXKNRDcaeo2yFWz4rlIoqU3Sl7TWBvnKJR6IkkWpCXO1e98-nZd-ip4HwQN9BVFcoVgrvRzJl7s2f72yZt52YKymmY0U58g8eWf2dH71h_do/s1600/Scan+2.jpeg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGWVv1y_GwekQ0Hr32bRvfHTrxjVBDzFC2zfy-bfSauekEO1mLEpuA-2DHNM8qsnuQG8O-8W_teLehN-Pgx95SlEYVXp2t-n2s9x1zy6OjD0NyJU3tAPpNwLsmCHFrOalooVnmrIv_ZXk/s1600/Scan+3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGWVv1y_GwekQ0Hr32bRvfHTrxjVBDzFC2zfy-bfSauekEO1mLEpuA-2DHNM8qsnuQG8O-8W_teLehN-Pgx95SlEYVXp2t-n2s9x1zy6OjD0NyJU3tAPpNwLsmCHFrOalooVnmrIv_ZXk/s1600/Scan+3.jpeg" height="210" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIT9zz0Qhyphenhyphensix2f9_s45CNIk5aYXT3d5J8YD2A9OrFA4V9nh6o2v-d3q7Z056IaRnlf2OGLscXKrZR6-jQ5p9NBLFkmyeDQrcKSjsOB-77k-aWinIFeKZr9yOVVMjlmWNxyT6HHNEuZ8o/s1600/Scan+4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIT9zz0Qhyphenhyphensix2f9_s45CNIk5aYXT3d5J8YD2A9OrFA4V9nh6o2v-d3q7Z056IaRnlf2OGLscXKrZR6-jQ5p9NBLFkmyeDQrcKSjsOB-77k-aWinIFeKZr9yOVVMjlmWNxyT6HHNEuZ8o/s1600/Scan+4.jpeg" height="220" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhadg7bWUPbTnejdrzczNtN2ustaS0zOPiLCSUoas8mf9jHeUWHjqJ8JmMQfQxk-DJi9aXkiswPr7iQhggAPvaSpCTiTtR8rfxfXJQNtWePxd0lOVVJ71QmstLa8-L0_-2w2I_PdQN5Xtc/s1600/Scan+5.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhadg7bWUPbTnejdrzczNtN2ustaS0zOPiLCSUoas8mf9jHeUWHjqJ8JmMQfQxk-DJi9aXkiswPr7iQhggAPvaSpCTiTtR8rfxfXJQNtWePxd0lOVVJ71QmstLa8-L0_-2w2I_PdQN5Xtc/s1600/Scan+5.jpeg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidcJepfD0C9EyrPOgbMbVE-rt-QCWPQeSOgHWF2BrfKBWhps5vlPuIvfgK3Nv4tOGCzRhA4nlo6x3Pp-74swd8gR8jCsAVjzepM_40UF3YJ3LgT8_3ZagvyGzcJ07SMyXpk_NcmxNWtaU/s1600/Scan+6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidcJepfD0C9EyrPOgbMbVE-rt-QCWPQeSOgHWF2BrfKBWhps5vlPuIvfgK3Nv4tOGCzRhA4nlo6x3Pp-74swd8gR8jCsAVjzepM_40UF3YJ3LgT8_3ZagvyGzcJ07SMyXpk_NcmxNWtaU/s1600/Scan+6.jpeg" height="204" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYDDMjm2bfy1erXchruLrAPJSUZg994xRildIdPZ1g_0MKrR6PfQKMpVc5TryToFmfhEW8Rqub3keLfkdjXw_amYnBWLqN1jS20zYcla_EQOv2woPwt78mlOgie6fGVzUnDumxQTnceU/s1600/Scan+8.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYDDMjm2bfy1erXchruLrAPJSUZg994xRildIdPZ1g_0MKrR6PfQKMpVc5TryToFmfhEW8Rqub3keLfkdjXw_amYnBWLqN1jS20zYcla_EQOv2woPwt78mlOgie6fGVzUnDumxQTnceU/s1600/Scan+8.jpeg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRwHvla7Y40FEG6S2UwnvKUUNAjevWL5Ei0jfW2ho1kS9T2y-o5n1dwy8xH6w6T7IsXR0AVOmpRPScNekHxvMVzHsRPk-v4M_OsTS7s8PPtPq9Nktr0NZhYb_8Dn_uQmUS1emfvVau0NU/s1600/Scan+9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRwHvla7Y40FEG6S2UwnvKUUNAjevWL5Ei0jfW2ho1kS9T2y-o5n1dwy8xH6w6T7IsXR0AVOmpRPScNekHxvMVzHsRPk-v4M_OsTS7s8PPtPq9Nktr0NZhYb_8Dn_uQmUS1emfvVau0NU/s1600/Scan+9.jpeg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwofo6FODq0iqGJfgVF0DjVTkaX4piXuoIUZuIOmtKgo3KXrBd0MDRW5w4vLEv9RAtzqKZlYMyaMRfPEsbNV9UcFvQdYXAuK-T5N3Et8oZ_X5P5eGcckpy5G6VX96lzodILfGaQZ-MvAY/s1600/Scan+10.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwofo6FODq0iqGJfgVF0DjVTkaX4piXuoIUZuIOmtKgo3KXrBd0MDRW5w4vLEv9RAtzqKZlYMyaMRfPEsbNV9UcFvQdYXAuK-T5N3Et8oZ_X5P5eGcckpy5G6VX96lzodILfGaQZ-MvAY/s1600/Scan+10.jpeg" height="211" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYHbZnhncrPB3jV-bWC5RDVww06vaepcu00WmAfaaW7acdkA3tRk7-ud1MoYQVusDBttbtn-wTTsMq13445jMDYwEqhSqSISuou4M_eXU1UeQgUtffqAu0DFn3ejVZyMKr1Tb9TktEi0s/s1600/Scan+7.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYHbZnhncrPB3jV-bWC5RDVww06vaepcu00WmAfaaW7acdkA3tRk7-ud1MoYQVusDBttbtn-wTTsMq13445jMDYwEqhSqSISuou4M_eXU1UeQgUtffqAu0DFn3ejVZyMKr1Tb9TktEi0s/s1600/Scan+7.jpeg" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYDDMjm2bfy1erXchruLrAPJSUZg994xRildIdPZ1g_0MKrR6PfQKMpVc5TryToFmfhEW8Rqub3keLfkdjXw_amYnBWLqN1jS20zYcla_EQOv2woPwt78mlOgie6fGVzUnDumxQTnceU/s1600/Scan+8.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYDDMjm2bfy1erXchruLrAPJSUZg994xRildIdPZ1g_0MKrR6PfQKMpVc5TryToFmfhEW8Rqub3keLfkdjXw_amYnBWLqN1jS20zYcla_EQOv2woPwt78mlOgie6fGVzUnDumxQTnceU/s1600/Scan+8.jpeg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRwHvla7Y40FEG6S2UwnvKUUNAjevWL5Ei0jfW2ho1kS9T2y-o5n1dwy8xH6w6T7IsXR0AVOmpRPScNekHxvMVzHsRPk-v4M_OsTS7s8PPtPq9Nktr0NZhYb_8Dn_uQmUS1emfvVau0NU/s1600/Scan+9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRwHvla7Y40FEG6S2UwnvKUUNAjevWL5Ei0jfW2ho1kS9T2y-o5n1dwy8xH6w6T7IsXR0AVOmpRPScNekHxvMVzHsRPk-v4M_OsTS7s8PPtPq9Nktr0NZhYb_8Dn_uQmUS1emfvVau0NU/s1600/Scan+9.jpeg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwofo6FODq0iqGJfgVF0DjVTkaX4piXuoIUZuIOmtKgo3KXrBd0MDRW5w4vLEv9RAtzqKZlYMyaMRfPEsbNV9UcFvQdYXAuK-T5N3Et8oZ_X5P5eGcckpy5G6VX96lzodILfGaQZ-MvAY/s1600/Scan+10.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwofo6FODq0iqGJfgVF0DjVTkaX4piXuoIUZuIOmtKgo3KXrBd0MDRW5w4vLEv9RAtzqKZlYMyaMRfPEsbNV9UcFvQdYXAuK-T5N3Et8oZ_X5P5eGcckpy5G6VX96lzodILfGaQZ-MvAY/s1600/Scan+10.jpeg" height="211" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi76hBOXIoXzVHXRVuAby_Tr_QFG4QERrUUmmUurXl7VGO3IM0YwEuaetgxipmTIAH6-lapQ2WVq9WbLMq5isiaoX67gndIz62fMTH5VZsnofsvu1K6mkE6dJ7xkP4jgm_dDWBcTeC5QSw/s1600/Scan+11.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi76hBOXIoXzVHXRVuAby_Tr_QFG4QERrUUmmUurXl7VGO3IM0YwEuaetgxipmTIAH6-lapQ2WVq9WbLMq5isiaoX67gndIz62fMTH5VZsnofsvu1K6mkE6dJ7xkP4jgm_dDWBcTeC5QSw/s1600/Scan+11.jpeg" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizYs6sNi_PuF9nSIn7Zpn8RQTbdJ3xoE3LkTaqiz_XAz1VB8DDRbFUFO6TwJG7WvYnh35BLOv7Rrc4vdg72_rvaqJDdODPTg10pdXzh9sECDL5GCUacWYnipuRt6_0XbzO8Z9YD-iDQus/s1600/Scan+12.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizYs6sNi_PuF9nSIn7Zpn8RQTbdJ3xoE3LkTaqiz_XAz1VB8DDRbFUFO6TwJG7WvYnh35BLOv7Rrc4vdg72_rvaqJDdODPTg10pdXzh9sECDL5GCUacWYnipuRt6_0XbzO8Z9YD-iDQus/s1600/Scan+12.jpeg" height="216" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6gMSGRbvLBekM3O2ZpU0MhMeaHcmHrCXBa-UHgo_ncHLxvwiHRXIfNmRowWqB5r72IMz-J3rEhWgP8fAL_ZzbDqRPkMKYUEQwwsJc8sBkhPXijL70aUL_dO5zflk9-W1CmNjr13CDBo/s1600/Scan+24.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6gMSGRbvLBekM3O2ZpU0MhMeaHcmHrCXBa-UHgo_ncHLxvwiHRXIfNmRowWqB5r72IMz-J3rEhWgP8fAL_ZzbDqRPkMKYUEQwwsJc8sBkhPXijL70aUL_dO5zflk9-W1CmNjr13CDBo/s1600/Scan+24.jpeg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPbIVJ13Z_-c1coqSAtz4buNkJYjheJfRv7rC5n0v-K0ssvUMf8OSOFfvOlzaz2BLZ3GDWvcsgLPqMiFlZb_sYv_DHASuQ5rOtSB-SMxsCwBMcV5LUbjmmPRcb5tZ1vuiAKyqwaA1mYYA/s1600/Scan+15.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPbIVJ13Z_-c1coqSAtz4buNkJYjheJfRv7rC5n0v-K0ssvUMf8OSOFfvOlzaz2BLZ3GDWvcsgLPqMiFlZb_sYv_DHASuQ5rOtSB-SMxsCwBMcV5LUbjmmPRcb5tZ1vuiAKyqwaA1mYYA/s1600/Scan+15.jpeg" height="207" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOxfEl_y-j8TWbC4Wjx_79f4sVwhfIpqr0-1g2yvO3u4yJklORbz5LCH0uDMWE6UF3_CxIOVbQlfY7hONahDmv2fQB2e4WmVbsV5sdW7LSCRsLWPd7qjK8brgvUNjTnS02alFdYWys6U/s1600/Scan+16.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOxfEl_y-j8TWbC4Wjx_79f4sVwhfIpqr0-1g2yvO3u4yJklORbz5LCH0uDMWE6UF3_CxIOVbQlfY7hONahDmv2fQB2e4WmVbsV5sdW7LSCRsLWPd7qjK8brgvUNjTnS02alFdYWys6U/s1600/Scan+16.jpeg" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6gH7ehRT4yFxWLB-ihVUBKRAAJ2Uhqsz29pcWtdYaHrGcq13uO-R3PBhh0piBeP9w0etxf8bCcARxh0EewijaIkcqG31nqxdLcPQLsJMIi3fImTzYmc-_0FKuuQ_txmgjQ9CDm_0o8o/s1600/Scan+17.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6gH7ehRT4yFxWLB-ihVUBKRAAJ2Uhqsz29pcWtdYaHrGcq13uO-R3PBhh0piBeP9w0etxf8bCcARxh0EewijaIkcqG31nqxdLcPQLsJMIi3fImTzYmc-_0FKuuQ_txmgjQ9CDm_0o8o/s1600/Scan+17.jpeg" height="216" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikICbt657IWywqHTUhOaia8Yqcin5M9aU_G2nIkvKGuleSnocj5nCuBEMFLNUkU0s8bBN-GeBzY2Rk3vmfJokm5IYwJIWEzmiAtCjYZI0W9NQhAmLj_VP7LFFaiL1-T6GupxxnMBq3N6s/s1600/Scan+18.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikICbt657IWywqHTUhOaia8Yqcin5M9aU_G2nIkvKGuleSnocj5nCuBEMFLNUkU0s8bBN-GeBzY2Rk3vmfJokm5IYwJIWEzmiAtCjYZI0W9NQhAmLj_VP7LFFaiL1-T6GupxxnMBq3N6s/s1600/Scan+18.jpeg" height="210" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhk_51luR1Yqlaol8CmRNzQVdFxQT6LydLPXRJeKPbsjp3VMSQPz74ewit0FlMnzVS1zuvXwKER4pj5ET8pQ9_RtbSU4SwclSAQgOjt7oLrEmkbxZAoOZ9mhnSCxNQm-xIH4stIGvzXE/s1600/Scan+19.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhk_51luR1Yqlaol8CmRNzQVdFxQT6LydLPXRJeKPbsjp3VMSQPz74ewit0FlMnzVS1zuvXwKER4pj5ET8pQ9_RtbSU4SwclSAQgOjt7oLrEmkbxZAoOZ9mhnSCxNQm-xIH4stIGvzXE/s1600/Scan+19.jpeg" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7TlLRZV-Se5jRTsu-m_M3s67TnyAhHmwrkEFH2rbA8WGlv-M_4159L2vHERWXyP3bBSDN8CiHn1QzULPFU87BTZEtBXCu9_ZI1Uj6NGK1GrMWfkE4CBybF73ecig9r0cCKBL93tzbqY/s1600/Scan+20.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7TlLRZV-Se5jRTsu-m_M3s67TnyAhHmwrkEFH2rbA8WGlv-M_4159L2vHERWXyP3bBSDN8CiHn1QzULPFU87BTZEtBXCu9_ZI1Uj6NGK1GrMWfkE4CBybF73ecig9r0cCKBL93tzbqY/s1600/Scan+20.jpeg" height="205" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEH2FvzhahuCy1UtIt7CbokSL_sXichERAcfXDr0fCQvQfn_IbO3LEZHX4UPkTHor8lGcfZ6xBWLkhFH3YU1j8zSp3zhKvZPBdVMYN7SJdHRAYS8qnJKVv1mdwGuf8H8DPCC1HQYqmjBo/s1600/Scan+21.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEH2FvzhahuCy1UtIt7CbokSL_sXichERAcfXDr0fCQvQfn_IbO3LEZHX4UPkTHor8lGcfZ6xBWLkhFH3YU1j8zSp3zhKvZPBdVMYN7SJdHRAYS8qnJKVv1mdwGuf8H8DPCC1HQYqmjBo/s1600/Scan+21.jpeg" height="211" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMxG2W7G0cqk6tfGiQe3s1acH5SWWN_xeGASPIvZQCKm5FugXnJrxHhvvfHHRBY-32HhIDEiGgr2De095k6i6M754N899ZvdXWtlNx_cIboiIFfTmng5BvdFR-QPjABo5AuFStUqie0TQ/s1600/Scan+22.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMxG2W7G0cqk6tfGiQe3s1acH5SWWN_xeGASPIvZQCKm5FugXnJrxHhvvfHHRBY-32HhIDEiGgr2De095k6i6M754N899ZvdXWtlNx_cIboiIFfTmng5BvdFR-QPjABo5AuFStUqie0TQ/s1600/Scan+22.jpeg" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9_ugSrZsJ_Iz2Z5zwGXtwVveYjR5PPq1bW8XSDixuyZEksUBYsqYUh0q_xY8WdnJg5WwjQcMk5Z-6xIqfMvE0VuKRvJgE-J7CGpRaYu6D7VLV7sQmQtoFMFYjMJFYgSHysa2kWLhk7kI/s1600/Scan+23.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9_ugSrZsJ_Iz2Z5zwGXtwVveYjR5PPq1bW8XSDixuyZEksUBYsqYUh0q_xY8WdnJg5WwjQcMk5Z-6xIqfMvE0VuKRvJgE-J7CGpRaYu6D7VLV7sQmQtoFMFYjMJFYgSHysa2kWLhk7kI/s1600/Scan+23.jpeg" height="218" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-75694709112708693312013-08-10T15:02:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:43:40.004-06:00INTRODUCTION<br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 36px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">INTRODUCTION</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Job, 12:18</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The United States Government repeatedly promised education as part of the payment for taking the homelands of the People who orginally lived on this continent. This is recorded in treaties, which are binding by law. Because public education is considered the key to effective democratic citizenship, universal public education is an entitlement for all children in the United States. Today, a little more than a century since the Blackfeet were forced to change their ancient way of life, what is the evidence that they have received the payment due them or have become citizens educated for public participation? Most evaluations have been dismaying.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The answer is more than mixed, but I will not use statistics to make my case. Rather I offer as evidence my experience of nine years as a high school English teacher on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana: five years between 1961 and 1966; two years between 1971 and 1973; and, most specifically, two years between 1988 and 1990. During the first two periods, I taught high school English in Browning. In the third time span, I taught seven-through-twelve English in Heart Butte. Forty years is long enough to see students grow up, have families, and send their own children to school. Many of my original students have grandchildren. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When first I taught in 1961, half of all the Blackfeet students dropped out between the eighth grade and high school. During the four years of high school, another half dropped out. Very few went to college. Roughly the same is true today except that there are many more children, nearly all Blackfeet-identified or at least Indian-identified, and probably a higher proportion of them are middle-class, expecting to attend college. A few have succeeded very well, becoming M.D.’s and Ph.D’s.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The schools I am talking about are not the infamous government or religious boarding schools, but rather ordinary public schools governed by the county superintendent of schools and the local school board, which in my experience has always been substantially Blackfeet. Teachers have ranged from the brilliant to the appalling, with both extremes more likely to move on than the average plodder. Special programs abound. Administrators proliferate. Parents become more demanding. Young people still crave something to fill their emptiness.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Two vast and uncertain "paradigms" control the concept of "Indian education." Notoriously, our notion of what an "Indian" is has been polarized between the "natural nobleman" and the "drunken savage." Today the indigenous Peoples themselves claim the right to picture who they are. Yet the question remains open -- deeply factionalized by schisms within the native population. Is "Indian" identity a matter of blood quantum, tribal enrollment, governmental recognition of specific tribes, residence on a reservation, the ability to speak the tribal language, faith in an indigenous religious system, or solidarity with political activists? Is it a card you carry, a face you see in the mirror, or something deep in your heart?</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most non-Indian people have no awareness of these alternatives or their implications. Those who would like to see Native Americans disappear are hoping blood quantum will be definitive, in the belief that full-bloods will intermarry (dilute towards white, what else?) into oblivion. An increasingly common phenomenon is a full-blooded Indian whose ancestors are from enough different tribes that he or she cannot be enrolled in any one of them. No category includes them, though they are richly and deeply Indian.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The other paradigm is "public education." The concept has been thrown into question throughout the United States. We are unsure about everything from how to finance schools to what ought to be taught in them, much less how to define or guarantee achievement. There is a flight to private schools of various kinds for various reasons. But on the reservations -- just where it ought to be questioned-- "education" is taken for granted as a known entity. These small communities assume school to be just what it was in the 19th century: a dictator of “rightness.” Recent charter schools sponsored by religious denominations are even more centered on rightness, now including morality.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Until recently education has been frankly meant to assimilate, but now we are afraid to say so. The issue has remained submerged by adding token classes in relatively trivial ethnic phenomena, like games or foods, rather than examining the underlying assumptions of two cultural paradigms. The definitions of both "Indianness" and "education" are deeply intertwined, and yet often they are opposed. When that opposition happens, public education is still meant to eliminate Indianness.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My contribution here is mostly raw evidence and personal opinion. A few of my friends refuse to believe that some of these things really happened: they do not like their convictions challenged. Indeed, in spite of every effort to be honest, my interpretations must be tentative. I may have completely misinterpreted what happened. Some will be troubled by my adventures: certainly I am. </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Alongside my own classroom adventures, I am able to supply tales from the late Thirties, when my former husband Bob Scriver taught in the Browning schools, and as far back as 1903, when Bob Scriver's father first arrived on the Blackfeet Reservation. There were no public schools then, but there were Indian schools provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or by religious groups, who were convinced that part of assimilation was conversion to Christianity. Montana is still today one of the parts of the United States where American is usually assumed to mean the same thing as Christian.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the end some of the insights here may be useful for the country at large. Reservations are intentional microcosms where the problem of drugs is being confronted with increasing success, where environmental issues have a sharply cutting edge, and where explosive population growth may turn out to be as much of a problem as the catastrophic population collapse was a century ago. Above all else, the reader should keep in mind that we are all connected. Nothing that is relevant to the Blackfeet is irrelevant to the rest of us.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Be warned that I am writing "against genre." Most books about Native Americans begin with the arrival of the Europeans at the east coast. I am calling up the Cretaceous Era on the huge inland now-dry seabed that is the American prairie. Most books about "Indian Education" are about elementary school students and ignore the tumultuous factors that arrive in the classroom after puberty. In fact, the dangerous side of the reservation itself is usually not mentioned when dealing with education. This is not a story about charming, docile, bright-eyed children, but questions about near-adults involved in violence, sex and drugs. I am not asking whether "Indians" should or should not be assimilated, but where planetary culture goes from here and how the <i>Nizitahpi</i> can become leaders in that new culture. The time of assimilation is gone. Now comes the time for innovation.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One more realization came to me slowly and painfully as I wrote. Although the invasion of the Americas by Europeans began five hundred years ago, the final devastation of the Blackfeet happened barely one hundred years ago, closer in history than the Civil War. The Blackfeet were not defeated in honorable battle, but wiped out by smallpox, starvation and massacre -- deliberately. No living people are actual survivors of the Baker Massacre or the Starvation Winter, but their children and grandchildren are still with us and remember hearing the stories from eyewitness accounts. European Americans have never really come to terms with their own culpability and Native Americans have only begun to release their rage and depression. It is a terrifying process on both sides, especially when connected to environmental devastation and religious issues. I would wish to broaden the consideration of trauma recovery to include the land itself, which once defined Native Americans and gave rise to their culture. I point to the urgency of the dilemma.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All Peoples on this planet are in the grip of time and change. None of us can go back. The question is how we can educate our children to go forward. None of them will go on alone, no matter who they are. No one is Other.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-2334028250868024922013-08-10T15:01:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:44:16.129-06:00CHAPTER ONE<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CHAPTER ONE</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The empire of climate is the first of all the empires.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>--Montesquieu, L'Esprit de Lois</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MY BRILLIANT CAREER</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">About the middle of June, 1961, I stood barefoot in the sun-warmed bronze moccasin prints of a Blackfeet man no longer living. On the horizon to the west were the Rocky Mountains, still full of snow. Away to the east stretched the prairie across which my parents had just brought me after graduation from Northwestern University. Until I stood in those footprints, I had no idea what to do with my life. Even then, I only knew I wanted to stay there. Forty years later many forces have pushed me out, then called me back, then pushed me out again. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The heartbreak I speak of in this book is not mine alone, but that of a People, the Blackfeet. Once freely roaming the Amerian Plains, today they are People of a specific legal domain: a United States reservation for which they qualify simply by having always been there. Many would like to foreclose that reservation -- some say it would be the best thing that could happen to that tribe, because then they would have to be like everyone else. But they would have to give up their ancestors, their ancestral home, and their identity. Some would find that death.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I'm not Indian. I was not born or raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, but over the last three and a half decades I have been drawn into a kind of Talking Circle, informal and ad hoc, composed of many sorts of people. Many of them never speak directly to each other, but word gets around. One of us, Dorothy Still Smoking, believes the future lies with the young and has put her energy into Head Start. Darrell Kipp loves language, any language, and has -- as an adult-- returned to speaking Blackfeet. His wife, Roberta, is an administrator for the junior high. His son, Darren, works in conservation and film. Joe Fisher is a cinematographer. Jack Holterman, in his eighties, has also loved the Blackfeet language and history since he taught on the reservation in the Thirties. These, along with me, are what I call “Darrell’s Tribe.” When he learned that one of the four groups of Blackfeet, the Scabby Robes, had died off earliest and most drastically because they were open to other tribes and traded with them, he took their name as his middle name so they wouldn’t be quite gone.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob Scriver, to whom I was married, was born on the reservation in 1914 when there were forty white men in town. He was white, but put his love for the Blackfeet into bronze sculpture. His father had come to the reservation in 1903.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The bronze moccasin prints in which I stood in were part of a circle of footprints commemorating the last of the sign-talkers, some of them whitemen wearing boots. Sign language was the lingua franca of the prairie, more eloquent than pidgin versions of spoken language, and useful over more of the continent. While the men stood in their circle, they were filmed as moving pictures for the archives of museums. The sharp nostalgia of times passing away began almost as soon as the white men arrived and even the white men felt it. "Why gone those times?" asked James Willard Schultz in the title of one of his heart-breaking books.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">"No natural ecosystem is permanently isolated from the rest of the world or is stable against evolutionary change from within," responds Mark Ridley, zoologist at the University of Oxford. The same is true of individuals. In thirty-five years everything and everybody has changed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet once occupied a territory mostly on the Canadian side of the border, reaching up to Edmonton and as far east as Saskatoon and Regina. In the south, on the United States side, they pushed against the Cheyenne and Crow, while to the East were the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota. This high prairie, called "parkland" because it is strewn with potholes left by glaciers and clusters of trees called "poplar bluffs" in Canada, was ideal for a nomadic people who followed the buffalo. It was open enough for free travel, and yet shelter and water were everywhere. First contacts with Europeans happened in the north through trade with the Hudson's Bay company. When Lewis and Clark came through looking for the headwaters of the Missouri, a skirmish resulted in the death of two Blackfeet. From then on, Blackfeet resistance was fierce until disease, starvation and massacre brought them low.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But I hardly knew this history when I came. Walking through the Museum of the Plains Indian was my introduction to the People. Just out of college, I had no plan for my life. I never set out to be a teacher-- it just happened. In those days female persons were either teachers or nurses. My training was theatre, but as insurance I had also taken teaching courses. I'd never heard of Browning until that day. It turned out to as theatrical as Broadway, not least because the Rocky Mountains stood always on the horizon. In mid-June the high prairie was a paradise of yellow and purple flowers and the grass was high enough to dance in the wind.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All the way from Chicago where I had just graduated, I had slumped in the back seat of the car, crowded by my own belongings, devastated by the prospect of life without my beloved theatre department, and defiantly barefoot. Only with my feet in the signtalk memorial in the front yard of the Museum of the Plains Indian, did I begin to come back to life. "I'm going to stay right here," I announced dramatically.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The clerk in the Museum Craft Store said there was a home economics position open. I thought I could teach home economics: I had once been Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year. In those days I thought I could do anything. "Where do I apply?" The clerk took me to the window and pointed out the principal, who was wading in Willow Creek trying to catch bullheads for bait. So I rolled up my pants legs and went out across a field of wild iris to talk to him, sending up a blue heron from the creek as I went. That's not quite how it was, but close enough. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I fell in love with the place rather than the people. Not until later did I begin to understand how the people were indigenous, native, autochthonous-- that is, people of the land. My Irish mother was a product of the southern Oregon valleys: a small-town, church-going person. My Scots father was from the Canadian prairie: politically progressive, book-worshipping. Both deliberately migrated from rural to urban in search of opportunity, but both conveyed a nostalgic understanding of geology as destiny, geography as the shaper of life. They spoke of Glacier National Park as though it were a temple, and indeed it seemed to be one with its ice-sculptured valleys and sharply carved peaks.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">From our Many Glacier campground, I telephoned the Browning superintendent, who was in Missoula working on another degree and trying out the oldest golf course in Montana, which had only recently been built. Once he got over his astonishment, he hired me to teach junior high school English. In those days no one wanted to teach on a reservation, let alone young women with good degrees from Big Ten schools, girls who ought to be looking for husbands and houses in suburbia. By mail my teaching contract followed us to Portland, Oregon. The salary was $3450. I spent the summer reading Isak Dinesen's, Out of Africa. My Africa would be Montana. My Masai would be Blackfeet. I would find a Dennis Finch-Hatton. And it all came true.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I arrived back in Browning in August. The prairie was seared tawny and heat waves quivered over the potholes and poplar bluffs. I had costumed myself in shirtwaist and pearls, with a straw boater. For some silly reason, I had packed my tatty old cotton underwear in a Peck & Peck cardboard hatbox which I insisted on carrying as a prop. Just as I stepped off the train into a blast furnace wind, the string on the hatbox broke and my unmentionables headed for the horizon -- stopped only by a barbed wire fence and many tall weeds. The superintendent, who had come up with his wife and children to meet me, gallantly helped me collect my goods. He tried not to laugh. In the car his wife failed to persuade me to have supper with them. Not much interesting happened in a small prairie town in those days. The tow-headed kids turned round eyes on me over the back of the seat. I know now what they were thinking: "How long will this one last?" But all I wanted was to see my new home.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Luckily, long before I heard of the Baroness Blixen, I had taken Anne of Green Gables to my red-headed soul. An L. M. Montgomery moment was not going to intimidate me. In that spirit, I looked around my tiny apartment occupying half a shack. Newly repainted pink, furnished with a massive dark red sofa set, and dominated by a hulking gas heater, it presented a lot of scope for improvement. The kitchen was so small that one could sit at the table while opening the refrigerator, reaching all the pots on the stove, and washing the dishes. The whole apartment was roughly the temperature appropriate for baking bread. My landlady had contributed a sprig of indestructible ivy in a ceramic apple that hung on the wall and more starched doilies than I had ever seen outside a county fair.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jimmy Fisher, the school engineer, arrived with my trunk and a dozen whiskey boxes of books in his pickup. "Looks like they hired a real boozer this time," he joked. With a crowbar he opened my painted-shut windows and left. Doubling back, he advised, "Better run your bathtub full of water. Never know when the city water system will stop working." I had just met my first Blackfeet Indian, but I didn’t know it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With my clothes on, I fell onto the bed and fast asleep. Next thing I knew was the air raid siren. This was the Sixties. I was trained for an atomic bomb drop. When I finally sorted my thoughts out, I was clutching my radio and pillow, crowded under the kitchen sink alongside a box of mouse poison and and a drain plunger. In a while it came to me that the siren was probably a curfew. A small reservation town was an unlikely target for an A-bomb. Unpacking sheets and a nightie, I went back to sleep properly.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At dawn, which comes early on the northern prairie in August, I woke chilled. The temperature had slid to the fifties, as it might in the desert. Past my bare feet, sticking out from where I'd failed to tuck in the sheet, I could see tall weeds sticking up past my window sill which looked out on the alley, beyond them an ancient log cabin, and beyond that a church built of stones. Slanting sun gilded everything. Then there was a pounding of hooves and the legs of a white horse passed by, with boots in stirrups. That was Bob Scriver who became my Denys Finch-Hatton, but I didn't know it yet.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pretty soon I dressed up complete with nylons and high heels and went out to find the main part of town. There were no sidewalks but there was a path across the field where the log cabin stood. I started along the path, cautious lest the burrs rip my stockings, but realized too late that a very tall Indian man in a wide cowboy hat was coming towards me and there was no room to pass. At the last moment, the Indian took off his hat, made a sweeping bow, and stepped off into the weeds with his hat over his heart. "Mawnin, Teacher!" he said. I nodded in a dignified manner, but couldn't think of anything to say. I thought he was my first Blackfeet Indian. All over town people said to me, "Mawnin, Teacher!" and I wondered how in the world they knew. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I had gotten on the train in Portland, my mother had said, "Now be sure to stay two years or it will look bad on your resumé!" I stayed for more than a decade that first time and have returned many times, this last time for three years. I would happily live there the rest of my life if I could make a living, but the only way I could earn a salary there would be to teach. The schools will not hire me to teach on the Blackfeet Reservation. When I have finished this book, you will understand why.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Malcolm MacFee, an anthropologist from the University of Oregon, wrote his thesis about the Blackfeet about the time I first arrived in Browning. What impressed him was that the people were split between those who identified with the old Indian ways (a few of them white) and those who chose the new assimilated ways, the way exemplified by the small town whites of Montana. He pointed out that this had less to do with blood quantum than the people's understanding of how to survive. He proposed the possibility of what he called “the 150% Man,” a person who could somehow reconcile both options within himself. I assume he chose his percentage thinking that 50% of each would overlap. The idea made enough of an impression on Darrell Kipp for him to try living the model with considerable success.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today both the Indian people and the Montana white people are far more various than anyone could have imagined. Now the problem for both Indian and white is not choosing which to be, or reconciling two opposing strategies, but rather finding any rallying point at all in a sprawling confusion of ways. Hispanic, African and Asian mixed-blood strands have surfaced, partly as a result of the Fifties effort to move Indians to the cities. Categories such as Métis have begun to claim their heritage on and near the reservation by clearing old cemetaries and creating little cabin museums. Many of the survivors of the Red River Rebellion across the border to the north took refuge with the Blackfeet. Tribal members have gone away to government schools where they married other tribes and brought back "pan-Indian" children, sometimes full-blood Indian but so mixed as to tribal heritage as to be unregistered with any tribe.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the “white” side, more than ranchers and small town traders live in Montana now. Survivors from the Hippie Era, technicians of natural resources both animal and mineral, organic farmers trying to escape over-used land, writers looking for cheap romance, crooks and smugglers doing what they always did, and rich folks chasing trends have all flocked to the Last Best Place. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What can unify all these various people? I say the land. I choose the land rather than blood quantum, tribal certification, language or religion. Others in the Talking Circle are working on those latter concepts as central and I support them, but my own reasoning begins with the land.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MINUS 31 AND THE WIND BLOWING</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Vast and beautiful as the historic Blackfeet range may seem, it is a hard place to live. The rich people, tourists, anthropologists and wealthier grain farmers only stay for the summer. For those who live on the high prairie year-round, life can be tough in spite of insulated houses, down coats, and cars with electric plug-in heaters. We can only imagine what courage it once took to face a Montana winter with one’s wits, a few tools, a pack of dogs, and an extended family.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The last year I taught in Browning, I lived in a two story house in East Glacier that had stood empty for several years. The owner had grown up there and said she always liked the house because when the snow buried the first floor, you could go upstairs and still see out. It was late in the year before I could afford a furnace and the friend who installed it barely made it home before the first major blizzard. Even then, I sometimes only found it possible to stay warm enough reading if I dragged my old wicker armchair in front of the cookstove and rested my feet in the oven.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was a twelve mile drive to Browning over a road full of deep cuts through hills which blew full of snow, alternating with high ridges built up through valleys where the wind could easily blow a car off since there were no side-rails. One icy night I returned late, came over a high cut and found a herd of horses standing on the highway. Rather than go over a twenty-foot drop, I turned off the headlights so the horses could see me, pumped the brakes (no anti-lock then), and tried to steer through the herd while they leapt out of the way. The last horse wasn't fast enough and the left front corner of my van caught his rump, hurling him over the edge. Eventually a vigorous cluster of well-fertilized trees grew out of his carcass.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That last winter was one of the worst on record. I had to chain up to drive the single block out to the plowed highway, where I could usually manage with snow tires. Over Christmas my parked van disappeared into a snowbank. In April I hired a backhoe to dig it out. In the meantime, we all car-pooled in Bill Haw's van, which had good traction since the three heftiest of us sat over the back axle. Finally a storm hit that trapped the teachers at school, but luckily not the students. For ten days the wives and children in East Glacier checked everyone's plumbing and fed everyone’s pets. For ten days the teachers in Browning played penny poker and slept on their classroom floors.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One evening someone bold suggested we try to drift-bust our way to the new motel just outside town. That way, we could get a proper meal and maybe see some new faces. The evening went well, but the storm made it impossible to drive back to town. Rather than pay for a motel room, I thought I would cross the highway to a friend's house. When I opened the outside door and stepped out, my nose was sealed by snow, my lungs clenched shut from cold, and the wind knocked me flat on my back. Hauled in and revived, I used my new VISA card for the first time. In the morning when the wind stopped, people went out to try to start their cars. When they opened their hoods, every tiny space was packed with snow. Even after they dug the snow out, it took many extension cords to plug in the engine heaters that everyone in that country installs in their vehicles. Even after the engines started, it was afternoon before the plow made a trail out to the motel. Finally, the Burlington Northern railroad sent a huge locomotive-mounted rotary plow along the High-Line through East Glacier to Browning and we all went home on the train, looking like Siberian refugees. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the spring, the floods were major. I tried to ford a flooded place on the highway to Cut Bank, and turned my van into a boat when the water lifted it off its wheels. Luckily, the motor was high enough to keep operating and the turning wheels paddled to where they could touch pavement again. A little cluster of on-lookers was trying to decide whether to try to cross and I remember their shrieks when they thought I was doomed. A little more water running a little faster, and the van would have rolled.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jack Holterman tells about a Thirties adventure. Blizzards had closed his one-room school. Desperate for civilization, he borrowed a horse from Old Man Swims Under, rode it ten miles to town, left it at the livery stable where people were startled by his ghostly white aspect, and jumped the train. He had Christmas in Chicago.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Old-time Blackfeet simply put up their lodges in river bottoms out of the wind and close to firewood. They stuffed the space between lodgeskin and liner with grass or leaves for insulation, and settled down for months of story-telling and sleep. This was the time that the children learned their tribal ways. It was a time to listen, remember and plan for the next year. If people failed to be resourceful, to cooperate, to remember all their skills, the penalty might be death.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LITTLE TURTLE ISLAND</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gary Snyder has revived the old name of the continent: Turtle Island. The Blackfeet Reservation is also a Turtle Island in the sense that it is of limited extent and the people on it must protect the land or see it stripped. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>“Although it's clear that we cannot again have seamless primitive cultures, or the purity of the archaic, we can have neighborhood and community. Communities strong in their sense of place, proud and aware of local and special qualities, creating to some extent their own cultural forms, not humble or subservient in the face of some "high cultural" over-funded art form or set of values, are in fact what one healthy side of their original American vision was about. They are also, now, critical to "ecological survival." No amount of well-meaning environmental legislation will halt the biological holocaust without people who live where they are and work with their neighbors, taking responsibility for their place, and seeing to it: to be inhabitants, and to not retreat.”</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">...The process becomes educational, and even revolutionary, when one becomes aware of the responsiblity that goes with "rootedness" and the way the cards are stacked against it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>At first the reservation was only a remnant of the original free prairie. Then its resources became objects of desire for those who lived around the boundary, tempting them into making repeated incursions for minerals, grazing, timber, and right-of-way. The railroad took what it wanted with governmental blessing. A fence was erected and laws made for the reservation only, like the law against Indians drinking. The question was whether the reservation wasn't really a prison or a refugee camp. Finally chopped up into family allotments, the reservation was meant to become private property. Yet it remained an "island of jurisdiction," an ironic convenience for activities forbidden by the state.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is the reservation today? Some say more than fifty per cent of the land is owned by Federal lending bodies, foreclosed in the struggle to stay afloat on family ranches, some white and some Indian. Some use it as a refuge for gambling, tobacco sales, and other state-regulated businesses. To many it is home-- a place that can never be left. To others it is a trap, never to be escaped.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Parents said to me, "My boy has got to get an education. It's the only way to get out of here." (They rarely said that about girls.) No one thought about what kind of education was necessary in order to stay right there successfully. How do you educate young people in a place where there are no jobs, where the population is too thin to support businesses, and where the main talent of the youngsters seems to be playing basketball?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The kids said, "This place is no good. It's just dead here. Nothing to do. Nobody amounts to anything. Nothing but dust and cold and dead dogs." None ever said, "I'm going to find a way to help this place."</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But back in 1961, people took John F. Kennedy seriously when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you-- ask what you can do for your country." And no one laughed when Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "I have a dream!" The high school students of that idealistic era when I first taught swore to each other that they would help their people. In the 1990's they have remembered themselves and begun to act. Darrell, Dorothy and Joe are among them.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is a lot of work to do. Blackfeet assets are in the hands of the government, held in legal trust, but millions of dollars have been misplaced through sloppy BIA bookkeeping. Yet when a vote is taken, no one trusts the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council without oversight by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Blackfeet schools are in the hands of white administrators and “apple” Indians -- with a few exceptions. Still today half of the students disappear between grade school and high school and roughly half of the students disappear between their freshman year and graduation. Families are still broken. Booze and drugs still sabotage good people. There are not enough jobs. The streets are full of dust and dogs.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But changes have begun. My job now is to witness. The way to bring about the “new paradigm” is to present the evidence that doesn’t fit the “old paradigm,” so that new explanations must be found.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-57271536604421491282013-08-10T14:59:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:44:47.679-06:00STRIKE THEM HARD<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">STRIKE THEM HARD</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Place is space with historical meaning.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>A yearning for place is a decision to enter history.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Walter Brueggemann.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SOLVING THE INDIAN PROBLEM</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What follows is not a novel, but an attempt to imagine something that really happened.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The winter prairie was flat and white as a page. The sky over it gave barely enough contrast to read the horizon. Moving northeast, a column of cavalry scuffled along in the snow, following ridges, too muffled against the subzero cold to talk. Their horses were shaggy with winter coats and frosted with their own steaming breath.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Major Baker's mounted infantry was going to discipline the Blackfeet. The Department of War knew how to do it properly now. No more wasting money chasing bands here and there over the prairie, while they vanished before the troups like smoke. Sheridan's proven technique was to arrive at a winter camp before dawn and slaughter everyone there, burning the lodges before leaving. It had worked before and now in 1870 it would work on the camp of the renegade warriors who had killed Malcolm Clark. "Strike them and strike them hard," were the orders. Congress was anxious for the Indian Problem to be solved so that the plains could be filled with homesteaders, made prosperous by farming. The railroads needed settlers. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The leaders in the Department of War felt it would be best to get rid of the Indians swiftly if violently. Protests in the east would not last long. Elimination was the real answer. Confinement to reservations (only made acceptable by the idea that Indians would die out or intermarry into oblivion) was a poor second-best, though some easterners were still talking of education, like missionaries craving converts. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Anyway, fighting the conventional way cost too much -- some estimated as much as a million dollars an Indian. This sudden "striking" in winter was hard on the soldiers, but they were a tough bunch -- leftovers from the Civil War and semi-criminals from the growing cities. Mulish and sodden, most of them felt that they were doing what had to be done for the newly reunited States of America. A country must have land and these savages weren't using theirs. Just look at the wasteland stretching away on every side. A few of the cavalrymen were blacks displaced by the end of the slavery, but you couldn't tell that with their heads so wrapped up to protect their faces from freezing.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In front rode the two scouts, Joe Cobell and Joe Kipp. They pushed out from the column and rode in great arcs, searching the terrain for ridges where snow had blow away and for signs of other people -- but there were none of the latter. They were alone on the infinitude of prairie. Sometimes the scouts disappeared ahead, finding a way down a coulee and across a watercourse. Once in a while they met and talked, their breaths pluming up.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Joe Cobell was an Italian, come up from New Orleans on a river boat and a long time American Fur Company employee. His second wife was Mary, sister of Mountain Chief, whose band they were supposed to strike tomorrow. Cobell was beginning to get a little old for winter riding, but maybe he thought he could protect his wife's relatives or maybe he just needed the money. Joe Kipp was half French/half Mandan, another American Fur Company man, but also a trader, a whiskey runner, an entrepreneur who turned his hand to whatever might show a profit. The two men may have been wary of each other in this winter of 1869-70 and even more wary of their employers. Half-European, half-frontiersmen, they had little patriotism for the U.S. of A. way out here in the Montana Territory.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Back in the column of riders, Horace and Nathan Clarke, barely teenagers, half Blackfeet/half English, struggled along in the column. they were softer than the hard cases around them, but fired from within by the desire for revenge. It was young men from Mountain Chief's band who had killed their father, in spite of the fact that their mother was also a sister of Mountain Chief. Peter Owl Child and his friends had picked a fight, killed Horace's father in front of the boys, shot Horace in the face, and thrown Malcolm's body down the well. Horace barely escaped death. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Birds came from nowhere to overfly the trail of broken snow, dotted with steaming dung from the horses. In order to withstand the cold, the horses had been well fed with oats, and the little horned larks of winter dipped and dived over the bonanza. The men sustained themselves with not-very-secret flasks of alcohol.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the winter camps of the Blackfeet scattered along the valley-arc of the Judith River, the few able-bodied men who would ordinarily be watching the sky and the long hills around them had left to go hunting, forced to go farther and farther after food. So many people were sick that the clusters of lodges scattered along the river were not as orderly as they might have been. Feverish, weak people could not get far from the tents when they had that need, so the trambled snow was sullied. Heaps of firewood were small. None among them realized that a quarrel born in the previous summer had smoldered until it was about to become a sudden holocaust for the people of Heavy Runner.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The U.S. cavalrymen camped early and waited in the darkness so that they could ride down on the Blackfeet camp before first light. Kipp had been in Mountain Chief's camp only ten days earlier, so they were confident they were in the right place. At the signal, they came down from the river bluff above the lodges as fast as they could ride without killing their horses. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The people were rolled in their robes, their fires not yet stirred up for cooking, and their dreams heavy with cold and sickness. It was not Mountain Chief, but Heavy Runner who was camped there. Kipp claimed later that he tried to turn the soldiers back, but was restrained at gunpoint. By the time Heavy Runner understood what was happening and ran out waving his document of peace, the shooting was underway and he himself was killed in the doorway of his lodge. Some say Joe Cobell in old age confessed to shooting the patriarch, to keep the soldiers from going on to the camp of Mountain Chief eight miles farther downstream. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Almost A Dog, <i>Imazi-imita</i>, tried to carry his small daughter to safety, but she was killed in his arms and the same bullet crippled him for life. His mother, father and wife were all killed. Red Horn, <i>Ikuzozkina</i>, and Big Horn were killed: both were hostile sub-chiefs travelling with the band. Black Eagle, another subchief at odds with the Army, was wounded but escaped on horseback and took the alarm to Mountain Chief's camp where the people cleared out in time to race for the safety of Canada. It is claimed that <i>Natahki</i>, who become the wife of James Willard Schultz and the mother of his son Hart Schultz, was in Heavy Runner's camp but survived along with several other children.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Part of the "striking" technique was to burn the lodges with their contents and to take the horses. This was done and bodies were thrown into the fires. Maybe not all of them were completely dead. When the soldiers realized they were dealing with smallpox victims, they abandoned all captives. Finally, they found Mountain Chief's camp and destroyed everything left there.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I first arrived in 1961, ninety years later, no one ever spoke of this incident, though I was teaching the direct descendents of Mountain Chief, Heavy Runner, Kipp and Cobell. The oldest Blackfeet had been alive at the time of the massacre. By 1989 people often spoke of the Heavy Runner Massacre and students wrote about it in class. It was considered an unique atrocity, white man's treachery, and entitlement to special treatment as compensation. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Research indicates that locating a small encampment of the enemy, taking them by surprise, and killing everyone except a few women and children was an accepted war strategy among plains tribes. Probably Sheridan developed the tactic from his knowledge of Native American warfare. It was the only way to make an impact on a people who could disappear like smoke across the prairie. If Baker had completed the deed as the tribesmen would have, he would have kept some of the children to raise as his own and some of the women to keep as slave-wives. (White civilization of the time had just fought a war over slaves.) It is said that Kipp, Cobell and some soldiers did take surviving children to raise as their own. Some escaped to other nearby camps, probably carrying sickness with them.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Perhaps this was a white form of warfare after all, because it is based on the use of horses reintroduced to the continent by Europeans, which allowed people to travel far, to strike hard by surprise, and then to withdraw before resistance from other bands could arrive. Introducing the horse to the American plains was something like introducing Chinese gunpower to Europeans in armor, or maybe like the invention of wheeled chariots among the Old Testament tribes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Try telling that to a small town high school class on the Blackfeet Reservation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TRAGEDY GROWS FROM SMALL SEEDS</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Baker Massacre was a single event in a chain produced by a complex social narrative The United States was in the aftermath of the War Between the States, with displaced and traumatized people everywhere. Military men found it hard to give up their power and thought of political goals. The Blackfeet, "raiders of the plains" as the anthropologist Ewers calls them in his definitive book, found it hard to reconcile with the new reality. The high prairie was still unsettled, particularly the Montana territory, where white people in the newly wealthy mining cities like Butte and Helena longed to become a formal State. This was only possible if the Indian population were confined to a reservation so that the rest of the land could be surveyed, claimed and developed by whites. It was the climax of a period marked by whiskey-trading, murder, and horse-stealing on both sides of the 49th parallel, but more on the American side than the Canadian because of the Mounties' efficient elimination of bootleggers. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The record of what actually happened to cause the Baker Massacre is blurry. Various books have suggested a half dozen versions. The following account is easy to challenge, but as easy to assert as any other. An arrogant young man named Pete Owl Child (<i>Net-us-che-o</i>), alleged killer of his own people, claimed that Four Bears had enticed or molested his wife. Four Bears was the Indian name of Malcolm Egbert Clarke, who was white. (No doubt he liked being called Four Bears better than being called Egbert.) A West Point cadet who had been dismissed from the Academy for "gross infractions of the law," Malcolm worked for the American Fur Company until it went out of business in 1864. Then he started up a ranch near Wolf Creek, about where the family ranch of Senator Max Baucus is today. This was the scene of the prologue to the massacre. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clarke was known as violent and ruthless, and perhaps because of that, he prospered, taking as his wife a Blackfeet woman (<i>Cathco-co-na</i> or Cutting Off Head Woman, whose father is given confusingly in the 1906-7 census as Owl Child, perhaps the son of Mountain Chief) and raising a number of "half-breed" children to adulthood. They included distinguished people. A daughter, Helen P. Clarke, was an early school superintendent. A son, Horace Clarke, became a political force to be reckoned with on the Blackfeet Reservation and around the state.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to written history, which is contradictory or vague, at Fort Benton on July 16, 1869, there was a quarrel with members of Mountain Chief's band. Two white men were killed and then, presumably in retaliation, white men killed several members of Mountain Chief's band, including some who were completely innocent. Pete Owl Child, who belonged to Mountain Chief's band (perhaps was Mountain Chief's son) may have felt this was excuse enough to get away with attacking Clarke for his personal grudge. Some say it was Mountain Chief's brother who was unjustly killed. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In any case, Owl Child showed up at the Prickly Pear stage stop (Clarke's place) with his "gang" at suppertime and was fed as a matter of family hospitality as well as frontier and Blackfeet custom. Then Pete Owl Child picked a quarrel. He and his friends killed Malcolm Clarke and shot Horace in the face, leaving him for dead. Helen and Isabelle, Malcolm's daughters, escaped out the window. Clarke's wife, <i>Cathco-co-nah</i>, was not hurt and neither were the several other Indian women and children present. The Clarke children identified the killers.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For those who wished to eliminate Indians, the death of a person so prominent and active in politics as Clarke served as an excellent excuse. A family quarrel now became a matter for the United States Cavalry. Colonel or Major E.M. Baker of the 2nd Cavalry at Fort Ellis was sent on January 6, 1870, to take four companies of mounted infantry to Fort Shaw. On January 19, fortified by two companies of mounted infantry from Fort Shaw, he left to find the camps of Mountain Chief, Bear Chief and Red Horn in order to punish them. The famous phrase in his orders was "strike them and strike them hard!" He was specifically instructed to spare the Heavy Runner band and other peaceful groups. His scouts were Joe Kipp, who had recently been to the hostile camp, and Joe Cobell, who was married to another of Mountain Chief's daughters and lived near Malcolm Clarke. Horace and Nathan Clarke rode along. (Helen and possibly Isabelle had gone to relatives in Minnesota where she stayed for the next six years. Eventually Helen, when she became the first superintendent of schools in Lewis & Clark County in Montana, owned one of the first pianos in the Montana Territory.)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One account of the statistics of the massacre reads thus:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Over 300 horses were taken.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">107 persons were killed in the hour-and-a-half-attack. (Guns being used were .50 calibre longshot rifles. This much time must have included the burning of property and rounding up of captives.)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">10 men between 37 and 60 years of age were killed but already had smallpox.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">8 men over 60 were killed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">35 women between 12 and 37 were killed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">55 women between 37 and 70 were killed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">50 children under 12, mostly babies, were killed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">140 captives were taken, many of whom perished because the lodges were destroyed. Most froze to death.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">46 survived as captives, finally arriving in Fort Benton.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">18 were women.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">19 were children under three years old.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many were wounded.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">5 men were hunting at the time of the raid and therefore were spared.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One soldier was killed in the fighting and one other fell off his horse, breaking his arm.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was a great public outcry back east, but Baker was quietly exonerated. Similar, more famous, massacres had happened before, but this was one of the last. (Wounded Knee was in 1890, twenty years later.) One of the better consequences was that Congress had been about to reassign Indian Affairs to the Department of War, but indignation over this massacre was enough to turn public sentiment in Indian favor so that they were left in the Department of the Interior.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WHO OWNS THE TRUTH</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Various versions of what really happened that sub-zero winter morning -- or even of what happened when Pete Owl Child showed up at what is now the Baucus Ranch in Sieben -- exist in writings made both then and now. None of them can be taken as actual reality. Many contemporary people base their political attitudes on what they believe to be the truth of the encounter and most people believe that at least there is a truth, a right and a wrong side that could be found through the examination of the facts. Only in the age of quantum mechanics, when we know that atomic particles are both waves and entities, both there and not-there, can we begin to accept the unknowability of history and give up the constant wrangling over whose version is more true. But the question of who "owns" the story and what it means will remain because of its importance to the future.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the next fall after the Baker massacre, that of 1870, the Blackfeet fought one more fierce battle with their long-time enemies, the Cree and Assiniboine, on the approximate location of Lethbridge, Alberta, near Belly River just a short way over the border. The Blackfeet won triumphantly and made a peace agreement with the Cree the following fall. It was their last old-time fight. In the winter of 1883-84 the buffalo did not return, the agent did not provide enough food, and one fourth of the people died of starvation, far more than were killed by Baker's cavalry. A great triumph was almost immediately followed by tragedy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By 1890, the total number of the South Piegans was 868 men and 943 women. Of that number it was reported that:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">95 could read.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;">1</span>50 could speak English.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">42 children were educated out of 679 children.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">64 of the men were polygamous.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">225 homes (one-room cabins) existed.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There were in that year 34 births and 52 deaths.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reservation included 52 miles square of territory.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">5% of the people were Christian and the rest were "Sun-Worshippers."</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE PAST REVERBERATES</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob Scriver and I often visited John Clarke, ancient deaf/mute woodcarver, who was the grandson of Malcolm Clarke. We attended John Clarke's burial near his sister Helen's grave in East Glacier and were present when the ashes of Hart Schultz, son of <i>Nahtahki</i> who survived the attack, were put to rest. My class roll book listed Mountain Chief, Heavy Runner, Kipp and Cobell. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Change has always been drastic in Browning. When Bob Scriver's father arrived in 1903, he confronted a culture newly broken. The middle-aged men who stood across the counter from him were the younger warriors of the Battle of Belly River. One of the major warriors, Green Grass Bull, hauled laundry water to households around town. His wagon full of barrels was famously rickety and always followed by a pack of dogs. My mother-in-law bought water from him. Most of recorded northern Montana history has happened only decades in the past. The area was settled late, partly because of the fierceness of the Blackfeet and partly because of the violence of the weather.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And yet there was another earlier era for the Blackfeet when they still controlled the northern watershed of the Missouri as well as much of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. In those days the only whites were the fur traders who came in from the north on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company. The beavers they wanted were not hunted by Blackfeet, who were a buffalo people, and so the Blackfeet set about becoming provisioners for the Cree and French trappers.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As soon as the horse arrived, the Blackfeet economy blossomed, for it was possible to hunt buffalo in small bands and to follow them for many miles. Horses made it possible to deliver much dry meat over long distances while the women stayed home tanning the many buffalo hides for lodges and clothing. Trade meant that the hunters brought home glass beads in gorgeous colors, brass falcony bells, small mirrors, Stroud cloth (red wool from Stroud, England), and lathe-turned pipestems. War became more deadly and more necessary, because their prosperity meant that they had more to defend. A man needed many wives, some of them captured slave-wives, to do the work and maintain the bigger lodges.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then the American Fur Company began to send representatives up the Missouri to the very heart of Blackfeet country and with them came the cream of European adventurers: artists, aristocrats, writers, and explorers. They reported that the Blackfeet were a large, handsome people who lived very well. Major Culbertson, who was the best of the American Fur Company managers, married a Blackfeet woman, Natawista, and proudly carried her back to St. Louis society to preside over his mansion. She put up her lodge on the lawn and wore the very latest fashions.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It took waves of smallpox pandemics, perhaps deliberate germ warfare sent via infected blankets on the riverboats, and the elimination of the buffalo, maybe through over-hunting and maybe through cattle-carried disease, to weaken the Blackfeet. It was all the harder for them because they had been so much gifted during what the anthropologists call "climax culture." For a few years it was as good as it gets for human beings on this planet. Then they were broken to the level of destitute refugees. Their pride survived somehow.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet retreated to the Reservation only because the government promised to pay them in food, equipment and schools. In that infamous winter of 1883-84 when the buffalo failed to return from their annual migration to the south, corrupt and morphine-addicted agents diverted money meant for rations, never bothered to buy any, or let them go astray en route. This is not word-of-mouth rumor, but documented. Liberals and reformers of the time raised hell about it in the Eastern newspapers and wrote blazing letters to the government with little effect. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Temperatures were deeply below zero and the many people who died of cold, starvation and disease could not be buried. That the bodies were laid in the snow in a long pile like cordwood along the ridge at Old Agency was perhaps only a little less shocking when living people still practised the ancient tradition of leaving bodies, well-wrapped and surrounded with their household goods, on prairie ridges. The colorful myth of Indians being "beaten fair and square" that whites tell themselves is false. The native people were conquered through disease and starvation in the face of a promise of help -- a documented but unfulfilled treaty.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Almost-A-Dog, the crippled survivor of the Baker Massacre, kept a record of the deaths in the Starvation Winter. On his counting stick he cut 555 notches. This, rather than the massacre, was the lowest point for the <i>Nitzitahpi</i>. The historical marker for Ghost Ridge is on the road in from Highway 89 to Heart Butte. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, decades later, people in Heart Butte were starving and the townspeople of Browning, who had their own Depression troubles, put out an appeal to help the smaller hamlet. It was the Somalia of the reservation. And, inevitably, people blamed them for being poor. They must be backward or lazy. God must not smile on them. They must have what one of our Blackfeet friends called "unluck." </span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-71214554291805274042013-08-10T14:58:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:46:01.387-06:00THEY CUT OUR HAIR<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THEY CUT OUR HAIR</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 29px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>It is our experiences that bind us to geography.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Tom King</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">MAKE THEM BE LIKE US</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Before American white people got to the Blackfeet--with its tribal back against the corner where the Rockies meets the Canadian border-- the Pikuni were having to defend their territory with energy, not so much against whites as against the other native peoples displaced by the eastern whites and determined to hunt on Blackfeet lands. Blackfeet resistance was supported by English traders from the Canadian side, who still saw the States as traitor colonies. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The young United States soon defined Indians as "Other," to be seen as not-human, mere playing cards on the political table of empire. To most leaders confinement, extermination, or assimilation were the only possible strategies. Even to the most liberal people, who put high value on the "natural man," assimilation seemed the only possible future. Mission schools were meant to fit the policy of assimilation, with the religious duty of conversion legitimizing the practical goal of erasing an ancient identity. Force became lawful. Kidnapping was accepted. Specific abuses of Native Americans-- like corrupt agents or abusive schools-- were submerged in the competing evils of slavery, military excesses stimulated by the Civil War, and growing industrial opportunism like factories where women and children worked long, dangerous hours. It was a harsh time, though some EuroAmericans were cushioned by the new industrial prosperity and the farming of the wide fertile lands of the mid-West.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1881 Carl Schurz, former Commissioner of Indian Affairs, said that Indians were confronted with "this stern alternative: extermination or civilization." Then he pointed out that it cost nearly a million dollars to kill an Indian in warfare, whereas it only cost $1200 to provide eight years of education. Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller figured it was costing more than $22 million to wage war on Indians and protect frontier whites-- enough to educate 30,000 children for a year. These arguments have a curiously modern ring, tailored to persuade tax-payers. But it is clear that education was always framed as an alternative to extermination.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of key examples of early Indian education is the story of Carlisle. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder, was a lieutenant in the army who was assigned to escort a group of arrested warriors to the old Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. A thoughtful and persuasive man, he converted his charges from sullen renegades into responsible citizens. This he did by taking good care of their physical needs, imposing military-style discipline, and teaching them how to get along in the nearby communities. It was Pratt who more-or-less invented Carlisle and made it work through his whole-hearted conviction that civilized people were the result of environment and environment only. He told about an exceptionally pale Indian recruit who came to Carlisle with his tribal "brothers," seeming exactly like them. Only after a while did the teachers realize the boy was a white captive who had learned to be Indian. He was not a better student than the others, which proved to Pratt, at least, that properly educated Indians could be assimilated into the general population. This was his goal -- assimilation. The controlling pattern was "us" or "them" as two mutually exclusive categories.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">THE EARLIEST WESTERN-STYLE BLACKFEET EDUCATION</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Schools among the Blackfeet came about through the efforts of Jesuits, often with the help of displaced Métiz (French/Indian or Scots/Indian people) pushed down from Canada. Métiz were already a third category. Most United States people know little about the mixed French and Indian peoples of the Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan who hoped to start their own nation. On the reservation the St. Mary Valley (which opened to the north) and the Choteau area south of the reservation had strong French/Indian communities who came with fiddles, bright sashes, and creaking Red River carts. Louis Riel himself, evading a hanging for leading the separatist revolt in Canada, taught at St. Peter's Mission in one of the four different locations it held as it kept being displaced north along the moving frontier. The first school was three log cabins erected in 1859 near present day Choteau. Only boys attended.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1872 the first public day school for Blackfeet was opened at Four Persons Agency near Choteau. The Indians refused to send their children unless whites also attended. Therefore the first enrolled class included ten full-bloods, six "half-breeds," and ten whites. In 1876 the experiment ended because of poor attendance and the resignation of the teacher. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next year, 1877, the agency moved to Badger Creek and another school was started there. It was a government-supported school with an extensive curriculum, but only eleven per cent of the children on the reservation were enrolled. The agency had been "assigned" to the Methodists, so that there was a split between the education provided through the Methodist agent and that already provided by the competing Jesuits.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1884 the Ursuline Order of nuns arrived and began to teach girls alongside the Jesuit teachers of boys. These were "contract schools," for which the United States government contracted to pay. During the infamous Starvation Year of 1884-85 the religious teachers were able to save children from death, in part by sending some to the St. Ignatius Mission in the more fertile and temperate Flathead Reservation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1887 the patriarch Whitecalf contributed land and Miss Drexel, a midwestern millionare female philanthropist, contributed $15,000 to build dormitories and classrooms on the flood plain of the Two Medicine River. The fine stone Victorian buildings were finished in 1890 and named Holy Family Mission. Mary Ground, an extraordinarily long-lived and vigorous old lady, attended Fort Shaw, St. Peter's Mission and Holy Family Mission, all three. "Schools were good," she said. "You didn't waste time... The good students were never punished... I had plenty to eat. They were the happiest days of my life." Since this was a boarding school, attendance was better than at the day schools. In fact, there was a high fence around the grounds and running away was punished. Some say Mary Ground had blue eyes and only liked the boarding schools because she was really white. I knew her as a strong enforcer of old ways. She liked order and it served her well.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By now many Blackfeet were living as refugees, homeless and starving, dressed in rags. Tuberculosis and trachoma were epidemic. Cleanliness was far down the survival list. In any case, whites were beginning to be much more determined about getting assimilation done and over with. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As in modern boot camp, hair-cutting was a way of establishing a new way of life and keeping the school population free of vermin. The children's hair was not just cut, but thrown directly into a fire -- not a comfortable act to observe after hearing a sermon about hell. In any case hair among Indians is a potent symbol of one's inner state. It is a point of vanity, to be groomed and arranged with decorations. Occasionally, hairstyles had religious meaning dictated by dreams.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In his absorbing book, “Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience,1875-1928,” David Wallace Adams tells about the opening of Pine Ridge Boarding School on the Lakota Reservation. Expecting trouble, the staff of the school had their barber sequestered indoors. One by one the Sioux children were to be called in and shorn. Curious to see what would happen, the children crowded to peek in through the windows under the drawn shades while the first child was seated in the barber chair. The instant the new students realized their braids were to be removed, they set up a cry "like a war whoop":</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"'<i>Pahin Kaksa, Pahin Kaksa</i>!' The enclosure rang with alarm, it invaded every room in the building and floated out on the prairie. No warning of fire or flood or tornado or hurricane, not even the approach of an enemy could have more effectively emptied the building as well as the grounds of the new school as did the ominous cry. 'They are cutting our hair!' Through doors and windows the children flew, down the steps, through the gates and over fences in a mad flight toward the Indian villages."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even Pratt had difficulties with his first group of Carlisle recruits. He had explained to his young men that hair-cutting was the routine military practise (Carlisle was a military school complete with uniforms and drill.) necessary as part of learning white ways. The older boys were determined to resist, but only one actually did succeed in refusing. He was left to himself, but -- maybe because he saw all his friends had been shorn and maybe because he realized he could not resist for long -- he took the act into his own hands. Going to the parade grounds that evening, he sang the mourning song appropriate for hair-cutting and chopped off his own braids. The other students began to wail and ululate along with the grieving youth, until the whole dark campus rang with the other-worldly sound. The staff did not sleep well.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet could not have felt differently about having their hair cut, their clothes burned, their siblings separated and their language forbidden. They loved the old ways and they loved their children. Being forced to choose was very hard. Some reconciled with the necessity of becoming white, and turned away from the old ways with forceful conviction. Others never did accept the demand. The split remains alive on the reservation today and often will be described as "those who want to go forward" versus "those who want to go back."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1889 forty-five Piegans went off to Pratt's Carlisle, Pennsylvania, school. This was the beginning of many migrations of young Blackfeet people to government boarding schools off the reservation. It was thought to help them break with the old ways and start a new way of life. At Carlisle itself, Pratt experimented with sending students as isolates into the white community, in hopes that they would be assimilated even more quickly, but the strategy didn't work very often. As had happened from the earliest contact with European households, the students were sometimes treated as slaves, or at least servants, and though they worked hard, they were not taught school subjects. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">A BLACKFEET TIME-LINE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Teachers in School District #9, which is Browning, are expected to take classes in the history of the Blackfeet within the first year of their employment. Darrell Kipp has been key in developing these courses. Often the first assignment is to prepare a Blackfeet Time-Line. Mine was a card file, so that I could continue to expand it and so that I could lay the dates out on a table like playing cards and think about how things changed. Most striking is the speed with which the Blackfeet world was transformed -- given new shape economically and materially.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Here is a quick review of my card file, if you will forgive some repetition: </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1872: The first formal school for Blackfeet children opened at Teton River Agency in Choteau. (This is four years before Custer met disaster.) The Blackfeet Reservation was steadily shrunk by executive orders pushing back the boundaries from Sun River to Birch Creek to Badger Creek, until in ten years it had gone from being one-quarter of the present State of Montana to its modern size. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1882: This was the last year there were any buffalo herds.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1883: Starvation Winter. Nearly 600 bodies were laid out on Ghost Ridge above Old Agency, waiting for the ground to warm enough for a burial which never came. In desperation Indian Agent Young told the Blackfeet to simply eat any cows they could find. Mostly what they found was trespassing herds from adjoining ranches. Young was indicted by a grand jury for this. At age 72 he was accused of "keeping a Harem of young Indian girls." The cattlemen who accused him were led by the chair of the jury, William Conrad, who was running 12,000 head of cattle on the reservation without paying any fees. Trader T.C. Power defended Agent Young because he had the profitable contract to bring in commodities for the tribe-- the goods just never seemed to quite make it to the reservation. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1886-87: This was the terrible winter that broke the free range cattle ranchers.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1888: The Sweet Grass Hills were severed from the reservation because gold had been discovered in one of the buttes. (In 1995 entepreneurs are still trying to get back to Gold Butte to begin cyanide heap-leach mining on the remnants of the original mine.) Strikes of other substances were made in what would become Glacier Park. In the heart of the area sprang up the small town of Altyn, where white miners ran their own school for their own children. A wanna-be cowboy called "Kid" Russell began to hang around in the Blackfeet camps, drawing on every flat surface and learning sign talk.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1889: Montana became a state, which was possible only because the Indians were confined to formal reservations. The first group of Blackfeet was admitted to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. (These young men would have been young adolescents during the Starvation Winter.) After the Carlisle men had graduated and returned, they formed a group called "The Red Man's Literary Society," which met to talk as the students were used to doing at school. This group was soon disbanded by the agent, for fear that they would form the nucleus of an uprising. If the agent had not been so short-sighted, they could just as easily have formed the first group of formally educated native leaders. Undoubtedly they did maintain the bonds formed by their shared experiences, but not in so public a way. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In those tense days, School Superintendent Coe reported the local reservation schools were a disaster. Agents of this time were accustomed to hiring their female family members as teachers in order to supplement the family income and often got into power struggles with the superintendents. The agent counter-complained that Coe was a drunk. George Magee, a local justice of the peace, complained that the agent colluded with a salesman of cheap jewelry to rip off the Indians. One of Joe Kipp's friends joined in this complaint, but then Joe Kipp was blamed for using the agency sawmill to build the Jesuit Holy Family Mission School on Two Medicine. That same year a Thunder Pipe Bundle was sold out of the tribe to a non-Indian for the first time. Early missionaries had said, "We must teach these people to be greedy so they will value what they have." Evidently they were succeeding with the help of many EuroAmerican examples. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1890: The Great Northern Railroad was built through Marias Pass, making Lake MacDonald and other resort areas accessible. Lt. Ahern was exploring this part of the Rockies for the government and the Dalton gang was hanging out near Chief Mountain. Great Falls, a hundred miles to the south, had a population of 3,979 and the first dam on the river had been completed at Black Eagle. Work had begun on the Boston and Montana Smelter, the tall copper smelting stack that was finally dynamited as obsolete one hundred years later. Paris Gibson, the founder of Great Falls, caused many sapling elms to be planted. Some of them reached the century mark before Dutch Elm disease made it necessary to cut them.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1893: The Great Northern Transcontinental Railroad was completed, generously supported by Blackfeet hay, wood, and labor which the agent authorized without pay. Tourists began to arrive. The government gave out great tracts of land for homesteading in order to supply the railroad with customers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1894: The Town of Browning was legally established. Opinions differ about whether it was intended to be an "island of jurisdiction," a bit of the state of Montana put inside the reservation. This argument continues to the present, with the balance tipping against the Town. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1896: Glacier National Park was torn off the side of the Blackfeet Reservation. The Blackfeet people agreed to sell it only because they were starving again. At this same time the gold-strike at "Last Chance Gulch" made Helena a millionaire's town where prosperous citizens enjoyed oysters, fine wine, and some of the earliest telephones--connected by the best copper wire smelted from the mines in Butte. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1901: The last recorded smallpox epidemic struck. Willow Creek School was in a disastrous state. Boys caught riding calves were confined for a week in an old meat refrigerator with holes in it, emerging only for meals of bread and water. Again the root cellar was flooded and dead rodents floated there. The Blackfeet fullbloods were so angry that Agent Monteith threatened to arrest White Calf. This provoked the Indian police to quit en masse. In addition, Little Dog announced that if Monteith ever dared to do such a thing, he would be bound with ropes and thrown in front of the next train. In this year there were estimated to be 2,084 Blackfeet with 50 births and 33 deaths. Births were finally outnumbering deaths. 64 children were attending Holy Family Mission and 57 pupils were assigned to the government's Willow Creek School. The Duke of York was visiting in Calgary. These are the Upstairs, Downstairs years in England.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1903: Chief White Calf died. My father-in-law, Thaddeus Emory Scriver, came to Browning. This is the beginning of oral history as I have heard it from people I know. About this time a formal tribal council was organized under government prompting. Elected to it were Joe Kipp, Horace Clarke, and seven older full-bloods. Horace, who evidently got his temperament from his father, soon made so much trouble that the agent banned him from the reservation. He remained a tribal council member in absentia and was just as active in state politics. (One thinks of Irish Gerry Adams, elected to the British parliament but forbidden to speak.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">PERSONAL CONNECTIONS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thad Scriver made it a point all his life to avoid politics and to be friends to all sides of controversies, at least in public. It was better for business and Harold, his oldest son, followed his example. In private Thad puffed his pipe and shook his head. He had a lifelong preference for full-blood Blackfeet as they were in the early days, though his friend Doug Gold wrote his master's thesis on the premise that full-bloods had lower I.Q.'s than mixed bloods-- that, in fact, the more white blood in the student, the more intelligent he would be. (This is Pratt flipped over.) In those days people had not thought about culture-bias in tests standardized on white populations. They did not realize that rather than intelligence, they were actually measuring degree of assimilation. Therefore, assimilation seemed to them a good thing, since it meant being more like them, but actual intelligence went unmeasured. Clearly, their own intelligence was faulty.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For a while in recent times, the Browning school actually brought into being by Doug Gold was named Douglas Gold School, but then that unfortunate thesis arose from the moldy library stacks and finished off his reputation. The school was renamed for Napi, the Blackfeet trickster figure who has an even worse reputation. (K.W. Bergan School, also named for a white man and a much lesser figure, kept its name.) Gold had written a book, A Schoolmaster among the Blackfeet, which demonstrates his fond but patronizing attitude. Some of today's elders appear recognizably as youngsters in the stories. Thad Scriver simply said you could trust full-bloods. I never heard him express an opinion of Doug Gold, who was considered a genius and was often a guest at the family table. As a superintendent, in addition to building the present Napi School, Gold made a number of educational innovations, supported Robert Scriver's bands and even owned a boarding house for teachers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">THE TWENTIETH CENTURY</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">September 10, 1904: Cut Bank Creek Boarding School was opened for students. It’s Victorian buildings were of brick and nestled in a beautiful small valley. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1911: The large and handsome resort hotels of Glacier National Park were being built, as well as the road over Marias Pass which ran parallel to the railroad. The reservation counted about 3,000 tribal members. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet Reservation was being surveyed in preparation for allotment of the land to individual tribal members according to the directions of the Dawes Act. This Act of Congress made it possible for reservation land to be owned by white people through patent and sale. Until this Act passed, the land had been held in community by the tribe. Indians were defined as legal minors, who required oversight by federal trustees, and could not sell land without permission. The Dawes Act was represented as a way of conferring dignity on individuals by letting them run their own affairs. But tribal members did prove to be vulnerable to the unfamiliar technicalities of land-holding. Anyway that argument was only a distraction from the creation of "excess lands," which remained after each adult member of the tribe had taken possession of his assigned acreage. These "excess" lands were considered federally-owned rather than reservation and were sold. The money did not go to the tribe but rather to the United States government. Clearly, someone knew that by dividing the land, they were diminishing the reservation. Some experts feel this was the point where reservations were doomed. The effort was to make reservations into homesteads-- and therefore, divide tribes into individual families which could be more easily assimilated.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">From Thad's point of view, things were going well enough. He had taken a partner and established himself as an independent Indian trader. In 1911 he returned east to marry Ellison Westgarth MacFie, a girl from a prosperous Quebec Anglophone family. She told me she wept for days when she saw her new home, lined with gray insulating paper, heated with bulky coal stoves and guarded from wandering cows by a strand of barbed wire. Quickly she rallied and her memories of those early days were much livelier than Thad's. I believe she thought of Native Americans as being somehow French, like the household help often hired in Quebec. Some Blackfeet, of course, had Métiz ancestors (Salois, St. Goddard, Pepion, Chouquette) and even spoke a bit of French.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On many reservations, tangled lines of federal bureaucratic accountability still pitted agents against school superintendents. The agent of this time, McFatridge, had a medding wife and a spoiled son, Leslie, who boldly threatened S.E. Selecman, the Browning principal. Selecman thrashed the kid. McFatridge fired Selecman, who went to court to get his job back. Locals called the McFatridge family "the father, the son, and the Holy Terror," and feared the wife the most. In the end McFatridge was fired and escaped to Canada with $1200 of Blackfeet money. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Duke of Connaught was visiting in Calgary at the time. Wessie Scriver sometimes reminded me that her mother was first cousin to Lady Kemp. The strange intersections between aristocrats of one sort or another and the Blackfeet people recur to the present and, if you count Canadian Blackfeet, include Elizabeth II of England, who is particularly fond of Alberta horses. Elders of the tribe have received many European royals or have gone to Washington to meet important people there. Their manners and sense of protocol are impeccable.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1914: In this year both Bob Scriver and George Kicking Woman (who is currently one of the most prominent ceremonial elders) were born. Inspectors found that the Cut Bank Boarding School had become a tragedy. An investigator named Elsie Newton reported that there were still six or eight polygamous families and rampant adultery and prostitution,with the whites as bad as the Indians. Almost no one on the reservation was farming, as was supposed to be the goal, and Blackfeet individuals were in debt to local traders for a total of $115,000. The allotted lands were hopelessly confused, genuinely incompetent people had been allowed to patent and sell their land for ridiculously low prices, and everyone was after the "surplus" lands, which had not been formally allotted. Standard Oil of Ohio requested a blanket lease for oil and gas. Huge reserves, a legacy of the Cretaceous Era, lie under the reservation and all along the east slope of the Rockies.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lily Monroe once told me she used to lie in bed and look out her bedroom window over the flowering hayfields where Browning was eventually built. Everyone agreed it was an exceptionally beautiful place because there was so much water. The town of Browning needed a good many culverts and drainage ditches before it became liveable. Even now in spring the Indian Days campground to the west is liable to be flooded.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The original Sherburne patriarch, J.H. Sherburne, acted as the "agent" for the town. At the beginning of the twentieth century a small private school was sponsored by the Sherburnes on the second floor of the house next door to the Scrivers. Judging from photographs, the students were both Blackfeet and white. The teacher was a Sherburne nephew. In the Sixties that second floor caught fire and I helped carry out old maps, books and furniture still lingering there.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1918: The roots of the present Browning Public Schools go back to when Mrs. Isabell Cooper patented her land so that it would be privately owned and not part of the tribal trust. This land was not for the school but for a polling place that would belong to the county and state, an "island of jurisdiction." 94 voters went from Browning to Mrs. Cooper's land in order to elect trustees. It was clearly time for public education, since for at least five years the community had been sophisticated enough to support two "show houses" with vaudeville and silent film. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Sixties one of those show houses still stood, though it was in dreadful condition. One summer day I stepped inside through a hole in the wall and found the stage intact. Film cans were strewn among the wreckage of seats. Soon afterward the derelict building burned. Bob Scriver said that as a child one of the puzzles he worried over privately was why the bursting dam painted on the fire curtain never seemed to move, but always to be suspended in time. Perhaps it was an omen.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1919: Glacier County was formed and Browning nearly became the county seat. The new Glacier County school superintendent had the responsibility of overseeing public education in Browning.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">October 9, 1925: The Browning Citizen, local newspaper, declares that the town population is more than 1000 "with the necessary complement of business houses, civic, religious and social activities." There are three churches: Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist. A "big high school stands on a slight eminence." (This is the building brought into existence by Doug Gold and now called Napi School.) There are many rural one-room schools: "Babb, Peskan, Heavybreast, Camp Nine, Swingly, McKelvy, Old Agency, Douglas, Many Glacier, Little Badger, Hamby's, Galbreath's, and Clark's." These, asserts the paper, "are evidence that the best criterion of a civilized people, their education, is not neglected in this part of our great country."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jack Holterman, a language teacher and historian, taught at Swims Under School, not far from Heart Butte, and at several other one-room rural schools on the reservation. He says his memories of those years are mostly good-- quite different from today's complex bureaucracies. "I was alone with the children and responsible for everything," he said. "Once there was a fire, but we simply put it out." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An older Cree/Métis man who attended one of these one-room schools says he was the victim of sexual discrimination-- even abuse! A grandpa now, he is still indignant as he explains that he was the only boy in the school and that all the girls, big and little, found him irresistible. They used to chase him and catch him so they could kiss him -- which he found objectionable. Since he rode to school on a horse and kept in a shed behind the school, his solution for lunch-time survival was to dash out the door and gallop his horse to a nearby ridge where he could eat in peace. When other boys showed up in the neighborhood, he was greatly relieved.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1924: The Blackfeet became citizens of the United States of America. Many had fought in World War I, though legally they were still considered "incompetent" and therefore wards of the government. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1934: The Indian Reorganization Act created the present form of tribal government, but the schools remained either public or federal-- not tribal.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At first Public School District #9 was two rooms and fifty students. By 1936 the "big high school" needed much renovating, which was done as a WPA project with nearly all Indian labor. By 1939 it had grown to 570 students K-12, with 125 in the high school. The building included a dorm, an auditorium, domestic science and industrial arts rooms, a typing and business department and a science laboratory. In addition there were six rural schools, accomodating in total 100 children. At the end of the Thirties there were about four thousand Blackfeet tribal members.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In these two decades Robert Scriver went from first grade to faculty member. Besides teaching academic subjects, he threw himself into the music program and soon the high school band was taking first place in state contests. Scriver had trained at Vandercook School of Music in Chicago where he learned an aggressive, innovative teaching style. In one three-year period before WWII and another three-year period after WWII, the students became so proficient that they could play Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite from the original score right along with a recording by a major orchestra. At one point in state competition they earned a "Superior ++++" (That is, four pluses above Superior, the highest category). At another competetion, Scriver rewrote the "St. Louis Blues" into a march, and again they won prizes, though the judges thought the idea was a little unconventional. Scriver formed a Blackfeet band, which played in full buckskins on major occasions --including the visits of royalty, politicians and movie stars --and a small jazz band which played for dances. Earl Old Person, present Chief of the Blackfeet Tribal Council, speaks fondly of his days in Scriver's band.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Robert taught the smallest kids with simple plastic song flutes so that they would learn breath control and develop their ear. The flute is a traditional Blackfeet instrument. Recent research hints that developing a musical sense causes the logic centers of the brain to grow, because music is a kind of language. Sometimes Scriver tried writing out "Indian singing" with European notation. He composed musicals for the kids to perform.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Scriver was a disciplinarian who locked the doors of the rehearsal room at the time of starting -- being late meant you didn't get in -- and he insisted that the band play one note over and over until it was perfectly in tune. Yet decisions about punishment (mostly suspension from practise for up to a week-- almost never elimination from the band) were made by the "Band Board," which was composed of the First Chairs of every section. Parents sewed the costumes (black pants, white shirts and red capes) and ferried the students to games and competitions in a small flotilla of private cars. Students were so dedicated that they would cut class all day, but show up for rehearsal. One young man rode a horse in from Starr School five miles away. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People still remember both the glory and the unyielding rules. To older folks in Browning, this was what school was supposed to be like. Yet the Superintendent, K.W. Bergan (the one for whom another School District #9 building is named), opposed the band and accused Scriver of trying to convert the whole system into a music school. (No one has suggested renaming K.W. Bergan School. I personally would like to rename it Green Grass Bull. The only school presently named for a tribal member is Vina Chattin Grade School. "Viney" was a dynamic force for education with flaming red hair even in advanced old age.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Decades later, in the Nineties, there are still Blackfeet musicians who got their start in those high school bands. Besides being a lifelong joy to everyone else, these musicians have been able to keep their pride and to strengthen their lives through their enjoyment of music. Late in life, they still play taps at the graves of veterans and dance tunes for parties. Compare what happened to them with the record of the athletes. The basketball players were reduced to reminiscences in a decade or so, but long after the rallies for high school games, the bandsmen went on playing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1944: The National Congress of American Indians formed. Indians were making strong contributions to both the military forces and the huge civilian efforts to build ships and guns. Many Blackfeet worked in the shipyards and airplane factories of the Pacific coast, creating enclaves in Seattle and Los Angeles. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1950: Government policy was to end reservations by relocating Indians to cities, but no one provided sufficient funds or orientation so that stranded and destitute Indians formed slums in Minneapolis and the West Coast cities. This was quite different than the voluntary migration during the war.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1953: The law was changed to allow Indians to drink on the reservation. The persuasive argument was that if Indians could fight in Korea, they ought to be able to drink at home. Some say this is when women first began to drink. They had never or rarely been included in the “raiding parties” of men in old cars who travelled off-reservation to drink and often wrecked on the way home.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1960: John F. Kennedy, Jr., extended federal housing assistance to the reservations. Many people were living in shacks and huts with no plumbing and undependable electricity. But television antennas were beginning to sprout from the humblest shelters.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AN EYEWITNESS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1961 I arrived in Browning. From this point I saw for myself. When I came onto the faculty of the Browning Schools, the movement was towards consolidation. Rural schools were being closed down. Students rode school buses with radios. Croff-Wren, Pontrasina, and Starr Schools were still operating as part of School District #9. St. Mary, East Glacier and Heart Butte had separate grade schools but bused their high school students to Browning, when weather allowed. The administration was struggling to require the faculty to become Montana Education Association members, in the belief they would become more "professional." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In that social revolution parallel in time to the Vietnam War and landing on the moon, came a quick succession of events that could be summed up as Indian Empowerment. The "relocated" tribesmen were drifting back. They had learned a lot in the city, much of it from Black Power. In Browning we watched desegregation through grainy black and white newscasts from Lethbridge television in Alberta. The attack dogs, the water cannons, the assassinations, all seemed like insanity to us. We were grateful to be in "God's Country."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1966: The first school organized and run by a tribe was Rough Rock Demonstration School in Chinle, Arizona, among the Navajo. This was the year I first quit teaching. In 1965 the daughters of the principal, the superintendent, and the chair of the school board became pregnant out of wedlock. It was clear that something had to be done, so six white teachers, myself among them, had our salaries frozen for "having affairs." Some wanted to fire us, but were afraid of the lawsuits. All quit except me, who taught one last year and then resigned. I had been assigned to the new Browning Junior High School, which was going to revolutionize education by running "open classrooms" in "pods." Instead, I married Bob Scriver.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1968: A congressional investigation of Indian education found that on the whole the government schools and public education for Indians was a "national disgrace." AIM formed that same year in Minneapolis. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1969: "Indians of All Tribes" seized Alcatraz.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1970: Nixon disowned both the policy of terminating reservations and the machinery of relocation. Russell Means captured the Mayflower that Thanksgiving. a pan-Indian group climbed Mount Rushmore and claimed it back. The new policy towards Indians was called “self-determination.” In the spring of 1970, newly divorced, I was hired by School District #9 to be a public relations person who would try to settle the local unrest by placing good stories about the schools in the media. I failed in this task and was reassigned back to teaching.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1971: The Native American Rights Fund was founded. The Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop began operation, the first school operated by Blackfeet for Blackfeet children. It was organized as an alternative school for drop-outs and the diploma was a G.E.D. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1972: AIM occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Washington, D.C.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1973: This is the year of Wounded Knee II, when a demonstration at the original massacre site became a seige at Pine Ridge, as well as the year I left both the reservation and teaching. Feeling that the world was passing me by, I returned to Portland, Oregon.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1979: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act became law. For the first time Indians could legally worship in their traditional ways. In addition, the Archeological Resources Protection Act, strengthening the portections of the 1906 Antiquities Act, tried to stop the destruction of ancient archeological sites.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet Community College, a tribal school, received candidate status for accreditation in the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges. Its status has been precarious ever since, but it persists. A major problem was soil contamination on the campus from the gas tanks of a service station nearby, but this turned out to be an advantage when the penalties from the contamination paid for more buildings. (One of the few times money has arrived on the reservation from Butte instead of going the other way.) It provides a focus (what the Red Man's Literary Society might have been), grants two-year associate degrees, and is a location for technological innovations like the Internet.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Eighties and Nineties, School District #9 has grown to a huge complex plant that includes giant satellite dishes to link the school to the world. The budget and payroll are the biggest in town, possibly exceeding even the Federal offices. Nearly a dozen buildings must be maintained, counting bus barns and administration buildings. Four former students have served as Browning superintendents: Tommy Thompson, Don Wetzel, Randy Johnson and J.R. Clark. The last two were both in my English classes. Keith Schaaf, another of my students, is also a school superintendent. [This piece was originally written before Mary Margaret McKay Johnson became superintendent of the Browning Public Schools. She has proven to be an EXCELLENT superintendent. Like Randy, her husband, she was in my English classes. These people would shine anywhere.]</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Randy was one of the last students to ride a horse to school. His family lived on the Methodist ranch outside Browning. When he died of cancer in 1989, the whole school population attended his funeral in the high school gymnasium. He had made sure to leave an inspiring message for them. Randy was the only non-enrolled local superintendent, but he was married to a McKay, one of the outstanding Blackfeet families. Iliff McKay had been a Tribal Chairman who died of anaphylactic shock after a routine penicillin injection. Many have wondered how history would have been changed if Iliff had lived-- or if Randy had lived. Too many fine leaders have been lost.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today Browning students boldly intend to be brain surgeons or astronauts, and they qualify for good colleges. The Indian Health Service hospital has grown in spite of cuts in federal support. Teachers, doctors, administrators, technicians of all sorts are Blackfeet. But the town itself has shriveled up. Many businesses have gone broke. There is little housing in Browning for whites and few whites run businesses. The exception might be Bob Scriver, who has built himself a small empire as a sculptor, but must keep out burglars with steel shutters, barbed wire, electric fencing and a trained attack dog. It is like living in a Third World Country.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Parallel to developments in the rest of the country, people tend to either be doing very well or to be on welfare. The destiny and therefore control of many people on the reservation rests with a few bureaucratic institutions: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, Blackfeet Tribal Council and School District #9. These tend to be secretive and competitive, self-contained communities without much crossover. Constant rumors circulate about graft, mismanagement, and other potential scandal. Many people say there are no real Indians left. My white friends advised me not to write this book for fear of retaliation. A document compiled by lawyers for use in a lawsuit against the U.S. government circulates secretly and my friends urge me not to admit I’ve read it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1989, after years of planning, the little village to the south of Browning, Heart Butte, opened its own public high school. I was the first high school English teacher. The actual building was not dedicated until the summer of 1995. The remainder of this book will focus on that specific community and the constant struggle of its schools.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NEWER THAN HEART BUTTE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Heart Butte is not the newest school on the reservation. The newest school is a one-room school house on Moccasin Flats. When I first taught at Browning High School, my classroom looked out on Moccasin Flats, originally built at the turn of the century as a row of log cabins and rough shacks to house elderly Blackfeet with no other place to go. In other words, it was a refugee camp, though everyone thought of it as "the kind of place where Indians live." In 1961 the little houses still had no running water, no garbage pickup, and no yards, but they had accumulated many auto hulks, mangy dogs and crooked television aerials. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now the shacks and cabins have been mostly replaced by housing projects. The road is still rough, but mercifully that keeps traffic slow where kids are likely to dart across. On one edge of the Flats, which some people can no longer point out, is the Moccasin Flats Blackfeet Immersion School, Amskapi Pikuni Ipausin Eskenimatoyis which translates literally to "The South Piegan Language School Where Is The Speaking Language of Ourselves." The new building is sun-flooded by skylights and the front door exactly faces the rising sun at spring equinox. It is owned and operated by the Piegan Institute, a non-profit corporation funded by private money, not government or tribal funds. Students pay tuition, but scholarships are provided. Inside, one must speak either Blackfeet or American Sign Language. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Staff comes before sunup to drink coffee and make plans-- in Blackfeet. The four-year-old students have already soaked up enough words to make jokes in Blackfeet. As soon as they learn the word for apple (<i>aipasstaamiinamm</i>), they are calling each other Apple Boy and Apple Girl. Two little girls in the cloak room call to another, "<i>Puks sa put! Ki ki neet ti kit!</i>" ("Come over here! Candy!") One little girl comes to school in her grandmother's clothes, because no one was awake to dress her and the clothes were handy. On the first Saturday the kids come rapping at the window, hoping to be let in. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A puppy comes to school and takes a nap with the children on their rugs. They sleep with their arms around his fat, furry body. "Do we allow this?" asks Darrell, the sort-of head of the school along with Dorothy and several others. The sophisticated, high-standards, Canadian Blood female teachers laugh. Blackfeet kids and dogs have been together for thousands of years. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell takes his pickup downtown to run an errand and comes back just in time to spot the entire school, including the cook, disappearing down the road on foot. They've decided to go use the Headstart playground. All the people who stand around watching, hoping for some chance to show their superior wisdom, say, "Darrell, can't you get those kids a proper van?" But Blackfeet kids have walked over the windy prairie for many centuries.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next week everyone is stumped. How do you say "Halloween" in Blackfeet? Or for that matter, in American Sign Language? "Regular" schools at Halloween are supposed to make Jack O'Lanterns and witches on brooms. This school and the teachers are not quite sophisticated enough yet to say, "Those are European witchcraft figures. Halloween is an ancient European religious holiday that goes back to the times when the Europeans themselves lived in tribes!" They get out the construction paper.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1996: The school, again celebrating Halloween, appears on NBC news with Tom Brokaw. They are the background for an announcement that Eloise Cobell, acting on behalf of a coalition of Indians through the Native American Rights Fund, is suing the United States Government for losing the invested capital of the Blackfeet Tribe and its individual members. The records of leases, mineral rights, interest on investments and inheritances are so hopelessly confused that independent auditors estimate that two billion dollars are simply unaccounted for and cannot be retrieved. These funds were put in the care of the U.S. Government to be protected for the Indian people because it was assumed they could not manage their own affairs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell Kipp says that he and his sister receive checks from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in strange amounts: $32.77 or $4.32. When he takes the checks up to the BIA office and asks to see the records, they can't show him any. When he asks what they are payment for, they say they don't know. When he asks what lands he has inherited, he is told the same thing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell Kipp's grandfather was a survivor of the Baker Massacre, a child of the Heavy Runner band adopted by the Kipps out of contrition for what had happened and given their name. Thus his past is divided between both the victim and the aggressor in the Baker Massacre. Darrell Kipp, a senior in high school when I came to Browning, is easily old enough to be the grandfather of these small students. Only six "degrees of separation"-- six generations -- are between these kids and the old chief of the Amskapi Pikuni who sprawled in the scarlet-stained dawn snow, his peace paper in his hand and a bullet in his heart. What will the Seventh Generation learn in their lifetime?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-56663214606375198572013-08-10T14:56:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:46:40.565-06:00SPUMOKIT: CHRIST HAVE MERCY<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SPUMOKIT: CHRIST HAVE MERCY</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Without some transcendent narrative, some shared story that makes learning meaningful and gives almost a spiritual imperative to learning,</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>schools become houses of detention.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Neil Postman</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HOLY FAMILY MISSION</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In March, 1989, on what must have been a teacher payday in Heart Butte, Montana, I returned after dark from grocery shopping in Cut Bank, a town sixty miles away in Glacier County. Leaving pavement among the rocker pumps of the oil fields that sustain both Cut Bank and the Blackfeet Tribe, I crossed the wheat fields of the eastern part of the reservation and followed Two Medicine River between the cottonwoods and the nearby cliffs. From those sandstone precipices buffalo were once driven to their deaths in order to feed hungry encampments. The cottonwood groves along the river have been a favorite spot of the Blackfeet for centuries. James Willard Schultz, who came to be among the Piegan in 1877 and chronicled their exploits in dozens of books, is buried near this road. He asked to buried near his Blackfeet mother-in-law, whom he loved. Schultz' son, Hart Schultz (known as Lone Wolf) did not get along with his father. Bob and I helped Paul Dyck and Naomi Schultz put Lone Wolf to rest next to his Blackfeet uncle, after all not far away.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Approaching the historic Holy Family Mission, I saw that the windows of the three-story sandstone Victorian building, once the boys' dormitory and main classroom building, were glowing amber. My first bemused thought was, "Oh, there must be a party in the old building!" Scenes from movies glamorizing the era of kerosene lights flashed through my mind. Hoopskirts and ringlets, gentlemen in boots. Then I thought again.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Holy Family Mission had been closed in the Thirties. The haunted building had been stripped and ruined for decades, unsafe to enter. Now I realized it was on fire. The girls' and nuns' building had already burned earlier in the year. No fire engines or people were present to fight the fire. I drove into the yard where the ice and snow had been melted back thirty feet from the walls and saw many tracks.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Square holes in the thick sandstone walls once had been windows. Through them I saw that the roof was gone. Inside, all three stories of old wooden joists and floors had subsided to a bed of coals. Shimmering heat had cleaned the ancient sandstone to the cream color it must have been when cut from the buffalo jump cliffs on a summer day not quite a century earlier. In spite of one side having been undermined and collapsed by the Big Flood of 1964, the stones remained square. Father Damiani, inspired Italian Jesuit missionary/</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">architect, had not thought about building on a flood plain, but he had laid his foundations true and level.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first time I was in the building, early in the Sixties, people still spoke of restoring the graceful rooms. Double front doors opened into a hallway where a wood-paneled stairway rose to the second floor hallway. Downstairs were classrooms with tall sliding doors between them. Some said the first floor was for the girls and the second for the boys. The top floor, up under the eaves, was said to have small study rooms for the priests.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The story goes that one night a priest stayed up late studying with his oil lamp. The nun on duty came to ask him if he would like some tea to help keep him awake. He said yes. After a bit he heard a shriek from outside his door and, suspecting some mischief from the students, threw open his door. There stood the Devil himself, grinning redly, while the terrified nun sprawled backwards down the stairs with her tea tray. The priest slammed the door in the Devil's face just as his two front hooves hit the other side. </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Forever after, I was assured, the Devil's hoof prints were charred into that door. People swore they had seen them -- like mule shoes, they said. I had never trusted the old creaking floors enough to go up and see for myself. Now in 1989 the entire building was a hellish inferno. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Jesuits never had to ask whose school they were running or what it was for. Their mission was plainly to make Christians of heathens, and that meant re-forming them into the appearance and lifestyles of rural 19th century white people. Many of the Jesuits were direct from Europe, often Belgium. They knew what peasants, people of the earth, were supposed to be like. The school, of course, was ultimately authorized by the Pope himself, the highest human authority, and God. Who could question this?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">During the summer before the fire, Darrell Kipp and Joe Fisher had taken videotaped testimony from old folks who had once been students at Holy Family Mission School. Standing in the early morning sun in front of the building now burned, the Blackfeet said, "Oh, they cut our hair. They took us from our families. They made us sick. They whipped us if we spoke our own language." Then they looked up into the rising sun and said, "I was never so happy again." Their eyes filled with tears.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Looking at the tapes, one wondered what they meant. Evidently, hard as the mission life was, it provided something to believe in when the world became a holocaust for the Blackfeet, reducing a nation of tens of thousands to fewer than one thousand souls on the American side of the border. Misguided and overly harsh as the Jesuits and their lay helpers were alleged to be, their rules were consistent, unlike those of the ever-changing Indian agents or the fickle United States Congress. Until the Depression came and the Mission was lost through debt to a local mercantile store, the Mission farm fed everyone there as best it could from its gardens, dairy and pig pens. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the old people were forbidden to perform their ancient ceremonies, such as the Sun Lodge and Bundle Openings, and the Societies were disbanded out of confusion and despair, the students at Holy Family Mission had learned the Holy Roman Mass and the assurance of the new rituals: Communion, Rosary and Confession. The Mission taught them how to fit into a new world: stay clean, be obedient, keep your manners, find a job, don't make trouble. In summer, plant a garden, cut hay and wood for the winter. In winter, study and pray. Always go to Mass. Those who did these things survived. Boarding school educated people are still a strong cohesive force in the tribe. Now they are very old.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Aloof from all visitors and most investigators, Chewing Black Bone, the <i>Ahko Pitsu</i> of James Willard Schultz stories, was able to sustain old ways past the 1960's on the Two Medicine ranch of his descendents, the Mad Plumes, very close to the Mission. Chewing Black Bone, said to be the last Blackfeet to have actually taken a scalp, was blind in his last years but lived in his own lodge indifferent to white ways and hostile to the Blackfeet Tribal Council, which from his point of view was a collection of half-breeds. His own integrity was stainless. His family dares not say whether he was buried in his Ghost Dance shirt for fear someone will try to dig him up. Such a shirt would sell for a lot of money.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An exceptional few of the old people managed to participate in both the remnants of the old order and the Jesuit-prescribed ways. Louis Plenty Treaty, a Bundle Keeper, shows up in photos of both Methodist and Catholic events, but Bob and I saw him acting as a Holy Person in the rarely observed Horn Society ceremony. He was simply a spiritual person, vibrant with the core of truth shared by many traditions. He and his wife lived in one of the small log cabins built in the 19th century. Holes in the glass of the windows were stuffed with rags. Yet all was clean and neatly in place. Louis was one of the good farmers who benefitted from Agent Campbell's Five Year Program in the late Twenties.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HEART BUTTE CHURCHES</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the early days of reservations, government bodies hoped to cover their mismanagement of Indian affairs in a mantle of sanctity. They soon discovered that the Christian denominations were competitive about who got to convert which "savages." To keep the peace they arbitrarily assigned the reservations to various denominations. Although the Jesuits had been in Montana since the earliest days and already had been working with the Blackfeet, the Blackfeet Reservation was assigned to the Methodists. History testifies that the Methodist agents they sent were just as corrupt as the ones the War Department chose, with the additional flaw of obsessing about driving out the Jesuits. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was so clear to the European-descended bureaucrats that the task was primarily one of extinction or conversion to their own world-view, that they were not aware of the content and significance in the old pre-existing religion. To them, at best it was gobbledegook, unintelligible. In any case, Christian work of that period was focussed on missions -- saving souls by forcing them to be like their oppressors. So the agents cooperated by forbidding the language, the rituals, face painting, or even crafts like beading or quillwork. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Institutional history has presented a confusing problem for the contemporary Methodists on the Blackfeet Reservation. In the time of Bob’s childhood, white people in Browning attended a Presbyterian church served for fifteen years by a Scots minister. Over the years, this congregation shrank and finally, by the Fifties, folded itself into the Browning Methodist congregation, which was just one part of the Blackfeet Reservation Methodist Mission. This gathered group of white people, in actuality generic rather than denominational Christians, has been not entirely comfortable with the outreach role of the mission. But the bulk of the funding for the whole operation comes from the larger denomination, specifically to be used for mission. Today the Methodist congregation, entirely aside from mission work, includes people of mixed blood and various heritages. It is ecumenical in its formal purposes, but the steadfast remnant of the earlier post-war congregation doesn't find it easy to be passed over in order to supply the mission work. Many of the Blackfeet whom the church serves do not attend the Methodist services, nor do they contribute in labor or money. It is always unclear whether the bales of rummage that constantly arrive are to be sold to support the mission or to be given directly to poor people. Of course, it is the local congregation that is expected to sort, label and distribute -- a full-time job with no pay. (The Catholics also import much used clothing. Older women in the Sixties prized men's wool suits which they cut into precise squares for quilts, gaily tied off with red yarn.) </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At Heart Butte a large quonset hut church has been built across the cemetary from the Catholic Church. In part, the new Methodist church is to fulfill a promise made by the Reverend Jim Bell to the old-timers at the time of the Big Flood. The flood had washed away the Little Badger Church much beloved by its people and Bell promised it would be rebuilt, though he didn't exactly intend a church in Heart Butte. Bell was an ecumenical, justice-seeking man who tried to include Blackfeet ways in his services. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today in Heart Butte during the summer the Catholics have church school half the day and the Methodists have church school the other half. Approximately the same kids attend both, eager to break up the summer boredom, make friends, and enjoy some good food -- maybe travel to camp. The sturdy midwestern Methodists, who come every summer to build and teach as part of their mission extension, are a little baffled. "I guess Jesus wouldn't object," opined one.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one wonders what Mohammed, Confucius, Buddha, or any of today's posse of religious philosophers might say. Sophisticated contemporary religious thought is unknown on the Rez except among the clergy. The whole idea of religion as an expression of a located cultural world-view is foreign. Cultural pluralism is vague and irrelevant, and therefore presents no moral dilemmas. (In fact, irate letters to the editor use "multi-cultural" as an epithet.) Christianity is simply the main option, with Blackfeet so-called "Sun Worship" as a conceivable sub-option. Issues are seen as "us" or "them," normal or weird, right or wrong. There is some idea that Blackfeet religious concepts and values are simply another version of Christianity and therefore shares privilege, as opposed to other world religious systems full of error -- heard-of but indescribably pagan. A strong sub-group of indigenous Blackfeet continues to oppose and try to eliminate the old <i>Nitzitahpi </i>religion, believing it is satanic and destructive. They are often Pentecostal in affiliation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">OLD TIME RELIGION</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Prairie religions among the Native American peoples were free of metaphors of king and city, free of the authority of a written document, and free of the kind of logical reasoning that depends on dualities and deductions. More than anything else, the people responded to the authority of the land, first and last, under pain of death. If they were accurate and timely in their observations, they survived. If not, they ended. If their ethos was one that supported and guided their lives, then it was reinforced. If notions arose that did not help their lives, they weakened and faded. Fittingness to the land was the great morality. The land was The Book and The Law.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Imagine a long, long expanse of prairie, furred with short grass and creased by watercourses. Imagine island hills on the horizon and an 8,000-foot-tall ribbed wall of mountains at your back. These shape the weather patterns and therefore the world. You must not lose track of the four directions even on the grayest days and you must not forget the personalities of the landmarks. To confuse two landmarks is to fatally misjudge the location of food, water, and sanctuary. Mistaking the Bear Paws on the American side of the border for the Cypress Hills on the Canadian side is said to have ended the long journey of Chief Joseph. He paused on the wrong side of the Medicine Line. On the Canadian side, the cavalry could not have attacked him.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Each morning the sun is greeted in the east. At night the stars form shapes , but not the ones the European astronomers named. Stories are about Star Boy, the Direction Star, and about stars that fall to earth. People dream of walking up into the sky, even marrying a star, but then speak of homesickness for the familiar earth places. Streaking meteorites are associated with puffball fungus in the grass which are associated with children and painted onto lodge covers. The shapes of the clouds, the direction of the wind, sun-dogs, rainbows, lightning are noted. Precipitation in every form -- snow, hail, freezing rain, thundershower, fog and dew -- is significant. Year-counts often mention weather events: the winter of ice, the spring of floods, the summer the stars fell. Life is sky-centered. But the earth is vital, too. Where is fuel -- either firewood or buffalo dung? Water is crucial. Where are plants for food, for doctoring, for cleansing and perfuming? Everyone is an herbalist.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One does not leave the outdoors -- there is no "indoors" in the sense of walls, roof, door, a fort. Shelter is made by wrapping skins around one's self or around a framework. Sounds are never cut off. Everyone is exquisitely aware of relationship in terms of spatial position: where in the camp each lodge belongs, where in the lodge circle each properly sits, how each element of housekeeping and etiquette inside maintains order and cleanliness. Women who keep a neat fireside while they cook or an orderly work-spot while tanning are respected and admired. Choosing the proper wood for the proper kind of flame and heat is an art form.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With the fussiness of all good workmen, one learns to strike obsidian at just the right angle to chip an edge, to pound plant material until it is reduced to fiber and then to roll it into ropes. Sinew from a carcass becomes thread. "Things" take on a kind of intentionality of their own: their grain, their resilience, their willingness to transform. Language modalities note the difference between a thing lying passive, unused, or a thing put into relationship--the tension of action. Objects have auras around them. While laminating, gluing, drilling, wrapping, quilling, beading, tanning-- sitting with friends and talking-- the mood of the maker becomes part of the work, so when seeing that bow, that shirt, that belt, years later, the time when it was made returns to the mind.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Animal life surrounds and supports the people. The dog and horse are part of daily life. Great herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope wander the prairie, following their own needs and season. People are around you, telling you who you are. Stories give many patterns of ways to behave and particularly urge everyone to be generous. The strong are to support the weak, because anyone can become weak in time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Hallucinations may result from hardship, fatigue, starvation, ingestion of toxic substances, trauma or sleeplessness. Move on through such states, persist in goals and yet to be aware and mindful of strange, threatening phenomena. Avoid what seems dangerous. Dreams and visions are taken seriously as a legitimate part of life. Intuitions are powerful. Poetry and philosophy are life itself.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All of this is religion, but a kind almost forgotten by Europeans. The Celts would have understood. All the early peoples of Europe once must have lived in some similar way.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NEW SKINS FOR OLD WINE</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Father Dan Powers combines new, old and very ancient in his role as celebrant at the little church still remaining on the grounds of the Holy Family Mission. The stained glass windows depict flying doves to stand for peace. The little congregation supports alcoholics in their fight for sobriety and therefore -- in a medieval practise -- does not offer wine to the congregation at communion, but only bread.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Chicago, Father Schreiter, who taught pastoral classes at Catholic Theological Seminary, urged us to a sophisticated point of view when considering what he called "local theologies." The Catholic church, because of its mission outreach around the planet, has had much intercultural experience, some of it startling. In some places bread is unknown. Does one substitute rice? Rice often means fertility, not a concept usually connected with the Body of Christ. In some cultures sprinkling water on women's heads is thought to make them sterile, an awful curse when children are the basis of prosperity. So how can baptism be conveyed? Schreiter cautioned us to look deeply into the symbols of one culture for their psychological and spiritual content -- then search carefully in the other culture for new equivalents. Can one speak of Jesus as a Fisher of Men and tell the story of the loaves and fishes in the Blackfeet world where people starved to death rather than eat fish, a taboo food? The Underwater Spirits are among the most powerful and malevolent of their old prairie figures.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clearly, when dealing with religious symbols one must be cautious and aware of the context. The first step is simply the awareness that what stands for virtue and safety in one culture, may not represent the same thing in another culture. But this does not make the other culture bad or even wrong. It simply relates to the place where it arose. No matter the number of Ph.D.'s among the Blackfeet, reaching ancient concepts embedded in rituals and stories of the original tribe remains problematic because they were metaphors drawn from an ancient way of life. Living memory grows ever shorter. The scholar reaches for material grown shadowy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My own idea is that the concepts remain in actual sweetgrass and cottonwood, sky and buffalo stone. The land itself serves as the original text, source and authority for prairie religion. I would say that the land -- mediator of holiness -- is the equivalent of the Body of Christ, but for most Christians this is a heresy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Piegan Institute, a better authority than I, feels that much of the old way remains in the very language itself. Vocabulary -- concepts in <i>Nitzitahpi</i> words that have no equivalent in English or French or Chinese -- can still be collected. More than that, the grammar itself -- its internal coherent structure -- reveals the old world-view. It is enough different that to some European people the language will seem grammarless. But then, Europeans are the same people who rip up the complex perennial grass culture of the prairie in order to plant rows of monoculture grain in strips which must be sprayed with fertilizer and weed-killer and replanted every year, wearing away the topsoil. They see only their own kind of order.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The old stories have changed, adapting themselves to modern tastes, but early versions were recorded in writing. These may still be sources of reflection and insight. I have been told that there exists or once existed a set of key oral stories that in ancient times had to be memorized word-for-word, because the words themselves were so significant. Jewish people would recognize this, since their nomadic tradition also depended on the memorization of stories and psalms. The Ark of the Covenant could be seen as a kind of Medicine Bundle.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet grammar has a unique pattern of inflection, that is, ways of changing word particles as we do in English to distinguish such aspects as singular from plural or male from female. Blackfeet language allows an object to be referred to in one of three ways. In the first "case," the object is just itself in the sensory world, like one of the huge stones left behind on the prairie by the glaciers. In the second "case," the stone is considered living and might speak. In the third "case," the object becomes sacred, valorized with meaning like the huge rolling boulders that sometimes pursue Napi when he has been up to mischief. To have evolved language indicators of these matters, the Blackfeet must have had a need to know whether an object was inert, living or sacred in any particular context. This tells us something about their world-view. No object is ever "dead" in the European sense.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MIDNIGHT MASS </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Sixties, both Midnight Mass at the Catholic church in Browning and Christmas pow-wow dancing at Starr School were classic Blackfeet experiences. In those days the roundhouse, an octagonal log-cabin, was still in use in the little village of Starr School, where the school ought properly to be called "Starr School School." Homemade steel-drum stoves glowed dangerously cherry-red. Inside the roundhouse the temperature was like a sauna. Drums and leg-bells pounded, driving rhythm heart-deep. Outside, it was far below zero and people were wrapped in vapor from their overheated bodies and from the tobacco in their hands. The drunks were quiet and overhead the stars were thick as avalanche lilies.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In Heart Butte in 1990 their round house was closed down, dangerously decrepit, and no Indian dancing was scheduled. But there would be a Midnight Mass at the little church and I resolved to go. The Methodist Church was having no service and I wanted to share this holy, starry, frozen night with a congregation.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Melting snow had frozen when the sun went down, so that the church on its side-hill slope was like a castle on a glass hill in a fairytale where the hero needs a horse with spiked shoes. I was struggling to sidle from one clump of sticking-out weeds to another, when suddenly two hands planted themselves firmly on my butt and propelled me right on up to the door. I turned around to find Angie Howe and her mother, Donna, the home ec teacher, laughing and panting beside me. It was Angie who had decided I needed help. We went in the door pink-cheeked and wreathed in good will.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Catholic church in Heart Butte was an old one for this part of the country. It was stuccoed concrete over logs, with buttresses to keep the walls from bowing outward, and had an emerald green door which peeled between repaintings. It was a mission church, which had been maintained by devoted Jesuit priests and Ursuline nuns. I chose a corner seat over to the right rear, mostly because that is always my tendency, but also because the two other times I had come to this church-- once for Mass and once for a funeral -- I had sat in that place and human beings are creatures of habit. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob Scriver had worked on the statue of Virgin Mary in the adjacent graveyard. I felt that gave me some legitimacy. I knew Father Dan Powers would not object to my presence. Recently I had attended his Mass at Holy Family Mission and afterwards shook hands with Carl Cree Medicine, who used to work for us. Tonight, as near as I could tell, the only white people present were myself, the priest (who has grown braids as a sign of joining the people) and Sister Edna, who is also a blood sister to Bishop Hunthausen, known as the Peace Bishop. Donna Howe is Blackfeet, married to a Crow.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The funeral I had attended here was for Carl Cree Medicine's son, Butch. When I had last seen the young man he had been a toddler clutching Carl's long leg. Barely adult, Butch was killed by a young white drifter, high on drugs which they may have been sharing. The killer, at the wheel of Butch's pickup, shot the Blackfeet boy as he sat on the passenger side. When a Highway Patrol officer named Mary Pat pulled the weaving pickup over, expecting a drunk, she also was shot point blank but survived. The case got a lot of attention, mostly focussed on Mary Pat. Father Dan had begun the funeral by sprinkling us all with Holy Water from a twig of sweet pine.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This Christmas Midnight Mass began, as usual, a little late. (One of the first cultural differences whites generally notice is often called "Indian Time," which means things are done when all is ready -- not according to a clock.) The sanctuary was painted peach and the windows were merely frosted, not stained glass. But the Stations of the Cross hung in place. In the front at the right was a kind of grotto for the créche, formed of Christmas tree and branches. On the left was a pastel plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. In back was a country music band around an electric piano. Someone played the flute and someone else the fiddle, while the piano player sang softly into a microphone. Father came in and out the door at the back of a partitioned corner at the right which led across the path to his house. Another partitioning on the left was only storage. When the crowd began to gather in earnest, Father gathered his vestments out of that corner, and calmly put them on in our plain view. The chasuble was a brilliant red with the Latin for "<i>kairos</i>" (the transcendent moment which contrasts with "<i>chronos</i>" or ordinary time), in a gilt pattern on the front.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People came in breathless, dipped fingertips in water, crossed themselves, chose a pew, genuflected before entering and knelt to pray quietly-- the pattern is old and natural. It was I who seemed stiff and resistant, just sitting in my Protestant way. I began to be aware that my fancy lined boots smelled of mothballs. Gradually more people came until the room was full and we were praying and singing together, melded into a real congregation. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Father's sermon was just a story but a true one, he said. It was about a little boy and girl, Blackfeet, who had lived not many miles away. Their parents were drinking and careless: there was no food or fuel in their house. They had been ill and though the boy, who was older, tried hard to take good care of his sister, on Christmas Eve they felt they could stay alone no longer and resolved to go to the neighbors. Reservation neighbors will always take you in. There was no phone and the nearest neighbor was five miles away. It was very cold and the snow was deep. But they wrapped up and set out together. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The little girl, who had been the most ill, began to falter after a couple of miles, but the boy urged her on. At last she said she could not go farther. He tried to carry her, but could not make much headway in the snow. Then she died there in his arms on that cold snowy night. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Years later this boy had still not recovered. Now it was he who drank too much and could not stop. But it gave him no comfort, for he was always haunted. He behaved badly. Somehow on a Christmas Eve he found himself back near the same place where his sister had died. He was drunk and he fell in the snow.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead of dying, he had a vision. His sister came to speak to him. She was standing with Jesus and she told him she was happy and wanted him to be happy, too. She told him to go from house to house until he found a home where there was a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. He was to stay with that family and to get well, to stop drinking, to make something of himself. The vision faded and the young man hitch-hiked back to town. He did go door-to-door and he found the family, who welcomed him. And he did stop drinking. Now he is married and has babies of his own. If anyone comes to him wanting to stop their bad ways, he lets them stay and helps them.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Father named the man and we all knew him-- or so we felt. The story seemed true. Two years later, Father confessed to me that he had made it all up, but that he had been divinely inspired, not knowing what he was going to say next, just working to stay open to it. It didn't matter. The story pointed the way to salvation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was time for Communion and people went forward reverently. Two women and one man, a tall and dignified Indian rancher, offered the wine and blessed wafers. One of the women was the Indian clerk of the school district. I sat quietly abstaining, praying, half-dreaming. The band sang softly, both Christmas carols and the usual country gospel church ballads.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When it was time to go back out over the threshold, the men stood spaced out and handed us along across the ice. Ungloved, I went from one large, dry, strong hand to another. People paused to wish each other Merry Christmas. The stars were great wreaths and swirls of sarvisberry blossoms across a black velvet sky. There was no wind to make the pines swish, but their smell enveloped us. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had parked away from the church, down by the cemetery, so that I wouldn't be trapped in the crowd leaving the mass. From a little distance the small church on the hill was archetypal: it could have been anywhere, maybe in Poland or China or Paraguay . The voices of the people rang and echoed like bells. Human experience united us.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE SPIRIT LIVES</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the summer of 1990 a minister friend and his wife came to visit me and I took them to see Holy Family Mission. Carefully choosing our way, we walked through the ruined rooms, seeing in our minds' eyes the students and the teachers in black robes, and imagining all the stories that must have played out there. My friend and I, with our divinity school educations, stood before the ruined altars -- still white and gilt in the midst of the debris, with a dove representing the Holy Spirit on the front of each -- and imagined what those Belgian and Italian Jesuits must have believed as they chose their lives, many of them dying far from home and family, and what they must have hoped would happen instead of this ruin. In an essay one Jesuit complained that the Indian world collapsed so fast they couldn't get organized in time to save the people. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On this visit, from the litter on the floor, I pocketed a bit of wall plaster with "Virgin Mary blue" paint on it. It was June -- the month that I had first seen the Reservation deep in grass and tapestried with flowers. Through the tall windows, now innocent of glass or muntins or sometimes even frames, I saw cottonwood trees intensely green with sticky new leaves. I wondered if the priests planted them or if they just volunteered. Bits of cottonwood down drifted like snow through the windows, glowing radiantly when shafts of sunlight hit them. Up above, in the high places where the priests had studied, we could hear the rustling and cooing of the pigeons that had moved in.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While the others took photos, I walked ahead and came up the broad formal stairs to the second floor, where I looked out on the little church with its stained glass windows of doves. I could see the broad burial ground with many familiar names, the rubble of the nuns' and girls' building, the house where a rancher still lives and uses the old farm buildings, and the tall more-gold-than-ivory cliffs from which the stone of the building had been cut and from which buffalo once had been driven in order to feed the people. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suddenly, soundlessly, I felt a breath and turned just in time to see white wings flare into sunlight, then float down over my head and on out the window. It was not the Holy Ghost -- only a barn owl who preyed on the pigeons -- but I shivered.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I said to Blackfeet friends, "You ought to go gather up the stones of those old Jesuit buildings and use them to build a new school where Blackfeet are taught by Blackfeet."</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Oh, no," one answered. "They're probably haunted. Cursed!"</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other friend, Darrell, kept silence. The Catholic church is meaningful for him. His mother was educated in this boarding school and never lost the comforting faith she found there. Some day he'll write a poem about the stones, just as he helped make a video about the building. The soundtrack of the video footage of the ruined boarding school is the bird-like sound of crying, children calling for help.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NEW BUILDINGS FOR OLD</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The December 7, 1995, issue of the <b><i>Glacier Reporter</i></b> has a cover story about St. Anne's Catholic Church, the little Heart Butte church with the emerald door. It is slated for demolition. The parish has raised $430,000 for the construction of a new church which will seat over 300 people and include classrooms, a kitchen, offices, bathrooms and real heating and cooling. Father Dan says the church needs more room for overnight gatherings, funerals, services and other church activities like community meetings, cultural programs and self-help groups. The new church will be even more impressive than the Methodist's quonset hut.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But I'll miss the old church and so will many others. Built in 1910, the little House of God stands for a time that remains golden in memory. Few Blackfeet that I know mourn for the loss of the old Dog Days -- not many are eager to spend a Montana winter with only the supplies a dog travois could carry. Some have feelings about the Horse Days, when young men in particular roamed freely and hunted easily. Who could resist the triumphant image of returning home from a raid on galloping horses, swinging the spoils of war overhead?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Blackfeet and the native white people (if there can be such a thing) both reminisce about a time when the horses overlapped with the early automobiles, the Edwardian Era, a time when the 19th century reached over into the 20th between the turn of the century and World War II. Life was much slower and simpler then. It was a James Whitcomb Riley world, a Hamlin Garland world, even in Browning, Montana.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That was when Christianity became conflated with Patriotism, being American. Blackfeet fought in World War I and felt for the first time that they were part of America. Young men from all over the States fought in that European war, united as Americans and beginning to form a picture of just what "being American" was. We were a rural nation then-- most people, including my parents and the Scrivers, lived in small towns or on farms. Houses were modest and clothes were practical. Most people didn't travel very far, so life was centered in the small communities around the churches, schools, and granges. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Things were quiet on the Reservation until oil money came to the Blackfeet at the end of the Twenties. Then the Big Hotels in Glacier Park saw some wild times, especially since during Prohibition they were conveniently close to Canada and its fine whiskey. Several Blackfeet were pretty good moon-shiners. But the "doin's" in the Park was not for most tribal people, except those who put up lodges on the lawn of the Big Hotel and met the trains in beaded costumes. Some got to be in movies or visited Washington, D.C. But the white people in the back rooms of banks dealt them no cards.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It occurs to me that the Blackfeet were broken twice, once when they were starved out of their horse-centered lives, and then again when the industrial world caught up with them, making their small farms obsolete and tormenting them with influences from the outside world. The quiet world that Christian missionaries had held up as an ideal and that some families had accepted with success, was shattered by the Depression, then World War II, and the subsequent invasion of competitive post-War veterans looking for ranches. Charlie Russell arrived on the frontier just as the horse-days were ending and for the rest of his life resented the coming of the "skunk-wagons". A dwindling number of old-timers around Montana-- red or white, on the Rez or off-- share the sentiment.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is no first-hand written account of the dog days. No one living remembers the days of the horse and buffalo. Only a few living remember the first decades of this century, but when those few talk about how it used to be just after the turn of the century, their faces glow and their voices soften. "I was never so happy again," they say. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-66608194309316686552013-08-10T14:55:00.000-06:002014-08-28T11:47:53.783-06:00A GOOD PLACE TO GET KILLED<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A GOOD PLACE TO GET KILLED</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>In front of Teeple's grocery was the most scariest place I'd ever been</i>.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--a cross country bicyclist in Browning, Montana</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BEFORE HERE WAS THERE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One summer I attended a literary conference honoring Wallace Stegner after his death. It was held in his boyhood town, Eastend, Saskatchewan, which is just to the north of Havre, Montana. At about the same time, it was revealed that a complete skeletal fossil of Tyrannosaurus Rex had been discovered not far away. It had been kept a secret for several years, because such a find is very valuable -- not just the fossil itself, but also the tourist value of the location. Quickly, the organizers of the conference arranged for the chief paleontologist to come speak to the literary conference. (And just as quickly, an enterprising ranch wife put her kids to work baking and decorating dinosaur cookies to sell.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"What was it like here when the dinosaur was alive," asked someone.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The paleontologist scratched his head. "Well, the first thing to remember is that there was no "here" then. One hundred million years ago -- the dinosaurs died out around sixty-five million years ago -- the continents we know now were still together in one mass, Pangaea. The whole continental mass was much closer to the equator than it is now -- or so we think -- and the weather may have been entirely different. Quite tropical." The audience was fascinated. Prairie people live by the weather.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Sixties, the year after the Big Flood, Bob Scriver, his grandchildren, and I had been prowling around the bluff above the Cut Bank Boarding School, idly looking for arrowheads, when we realized we were standing over the complete skeleton of some kind of dinosaur: head, ribs, legs and tail -- all where they ought to be. Excited by our find, we rushed home to the telephone and tried to find out what we ought to do. No expert or organization we could locate got very excited. "Just leave it alone," they said. "There are lots of dinosaurs." Crest-fallen, we tried to just forget about it. So far as I know, it eventually eroded away.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the June 20, 1996, Glacier Reporter, an organization called the Blackfeet Human Rights and Sovereignty Coalition paid for an advertisement covering an entire page to accuse the current Tribal Councilmen of allowing a fossil to be sold for $25,000 which was then resold by a "Canadian firm" for $1,000,000. Fossils large and small had been "rustled" off the reservation for years and in fact the Council had passed laws against it, but this was the first time anyone had gotten so excited. Nothing attracts attention like the words, "one million dollars." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Much more than a million dollars has been pumped out of the reservation as a legacy of the Cretaceous Era. Huge oil and coal fields in Alberta hint that there is still more oil and natural gas left under the Blackfeet lands. As technology advances, resources that were left behind as uneconomical to recover have now become accessible. Mining companies long to get back to the Sweetgrass Hills, sacred land for the Blackfeet and other tribes, in order to try cyanide heap leach mining on Gold Butte, where a conventional mine was played out decades ago.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the most valuable legacy of ancient geology is still the Rocky Mountains, the upheaval of sedimentary ancient stone that was later carved by glaciers into Glacier National Park. It is a major tourist attraction, but the value of the mountains is beyond visitor industries. Because the clouds coming inland along the storm tracks and jet streams must drop their moisture on those mountains to lighten their load and rise over to the prairie, the mountains themselves constantly feed a myriad of streams that carry water down and out across the dry rainshadow on the eastern side. The East Front of the Rockies has the fortuitous combination of sun and dependable running water that can create prime grass country. Of course, because the air has risen, dropped moisture, and then compressed in descent, winds blow constantly -- warm winds that are called "Chinooks" in winter. They can strip snow off the land like sheets off a bed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is high country -- the prairie comes up from the east in a long easy-rising slope that is imperceptible unless you are watching an altimeter or driving a heavy load. When the wind comes from the east, it is hot in summer or cold in winter. Once in a while, a slow bubble of extreme cold drifts heavily from the Arctic and sits... and sits... and sits, until the foam seats of pickups are like blocks of wood and you must not touch metal without gloves.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Rocky Mountains are relatively young mountains thrown up by tectonic forces under the continents. Beneath the Rocky Mountains are other, older mountains, formed over many millions of years of colliding forces. However the combination of forces worked, the mountains of Glacier Park were overthrown up from the Flathead Valley, so that the oldest stone is some of the oldest on the face of the planet, and the younger layers are on the bottom. The stone is sedimentary, accumulated as limestone at the bottom of seas when tiny sea creatures died and their skeletons drifted down, as aeolian sediments blown in by the wind, and as volcanic dust, probably mostly from the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest Ring of Fire. All of this has been compressed under great weight and heat in the past.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The prairie is also sediment, but moving and shifting whenever the cover of grasses is disturbed, and worn down into coulees and valleys whereever watercourses tumble down from the mountains. It is estimated that the land has risen three times and been worn away into bench and coulee just as many times. One more upheaval may be underway now. No one knows for sure how many periods of drought have set the dirt free to blow or how long the rainy periods may have lasted, except that there have evidently been no trees for a very long while. Some say the native peoples used fire to keep them back.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Huge structures best observed from satellites still persist from the thousands of years ago that glaciers crept down to cover the northern half of Montana, even scooping into the mountains. Along what would become the United States/Canada border, volcanic action raised a line of hills which during the glacier ages became islands in the ice: the Sweetgrass Hills, the Cypress Hills, Old Man Lying on his Back, the Bear's Paw Mountains. Vegetation on the tops of these hills is ancient. Deep in the earth, poking up through the sediments of the prairie, came blisters of lava that didn't surface, finding ways through cracks and forming what would be-- when the land was worn down again -- buttes and dikes of stone.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Plants and animals must have thrived along the southern edge of the glaciers, just where the climate was too warm to allow the ice to persist, so that there was always water. And no doubt human beings found their way back and forth along this ice edge, just as they found their way north and south along the east slope of the Rockies until they formed the Old North Trail. Travois marks are still visible on that trail. No wonder the people thought of the four sacred directions when their north/south axis was the mountain ramparts and their east/west axis was a green edge along the blue glacier. Human beings have been on this prairie so long that there seems to be a Blackfeet word for "mastodon." It may have become the word for bull, "stumik." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ten thousands years ago the glaciers began to melt again and form huge impounded lakes, more like seas. For centuries they deepened, until they found gaps in the hills and finally the gigantic glacial lakes of Montana swooshed down through the southern part of Idaho and through the bed of what is now the Snake River, pounding through lava in what is now the Columbia River and continuing to the Pacific Ocean. This is how the rivers made such deep gorges through the volcanic rock-- with irresistible force and long-term erosion.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Long ago as this happened, there may have been witnesses. To this day the Blackfeet don't like or trust water. They have flood legends, which pleases Biblical universalists. Their story about the origin of death involves a wager between Napi and his wife over whether a stone and then a buffalo dung will float or sink. In the end, death wins and it is the woman's bet that makes it so. So much do the Blackfeet distrust water, that even when they were starving they refused to fish. An effective form of discipline was water thrown on a child or even up its nose. Today some Blackfeet are assimilated enough to enjoy fishing from the shore, but few own boats.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A rancher on Milk River ridge, a glacial moraine, once showed me a place on his land where road-builders had dug for gravel. Where the hillside had been trucked away, the layered remains of three glaciers were clearly visible because of the different colors and textures of the soils. The rancher pointed out sorrowfully that the middle layer carried wonderfully fertile soil from what must have once been Canadian forest, but the top layer was full of rocks. "If only the order had been different," he lamented, "I could grow so much more barley!" Yet they say that when the glaciers crossed a huge limestone deposit in Canada, ice carried limestone on down to Montana, powdering the stones nicely on the way, and scattering the mineral so that it enriched the grass. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes the huge boulders called "erratics" were brought along by glaciers and left sitting solitary so that grass grew up around them, until the buffalo used them for scratching or shade and wore a dirt moat around the bottom. Hawks perched on them and the Blackfeet found them full of stories. Just as boulders were left, huge chunks of ice were left embedded in the land. These melted, forming potholes or "kettles," perfect for ducks and geese. Around the little potholes grew willow breaks and bush berries, so that humans and animals could stop in the shade or find shelter from the wind.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Along the old North Trail, north of the Sweetgrass Hills and Milk River Ridge, is a place good for scaring buffalo over a cliff. A meadow nearby offers good grazing, and then an abrupt drop, so that buffalo falling over it would be killed or crippled enough for human beings to finish them off with a spear or a club. Many of these places can be found. Layers of ancient bone are interspersed with layers of charcoal where the hunters got rid of their offal. These people were fire-users, setting fires to renew the grass or drive animals. Some say the Blackfeet got their name from walking through burnt grass.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, where today there is a fine provincial museum, the archeologists have sifted down through the layers of bone char until they came to the bottom. They estimate that the jump is roughly the same age as the Egyptian pyramids. This place near Fort Macleod got its name when a smashed-in human skull was found among the buffalo bones. The archeologists envision a man running ahead of the buffalo, taunting them to make the thundering monsters chase him and leading them to the cliff-- but when it was time to leap aside, by accident getting swept over in the huge thunder of the herd.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No need for those long ago prairie people to build pyramids. The outcrops of the land provided plenty of high places. The land was their life and they fitted themselves to it inseparably, drawing from it not just shelter and water, but also their understanding of time, their sense of fitting behavior, and their endless stories. The day, the month, the seasons, were their clock. They watched the sky. Generation after generation the babies came, grew up in families and cohort groups who taught them how to be human, went out onto the land alone to seek a vision, fought skirmishes that brought joy and grief, made love, talked about everything, sang often, sometimes danced-- until they grew too old and their voices shrivelled into silence. Then they were wrapped and left on a ridge or perhaps high in a tree with all their material belongings.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This way of life has been described as "deep community," an evolved relationship among land, plants, animals and humans where everything fits together into an ecosphere that sustains lives disciplined by the good of the group and the inevitability of hardship. Over thousands of years the sensory world becomes numinous, holy, so that everything has meaning in the sense of poetic depth. The people dream in order to tap their deepest intuitions. Today many yearn after this way of life. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The chain of hills that runs approximately along the 49th parallel, including Milk River Ridge, determined the boundary of the United States. Thomas Jefferson had "bought" from the King of France the whole of Louisiana, which was defined as the drainage of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Lewis and Clark were sent out on their expedition to find just how far north the drainage went. Along Highway 2 on the road between Browning and Cut Bank is the location of Camp Disappointment where Lewis finally realized that the headwaters did not reach to the fiftieth parallel as they had hoped. These days the commemorative obelisk is much abused and marked with graffiti. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On July 22, 1806, Lewis -- who had separated from Clark in order to go take a look north -- wrote in his journal:</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"This plain on which we are is very high; the rocky mountains to the S.W. of us appear but low from their base up yet are partially covered with snow nearly to their bases. There is no timber on those mountains within our view; they are very irregular and broken in their form and seem to be composed principally of clay with but little rock or stone."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today this part of the east slope is called the "Lewis Overthrust." Lewis was standing on what would become the Blackfeet Reservation.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I believe that the waters of the Suskashawan approach the borders of this river very nearly. I now have lost all hope of the waters of this river ever extending to N. Latitude 50º though I still hope and think it more than probably that both white earth river and milk river extend as far north as latd 50º."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After a few days of enduring a rainy and hungry camp, Lewis and his company moved on, encountering several deserted Indian camps with the poles of lodges remaining. He noted, "We consider ourselves extreemly fortunate in not having met with these people." Then their luck ran out. On July 26, a Saturday for what that is worth, they met a small band of Piegan Blackfeet and cautiously shared a camp with them. The American explorers were on Birch Creek, the southern boundary of the modern reservation. On Sunday morning there was a ruckus which ended in the death of at least one Blackfeet and so panicked the small party of explorers that they galloped all the way to the Great Falls over what had once been a seabed and is today wheat fields. By the end of September the explorers were safely back in St. Louis, attending a dinner and ball.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet, for their part, were aroused to ferocious resistance against all invaders, whether other tribes or whites. By acting strongly, they managed to postpone the breaking of their way of life until very late, almost the turn of the 19th century. The last of the buffalo herds lingered around the Sweetgrass Hills. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Relations with the Canadians went better, as had interactions with the early European traders. The Blackfeet were not beaver trappers, but revered the beaver and organized their major Sacred Bundle around that creature and other water denizens. Instead of trapping, the Blackfeet accumulated horses by stealing and breeding, and then used those horses for hunting buffalo and buying women for extra wives. At first they acquired weapons and other paraphenalia by provisioning trappers with pemmican, which their women made. Later they sold buffalo robes, which their women also prepared. The real wealth of the Blackfeet was women and they knew it. Lodges became much bigger and finer, and even a single woman could make a living by creating elegant beaded clothing and bags. Today men still acquire ranches by sending their wives to town to work as teachers or shopkeepers. Of course, now they are legally allowed only one wife at a time.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When in 1824 Jefferson laid out his topographical theory of the world, he started with the Blackfeet and then rhetorically moved East. He saw the distance in hierarchical terms with the high slopes of the Rocky Mountain front as the paradoxical depths of savagery and his own swampy capitol as the height of sophistication and culture.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today we might be more inclined to see the romanticized Indian as the highest state while the swamps of Washington, D.C., represent the moral depths of civilization.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HIGHWAYS TOO SMALL TO BE BLUE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Something about the east slope of the Rockies makes it feel numinous, sacred, mysterious. Maybe it is the altitude or maybe it is instinctive in humans from early grasslands times. Many people find the Blackfeet Reservation spiritual-- yet dangerous. It is not really possible to understand the Blackfeet Reservation without reflecting on the geography. The topography, the climate, the soils and minerals, the fossils and wildlife, the transportation and communication networks are keys to both prosperity and institutional life. They dictate where there is work, where you can live, what you can grow, how much of your life is going to be tied up in getting supplies and services and what school district your children belong in. Occasionally, where you are becomes a life-and-death question.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you drive north-to-south on Highway 89 from the Canadian border to Dupuyer (roughly along the Old North Trail), or east-to-west on Highway 2 from Cut Bank to the Continental Divide (which may have been the edge of the glacier for a long time) , you pass through Browning at roughly the midpoint of the Blackfeet Reservation, where the two highways run on top of each other. This is the capitol of the reservation. Main Street of the town is cut twice, once by the combined Highways 2 and 89 which swing around to get perpendicular, and once by Willow Creek which separates the Bureau of Indian Affairs Square from the town. In the early days of Browning, on the lawn of Government Square every spring Blackfeet girls in white dresses wound through a Maypole dance in the ancient British custom, though they probably did not realize it was derived from a pagan fertility ceremony. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today few tourists slow down enough to see that there is a Main Street, unless they need the post office or bank, which are still at the old town square alongside Willow Creek.. In the days of my in-laws' youth, there was a pond where the livery brought their horses for water. Before World War I the Browning Mercantile was built on this square by Thad Scriver and his partner--right across the street from Thad's former employer, the Sherburne Mercantile. At one point Joe Kipp also had a mercantile store there.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you continue south of Browning to Heart Butte, you may choose between two roads: either Highway 89 or "the inside road," which goes south through the railroad depot, giving access to many small ranches and home places. Either road must cross three creeks: Two Medicine, Badger Creek, and Birch Creek, which is the southern boundary of the reservation. These creeks carry the real wealth of the Blackfeet: water. The Rocky Mountains are essentially a water-maker, storing it as snow. Water makes grass which makes meat or small grain. In this century many ambitious irrigation projects have been started. The most successful has been the system that created Lake Francis where the hayfields of the Box Hanging 7 ranch used to be. It is next to Valier, just off the reservation. In recent decades the flumes and canals on the reservation have begun to cave, collapse and fill with growth for lack of maintenance.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A tribal paved road connects highway 89 with the “inside road” along each of the three creeks: you may turn west at Two Medicine, at Badger Creek, and then turn south again on the “inside road,” or if you choose the road along Birch Creek, you will turn north on the “inside road.” Birch Creek is the southern boundary of the reservation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When you reach Heart Butte you will be at roughly 5,000 feet above sea level, just about where the snowline often stops. To the south and west is a great complex of federally reserved wilderness beginning with Glacier National Park at the top and then Lewis and Clark, the Great Bear, the Flathead and finally the Bob Marshall Wilderness areas together in one of the last remaining ecosystems large enough to support a population of grizzlies.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These days, partly in an effort to protect grizzlies by not attracting them to settled areas, reservation garbage collection is tightly regulated. Even so, when one takes a sack out to the dumpster, it is a good idea to whack the side of the dumpster a few times so scavengers will leave. Mostly magpies scatter, but once in a while a startled bear, even a grizzly, leaps out and scrambles off. In spring when grumpy, hungry bears are around, the aides go outside to scan the playground before the children take a recess. Often a lone bear is spotted up on the side of Heart Butte, ambling along, muttering to itself-- maybe needing dream therapy. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The spring before I came, bears hung around the school so much that an eight-foot cyclone fence was put up surrounding the schoolyard. One student told me he was alone out there when he saw a bear on the other side of the fence. Feeling safe, he taunted the bear. With one blow of its mighty paw the bear tore down the wire, which delayed the attack only enough to allow the student to escape into the building. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Others told me this kid was full of tall tales. In their opinion the fence was just another way to keep the kids in during school hours but out on weekends and vacations. Officially, it turned out that the bears were being attracted by a rancher's boneyard a mile away. When that was eliminated, fewer bears came around. Unofficially, more people than usual carried rifles for a while and if one or several of them happened to kill a bear--even knowing that the hides are relatively worthless in spring--no one would admit it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the teachers' aides lived even farther up into the foothills. In spring she and her husband were often missing a calf or a colt. She said that if the predator were a wolf, what was left of the carcass would be on the ground, but if it were a cougar, the remains would be missing, only rarely discovered in a tree some distance a way. A quiet, gentle Blackfeet woman, she was reluctant to talk about any controversies, but sometimes the losses were frustrating enough for her to mention them. The subject was a hot one -- not between whites and Indians but between locals and outside environmentalists.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the early nineties there seemed to be an excess of cougars all over the west. A few were coming into the hamlet itself, killing dogs. The kids, who loved to be spooked and expected the ancient tales that I collected for them, asked me, "What are these cougars a sign of?" "Weeeelll," I drew out the moment and leaned forward so they would come closer. "It's a sign the cougars are...HUNGRY! BE CAREFUL!!" They jumped back. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actually, experts agreed it also meant the cats were young and incompetent, dependent on easy prey and looking for a territory. No one ever saw any big cats. We only found tracks or remains. On the west side of the mountains where the population was denser and less wary, pets and a few small children were attacked. (Mercifully, no children were killed). I call the west side the "fur" side of the mountains, because enough rain scrapes off the passing clouds against the mountains to make lots of trees. The easier climate means more community prosperity. On the east slope in the "rain shadow" of the Rockies, we lived on the "rawhide" side. Trees are scarce and the grass is cougar-colored most of the year. It is a leaner, tougher place to live. Ivan Doig calls it "drumhead earth."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet from the other reservation communities sneer at Heart Butte, saying they are backwards and inbred. Inbreeding is a big concern among people who raise stock and who grew up in the Thirties when chromosomes and genes had just been discovered. In those days fairs held contests for "best humans" just like the ones for "best horses and cows." The winners were almost invariably big and blonde. The population of Blackfeet collapsed so swiftly and in this back country mixed so little with outsiders that the suspicion of inbreeding seemed realistic to lay persons. But mostly, the "breeds" could use the in-breeding idea to slam full-bloods, the way full-bloods, red or white, might say "mongrel half-breeds." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The importance of good genes to the male frontier psyche, cowboy or Indian, emerges in the local insistence that Hutterites sometimes kidnap exceptionally strong and handsome young men, take them off in the night and force them to make babies with Hutterite girls. Hopeful young men, both white and Blackfeet, will swear with tears in their eyes that they know someone to whom this personally happened. They will explain how they were tied to a table with a sheet draped over them-- the sheet having a hole in a strategic place, but covering their head so they won't recognize the girls afterwards. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Full-bloods attract romantic souls from back East who see Heart Butte as the last stand of the "real" Indians, a place where people preserve the noble purity and ancient ceremonies of their ancestors. They say the last true Sun Lodge was erected in Heart Butte and that the Indian Days there is truer than the one in Browning, which is now little more than a dusty fair for tourists and bead-peddlers who stay in RV's instead of proper lodges. In Browning more stickgame and blackjack happens than fancy dancing. The Sixties competitions for "most authentic lodge" that I remember and that Bob Scriver used to judge are no longer held. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Behind Heart Butte looms Feather Woman Mountain, alongside a peak called Major Steell's Backbone. Major Steell [sic] was one of many disastrous Indian Agents for the Blackfeet. In control between 1891 and 1892 and from 1895 to 1897, Steell somehow managed to get the support of James Willard Schultz in spite of Steell being a morphine addict. He stayed in his office at the Agency in Browning, speaking to Blackfeet petitioners only through a small door cut at eye level in his office door. Perhaps he was hooked on morphine in the Civil War, just as Vietnam vets got hooked on heroin. Schultz had a bad back himself and sometimes hinted at drug use. At least he often recorded a high opinion of "grass." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At any rate, Steell was married to a Blackfeet woman. Her allotment, a ranch, was on the reservation on the headwaters of Birch Creek. It was on her land that Swift Dam was built, the key to the irrigation project that created the massive ag complex of canals, elevators, railroads and international trade. Steele's fortunes improved dramatically during his tenure as agent. The mountain named for his backbone has a distinct sag in it.</span></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LITTLE TOWN ON THE FLOODPLAIN</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte the town is on the floodplain of Whitetail Creek where it comes out of the mountains below Heart Butte the mountain. During the Flood of 1965, the hamlet was devastated by the failure of Swift Dam. Many people were killed, particularly along the streambeds of the foothills close to Heart Butte. The original cluster of shacks and log-cabins was undermined, but then augmented by quickly built "flood homes." Never meant to be permanent, few have stood empty in the thirty years since and some of the little old shelters have been reinhabited as well. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One set of newer HUD homes is on the old location, and another more recent cluster is a quarter-mile away on a creek. When originally built, the houses all had modern amenities, but the telephones quickly ran up bills that some didn't pay. Now one must put down a sizeable deposit in the Three River Cooperative in order to have a phone, even if one has a long record of conscientious payment. When I moved in, I objected. In all the places I had lived, I had never been required to put down a deposit of hundreds of dollars. After being passed through several supervisors (me shamelessly demanding, "Don't you know who I am?") the deposit was waived, revealing it for what it was: a filter against Blackfeet assumed to be deadbeats unless proven otherwise. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The center of Heart Butte is a "round house," built of logs and once used for dancing on the major festive holidays but now condemned. The small Catholic church is on a slope nearby, alongside a cemetary where baby's breath from funeral bouquets seeds a lacy drift downwind every summer. The Methodists' quonset-hut type church is on the other side of the cemetary and recently added a fine community kitchen. It was financed in part by donations from rich women romanced by an ambitious previous minister and in part by hard work on the part of conscientious Iowa parishioners who come to work every summer and who supply heaps of used clothing the rest of the year. The minister, the Reverend Ms. Donna Martin, has grownup children and a supportive husband. For the sake of both health and low prices, they have organized a successful food cooperative that sells staples instead of junk food . The church often shelters a social worker of some kind who has managed to raise funding for a project. Sometimes the worker is from a foreign country, fired up with romantic notions about Indians, but nervous about actually being on a Rez.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The old tall-windowed Heart Butte school is near the round house, next to weather-worn tribal and BIA buildings clustered around a cement plaza. HUD has added modern split-level houses to the few small shacks not torn down in the name of renewal, but the streets that string them together have been intermittently paved. In summer one dodges potholes and in winter the school bus can hardly burst through the drifts. (The new school is too far up the hill for students to walk through winter winds and snow. In summer they are insulted by the idea they should have to walk.) The inevitable discarded cars and stray dogs scatter along dirt tracks made by impatient pickups taking shortcuts. Tipi poles lean against the houses. Any tourists lost enough to pass through would shake their heads and say, "How depressing." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the church side of the highway, as well as the area across from the store, most of the land belongs to Tommy Thompson and his wife. For decades Tommy's mother ran a small store with a gas pump and a post office, which was also her home, so that she could wait on customers between her household duties as rural people have always done. Tommy was meant to have an education. When he got it, he became the school superintendent in Browning and then retired young. His present wife, a Greek from the Chicago area, continued the family business for a while. Then she wangled a new post office building where she presides as postmaster. Tommy yielded to the needs of the community by building a small store on the other side of his house. Competing stores always shrivel and die. The Thompsons' son goes to school in Browning where he also is meant to have an education. Athena has presided over the school board twice, the last time while I was there.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A mile or so away along a country road, a cluster of random houses belong to the offspring of the original Calf Boss Ribs, who died before the reservation was cut into parcels in 1911. The original small ranch house, much remodeled, is still occupied and descendants have brought in trailers which they have converted to houses when opportunity and income allowed. The men still run cattle, which sometimes hang around in town, and the boys all own horses. At roundup time the women also saddle up. The school draws heavily on this family for secretaries, aides and carpentry work.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">UP THERE ON THE HILL</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Up above Heart Butte village, where a ranch access road cuts from the highway to the school and back into the coulees below the Butte, is the Crawford land. Crawfords (whose name might once have been Crowfoot) have always maintained good relations with the wider world, sometimes by guiding people-- including modern passport Europeans-- into the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Some of the "boys" have married white women and yet this family knows more than most about old ways. They do a little mechanic work and sell gas when the Thompsons are locked up. It was the Crawfords who gave the land for the new school. Crawfords supply both teachers and aides.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The "new Heart Butte School," a decade old when I was hired in 1989, was built as an elementary school, sunk into a hilltop for the sake for heat conservation. In theory it is heated by the lights and the body heat of the students. Problems developed while watching videos. Quiet students didn't produce as much heat, so in the middle of the movie the lights came on to compensate. Only the gymnasium/cafeteria entrances, part of the office, and the kindergarten classroom have exterior windows. The whole school complex is all-electric because, I was told, insurance companies will not approve gas. Frequent power outages force school closure, even when the weather is mild. Since water is brought in with an electric pump, when the electricity is off both the plumbing and the lighting are inoperable. Another problem unforeseen by architects not of that climate is that the two emergency exits, which are cut down into the hillside, pack full of snow all winter. They would be impossible to shovel clear except with backhoes. Anyway, the wind would soon pack them full again. I developed a particular fear of fire, since there were no windows or sprinklers. Certain boys thought it was very funny to set bulletin boards on fire and watch me react.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LIFE IN A COMPOUND</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Teachers, unless they were already local, were not allowed to live in the town. Rather the school provided housing on the “campus.” Originally the teacher housing was separated into two strips of apartments: one row of apartments with two or more bedrooms for families and the other down the hill and across the road for singles. When the high school was begun, trailers and modular homes for the new faculty were moved in on a shoulder hurriedly bulldozed between the two strips. Wind wracked these trailers, so that their storage sheds and porches drifted off like unanchored boats. Everyone developed the habit of checking before stepping out the door-- just in case there was nothing to step onto. The insides were so new that at least one teacher complained of headaches from formalin fumes. He counteracted these by keeping his goat in the quite generous space behind the skirting on his trailer.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Water for the school and teacherages comes from spring-fed wells behind the teacherages, next to a beaver dam. The head janitor occasionally failed to send samples of the water to the State Health Department. We knew this because the law required that every time he failed, the fact had to be announced in the local newspaper so we could boil the water until safety was re-established. Generally the announcement said the water had been unsafe last week, but was okay now. The school's water storage tank was under the outdoor basketball court, a little lower than the school. On a very still night it was possible to hear sloshing down under the cement court.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte in general, and the school in particular, were at the end of a "T" in the electrical lines, and heavy-duty transformers stood between the teacherages, which were also all-electric. At night I woke up to see my television's screen glowing, though it was neither turned on nor plugged in. During winter storms the electrical linemen worked heroically to keep the electricity on, knowing that otherwise we would have no heat or water. Even when the road was closed they found their way along ridges in big trucks. In a real disaster they used a snow-cat, a "weasel," right out of science fiction, which they sometimes loaned to rescue people.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte people in the town below inevitably spoke of "those up there who think they are so good." The kids used to protest, "You don't know what it's like down in town." They were wrong. In summer even I could hear the fighting down below. Anyway, I'd argued with many a drunk during my years in Browning. Few drunks dared to come up to the teacherages and push their way in, but I knew that it happened to the kids' houses even when they were alone behind locked doors. Just because they knew who the drunk was, might even be related, the experience was no more pleasant. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When it became clear that yet more teacher housing might become necessary, I suggested loudly that new housing should be put right in town, preferably on scattered in-fill sites. "Are you crazy?" blurted the principal. "We'd never be able to get a teacher to work here then!" My thought was that teachers who had to live with the kids might demand law and order. That would make it a lot easier to teach in Heart Butte. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Also, a few of us had enough of a Peace Corps mindset to want to live with the locals. I personally was not comfortable that the janitors came and went from my apartment to suit themselves. When the pest eliminator came to spray our apartments, I asked that mine not be sprayed because of my cat and was promised that it would be skipped. Seeing a little gleam in the principal’s eye, I set a trap so I could tell whether anyone entered my apartment. They did. I wrote an angry letter to the school board who couldn’t see why I would get so excited.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reality is that now even the Browning teachers live in a "teacher ghetto" resort town a dozen miles up the foothills from Browning. When that road is closed, school has to be cancelled. In the Sixties I had been told, "If you live in East Glacier, don't expect any pay for the days you miss." During those days in Browning older women, both white and Blackfeet, used to subsidize their retirements by owning little rental houses for teachers all around town. Not only did we live next door to everyone else, our landladies usually inspected our housekeeping while we were up at school. Both those old ladies and their houses are gone now. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Montana is a catalogue culture. Most middle-class housewives have a stack of shiny-bright books-- not just Sears or Monkey Wards, but also Yield House, Crate and Barrel, L. L. Bean. A particular favorite of the elementary teachers was about a set of dolls called "American Girls." Heart Butte teachers love to order goods by phone. An intrepid UPS driver and a charge card made everything possible. On days that school was called off and the roads were technically closed, I'd hear a knock on the door and find the UPS driver out there in the drifts. The mail-order stores nearly always demanded an address, which we didn't have. To big city folks post office boxes meant anonymity, unknown location, shady customer. To satisfy the people who took orders on the phone, we made up phony addresses: "43 Kensington Mews" or "83258 SW Pothole Alley," depending on the mood. The operators typed the information into their computers with no comment.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In actuality, the UPS driver simply brought everything up to the school where it was kept in the office until claimed. The Doc begged us to make sure our names were on the packages. He once had to open a padded sack to find out to whom it belonged, and discovered to his purported horror that it was lady's underwear. Myself, I ordered fresh coffee beans from Seattle and rented high brow film videos from New England. Delivery came in two or three days. I ordered my books from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore back in Chicago where my membership got me 10% off-- enough to pay the postage. What a life! I sat with my wool-socked feet up on the windowsill, warming my hands on a cup of fresh-ground filter coffee , watching a famous Swedish film vaguely remembered from a decade earlier, while out the window downy flakes of snow gradually decorated the bull pines! For a while it looked as though I'd discovered the ideal place to live the rest of my life.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actually, the school community lived along the Crawfords' old ranch access road. First after the turn from the paved public road was the DeRoche's house, just before the school land began. Next was the Doc's house, beside a barbed wire corral he built for his three Tennessee walking horses. The kids never understood his horses not being able to run free. Tony. part horse himself, threatened to "save" them some night by cutting the wire. The Doc said he would shoot anyone he saw meddling around. Every morning he went out in what appeared to be his underwear (boxer shorts and an Archie Bunker undershirt) and raked the night's manure over the twenty foot bank of the coulee towards the creek that ran on through the town. When the manure had rotted pretty well, I used it on the roses someone in the past had planted around the singles teacherage close enough to the foundation to keep them from freezing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I heard the superintendent gloating over having tricked the Doc, hired to be high school principal, into taking what amounted to the "gatehouse." But as a twenty-year Navy man proud of his hunting prowess, the Doc was willing to take guard duty, leaving the Supe and the other principal to new modular homes near the school. The Doc's horses were rarely ridden except by the Marlboros, looking romantic in boots and macinaws. Mrs. Marlboro, who taught art and P.E., was an "Iowa Sioux." What that meant I never asked and she never explained, though she remarked once that she thought it was strange that I didn't ask. Mr. Marlboro, the counselor, did indeed look like a Marlboro model but he was not a Westerner. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Despite fences and cattle guards, if the gate blew open, cows and horses drifted past my bedroom window inside the yard, sometimes seeking shelter from the wind and other times intent on the Doc's haystack. Often enough I woke to the cat hissing on tiptoe on my chest, and a long dark face peering in the window. Then I jerked something on over my nightgown so I could chase the intruders out and shut the gate. Sometimes I stood out there in the breeze and listened to the bull pines soughing, while the cat waited impatiently for me to get back in bed so she could warm up.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MONTANA COUNTY POLITICS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte is the only part of the Blackfeet Reservation that is in Pondera County. Conrad, population 3,074, is the county seat. Conrad carries the name of one of the hard-core frontier Montana entrepreneurs, whose descendent has published a book about him. Conrad, the town, is near Interstate 15, the main four-lane artery to Canada. Truckers and county business keep the town alive in spite of being by-passed. From the highway on a forty-below winter night, its lights off to the side look like salvation itself, and one takes the turnoff. When I continued to do my shopping and banking in Cut Bank, seat of Glacier County, where I had always traded when living in Browning, I was accused by the Supe of not being "loyal to home." In fact, I probably did cut myself off from potential support by the county school superintendent who never, to my knowledge, visited us. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cut Bank has the advantage of being on the "high line" of the Burlington Northern, originally built as the Great Northern. The railroad, from Chicago, follows just south of the Canadian border and links Cut Bank, Browning, East Glacier, West Glacier and on to the Pacific Coast. This is an Amtrak route and a good way to get freight out, but stops and runs are constantly being cancelled because of bad economics. More goods go by truck now, but trucks have a rough route through Browning and over Marias Pass to the Flathead. Just the same, Great Falls is a good place to buy things because it is at the end distribution point of truck shipping centers in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and Spokane.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most Heart Butte folk bank and get their driver's licenses in Conrad, but the tough old wheat ranchers who act as Pondera County commissioners feel precious little concern for anyone but themselves. They hardly help out Valier, much less any Indians. When a major blizzard closed all the roads to Heart Butte for ten days, the Browning plows never made it out to us--partly because one of the drivers was snowed in at Heart Butte. There was no building to house the plow in Heart Butte. But only a few miles away in Dupuyer was a brand-new Pondera County plow that could have reached us easily. It was never fired up. When reproached that babies and old people were endangered, Pondera snarled, "You're Indians. Ask the BIA. Get money out of your tribe." Raising grain is industrial agri-business and risky even on today's mammoth scale. When things were going well, the prosperous agri-businessmen spend their winters in Arizona, but when the market is bad, they live in trailers on their fields. They survive by keeping their focus. As often as not, they don't survive.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Highway 89 runs roughly parallel to Interstate 15, closer to the Rocky Mountains and more or less along the Old North Trail which has been traveled by game and humans for thousands of years. When people from the reservation go to Great Falls, one of two towns in Montana approaching 100,000 (Billings is the other--no Montana towns are bigger than 100,000 but Lethbridge, just over the border from the reservation in Alberta, is bigger than that and growing.), they either go by the "Valier Cut-Off" over to I-15 which fast-driving 18-wheelers headed for Canada burn dry in winter, or travel along 89, which is a much twistier, riskier road any time of year. At dusk it is crucial to watch for deer crossing the road. I generally prefer the latter route, if only because when I stop for gas in Choteau I might run into one of the Nature Conservancy people. Just west of town is the Pine Butte Swamp Refuge, where grizzlies gorge on spring vegetation to clean out their guts after hibernation. The original dinosaur eggs were found out that way.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even closer to the Rockies, from Heart Butte to Dupuyer, runs a dirt road usually called "the nine-mile road." If you take that road at night-- which isn't very smart if you don't have a dependable vehicle with good tires-- stop, shut off the lights, and get out. If there is a full moon, you will find yourself standing on an unknown silver planet. If there is no moon, you will be in the midst of a stupendous galaxy of stars. Space stretches out on all sides, marked only by wild sidereal lights never lit by human beings. A space walk by an astronaut must feel something like this. It's easy to believe that a star might speak to you, call you to walk up into the sky.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reservation back-road networks serve a series of ranches and small lakes with excellent fishing. Running up to East Glacier is a treacherous dirt trail with particularly gorgeous scenery. When freshly graded and therefore passable by ordinary cars, locals like to cruise it. Three other connector roads follow away from the mountains down along Two Medicine River, Badger Creek and Birch Creek east to 89. We once had a small ranch on Two Medicine, two miles from 89. In those days one left pavement at 89 and drove on the peculiar fine dirt called caleche that turns to slime when wet. On more than one night my van mired hopelessly. If there were no moon and the stars were overcast, I took my shoes off and went home barefoot so I could tell when I was on the road. The next day someone would come to the ranch to get me and pull the van out. Or they might just tow the van over onto the grass so I could walk to it. If all else failed, I simply waited until the road dried out. There was no phone because there was no phone line. That was twenty years ago. Today the road is paved, the ranches have night-lights, and there is a phone line, but my van would be stripped if I left it overnight.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These various ways, these ancient Blackfeet trails, are never seen by tourists, who complain bitterly about the hardships of driving twisty Highway 89 in their Iowa-licensed Winnebagoes. Along the quiet creekside roads are an increasing number of homes, a reaction to the ghettoes inadvertently created in Browning by clustered low-rent housing. Few, if any, could make money ranching on these riparian homesites, but they are good places to raise a family. At night the ranch lights are startlingly numerous. I always found it hard to drop off kids from a school bus knowing they would have a dark half-mile walk to the house. Often an old car was left at the entrance gate or parents would drive out if they knew what time to wait. Yet, with headlights off, the clear night sky on the prairie is whorled and spangled with the universe. Can it hurt kids to walk beneath that? Or might they wish to marry a star person and leave their families?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Valier's population is 640. Dupuyer is too small for my Rand McNally to list it, but Charlie Russell once painted a picture he called "How Dupuyer Got Its Name." A cowboy is using rocks in the creek to pound the lice out of his cowboy shirt: "de-poulier" in French. Dupuyer is a little post office and supply town about thirty miles from Heart Butte. Ivan Doig once boarded there while he bused to high school in Valier, also thirty miles from Heart Butte and the closest place to get a Sunday paper if you want it on Sunday. (Most people get their papers by mail a day late.) Doig has made his English teacher, Mrs. Tidyman, famous. She deserved the accolade. Besides a fine job in the classroom teaching English, French and German, she sponsored the National Honor Society, the yearbook and the newspaper. But the Blackfeet kids who were in her classes--Heart Butte kids went to either Valier or Browning before there was a Heart Butte High School-- did not attract her attention nor does Doig write about Blackfeet. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte is a distant satellite community, connected to Conrad and Valier because of being in Pondera County; to Dupuyer by friendships; to Browning because of the Tribal and BIA offices and the Indian Health Service; and even to Cut Bank, if anyone has business in the Glacier County part of the reservation where the timber leases and oil wells are. Babb, St. Marys, and East Glacier are oriented to Glacier National Park and the related tourist businesses. They tend to be white-dominated with little awareness of Heart Butte. In Babb and East Glacier newspapers are delivered to the stores and the dispenser boxes about the time the cafés open, even on Sunday.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One strong tie between Heart Butte and East Glacier formed through the Badger-Two Medicine oil-drilling controversy. The site can be accessed through either town. Called the "Ceded Strip," the area in question is just south of Glacier Park but its legal status is clouded. Historical documents are unclear about whether the land went with the Park when it was bought, or was reserved by the Tribe. It is claimed as sacred land, but geologists are pretty sure the area is oil-rich. Heart Butte students have little awareness of their geology or history. There is no book on the geography of the reservation. But they could hardly miss the deliberate seismic explosions of geotech explorations or the whapping of the helicopters that brought people in and out. When publicity and demonstrations began, even the kids paid attention. The issue is still deadlocked. Rather strangely, the headquarters for resistance to development is in Missoula, where the University of Montana is located.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CROWN OF THE CONTINENT</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s easy to understand why anyone would fall in love with this country despite all the difficulties of climate and remoteness. Mystics and wildlife photographers never tire of the place though few stay through the winter.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First snowstorms often hit the Reservation around Labor Day, but quickly clear away for an interval of golden clarity while the aspen turn cadmium yellow and Canada geese yelp through, riding strong winds. You could speak of the time as "Indian Summer." Another storm usually comes around the end of October, and the first real blizzards hit about Thanksgiving. From then until mid-February, cold alternates with chinooks until the February thaw, which is unpredictable but always pleasant, with temperatures up into the fifties. March can be the roughest month of all, and April can still mean blizzards, often calf-killers which soak and freeze the newborn. If all goes well, winter snow is dry and soon blows, so that grass on hilltops is bare and the coulees fill with snow that will melt all summer to keep trout happy. If things get in the wrong order or out of proportion, deep snow can thaw and then freeze, so that cattle cut their legs and tire from trying to paw out food. Sometimes snow, sun, and lack of wind can create a kind of deadly torte, layers of snow/ice that trap grazing animals and freeze them where they stand. Those years become legendary as ranch-busters.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In winter the Rockies mark a division between two continental storm systems, a wet one that brings air off the Pacific and a cold one where the Alberta Clipper comes whistling down from the Arctic. If the two are mixed by the storm track, it is possible to leave Highway 89 on dry pavement and be up to your hood ornament in snow by the time you reach Heart Butte. To ignore this possibility can be fatal, especially since modern engines have air intakes low to the ground where they can be clogged by snow. Smart people always carry a small stove, a bedroll, and food. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had a hooded rancher's coat so stuffed with down that it sat upright by itself on the pickup seat beside me. "My Friend the Coat" went everywhere with me and literally saved my life several times. People tell about an old rancher who kept a fifth of whiskey under his pickup seat in case he got stuck in a drift. But when he did get stuck, it was so cold that the whiskey had turned to slush. My van had no radio and my heater was undependable. I used a personal tape player with headphones, but once it got so cold that the batteries wouldn't operate unless I put the player down my neck inside my coat. That worked fine except when it was time to change the tape.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In summer (a relative term since at this altitude a snowstorm can come at any month of the calendar) the climate is ideal, bright but not uncomfortable because of the low humidity. Pothole lakes become mirrors where horses wade up to their bellies in their own reflections. A breeze keeps insects moving along. The growing season is not quite long enough to mature tomatoes, as I discovered when I tried to finish raising some seedlings NASA sent the science class to grow after the seeds had gone into space. If the winds hold off, fall can be a glory of glittering yellow aspen, purple hardy aster, and red "sticky geranium" leaves. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In every season the landscape offers one vista after another. Even in a blizzard a sensitive eye sees washes of palest blue or rose on the snowy delicate pencil sketches of weed and branch, and bursts of golden light even when the air is full of goosedown snow. Rainbows can arch in every direction, one inside the other, and every summer cloud is followed over the land by a shape-shifting indigo shadow. Boulder erratics the size of a house stand alone on the prairie, some of them shaped vaguely like buffalo or other forms. In the old days, The People found them Sacred.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I sat in bed reading, I could glance up from my book and out the window beyond the town's water tower, down the long valley of Whitetail Creek to a row of hills that were miles away. Often I would look up to see a dark purple sky with light-struck, gold-dipped hills in front of it. Or maybe the reverse: dark hills with fabulous gleaming clouds piled up behind. Sometimes I forgot to get back to my book. Bull pines, gnarly limbed and long-needled, with cones covered by clear, dripping sap, stood just outside the window, the rust of the dead limbs contrasting with living green. One quiet Sunday afternoon when everyone was gone, I went out with a pruning saw and made a little space in the boughs in front of my desk window so I could see the town and the landscape beyond. One of the teachers always said that after the school was moved underground, her lessons took half as long as they used to in the old tall-windowed school. I wondered what could be a more important lesson to teach than one's own landscape.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On that hillside out my bedroom window the junior high boys on their skinny horses loved to play tag. The town water tanks, an original and a second newer backup, were "home" because they were easy to touch on horseback. Still-high voices would mingle with thumping horse feet. They rode wildly, out of balance and yet never falling. I was careful not to let them know I watched. They already felt too much scrutiny and wanted to be let alone.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the coulee behind the single teacherages the brush sheltered many magpie nests. These showy but raucous birds are hated by ranchers for their habit of ripping at wounds on stock. One day I dumped a box of old nuts out on a stump in the backyard, thinking it would attract the chipmunks, but soon a mandala of twenty magpies was pecking away at them. Their bills struck the wood like hatchets.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing at my desk one day, I heard the snap of small gunfire. Checking the cat-- safely asleep, what else?-- I cautiously peered through my gap in the boughs. It was Bill Kennedy, potting young magpies with a .22. I watched to see if he were being careful about shooting towards the teacherage and he was. I couldn't really object-- I got tired of the mess and noise of the creatures, too. Coming from the city, I was nervous about guns-- not because I am unfamiliar with them but because of nightly driveby shootings. (The part of Portland, Oregon, where I grew up had become ghetto -- "Little Beirut," people call it.) Few people on the Rez carried handguns. Mostly, only white people seemed to keep them hidden in their pickups. Everyone else carried rifles openly, on racks across the back window. Many were too poor to buy ammunition, let alone guns, so they often borrowed. A particular gun became recognizable to a number of people. "Oh, that's Joe's old Enright. I made that chip right there when I fell on the rocks."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the young goat-owning teacher first arrived, wearing authentic lederhosen, he set out to climb Heart Butte. Other teachers had done the same, sometimes with students along. This tall, sun-burned blonde was proud of his solitary exploit, experiencing exaltation and a sense of privilege. There are books to read about the point in time when Europeans began to interpret peaks as a challenge to strenuous adventure, something to conquer. The old Blackfeet always thought of mountains as dangerous, a good place to get killed. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What the teacher didn't know was that the whole time he was climbing one of the Heart Butte students watched him through the scope on his rifle. "I could have picked him off anytime," said this boy to me. He didn't. In fact, if the teacher had fallen, this boy would immediately have organized help. But what if it had been another boy, one angrier and more out of control? One on drugs?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One night a year after I left, in front of the teacherage where I lived, a pickup burst into flames, burning its occupant beyond recognition. The consensus was that the victim was Charlie Hirst, the slender and amiable man who maintained our school buses and who lived in the teacherage next to me the first year I was there. More than once he rescued me and my balky car, and he did the same for others. I always admired the neatness of his shop. No one knew whether the fire killed him or if he was already dead or whether he was murdered. As I write, his death is not solved. In fact, I hear that the FBI refuses to even positively identify the body as Charlie's.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte is a good place to live, but it is also a good place to die. Living up on the hill with the teachers does not necessarily save a person from violence. Many people pretend that Heart Butte isn't really there. Maybe they are afraid. I have no way of knowing exactly how many unsolved murders there have been, but I suspect the number is high, even for a ghetto.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HAIRY NOSES</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet once roamed the east slope of the Rockies from Great Falls to north of Edmonton and east of Saskatoon. When the reservation on the American side of the 49th parallel was formed, only part of the greater Blackfeet coalition was settled there: the South Piegan portion. Of the clans making up the Piegan tribe, some of the most traditional settled near Heart Butte, which ended up in a lobe of the reservation extending out of Glacier County into Pondera County. Thus Heart Butte is a separated part of the American Blackfeet reservation that is a separated part of the pre-existing continental Blackfeet nation. Many tribal Heart Butte people keep alive their ties to Canadian Blackfeet-- sometimes having more in common with the traditional people up there than with the white-assimilated population in Browning. Pondera County sees them as part of the reservation, which is irrelevant to the white world.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All these forces cause Heart Butte to turn back on itself with a sense of isolation and abandonment. Those who wish to tease them call them "hairy-noses". No one knows why or what it is supposed to mean, but it makes people turn red and get angry. Sometimes they feel like a pariah population, poorer than the others, considered more violent, and certainly in the past more isolated because of the lack of good roads. "Don't go out there," advised one of my full-blood friends. "Those people are 500 years behind the times."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte gathered a certain amount of Montana fame through a column in the weekly Browning paper, The Glacier Reporter, written by John Tatsey, the local arm of the law in Heart Butte in the Sixties. John's surprising grammar and deadpan sense of humor were very popular and he built quite a mythology about the Napi-like (coyote/trickster like) antics of local people drinking, gambling, racing horses, and chasing or being chased by women. His favorite butt of jokes was "Stoles" (Stanislaus) Head Carrier, a large gentle man who loved drink and gambling. I saw him once, seated on a blanket playing cards while babies sat and lay all around him, left by mothers who knew he would stay there and watch them. His sister-in-law taught Blackfeet language at Heart Butte School while I was there. She was fully accredited by the state of Montana and retired about the time I left.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tatsey's columns were reprinted at various times and places, including the Congressional Record, and are part of a genre based on antics of people like those in Kinsella's books, or Dan Cushman's Stay Away, Joe (which became an Elvis Presley vehicle), or most recently The Pow-Wow Highway, written by David Seals. Tatsey had a curiously superior attitude towards his townspeople, though he was once brought before Justice of the Peace Bob Scriver himself for being drunk and disorderly and, in all fairness, put that in his column, too. A collection of his columns was published locally as Black Moccasin. His descendents have formed a strong, tightly-knit clan entrenched in the local schools. Many are teachers and a few are administrators, though that generation is nearing retirement.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the early 1960's there was a notorious incident near Heart Butte in which a policeman confronted several young men who roped him and dragged him to death. Because the Tatsey columns have been reprinted so much over the years, in a kind of print loop, the incident has remained in many minds, taking on the status of a truer-than-truth myth, until the family of the policeman recently have begun to talk about a posthumous award for his bravery. In fact, George "Duffy" Comes At Night was finally honored at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law Enforcement Memorial in Artesia, New Mexico in 1994, the National Police Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1995, and finally on the annual Montana Peace Officers Memorial Day in 1996. People in surrounding white communities have forgotten the case is thirty years old. In 1988 an official at the Canadian border told me the story, swearing that it had happened only a few years earlier. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It has been easier for white folks to forget the 1965 flood. Swift Dam, upstream and not far from Heart Butte, crumbled because of lack of maintenance and sent a wall of water down Birch, Badger, and Two Medicine Creeks that killed many people and destroyed homesteads. Families were disrupted and many moved in the ensuing grief and confusion, some ending up in Browning. "Flood homes" were issued only to Native American survivors, prompting a good deal of jealousy among local whites who were also hit hard. Three dams had broken, all of them federal and in theory monitored by federal authorities. They had originally been intended as part of a huge irrigation project in the Thirties that had slowly lost its focus and died. The federal government had deducted the cost of the project from the negotiated payment for the reservation land.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Paving the reservation roads in the Eighties had made it possible for Heart Butte families to move back while keeping jobs in Browning, so the number of children in the community increased dramatically. In 1989 Heart Butte Grade School was finally granted permission to extend itself to a K-12 school, but since the change was experimental the additional classes were housed in the same ten-year-old building where grades K-8 attended. A separate building was to be provided once the viability of the expansion seemed assured. By the time construction was finally begun in the summer of 1994, every teacher on the original high school faculty had been driven off. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1990, a century after the Starvation Winter and after paved roads made it possible to get to town on most days, certain young healthy men without jobs, but possibly with drug habits, survived by raiding the houses of their frail grandmothers to get food bought with Social Security. They did not mean to do harm, believing that the grandmothers would simply receive more food or money. The sources of federal money are dim and arbitrary. In most young tribal minds the money is an entitlement rather than welfare. The tribe does receive entitlement money from the U.S. Government as part of treaty agreements and payments, but individuals also may be part of the same welfare and social security programs as any other citizens. This money could not be replaced and old people went hungry, along with the children they tried to raise. Other family members threatened violence. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I heard about the situation, knowing that the offenders were among my students, I told about the Arctic Inuit who had to survive the most dreadful of circumstances and I repeated stories of small isolated families who had to resort to cannibalism, eating the old people in order to keep the children alive. Though an Inuit would understand that keeping the children alive was keeping the whole group alive and therefore justifiable in extreme circumstances, the students were horrified. Without being specific about individuals, I told them there was no difference between the young men who stole their grandmother's food and the Inuit who cannibalized their grandmothers. "Were times really that hard?" I asked. "Was there no other way to get food?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Robbing the grandmothers didn't happen again-- or so I thought. This is the power of a story. A hundred years earlier the stories would have come from the old people themselves and the young men would have honored them by bringing food they had hunted in cooperation with each other. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I was finally ordered to leave Heart Butte, it was really because I dared to tell such stories. "English teachers," said the principal, "Are supposed to teach correct grammar-- nothing more." Stories are political-- an ancient and effective way of teaching-- and who can control the way they are interpreted? Politics are important to a superintendent making a higher salary than he could ever earn in a white school, especially just before retirement. (One's retirement salary is determined by one's last three years of pay.) For the administration, confrontation was effective so long as it was with their white teachers. If administration confronted community, even through the school board, they would be gone, too. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the other hand, it was wrong for me to tell the story--because I was not the right person and therefore the reason for telling it could be construed as a white woman telling lies about the local people and accusing them unjustly. I could be too easily slid from defender to persecutor.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-43045598835350555492013-08-10T14:53:00.003-06:002014-08-28T11:49:13.982-06:00THE DUST SETTLES<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE DUST SETTLES</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>When I need advice, I'll ask a raven</i>.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Robes</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BLAMING THE VICTIM</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The summer I moved to Heart Butte there was a murder in Dupuyer, thirty miles away on the southern edge of the reservation. A couple of alcoholics, chronic to the point of being "wet-brained," had been hanging around town pestering people. They slept in unlocked cars and outbuildings, bummed money and food, and generally made themselves a nuisance. In the city they would be called street people. In so small a village as Dupuyer everyone knew them by name. Except one person. An old gent from somewhere else had recently bought one of the Dupuyer bars, expecting (not unreasonably) to make a lot of money. Towns have always lived off the thirst of reservations. Many Montana fortunes have their roots in a still.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It would not be wise for a Blackfeet to be drunk in the larger Pondera County town, Valier, which was founded by Belgians wanting a place to raise families away from the rough oil town of Cut Bank. College-educated mixed bloods-- especially Browning school administrators and coaches (often the same thing)-- drink in Valier. Browning bars can be rough and may not treat Heart Butte drunks kindly in the event of trouble. So by default tiny Dupuyer has always been a more or less safe place for a quiet binge.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But this new tavern owner did not know these particular drunks. When one was thrown out but returned to beat on the door, the owner locked it, went around to the back to his living quarters to get a rifle, and circled to the front again in order to lean over the fence and fatally shoot the drunk. The old man was acquitted. His defense was that he was afraid for his life and that the drunk was getting a tire iron from a pickup in order to attack him. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No tire iron was found. But the archetype of an angry man taking up a pipe or bat is the reservation equivalent of a drive-by shooting. I have seen them myself, walking forcefully in two's or three's-- rarely alone--searching for their enemy at any time of day. Even reservation women enraged with their lovers will take up a bat and destroy the offender's car. One of Browning's most admired students had been killed with a jack handle by another youth only a short time earlier. People near the reservation were willing to believe there might have been a tire iron. White people.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At first people interpreted the incident as racist. (Rightly, in my opinion.) In only a few months most of the local Blackfeet were saying, "Well, that drunk in Dupuyer should have known better. He never was much good." This is called "blaming the victim." It has the advantage of not requiring action. For a while the local Blackfeet avoided the tavern, but as soon as they had sufficiently settled in their own minds that the drunk himself was to blame, they drifted back. He became different from them, and therefore they felt safe. He was the scapegoat, heaped with the sins of the community and then sacrificed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If I had been an old-time Methodist minister, like the one who finally ended vigilante hangings in Helena by going out with a saw one morning and cutting down the hanging tree, I would have taken a sheet of plywood down to the tavern and nailed it over the front door. But to make such gestures, one needs a source of income that comes from elsewhere. The social hierarchy is held in place by economic opportunity.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The drunk had two high-school-aged daughters and one son. They had loved their father, whatever his faults, and they grieved almost secretly. In class it was hard to hold their attention. Soon they began to act recklessly and to disappear for months. The drunken man so many were quick to blame was a vital and necesssary part of their personal lives, even in death. Too many people expect the school to be able to discipline, comfort and inspire kids like these. The school copes by denying that any of these community problems are their business.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And so the dynamics that created the “Baker Massacre” continue. Fringe characters cause low-grade trouble. No social entities take responsibility. Someone over-reacts. Lives are lost which means that the innocents around them suffer and the society in which they live is torn, and then there is a storm of blame, soon suppressed because it is painful. No one looks for root causes. No one takes responsibility for change.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">PROTECTION</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Who is your man?" the students asked me. A woman without a man in a place without law and order is seen as a person one can hurt without consequences. In the Sixties the mere name of "Scriver" was enough protection for me to walk anywhere on the reservation-- even in the middle of the night-- without fear. Bob Scriver was both the City Magistrate and a Justice of the Peace. His father and brother were respected city fathers. In those days being white also gave me some protection, since an Indian who bothered a white woman-- like a Black man in the south-- was bound to be in serious trouble. White people dominated Browning and the BIA. I often heard it said, "Well, we can't let the Indians get control of this." Strangely, they would say it right in front of the assimilated Blackfeet among them who ran successful businesses. If you had asked those indiscrete whites why, they would have said, "Oh, he's not an Indian. He's one of us." That's what assimilation means: becoming just like the dominant group, who think they are the norm and therefore the way people ought to be.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BONDS AMONG ALL PEOPLE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of those enterprising men fit the stereotype of the Westerner shaped by Jimmy Stewart, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne, whom they consciously took as role models. Hard-working, handsome, lean men with families, they ran the ranches and small businesses of the town. Some were World War II or Korean veterans. Few were easy on their wives and more than a few were hard drinkers. Some were misfits in the larger society who had found a little corner where they thought they could be themselves. Secular or maybe Christian in the narrowest sense, they mostly attended the white Methodist church if they went at all, and didn't give much thought to the larger community of Blackfeet, except to shake their heads over laziness, tardiness, dirtiness and the other things they hated and tried to eliminate in themselves. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The children of these men dominated the high school activities of the Sixties. More than a few of the children married Blackfeet classmates, so now these white men are the grandfathers of mixed-blood Native Americans whom they tenderly cradle on their laps. They are not always sure about their sons- or daughters-in-law, but dearly love the third generation. For the sake of those children, they are willing to at last curb their prejudices. And, a little late, they begin to realize that their kind of white man, small family ranchers, is as endangered as they thought Indians were.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Until the Sixties when the BIA decided to hire Native Americans, the white employees of the BIA and the hospital were a kind of co-community with the white residents of Browning. Often well-educated and more worldly than the local whites, the whites "on the hill" from past times were legendary to me through my in-laws, but I knew the last white superintendent, Bill Grissom. He was an intelligent man who achieved heroism when the Big Flood came in 1965. In the John Wayne tradition, he personally labored to save people and did not sleep until all were safe. In fact, Phil Ward and other school officials went out to help and faced the horror of seeing children they knew drown before their eyes, though they stripped barbed wire from the fences, tied tires to the end, and ran alongside the rushing water to throw them as impromptu lifesavers. For weeks the schools became refugee centers.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It has always been a strength of the reservation that in times of real emergency, everyone forgot their differences and threw themselves into the effort to save lives. The bonds formed in those circumstances are what keep the small prairie communities of today still alive. Perhaps it is the many perils of ordinary life in such a place that give it more depth and “edge” than life in tamer settings.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">About the time I went to Browning, the nurses at the Indian Health Service began to be Indian. Audra Pambrun was the most famous one, winning national awards for her dedication to helping. Then in a few years the doctors were Indians from other tribes, and finally now, after decades, there are Blackfeet doctors. Many of these people are talented and dedicated to helping, forming a flying wedge for improvement in at least the health aspect of the tribe. These days they put much of their effort into prevention. Since health care workers used to responding to anyone with a need, they are also a force for inclusion and in an emergency do not turn away anyone, red or white, local or tourist. They have rescued Scrivers several times. Mary Ellen LaFromboise, now a director of hospital programs, is the great-granddaughter of Chewing Black Bone, last warrior to have taken a scalp and friend of James Willard Schultz. She is only one among many to have found a new path.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the days of my in-laws, the first decades of Glacier Park, the rangers and managers of the Park Service mixed with the people of Browning, but now there is little relationship except in the tourist towns right at the gates to the Park. Glacier Park's white bureaucrats hardly interact with the Blackfeet except in small confrontations over summer jobs. Smart park superintendents are careful to invite Blackfeet to speak to tourists in the big hotels or to work making beds over the summer, especially after the Minnesota college kids have worn out and left. But they are not anxious to have Blackfeet as real players in the Park Service hierarchy. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By now Browning's businesses have been mostly sold to outsiders who may "run-them-to-failure" (a conscious business strategy when there is no hope for growth). Or they may simply have been left in physical ruins by aging proprietors with no heirs. A series of governmental and tribal blunders have created half-developed hulks of factories around the town. Some mixed-blood people run cafés and service stations, but the most prosperous are only fronts for investors in Butte. A few whites have managed to sustain good businesses. A nun and a priest fell in love, married, raised a family, and sustained a series of businesses, never wavering in their hard work. Another couple kept a small clothing store humming along. The IGA is said to be the most profitable unit of the owner’s modest chain. The owner hires local help and does not live in Browning anymore. But the smaller village of Heart Butte has had no white community to speak of until the high school brought in so many new teachers at once. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Tribal Business Council becomes ever more aggressive about keeping the chips in front of themselves. New taxes are being imposed and contracts are signed with the State in spite of loud opposition from tribal members. It is against the law to buy or sell property without the knowledge and approval of the Tribal Business Council, a rule that gives that particular set of individuals something like insider information to the stock market. Getting onto the Tribal Business Council is like striking gold. Election battles are free-for-alls. Recent Council minutes quoted a local tribal leader as saying, "What we need around here is one honest Blackfeet." He meant that every time a good business prospect develops, the people in control of it can't resist using it for their own benefit.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LOOKING FOR WORK</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">White people who wish to put down Indians often say, "Let those deadbeats get jobs. They should get off welfare. Then they can hold their heads up." But the truth is that jobs for all simply don't exist. Wealth comes to the reservation through the major institutions: Bureau of Indian Affairs, school system, Indian Health Service, federal welfare and state unemployment. Payments come in enormous amounts, which means it is easy for the skillful to cut off little slices here and there without anyone noticing. Much of the wealth is doled out in salaries, which depend upon staying in the good graces of one's boss and complying with whatever regulations pertain. There are no labor unions except the teacher unions, which works somewhat in Browning but not in Heart Butte, which is not big enough to be worthwhile for a union to concern itself. (Both the NEA and AFT reps told me that bluntly.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A great deal of money comes in grants and contracts, governmental and private. So far as I know, there is no way to make a comprehensive inventory of either sources or recipients, since they are so various. Those with education and vision can support themselves in the modern "hunter/ gatherer" mode, taking consultancies and doing projects. If they are people of conscience, they can share what they find. But when an organization like Headstart or Piegan Institute succeeds and prospers while helping others, people react with suspicion.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To be a good school administrator on a reservation one must be a dedicated reader of federal regulations. Some funds come automatically through student attendance numbers, like federal money that is meant to replace local state property taxes which is the traditional means of supporting public schools. This money is necessary on the reservation and on military reservations or other blocks of federal land because few state taxes can be collected there, even though the schools are a state responsibility. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some money comes through treaty obligations, the agreed payment for lands surrendered by Blackfeet a hundred years ago. Other government funds come through various application processes that mean monitoring and meeting deadlines. The funds might be earmarked for remedial education, for affirmative action, for libraries or a host of other "titles" as they called in shorthand for the part of the law referred to in conversation. Currently, the titles are grouped under a United States law called the Improving America's Schools Act.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">School grants, public or private, demand considerable thought and resourcefulness. One must write an application-- sometimes even come up with the concept. My brief experience with grants was in Browning in the Seventies when I helped Bill Haw write a grant for Experimental Schools that would have supported a major reorganization in Browning. The amounts available approached a million dollars. Our ideas weren't good enough, the panel said, but our appeal was so eloquent that they were sending along $10,000 for us to use to do research so we could reapply. The administration used the money for something else-- transporting parents to basketball games, I heard.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another teacher in Browning wrote a grant application for a measly $500 to buy art materials for his class. Art is one of the effective organizing and healing forces for the kids. The money came but was used for a snow blower. The art teacher quit. This pattern is repeated over and over in many variations. The institutions who make the grants are stretched thin to even sift through the applications, much less follow up to make sure the funds are used wisely. Anyway, the Blackfeet Reservation is so remote that no bureaucrat wants to take the sequence of airports, rental cars, and risky roads --much less the time -- to see what goes on. One might not make it back to the airport on those roads in the dark. Montana has been like that since the first Governor was lost overboard from a riverboat.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If someone becomes an effective grants writer and even uses the money properly, the Blackfeet Tribal Council or the henchmen thereof are likely to come around like bears scenting carrion. Recently one such councilman actually hired a "financial investigator" in Minneapolis to get access to personal credit records for one successful individual, in hopes of finding juicy material for a confrontation that would knock his target away from the big economic card table that is the reservation. Everyone always suspects the school superintendents of some kind of skimming. Some entrepreneurs are exploring the modern lawsuit as a kind of mining operation, blackmailing corporations one way or another. Public sympathy for Native Americans is high. Juries are likely to generous, unless they are from near the reservation.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Heart Butte when I was there, the favorite trick of the Supe was to apply for funds through ear-marked Titles (sub-sets of bills passed by congress) for a drug counselor, a language aide, or a library aide-- then use the employees as substitutes or office help. Financial statistics were a secret-- though they were supposed to be public record-- and committees required by law didn't always really meet. Instead the Supe would take a quick drive around town consulting individual members to get a quorum of consensus. That way democratic processes like arguments didn't slow things down. He was always fighting deadlines. If things didn't turn out well, the board members could individually claim that they didn't know, were deceived, didn't make that decision or weren't even in town that day. It seemed like a good strategy for re-election, but in fact it was a good strategy to keep everyone divided and indecisive. Of course, when a meeting was called in Heart Butte, there was never any assurance that people would show up even if it were in their best interest.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A PARABLE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Heart Butte town dogs were unknown to me, but the teacherage dogs had distinct personalities. When I first came, Shunka, which is Sioux for "dog," felt he was the alpha-male. A husky mix, he ran loose, making puppies and chasing off intruding males. Two other vaguely shepherd dogs were kept in their yards. One small cringing female, a black dog with brown eyebrows, attached herself to Mrs. Marlboro, who got her spayed and named her "Kiki." (I called her "Keeka," meaning "wait now" in Blackfeet, which annoyed Mrs. M.) A female blue kelpie, valuable for working cattle, raised a batch of pups under Mr. Z's trailer. The Lederhosens soon brought in a foolish female shepherd mix. At first the dogs didn't make as much trouble in my life as a big yellow tomcat who came visiting, unwanted by me or my spayed calico cat. But pretty soon the tomcat mysteriously died.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then a big white dog appeared. Maybe he had a little blood from the huge white Kuvasc dogs sometimes used around there to guard sheep from wolves. To get rid of him, he was given to Augie, a student who lived in down in the village and unwisely remarked it would be nice to have a dog. But the big male, now named "Augie," refused to stay in town. Churchill, the athletic director, took a liking to him and began feeding him the scraps from the Omaha frozen steaks he favored. Churchill called the dog "King." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day King and Shunka engaged in an archetypal battle for dominance. All day they alternated between slashing at each other and taking short rests. Once they fought their way into and then back out of one of the garages, leaving long spatters of dog blood on the walls. Their snouts were bloodied and their sides were streaked. No one tried to intervene and anyway nothing short of shooting one of the dogs would have worked. We all, teachers and students, kept track of what was happening but didn't stand around watching. In the end King crunched Shunka's foot hard enough to break the bones. The loser went crying off with his foot held up. The kids were glad because Shunka was known to bite them. The men were secretly proud of the shining white King. The women were glad that Shunka would be staying home for a while because they liked to walk over the grassy hills and Shunka always insisted on coming, but chased cows which made the teachers unwelcome.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was fond of King, too. But when the Lederhosen's moved to the single teacherage next door to me with their female, now with a puppy by King, the three dogs covered the yard with droppings and leapt into my car trunk to steal groceries unless I closed it after each trip to my door. King got into the habit of sleeping on my doormat, so that I had to heave him to his feet to get in or out. I began to be annoyed. My disposition was not improved by Mr. Lederhosen's attachment to loud musical instruments on which he never played whole melodies, but only intermittent snatches as the mood struck him. I was beginning to get cabin fever-- shack batty. A familiar malady in those parts, but mine came from wanting to be even more alone.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Lederhosens gave birth to a baby. Their first goat, fond of riding around on the front seat of the pickup next to Mr. Lederhosen, was once transported in the back of the vehicle, where it found a bag of dry rice and foundered during the ride. Their second goat, a sweet little angora nanny, was tethered to her goathouse alongside the teacherage. Mrs. Lederhosen was standing next to the goat, holding her baby, when King came out of nowhere and tore the throat out of the goat, killing it on the spot and traumatizing the gentle mother. Later, calves began to be killed and King was shot on the scene of slaughter by one of the students whose family owned the calves. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Probably nothing divided the outsiders from the insiders so clearly as their reaction to the death of the King. Country people hardly paused to notice King was gone. More dogs were always coming. City people thought that if someone just tried enough, they could find some way to end violence, prevent bloodshed, and stop the dominance of alpha-animals. These dogs are my metaphor for the conduct of administration in Heart Butte. Likewise, the community would make attacks on the administrators, one after another, believing the supply of new superintendents was endless. The teachers believed that reform was possible and tried to organize committees, write letters, and make plans. This got them fired.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The cynical conviction that underlay much of the Heart Butte political scene was, as Churchill put it, "Big dogs eat first." The administration and the community families were pitted in a battle for dominance as surely as Shunka and King. The goal was economic security, which only the school could provide in this tiny reservation hamlet. This dynamic was so strong that everything else became scenery and every kind of strategy became legitimate. White educators off the reservation, and even Browning administrators, watched with interest but had no desire to intervene. They also intended to be Big Dogs and to Eat First. But Heart Butte wasn't their pack.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Strategies included hiring weak teachers, making sure they never got tenure, keeping facts -- especially about funding-- secret, doing business in a fractured and unrecorded way, buying off enemies, and -- if necessary-- bluffing. Few administrators or school board members, if any, ever took any interest at all in teaching methods or content unless the community questioned them. Government overseers, both state and federal, were too far away to know what was going on. The biggest advantage the Heart Butte administration had was simply racism, both the racism of the local white community and the racism of the elitist half-breed community. Secretly, both groups believed that Heart Butte did not deserve help. They thought nothing could be done to improve the situation and would freely say so in bars -- though not in official contexts. In short, the local citizenry was so busy fighting each other, they were easily shunted aside from saving themselves.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the actual matter of killer dogs, the Supe issued a memo, which I quote exactly:</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">RE: Dogs</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">There has been a lot of dogs in the neighborhood that have not been under control, fenced, leashed, or kept in. The problem needs addressed immediately.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All dogs who are not kept under control by a leash, fence, or kept in, and is allowed to run, will be subject to removal by the authority of the Heart Butte School District.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No real action was ever taken. The Supe knew that if he really did anything, people would be angry. In short, the Heart Butte School District would claim no authority. Let sleeping dogs lie.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TROUBLE MAKER</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I flatter myself that the Heart Butte administration would have been terrified if they had understood what I was about. They, like Edward T. Hall's one-time boss on the Navajo Reservation, disliked anyone "Indian, intellectual, outsider or not under his thumb." That is, they disliked sources of trouble and were alert to identify those persons, so as to eliminate them. They mistook me at first, because they thought I was a white woman from Browning (therefore racist) and because they didn't understand my connection to Bob Scriver, whom they assumed I would resent. My education, from my B.S. in theatre at Northwestern University to my M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago and my M.Div. from Meadville/Lombard Theological School, was a total mystery to them. They thought all ministers were Christian order-keepers -- not intellectual iconoclasts or social change-makers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The superintendent--who said he wanted the school to be a clean, orderly haven (white) in a degraded world (Indian) -- finally began to sense something different and asked me to explain what I was doing, but I evaded him. Not knowing made him suspicious, but knowing would only confirm the worst. His intent was to impose a rigid small-town set of standards that would reduce Indians, in the name of "what's good for them," to a class of servants who wait tables, change tires, arrange shop shelves, and are grateful to the white man for his generosity. Many of the Indian adults would have said that was a good goal, in fact, the only one they could imagine. Many Montana white people live their lives as servants and do it proudly. But they all secretly want to be Big Dogs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The only way I could see for Heart Butte to have a future was to create a generation of entrepreneurs and cooperators who could make the reservation self-supporting. I thought these kids could want to learn, demand to learn, learn in spite of the difficulties. They needed to take their lives into their own hands, find out what they cared about, and accept the challenges of doing things never done before. In a world so rapidly reconfiguring, this is what kids everywhere must learn to do. The technical part was not a problem for Heart Butte kids -- they could program a VCR as well as any suburban kid -- but they were terrified of taking hold of their lives. In fact, they figured they wouldn't live long enough to have any choices anyway and often said so.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just as exercise, I brainstormed small business ideas all the time and wrote up little plans about how they could be done. "Pretty Maids All in a Row" would be a contract motel-cleaning service and supply teams of room-cleaners trained to be fast and thorough. If they were in teams and traveled together in a van, that would solve the problem of individuals who disappear to go Pow-Wowing in the middle of summer. It could be run as a co-op that contracted for its own manager. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Yellow Jackets" was to be a sewing enterprise involving jackets in Blackfeet designs but with modern casual materials: Corduroy and rickrack, wool and embroidery, maybe velvet with sequins for evening, and--as an expensive climax-- buckskin with beads or quills-- absolutely authentic right down to the tail of the deerskin folded over under one's chin. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Lodge Willow" would be a furniture company that made chairs from lodgepole pine and rawhide, with Blackfeet willow backrests. For tourists, who can't take big chairs along, they could make little toy chairs or even miniature authentic Blackfeet backrests. "Red Skins" could be a hide-tanning business, specializing in smoke-tanned buckskin, wonderfully aromatic, waterproof, and suede finished. Anyone who thinks they can make these businesses work on the reservation is welcome to the ideas.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I talked about these ideas, most people looked blank. I asked a senior boy, one of the best shop students, to make me two sawhorses so I could put plywood on them for a table, but he never could understand how to begin. Yet there have always been fine builders and cabinet-makers around the reservation. It was just a matter of believing it can be figured out and that nothing would be lost by trying. Something in the experiences of the young people kept them from trusting themselves. They looked always to authority figures, but then blamed them when things didn't turn out to their liking. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TOP OF THE HEAP</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the time of year I was hired to teach at Heart Butte, the Supe was the only administrator. A big ruddy man with the beefy-tallow of an athlete gone to seed, the Supe had spent years selling insurance and could spin a story. He was born and raised poor in a tougher and smaller place than Browning. He fancied himself a philosopher and a benefactor of the Red Man, though his idea of doing them a favor was to close down the reservation and kick them all off welfare. Our hiring interview was almost flirtatious. ("You're quite a woman!" he exclaimed.) He told me about a dream he had that he'd like to develop into a book. The hint was that I might do a little ghost-writing. It sounded a whole lot like Brigadoon: going on a walk one day and finding in the mist a magical place where everything was all right.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was told by people who had known the Supe in his days of college football coaching that he had run a rough squad. He had been divorced from his first wife--the children from that marriage were grown and almost all well-placed in education jobs around the state. Now he was married to a woman quite a bit younger. They had adopted two pre-school-aged Native American children, not Blackfeet. I was never in the Supe's house, but was told that his wife kept it immaculate and made every holiday magical by decorating and baking. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Supe was a "jack" Mormon, meaning that he was raised that way but did not obey the precepts or attend services. His wife seemed truly religious and enjoyed singing with the Catholic choir. Later, when people became angry at the Supe, one of their punishments was to drive her out of that choir. I always thought it hurt him more than any attack on himself personally. He sometimes got tears in his eyes when he spoke of his wife. I wondered if she hadn't saved him from personal disaster somehow, maybe by helping him to break a drinking habit. But even as he tried to protect her, he tried to figure out how he could get her on the payroll to teach music without causing a great outcry over nepotism, one of the hot-button issues in Heart Butte.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Supe was pulling down a salary approaching $60,000 -- same said $72,000 when free housing and other benefits were counted. (As a former insurance salesman, he made sure that we got the best health insurance policy in the state. I always regretted not taking more advantage of it.) In Montana that amount of money is what the governor of the state is paid. He thought he needed all the money, as well as serving Heart Butte a third year, before he could retire with enough pension to build a house over in the Flathead Valley. He knew that very few administrators ever got through a second year at Heart Butte: most of them lasted only one. The Supe was hoping that by riding the wave of a new high school, he would pick up popularity. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He also managed to establish in everyone's minds that he had great expertise with money and was the only person who could make sure that Heart Butte got everything coming to it from the Federal Government. Day after day he sat in front of his little Apple IIC computer crunching long lists of numbers. One day I came into his office a little too quietly and realized he was asleep there, snoring quietly with his head tipped forward.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Everyone was impressed by the Supe except Athena, who second-guessed every move the Supe made. This woman was always convinced that someone was bleeding off money from the school. Early on I accidentally happened upon school office staff running an appeal for funds for the Catholic church through the school mail meter. Everyone knew that the school let the church use school buses, classrooms, and copying machines at no charge. It would have been political suicide to refuse. When I asked Athena about the church using the school mail meter, she violently denied such an idea. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some of the opportunities for real, if petty, graft didn't occur to me until later. After I had left, the Supe retired but then discovered he didn't have enough money after all. (California Yuppies in search of paradise had immigrated to the Flathead in such numbers that real estate and building prices had soared.) The frozen food company that had delivered all our cafeteria meals and much of the teacher groceries gave him a job driving one of their refrigerator trucks. It suddenly came clear why three big guys with high cholesterol counts always threw out scraps from the very best Omaha aged steaks, the kind advertised in good magazines. And why the school cafeteria constantly served reheated frozen deep-fat-fried fast food-- mysterious and nearly inedible single portions labeled "gyros" or "pizza pockets"-- instead of more healthy meals as government guide-lines suggested. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I began to think about why our milk was often sour and why the Doc was so reluctant to object to the provider. The kids said, "They give all their bad stuff to us because we're only Indians." The Doc said, "Oh, it's just a state of mind. One person says sour and everyone else gets the same idea. But it's really all right." Once I made a protesting little girl attempt to drink some but she gagged on it. She opened up the carton and showed me: completely curdled and spoiled. I was ashamed. The kids were right. And the Doc would not challenge the distributor even when I carried the evidence to him. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I also wondered about our top-of-the-line athletic equipment-- what special perks went with them? Especially remarkable was the football equipment in a place where, because of temperament and the climate, football was not particularly popular. (In fact, no one turned out until the coaches worked on the boys for a while.) There were expensive jackets for all athletes and big color portraits of all the teams. Yet there was little money for the yearbook. Then what about that wonderful teacher insurance for a place where most of the teachers and staff were entitled by treaty to the free full services of the Indian Health Service? They rarely used the white doctors or hospitals who would have asked for insurance.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After my first interview, the Supe walked me through the school, proudly describing all the heat-saving features and showing off how well-maintained the place was. "Except for this little corner here, where Shorty stands all the time and rubs a greasy spot, this school is kept immaculate." (Shorty had severe fetal alcohol syndrome.) It certainly looked much newer than the ten years it had seen. The library had a wall-sized photographic mural of a rain forest. A hallway had another mural of woods with a deer. Both were un-defaced, remarkable in a locale where no sign featuring an animal goes unperforated. In Education for Extinction, the author remarks that many of the old government-employed educators saw their mission as protecting the government's property. The Supe wasn't a government employee, but still was prouder of the building than of the students.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the cafetorium ghostly portraits of native Americans were painted on the walls -- somehow foggy. The Supe explained that the Blackfeet art teacher had painted the figures but became unhappy when he wasn't paid as much as he thought he deserved, so tried to spray them over with white paint but ran out of paint. It was politically inadvisable for the Supe to paint them out with the burnt orange enamel of the walls, but he still refused to pay to have the figures finished. Thus, a standoff--warriors in a mist. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SMALL BATTLES</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the more exciting stories in Education for Extinction is about a clash between a sixty-five year old Indian Agent on a Shoshone reservation in 1899-1900 and a female school superintendent. The agent, who had been running the schools himself after the previous superintendent had left, tried to power down Anna Egan, a mid-thirtyish red-headed female: Irish as Paddy's pig, Catholic, and independent as a hog on ice. She was also evidently an early feminist. The agent, John Mayhugh, said that within twenty minutes after arriving she announced that "for the first time in her life she was placed in full power and she knew how to use it."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Documented by reports to headquarters from both sides and finally by a court case, the two strong personalities struggled for dominance, spreading rumors and accusations. Mayhugh stormed that Egan wasn't up to her task. Egan objected that Mayhugh was trespassing. As usual, sex-- not gender but eroticism-- got into the picture. Agent Mayhugh claimed that two young women, one a student and another a kitchen worker under Superintendent Egan's sphere, were immoral and doing bad things. He sent agency police to remove the two bad girls. Egan staunchly defended her student and her kitchen helper. saying they were always "under her eye," and she turned away a posse of five officers with her pistol, threatening to use it "next time." She stationed a woman with a telescope in an upstairs window to watch for developments. The doctor and his wife sided with Egan. The wife waited on the front porch with a two-foot club. It appeared to the Egan side that the Mayhugh side was arming, though in fact Mayhugh had no gun and his friend, Mayers, carried only a broken gun which he hoped was intimidating.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finally Mayhugh and Mayers rode up to the school porch, threats were uttered, both Egan and Mayers waved their guns, and Doc Merriweather-- evidently cracking under the strain-- grabbed Egan's pistol and fired two shots. One grazed Mayers and the other went wild. The Indian police came galloping up, firing over everyone's heads. From then on, there was no more violence but many accusations and no clear conclusion. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In my time matters in Heart Butte rarely reached quite this pitch of violence, but the potential was always there. What did happen was lawsuits over things like people "living in sin" in the teacherages or being wrongfully discharged from their jobs for unproven character flaws. At least one person came away with a comfortable settlement. (Probably I myself had an excellent potential lawsuit, if I'd had the inclination and the money for a lawyer.) Some parents occasionally offered to fight administrators out on the lawn. A previous principal told about spanking a child but later, when the child's grandmother arrived in a rage, having to run for safety in his office while the school secretary calmed the woman.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WARNING SIGNS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the summer of 1989 I began moving my furniture into one of the teacherage units for singles, though the assigned unit was already full of school-owned furniture. By the time I had all my 120 boxes of books squeezed in, it was tight work getting the school's pressboard bureaus and bright print sofas out, but the Supe and a couple of custodians came down with the pickup and did it all in an hour or so. The custodians hardly said a word. The Supe was so ebullient and over-the-top in his bouncing around kidding everyone that I wondered if he always maintained such an energy level. I was picking up bad vibes. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other incident came one day just before supper. I heard a man's voice shouting and went to the window to see the Supe trying to make one of his small adopted sons come home. The boy, about three, simply refused and evaded him. The Supe roared down on him, took his belt out of its loops, and threatened to swat the boy while dragging him by the arm. It did not seem like idealistic or professional behavior in an era when schools tolerate no violence or even touching. I got the impression that the Supe was out of control, though he didn't really beat the child. Others who knew the child better than I said he was incredibly strong-willed boy who needed a firm hand. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was this incident I remembered when, later in the fall, I questioned the re-allocation of a $500 refund on textbooks sent back by the publisher from whom we had originally ordered remedial English books, later trading them in for literature. I wanted to use the refund for more books. This made him angry. His face grew red, his voice rose, and he began to grab computer printouts and fling them on the tables and desks with such force that they slid off onto the floor. One he put under my nose, moving it around and slapping it with the back of his fingers so I couldn't quite read it. A car salesman did that once: waved a contract at me that he claimed showed he was losing money by selling me a car, but kept it moving too fast to read. I still wonder whether that refund ever showed on the books.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Again, when bad behavior on the part of the students finally compelled an assembly, the Supe lost his temper. The high school boys, several of them approaching twenty-one, enjoyed every chance to literally press themselves on the girls. The younger kids were protesting to their parents that they were embarrassed. The big boys had given so many younger boys "swirlies" (forcing their heads into toilets while flushing) that the victims were desperate to get permission to go to the bathroom during class. In an empty hall they could check out the bathrooms before entering or sneak into the teacher or primary bathrooms. There had been a lot of vandalism: one of the newly delivered desks had had the formica carved off. And the teachers were on the receiving end of a lot of nasty language from students. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Supe started off meaning to deliver a kind of locker-room pep talk, but it soon ran away. "No one treats my teachers this way! I demand respect, do you hear me? Respect!" He sounded hysterical. The kids were snickering. "I love my dear wife but I don't twine myself around her in public like some kind of a snake." The bigger boys looked interested. Then he lost it entirely and held up the defaced desktop, wrenched off its chair. "Look at this! JUST LOOK AT THIS!! SHAMEFUL! JUST SHAMEFUL!" And he hurled the slab of wood down on the gym floor, the sacred gym floor which was the whole point of having a high school so that Heart Butte could once again have warriors. For the week that people talked about this assembly, all they remembered was that the Supe might have dented their gym floor. People came up to school to take a look. (The most impassioned school board meeting I attended in Heart Butte was about poor quality paint used for striping lines on that floor.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">From then on, the Supe never made the political mistake of confronting an issue in public. He did no more assemblies unless he was there to make an award or share praise. All public duties were shunted off to Churchill and then in the second year, Cheever.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My relations with the Supe originally cooled because of my clashes with "The Doc" as the Supe called him. Later, at a National Council of Teachers of English conference I met a woman who had been part of a nasty political implosion in Harlem when the Supe had been superintendent there. She told me one version, and when I mentioned it to the Supe, he told me another version that showed him in a much more favorable light. "I had to take those people down a notch! They thought they were just too good!" He talked fast and his face got red. He was never friendly again.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">STRATEGY IS THE BEST POLICY</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Technically, Churchill was the elementary principal, but in the juggling of roles among the three administrators it became clear that Churchill was the diplomat and the athletic manager with little or nothing to do with elementary school matters that more or less ran on automatic. He was a man of quiet diplomacy whose hero, Winston Churchill, suggested that psuedonym. Long a high school football coach, he had also been a high school history teacher and so believed in strategy. He came at all out of friendship for the Supe and because of difficulties in his private life, including health problems like severe overweight. Though he only stayed a year, he was able to snuff out many a potential firestorm. He was especially skillful with the big hormone-saturated basketball players, the weaselly little misfit boys, and me. I soon decided he was the only one with enough education to understand what I was doing. He did my evaluations, always positive, though I had to keep copies myself because the Supe "lost" them. When there was a game, dance or assembly, it was Churchill who quietly saw them through in ponderous dignity. I never saw him rattled or angry. Everyone was particularly fond of his wife, a small cheerful person who sometimes came into the office to restore order or do a special project. She was a professional administrative assistant but could not be hired as the school secretary or board clerk because of nepotism.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE NAVY LANDS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In July the Supe told me he had hired a principal, "Specialist in Indian stuff, already has a complete curriculum, fresh from Alaska, doctoral-level-- exciting, huh?" The man turned out to be a blowhard with a belly, a marcelled hairdo, many tattooes from his twenty years in the Navy, and a watch band of carved walrus ivory. (Later, the fourth grade wrote letters to him telling him that he was contributing to the endangerment of a species, but they were scared to actually deliver the letters.) He installed a very dirty stuffed penguin in his office. His wife always referred to him as Doctor So-and-So, since he was fresh from a D.Ed. program in Bozeman. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ironically my lowest moment with the Doc came when he made me a peace offering: a box of matches from a supply cache left behind by Admiral Scott on his ill-fated journey to the South Pole. I had mentioned that Scott had been a childhood hero of mine-- not so much by choice as by accident. A movie about the expedition was repeatedly shown at my younger brothers' scout meetings because it was free to check out of the library. Scott, rolled up in his sleeping bag with only a tiny pup tent for shelter and a candle stub for light and heat, wrote in his journal, then numbed into death while the tent was buried in snow. The image stays in my dreams, as well it might during a Montana winter. The Doc had been with a Navy expedition to the Antarctic (thus, the penguin) that discovered the cache and basically looted it. I thought he had desecrated a shrine and scornfully turned aside his little box of matches. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc was not bashful in telling us that he had gotten into big trouble in Alaska by offending local people. He said that he was always saved because his wife was the bookkeeper at the big headquarters, with the implication that either because of her knowledge of financial irregularities or her ability to short-circuit requests, she had the weapons to protect him. He said there was a town up there that hated him so bad that there was a sign at the edge of town forbidding him to return. He said he had had one troublesome Eskimo (he never used the word Inuit) student who was so incorrigible that he routinely locked him into a small storage closet all day and once forgot him over night. Later he said he was only kidding.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because he had been a supply sergeant in the Navy, The Doc had been assigned in Alaska to organize the setting up of new schools-- not the curriculum, but the physical materials. The famous Bering Straits curriculum turned out to be a red herring. Though he possessed a copy of it, he had no idea what was in it. He was constantly talking about "natives" in terms of Bering Straits people. The school secretary, a Blackfeet, kept trying to say that there was no similarity between a culture based on a frozen sea and a culture based on hunting grassland buffalo. "They're all natives, " he declared, seeing the important distinction as being between Dominant White and "other." He was not aware that even the theory of American Indians coming across the Bering Straits is a smoking hot button issue, because the theory is used by Europeans to imply that everyone in America is just an immigrant and therefore on an equal entitlement footing. Sure enough, in the curriculum itself I read the statement: "All Americans are immigrants. The Indians just came a little earlier." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> On the first day of school the Doc sent us all off with the most "Indian-looking" elementary teacher (who was only half Blackfeet) so she could tell us about the culture. He warned us, "You know, in Australia you don't want to say 'Kleenex' because that's their word for 'Kotex!'" He didn't come along himself. Luckily, the woman is an intelligent and strong person who gave us excellent advice about how to survive in Heart Butte. Her bulletin board was full of pictures of students she had loved and supported over the years. The most salient thing she had to say was that parents would simply not accept any disciplining of their kids. This attitude evidently comes from a strange combination of prideful entitlement on the part of the parents and pity for the children, who mostly are living in poverty.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So "the Doc" directed us all to observe local taboos and then sat down comfortably under an array of photos of himself shooting bears-- a taboo if you're a Blackfeet purist. Bears are seen as other "two-leggeds," nearly brothers. Still, he got by on bluff and loudness until two girls got into a fight in the hallway. He came barrelling out of the office, grabbed one girl by tucking her head under his beefy arm, and then failed to realize what he had done until her opponent took advantage of the restraint by running around behind him and landing several good punches in the face of the captive. That was enough to convince the population of Heart Butte that he didn't know what he was doing. Complained the Doc, "These people fight like Puerto Ricans."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A LITERARY APPROACH</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the second year, Mr. Cheever arrived to replace Churchill, though without Mrs. Cheever (a second wife) or his teenagers (from the first marriage), all of whom refused to leave Missoula, the college town where Mr. Cheever had just ended a year of unemployment. He was an English teacher with a book manuscript under his arm, an almanac of Montana historical events. It had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to. His specialty had been teaching English on reservations, moving on after every second year, until he couldn't get hired for that position anymore and retrained for principal. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mr. Cheever was a workbook teacher. He had one particular workbook he admired, with one subject for drill and review on each page, and he "did" a page a day. "I wasn't a lazy teacher," he said. "I always corrected those workbooks every night." I thought they were the most boring, useless, beside-the-point things I had ever seen but inevitably I ended up teaching out of them, as did the two other English teachers we had somehow acquired. This had the side-effect of letting the kids who took English from several of us find out the answers in one class, hand them in for the other class, switch workbooks after one had been corrected, and otherwise confuse and subvert all attempts to make order. Within weeks every workbook except those belonging to the habitual good guys had been lost at games on the other end of the state, locked in the trunks of cars, trod upon by horses, left in team buses or soaked in showers. There was no sense in trying to make families buy replacements-- they had no money.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was particularly disgusted because the Heart Butte kids were workbook students. From kindergarten on up they did workbooks, collecting little stamps, scratch-and-sniffs, paste-on hearts. They expected everything to travel at the pace of the slowest person, to do everything in groups and to always have adult support and guidance, and --most of all-- never to have to figure anything out by themselves. Most of the literature on teaching Indians will assert that this is cultural and should not be challenged. At least a half dozen of the high school kids never did figure out that the answers to the workbooks were in the back. One of the ones who did find out immediately showed this little treasure to The Doc, who demanded that I tear all the answers out and destroy them. When I did, the learning curve showed no changes.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, Mr. Cheever was literate, if a bit morose, and he did understand my curriculum -- had even read the books. He was an Easterner, someone who had slipped out of a gray flannel family, with a sort of Richard Ford vision of life as a long, snowbanked, night highway where one could expect, at best, the excitement of occasionally sliding into the ditch. He got all the worst jobs, like phoning frantically around town -- in a town where fewer than half the people had phones -- to find substitutes for teachers with last-minute flu. One day the dishwasher failed to show up and no sub could be found in this village of near universal unemployment -- not an unusual occurrence -- so Mr. Cheever tied on an apron and got to work, good-naturedly. For this bit of heroism, he lost big points around the school. Clearly, he was a powerless bumbler to get stuck with such a job and not be able to make someone else do it. The kids scoffed and jeered. Their parents suggested he was taking work away from the tribe out of racism.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I fought a constant and lonely battle against the erotic harassing inflicted on the long-suffering, oddly maternal, girls. One lunch hour I sat on a cafeteria bench talking to Mr. Cheever when I realized he was looking over my shoulder at something. His eyes dilated and his upper lip swelled. I turned around to find one of the usual suspects with his nose buried in the neck of one of the girls, snurfling and sucking as far down in her blouse as he could get. When I yelped, Mr. Cheever came to the boy's defense. "Innocent fun," he said. For him, maybe.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I tried to warn him about the political undercurrents. At first he played things straight, the way the rules prescribed, like turning in my suspected incest case to the psychologist and dealing tactfully with the slightly crazed male librarian. (Instead of using the locked cabinet in his office for storing videos, the librarian hid them behind the books on the shelves, alongside muffins he had saved from lunch. But then he couldn't find the tapes when you asked for them. And if you went hunting on your own, you were more likely to find stale muffins.) When the postmistress began telling us that she smelled booze on the Supe in the middle of the day, I asked Mr. Cheever if the Supe drank at lunchtime. He innocently replied, "Oh, only a beer or two, I think." Or maybe he wasn't so innocent.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then he began to see his own danger. In the third year of the high school, after I had left, he was rehired, but the new superintendent was run out in late winter. So was the other principal. Pretty soon Cheever also was fired. He stayed on out of inertia, and by default ended up running the whole place in spite of his dismissal. I always pictured him doing it with an apron tied on. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That superintendent who had briefly succeeded the Supe was hand-picked by Athena. When he proved unresponsive to her directions, she led the attack on him. The school board settled the resulting law-suit out of court. This replacement superintendent also had a law-suit pending at the school he had left in order to come to Heart Butte. The legal profession loves confrontations.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">FAMILY POLITICS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte tends to be dominated by a few major families such as the Crawfords; the Calf Boss Ribs and Aimsbacks (who have reputations based on the size and volatility of their interlinked families); and the Running Cranes (ancient leaders among these bands). Rivaling these families are the Little Dogs (also ancient leaders) and the Tatseys, who have many ties to the BullShoes, a family of women famous for becoming locally powerful educational leaders. Another prominent family is Sioux, the Whitrights, who are better educated than most and linked by marriage to the Arrowtops, which is a Crow name. This is the level of politics where the real power is and the level that remains a mystery to most outsiders. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since economic advantage depends upon control of the few jobs and prestige comes from such things as membership in the basketball team, families work hard to make schools represent their members as successful and honorable, regardless of the facts. Any kid from a powerful family is pretty well protected from punishment or bad grades. At the same time, everyone is quick to point out the faults of other families and demand that they be brought to account. A constant crossfire of accusation, defensive offenses, and other operatic fireworks might be amusing except that they rapidly escalate into the dismissal of anyone who doesn't have either a powerful family or a vital impact on the presentation of the school to the larger population, such as coaching basketball extremely well or causing kids to win prizes in state competitions.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In recent decades some of the parents of elementary students are little more than teenagers and many are single mothers. A high proportion of families are alcoholic or otherwise disfunctional because of constant economic hardship, various abuses, or a simple lack of any dependable cultural pattern. Television soap operas or talk shows are probably the most thoroughly internalized pattern, with all their emphasis on materialism, romance, sentimentality, and concern about whose baby is whose. Situation comedies are seen as an accurate depiction of Americans off the reservation and so are the "real life" cop shows. The family of one of my students canceled a vacation to Portland, Oregon, because drug busts were so often featured in one of those cop shows. When I said that was my home town, they were impressed but worried for my mother.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of several teachers in Browning was alcoholic. The school sent him to a dry-out program, because that is contract protocol when the union functions. When he came back he told exciting tales, especially about one beautiful young woman with a spread eagle tattooed across her chest from shoulder to shoulder. The kids could hardly wait to get such a tattoo. Going to "program" had prestige. Kids asked each other if they had been to program as conversation openers, the way singles in bars ask about horoscope signs. Nevertheless, opposition to drinking and understanding of the dynamics of alcoholism are gradually growing. Support groups abound. AA meets within driving distance almost every night. Many people are now teetotallers. There is a women's shelter for victims of abuse.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Churchill searched for months to find a school drug program that was operated by Indians and finally contracted with a group from Portland, Oregon. Two consultants arrived, one "Sho-Ban" and the other Mescalero Apache. Driving to Heart Butte in a snowstorm after their first night in a Browning motel, their rental car slid into the ditch. When they accepted the friendly offer of a lift, someone stole the Apache's impressive broad-brimmed hat out of the abandoned car. (Later it came back.) The plan called for everyone to attend the drug program-- including school board and custodians. After a half day, no grown man was left but those obliged to be there--mostly faculty.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As it turned out, I had gone to high school in Portland with the Sho-Ban's sister and when we did prayer-words in a circle, I used my Blackfeet prayer which impressed some folks, so I was having a good time. But difficulties arose. The follow-up for the workshop became confused, and in the second year the expensive program was abandoned. The new drug and alcohol counselor objected to the humorous and unflattering illustrations of drunken native American kids the program used in their workbooks. Anyway, the two program facilitators seemed reluctant to come back.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The political scene on a reservation is always both fractured and fluid. Alliances change momentarily, not always for reasons anyone can perceive at the time. The first fracture in a dominated people is between those who identify with the oppressor, trying to become like "him," and those who try to keep their own separate previous identity. Soon there are marriage alliances between the oppressor and those who identify. Perhaps a trader has an Indian "wife." This creates a half-caste middle group which must decide which way to go: Indian or white. Malcolm MacFee, in his study of the Blackfeet in the Fifties, felt that the crucial element was the "choosing" of whether to be Indian-identified or white-identified. Whites could even "choose" to be Indian-like. Full-bloods could decide to live as whites, at least on the surface.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thirty years later there are many more choices. Among the groups descended from MacFie's dichotomy are:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>middle class whites;</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>poor whites; </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>assimilated Indians who try to live like whites;</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Indians who continue in traditional ways; </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Indians who try to return to being traditional after assimilating; </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>mixed bloods who try to be white-- usually middle-class; </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>mixed bloods who try to be Indian-- usually poor; </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>mixed bloods who move back and forth over the boundaries;</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>whites who try to be Indian in a romantic, literary way, like James Willard Schultz or Adolph</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Hungry Wolf ("invented Indians); </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>or Indians who are fullblood but from several tribes of Indian: pan-Indians.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These last became a common variation among the students at government Indian boarding schools and among families who travel to Pow-Wows all summer-- a natural enough consequence of young people from several tribes being together at the age of romance. Unexpectedly-- after Fifties relocation put many Indians in the slums of cities where recent immigrants struggled--new mixes have appeared: Blackfeet/Black, Blackfeet/Mexican, Blackfeet/Samoan, Blackfeet/Philipino. Some of them mixed through the urban drug culture. Blackfeet students at last began to attend college and even medical school, where they met and married whites. Add to that spectrum the political identifications of people attracted to reservations: scholars, feminists, gays, writers, ecologists, granolas, Vietnam vets, militia groups, do-gooders, Ivy-Leaguers, cultural drop-outs. The unforgiving choice between red and white is now shattered into dozens of variations. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This scattering may paradoxically clear the way for a new unification if some underlying essential quality of Native American can be found and affirmed as central. The question is how to find that definitive unity and assert it clearly enough to provide a focus for everyone. Will it be living on or owning the land base of the reservation? Will it be blood quantum? Enrollment with the tribe? The ancient language? Religion-- philosophy or practises? Is there some ancient ethos that can be reinstated?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet imitate the very different kinds of white people who impress them: shop keepers, ranchers, Hollywood actors, literary intellectuals, anthropologists, politicians, evangelists, athletes. Indians, like cowboys, read what the anthropologists and novelists write about them and try to live up to it. After the Sixties the counter-culturalists showed up on reservations with romantic ideas about native Americans. Adolph Hungry Wolf (Adolph Gutohrlein, Austrian-born) had been living the hippie life in California. He arrived one Indian Days in an armored car converted to a camper. (I always wondered about the gas mileage and whether he expected armed attack.) He has been living an "authentic" native American life ever since.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In a strange folding-back, the Native Americans who could no longer remember the old ways took white interpretations of the old ways to their hearts and told them to new white men as the real truth-- until real memories became hopelessly entangled with memories of movies and late-night boozy conversations. The real traditionalists (often unrecognized even among their own tribe) found themselves confronted with New Age traditionalists they could not understand. When, one Indian Days, Adolph walked into a Blackfeet lodge with a wooden bowl and asked the old lady within to feed him -- as was once a tradition -- the old lady was terrified and ran to Bob Scriver so he would drive the intruder away. (Bob was the city magistrate and Adolph was white, so she knew her jurisdictions.) The old lady was boarding-school-raised and upheld Victorian standards. No strange men barging in!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So far, this complex cultural situation hasn't created enduring alliances that might stabilize the reservation. Nevertheless, the people in the larger Browning schools have settled into a middle-class, almost suburban, sort of routine. School District #9 is packed with "programs," of every sort: computers, science, anti-drugs, athletic, academic achievement, "stay-in-school" and so on. The school media station beams public television directly into the community all day, so that those who can't afford cable and don't have very good antennas or satellite dishes are watching this channel constantly. Local programs and a community bulletin board are produced. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Right in the center of the East Glacier bedroom community "teacher ghetto", HUD installed a set of houses for middle class Blackfeet. Now those houses are the most carefully maintained in town. The occupants are mostly assimilated BIA employees. The favorite radio station up there is National Public Radio from Missoula, brought in through a repeater privately maintained by community volunteers. Terry Sherburne, a descendent of the original Indian trader, is the most stalwart. For many years he taught foreign languages in Browning and even founded the original Blackfeet language program. Idealistic granolas also settle in East Glacier, interweaving with the teachers. Since "all the children are above average," the elementary school there is probably the most difficult teaching assignment on the reservation, </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MEANWHILE, BACK IN BROWNING</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In many ways School District #9 looks like a major success. Many of the graduates serve as administrators and teachers. (Keith Schauf, one of my former Browning students and a native of East Glacier, was the Heart Butte superintendent for one year. By the end of the year he was by default the superintendent, the principal, and the school clerk. He managed to stay the course and there was no lawsuit.) But I always have the uneasy feeling that the Browning programs are more important than the kids themselves. And there are always rumors of Watergate-type scandals: secret deals, shoeboxes of cash in safes, papers switched, credentials falsified, sexual harassment, etc. High school boys still show up drunk, but play ball anyway. The dropout rate remains the same, about half, although juggling the statistics can produce better percentages.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the summer after I lost my job in Heart Butte, while acting as a stringer for the Great Falls Tribune, I went to interview the head of the drug program in the Browning School District. She was the young, slim wife of the superintendent in Valier. (Some said she never bothered to drive to Browning if the weather were bad. Her husband and the Browning superintendent were buddies.) As I pressed for specifics, she became uneasy and put me off more and more. The program had previously been controversial, partly because some overheated vigilante parents had grabbed a video camera and gone out to document local drug deals. They succeeded all too well. The firestorm of indignation and denial almost killed the program. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I remembered one afternoon when a knot of girls came out of the Browning Middle School bathroom acting high and tiddly. I had gone into the bathroom and searched for booze, but found none. When I reported this to the "apple" (red on the outside, white on the inside) principal, he became enraged and forbade me to even think such a thing in the future. "What would the parents have thought if you'd found something?" he demanded. He was right. The parents would have had his job, even though he was a local Blackfeet, and probably my job as well. Education for Extinction documents several such incidents on various reservations over the decades. In order to get money and praise, the Browning Schools must only appear to have success. There is no need to really succeed. Newspaper stories, television programs and mountains of paperwork are what matter. It pays to produce something that can be shipped to Washington, D.C. so that politicians there can use it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LIVING WITH GRIEF</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yet, success happens even when it is not documented. One counselor in particular always impressed me with his straight-on approach to hard issues. In a school where one of the teachers could fill a blackboard with the names of his students who had been killed since he came there, Mr. Barnard ran a grief recovery group. He allowed me to attend, but I'm not sure he knew how paralyzed by grief I was myself. He was one of the few who acknowledged my ministry credentials. (No one at my liberal seminary had been able to address my reservation experience-- they could not relate to what I told them.) I wish I could tell you the stories I heard from the kids about their losses, but one of the conditions of attending was secrecy. What struck me most was the bravery of pre-adolescents in trying to help their parents, protect their younger siblings and somehow comfort themselves. Often the deaths that they cried over most were those of pets. Sometimes it was their own parents who had deliberately killed the animals.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of my former Browning students are dead. The beautiful and intelligent daughter of my first superintendent died young from a brain tumor. A brain tumor claimed a second, equally outstanding young woman, this one Native American and a nurse. A straight-A white boy committed suicide. A Blackfeet boy, an outstanding artist in a southwest school, also committed suicide. Another suicide was ambiguous, a drug overdose combined with drinking that might have been accidental.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another past student was gifted, far beyond the ordinary, but he was a drunk. Instead of jail, the court would sentence him to the state mental hospital where he would play his guitar and sing for the children. When he was dried out, he'd come back and be all right for a while. Once, on a binge, he stole an ancient, bright red Glacier Park bus and drove it over the high mountain pass of Going-to-the-Sun Highway by moonlight. He used to come in his car and park in the yard, honking for me to come out and talk. Sometimes I went and sometimes I was irritated and didn't. I still have stories he wrote. His wife, a beautiful young woman, smoked while reading in bed, fell asleep and burned alive. Their youngest son was a "sniffer," inhaling solvents. The boy's sister has tried to guide him but inhalant abuse is brain damage that cannot ever be undone, actually dissolving brain cells in a chemical lobotomy. The father promised he would reform, but he died-- perhaps of grief. The grief of his son has never dissolved.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I could name half a dozen more lost students with special gifts. At least one has died of AIDS. Pneumonia. Epilepsy. Car accidents. One young man died in Vietnam. His special friend, the janitor in Heart Butte, brought me a rubbing of the soldier's name from the Memorial in Washington, D.C. To live on a reservation -- like any other ghetto -- means living with grief. The local newspaper is always full of memorial poetry, most of it detached from its proper attribution but some of it original. As a way of comforting the survivors, death is made to seem magical, even desirable. The dead people are held up as ideal, angelic, full of love and compassion. This is in sharp contrast to the old stark Blackfeet fear of ghosts as vengeful and likely to cause trouble.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mr. Barnard, who never advertised that he was also part Native American, got into major trouble when he published in the local newspaper the results of a survey of young people in the state. The survey listed the percentages of kids who had sex, took drugs, got drunk and so on. The parents took this as an accusation of their own specific children and flew into a rage over the idea that anyone should talk this way. The kids themselves read the statistics calmly and agreed they were probably a little understated. When Barnard left, people said, “Oh, he thought he was better than us.” Maybe he was.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Back in 1961 when I was teaching that first seventh grade in Doug Gold/Napi School, I left the class alone for a few minutes while I ran to the office for something. When I came back, they were out of their seats and throwing erasers. "What do you think you are," I demanded in my parents' voice, "A bunch of wild Indians?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The answer was loud and cheerful. "Yes! Of course! What did you think?" Today kids that age would be incensed that I would say such a thing and their parents would be up to the office the next morning. They wouldn't be able to tell you what the insult was, only that they felt there was one. When researchers asked some recent fifth graders if they were Indian, they covered their faces with their hands and refused to answer.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Disturbingly, when I have told these stories to friends -- usually well-educated, liberal people working in religion, education or government -- their reaction has not been to support kids in trouble. Rather they want to “get control,” “structure the situation,” “enhance self-esteem,” and force compliance to their own code. They want to be “big dogs,” too. Some will even defend the administrators, saying, “Well, they were in a hard job,” or even, “Come on! Everyone takes a little piece of the action. Otherwise the job wouldn’t be worth it.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">RELIEF THROUGH RITUAL</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most of the kids would have told you religion had nothing at all to do with their lives, but that was only because they had a narrow understanding of religion, limited to the institutional church and whether or not a person believes in God. To them everything else was secular, which is far different than the way most people through history have seen the world , particularly the autochthonous peoples of the American prairie -- their own ancestors.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Modern commercial holidays are sometimes closest of all to medieval "reversal" festivals: New Year's in Times Square, Mardi Gras in New Ordeans. In Heart Butte it was Halloween. Victor Turner describes theories of ritual in his landmark book, "The Ritual Process", which suggests key concepts in the anthropological study of religion. The "process" of the title depends on a three-step ritual that "goes over the threshold" or "limen" into a special virtual context in which everyone is totally equal, normal rules are suspended, and deep changes or catharsis can take place. It can produce an emotional and social cleansing after enduring oppression and confinement. Then one returns "over the threshold" renewed and ready to go on.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One "goes over the limen" by using music, drums, a special set-aside place, the control of light, the raising of a curtain-- something that will signal the mind in a sensory way that this time and place are different--like going into a church while the bells ring overhead, hearing an orchestra tune-up, or feeling the moment when the theatre darkens and hushes before the curtain rises. During the ceremony time and place take on virtual reality, a suspension of disbelief, an openness like children playing. When leaving the "liminal" space, there are again sensory signals that return one's thinking to the real daily world. But one goes back changed, renewed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even for ordinary people Halloween is special, with disguised little children going out at night to beg from door to door for treats they really ought not to have in such quantity. For the medieval people and for people in Heart Butte -- who had heard many vigorous sermons about the devil as well as many secret ghost stories from the old people at home -- Halloween was full of haunts. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Living in Browning as long as I had, I'd never heard about Halloween in Heart Butte. Trick-or-treating went as usual, but then everyone gathered for a dance at the school. Instead of store-bought costumes, everyone put on old second-hand clothes too big for them and stuffed the clothes full of other old clothes or rags, so that their bodies were completely disguised. Many had store-bought rubber masks that fitted completely over their heads. With their identities secret, they could dare to do forbidden things. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the dance party, the older people sat in folding chairs around the edges. Dances alternated between Indian-style and country, with Leonard Mountain Chief acting as master of ceremonies and playing his fiddle. Like Indian Days pow-wows, there would be prizes for dancing in categories by gender, age and type of dancing. But the only way to claim the prize was to reveal who you really were. Some did and no one was surprised. Some took off their masks to gasps of astonishment. And some refused to unmask. Rumor was that they were nuns or priests, or strange intruders from other communities.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The main principle of a cathartic, stress-smashing, anxiety-purging festival is reversal. In medieval times the king was required to act like a beggar while a real beggar took his throne. In one French town the people of the cathedral performed a mass in honor of the donkey that took Mary to Bethlehem, and hauled a surrogate actual ass up the aisle, prodding him to make him hee-haw in the proper places-- that is, where the priest normally called out.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first reversal I noticed in the Heart Butte cafetorium was a dozen full-blood Blackfeet dressed like Hutterites, who are white-- often blonde. They were stuffed out into the round, well-fed German shapes we all recognized, the men wore pasted-on beards, and the women had the typical dotted scarves tied under their chins. As if that weren't enough, they had actual names pinned to their backs, names of people we knew. In fact, the Hutterites had loaned some of the clothes.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since I was not in disguise, it was a little scary to cross the entryway through the lounging bodies of smokers. Some of my trick-or-treat beggars I had recognized as fellow teachers-- their voices and kids gave them away-- but I wasn't sure that white teachers were really welcome at this dance. Big male figures leaned my way, and I wondered how far they would go. One had a gorilla head. A little chimp came up beside me and put its arm around me. I wasn't quite comfortable but tried to stand still. Glass behind the little eyeholes glittered and I tried to remember which of the boys wore glasses. Then the hole at the mouth gradually filled up with an oozing pink tongue which slowly worked its way out at me and reached up for my face. Hiding a little panic, I laughed and pulled away, going to sit with some of the older folks out of costume. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The dancing was extraordinary. Both Indian dancers and "jig-ers" went to extremes to be athletic and original. Arms and legs flew everywhere, heads bobbed nearly to the floor, bodies twisted and twirled in an impossible way. One of the most extraordinary figures appeared to be a lady from Dogpatch, her skimpy dress stuffed and weighted in front to create a pendulous bosom, a garter belt over her long, hairy, muscular legs which ended in high heels nearly squashed by her weight, her raggedy flowered hat held on by elastic but shedding an occasional petal, and her rear end jutting out under athletic shorts. She used her handbag like a weapon, clearing a space in which to dance. Another extraordinary female figure had two great spheres for boobs: one labeled "hot" and the other marked "cold." The gorilla turned out to be a pretty good dancer.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I thought this was what the old times must have been like, a great explosion of energy and invention woven around familiar things made strange by firelight. All the weighty vigilance of staying alive on the prairie among competing tribes must have been thrown off for a night of feast and revelry, a defiance of ghosts. For me to go was a trespass, perhaps, but soon I was laughing too hard to think about it much.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then came time for the prizes and unmasking. The gorilla was one of my best senior boys. Other dancers were surprises, some of them middle-aged and wheezing. The Dogpatch damsel was a basketball player, an uncontrollable young man who belonged in remedial classes but was convinced he was going to be a college star athlete. It was a year before the little chimp with the oozing tongue confessed: it was a quiet, mannerly little girl I never would have suspected. So far as I know, no nuns danced that night.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If we only had the faith to confront the ghosts, what amazing energy might burst out of the kids? </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-16482466124314674952013-08-10T14:52:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:50:06.831-06:00TOMORROW'S PEOPLE<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TOMORROW'S PEOPLE</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time-- But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Aboriginal Australian Woman</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SEVENTH GRADERS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I first taught in the Browning Public Schools in 1961, I started in the junior high school grades. In those days we "tracked," a practise which is much criticized now. It means grouping the kids by ability-- which usually boils down to performance. An intelligent student who is a discipline problem or who doesn't try gets bumped down to a "lower" group. In the afternoon I taught English to the "best" of the seventh graders, that is, the kids who had the best grades, deportment, and family connections. In the morning I taught English to the "worst" of the eight graders, that is, kids with bad grades, bad behavior, sometimes physical handicaps, and families of no power, at least in the school context. We had no special education, remedial or "Title" classes. Bad students just disappeared as soon as they could.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The eighth graders were all boys except for one girl who only stayed with us a few weeks. I used my sharp tongue to keep order the way all my grade school teachers had-- particularly Miss Coleman, my fourth grade teacher who was a Chinook Indian and published author (Kutkos, Chinook Tyee, now out of print). Then one day as I was scolding, I glanced over at the lone girl and saw that she was huddled down into her seat, trying to hide her head under the desk. In those days we didn't talk about family abuse and reactions to violence, but I could see she was terrified and I got her transferred out. In the next track "up" she did much better. I tried to remind myself to find alternatives to tongue-lashing-- not very successfully.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Over the years it has been those dozen boys of that eighth grade who have haunted me most in terms of what could have happened for them and didn't. Some are dead through no fault of their own. One was working as a carnie, took a nap under a pickup, and was run over. Some are in jail: one boy said bravely that his ambition was to join all the adult men of his family in the state prison, as though it were the army or a club. Several became amiable drunks and died of related causes, non-violent. Almost all fathered many children.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The top-track seventh grade produced tribal council members, teachers, nurses, BIA officials, pretty much as expected. They were told they were the best, that they would succeed, and they did. Not long ago I had lunch with one of the women, now director of the Indian Health Service in a major city. She is the daughter of one of the school board members in 1961, a man I have always respected and who was a good boyhood friend of Bob Scriver. In some ways she is bitter about those early years and her unsuccessful marriage to a white boy in that class. Now she tells me of stresses and dilemmas I never would have guessed at the time. Her sister, who recently taught with me for a short period, backed up the truth of the tales. These women are my peers now. It is strange to have such a window to the past and to see that much of our idealism was just denial. Nevertheless, we had a whooping good time remembering funny stories. In many ways they are wiser and more experienced than I am.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even grade-groups are discredited in some educational circles these days. Yet in close-to-the-land societies, affinity cohorts usually form according to age. Boys or girls of a certain age stuck together, cycling through their age-appropriate tasks of learning. Pre-adolescent boys ran in a pack practising hunting skills and learned even that early who could lead successful adventures. Girls stayed in the camp with the women and even then it was clear who was most skillful and willing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Heart Butte the seventh grade was the most truly local group I taught. They had grown up there and had gone through the grades together. The seventh grade boys were as yet too small to play basketball, but anyway they still loved their two-year-old horses and playing horseback tag. The seventh grade girls, in contrast, were an "initiated group." It was impossible to keep the high school boys from dry-humping them against the lockers at class breaks. Some liked it and some didn't but pretended they could handle it. A few were tigerish enough to be left alone. And some attracted no one, which hurt them. Sex was the only criteria for a blurry adulthood. Girls with babies had had their rite of passage and were proud of it, which made it hard for the others not to follow.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since Heart Butte had already been offering seventh and eighth grades, there were literature textbooks on hand, but they were childish, worn and out-dated. This particular dozen seventh graders was far beyond bunnies and let's-have-a-club. Some of the anthologies included stories about Native Americans, romantic little tales about the nineteenth century. My particular crew of N.A.'s were beginning to be outraged by hypocrisy. They were hungry for the raw truth of life and thought they saw it on the tabloid television shows. What I really needed was Vine Deloria, Jr. and Paula Gunn Allen, only with easy vocabularies.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day as we talked, one of the girls hurled at me the accusation that I didn't know what their lives were like. "You live up here on the hill in your teacherage and you don't have any idea what it's like to have drunks banging on the door or your folks mad at each other or nothing in the house to eat." She made me remember Alfred, the boy who thought about raspberries in January, and another boy named Charlie who had long ago written an assignment about "the best thing that has happened to me recently." He said they finally moved into a house with running water so he didn't have to haul it in a bucket from the community pump. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That night, after the girl made her accusation, I went home and typed a page as I thought one of those girls might have written it. Next day I handed out copies. "Is this what you feel? Have I got it right?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Weeeelll. Close maybe." The trust level went up a bit. I asked them to write their own versions. One boy wrote simply, "I am a turd." I expressed concern to the counselor. His mother and grandmother came to accuse me of framing him by saying he wrote that when he didn't. I showed them the paper with his handwriting. They said nothing. Next day he was transferred to the remedial class. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This boy was not even close to being a turd -- he just knew how he was being treated by the world -- like a turd. He didn't belong in a remedial class, but once there he worked hard and well. He was the most "Indian" of all the kids in that class. I wrote a page from a boy's point of view but it was pretty much of a flop. No one would talk about it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next time I wrote to the Office of Public Instruction, I included the page of the "girl's point of view" with some other things and didn't label clearly what it was. Back wrote the OPI Language Arts person saying, "This girl must be helped! She is so full of talent and deserves as much support as we can give her." I confessed, as tactfully as possible, that I had written the piece in an attempt to be absolutely true to the girls' feelings in my class. There were no more offers to find scholarships or to get the girls into special programs. And yet I had quoted what I heard them say, only tried to give them voices. They did feel those things. They were that girl. They still deserved scholarships and special programs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day I tried a little human relations gimmick. I brought a ball of red yarn and sat us all in a circle. I instructed each one to tell us a memory about someone else in the group and to throw the ball to them, paying out the yarn so the connection stayed traced by red. In a half hour they had used the yarn up and a complex web zig-zagged among them. As always happens, they had been careful to make sure that everyone got roughly the same number of memories. At this point in the exercise I normally take out the biggest pair of scissors I can find and say, "This yarn web is the community -- and this is what death does." Then I take a big snip through some of the strands so that they fall down.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These kids would not allow it. They shrieked and rose as a group to escape me, keeping the yarn stretched out among their hands. Then the bell rang. They realized they could move as a group without losing the web. "We're going to go show Mr. Z," they cried, and off they went down the hall to biology, yelling at people to make room for their yarn web. He told me how they explained it all to him. Knowing Mr. Z, I expect he managed to get an ecology lesson out of it. At the end of the day, my yarn came back all neatly wound up in a ball again.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These kids had been drilling on grammar for years and had pretty much sorted themselves out on the skill continuum according to their interests and abilities. What I could affect was their level of aspiration. My heavy-duty secret weapon was Star Wars: the Trilogy. First we just watched it and did the dutiful stuff about plot-sequence and character motivation. Then I took off with the Joe Campbell hero cycle stuff: how we all get thrown out, sent out, called out, to seek our destiny and after many struggles and loves and new friends-- we grow up. Then we come back to help the others. That's the part that most often gets left out.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of all the things these kids wanted, growing up was the fate they most dreaded. Growing up meant ugly sex, violence and drunkenness. To them childhood-- shelter, dependence, irresponsibility-- was the ideal. Most of the changes in their lives had been for the worse. Sometimes they would actually say, "Boy, I wish I weren't growing up so fast. It's hell to be a grownup. You have to work all the time and everybody's mad." They still wanted to stay in the pack they had been since they began school together as kindergartners.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Star Wars" was old enough that these kids had not seen it. In Heart Butte it was not a popular rental video -- not sexy and violent enough, I suppose. It was worth the whole effort to see their faces when they realized that Darth Vader was indeed Luke Skywalker's father. I only hoped that the insight into the Demon Father and his origins would somehow bring them healing. At least they would share a contemporary myth that is constantly referred to in the media and conversation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And they loved Yoda. In fact, I got a good grammar lesson out of the little elf by teaching them how to talk in wrong-side-out sentences: "Hungry I am." "Thump you I will!" We wrote out sentences, labelled the predicate words and objects and then put them first -- presto! Yoda-talk.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The larger lesson I hoped they would learn is that every language has an inner structure, but that those structures are not all the same. Some of these students were still close enough to being Blackfeet speakers that they had trouble with the difference between plural and singular indicators or male and female gender references. Neither grammatical distinction exists in Blackfeet, nor does it in many Native American languages. Some have pointed out that it is more politically enlightened to speak of persons without reference to their gender, as is possible in Blackfeet which is truly "gender-inclusive." English could take a Blackfeet lesson.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once at a National Council of Teachers of English workshop I attended in Minneapolis, a nun announced that she had solved this ubiquituous (and from her point of view, iniquitous) problem. As a speaker of the tribal language where she taught, she simply imposed upon it arbitrary grammatical signals for gender and number. These she would teach to the children in their own language and then-- she claimed-- it would be a snap to teach the same thing in English, because they would already have the concept. Afterwards I expressed shock and indignation over the idea of imposing European grammar on native American languages. A seasoned teacher next to me asked, "How long have you been teaching Indians?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Five years." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Well, then why are you worrying? What do you think her chances are of succeeding?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I cheered up. "Zero, probably." I never heard what happened.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WE BECOME NOVELISTS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My seventh graders weren't anxious to know grammar. What they wanted to know about was life -- how people fell in love, what was important for happiness, and whether they were good themselves. I wanted to talk to them about a lot of things. Little brothers with faces and minds crippled by fetal alcohol syndrome and aunties who got drunk anyway. Fathers shot by scared old bartenders. Co-dependent girls who let their boyfriends hit them. Mothers who got into knock-down-drag-out fights in the street and expected their daughters to join the battle. Fathers who screwed your best friend's mother on the floor in the middle of the front room when they only thought you were asleep.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But how could I? Any mention of real life was going to bring parents storming into that classroom and blow my cover. The page I had written while pretending to be a seventh grade girl, combined with my fooling around in while learning how to use the Mac Plus, gave me an idea. We would write a novel. Sitting at the computer, I turned in my chair and said to Jonelle, "What's a good name for a girl?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Heather." Without hesitation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I typed the beginning of the story. "What's a good name for a boy?" There was some argument, but then they said, "Che." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That night I finished a first chapter, photocopied enough for the class, and we began to read it as a group. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every week for the rest of the year we talked about Heather and Che, their life and what they ought to do. We wrote it together like a screenwriting team for a television show. "I think something sad ought to happen now." "We need a new character." "This is getting boring." Then when we had an idea what would happen next, I would write the chapter, keeping in mind that they needed to notice how quotation marks worked or how description could create a mood. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I thought to myself that it was almost marketable and that, if it were, some of the money ought to get back to the kids. So we wrote their names into the story. If you were in the story, you were one of the authors. The boys show up at a house fire and the girls have a scene in the school cafeteria. When I did actually send the finished story around to a few publishers, they said, "Well, we have an author here who could do a rewrite-- polish it up a bit... Make it more consistent. You know." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I didn't know. The point of the story was that it was the way the kids agreed it ought to be. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BEAUTIFUL SKINS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Towards spring I looked over to see one of the boys concentrating hard as he wove a stolen home ec sewing needle through the skin on his forearm. I knew this was behavior associated with drug use, but more than that it seemed to me obsessive, self-hating, and a cry for help. I went over, sat in front of him and gently took the needle. He didn't resist.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Don't do that to your beautiful skin," I begged, and rubbed his forearm to soothe it. He hadn't gone deeply enough to draw blood. "You mustn't hurt yourself like that."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Nobody cares. I'm no good." I had no idea what had just happened to him and thought it would be better not to find out, since I was not prepared to do full-scale therapy and I was pretty sure the school wouldn't get the kid any help either. But the other students had seen the whole thing and gathered around.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It's not true. You are a unique and valuable human being and everyone in this room cares about you." The others nodded. I took hold of the boy's hand, firmly, to anchor him and begin to tell him everything good about himself I could think of. The helpful things he did, the jokes he told, his courage, his sense of humor, the intelligent things he said in class. It almost destroyed him. If I hadn't had a good grip, he would have twisted onto the floor. I knew from my own experience it is very hard to accept praise. He had tears in his eyes. In a minute I stopped.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Do me next, Mrs. Scriver. Do me!" They were all clamouring. So in turn I sat across from them, gripped their hands and looked hard into their faces. I did the best I could and was grateful there weren't many of them. I made a mental note to pay more attention so I'd have better things to say next time. A few were pretty hard to think of good things about, but I kind of figured out the trick. You had to go to the context of the kid -- not stay in the framework of school. "You are very brave," to the boy who defied authorities. None of the other classes ever developed enough trust to let me do this kind of exercise. They would rather have been slapped.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HEART BUTTE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CLASS OF 1991</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next year, after I had been "non-rehired," the Graduating Eighth Grade Class of 1991, which had been that yarn-web seventh grade -- asked me to give their graduation speech. I was flattered. In 1990 the speaker had been Earl Old Person, chief of the Blackfeet Tribe. This year the superintendent did not attend. He had attended the night before at the high school graduation, where Don Wetzel spoke. (Wetzel was an admired coach and administrator who had accepted the personal crusade of stopping student athlete alcoholism. He would become the superintendent in Browning, but leave mid-year.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is what I said that night. I am using the real names of the students.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There once was a time when eighth grade graduation was as far as most people went in school. It's still what the law requires. Almost everywhere that human beings live in groups, it is at about this age that some kind of ritual happens to recognize a big change, a change in bodies-- a coming of age-- and a change that goes deeper, even into the heart of the personality. It is about this age that people become capable of parenthood and therefore need to be taught the ways of their tribe, the secrets that can keep families whole and the generations moving safely into the future.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, maybe thirty thousand years ago-- before Heart Butte was called "Heart Butte" or even Moskizipahp-istuki-- people were camped here and their children were becoming adults at about this age. Perhaps things were more what we'd call "religious" then. We tend to think that there was less to learn, that life was easier, but I'm not so sure. My guess is that life was just as hard, that there was likely to be something as difficult to learn as algebra. I know there was an oral tradition of great depth and beauty, one that was learned by heart instead of read from a book-- the same way the Old Testament of the Bible was handed down. I'm told that the oldest Napi stories were like Psalms, in that they were meant to be memorized word-for-word in order to preserve ancient ways of speaking and thinking exactly. I'm told that the Blackfeet language is so old that there is a word for mastodon.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now we have to teach our children to count to ten in Blackfeet.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is hard to know what they will need to learn for the future. When the early missions came here, they thought Indians ought to be educated as a servant class. They wanted students to learn to be on time, to be clean, to be obedient, to work hard, and not to question orders. Those are not bad things to master, but they are not enough now. Some people haven't realized that yet. We are not just educating broom-pushers and typists, though everyone ought to be able to sweep thoroughly and to keyboard skillfully from an early age.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What the Blackfeet need is people who can analyze treaties that were written carelessly and with a slant, so as to bring this Indian nation to greater justice. We need certified public accountants who can trace what the government does with the assets of the tribe and find out what happened to the misplaced billions that government bookkeepers lost track of over the years. We need people who can sit down with families and get to the bottom of the grief and rage and confusion, so those families can express their love for each other and heal. Don Wetzel said last night that he calls this generation the "healing generation."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We need people who are geologists who can judge whether or not there is likely to be oil or gas or coal in the reservation ridges and valleys, and people who are biologists who can manage the animal resources of this inner nation, which is about the same size as the Serengeti Crater of Africa where famous herds of zebras and antelope attract visitors. The last of the grizzlies live here and a small herd of buffalo already roams these ranches.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And we need novelists who can explain what it means to grow up Blackfeet on the front range of the Rocky Mountains at the end of the second Christian Millenium, the beginning of the 21st century. So that someday an African girl can read and understand us; a French boy can laugh at our jokes; and a south American gaucho herding cows on the pampas by swinging his bolla can see in his mind's eye the way we herd cows on these Montana grasslands.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I believe those people we need are right before you here on this stage, this very minute: the scientists, the therapists, the doctors, the teachers, the lawyers, the hunters, the fathers and the mothers. Maybe astronauts and rock stars! Anything is possible with this class!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In fact, this particular bunch of students is more than just a class. They're like a tribe or even a family. As individuals they represent a great span of styles-- no two of them are much alike. But as a group, they have a real personality, and they will stand together in the face of a threat or in order to meet a promise. They are exceptionally brave. They choose to look for the truth and because they care about that, they make us care about the truth as well.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kenny Spotted Eagle wants to be a doctor-- not just a doctor, but a surgeon. The other day he said to me-- and he is very earnest when he asks these things-- "If I go through all the training that a doctor goes through and I pass all the steps and get all the certificates, would you trust me to operate on you?"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now I've never had an operation. I'm terrified of operations. And look at Kenny-- he's just a kid! He's a nice kid, but-- heck-- I taught his daddy in school, which makes him seem even younger. Would I let Kenny Spotted Eagle take a knife and cut me open and rearrange my insides?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If I wouldn't, what are we doing here? We're not pretending to teach students. No one can fake doing major operations, can they? We are forced to realize that the students we teach will be controlling us and our world in the future.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think of how carefully Kenny does things, how willing he is to look hard things in the eye, how much he really cares about people, and I realize that, yes, if Kenny makes it through med school, I will trust him with my life.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What about these other kids? How can I tell you about the specialness of each of them? It is as though they cast a great shadow behind them, twice as tall as they are, but not a shadow of darkness-- rather a shadow of light, something like the Urskex at the end of The Dark Crystal. The shape of their potential futures is almost frightening in its brightness because-- I've heard these kids think out loud-- what if it's too hard? What if they can't make it? What if things go wrong? What if they get hooked on something or hurt? What if they let people down? What if -- what if--</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That's what we're here for tonight, isn't that right? We're here just in case-- to help, to lead, to support, to applaud, and--if that's what it takes-- to scold, to weep, to yell.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Let me talk about these people a little more personally.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kenny you already know about. He should be ready to do surgery about 2007. I'll be 68, about ready for repairs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jonelle Tailfeathers says she is going to be a teacher and none of us have any doubt about it. One day last year she got so bossy I just turned the class over to her and she put us into good order in no time. What may not be so obvious to everyone is that Jonelle is a person with a great capacity to love others and to support them, even when they don't necessarily deserve it. She's a fighter and she'll fight for the underdog because she has a strong sense of justice. I predict that she'll be a fine teacher, loved by many. If her first class is eighth graders, she may be speaking at their graduation in the year 2000.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Emmett Cain might surprise some people, including himself. He's a deep one, Emmett is, and smart enough to watch and listen much of the time. He ought to get his bachelor's degree about 1999, and I suspect he has the kind of cool and ability to stay centered that would make him a good administrator or manager. But he also has enough daring to be a successful entrepreneur. I'll be very curious. He likes the good life, you know, and I think that will push him to success.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Christy Crawford is a girl who needs to take care of others and she's got someone now, though we won't meet that person for a few more months. This means that Chris is going to have to work extra hard, give up a lot of things-- like sleep, for starters-- and make hard choices. But you must understand that Chris is a young woman of enormous intelligence-- in fact, once her emotions begin to simmer down a bit more, that intelligence will carry her through into skills we can only guess at now. She could go so many different directions it's hard to predict: teacher, minister, clinical psychologist, tribal council chair? Could be any of those.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mitchell Messinger is a quiet fellow. He's so big that every move he makes bumps into someone else, and they let him hear about it. Sometimes Mitchell suffers and no one even knows it. He never means to hurt people. I watch him draw-- which he does very well-- and try to answer his questions about the old days, and sometimes his face is like a window on the past. Maybe he'll be a movie star, like Rodney Grant. I think he will always be a good friend to those around him.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cindy Rutherford is a real firecracker. Far more beautiful than she has any idea-- rather French with big soft eyes and flyaway bangs-- Cindy has major emotions and -- in her own words-- "a red-hot steaming boiling firebird temper!" But she is quick to repent and generous in her apologies. Sometimes she hurts and looks bruised and sits quietly alone. Other times she has so much energy it's like a whirlwind in the room and she gets us all up and doing and laughing. What will Cindy be? Something special. Something wonderful, I think. Let's see-- an airplane pilot? A news anchor on television?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Nikki Rutherford was late coming to this class, and she still hasn't really had time to be fitted into some kind of role. But she is another high energy person, generous with her emotions, quick to look for heroes, intense in her feeling for justice, honest in her confronting of troubles. Nikki will shine in high school. She only begins to realize how intelligent she is. Maybe she is going to be the state senator who can energize everyone or the lawyer who will save the Badger-Two Medicine.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Patty Bremner has changed more completely than any other member of this class. In two short years she went from being a knobby-kneed colt who loved to buck and cause a commotion, to being a slender, poised young woman who looks like Julia Roberts. She is actually at rest occasionally, and as willing to hold hands as to sock someone. She is changing too deeply and too quickly to forecast her future, but I predict it will be surprising. For one thing, I think Patty has a lot of brains. Maybe she'll be a chemist or physicist-- once she realizes such things exist.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Victor Day Rider had a turnaround year this time, too. He is changing his picture of himself, as well as our picture of him. Now his energy begins to go into more constructive pursuits-- his image is split between an earring and a shop coat. We have many strong wishes for Victor's future.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Galen Bullshoe is one of the most centered, patient, real people I know. He is already growing into a kind of man that Blackfeet often are-- a stable, kind, hard-working man of the land. There used to be a lot of them ranching around here. Galen's intelligence is that of the knower of land, knower of animals, knower of skies. It is not so much in his head as in his heart and his gut-- something inherited more than taught. Value this young man highly. He is precious.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Allan Arrowtop hides from us. Only now and then is there a little glimpse of someone in an internal world of considerable complication. But he watches us, and learns from what he sees. In these next few years, Allan will have to make some connections and reach out for his future. We see his dreams in his drawing and we want to know more. Especially about that wild sense of humor. Maybe we have a cartoonist here.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Shannon Bullplume did not take English from me this year or last. But almost every day he shows up in my classroom and every day I throw him back out, which he never holds against me. I look up, and there he is on those incredibly long springy legs, eating my Scotch tape with a big grin on his face. This is not an ordinary grin, for Shannon has joie de vivre, that is, joy of life, and he is not stingy with it. I suspect that Shannon will be a joy to everyone around him until he is a great-grandfather with hundreds of little kids hanging onto his long legs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This class has not forgotten the other students who have come and gone from their midst. We often speak of Angie Howe, who added so much last year. Emmett says he misses her most when things get boring, which gives you an idea of what she contributed!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">David Running Crane jumped ahead to high school and Joey Trombley went his own way and Berry Running Crane transferred to Browning, but they are still sort of like cousins to this family of eight graders. Do you remember Kaylene Spotted Bear? These eighth graders don't forget, they don't reject, they don't avoid, they don't deny. they want the truth, all of it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">JoAnn Clark, one of my former students who teaches eighth grade English in Browning, says that eighth graders always break your heart when they graduate, because they grow and change so much during that year. When people go through intense things together, it bonds them and makes them love each other. it's hard to turn back to the next set of reckless characters and start all over again-- because they are always entirely different.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When you come back as freshmen in a few months, you may look different, especially the boys. Your long bones will be stretching out and your faces will take on more shape. Complexions will begin to clear and feet will begin to go where you want them to go. More than that, in the next few years something hidden and wonderful will happen to you. This is documented and a scientific fact, though lots of people don't notice.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Your brains will be coming of age. Like a wonderfully complex living rose inside your skulls, you will be blooming mentally. Suddenly you will see the point of poetry you didn't understand earlier or you'll understand the shape of equations that didn't make sense before. The world will come into better focus and be more deeply colored, more scented, more various than before. This is what it means to be human.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is what drugs or alcohol could steal from you.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And because you are Blackfeet, a gift that carries an obligation, you must use that unfolding intelligence to learn your land. Get out and ride, walk, explore, until you know all the ridges and coulees of this country from the Canadian border to Birch Creek, from the Rockies to Milk River. Become experts on your reservation. Read what you can find, write what you think, talk to your brothers and sisters, your parents and elders.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And learn to speak Blackfeet. Sit with the elders, sing with the drummers, sweat with those you respect!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You are not trapped here. The world is as much yours as it is open to any human being. You will find that the farther away you go, the less prejudice there is. The higher you go in education, the more people will work to understand you and value you.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But this is your center, your homeplace, your place to come back to. I love it, too, but it is not mine. It is your heritage! You don't just love it, you are it! This winter I saw a lot of sweatshirts around here that said, "Carpe diem!" Seize the day! I say, "Carpe mundi!" Seize your world!</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The motto of this class is: Each of us has different talents, different dreams, different destinations-- but all have the same power to make a new tomorrow.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When my seventh graders had graduated to the eighth, I had looked forward to seeing them again, but they had changed. They were harder now and some of the boys never reappeared. In every decade that I taught, half the kids disappeared when they reached the legal limit of school attendance-- or a little sooner if they could stay invisible enough-- and half of the freshmen disappeared before high school graduation. Very little has changed. "Where did they go?" asked JoAnn Clark. "I was close to a lot of those people once, but now I have no idea at all where they are. They must be here somewhere." The truth is that they were right there on the reservation. But they didn't travel in circles that intersected with the school anymore. Even if they had kids of their own, they stayed away. If school people went out to hunt for them, they hid.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I looked over my new seventh graders, they were nothing like I'd expected. These were real children, with little backpacks where they had hidden stuffed toys. All they wanted to do was color with scented felt-tip markers, read comics and sprawl on the floor. They were determined not to work, not to succeed and not to get older. Daily we locked in combat and on most days they won. About once a week I was reduced to making them write sentences a hundred times. They never minded this punishment and never questioned whether I could or should make them do it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They lied, they sneered, they cheated, they stole, they broke things, they turned into noodles and slid out of their chairs. When I was absent they talked the sub into unlocking the cupboard and showing them the R-rated videos. Their eyes rolled up in their heads. They made terrible noises. They took all the screws out of my teaching station so the racks fell off of it. They came late and constantly tried to slip out of my classroom into the next one.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have to say that I took them by the arm very firmly indeed. I may have left finger marks. They were still small enough to lift up and put someplace. If I laid a finger on them, they howled, "You hurted me!" But they never said they would tell. So far as I could see, they only tattled on each other, which they did constantly. When their parents came for conferences, the adults expressed disgust and despair at the behavior of their children.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had some long talks with myself in the evening about violence. It would be so easy to dislocate or even break an arm. When I was monitoring study hall in Browning, I had taken one girl aside (as aside as you can get in a "teaching pod") and hissed the truth at her, "I'd just like to strangle you!" Five teachers popped out of their classrooms to see what was happening. They took the threat seriously. To me it was so exaggerated as to seem almost ridiculous -- to them it was entirely possible that an adult might strangle a child in the school hallway. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This girl's "cousint" in Heart Butte was just as aggravating and I recalled that her aunt had been the same, thirty years earlier. That long-ago girl, in the seventh grade, had worked herself into such a tizzy one day that I picked her up and put her out in the hall to cool off. We had doors to shut then. Now I told the "cousint" she was just like her aunt. The next day she informed me haughtily that her mother said I was never to say I was like any of her relatives and never to mention the family again at all. Since her father was chair of the school board, the command had a certain amount of weight.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">None of this second batch of seventh graders had the slightest interest in writing a novel. I could occasionally get them to write about pets or what the older kids were doing. They wanted to draw or make paper decorations, as they had for the previous teachers. But they loved to spend time writing out the lyrics to sentimental pop songs. One snuck into a bar with her older brothers, passed a note about it under my nose, and was outraged when I gave the note to her mother. So was the mother -- not at the girl, but at me.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I gave them the pep talk about being the leaders of tomorrow and they laughed at me. All those people were corrupt and deserved destruction, they said. I challenged them to name good people in town. They came up with two names, both prominent folks, but we all knew one was alcoholic and the other smoked pot, the devil weed we had assemblies to condemn. I was slow realizing that this class included the scions of the biggest drug-pushers in town, if not the source of the triple X videos.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day, when they were really being awful, I decided to use psychological judo. "This is great! You kids are absolute masters of class chaos. Let's get this down on the board before I forget." I began a list.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1. Pretend not to hear what the teacher says.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2. If that doesn't work, pretend to misunderstand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3. If the teacher opens her mouth, start to talk or make a noise. If she stops <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>making noise, you stop, too, and pretend you didn't make a noise. But if she <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>opens her mouth again, make the noise. (This one can be fun! I saw Soupy <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sales do it on television once.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4. Drop your pencil. Pretend to be picking it up, but instead roll it under a girl so you can crawl under her.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5. Put your hand up. If the teacher calls on you, say, "Oh, nothing," and take it down.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6. Go sharpen your pencil until it is a stub and then demand a new one.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I must have had thirty items and some kids were getting interested until one of the more suspicious cried out, "Stop! She's going to get us all in trouble!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes I used the Assertive Discipline rigamarole, which doesn't usually work very well beyond junior high kids. It's basically a kind of carrot-and-stick routine involving putting kids' names on the board and putting tallies beside them. Every time they got a tally, they had a ten second delay leaving the class. Some kids ended up with more delays than there were minutes between class, so I'd give them delays on successive days which meant a lot of record-keeping. It was all tiresome, dumb and childish. Just another fancy manipulation requiring expensive demonstrations from flashily dressed former teachers who came around selling workshops and books. It's enough to make anyone cynical, but these kids liked it. In fact, they critiqued the way I used it. "You're not doing it right."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day a boy decided to parrot everything I said. "Take out your books." Take out your books. "Enough of that-- it's time to work." Enough of that, it's time to work.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At first I tried to say things that I thought the parrot wouldn't repeat, bad things about himself, but found that he was perfectly willing to say them and the class thought it was even more hilarious. So I tried a new tack: "Herb is my favorite student." Herb is my favorite student. "Herb is really smart." Herb is really not smart. "Herb has a lot of friends." At that point Herb lost interest.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These kids knew exactly what they were doing. They did not intend to grow up. And they were certainly not going to let me get close enough to them to entice them into changing their minds.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There was one girl with better sense than the rest. Her dad had become part of the growing group of Native American extras being cast in movies. She often had a casting catalogue with her and we would talk about my "crush" on Graham Greene. She would encourage me to think about Rodney Grant -- so handsome with that sheet of silken hair -- and I would protest that Graham Greene had much more substance and a better sense of humor. Then she would offer to introduce me to him sometime. She was often solemn, but this made her laugh. It was an argument that wouldn't have been possible a few years earlier because then there were hardly any known Native American actors. Her family name came from one of the major chiefs of Blackfeet recorded history, Mountain Chief. It was his band that Baker was trying to destroy when he hit Heavyrunner so hard. When my Glacier Reporter came recently, I was excited to see that this daughter-of-a-movie-star was recently featured as one of two students who spent a summer working in medical research at Montana State University in Bozeman.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was to this class that I read a favorite book of my own childhood, "Tangled Waters". It was about Navajo and written by a white woman, but the story, now out of print, is an accessible and memorable account of two young people trying to find their way between the past and the future. I think the Blackfeet kids will remember, maybe at a time when it is helpful. Certainly, they listened quietly without games.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The remarkable and hopeful fact about human beings is that a new generation is always beginning, with a fresh chance to figure things out and a whole new set of circumstances. Jonelle and Christy already have babies. It is those babies who might even live to see the twenty- second century if they live as long as Mary Ground, Grasswoman, did. May they remember her name and honor her.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-39409474867506946472013-08-10T14:51:00.001-06:002014-08-28T11:51:15.875-06:00SO TEACH ME<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SO TEACH ME</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Rage is the only emotion that can't be controlled by shame. Actually, the intensified anger we call rage is anger that has been shamed. Anger, like sexuality, is a preserving emotional energy. Anger is the self-preserving feeling. Our anger is an energy by which we protect ourselves. </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Our anger is our strength.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--John Bradshaw</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MANAGEMENT BY ELIMINATION</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once I went to the open door of the Supe's office without him noticing I was there. He was talking to Churchill about a list he had made of the ten "worst trouble-makers" in the school. The list was headed by the big brother of the child with fetal alcohol syndrome. Handsome, not quite adolescent but strongly developed and defiant, this boy was always crosswise of authority figures. The Supe had bragged to me that in the previous year the boy had tried to fight the coach, so the Supe had had the local policeman come up, put the cuffs on him, and carry him off in a squad car. The boy often fought to protect his little brother or to defend his alcoholic mother. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Supe was trying to convince Churchill that if they could just get rid of these ten kids, mostly boys, that all their discipline problems would be solved. There was no need to persuade the Doc, because it was well-known that he thought only Catholic schools, where discipline could be enforced with a paddle and all bad kids could be expelled, were real schools. Churchill was studying the list when the Supe saw me. Instantly he was on guard. "Don't tell anyone what you heard! And why didn't you knock?"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was afraid of what the families would do if they found out one of their kids was on the list. Busy blaming the victim again, he had no awareness that an organization has a natural internal structure. If one set of "bad actors" is removed but the underlying forces that created them are not changed, the "bad actors" are simply and involuntarily re-cast. That is, if the unfocused rage and desperation of the boys on his list were addressed by getting rid of those particular boys, new boys would soon be acting the same way. And if this set of angry faculty members were all forced to resign, the new ones would soon be just as angry-- unless true changes were made in the goals and structure of the school.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The very definition of neurotic behavior is that all attempts to escape the painful situation lead the sufferer back into the same painful situation. At some point the assumptions that give bad directions have to be brought to consciousness and questioned. Heart Butte needed to question at least two deep convictions. First, that change can only be brought about by a powerful male who uses force to impose "order". Second, that when bad things happen it is because of bad people who cannot be changed but ought to be punished. (Bad people are defined circularly as people who do bad things.) These are not just Heart Butte theories, but ideas deeply imbedded in the whole nation, especially those who benefit from the status quo and think they know bad behavior when they see it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Often bad behavior has a racist dimension. "Fonzie," had spent some time in Colorado Springs with an uncle. A fine student and chess player who looks very much like Jim Morrison, his hero, Fonzie had handcuff scars on his wrists from the Colorado Springs police. "What did you do?" I asked. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Oh, I was just hanging around in the wrong place at the wrong time." He was no angel. He was locally famous for having run up an enormous bill on his grandmother's phone by dialing up phone sex. He could invent "rap" and spin it out for minutes. Sometimes he would sink into despondency. "Why can't things be perfect?" he would sigh. He sounded exactly like the young members of my congregation near Seattle -- upper middle class kids with every advantage who sometimes went looking for trouble. None of them had handcuff scars.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Passive aggression is a powerful force. By balking, going slack, making "mistakes," and "accidentally" breaking things, either students or teachers could do as much damage as if they actively attacked each other. When a motivated teacher-- no matter how idealistic-- meets a student determined to resist in infuriating ways, it is a rare person who can always keep control. I was no exception. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day in the spring of the second year, I showed a short movie. One of the less controllable kids sprawled on the floor to watch. At the end of the movie I turned the lights back on and asked the kids to pull their desks into a circle for discussion. The kid on the floor refused to move. There was very little time left in the class period. I really wanted the discussion to happen. I knew I was likely to be fired soon and that the principal had a thing about students on the floor. But no threat, no bribe, no promise would get that boy off the floor. He was big, he was sexually active, he was a fighter. I stood over him and shouted. He sneered. I nudged him with my foot. His response was obscene and contemptuous. My foot wanted very badly to kick him hard.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Completely losing my temper, I reached over and grabbed a good handful of hair and gave a sharp yank. I'd have done more, like dragging him to his feet, but one of the girls yelled, "Keep your cool, Mrs. Scriver! Keep your cool!" Her voice was desperate. I stopped and stood back, my hand coated with hair goop.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The bell rang. The boy got up and stalked out like a leopard, still sneering, and the other kids left, ashamed for me. I, too, was ashamed. I'd been defeated. This boy was first on the list of people the principals wanted out. He had perfected his sneer on those big alpha males. Finally after many, many suspensions they convinced him to transfer to Browning. Now I see him on lists of people in court for disorderly conduct. As he gets deeper into drugs and booze, I expect he doesn't have as much control as he did in that classroom. His aggression becomes more naked. His death comes nearer until it is almost welcome. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Talk to him! You should talk to him," advised some. What would I say that hadn't been said to him a thousand times? Others suggested articles written by “experts,” most of whom had never taught in ghetto schools. They suggested many seductive strategies and points of view-- none of whicih were realistic.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What I remember most was the desperate quality of the girl's intervention and her need to save me from myself. I got the feeling that she'd had a lot of experience with people fighting in front of her and I knew that it hurt her. But also she had a sense of stepping in -- that bad things can be stopped. I can't remember another time when a kid tried to change my behavior in a parental, protective way like that. Perhaps at last many people on the reservation are feeling the possibility of intervention.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what I ought to have done. Maybe the simplest thing would have been to take the class out in the hall for our talk. Evading a passive person might work. I've thought about why I lost my temper. It didn't help that I was without recourse: not only was the administration unwilling to back the teachers because of the catastrophic consequences in terms of their own careers, but also they were intent on keeping the faculty off-balance, one-down. They were looking for evidence to make us vulnerable, so there was a double-bind: one could only call on the higher authority by admitting you lost control, which would be held against you. Hostile administration is never discussed by the purring experts who write articles. Most of them have never taught in a small town with sharp economic disadvantages.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But part of it was deeper than that. Over and over in poor families it is older women who try desperately to keep order and make progress while the young men test all limits in their determination to dominate. In a culture that works, where people's lives are fitted to their work and their families, older women have their place and older men protect it. The young men go out from the families until they are ready to mate, just as young male elk or mountain sheep do. But when older women are charged with controlling young men, a nasty woman-hating edge creeps in. This boy wrote essays (if you could call them that) about abusing people. I saw him being abusive to girls and smaller boys. He was an accomplished sneak and liar. So far I could ever tell, he had no family whatsoever.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And deeper than that was my own family history, which is Scotch-Irish immigrant. When I was growing up, "spanking" was considered desirable. Teachers never spanked me, but they often threatened my brothers and a second-grade teacher threw an ink bottle at one brother's head. My parents were sometimes angry, frustrated people and though I was an ideal student at school, when I was home I was exactly the kind of "passive aggressor" I've been describing. The last time I was "spanked," I was nearly fourteen. We were on a family outing, my father lost his temper at kid-bickering, and he stopped the car along a major highway. Choosing me over my younger brothers, he dragged me out of the car and administered what today might be called a public beating though at the time it was simply "spanking." I never got over it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These long-ago personal dynamics made me both more sympathetic to the students and more vulnerable to their games. With enough pressure, I leave myself and become my parents, just as my parents were probably becoming their own parents when they punished me. But my parents never went beyond spanking . The parents of these children, especially when they were drunk, had no limits, not even death. It is important to realize that for a middle-class teacher, the continuum of violence is not the same as it for ghetto students. What for the teacher is an extreme response, may be for the student a prelude to life-threatening behavior. No wonder it is nearly impossible to impose discipline through threats.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I "listen to" teacher chat lines on the Internet, I see message after message about discipline. It often seems that every teacher constantly obsesses over discipline "tricks and strategies." Yet I rarely see student/teacher conflict discussed in terms other than “classroom management.” We might make more progress if we looked at larger social patterns (class, economics, ethnicity, family structure) and the inner structure of teacher psyches. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Schools that have few discipline problems enjoy a consensus about what ought to happen there. When they do resort to spanking or paddling, everyone agrees that it is justified. The real secret of the success of contemporary Catholic schools is not paddling, but consensus. People agree about why they are there and what behavior is reasonable. If they don’t agree, they leave. The public school cannot eliminate dissenters, but must control them somehow in order to do its job.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">VIOLENT ATHLETICS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Social issues and private personality dynamics rush in to fill empty space left when a school has no purpose but to supply salaries and athletic programs. If athletics cannot be separated from public schools-- and I'm not so naive as to think there is any chance at all that might happen -- then we need to develop "fire-walls" between athletics and academics. In my opinion, using athletics to keep kids in school only destroys standards of scholarship and intensifies the kind of pressure that can surface old scripts. Coaches become so obsessed with winning that they cross the line into rule-bending at best and real abuse at worst. The community puts the value of winning so high that they grant coaches the right to be violent. I've heard fathers call from the sidelines of basketball games, "You make that freethrow or I'll beat your butt tonight!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A teacher or superintendent in a reservation town is far more likely to be fired over a losing team or the privileged behavior (drinking, fighting, defying teachers) of a winning team than over any academic issue. The school board in Heart Butte promised its new basketball team that if they could take state, the board would buy them a Bluebird bus-- a potent bribe in a place where basketball teams are on the road almost continuously during the season. A Bluebird bus costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to install an outstanding collection of books in the library. No one ever suggested, “If you all graduate from college, the school board will buy thousands of dollars of books for the library where they can inspire the children of this community for decades.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The big myth is that sports keep kids in school. Instead, I saw sports destroy school as a source of education. One of the boys claimed he was going to college on a basketball scholarship, but the truth is that very few Native Americans ever manage such a thing. They are often good players, but they will not invest in being students enough to stick in college. This particular boy was supposed to be in remedial classes but used his basketball status to stay in regular classes where he understood very little. He was disruptive, never did any work, and actively hurt many of his classmates by punching, tripping and dragging them around by the head. He lived for games, but --more than that-- for the keggers afterwards which the police overlooked. As the year went on, he became less and less valuable as a player. His parents never came to the school despite many letters from the administration. He did not live with them, but floated among relatives.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HOME VISITS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The tribal community people who claim the attention of teachers are not the quiet, conscientious, hard-working parents. More likely the ones the teachers get to know are the trouble-maker parents, the meddlers and squawkers. Mature local folks have tired of seeing people come and go with their new ideas and inexplicable changes. ("I used to make friends," one woman told me, "but it hurt too much when they left-- and they always leave.") Old people who truly keep alive the old ways do so by shutting out strangers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most writers recommend that teachers go visit parents at home, both as a friendly gesture and as a way of understanding where the students literally come from. One night Miss Pickletoes and I, fed up with the shenanigans of one of the students, decided to go make a home-visit. We set out in my little hatchback, bounding over the prairie in the dark with the headlights as likely to be pointed straight up as onto the wheel-tracks. After some blunders around snowdrifts and coulees, we found the right house. The pater familias was astounded, but welcomed us and quickly supplied hot coffee. The kids of the household gathered around with their ears sticking out, though they pretended to be watching videos or playing electronic games. I counted three tv screens in the room. The home was comfortable, middle-class, and orderly.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Despite our serious issues, we had an hilarious time joking about trivial things. The father told us that he had never been visited before but he had often "gone up to straighten things out." He felt no one took him seriously or would listen to his opinion, even when he demanded a good old fistfight. Together we laughed at the ridiculousness of the whole situation and then we went off, waving goodby out the windows. We didn't have any trouble with that family's kids for months. When the superintendent found out we had been out prowling around house-to-house in the dark, he forbade us ever to do it again. His mental picture of the students' homes was far darker than what we found.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many veteran teachers spread sensational tales of what it was like to teach on the Rez, how it wasn't possible to succeed. It is easy to walk off holding your nose if you're white. No one will blame you for failing. You needn't feel guilty. They are only Indians and wouldn't amount to anything anyway. A professor at a teacher training college in Great Falls confided to another professor, "No use trying to teach Indian students anything. They'll just go back to the Rez and teach Indians."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I went back in 1989, some of my former students and friends were angry with me. "Why did you come back?" they demanded. "You made it out of here. You could have had a good life away from here." Parents would say, "I want my children to leave, so they can make money and have a good life." Yet many tribal people my age came back while I was there -- for the same reasons I did. Even some of we whites love the place, miss it when we are away, and want to help those we remember. We feel more ourselves when we are there.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MIRACLE TECHNOLOGY</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Those who look at technology as salvation were defeated on this go-round. The superintendent had spent thousands on eight Macintosh computers: six Pluses and two SE-30's. (He either didn't know or didn't care that they were just about to take a major price drop -- the computer expert on Canadian radio advised this -- or maybe he bought them from a friend just before the drop.) At the same time he bought "Mac School," an ambitious integrated administrative program to be used for attendance, supplies, and other data bases. But no one could make the program work. Under direct orders, the Doc finally learned by rote how to list his purchasing invoices, but if he got off the six steps outlined on the 3X5 card taped to his monitor, he locked up. He bragged that in the previous school he had had a bigger, fancier, more powerful, more real (IBM) computer, which he never used at all. "I kept my back to it all year," he boasted. We believed him.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A single class was organized in Great Falls to teach the office secretaries and the administration, but the administrators got frustrated and left early. The secretaries learned only how to type in information. When I brought in my curriculum on disc, they printed it out and retyped it onto their own discs, because they didn't know how to transfer the digitized version. No one had showed them how to drag an icon. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Browning School System had ordered the same software and were having good luck with it, but no one from Heart Butte would ask them for help. In fact, we probably could have linked our attendance programs over the telephone and for once have been ahead of the kids when we tried to figure out who was attending school where. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The salesperson had sold "MacSchool" by describing the use of the linked computers as an in-house LAN, but no one had the slightest idea how that was done and the salesperson had not explained that more equipment plus some technical installation would be necessary -- to say nothing about maintenance. Communicating by computer just seemed too mysterious. No one bothered to find out any more. No software was bought for or by the teachers. Not even a catalog showed up. Some salesman missed a step. There would have been a lot of potential in following along behind the hardware purveyors in order to promote software. How much of modern American education is completely dependent on enterprising salespeople?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had no experience with computers at all, but I had good contacts. A nuclear reactor scientist from Idaho Falls told me about "Writenow," a low-cost, easy to use, word-processing program. I bought it, read the directions carefully, explained what basics I knew to a couple of kids, and left them in a corner of the room to struggle with it. In a half-hour they had figured it out and wanted to print, which I couldn't do because there were only two printers in the building: the one in the school office and the one Churchill had. (Churchill quietly mastered one of the SE30's and ran his athletic program off "Microsoft Works." He would not let me use the program. Of course, it might not have been licensed for more than one copay.) To print I had to beg for a few moments on the office printer or catch Churchill at an indulgent moment. So the kids kept their work on floppies, pretty soon they were bringing their own from some mysterious source, and by the end of the year the computer had a virus.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, the business teacher-- who proudly announced he knew nothing about Macs but had real IBM's in his classroom-- never ordered ribbons for any printers at all. Halfway through the year-- after I had created two dozen floppies of classroom materials on the Macintosh and had become desperate for printer ribbons that actually made perceptible marks -- the Doc informed me he was going to sell off the Macs because it was too much trouble to order different kinds of ribbons. When I flew into a tantrum, he was self-righteous. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the end of the year it turned out that a third Mac printer had been across the hall from me the whole time, unused all year for lack of a three-foot plug-in cord. I found out by accident when the fifth grade teacher complained that she hadn't been able to print out any of the stuff her kids had been doing on their early Apples. She was teaching programming language as a way of encouraging logic, and had asked and asked for the few dollars it would take to get the connector cord, but got no response and refused on principle to buy it herself.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Somewhere in some training course, the Supe had been told that teachers should be allowed to take computers home. He was happy to check one out to me (no one was using it anyway) and soon I was addicted. It was worth the whole two-year teaching gig to break through to that little Macintosh Plus. At least now my worksheets were customized with local and Blackfeet contexts. One of the other teachers took a Mac Plus to his classroom but soon brought it back. "There's nothing on it," he complained, evidently thinking it was like television. The shop teacher took another to use with a computerized horse-shoeing course. (There's something strange about that in a place where ranchers shod real actual horses all the time.) He didn't know to make a backup copy so when the kids accidentally erased the most crucial part of the program, it was worthless. The company refused to supply new software without the school paying full price, which it would not.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At one point Mr. Z thought he had outwitted the lack of ventilation in the science room (which meant that no chemical experiments could be done) by ordering Apple IIC computers for each student plus a chemistry class on floppies. He taught himself to use the machine and the kids caught on pretty well, but the actual chemistry material was too difficult for the kids. The biggest computer success was a set of ground-level arithmetic games on a simple Apple machine from the remedial room. The kids played them almost obsessively. The win-win-win-win was addictive. More challenging games were disconcerting. Yet there were a few students who would eventually learn on their own how to master the most complex of computer games, like Myst. Many kids had home video games and soon some had their own computers. I have no idea where the money came from.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other big hit was the greeting card and banner program on the IBM's in the computer room. Banners appeared everywhere. Since they were printed in black and white, hours went into hand-coloring them with fibre-tip pens. Once, pushed to my emotional limits by unreasonable kids and suffering from a toothache anyway, I cried in class. In half an hour the kids had produced a hand-colored greeting card apologizing for their bad behavior and begging forgiveness.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A grant from the Federal Government brought us a roof-top satellite dish that was supposed to give access to a satellite-link all across Montana that would supply classes and educational materials. The librarian was given a VCR to tape important shows and a monitor was set up on the stage of the cafetorium. But the VCR had no remote timer that could come on by itself, and since the librarian refused to walk the few hundred feet from his house to turn it on, there was no use requesting that any evening programs be taped. The educational network never materialized. Instead, throughout every lunch the monitor played Country MTV on the cafetorium stage. The cowboys among us sat in tipped-back chairs with their hats pulled down over their eyes, morosely contemplating the disasters of honky-tonk life. When I went up and tipped back a chair of my own, they rolled their eyes over to stare at me without moving their heads. "What does all this stuff really mean?" I asked. No answer.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the same time the Browning Schools put in several truly humonguous satellite dishes, started up a studio with local programming, and flooded Browning with public television. Montana is one of the few states where you can't watch public television without cable or a satellite dish. Suddenly Browning's Headstart and several day care programs could show Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Since the quality of the reception was so good, many began to watch science programs, news events, and Masterpiece Theatre. But back in Heart Butte the best media was still CBC radio from Canada, which I knew from my years in Saskatoon. (It was pretty good. I still miss Peter Zoski and his conversations every morning.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MY PRIVATE LIFE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The regular network television Heart Butte translator had broken down, either vandalized or weather-beaten, and since no one would pay for repairs, there was no television. Then someone convinced the Tribe that juvenile delinquency would be abated if the kids "had something to do," and the translator was fixed by some intrepid person who struggled up to the ridge. The sound was better than the picture, so I often used my little black and white as a radio. Since my apartment had only one small window to the east, I left my door open with the glass storm door shut for a window to collect sunshine. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"What are you doing in there, Mrs. Scriver?" the kids demanded. "Why aren't you correcting papers? Why don't you have a color television?" I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I never seemed to go to anybody's house-- they couldn't figure it out. When I came back from a trip, cars would join me on the highway and trail me home to see what I took out of my car and whether anyone was with me. Late at night in a storm, it was intimidating. Because of the headlights, I couldn't tell who was following me. One man, known to be armed, would follow single women with children. But maybe people were following me in case my car broke down or went off the road. Maybe they were trying to help.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"What do you eat for dinner?" the kids asked. I hated to tell them that my favorite meal was a package of frozen peas heated up with butter and garlic. It was quick, tasty protein and I could eat it easily while I read. When I asked them what they ate, they evaded the question. I decided they lived on Korn Kurls and orange pop.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the first Christmas came, the kids were shocked that I didn't trek off to Portland to be with my family. "You're supposed to go feast and get presents," they insisted. All the other teachers did this. How could I explain that the gift I wanted was ten days of peace and quiet to read and write? I finally said to them, "Look, I'm a religious person. On Christmas I stay alone to fast and pray." They understood that and acted respectful.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">My mother, nearing eighty, came to visit. The kids were impressed and when she came up to sit in on classes, their manners were excellent. One of the worst act-up characters drew a picture of me and gave it to her. It was pretty good and after that she always asked about the boy. She went out to walk on the hills and gather small bouquets. The Supe went by in his pickup and stopped to visit. He was quite charming and she was well impressed. Then later he told me, laughing, "I saw some old white woman out there trespassing on school property so I took a shot at her to scare her off." This passes for teasing in Montana.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE KIDS’ PERSONAL LIVES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What slowly became clear to me was that the kids saw themselves as something like the "lost civilizations" on Star Trek where the Prime Directive prevents any kind of interference with the culture. They felt that, miserable as their situation sometimes was, it was far better than the corrupt free-for-all of the larger world, which could only offer them technology. At the same time they yearned for the sentimental rigamarole that the media constantly promoted: trappings, decorations, things that cost money, gizmos that provided pleasure with no effort.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Their own strongest imperative was to prevent change and, if possible, to keep from growing up. To become an adult was to become unhappy, burdened and alcoholic. This was what they saw around them and the parents agreed with them. "This is the only good time of their lives. Let them enjoy it," they said. Some people left, but they went out into a mysterious world that the kids feared and did not want to enter. To their minds, being a kid meant being free to be themselves. Growing up meant sacrificing both identity and privilege. They had a very bad case of Peter Pan Syndrome. It was a powerful force against education. It made me very angry, because it fed directly into the racist assumption that dark people are like children, and therefore ought to be controlled by parental white people.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the older girls had a hard time with English. Ever since reading "Up the Down Staircase in the Seventies," in which a male teacher received a love letter from a student and corrected it with red ink, causing her to commit suicide in despair, I have not been able to keep from equating red ink with blood. I made it a point to correct papers with green ink. I gave this girl her paper back, looking mighty green. She barely glanced at it before it went into the trash. "How can you learn if you don't look at it?" I asked.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I just hate it. I'm so stupid."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Look, I'm not trying to hurt you. It's just a way to explain what you should do next time." And I told her why I used green ink. She stared at me with her mouth ajar. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I never looked at it that way. I never thought you were trying to help me," she said. "I didn't think a teacher would try to help me." Despair comes in all colors, I guess.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SPEEDING TOWARDS A TRAIN WRECK</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The fantasy that Heart Butte School was going to have a small student population, a strong connection with the new electronic media, and a new philosophy of education was very attractive. The Supe must have sold a lot of insurance in his time. We all believed in the fantasy until Christmas, and then reality set in.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The pre-existing K-6 school went on about its business pretty much as usual, except for the dangers and distractions offered by so many big kids on the premises. The seventh and eighth grades had always been problematic but now they became almost uncontainable. The boys were small and speedy in every sense, determined to test the absolute outside limits of what they could get away with. The girls were irresistible to the older boys and their little permed heads were turned. Surely now they would marry their heroes and live happily ever after on Aid to Dependent Children in their own HUD house.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The high school students were an assortment, but almost all of them had been on their own for a long time. They saw themselves as adults and in many cases they were several years older than they should have been. A few could not be controlled or even influenced by any adults. A fair percentage were there on a last-chance basis, but as far as they were concerned the whole process was arbitrary and inscrutable. Stuff a person did in school didn't mean anything. But if you had to do this junk in order to get into the military, in order to play basketball-- forget jobs or college-- well, there was no other place for them to go anyway.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The strongest conviction I had was that these students could not be forced to do much of anything. Even the ones desperate to play basketball would use up enormous amounts of energy trying strategies they thought would get them around grades. If they had put a fraction of that effort into their homework, they would have had good grades. We turned in flunk/pass reports once a week. In theory no one who was flunking could play. So they were "absent" in order to have make-up time or to turn in papers after the other kids got theirs back, so they could copy. They were robbed, they lost their papers-- something always happened. The teacher hated them and in revenge was sabotaging the team. The idea was to create a lot of confusion and then question any written records. Parents would never come to regular scheduled conferences, but they would appear by surprise, incensed over some injustice and demanding that whoever was guilty should come outside and fight.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The students were simply too resourceful to be powered into working. My energy went into trying to find some way to persuade them to make the decision to learn. For girls, having a baby was often the persuasion they needed. For boys there seemed to be no effective enticement. Once in a while I would find a young man who asked questions, who had a social conscience, and this would be a beginning, but not one that any authority figure welcomed. Outside judges could be told the students were not learning because of deficiencies in the community or the students themselves. But no one wanted students out of control. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Students promoting chaos were greatly helped by constant invasions of the classroom by non-teaching school people. The Doc came in to hand out faculty paychecks-- no envelopes, so that the kids grabbed and craned to see what the amount was and exclaimed indignantly over the exorbitant amount of money. Teams of kids from other classes came in to sell candy or lottery tickets to raise money for some worthy cause. The nurse came in to read TB skin tests or to give flouride "swish" treatments. The intercom called people to the office for phone calls or because their mother wanted to see them or because the principal promised they would provide help for a custodian.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Besides that, there were the "Pull-out" programs: kids pulled out for drug programs, for military recruiting, for science trips or spell-athons. Kids begged to be excused so they could finish projects for other classes, or they left early so they could drive their folks down to Great Falls or to Browning for the doctor. They went out for speech therapy, for counselling, and to explain their behavior the day before. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The school had signed up for the normal series of school assemblies, but we were thirty miles away from anyplace with a motel, so the speakers were never ready at the time when the assembly was scheduled. If one prepared lesson plans and began to teach, they showed up. If one counted on the assembly and made no plans, they took the wrong turn, got caught in bad weather, or just chickened out. After the assembly left, everyone was hyper for an hour. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It seemed to me that there was a serious decline in the quality of the assemblies from the ones we saw in the Sixties. Maybe the school simply bought the B-string. One of the most memorable of the Sixties was a man in training to be an astronaut who “blew the whistle” on some part of the program and was busted out of the system for it. He gave a stirring talk about free speech and honor. Another was the predator bird trainer for Walt Disney, who brought hawks and owls that flew through the gymnasium and returned to his hand. The Heart Butte assemblies blur together in my mind, but were mostly on the level of novelty musical instruments or the physics of yo-yo’s.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I kept bugging the Doc to "shrink" the schedule for the days when we had assemblies so that the kids wouldn't keep missing first and second periods over and over. He didn't understand the concept. His big worry was making the lunch schedule, which was staggered in order to fit everyone in, come out even so the cooks wouldn't be mad at him. He understood that cooks are to be respected. Once he issued an edict that no one was to bum coffee off the cooks any more, because they were getting cross. He was slow to realize that he was the only one who raided the cooks' coffee. The rest of us stuck to the swill we made in the teachers' lounge. We were careful about the cooks, too. When Mary, nicknamed "Monkey," came out of her kitchen with a giant spoon in her hand to give us a lecture, everyone shaped up.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When basketball really got underway, the kids were hardly in school anymore. In Montana teams have to travel so far that they leave at noon and don't get home until well after midnight. On days that interesting games were scheduled, the non-athletic kids stayed home to prepare for travel on their own. The kids who came were in a great flurry to get clothes lined up, collect money, and make arrangements. The next day they just didn't show up. The team was often officially excused until noon on the day after a game-- or if they came, they put their heads down and slept. .</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So a student got behind a little, that coincided with other interruptions so the missing work was never made up, the concept was lost, the next assignment was impossible to explain -- yet promises were made and intentions were good. The third assignment was either a clean start or became crushed under the loss of the earlier work. It was impossible to build sequence, to gather skill. This was especially deadly for English.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All along I knew that if I taught as I thought was right and effective, I was likely to be fired. I knew that the kids shut out any kind of phoniness or hypocrisy. I spoke frankly about sex, because the kids were "doing it," and had many questions as well as a lot of crazy convictions. (Like, if you have relations with a woman who is menstruating, it will drive the blood to her brain and kill her.) When things got pretty sticky, Mrs. Marlboro (presumably as an Indian woman who would avoid the taboos and not be criticized and also as the "health" teacher) took all the girls for an afternoon and "had a good talk with them." I heard her voice from the next room. She sounded angry and punishing-- the way a nun in a boarding school might sound. (I thought of the devil-hating nun in Louise Erdrich’s stories.) Afterwards the girls came away with the absolute conviction that a person could get a sheep pregnant. No amount of my talk about DNA would persuade them differently.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">STARTING THE INJUNS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I taught Blackfeet history as though it mattered, spoke a bit of Blackfeet, kept classroom order no matter the level of confrontation it took-- even physical contact short of striking -- used video tapes as much as books, and taught the traditional high school literature: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowolf, Whitman, Poe--as well as the "New Canon" of Native American literature: not just James Welch, Jr. (who is half Blackfeet) but also D'Arcy McNickle, Louise Erdrich, Paula Gunn Allen, Beverly Hungry Wolf (who is a full-blood Canadian Blackfeet). The wonderful new wave of Native American books was just beginning, and I tried to keep up. I had the idea that if I could get the kids curious, make them care in spite of themselves, that the constant drifting would end and they would start their engines.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because I couldn't find a good Indian account of the early Blackfeet times and because the more scholarly Blackfeet: Raiders of the Plains by John Ewers was being used in social studies, I made every student read McClintock's The Old North Trail. The second year I chose one Indian-written novel for each grade level. Also in the second year, since my room was only roughed-in drywall, I stapled maps of the reservation all over them, plus an aerial view of Browning. The kids spent a lot of time studying them as well as a handsome Atlas I kept on the counter. My own personal thinking tends to be topological: foreground, background, central and peripheral, etc. I think this was also true of some kids. I thought any kind of representations, schemata, abstractions, were good for them. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We watched every movie about Indians we could lay hands on, but also movie versions of the "classics" like Little Women (both earlier versions-- the newest one hadn't been made yet) and Tale of Two Cities. I read books out loud, being careful to stop at cliff-hanging moments, and sometimes the kids would check the book out of the library to read ahead of me. The kids all loved Anne of Green Gables, both book and movie. When I asked them why, they said it was about a small town where people were close, like Heart Butte, except that they kept nice yards and had orderly parties. It was that 19th century pastoral world the Blackfeet lived in for a few decades. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I played a sound tape of Doig reading from his work about Valier and the five students in the room put their heads down to sleep. A year later one of them, a potential writer, began to talk about that tape in a way that showed he had heard it and pondered it repeatedly. This boy's uncle had been one of my best writers in the Sixties. Often it seemed that talent ran in families, maybe because as a group they valued stories and writing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I told the kids never to think of themselves as half-breeds, but as "double-breeds," people whose heritage came from two mighty historical streams that mingled in them, giving them all the strengths of both. (This was my version of the 150% man MacFee talked about.) On my classroom walls I put up portraits of famous Indians from many tribes. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One boy responded petulantly, "I don't know why you'd put up portraits of Indians who aren't even from our tribe." He had caught on to the strategy of always making one's wants more pure, more stringent, so as to never have to admit satisfaction. It's a familiar strategy among people who have found their historic misfortune to have great political power. The boy did not recognize the names of the people whose portraits I put up. Not even the Blackfeet, whom I had to point out to him. He did not recognize his own people from an earlier time, but only the current cast of characters.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One whole wall was Blackfeet from Winold Reiss' portraits commissioned for Great Northern calendars. Bob Scriver had known Winold Reiss, whose son was the same age as Bob, and he had hung around the artist's colony in St. Mary. I told the students this. Some of the portraits were people I had met myself, old people in the Sixties. It made them angry that I knew more about them than they did. "You're a wanna-be," they accused. "You just come here and take over our stuff." (They will accuse me of writing this book in order to make a profit from their lives.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I let the kids write anything, no matter how violent, profane, or inappropriate, no matter how anti-white or self-hating, no matter how childish or twisted. I made no comment, but tried to understand what prompted them. In Browning some of the boys had drawn obscene cartoons--like women bending over and holding their cheeks apart-- but I never saw them in Heart Butte. Maybe they were just better hidden. It was clear that the kids were living hidden lives, just as my own white teenaged grandchildren-by-marriage did, so that they shared everything with each other but nothing with any adults. Among themselves they knew which parents beat each other up, who all the homosexuals in town were, which baby belonged to which father, and how to get drugs or X-rated videos. Sometimes they kindly tried to clue me in to the real nature of life. Bad. Short. Hopeless.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For the most part, the kids didn't pass judgment. In fact, in their limited but shared wisdom, they handled their illicit knowledge better than the adults, who tried to deny and hide everything but ended up obsessing and projecting it all onto each other. The kids were endlessly scornful of adult hypocrisy, as they always are. Like the eighth graders I had known in 1961, some of these kids with dependable parents tried to help the ones who were needier. One gay young man would ask me for advice in comforting his self-destructive younger partner. My suggestions were pretty weak.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In order to teach well, it was vital to know what was real to the kids. I spent a lot of time listening and watching. I figured that it would take several years to really understand what was happening. I tried to give them a voice by constantly typing out what they wrote -- corrected in order to dissolve the bad grammar, nonstandard spelling and clumsy handwriting so the ideas would come through. In this way I processed everything everybody wrote and handed it back to them, stapled together by subject, so they could see for themselves that some people were writing nearly publishable material and others were barely getting down two sentences. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE MEDIA AND THE MESSAGE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was supposed to be "doing" the school newspaper and decided it would be a truly kid paper instead of a pr job. The kids drew intricate mandalas and logos adapted from the world of rock music-- feathers and skulls, daggers and warbonnets. The tamer ones got silk-screened onto the backs of satin jackets by various organizations. For Halloween I included in the paper some of the wilder skulls and plucked-out eyes. One of the parents spent an hour patiently pointing out to the Supe where all the devil-worship codes were hidden in the drawings. Maybe he was right. The kids insisted that certain people were killing pets, especially cats, right in front of little kids. One Easter a "sacrificed" lamb was found on the altar of the ruined Holy Family Mission building. Television obligingly supplied lots of ideas about Satanism, ghosts, and extraterrestial delinquency.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc called me in for a lecture. "That's not a newspaper," he said to me about my photocopied tabloid. "This is a newspaper!" he proclaimed in a Crocodile Dundee voice, whipping out a four-color overlay slick-paper professionally printed near-magazine and slapping it triumphantly with the back of his hand. "This is what we did in Alaska! This is your goal! I want you to try harder!" But he was upset that I was using the photocopy paper so fast. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We all were. The copy machine fairly smoked by afternoon. It was ten years old and no one had ever planned money for its replacement. Maintenance people hated to drive the hundred miles up from Great Falls. The Doc decided we couldn't be trusted to use the machine and put a lock/ counter on it. This was remanded into the custody of the most reliable school aide. "For now on, only this aide is allowed to photocopy!" announced the Doc. Then he used the aide as a substitute for teachers, so that she never had any time to do copying. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One night before the counter was installed I trudged up the hill in the snow after supper to print the newspaper-- the 14 X 17 sheets wouldn't feed properly if the machine were hot. Suddenly the Doc's big banana-colored Caddie wheeled up next to me. "Where do you think you're goin'?" he demanded. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Up to print the newspaper." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Just what newspaper is that?" I think he thought that somehow I was pirating out a personal 'Zine. Since I had entered seminary, I had put out a private newsletter called "Sarvisberry Soup" which went to friends and family. Maybe he'd found out about that, though I got it printed in Great Falls. "Go home," he ordered. I did.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My household is always awash with magazines. I toted the Western art slicks (Southwest Art, Art West) up to the classroom for rewards after work was done. The non-readers craved them-- they yearned over the stories in the pictures and copied out parts-- horseheads, regalia, animals. No one stole them. No one tore them up. At first I took fashion magazines up, but the girls were shocked by the naked women. The thinness didn't bother them -- many of the girls were as thin as the models-- but the sexiness shocked them. Both the oldtime Blackfeet culture and the later Mission rules emphasized that a girl should be irreproachable for her own protection. If she did something bad, she must have tempted the aggressor somehow. It's an old story. But it was strange that the girls accepted what verged on abuse, while rejecting come-hither images in magazines. Why didn’t they protest that their behavior was just fine? Why do victims of all kinds accept blame? Why didn’t their parents or the school personnel see that the girls were blameless and intervene to protect them? Maybe when girls’ basketball teams take state, things will change.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE 'OTHER' WITHIN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Among the juniors was a very troubled young man who came to Heart Butte to play basketball because his uncontrollable temper had already gotten him barred from the Browning team. Scottie's dark skin made it clear that his father was black. I was told that after Scottie was born, his mother took a long look at him, laid him on her bed in the Indian Health Service maternity ward, put on her clothes and quietly disappeared. Scottie was handed around from one relative to another. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was desperate to completely identify with the Blackfeet. In an essay assigned to be about "Why the Basketball Team Will Win This Weekend," he wrote that the team was undefeatable because it was an All-Blackfeet team, which anyone could tell from looking at the names, including his. It never occurred to him that all the names were in fragmented English translation, not Blackfeet, and used as family patronyms when the Nitzitahpi way was to give everyone a unique personal name.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every day Scottie came into the room looking for a fight. His English skills were weak and that shamed him. I knew if I gave him an edge he would take over and I was determined to run my own classroom. I tried every trick I could think of with no results. So we went through a little ritual: I gave an assignment, Scottie raised his hand with an objection, I over-ruled him, he escalated his volume, I insisted, he began to throw his chair and yell, "Fuck you!" At that point I sent him out of the room and we went on with the lesson. If he did it too often, I wouldn't sign for him to play basketball. The coach didn't fight me very much to let him play. He was not a key player and he had been put out of the Browning team for fighting the coach.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The real prime player was Joey Tatsey. Joey had done very well in his four years of high school basketball. He had intended to leave for college but he was persuaded to take one more year of high school, which they guaranteed him he would pass. "They" also expected that Joey could win games for Heart Butte and they were right. The only trouble was that the state athletic regulatory body found out that Joey was a five-year student, against the rules, and disbarred him as well as cancelling the wins he had led.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Joey rightly figured he had been double-crossed. The English class he took from me only had three people in it. He informed me early that he considered the class a nuisance, that he didn't feel like working, and in fact he wouldn't attend any more than he had to. So I flunked him. After all, he'd already passed senior English. In fact, his skills were okay. His grandmother, a school principal, had a little talk with the Supe and the F went magically away. "My grandsons do not flunk," she was heard to say.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the year after I had left, Joey and Scottie went to a party together. Booze and quarrelling intersected and someone shot at Joey, or so one version went. Instead, they shot Scottie in the head. Some said Scottie was trying to protect Joey. At that moment Scottie went from the mythology of the Lost Dark Prince to being the Shining Angel full of transcendent qualities. Patricia Tatsey, Rainbow Woman, eulogized him in her newspaper column, saying that now he walked on diamonds in heaven.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But no one ever had much time for the real Scottie. I always wondered what would have happened if I could have found some strong, handsome Air Force man in Great Falls, a Black hero, who would be willing to spend some time with Scottie. I doubt that his family would have allowed such a man to be in contact. They would have feared him. When it’s tough enough to be a 150% man, how does one kid reconcile both European and African heritage with his Native American self?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When we came to Langston Hughes in our American Literature anthology, I decided to try an experiment. Speaking as much like James Earl Jones as I possibly could, I leaned my voice hard into the cadences and rolled through the poem. When I got to the end, the whole class turned and looked at Scottie. "Read it again," he said. And I did. Then he got mad, did his violence thing, and we went on as usual. But it was a little bit different after that.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the first year I ever taught, there was a half-black kid named Stanley Chief Coward. He would be nearly fifty now. He also had a Black father. His mother, alcoholic, had been killed by a car on the main highway through town. In the version I was told, she came onto the road suddenly from between cars parked in front of a bar, and a white man from out of town struck her before he knew she was there. Stanley's focus in life was to grow up, find that man, and kill him for vengeance. No one knows where Stanley went. I use his real name in hopes of finding him. Over the years I've thought about him often.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was raised by his grandmother-- maybe actually his great-grandmother -- an old-time Blackfeet who did things the old-fashioned way. Probably Stanley, a double or triple-breed, knew more old ways than his classmates. His features and build were purely Blackfeet-- but his skin was dark and his hair was fuzzy. "These Browning kids could never make it in a real city ghetto," said one white teacher scornfully. "Real street gang Blacks would have them for breakfast." Somehow there was indeed an innocence about Stanley, in spite of his lust for vengeance. His IQ was recorded as 100, which means it was probably really about 120, gifted.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In one of the study halls I babysat (in '88-'89), a beautiful part-Black girl would not allow her legs to be touched, and you didn't want to come up behind her too quietly. She read constantly. Book-pusher that I am, I gave her Michael Dorris' novel "Yellow Raft on Blue Water". It is about a mixed Black/Indian girl who receives unwanted attentions and then the story continues on to a "prequel" about the girl's mother and grandmother. I felt sure that it would be almost dead-center about her. After a while, I asked her how she liked it. She looked me straight in the eye-- which she normally didn't do-- and said very deliberately. "I lost it. I never read it." My hunch is that she read it all right. She just didn't want to talk about it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What right did I have to even suggest I understood what these kids were living through? No one has ever had their experience before. And yet it was a universal experience: the outcast, the ugly duckling, Anne of Green Gables, the Hero with a Thousand Faces. Maybe the very fact of paying attention made a difference. At least I take it on faith that the more exactly and deeply a person feels understood, the more likely healing becomes. The opposite of witness is denial. Denial is the strategy of choice on a reservation, but it is a lethal one, killing hope.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For biology class Mr. Z ordered a kit from the Montana Wildlife people. In the kit was a set of 3 inch squares of various hides. The idea was to ask the kids if they could identify what animals the hides came from. Only one of the Heart Butte kids could do it, but I could. Helping Bob Scriver in the taxidermy studio and maintaining the full-mounts in his museum had taught me the texture and shadings of all the major Montana animals. The hollow dark hairs of moose, the equally hollow and stiff gray or rufous hairs of deer, the two-lengthed white fur of mountain goats, the long waxy ruff hair of buffalo-- all were as familiar to me as the fur of my own cat. To everyone, even Mr. Z maybe, for a fat middle-aged female English teacher to know more about the local ungulates than these supposed young hunters (who hated to get out of their pickups) seemed against nature. "Go correct some papers, Ms. Scriver. We're busy."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the 1960's one of the busiest and canniest trappers and hunters on the reservation used to come into Bob's shop to sell mink and beaver hides. Sometimes he would have something bigger, a lynx or a bear. If it was out there, he could get it. This man was now the custodian who was supposed to be testing our water supply. No one ever asked him to talk about hunting or trapping. At least his daughter could tell pretty good bear stories.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A summer or so ago I was sitting in the front room of Bob Scriver's studio/museum when a band of ragged local boys came in to sell him dead gophers for his wild pets to eat. There were four or five small boys and two or three taller, older boys, half-Black. They were from the subsidized housing projects, pretty much let run wild all day. What struck me was that their bearing, their way of interacting, was more like the kids I had known thirty years ago. They were hunters, in a small way, and they covered a lot of prairie on foot-- planning, anticipating, watching-- in their determination to get gophers. The land was pulling them back into old ways.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is often suggested that the public schools on the reservation ought to teach and sustain the historic culture of the tribe. How is that to be located and defined? Through scholarly notes taken by anthropologists and archived in museums? Through old people born in this century after the original cultural system had been destroyed by the death of buffalo economics and the suppression of the social structures built around the great herds? Through the demands of neo-traditionalists who feel that blood quantum entitles them to judge? </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My own contention is that the native peoples must go back to the land that shaped them in the first place. Before the culture can be recovered, the land must be redeemed. If the reservation is to be preserved, if assimilation is to be resisted, then the people must fit themselves to the watercourses, timber, and haymeadows-- even the oil wells and grain fields. They must know the animal lives around them. Even if people come from other places with other histories, the land can teach them to be local, native, autochthonous.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one wants to be out in a Montana winter with only the supplies in a dog travois. The only person I ever knew who actually lived in a traditional lodge all winter was Adolph Hungry Wolf, a voluntary Blackfeet. No longer are there herds of buffalo to run over cliffs. So how do the Blackfeet return to the old ways in a new world? My Blackfeet friends feel strongly that the first step is the preservation of the Blackfeet language. I think we are both talking about the same thing. The language and the land are intertwined-- one is not alive without the other. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-42088036039069873092013-08-10T14:49:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:52:07.933-06:00THAT AIN'T ENGLISH<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THAT AIN'T ENGLISH</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>To get out of history, get into geography.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--James Hillman</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SPEAKING COMES FROM THE HEART</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the end of the Eighties, members of the Piegan Institute did a language inventory of children ready for Head Start. When they had screened the children for English, half a dozen were left in a category marked "non-English speakers." Surprised that so many children had Blackfeet as a primary language, they did something no one had thought of before: they screened the children to see how much Blackfeet they knew. And the appalling truth was out: the children didn't speak Blackfeet either. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They didn't speak any accepted language, but only a kind of family-specific set of indicators for the basics: water, food, sleep, the bathroom. True babytalk. The only people who really understood them were the slightly older children who had the duty of babysitting them. This is not a circumstance peculiar to the Blackfeet or to native Americans or even to poor people. It is something that happens whenever adults are too busy, numb, drunk, angry, depressed or otherwise "out-of-it" to pay any attention to their own children. If the kids are lucky, the household will not be too chaotic for them to watch Sesame Street. Then they have a chance.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is no way to know if there were children in the Sixties who spoke no language at all. No one tested for Blackfeet speakers. Some say that the children have come upon hard times because the boarding-school-educated grandmothers are gone-- already frail from old age in the Sixties. Others say it was allowing alcohol to be sold to Indians on the reservation after the WW II veterans came back. That was when the women began to drink. In the Sixties I never saw a fetal alcohol child. (The Sixties was also a time when certain doctors felt entitled to sterilize Indian women with little cause and no consent. Adopting Indian babies to white families was seen as giving the babies a chance.) Some would point to the efforts to move Indians to the cities, where they lived in ghettoes and acquired the culture of despair. They stopped living for the future and therefore stopped valuing children.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Human speech develops between specific ages of the child. If the window of opportunity passes without language being learned, the brain closes down that option. Children can be raised by wolves, but they will not speak. They will not read. Their culture will be the culture of wolves: eat, sleep, greet the known, fear the unknown. This is why the early years of the children are the most crucial of all if the Blackfeet Nation-- or any other-- is to survive.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LITERATURE BASED</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I came into my new underground classroom, clammy from being empty all summer (there was an underground spring under the hill next to my classroom), I found a stained carpet piled with brand-new boxes of remedial English drill texts. The </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Doc, who had been hired to make sure everything was ready, hadn't been able to get desks yet. "Well," said the Doc grandly, "If your predecessor left you garbage, just send it back." I took him at his word and did. I bought mythology and literature, the college prep kind. I didn't intend to diagram many sentences. I've never had a former student thank me for teaching him or her to diagram a sentence. I've had one or two tell me that when they were at a high-class city party and some over-educated showoff quoted Chaucer, they had some inkling what was going on. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote..." Some could even chime in with the next line. It was like a password for the initiated. I believe in initiations. And passwords. So long as access has a just basis.</span></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My bet was that there was no chance of teaching these kids in any conventional way and I knew the administration would not allow any deviations from what they thought the norm was-- if they knew. I believed, as the Montana state teachers' union rep once remarked, "These administrators are so fat and lazy that as long as they get their paychecks and you keep your classroom door shut, you can do just about anything you want." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Luckily, the ultimate legal authority on English was the Montana Office of Public Instruction. "Rule 10.55.1101 Communication Arts Program (In accordance with ARM 10.55.603 and ARM 10.55.100 (1) In general, a school's communication arts program shall (a) be literature-based. " The administration didn't understand it, didn't like it, wished it would go away, but that little "rule" gave me the power to do what I believed in. The literature I intended to use was going to have as much as possible to do with Blackfeet, native American people in general, and world literature. The OPI specialists encouraged me-- privately, almost secretly.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I don't see why literature even matters," grumbled the Doc. "You read a story, I read a story, we both know the plot...so what? Nothing changes. What good is it?" The Doc and the Supe were nearly illiterate when it came to writing something original. I asked them each for a short essay for the school paper. The Supe's was so full of smoke and commas as to be unintelligible. Doc's was something he had in a file, about how he happened to go back to high school after dropping out. I suspect he flunked out and got back in via a Navy G.E.D. and helpful wives. I once challenged one of his professors at Bozeman about how such a person could earn a doctorate. "That guy should keep his big mouth shut," mumbled the professor and ended the conversation.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc had been hired because he purported to be an expert on curriculum for native Americans. He was supposed to have developed an exemplary document for Bering Straits, which everyone assumed would be relevant to Plains Indians. As time went on, it turned out that that curriculum was actually written by teachers under the direction of one of his sons or sons-in-law. It was a typical midwestern, textbook-based, 1950's course of study. When Mr. Z. inquired as to where in the curriculum there was something uniquely cultural about the science program, the Doc muttered about sleds made from whaleribs, but couldn't find the right page.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The state of Montana was trying to achieve quality goals by requiring each school district to develop and use an actual curriculum instead of merely doing "ten pages of textbook" per assignment. They had drawn up a time-line with a goal date for completion and each superintendent was being held responsible for sending in the proper materials. The idea was that if we drew up our own, the state could not be criticized for dictating, but if there were at least a document to consult, questions could be raised for discussion about the actual content and new teachers would have some sort of reference.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte had no document at all, not even the previous 7th and 8th grade lesson plans for the year which might have given me a clue what the students had been studying. As it happened, in 1962 I already had written one 7 - 12 English curriculum for the Browning Public Schools. Meant for team teaching, it had been based on stories of the world, including Blackfeet mythology. From that experience, I had a pretty clear idea of what to do. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My problem was that the Doc insisted that we had to turn in our curriculums in the grade sequence: that is, he wanted the seventh grade requirements on one day, then the eighth two weeks later and so on. My own plan was to build the curriculum in "strands," skill-sequences in various aspects of language skills: several for speaking, several for listening and so on. Few of the kids fit into their "normal" grade-- if there is such a thing-- and no child anywhere is ever on the same level as the "norm" in every skill. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wanted to write each strand from 7 through 12 without paying much attention to which unit should be taught which week in which grade-- just how they should unfold for each child. That would be a roadmap for each student, so that I could say how far along each one was in a particular skill and therefore what they ought to work on next. I thought the only hope for the kids was to teach like a one-room schoolhouse crossed over with individual instruction.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc couldn't grasp the concept. "In the eighth grade, they ought to do eighth grade stuff," he insisted. "What's the big deal?" To him the concept of grades was a given-- not negotiable or even re-conceivable. But the plain truth was that in this school-- and in most I know about-- grade levels are mostly an illusion convenient for the writers of textbooks. It's one of those salesman's concepts.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"In this eighth grade there are people who read at the fourth grade level and others who read at an eleventh grade level," I explained.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"They all should be doing eighth grade stuff," he commanded. "Make them do eighth grade stuff. It says on the plan that you're teaching the eighth grade here and I expect you to do it."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Language arts are a multiple skill. People operate at different levels of skill. Some kids are not good readers but excellent speakers. They might be good story-tellers but bad spellers."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"That's ridiculous. You have eighth grade books here. Issue them and teach eighth grade stuff." He was simply impervious to reason or common sense.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was reminded of the story about the child who brought a worm to his teacher for identification and was told he couldn't know because that worm wasn't taught until next year. It's a little story that a lot of teachers know.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once I lost my temper and said to him, "Look, I'll use your own way of understanding things. I'll assume we have the same goals, but I'm trying to seduce these kids and you're trying to rape them by force."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"That's it," he said, completely insensitive to the metaphor I was using. "Force them to do what they're supposed to."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes reduced to tears and sometimes in cold fury, I managed to produce my curriculum, which was praised by the state English curriculum people and even used as a shining example in an education class at Columbia University where someone had faxed it. I was awarded a special citation from the National Council of Teachers of English for "Excellence in Teaching English to Students At Risk." Since the administration was trying to get rid of me, they tried to keep the award secret. I called a reporter in Great Falls who wrote an article. No one in Heart Butte noticed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I would be willing to bet a thousand dollars that no one in Heart Butte has taught from that curriculum and maybe a hundred dollars that no one would be able to to find a copy of it in the building today. To be honest, there was never any budget for the materials needed. And doing curriculums properly takes time. Probably it would have been five years before the bugs were worked out of it and materials were found or designed so it would really unfold as it should.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CURRICULUM AS A BIG STICK</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Other teachers, most of them beginners, had a tough time for different reasons. There was no opportunity to discuss goals and priorities as a faculty nor was there leadership in terms of an institutional mission statement or guiding philosophy. We were not allowed to schedule meetings or bring in consultants. "It's just an excuse to ask for money," scoffed the Supe. "Next thing you know, they'll all want more pay for writing this curriculum because they had to spend their precious private time on it. Browning is making a big mistake by allowing released time!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Soon the curriculum check-list had become a weapon and administrators were muttering ominously that we'd better be careful what we wrote because we'd have to teach it exactly. The Supe worked hard to demonize the Office of Public Instruction so that we wouldn't listen to them or confide in them. He resented them knowing anything about what he was doing. Neither did administrators want us to contact Browning schools or to use any of their materials, though that district had been exploring Blackfeet curriculum development for decades and the Blackfeet Community College presumably had many rich resources.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My original hope had been for time to watch and listen until I could see natural ways of supplying what the students needed and could develop materials specific to them. Curriculum, it seems to me, should grow organically out of dialogue over a period of time-- an interpenetrating reconciliation between the local and the universal. It takes time to educate a community about what the concepts are and how to value them. For that matter, no one was listening to the community in a real way. No one pressed the school board about what they really meant when they generalized about "vocational education" or "equal education." What the community heard was "guaranteed jobs."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the first year of teaching I didn't expect much success because of not having the right feel, not knowing what would be of deep interest, not being able to find the boundaries of what would be tolerated or understood. I expected to blunder, to experiment, to take risks. But I had not expected the administration to misunderstand and attack me. I remembered better from the Sixties.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TEXT BOOKS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"English" is the most problematic subject taught in "ethnic" American schools because it is the most directly based on culture. And yet the subject is not even called "American," which-- of course-- it is. The subject we call "English" is really a kind of evolved jumble that includes grammar, rhetoric, and what is called "the Canon," which is a collection of writing (predominantly white, male, and British) that most people know and expect other educated people to know. The Office of Public Instruction in Montana was aware that "English" per se was a territory ill-defined and unreasonable, and so they called it "Communication Arts."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The great majority of citizens have never thought about "communication arts." Yet they spend their days speaking and listening, writing and reading. Many of them prefer to spend as little time writing and reading as possible. If you ask most people what English is about, they sigh and claim they hated the subject. In their experience it was about never being good enough. Everything was mysterious and self-conscious, from finding the source of inspiration for a bit of writing to knowing which form of "their," "they're" or "there" to use. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Luckily, human beings can hardly keep from learning spoken language. Patterning sounds and understanding the spoken sound patterns of the people around him or her is among a baby's first tasks, achieved so early in life that the baby has no memory of a time before words. By the end of the primary grades, most children have mastered grammar in their spoken words or risk being mocked by their cohort.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In fact, language evolves constantly and often forms pools of vernacular wherever people talk to each other more than to any out-group. Heart Butte kids who ventured outside the Rez soon became aware that they pronounced words differently and had different vocabularies. At that point, they shut up. More than a few students transferred to Heart Butte from Valier (or dropped out of Valier before Heart Butte High School existed) simply because they refused to speak in front of white people who might mock them. Valier required every high school student to make a speech and do a research paper, both beyond the capacity of Heart Butte students-- or so they thought. Requiring such patterned communication was frankly meant to assimilate all students to a certain standard. To the Heart Butte kids, the requirement became repression because it meant they had to risk public shaming.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Written language is another story. Only for the last two hundred years have large numbers of ordinary people been sophisticated at using print, so it has overtones of elitism. The question "Have you read such and such?" is not interpreted as a simple inquiry so much as an opportunity for oneupsmanship. "She reads a lot," is said in a respectful voice, though "she" may in fact be reading trash. On the prairies anti-intellectualism is alive and well. To be well-read comes close to putting on airs. A highly educated adult who isn’t careful to be one of the folks can become a freak. In the past such people were accepted as clergy, school superintendents, or doctors. Now people may be uncomfortable even with those authority figures seeming too intellectual.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In most contemporary American English classrooms at the junior high and senior high school levels, what is taught depends on textbook salesmen more than on any coherent or logical curriculum. Usually the textbooks are already in place when the teacher is hired. Because they are so expensive, replacing them is always delayed as long as possible. The exception is the parallel workbook, which is supposed to be issued to the individual pupil and used up over the course of the year. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Textbooks are usually bought in a series, which means buying a set for each of six different years of school (7-12), and often are "tracked" to different degrees of difficulty (although technically this is an educational heresy), which means buying as many as three or four versions for each "year" (college-prep, occupational, and slow learner, plus maybe something experimental). Grammar and usage textbooks have no relationship to literature textbooks, but they also come in a series with "tracks:" high, low and medium. A good salesman, who found a school with unlimited funds and convinced them to buy everything they needed, might easily sell two books for every student enrolled: six grades of literature times three tracks (college-bound, "vocational," and remedial) and six grades of grammar & usage times three tracks (college-bound, "vocational," and remedial) plus one workbook for each text plus teacher's copies (with the answers), overhead transparencies and now, I suppose, CD's for the computers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It's a gold mine. Textbooks cost far more than ordinary books. The commissions must be substantial. To make it easy, figure one hundred kids, $40 per book, two books per pupil, so that's eighty times one hundred or $8,000 dollars, plus the other stuff. I don't know what kind of commissions a salesman gets, but ten percent would be $800.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">New textbooks are a major budget item. Changing from one "series" to another is a decision that can cost thousands of dollars, even in a small school. Yet there is not very much difference among text series. In truth the content is determined by what will sell in the most populous locations: urban Texas, California, New York. Native American literature content in the texts we had was stereotypical, sentimental, 19th century and often written by a white. (One of my former students, Robey Clark, had the task of reading the "ten texts" for history in order to make a recommendation to the Portland Public Schools. He said each text had a little piece of the real story of the American Indians-- none had the whole story.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most often in larger schools new English textbooks are bought after a committee of teachers looks at brochures or, hopefully, samples sent out by the publisher. Discussion may continue for a full year. Perhaps a teacher is exceptionally motivated and subscribes to one of the teaching journals with advertisements in it. Most often teachers have already taught from one set or another and prefer what is familiar. Never have I seen a publication that analyzed "English" textbooks or rated them in an objective manner. Since there is no consensus about what "English" is, or how best to teach the various enterprises called "English," I don't know how anyone could pretend to be objective.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The texts, bright and shiny as apples, become a "holding" of the school and administrators insist that they be accounted for constantly. I numbered mine on the top, handed them out at the beginning of the class, demanded them back before the end of the class with enough time to spare to put them back in numerical order so all were accounted for. People who were absent had to check the book out after school and bring it back the next morning. This was found objectionable -- too strict. So I issued a text to each student. Soon we had too many students for the number of texts, but no money to order more. Even sooner, texts began to disappear. Every inquiry into where the book went was met with great outcries of innocence and accusations of racism. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After some voice-raising on the part of faculty, more texts were ordered, but then the students began to disappear without checking in their texts. Texts turned up in abandoned lockers, under piles of coats at games, in primary classrooms, and in cars. No parents could afford to replace what their child was accused of losing. Every now and then I went through all the lockers-- with the usual backlash against invasion and injustice-- and among the pop cans full of snoose juice (from chewing tobacco) I would find half the books that had been "lost." Their assigned custodians purported major astonishment, as though they had been teleported there by aliens. By the end of the year, our "holdings" were seriously diminished. I suppose we could have gone house to house, searching.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In order to prepare six daily lesson plans and because the administrators refused to allow teachers to return to the building to work in the evening, I either had to take a set of texts down to my apartment for the year or resign myself to hauling ten pounds of books back and forth every evening. I did a little of both. And I dreamt of the time and resources to create a custom "looseleaf" text. Someone is missing a major opportunity to do "niche marketing" to reservations.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The library had a good supply of elementary books, but no high school reading material. One of the Montana city high schools cleaned out their stacks and sent boxes of books, but the crazy librarian piled them along the wall without unpacking them. After six months I simply stayed after school a couple of nights to search through them. The librarian was enraged and I was told to stop-- too late, because I already had taken what I wanted. It was not particularly useful stuff. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People who wanted to help Native Americans constantly sent along mittens, caps and mufflers. I wished they would send good quality books instead. Don't think of them as little children with cold hands. Think of them as young people who hunger for good stories and information-- the same as anyone. They don't like being patronized.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span>
</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">USING MY OWN PAST</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Addressing my job in Heart Butte meant either accepting the conventional way of managing "English" classes (drill, assigned reading, ten questions, and the rare one-page writing assignment)-- though everyone agreed that it was an exercise in futility-- or doing some heavy thinking about just what the class really was. My best advantage was having had that year of site-specific language arts curriculum discussion in Browning in the Sixties with the superintendent actually participating. As a former English teacher himself, he truly understood and had passionate opinions.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Phil Ward, Jr. was the superintendent who first hired me. Phil's dad had been a school man, also. Mormon, calm and practical, literate and a pretty good poet himself, Phil was as enlightened as administrators get. He knew how to inspire people and yet the Browning white folks never really understood him. Once in a while Phil would pass my classroom in the hall, hear what I was teaching, and come in to ask if he could try teaching the subject, just for a class period-- just because he loved the subject so much. I always learned from him. Recently I spent a summer evening in Choteau talking to Phil Ward Jr.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By this time Phil is a retired professor of school administration in Oklahoma. In his college courses he taught by using case examples in the famous Harvard Business School method, always approaching from an ethical point of view. He still finds me well-intentioned but a little out of control. To his thinking, I have a lot of potential but lack discipline. Remember he is Mormon and I am Unitarian. We are each faithful in our own way. He is a patient assimilationist and an incorrigible optimist. I'm a realist looking for some way to preserve everyone's differences, including his. We bring who we are.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I began to teach in Browning in the Sixties, Phil had to bail me out of trouble several times. One of the earliest came about because of a speech and drama class I taught in the junior high school. Several kids were far too shy to talk, which presented a problem. I organized a style show, going downtown store-to-store to borrow outfits. Then I had to convince even the bolder girls that it would be all right to put on strange clothes and NOT on top of their own clothes. Two girls were too shy even to walk across the gym floor. Since it was near Halloween, I put sheets over them and they ran across the floor as ghosts. One of those girls, Dorothy Still Smoking, is now finishing her Ph.D. while directing the local Headstart Program. She has just been elected to the national board of Headstart. By writing grants, she has brought millions of dollars to her people and she is a founder of the Piegan Institute as well as the Immersion School. The other "ghost," Beverly Bullshoe, is a dedicated parish worker in Heart Butte, a kind of lay sister.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Neither woman, as an adult, would make the next mistake I made. Inflated over the success of my style show, I decided we would write a play. Since we were all girls, the setting had to be a place with only women. The girls decided on a reform school and we soon had an exciting plot about rival gangs and an escape during which dogs were used to track the escapees. One of the parents, a matron at the Cut Bank Boarding Dormitory ( a residence for kids who live too far out on the reservation to make it to school otherwise), saw the script and decided the play was a poorly concealed attack on the boarding dorm. She demanded that I first be instructed about what was proper and then fired. Phil managed to save my job, but it wasn't easy. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The girl who was to have played the leader of one of the gangs, Delores Butterfly, is now a teacher in the Browning Schools. She married a Bird, so -- as she puts it-- "I still have wings." When I read about the old Holy Women of the Blackfeet, wives and mothers who have lived irreproachable lives, and thereby earned their sacredness, I think of Delores with her quiet inner light. Once a few years ago I embarrassed her in a class we were both taking by trying to explain to the group how her spirit had stayed with me over the years. It was pretty corny, and I shed tears. No one knew quite how to react. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next year after my play that closed "out-of-town," my seniors were in an uproar about confrontations with the local police, at that time separated into City Police and Tribal Police. Seeing a chance to teach discussion skills, I let them talk about their troubles. In the Fifties, Northwestern University was one of the sources of theories of constructive negotiation. Dean Barnlund taught us that people ought to practise on topics they really cared about. Next thing I knew, there was a knock on the door and the Chief of Police was there with his ticket book to write me up for libel. He cared, all right. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We went down to Phil's office. Phil, ignoring any issues of jurisdiction, leaned back in his chair and said gravely, "Well, you know that the defense for libel is simply proof that what was said was true." There was a long pause before the Chief of Police left. Then Phil tried once again to explain to me that teaching is both ethical and political. It is not unethical to keep from stirring up trouble. I differ with that concept when trouble is the only route to change. Was there really no way to even talk about cops who beat up kids? Couldn't we have actually done something? Were we afraid of confronting it? The whole thing haunts me. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">In 1964-65 a committee in School District #9 consisting of myself, Phil Ward (the superintendent), Tom McKeown (the junior high principal), Darrel Armentrout (the counselor), Grover McLaughlin (the high school principal) and the other high school English teacher spent a year developing an English curriculum. In those days administrators were interested in education.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Phil Ward already had his specific aims for the high school program:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To provide a meaningful program for each student.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To provide a plentiful intellectual growth opportunity through curriculum based on skill improvement, exploration, and challenge.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To provide for physical development.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To develop social awareness and a social conscience.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To assist the student in making a realistic evaluation of his capabilities that he <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>may make well-considered decisions relative to occupational choice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To provide the student an understanding of, and an appreciation of, the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>culture and tradition that is America, toward the end that his citizenship <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>participation may result in an ever-improving nation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To develop good readers, good listeners and good speakers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>8.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To develop a recognition of propaganda, its purpose and intent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>9.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To develop cultural interest wherever, whenever and however possible.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>10.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To provide opportunity for the development of character and integrity. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is the goal-directed curriculum minimum my notes of the committee meetings show:</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The following goals are for a graduating senior:</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SPEAKING:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tell a traditional story in a direct way without notes so as to hold the interest of <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a third grade group.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Give an organized, substantiated, serious five minutes speech from notes.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Carry on a conversation on a level he [sic] will probably use in future life.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Discuss a subject in a group following the recommended steps and reaching a <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>clear-cut conclusion. The recommended steps are:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A. Determine the question.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B. Define terminology.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>C. Assemble the evidence.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>D. Make a hypothesis.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>E. Judge the hypothesis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Use parliamentary procedure to chair a meeting.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pass an oral examination on any special field in which he [sic] has done special <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>research and which is approved by a faculty sponsor.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WRITING:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Write a 500 word organized essay that:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Has a main theme supported by specific evidence, instances, anecdotes.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Has unified paragraphs.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>C.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Has complete sentences on a level of complexity equal to what will be expected in life.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>D.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Uses imagery and concrete sensations.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>E.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Is clear and direct in style.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>F.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Uses good handwriting.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>G.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Has no more than:</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>one spelling error</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>one capitalization or puncuation error</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>one usage error</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Paraphrase material on a level of difficulty he [sic] is likely to encounter in life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Write a one-sentence precîs of an essay, movie , novel or poem that is a clear statement of the central theme.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Write a one-paragraph example of:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Narration</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Exposition</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Description</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Argumentation</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Write a clear, presentable business letter.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Proof and edit a prepared paragraph in order to correct mistakes and improve <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>clarity.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">READING:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pick out the sequence of events or ideas in a work of fiction or nonfiction.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pick out the main theme or idea of a work and justify it with evidence from <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that work.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Identify propaganda and ulterior motives.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Find and use whatever library materials he may need in life.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Read at a rate of speed and depth of understanding equal to his potential and/or what is likely to be expected of him in life.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LISTENING:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Remember and repeat simple instructions.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pick out the sequence of events or ideas in spoken fiction or nonfiction.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pick out the main idea from a speech.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Take notes in outline form form an organized twenty-minute lecture.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Recognize propaganda and ulterior motives.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We also provided a list of habits we wanted to build in school:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Being on time.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Maintaining a certain degree of cleanliness.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Reasonable manners (Waiting one's turn, not calling out rude statements, no hitting, etc.)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Taking care of one's equipment.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Respecting organized authority.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Attending school every day.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dressing acceptably.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Doing one's own work.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Accepting responsiblity.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Respecting property rights.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We felt no self-consciousness about "changing the culture," though "Indian time" is notoriously a part of reservation life. Likewise, we didn't think about how hard it might be to maintain cleanliness in a one-room cabin full of people. The rest of our standards were against the grain, but no one thought of them as lessening the "Indianness" of the students. We thought of them as part of growing up. We intended to assimilate to “Americanness”, assuming that was the same as improvement.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This sort of results-oriented approach is very popular as I write, but is coming under heavy fire from parents who believe that somehow these kinds of statements contradict the basic three R's kind of education they had. It ain't drill and therefore it ain't English. But I would still happily defend this list of goals in the name of practicality and function. I expect no one in School District #9 would recognize them now, although the people who later became teachers and administrators did actually meet these standards as high school students. Unfortunately, it was the most full-blood students who gave up and faded away, precisely because of these demands.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The administrators were upset by the prospect of having to tell non-achievers, still faithfully attending after twelve, thirteen, and maybe fourteen years of getting "social" passes in order to stay with their classmates, that they would not get diplomas. So we teachers made a loophole: "equal to the student's potential and likely to be expected of him or her in real life." Nowadays, students who have not passed are given diploma boxes with nothing in them. The rationalization is that they will come back to pick up their incompletes. They wear the cap and gown, walk in the procession, and get the heap of presents their families provide, but they may never receive that piece of paper with a seal on it. A few will never figure out the difference-- mostly because a high school diploma will not be expected of them in real life.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Unless a school is clear about its unique philosophy, I don't know how anyone could achieve integrity in teaching. At Heart Butte there wasn't even any school-wide mission statement, much less a focus for the English program. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These were the goals I settled on in my own mind:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1.Familiarity with literature:</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that people expected high school students to know,</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that explored the Native American heritage, and</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that was locally based, that is, Montana writing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Confidence in writing and enough pride in performance to care how good it was, right down to whether the paper was clean.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Vocabulary, based on roots, prefixes, suffixes, and metaphors in as many <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>languages as English includes. And, as an adjunct, Blackfeet roots, prefixes, suffixes. and metaphors.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>An understanding that usage and spelling are a matter of habits and attention <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and that conventional usage is an advantage in the world. They are a form of good manners.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For those who could master grammar, a good enough grip on the parts of a <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>sentence to make them able to wrestle with sentences as structures.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The beginnings of media literacy, especially narrative video.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Thinking skills</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This does not even scratch the surface of what "English" can and probably should include. But it was a major mandate for someone returning to teaching after a lapse of twenty-odd years and it was a major challenge for an assortment of young people at every possible skill level in many different psychological states. Explaining it to the administration would have meant being shut down, since they would not understand it and therefore would not agree with it. I think it is wrong and dangerous not to confide in one's administration, but I believed the situation was extreme enough to justify my decision.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CREATING A CANON</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1989 in Heart Butte the strongest goal I had in mind was compliance with the State of Montana mandate that English be "literature-based." I whole-heartedly agreed. If a youngster reads well and knows that there is exciting stuff out there in the world, his or her future is almost guaranteed, because he or she will self-educate for the rest of a lifetime. I thought that the literature we spent time on should include the conventional canon, because certain writing (often the most difficult) is considered a marker of education at higher levels. Not knowing Chaucer is a bit of a handicap. Not knowing Shakespeare is a much more serious deficit. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But not knowing one's own literature has got to be the most serious loss of all. "Montana literature" seemed a new concept on the reservation Mac Swan, a teacher in Kalispell, was considered a pioneer when he took a year's sabbatical in 1987-88 to compose a workbook for digesting major Montana books. ( ) Many English teachers these days are new to Montana and so have little notion of who the many local writers are. Luckily, the anthology called The Last Best Place has changed all that. For all its possible faults, it is an undeniable Canon that is local. The book, massive as it is, ought to be a textbook in Montana high school classrooms. It is a best-seller, not just in Montana but among all people interested in the American West. The public radio stations took up the cause by organizing on-the-air discussions of Montana books and call-in interviews with local authors. These programs are available on tape. In addition to schools, library-based adult reading groups benefited from the lively series. People called in their opinions, often memories of the events in the book and sometimes with personal tales about authors.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just as the Eighties tipped into the Nineties, there was a flood of fine Native American writing. The earlier writers like James Welch, Jr., Leslie Marmon Silko, and so on were joined almost weekly by names I'd never heard of before, and now almost every issue of The New York Times Book Review includes a book by and about Native Americans. There are even sub-genres about gay Native Americans or in a gothic, surrealistic style, not counting the grocery-store-rack pulps of pop history or pre-history.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It seemed clear to me that we should be reading the classic canon--with a lot of coaching and interpretation-- alongside contemporary Native American and local writing . Based on this, we would write. Reading and writing would go together. We would read each other's writing, workshop-style, sometimes with the protection of anonymity. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Sixties I had assigned an essay about one's own room. The following brief essay -- or maybe poem, as I have organized it below-- stunned me:</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>One does not associate a room to one's inner self,</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>but I shall try to relate it to the aspirations of the mind. </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>A room, suspended in time, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>entwining through the past and present. </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>A hovel, a castle, a bearer of truths,</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>a deceiver of falsehoods of thoughts of deep despair, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>and of highest hopes to tumble mountains , </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>raise the heavens. </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Comforting and passive in manner, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>progressive and blunt reality. </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>A sanctuary of harmonized solitude,</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>a mirror of life, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>of planes coinciding with one another, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>of unbound dreams,</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>a distorted cube constricting one's being,</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>harrassment of undepictable horror, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>a bomb of explosion, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>blazing and blowing thousands upon thousands, </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>thus accumulating in globes of section </i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>in which appears one's many lives.</i></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This student was far beyond anything I had encountered. How does a teacher approach someone who writes like this? Where on earth had it come from? Was it copied? What was he reading? I can't go to him now--as I have with some students-- to ask him about what he wrote, because he is dead. If he were living now, what would he be writing? Does he have descendents who write? Did we somehow lose a Blackfeet James Joyce or Thomas Wolfe? Are there others who can write like this?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wanted the students to write about what they knew, to be able to give realistic and meaningful evidence of their own lives, but there is always something beyond that. This deeper level of writing is what I was looking for in Heart Butte students. A poetic sense of beauty, mystery, and uniqueness seemed to me at the heart of what Plains Indian culture was about-- majestic thunderheads, seething grass, dreamguides, shape-shifters. Mysticism without drugs, vision beyond any one culture, even New Age. If there are no jobs anyway, why not educate people to be poets and philosophers? Particularly if that is their natural aptitude? And if the larger culture is hungry for it?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Teaching writing is an industry in the United States, with dozens of summer workshops offering personal coaching. Sometimes one must qualify by submitting a manuscript, but mostly people simply gather someplace pleasant by paying a fee up to a thousand dollars for a week. Writers who can claim to be professional (published) are the teachers, which mostly means they read the manuscripts a little in advance so they can lead group discussion on each effort. Criticism is usually subjective. There is a certain amount of overlap in style with the kind of groups who meet for psychological growth, which--in my opinion-- is legitimate since writing has a great deal to do with what kind of person the author is.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In winter the same writing teachers will often serve as "poets-in-the-schools" for several weeks or months. Heart Butte school in its K-8 version has had at least two poets-in-residence, Ripley Schemm and Mick Fedullo. Poets are among the people who are willing, even eager, to stay in Heart Butte for a while because they are curious about the people and open to the beauty of the location. Anyway, Ripley Schemm grew up just miles south of Heart Butte, near Choteau. These people from "outside" were gentle, encouraging, and non-judgmental. The results were little pamphlet books of poems in naive free-verse style, pleasant but not surprising. The kids learned that the enterprise was both easy and praiseworthy, which is a good start.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But at the high school level that sort of writing can descend into being "precious" and sentimental. Real thinking, logical organization, vivid imagery and psychological insight are not beyond high school writers. Most people won't put out the effort or take the risk of revealing themselves unless they have strong feelings about what they are expressing. Therefore, I was tolerant-- maybe over-tolerant-- about subject matter. At the same time, I assigned topics, usually one a week. The load of correcting essays -- even short ones -- was a heavy one. Sometimes in place of grading I simply typed them all together, correcting all the grammar and spelling errors but not editing, and let the classes discuss them. It was a form of "publishing." Even the non-readers would read them, even when they were not assigned. Elementary kids, parents, the janitors, other teachers would all read them. Students kept them and read them again months later.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes I made up worksheets from the most common errors. For a while I kept individual files on students so that if a person were constantly making one mistake, I could supply some special worksheets and instruction on that topic. Generally they clustered around one or another mistake, so a universal classroom lesson was a good idea.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the older women who acted as aides was reminiscing about former teachers. "She was the best English teacher we ever had. She never made any mistakes and she corrected everyone all the time. She was really strict." The aide looked at me meaningfully, saying with her eyes, "Get a clue!" To her, English was the same thing as legitimacy which was the same thing as propriety. That woman and I are the same age. Her point of view is the one adopted by media portraits of English teachers-- a stereotype about as accurate and nuanced as media portraits of Irish priests-- or American Indians.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Much of what is taught as English to "slow" students is really just an attempt to change habit patterns. Whether one uses "to," "two," or "too" in writing that particular homonymn is just a matter of conventionalized habit. We try to agree among English speakers in order to preserve understanding, but we usually really know what is meant, the same as we can stumble through 18th century creative spelling like Ben Franklin's--if not archaic language like Chaucer's. I could find and/or invent page after page of drill on "they're/their/there." After weeks of correcting papers I myself was losing the line between "its/it's." I still spell some words differently because of living in Canada for a few years. Most people are not troubled by small variations, but I used to type out dictation for an Australian law professor who was very concerned to make sure I used American spellings, because being culture-appropriate had been made an issue for him. It's not just a problem for little kids. Computer spell-checkers must be adjusted for at least four kinds of "English:" American, British, Canadian and Australian.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE POLITICS OF ENGLISH</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Language has many political and moral attachments, both in the larger aspect of a complete language system and in the smaller aspect of vernacular uses within one language. Some sub-pronunciations, local grammars, and unique vocabularies are labelled "low-class," to be extinguished. When students say "ain't," the effect is almost like swearing. "You shouldn't say ain't," scold the virtuous who KNOW. From then on the word has an aura, like forbidden sexual words or cursing. Playing with the words is playing with emotions-- getting the grownups mad, showing independence, making a statement about class and status. Kids know a lot about rhetoric-- they just don't have a name for it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Phil Ward used to look forward to television reaching the community, because he felt that it would be a way for the kids to hear and develop standard pronunciation. Bless his heart, he couldn't have predicted Rock n' Roll culture, shock-jocks and the ghetto-based lingo that dominates much of the media. Not too many Rez kids watchin' Hallmark Hall of Fame! (They all watched Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" with the result that I was never able to use the word "poke" in class again.) But just the same, I do think the kids now have better spoken and heard vocabularies. They just don't read as much as they used to. They carry videos instead of books. Movies are texts as surely as novels. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I grew up with a reading vocabulary that overreached my verbal vocabulary and ran into embarrassment when I had my own peculiar pronunciations. (I used to speak knowingly of "man-yer" as a fertilizing agent.) Today's kids are likely to have many words they speak but never see in print and therefore can't spell except phonetically. We are in a time when vocabulary is being created daily, both because of new technologies and scientific terms (i.e. "floppies," "plate tectonics"), and because of world culture-meshing or even the popularization of under-class vernaculars by the media. ("Don' be dissin' me, girl!")</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because of renewed waves of immigration from South America and Asia, speaking English has become a political hot-button again. "Speak English or get out," say the conservative patriots. Not speaking English is equivalent to being un-American -- resisting assimilation. It never occurs to most people that English is an imported language-- even a latecomer, since the earliest visitors from Europe were Spanish and Italian. (Columbus brought a rabbi along in case the natives spoke Hebrew, which he thought of as a sort of ur-language.) Blackfeet is a literally native language. But Blackfeet is also portrayed by some as a "foreign" language. A few still hang on to the idea that it is a pagan and therefore satanic language. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It seems to me impossible to teach English on the Blackfeet reservation without coming to terms with the teaching of Blackfeet language, because at one time English was the forcible replacement for Blackfeet and still has that political stigma. Speaking English was the criterion for assimilation. People still living were once whipped for not speaking English instead of Blackfeet. They can hardly be blamed for resenting English or even for trying to escape the whole issue of language. They are self-conscious about the near-dialect that many habitually use and afraid of being criticized for it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc constantly urged me to drive the kids "the way the Japanese push their kids." (They have the highest child-suicide rate of any country.) But he was dubious about any kind of stuff that might be unAmerican. Every morning the administration made sure the student body president read the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom, even though he got the giggles so bad he could hardly finish. It was the forms that were insisted upon, even when the spirit was exactly opposite to what it ought to have been.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every morning my more sophisticated students refused to stand up or put their hands over their hearts. I didn't insist. I did stand with my own hand over my own heart. When I gently inquired with one dignified and rather well assimilated girl, she said flatly, "They killed us and took our land. I won't pledge to them." I never would have suspected she felt that way. It was a little harder for me to stand and pledge, since I am “them.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE NEED TO BE UNDERSTOOD</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Being truly understood in spite of blunders and limits is the great magnet that calls out talent. Every time I've ever asked one of my former students, or even one of the high-achieving older Blackfeet, just what it was that made them outstanding, they've said, "My teacher believed in me." Or maybe it was their grandpa or their mother, but someone believed they were an achiever. They could do it. Feminists sometimes speak of being "listened into understanding." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suzanne Langer proposes that language arises from feeling rather than logic. It is the need to share that drives speech and writing into being. Her philosophy has great integrity and persuasiveness, but I also believe it intuitively. What kept the students from growing in the language arts was their own inner reluctance to feel, because it was so painful and risky. There was no safe environment in which to share. And yet their only chance of finding out how to survive was to plunge into words and feelings. The forces of secrecy that come from alcoholism, traumatic pasts, festering hatreds, and political competition were all in the way of good writing, which depends upon honest disclosure. This, I felt, was the real reason the community was hypocritical when it said it wanted the children to be "good in English." If they began to write truly out of their own experience, people could no longer pretend to be what they were not.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How do people think before they know any words? This question fascinates me. I find that when I think there is often talk in my brain, but sometimes it's more like drawing diagrams, or a camera panning, or like a dream in which I'm dancing. Sense memories are underneath the words; they are the raw material the words only symbolize. The smell of parents, the sounds of doors and cupboard catches, the taste of rubber or wood, long shadows, warm water, wind in the trees, dogs barking far away, car upholstery-- all the clues that float through dreams.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Solid connections with the actual world, strong sensations deeply and accurately felt, are sources of both sanity and good language. My acting training centered on sense memories, the language in which emotions are coded in our brains and transmitted through our poetry and stories. Alvina Krause, famous professor of acting at Northwestern University, taught us how to find the body and surroundings of a character. "Think what it is to be alive for this person! What is around you? How do your clothes feel on your body? What kind of chair are you sitting in? What music do you hear? What do you smell? What was the last thing you ate?" She insisted that we hold an imaginary rose in our hand and make it so real to ourselves that she could tell what color it was from looking at our faces! ( A little show biz hype!)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The textbooks I taught from in the early Sixties listed Wallace Stegner as one of the editors. (He was a small boy on the Montana/Canada border and in adulthood developed one of the nation's finest college writing programs at Stanford.) The sections on writing were very much anchored in the five senses plus kinesthesia and movement. Exercises were based on vivid description, ordered in space (back to front, left to right, top to bottom) in time (earlier, now, later), and in psychology ("the first thing I noticed was..."). They did not begin with actual writing, but with preparation for writing, the summoning up of material. It was a way of learning how to write out of abundance. To lack this step is to lack confidence that one can write or that writing is "about" anything.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Over and over I chose a topic and -- forbidding the kids to seize their pencils and embark on clichés -- made the students sit still, remembering some specific time and place until it seemed almost real. Then I made them write a list of ten sensations, each one in a complete sentence, two for each sense. At that point they were to compose a topic sentence, then choose the best three sensations, and pull together a paragraph from all the raw material they had summoned up. Recently I described this method to someone at a writing seminar who accused me of “hypnotizing” the kids. If focus is the goal, I guess it is a little like hypnotism.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In those days, the good kids tried to write "pretty" and "nice," in a sort of greeting card way. I penalized vagueness and icky sentiments by taking points off, but they clung to their blue skies and fresh air. Finally I had to resort to giving every paper with the words "pretty" or "nice" in it an automatic F. Even then, once in a while I would have to dramatically tear up a paper while gnashing my teeth to get the point across. I also kept a six-foot poster of vivid synonyms. I tried to pass on what my high school writing teachers had required: "All right, Mary. You say this is lavendar. Point to something in this room that is lavendar. You say a robin was singing. Imitate that robin for me to prove you know it." Precision. Accuracy. Location.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of my all-time best paragraphs was from Kelly Grissom, son of the BIA superintendent. The assignment was memories of summer. Of course he meant to be shocking. He wrote about watermelon juice trickling down his shirtless belly, chicken manure squishing between his bare toes, and sand in the bottom of the bathtub. I loved it. A little kid in shorts on an Oklahoma farm.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Heart Butte I went to a more abstract and newer process called "webbing" or "mapping." The idea is to draw a small circle on a big piece of paper, write the topic in the middle of the circle, and then let ideas occur to you by free association-- "brain-storming." As the ideas come, instead of trying to maintain a hierarchy, scribble them into balloons and attach them to the main idea with lines. If sub-ideas come along, put them in balloons and draw lines to the closest related ideas. When it is all done-- and sometimes I did this on the board with the whole class collaborating-- there is a lot of material ready to be used. Often the whole thing falls into order by itself. Usually one needs to do editing or even some research.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What this revealed was that some kids had few ordering skills. They couldn't think in categories or see relationships. Everything had about the same importance. Most stuff was so mysterious and amorphous to them that it simply was indescribable. As far as some of the kids were concerned, we were talking about an invisible world-- one their senses couldn't reach. Often there was no world they really cared to think about. I didn't know how to deal with this. It was existential despair. The remedy is religious, not educational.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In fact, at Heart Butte when I used sensory exercises, just lists of smells and sounds, they didn't work very well. For some kids the world was a blur they tried not to experience. Brain damage might have been involved-- real difficulties in sorting out sensory information about color, shape, size, and movement-- but it seemed more like attitude: they didn't want to feel anything. They didn't want to know anything. The world was a painful place and the idea was to either be so disengaged that it would all be a gray blur or to be so over-stimulated by speed, danger, drugs or sex that it would pass in a glittering flash. They had no interest in controlling themselves, because they felt so paralyzed by things they couldn't control. What they liked best was to be caught up in something intense but external, like a movie, so that the time passed with them hardly knowing it and without any risk on their part. Before these kids could be convinced to read or write-- indeed, even to talk to a teacher-- they had to be brought alive. They were zombies, on-lookers at their own lives.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Trying to teach such kids how to diagram a sentence or even to punctuate was pretty much an exercise in futility-- almost like taunting them. The underlying grammar in a sentence cannot be seen by people who can't grasp abstract relationships like predicate words or subordinate clauses. When I asked the class what a noun was, they all parroted, "a person, place or thing." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It is NOT!" I exploded.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They were astounded. "But every teacher we've had has said so!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"A noun is a NAME of a person, place or thing!" I bellowed in an explanatory manner. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Same thing," they shrugged.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It's NOT! A person, place or thing is real, a sensory object you can hold onto-- and maybe something you are pretending is a sensory object. A name is just a sound-sequence that stands for the person, place or thing. Or maybe it's a set of particular little squiggles on paper that stand for the sound-sequence that stands for the person, place or thing."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They sighed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It took me a long time to convince them that NOUN=NAME. It was the concept "name" they couldn't get. They had a Pavlovian understanding, not an insightful one. And they didn't think it mattered, but it matters a lot when you do grammar and must reflect on what a word is standing for.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They couldn't get MODIFY either. "That's math," they said. Well, math is just another language. But if you can't understand "modify," then you can't identify adverbs and adjectives, or phrases and clauses used like them, so you can't diagram and you don't get the idea behind where the words can go when the sentence is reassembled. (Adjectives have to go right ahead of the nouns they modify-- adverbs can move around.) All of this is as logical as chess, if only one has the first insight into the underlying assumptions.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">RESOURCES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All teachers recycle their own student days. I have always used the teaching methods of Agnes Carter, my red-headed, bow-legged 8th grade English teacher. She was Irish, a pillar of St. Andrews Catholic Church whose tolling bell I could hear from my backyard, and she took no nonsense off anyone. Her solution to teaching grammar was simply to make us learn sets of the small recurring words by heart in batches. We learned all the linking verbs, then all the prepositions. (To this day, in our fifties, my brothers and I can recite them aloud.) It was a wonderful help and if I succeeded in teaching the kids to spot prepositions, then they could usually find the whole prepositional phrase. Once the prepositional phrases are excluded from a sentence, the bare bones left would more easily yield subject and verb, especially if you know "have-has-had-do-does-did-shall-will-must-might-should-would-could-be-am-is-are-was-were-been" are always verbs. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For the Heart Butte kids I tried to teach it with rhythm, like rap. "Have, has, had! Do, does, did!" I even made them stamp their feet and clap their hands. Stamp, stamp, CLAP! Stamp, stamp, DID! It worked just fine. Except that it was getting towards spring and there were never again more than a third of the kids in any class, no class with the same combination of people from one day to the next. My bookkeeping about who-had-mastered-what broke down and was never completed. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Teachers & Writers Collaborative proved to be a rich source of materials. One of the best was a two-part set of books called Origins. It was about word roots in English (e.g. BHEL, to swell) which became whole families of vocabulary (billow, belly, balloon, bowl, bold, bulky, ball, boulder, bulge). The books include exercises and stories, which I used, but I was especially careful to use the "Total Physical Response" method that the Blackfeet teachers found effective. That is, we said, "BILLOW, BELLY, BALLOON...." while pretending to swell up and roll around. It was a great release for the class clowns. Besides having another way to get at word meaning beyond the Latin and Greek clues, I hoped they would see that languages are almost physical-- that they come out of life itself. I wanted them to see Lear some day and recognize "Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!" I wanted them to look at a bloated horse or a hay bale and think: "swell up: BHEL!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For the very first spelling lesson, because our books hadn't come yet, I used some simple naturalist lists that Glacier National Park had made for tourist kids. No Heart Butte kid could spell "ptarmigan" or even knew what one looked like. Same for "marmot". After some discussion a few kids realized they had seen ptarmigan, or at least grouse, walking around right in the school yard. They had been calling the marmots "ground hogs" -- just didn't know proper names. I was determined that the kids should know what they saw around them, be able to name them and to spell the names.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For the remainder of the year I tried to draw the spelling words from their lives, so the list was likely to include things like the parts of saddles and horses-- "pommel" and "haunch." The project was complicated because of local pronunciations. Among these kids the cowboy leapt into his "sattle." "B," "d," and "t" slipped back and forth in unexpected ways. If one spelled as they pronounced, it became clear that here in Heart Butte words had drifted in common usage. I said to a dog, "sic 'im," but they said, "sig 'im." I said "pot-bellied" and they said "pop-bellied." Sometimes I liked their version better. How can anyone teach phonetic spelling to kids who don't use the same consonants as the rest of the country?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some kids were dyslexic When reading and writing they reversed individual letters left to right (b for d) or even top to bottom (p for b). But I didn't know what to do about it and could find no helpful references. Not until the end of the two years I taught did I uncover a priceless book , Language Arts: Detecting and Correcting Special Needs. Every time I got close to a college, I raided their bookstore, but invaluble as the resources were, it was hard to digest them alone. I longed to talk to someone about them, but there were few opportunities to meet with other local "English" teachers. Those I did talk to were just as stumped as I was. High school teachers are not taught how to deal with such problems because it is taken for granted that they will be addressed at the elementary level.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Blackfeet nouns are not singular or plural, signaled by suffixes, which is why no one can ever explain definitively whether to say "Blackfeet" or "Blackfoot." Their pronouns don't carry gender clues either, so old-time Blackfeet speakers would confuse male and female references in English. Stories with gender references mistaken in a funny way are still told by white people, many of them with uncertain English skills of their own-- which is why they like to tell the stories. It's always nice to feel you're smarter than someone else.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Blackfeet a vowel is drawn out to make a different, new vowel, and the sounds are shaded slightly. People speak of Blackfeet speakers as drawling. Blackfeet also includes consonants that were long ago dropped out of English in its passage from Anglo-Saxon: back-of-the-mouth fricatives and plosives, glottal stops like Scots talking. I called it guttural once and made a former student very angry, because he thought it had something to do with the gutter. One almost needs an x-ray in motion to see what is happening in order to learn to do it. And until one learns to make the sound, it is hard to hear. Of course, the English alphabet has no symbols for some of those sounds. There are specialized alphabets with proper symbols, but I don't know them.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now and then I heard a French locution-- a word order not used in English or an unusual inflection-- not surprising considering that French Canadians and Metiz had been in the area for a hundred years. One of the little localisms often mocked even while it was consistently used was “init.” I wondered if it weren’t a conflation of the French-style phrase, “Is it not?” That would be logical, init?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I ached to know more, to find better resources for describing and guiding. I used what conventional spellers I could find, but continued to take spelling words from their own papers. Using Sylvia Ashton-Warner's ideas in her book about teaching the Maori, I gave them pieces of paper with "their" words on them. I kept a file of the words each kid consistently mis-spelled and based quizzes on the ones no one got right. They were always willing to write words twenty times or even fifty times, and sometimes that helped.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Occasionally I thought the real problem was the kids not hearing words accurately, and requested hearing tests. Many had recurring ear infections or had received blows to the side of the head, as well as wearing too-loud headphones for their beloved rock music. Icy winds in winter and blowing dust in summer didn't help. No one was surprised to find many hearing deficits. Speech therapists came from the Browning school system to work with the kids. They were the gentlest and most inspired of teachers, doing as much counselling as pronouncing. They sat in quiet relationship, listening, demonstrating, playing little win-win games they had invented. They were kind of a model for my ideal: quiet collaborative learning. I never met their standard.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CARD GAMES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Still hanging on to the idea that these kids were "double-breeds," I ordered a set of books on Greek mythology to complement the material in their literature books. They would sometimes choose the mythology books for free reading. To teach them the gods, I made a little set of cards with each god sketched and named. Then I developed a technique of fortune telling using the cards. "Oh, yes. I see! Here is Venus, which means you will soon fall in love, and this is Mars, which means you will have a fight with someone." Since I knew about these kids private lives, I could easily do a little counselling in the course of predicting. "Oh, my. Jupiter and he's upside down-- that means you're quarrelling with your father. But here's Athena, the goddess of wisdom, so what would be the wise way to handle this?" A few girls came every morning to get a reading, until their parents began to mutter about the work of the devil in cards. (Athena had also gotten into trouble over doing Tarot readings. I sometimes thought she ought to have been named Juno.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The idea of the cards came from being suddenly pressed into service to babysit the Blackfeet language class when their teacher, Molly Bullshoe, was ill. Desperate for something that would hold the attention of the junior high boys, I grabbed my set of Medicine Cards-- animals with Jungian/New Age/Native American interpretations. Each kid drew a card from the pack to establish his true nature-- "Ah, you are a badger! That means you are fun-loving and work hard!" I improvised, having once had a pet badger. We went on from there. The Jungian philosophy that accompanies the cards is so mysterious and magical sounding that they loved it. "What does that mean?" they demanded and really tried to figure it out. I used the approach I learned from Thomas Moore, when he did a class on dream interpretation in Bozeman, long before his books on spirituality became best-sellers: "What does it mean to you ? Use your imagination. Everything means something. Turn it around. Take a chance. Look at the small details. Let the objects speak."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MONTANA LITERATI</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Montana Writers and the Choteau School District organized a literary conference in Choteau in honor of A.B. Guthrie, Jr. who was still alive but very frail. It was the kind of event that initiated literati would fly thousands of miles to attend. Significant Western writers by the handful would be speakers. One day was set aside specifically for high school students. I asked the administration for transportation and the day off to take four of my best writers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was especially anxious to get them there because James Welch, Jr. would be one of the speakers and I wanted to plant firmly in the kids' heads that they could follow his path. Also Ripley Schemm would be there. A fine poet herself, the widow of Richard Hugo had spent a year as "poet in residence" in Heart Butte where she was much beloved and got good work from the younger kids. I had read out loud The Blind Corral so we also looked forward to Ralph Beer in his big black mustache. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The kids were scared before we even started out in the Jimmy with the truant officer driving. The bold author of an impassioned story about Vlad the Impaler, the Ur-Vampire, was late waking up as usual, and we had to go pound on his door. All the way down Highway 89 the student writers had panic attacks about what the Choteau kids might do to them. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When we arrived, I buzzed around saying hello and asking questions. I found Welch and towed him over to my foursome so I could brag about each of them. He was gracious and truly interested, as he always is, but the kids were mortified. As soon as he left they scolded me, sotto voce. "You're calling attention to us! Everyone is staring!" They tried to stand with their backs together like buffalo facing wolves.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At lunch time, after incredulously inspecting the Tater Tot casserole on their plastic trays, they rose in a body, scornfully dumped the offending food into the garbage, and stalked off to find a fast food vendor. The truant officer went with them. I suspect they also picked up some cigarettes. Partly because I was provoked with them, I ended up picking an argument with a Choteau teacher who claimed she understood all about Blackfeet kids.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The day was divided into sessions, of which we were to choose one from several alternatives. The kids, moving as an eight-legged animal, mostly stuck close to me. The last reading in the afternoon was by Mike Riley, a colorful young man who had once taught in Augusta but -- for reasons not unlike those that put me out of Heart Butte -- was now on the faculty in Cody, Wyoming, where he was rewriting a novel about Indian basketball players. A reformed druggie with a fast-and-fancy take on language, a wild sense of plot, and an obvious love for kids, he read a scene wherein one dark night a wooden Indian from a cigar store is stolen and incinerated at a small town intersection. All four Blackfeet fell madly in love with him. They still ask me when his book will be published. That fall I called him in Cody and offered to swap teaching jobs for a week, but since he had a wife and kids, it was too complicated</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next summer Nature Conservancy near Choteau sponsored a poetry workshop taught by Ripley Schemm and Mike Riley. Schemm had grown up there. This time Mike Riley gave me a stiff lecture about not living up to my potential. The teacher I had quarrelled with in Choteau was at the poetry workshop and we made peace. After I was thrown out of Heart Butte and living for a summer in a tiny yellow house behind a photography shop in Browning, Riley brought me a gleaming fat trout he had caught, which I grilled to my cat's enormous appreciation. (She got the skin and head.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So many writers were working in the area, from Rick Bass in Yaak to Linda Sexson in Bozeman, that I thought we had a unique opportunity and a real obligation to involve Native Peoples in their lives and the writers in our Heart Butte lives. If Victor Frankel believed in a "talking cure" as a means of trauma survival, then I believed in a writing cure. If there ever was a dream for Heart Butte, I saw it as the creation of a voice. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First, there would be student writing that was honest and powerful. Then, networking through computer modem hookups on Internet, they would be able to search the libraries of the world and to stock their own collection of books. Someday-- a publishing house. They could send their work direct to Japan and Germany, where people hunger for stories about Plains Indians.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I envisioned books written by The People, printed by The People both in cheap editions and in fine quality letterpress editions, both for the use of the Nitzitahpi (hopefully using myths and poetry written by themselves) and to preserve historical works-- all bound by the Nitzitahpi in leather tanned right there. Imagine a specially hand-set version of Napi stories-- restored to their original vigor and uncensored by white men (In some stories Napi has a penis so long it has to be rolled up like a firehose!)-- with marginal decorations and illustrations, bound in smoked buckskin with a grouse feather for a bookmark. (No eagle feathers-- too sacred.) Maybe the shaft of the feather could be beaded or quilled. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On this deeply aesthetic level one might begin to create a kind of jobs that people would enjoy and stick with. I sketched out a plan for how a building could provide a place to work, with lockers for individuals to keep their projects safely, and someone to sell materials as they were needed or buy them as they were brought in. Marketing could be done on the Internet, through bookstores, or through the conventional tourist trade. They could tap the world market that exists for old-style artifacts done with care and inspiration. (Now some say the best ones are made by German aficionados.) A Native American former drug addict told me the most successful therapy for fighting drug addiction he knew of was beading-- a kind of replacement repetition-compulsion obsession addiction. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People said it wouldn't work.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">GRIZZLIES, LOVERS, TRICKSTERS AND HEROES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the second year I decided that I would organize each grade level's work around a specific theme. This was partly to keep my own head straight about who was doing what, and partly to relieve the boredom of students repeating the same class. The counselor assigned them to whatever English fit the rest of their schedules. Some of them were making up three years of failed English classes. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The freshmen were assigned grizzly bears. I bought as many picture books as I could afford-- with my own money so I wouldn’t have to argue with the administration. The kids pretended they were bears, they told real life bear stories, they told bear tall-tales, they read photocopied newspaper stories, and I read out loud Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years and Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly. We saved Far Side grizzly jokes. For several years I had attended the annual grizzly/wolf technicians' conference that formed around Chuck Jonkel, a professor in Missoula and a much-loved and powerful visionary. (It's not easy to attend these conferences since they go out of their way to pick an inaccessible campground and don't let the public know where it is.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jonkel, a strong believer in wildlife videos and student video work, loaned me lots of videos about bears. Once, for some reason, he included one about meerkats which knocked us all out. None of us had known anything about meerkats before. They are a sort of cross between a weasel and a gopher that live in colonies in the African desert. Some kids were a lot more interested in meerkats than grizzlies. The strange is always attractive.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We watched the Scandinavian movie, The Bear (The kids loved it, especially when the cub got high.), and an awful grade B movie starring Clint Walker about a demon grizzly that turned out to be very close in plot to one of the stories in The Old North Trail. An early warrior is heroically brave but is killed. He becomes a grizzly and guards the old Cut Bank Pass trail, but then he is killed again and becomes a tree that still stands there, looking vaguely bear-like. People on the Rez can point out the very tree. (Bob Scriver says that over the years there have been three or four of them.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I described the Bear Knife Bundle, one of the most impressive objects in the Scriver Artifact Collection that went to Edmonton. I read part of the Craighead's book out loud and we watched a pretty inept film of Faulkner's story, The Bear, which was only a black bear anyway. I got so into grizzlies myself that I rose up at 4 AM and went out to watch a road-killed bull from the safety of my pickup, in hopes a bear would show up. None did. It was cold and rainy, so there wasn't much smell to get the message to the bears. Sitting out there in steely darkness, gripping my thermos of coffee, I felt at last I was becoming a nature writer.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Towards spring the kids were able to sit down and write a paragraph about why bears are of scientific interest. " Bears are studied by scientists for three reasons. Bear ovum do not implant in the womb until the bear hibernates. Bears get fat but do not have a problem with cholesteral. Bears can sleep all winter without urinating. The things we learn from bears can help people." It wasn't much, but it was clear and orderly. It was not stupid.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For some of them it worked pretty well. But one kid heaved a sigh and said, "You sure do have a thing about bears, Mrs. Scriver. I wish I knew where it comes from." They reported all their own bear-sightings, which were rather numerous, but took a bored attitude about bears. They were just common. All I cared really was that they stop thinking that writing a report was the same as copying something out of the encyclopedia. I saw them in the library, copying and copying-- mostly inaccurately-- for their other classes.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By now I had discovered the wonderful Boynton/Heinemann books about how to teach writing in the classroom and was using the little "paragraph creature" to remind them how to organize: a head for the introduction, three points on its back with underneath lots of feet (details to make it "walk") and then a conclusion for a tail. I kept a drawing of the creature on the bulletin board and insisted that they look it over and think about it before writing. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LOVERS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All over Montana high school teachers were teaching Shakespeare by using "West Side Story" and the Zefferelli "Romeo and Juliet". For the sophomores I followed suit. The theme was to be thwarted lovers. When "West Side Story" first came on the screen, the class was electrified and incredulous. All heads swung around. "What are those people doing?" they demanded. " Are those gang guys dancing and singing?" They had never see a true musical before --just MTV. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I added "Dirty Dancing". We made a list scene-by-scene of how the plot went and then began to write a new story called "Dirty Horseback Riding" about a Blackfeet boy who is a guide for dudes in Glacier Park and falls in love with a tourist girl from Minneapolis. (Other things intruded and we never finished it, but it was a pretty good tale. I still have the notes.) "See, just pick out two people who are in love but from two different worlds and then play those two forces against each other." It was a chance to talk about cultural differences and the consequences of prejudice, as well as how plot unfolds from conflict. I rented "Elvira Madigan. " The girls were entranced-- the boys could care less.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They wrote about Indian/white romances and Blackfeet/Crow romances. I pulled out of "The Old North Trail" and other books some of the old legends about women who fall in love with a bear or a star or a dog. One luckless maiden fell in love with a turd, which was melted by spring rains, much to her despair! Again, in the Scriver Artifact Collection is a Beaver Bundle, which was said to be created when a Blackfeet woman fell in love with a Beaver. McClintock describes the story and the Bundle in detail and shows photographs. (This is objectionable to some Nitzitahpi.) Bob had done a sculpture of the Beaver Bundle being opened, as well as a sculpture of the woman and the beaver embracing, echoing in their curved form the beaver's lodge. I explained and demonstrated the Beaver Women dancing with sticks in their mouths. I suppose some would consider that sacrilegious.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Towards spring, the class-- now down to three or four students-- insisted they wanted to watch "Pretty Woman", in spite of having seen it half a dozen times at home. I consented, but only if they would let me talk during the show. I did a running commentary to get them to see how the costumes, the lighting, the scene cuts, and the underlying assumptions were coaxing them to believe that something as hard, demeaning and destructive as prostitution could be the path to a happy life. "Is this real or is this Cinderella?" They knew women who had been prostitutes, but none of them knew men who paid for sex -- in their experience, men just took it. To them, someone who actually paid must be a real gentleman. "But a man who has to pay for sex? Do you think he is likely to be so handsome, so considerate?" They looked at me and I saw the bubble had burst. "It's just a fantasy, isn't it?" they sighed. Why are the public schools not teaching students how to resist such brain-washing? </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">TRICKSTER</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The juniors' theme was the Trickster. They knew their own Napi, who gets everyone--including himself--into so much trouble all the time. But I wanted to include Loki, Coyote, Road Runner, Hare, Mercury, Odysseus. The theme works remarkably well as a way into American literature. Huck Finn, Walt Whitman, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. Perhaps these American tricksters are indebted to the underlying Native American culture.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">COLLEGE PREP</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Seniors were to consider heroes and anti-heroes: Beowolf, King Arthur, Macbeth, World War II soldiers. For the freshmen and sophomores, I had ordered the easier reading books, but for the juniors and seniors I ordered college prep. My rationale was that the five or ten students who made it that far deserved to know what everyone across the country was reading-- even though I knew I would mostly just explain parts or show movies. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was surprised when Beowolf was a big hit with the seniors. My approach was to show "Aliens" and to explain that the story was very much parallel to "Beowolf." (In fact, "Star Trek" recently did a take-off on "Beowolf".) Defining video movies as literature was a little close to the conventional edge and The Doc hated them, associating them with the kind of teacher who gets tired at the end of the week and shows any old film that happens to be lying around. "I know you do it," he claimed. "I used to do it myself."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My approach was much more esoteric. I sketched out Joe Campbell's hero cycle over and over. I thought it was not unlike the pattern I had seen lived out by actual Blackfeet who had left the reservation, had careers, and then returned when they neared retirement, bringing new ideas and energy back with them. The strategy worked well and I continued it on into Idylls of the King. I figured Celts, Angles, Saxons were the Natives of their time and place-- horse-culture warriors. I was just a little bit ahead of Rob Roy and Braveheart.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One afternoon a single student showed up for senior English. The assignment was King Arthur. The young man was having a rough time in his life. His best friend, the friend's wife and their new baby had been burned to death in a trailer fire. He and his girl had had one stillborn infant. Now they had had a second baby, but their relationship was rocky. The girl had gone back to stay with her parents who warned the young man to stay away. I had bought a video of "Excaliber", knowing it had gotten good reviews and that the casting was English Shakespearean actors, but I hadn't previewed it yet. It was rated "R."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I mentioned this to the young man, I was startled by his reaction. "What?" he cried. "I've been looking everywhere for that movie! I've got to see it!" For the next fifty minutes we watched it together without interruptions-- or rather he watched the movie and I split my attention between my student and the movie. The R rating was for nudity and violence. The film is very long. When the bell rang at the end of the class, we were just past Lancelot and Guinevere betraying Arthur. They were asleep on mossy boulders, startlingly nude and vulnerable. Arthur came as they slept to plant Excaliber between them while great chords of Wagner swelled on the soundtrack. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fairly true to the Malory version of Morte d'Arthur that was in the textbook, the movie is also a great heaving, steaming entanglement of echoes from "Star War"s, Ursula LeGuin, a bit of Monty Python thrown in here and there, and an occasional shadow of Ingmar Bergman. When I watch the video now I recognize Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson. The plot follows on out through Fraser's "The Golden Bough" and the Fisher King motif beloved of T.S. Eliot -- the health of the king is the health of the land-- until the body of Arthur sails off into the setting sun. There was easily enough material to occupy a college seminar. Well -- a broad-minded one. Maybe one led by Thomas Moore.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The textbook printed version of the Arthur myth was not acessible to many among my students. This spoken, acted out version would at least make the plot clear. Sadly, from experience I discovered that the old black-and-white Orson Welles-type versions of Shakespeare were repellant to these kids. Too dark, too arty, not enough special effects. But now I realized-- unprepared-- that this movie had an almost religious meaning to this young man, in the sense that deep concepts were moved at the level we call the "heart" as compared to the "mind." It was pre-verbal, even psycho-therapeutic. To him the screen had a mythopoetic reality, an authority, like foretelling dreams or Jungian analysis. It was an understanding underneath the words, carried by images and music, a meaningful archetype -- and why not? Knights have been role models for generations.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If someone could reach students on that level, I thought, their lives could be interpreted , even transformed. But I was neither Merlin nor Yoda. At that moment I was not capable of saying, "Look, this is a story about pre-Christian or at least paleo-Christian time-- about the end of one civilization and the beginning of a new nation. It's about druids being replaced by priests and the Roman Catholic church-- not so different from the old Blackfeet shamans being replaced by Father Mallman, the Merlin of Heart Butte. And it's about tribes who war among one another uselessly, which takes the land into destruction and the people into poverty. The secret is that the king--the chief-- and the land are one, which once meant that the king and the nation are one-- but maybe now it means that the actual land and a strong leader could redeem this Blackfeet landscape and nation. And maybe you are that leader. Or maybe it will take a whole Round Table of knights." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I believe that in an incoherent way, the young man was feeling--not thinking-- these things. He longed to have power, to be a leader. But he lived in a violent time where the deadly magics of alcohol, methamphetamine and cocaine make illusions and cravings more vicious than Grendel's mother. How is he even to identify the villains? The rage is there, but it has no focus, no plan of action, and so it turns inward on the very People the heroes ought to be protecting. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, the next day class was cancelled or the student didn't come or the other two students in the class came back-- something happened to break the magic and we never did have a chance to really talk about what the movie meant. But I was convinced again that videos can be as effective as the original experience of sitting in a great stone hall listening to a wandering poet chant/sing the great heart-deep legends of Beowolf or Morte d'Arthur, which was how the whole thing got into the English textbook in the first place.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-67730636992705753872013-08-10T14:48:00.000-06:002014-08-28T12:11:38.842-06:00YOU'RE NUTHIN' BUT A WANNABE<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="font-size: 24px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">YOU'RE NUTHIN' BUT A WANNABE</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>"Indianness" never existed except in the mind of the beholder.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Vine Deloria, Jr.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LANGUAGE IS CREDIBILITY</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the nineteenth century a Native American man was found wandering alone on the prairie and put into an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., where he was held because he would not talk. This was thought to be a symptom of catatonia. After many years he was found by Helen Clark who knew his native language. Hoping to comfort him, she sang to him a child's lullaby in Blackfeet. He responded with joy, tears running down his face, and was released. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Only a couple of years ago here in Oregon a man was arrested. He was clearly Mexican-looking, but would not speak either English or Spanish. Again, he was put into a mental hospital for evaluation. This time it was only days before his friends found him and explained that he was Indio -- native to Central America -- and spoke the language of his tribe in a remote part of Mexico. Like it or not, language is a key to credibility.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the early Eighties a class at the Blackfeet Community College went out to look for Blackfeet speakers. They found that 30% of the people on the Montana reservation spoke some Blackfeet and all were over 40. The 200 fluent speakers were all over sixty. The estimate was made that in thirty years the language would disappear. In 1970 some VISTA workers took a broad survey of the reservation and found that 99% of the parents wanted Blackfeet history and culture to be taught. In 1987 Dennis Clarkson did another survey which found that 87% wanted Blackfeet history and language taught. Why has it taken twenty years to get effectively underway?</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I can easily brainstorm a list of ten reasons:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1. Teaching such things makes the white administrators nervous.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2. For full-bloods to be the experts makes the mixed bloods nervous.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3. No one knew quite how you're supposed to do it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4. The State doesn't require it and the State is the perceived authority.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5. People think that learning a language is just "learning the names for things," not learning a whole way of perceiving the world with a <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>different set of grammatical assumptions. To them a foreign language is a kind of parlor trick. For years, all that was ever taught was how to count to ten in Blackfeet. No one ever saw anything but children's books printed in Blackfeet. No one ever heard it except from the announcer at Indian Days, which whites see as a tourist event.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6. The scholarly work being done in Blackfeet was in Canada and though it was only a hundred miles away, the border is a major psychological barrier. Scholars there have produced a dictionary and a grammar, but they are expensive and not often available in Browning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The school was already carrying an enormous burden. To add another whole dimension was very difficult. Where was the space, the time, the budget, the personnel? Who knew whom to hire? Who would certify teachers?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>8.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Blackfeet is an oral language (so far) and has no library of books where a person could go alone to study. European culture defines education and religion in terms of the book. Thus Hebrew could be brought back to life by the people of Israel because it was a written <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>language and scholars had kept it alive so they would have access to the original documents. But Blackfeet depends upon living speakers in <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>community, with their living memories as the only "paper." Even tape <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>recorders are inadequate, especially since many Blackfeet consonants <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>are soft palate and glottal sounds which are hard to see, much less record.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>9.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The prohibition on Blackfeet speaking has been both political and <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>religious. The generation educated in boarding schools were <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>thoroughly convinced that clinging to Blackfeet and the other old ways was sacrificing any chance of economic success in the new world order and perhaps even sacrificing one's soul. Speaking Blackfeet was equated with hanging on to the old religious ways, the ancient prayers and stories -- maybe going to Hell.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">10.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Considerable prestige attaches to being able to speak Blackfeet these days. Old timers who can pray effectively are in demand, likely to be asked to open meetings and appear in videos. Though they are a generous sort of people, they are not so dumb as to not realize that if everyone speaks Blackfeet, one of their incomes and sources of <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>prestige is gone.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell Kipp says that when he works with adult Blackfeet, even the younger ones, he has to push them until they know enough language to make simple statements. Grown men get beads of sweat on their upper lip. Only after they get "into it" for a while does something "go click" in their brains so they realize they are not going to be struck by lightning. Up to that point it is not just an act of faith, but also an act of considerable courage to learn a language their grandparents and parents had given up and denied in a despairing attempt to survive. Beating the old language and ways out of children turned out to be all too effective. Surprisingly enough, most of the people recently objecting to the teaching of Blackfeet language have been at least in part Blackfeet. They believe that the only hope of survival is to become like the oppressors who took their language. The question is, if they become like their oppressors, aren't they gone anyway? Is that survival?</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I SPEAK AS A CHILD</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Sixties Peter Red Horn was a Blackfeet speaker who made a brochure for tourists, a little noun-and-phrase book someone pecked out on the typewriter. That was long before there were associations for the preservation and promotion of indigenous languages who publish posters that show which languages have gone extinct in the previous year. When I look at my copy now, which I've had for thirty-five years, I can recognize most of the words and know how to pronounce some of them, although real speakers laugh at my accent. Peter used to be master of ceremonies at Indian Days, the role that now is filled by Earl Old Person. Indian Days is one of the times a person can hear long Blackfeet speeches, whole sentences and paragraphs of carefully shaped rhetoric. Darrell says that in Blackfeet people have different personalities than they have in English and some who seem irrelevant or slow-witted in English become people of stature and eloquence in Blackfeet.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One night in Heart Butte I tuned the radio to "Wind Speaker," an aboriginal program that comes over CBC in Canada. Usually it is mostly in English, but carries news about tribes across the prairie. On this night the speaker introduced a man who then gave a five minute speech in Blackfeet. I couldn't understand it except for a few words and the tone of his voice, but I sat riveted, recognizing without being told that it was indeed Blackfeet and realizing that it was the first time I'd heard the language over the radio. The sounds were familiar, even though I couldn't make out the meanings.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I came to Blackfeet like a child, not a scholar. Speaking Blackfeet was natural and playful. In the Sixties I never thought of studying it in order to speak whole sentences. I just learned words because they were there and I like words. I was romancing Bob Scriver, who used store-keep Blackfeet all the time because he hired full-blood help and bought furs from full-blood trappers. Anyway, he had learned Blackfeet phrases as a kid and liked to use them. His accent is good (I think) because he learned so young.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once Bob Scriver and I had driven up to Cardston for some reason or other. It's a small town and in the 1960's there weren't many businesses. We stopped to get gas. I went to use the restroom, but when I came back out I almost collided with a huge Blood woman with a lot of little kids, all of whom had to go to the bathroom in a hurry. She was angry that I had been slow and as she went by me, she growled, <i> "Napi-yahki ! Eeematuskee!" </i> Without expecting to, I understood what she said.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I climbed back into the pickup, I must have had a strange expression on my face. Bob asked me what happened. "That woman just called me a damned white woman and a dogface!" We looked at each other and burst out laughing. At school they had told us if anyone called us <i>"napi-yahki,</i>" they were to go straight to the office. It didn't really mean "damn" at all-- just "white woman," but the tone of voice could give it sort of the same spin as "squaw" or "buck."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Eeematuskee</i> was a word I knew because of story Bob told about his childhood. A very old lady used to sit out in her yard down the street from his house and make tipi covers from canvas. She used a huge sailor's needle and stout thread. Bob was still a little kid, and not a particularly "good" one. He was fascinated by the old lady and, knowing eematuskee from his friends, he ran up and called her that. Instantly she leapt to her feet, outraged, and chased after him with her long needle flashing in the sun. He barely made it home. He had just learned that calling someone "dogface" in Blackfeet was about the world's worst insult.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob Scriver is not a Blackfeet speaker really, but he has always thrown Blackfeet phrases into his conversation the way some people use French or people in Texas pick up Spanish. When someone came in to sell something or ask for a job, he said, <i>"Oki, tchiki! Tchenustepi?"</i> Which is to say, "Hi, kid. Whatcha want?" </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Let's go get our <i>anacost.</i>" That meant let's go get our wagon, meaning the pickup. "Bring our <i>sknih-nitsi-mah.</i>" That meant to bring along the bags and bundles. <i>Pooksapoot</i> meant "come over here." <i>Mistapoot</i> meant "get out of here." <i>Keekah</i> means "wait now," which is a sort of famous phrase in Browning. I've seen both "wait now" and "<i>keekah</i>" on personalized car license plates.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One summer a pair of sisters, seasoned old ranch cooks, ran a little cafe across from the museum. When we got a break, we would run across, hop up on the stools and holler, "Quick! <i>Siksikimi</i>!" meaning coffee. The joke was that the sisters were Cree and looked at us incredulously. Then one would say, "You heard 'em. Sock it to 'em!" Laugh-In was popular on television then.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I made a set of puppets for the kids back in the Sixties, including an Indian princess whose flannel dress featured my first lumpy attempts at beading. I think it was Beverly Bullshoe who named her <i>Sik-et-soo-ahki</i>, and taught me that it meant "dark and pretty." Now I know that <i>sik</i> means "dark" or even "black" as in Siksika, Blackfeet, and <i>ahki</i> on the end of a word means "woman." My name is <i>Mik-skim-yahki </i>which is "Iron Woman," so I feel safe in saying that <i>mik-skim</i> probably means "iron," but it might mean a phrase that refers to iron, like "metal that rusts" or "red metal." Bob always joked that it referred to my disposition. Bob's name is <i>Sik-poke-si-mahp</i> which is to say "he who likes his back fat burnt black," or "this guy likes to char his fat meat crisp when he eats it." Or "Make his steak well-done!"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some young Blackfeet have set out to become fluent in their language -- fewer have had Blackfeet speakers in their own households to teach them. It is possible as a scholar to learn Blackfeet grammar and build a Blackfeet vocabulary. Sometimes that is an attractive prospect to me. But curiously, when I think of undertaking such a project -- and I have been to workshops and do listen to vocabulary tapes -- my mind turns instead to learning the ancient British languages, say, Gaelic. If the Blackfeet language has come out of their land and their genes, wouldn't it make sense for me to follow my own genetic heritage back to Scotland and Ireland? And yet Darrell encourages me by saying that historically the crucial line separating Blackfeet from the others was language -- if you could speak Blackfeet, you were considered at least a friend and were entitled to hospitality. You would not be killed. I wonder which modern Blackfeet would honor that besides himself?</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of my Heart Butte students says that Darrell "might have studied [Blackfoot] but I live it. I can talk my language very well. I can talk it so well that I can have a long and meaningful talk with any Blackfoot-speaking person on or off the Rez. There is a lot more to talking Blackfoot than counting to ten or saying hello to someone. Or saying coffee or water. There's a whole other world in Blackfoot, and if you're gonna learn it, you must forget English. They do not go together!" Before that moment, this fiery young man had never given me a clue that he spoke Blackfeet at all. I doubt that the surveys found him.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WHY I RETURNED THIRTY YEARS LATER</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Everywhere I've gone since living with the Blackfeet I have been deeply homesick for the reservation, in a way that only people who have lived there a while can understand. Partly it's the glory of the geological place itself-- ancient seabed, grassy sky-bowl -- with all its extremes. Storms can be seen approaching from a long way off. Clouds sail like great ships. Sunrise and sunset are operatic in scale. Partly it is the intensity of experiences in a place where the weather can kill you, bears are sighted, and emotions run high. Ordinary life is full of confrontations, revelations, and shoot-outs.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is something deeper: the wrenching dilemma of a whole people caught and broken by time. So many people there look back at a Golden Age, a simpler time. I was young there, inventing myself. I think that in 1989 at some level I believed -- turning fifty years old -- that if I returned to the scene of my youth, I would be young again. Once there, I figured I probably had one good shot left at doing something worthwhile for the Blackfeet. I decided to be a change-agent. I knew it would get me thrown out, so I have no right to whine. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I can't figure you out, Mrs. Scriver, " commented one of my Heart Butte students. "Sometimes you seem like an Indian and sometimes you don't." I made it a point to use the scraps of Blackfeet I knew. I drew the outline of the Rockies from Chief Mountain to Heart Butte -- a line I often recognize in paintings or photographs --freehand from memory on the blackboard and challenged them to do the same on paper. I cut flat lodgeskins out of brown wrapping paper and drew on them with felt-tip markers the symbols for mountains, puff-balls, the Pleiades, animals with their hearts and kidneys colored red. My classroom was lined with famous Indians, including Winold Reiss calendar portraits of Blackfeet from living memory. It was a pitiful effort, really, but I used all I had.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I made everyone in all my classes read "The Old North Trail", by Walter McClintock, a trained naturalist's account of his sojourn with Blackfeet about the turn of the century, illustrated by photographs he took. Over and over I told stories about the early days I had heard from my father-in-law -- who knew McClintock -- and stories from books written on or near the reservation. I wanted to challenge their assumption that no white man could know as much about the place as they did, that no white man could love and stay in the place because it wasn't worth it. I wanted them to look at where they were and love it as the <i>Sokeetapi</i>, the old ones, had. I wanted them to walk up and down the Old North Trail through plants they could name, even use. I wanted them to be wreathed in stories, to cross thresholds, to make Bundles. But they may only have felt put down that a white person from outside knew more than they did.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Always I circled through the ideas of philosophy of place: how this high prairie against the east front had shaped the Nitzitahpi into the people they were and how endangered that place has become. Drilling oil wells, dragging huge gang-plows, damming rivers, trenching cables and burying pipelines -- these acts had changed both land and people. Industrial-scale uses of the land were making it small. The topsoil was blowing away. No longer was the air as clear as it had been even thirty years earlier. Smoke from the aluminum refinery across the mountains stood above the peaks in a red plume of warning. The Blackfeet knew all that, really. They just didn't agree what to do about it any more than white people do.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One late night in Heart Butte I stood in my doorway watching a ground blizzard. To the height of my shoulders a driving wind whipped snow into swirling tidepools of froth, obscuring even the teacherages across the way. Above that, the mountains rose into a clear night, where a glowing moon lit the glaciers. Into this ancient scene flew a bomber. seeming at treetop level, flashing its colored lights, practising attacks on terrain chosen because it resembles parts of Russia. What did the Old People know about industrial warfare? What story would they have told? Could it save us from the immolation of our planet?</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WE JOIN THE OLD PEOPLE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1966, soon after I married Bob Scriver and just before the death of his daughter who was my age, Bob was working on a sculpture of the "Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle." We attended a Pipe Bundle opening at the home of George and Molly Kicking Woman, a day-long experience we found intense and holy. Nancy Tailfeathers sat beside us, tactfully prompting us to do the right things. The acts are as simple as communion: dance, song, objects, food and prayer. But the protocols are strict and the consequences of breaking them are drastic. One does not repeat the details without good reason. The chairman of the tribe came with a tape recorder, but when the old folks stormed that if he taped the ceremony it would be bad luck and cause people to die, he retreated with his machinery. He knew very well that someone was bound to die in the coming months and that he would be held personally responsible. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Soon after, Bob woke one morning and told me a dream. It was vivid and moving to him, as though it were a message. He had dreamt he was a small boy sitting in a Blackfeet lodge that was struck by lightning, killing all but him. Adding scientific details, he said he was spared because he was sitting on a pile of hides and skins which included that of a black bear, good insulation against electricity. Much of Bob's life has been occupied by the handling of such hides and skins because of his taxidermy business. He doesn't just name these objects: they are strong sensory entities to him. He knows their behavior and where they live. Each carries meaning.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When he told this dream to the Old People, they said it meant that he was supposed to become a Bundle Keeper. In the next weeks Bob was guided through a protocol that included wrapping himself in a blanket and going to the home of Tom Many Guns, where he presented gifts and a pipe for smoking. By accepting the gifts and smoking the pipe, Tom agreed to a pipe transfer. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The transfer took place, guided by Richard Little Dog who was said to be the last person on the U.S. side of the Blackfeet Nation who knew all the songs and prayers. Anyway, it had been his pipe. The traditional gifts of a horse and tobacco were honored, as well as a practical exchange of cash for both Richard and Tom. We prepared a new canvas lodge, engaged "dog soldiers" to keep order, learned a proper prayer, and bought clothing to exchange for other clothing that Richard and Margaret Many Guns would give us to wear, so that the spirit of the pipe would recognize and go over to us. Since Richard had been widowed, Margaret acted as the female helper. Her husband before Tom Many Guns, a man called Stud Horse, had been a major religious figure in Canada and she knew the protocol.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Richard gave us each Blackfeet names: Sik-pok-sa-mahpee ("He-who-likes-his-backfat-charred," otherwise known as Middle Rider) and Meek-skim-yahkee (Iron Woman, presumably wife of Middle Rider). Bob knew the original old-time Middle Rider and respected him very much. We were pleased. These were not tourist names. Every year since then, except when he was ill or in some kind of crisis, Bob Scriver has opened his Thunder Pipe Bundle and has properly maintained it in his studio with smudges and prayer. His fourth wife now acts as the wife of the Keeper. He has given her the name of Badger Woman.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While I was still acting as "wife," he had another dream of the same kind. This time it was about a badger and the old people said it might be a lodge-painting dream. Bob wanted this to be true and immediately set about getting his design ready. Everything on it related to the dream. The children of his dead daughter were there and helped him to collect the objects necessary, mostly small animal skins. One last thing was missing: a badger hide for the tipi flag. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On a summer morning Bob called me in East Glacier, where I had moved, to tell me his father had died. I immediately started down to Browning. At the side of the road was a small dead badger, freshly killed and intact. I stopped to pick it up. It became the tipi flag for Bob's dream-painted lodge. Thus the badger totem became deeply enmeshed with the spirit of Bob's father, who had been small but strong and tenacious.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For both Bob Scriver and myself, the Thunder Pipe Bundle, which had been part of the uneven healing after the death of his daughter, and the Badger Lodge, which was mixed with the spirit of his father, were sacred and psychologically supportive. They are still part of the identity of our individual selves and of our ended marriage. Very few people on the reservation are really aware of this. Only one or two of the people who sat in our Bundle Opening circle still live.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Rather, the younger militants focus on Bob's presumed wealth. Over the years he had collected Native American objects, some as minor as a little leather bag of needles off a balsam fir (sweet pine), and some as major as a Bear-Knife Bundle which features a large dangerous blade with clusters of brass falconry bells attached. Together with objects collected by his father and brother, these things resulted in a major collection. But the militants never admit that even the Bear Knife Bundle is made partly of whiteman materials imported for trade with Europe. These are 18th and 19th century artifacts, made after the ways of the Dog Days were already changing. A purist would have to seek ceremonies even earlier.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With a rising Indian Empowerment force on the reservation, the same Scriver who had been accepted and taught by the Old People was brought under attack by the young people who had never participated in the old ceremonies, but now claimed entitlement to them because of their blood quantum. Just as he reached a position to be an elder to them -- and he is still well-remembered as a band teacher and justice of the peace -- they turned on him. He returned the favor. To him these modern mixed-blood descendants are nothing like the Amskapi Pikuni people he knew as a child. One has to admit that's true.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At about the time I returned from Canada to the Reservation in 1989, Senator Inouye was approached to sponsor a double-pronged bill. One thrust would protect Native American religions (especially those which traditionally used drugs like peyote or tests of endurance, like piercing at Sun Dances) and the other would return publicly-owned Native American artifacts and skeletons to the original tribes. Seemingly idealistic and generous, these ideas had some unforeseen negative effects. Private collectors of Native American artifacts (and possibly museums) now saw them as endangered, subject to government seizure, and therefore even more valuable. German and Japanese collectors, always powerful and interested, realized that they should pay high prices very quickly before everything went off the legitimate market. Unscrupulous Native Americans saw that they could represent their tribes, collect the artifacts, and then quietly resell them underground. Some of these people were Blackfeet.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even legitimate tribal representatives had no experience or funds for proper cataloguing, storage or display of the vulnerable objects. In truth, most of the younger people who were the loudest and most politically heated knew little or nothing about what they were after or what to do with artifacts to either preserve or reactivate them into ceremonial use. The Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning has been damaged and without a credentialed curator for many years. At present the government plans to close it down.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even deeper, the young had no familiarity with the land-based life and animal ways that gave rise to the objects in the first place. Very few could speak Blackfeet. They had adopted the white man's idea of ownership and entitlement in place of the old ethic of sharing and generosity. At the same time, when ancient skeletons were returned for burial, the old people shied away from the ceremonies of re-interment, fearful of ghosts clinging and insisting on revenge. It was the younger, bolder, educated people who buried the ancestors.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">About this time a movie called Warparty was filmed on the reservation. The plot revolved around young men stealing back --"liberating" -- artifacts from a museum, which in the movie was the Museum of the Plains Indian but stocked with Bob Scriver bronzes. Bold talk about "raiding Scriver" went around. There was even talk about roping him off his horse during the North American Indian Days parade, in which he has traditionally ridden. Nearing eighty, Bob might not have survived being roped and dragged, but he had no intention of not riding. His solution was to ask Carl Cree Medicine to ride alongside him. Carl and his sons have worked with Bob for thirty-five years. Carl was happy to ride. No one messes around with Carl Cree Medicine. Aggressors stayed back.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of the young Neo-Traditionalists lived in the Heart Butte area and sent their children to that school. In the classroom the hostility against Bob was easily displaced to me. At the very least there was curiosity and sometimes a demand was made that I turn against Bob so as to be in solidarity with the Red Power advocates, though they rejected any relationship with me personally. The school administration and the white teachers had no consciousness of this dynamic at all. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After many qualms and frustrated inquiries, Bob Scriver decided to sell his artifact collection to the Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton. Someone stole and made public the inventory of objects that had been used for insuring the collection, which amounted to a value of about a million dollars. The magic phrase "million dollar collection" attracted much media attention. Political attacks came from all sides, but the collection was indeed sent up to Edmonton where Bob had spent World War II with the U.S. Army Air Force band. Montana Blackfeet followed to Edmonton and "put a curse" on the curator of the museum. The Alberta Blackfeet prayed it away.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">About the same time, the Browning Mercantile burned to the ground. The old wooden building with its oil-soaked floor had been bought by a local Blackfeet family, who were using it for storage. In Heart Butte I heard about the fire on the radio and drove to Browning just in time to see the last of the smoking ruins being drenched. The fire chief, one of my original seventh-graders from 1961-62, came over in his rubber coat to offer sympathy and the opinion that "It wasn't arson-- We're sure it wasn't arson." That building was older than some of the artifacts Bob had sold. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An older Blackfeet woman came and stood next to me. "We'll all miss that place," she said. "It was part of our past. I feel sorry that it's gone. Don't cry too much. Times change." The more superstitious Blackfeet said that the Thunder Pipe Bundle was punishing Bob Scriver for selling his artifacts. More modern folks spoke of insurance.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mrs. Old Man Chief, an ancient tiny old woman, used to sit on a straight chair in the front of the store, watching the people come and go. When late afternoon came, Leo would put the groceries in the delivery van and then Mrs. Old Man Chief would get a ride home. One day I saw her lifting her tiny moccasined foot from under her six or seven calico skirts in an attempt to get into the high delivery van. When I put my hand under her elbow to try to lift her up, I nearly threw her onto the seat. She was no heavier than a wren and even that weight must have been mostly skirts. Maybe somewhere in heaven she is sitting in the Browning Merc. Maybe the Browning Merc went to the Sand Hills. Certainly, things are more complicated than it would seem on first glance.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob Scriver did not sell his Thunder Pipe Bundle nor his Badger Lodge. The sculpture of the Pipe Opening (which includes recognizable portraits of all the participants in our Transfer Ceremony except for he and I, who are replaced by Charlie Reevis and Mary Blackman) and of the story of the Badger Lodge are still in his Museum of Montana Wildlife as part of his bronze history of the Blackfeet people. No one from Heart Butte goes there, though the Browning Schools sometimes take the kids through as a field trip. Before the artifact collection went north, Bob Scriver had it photographed and made into a book at his own expense. Now every Blackfeet can own the collection and many people can study it. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Few people in Heart Butte can afford the book. The school did not order it for the library. Everyone pretended it didn't exist. Except that up at the Blackfeet Community College in Browning, which could afford the book, the old people were seen poring over it, recognizing objects and trying to remember who had them last. When they were pressed very hard to say that Bob Scriver had done something evil and shouldn't have a Thunder Pipe, they said that the Blackfeet way was for each man to guard his own conscience. They would not judge. Judging was a white man's way. The essence of a Holy Object is that it has the power to protect itself.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A FINE EXPERIENCE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Seventies I had been marginally connected to the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop, a community tribal free school for high school dropouts. The Browning High School counselor, Bill Haw, had become the director of the school and I, as a part of his East Glacier circle of friends, often stopped by the school in its converted warehouse. Something interesting was always happening, if only good conversation.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once I helped with a memorable summer teacher's institute meant to raise the consciousnesses of kindergarten teachers who might have Native American students. Bill believed in experiences rather than lectures, and he had a bold imagination. The women (I don't recall any male teachers) were dropped in groups: one was to hitch-hike back from Browning to Boarding School where they were staying; one was to go on a scavenger hunt across Moccasin Flats asking for eggshells, coffee grounds, an old newspaper and so on; and one was -- without telling them -- to be "arrested" and thrown into the tribal jail for an hour. As it turned out, one of the strictest tribal judges, Mary Spotted Wolf, just happened to be in the group. All the white women had been nervous about even staying at the Boarding School. Now some were panicky that they might not survive the day. But by the time we reassembled for supper, they were euphoric over riding in the backs of pickups with kids and dogs, taking tea and cookies inside the little houses that looked so humble from outside, and making friends with several of the town's drunks. Even Mary Spotted Wolf turned out to be a good sport who joined in jailhouse singing! (Haw was relieved.)</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">RETURN TO THE CENTER</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every attempt at reform curves through the same trajectory of optimism, success, ossification and closure. Yet a little core of the change always proves to be a seed for future growth. One of guides of the school in its successful period had been Darrell Kipp. Darrell, a graduate of Harvard and Goddard, had always impressed me as exceptional. His Browning teachers always spoke proudly of him: he was "inspire-able." When his high school English teacher left, she gave Darrell a box of classics from her own library, which he actually read. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day he was sitting in his cabin at St. Marys feeling old and existentially exhausted -- reflecting on a solution. Maybe it was one of those mid-life crises. "When things are wrong, go to the Center," he believed. So he got into his pickup, drove over the border to the Blackfoot Reserve there and walked into a cooperative moccasin factory. "Teach me to be a Blackfoot," he asked, and the ladies there were delighted to oblige. What they taught him was an old piece of wisdom: that he already had what he needed. Slowly, he began to recall his childhood, to recover the lives of his parents and grandparents. He began to see that the whole tribe needed to do the same thing.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the Nineties, newly returned again, I made it a point to attend Darrell's evening classes. Blackfeet "history" was controversial and often used in power claims, so Darrell switched to discussing Blackfeet "philosophy," which was understood by most people to mean "it's just my opinion" and therefore tolerable. (His background is in sociology.) The classes were meant to satisfy a school district legal requirement that all teachers take classes in Blackfeet culture. It was in one of these classes that I finally recognized Delores Butterfly Bird, the woman with "wings." Over a period of years this class has allowed many whites and educated Blackfeet to participate in loose discussions and often emotional testimonies. At last we were doing what Dean Barnlund had taught us would work! I aligned myself politically with this line of development.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Great Falls, when I took the National Teacher Examination in preparation for re-certifying to teach, a Blackfeet woman asked to sit with me at lunch so as to become acquainted. She was a Canadian engaged by the Browning schools to teach Blackfeet language and culture. Once a bartender in Browning, she had powerful family connections in Alberta, and was now embarking on a more dignified career with a fresh degree. Though the administration did not confide in me, I feel sure that they thought by hiring a Canadian they would avoid local controversy over who "owned" Blackfeet culture and the valuable jobs that accrued from that definition. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This woman must have known about my "Bundle-Keeping" and was very much aware of Bob's reputation as a wealthy and powerful sculptor. But she soon found that because of the sale of the artifacts, it was better in some circles to be identified as an opponent than as a friend. She advised me to "dump Scriver" and "leave that old man alone," so as to be on her side. I chose to decline. The newly formed Piegan Institute had the goal of supporting and developing the Blackfeet language in a broad philosophical way without using race as a qualification or entitlement. They evaded confrontation. I put my trust in them.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At a summer school class in Blackfeet Language under the auspices of the Canadian confronter, I became the focus of what nearly amounted to an interrogation. A national news team had come to Browning to do a story about Bob's "million dollar artifact sale." Bob's accusers had been interviewed on film and Bob himself had been interviewed. This film, uncut, was shown at Blackfeet Community College, and the indignant meeting that followed was video-taped. The moderator was Gordon Belcourt, then the president of BCC, later to have his contract broken over other issues. Gordon, once an English student of mine, made the most of the opportunity to storm the ramparts. The resulting film-around-a-film was shown at the language class, over protests from some that it was not relevant. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I tried to remain silent, to simply play the interested observer, but in the end Dorothy Still Smoking asked what I thought. I did speak up to tell what I knew about the objects and about Bob's relationship to them. I became tearful. Soon afterwards, when the class was taking their "final exam" on videotape, I was also pressed to take mine. Somewhere in the archives of some institution, there is probably still tape of me trying to remember Blackfeet vocabulary in a trembling, weepy voice. I have my certificate of competency, along with my mini-text of Blackfeet words. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These dynamics of opportunism, rear-guard strategy, and webbed relationships are impossible to keep track of without many years' experience and much long discussion. Sitting in a kitchen or a bar, one discovers some bit of information from decades earlier that finally unravels a mystery-- something about parentage or jobs or romance. Everyone is seduced into gossip. If I picked up this much of a political penumbra in thirty-five years, imagine the accumulation over several hundred! And imagine how inscrutable it would all be for someone only there to take notes over a summer. The complex of privilege, entitlement, resentment, and relationship stretches back through history long before Malcolm Clarke showed up in Montana territory with his West Point failure rankling him-- even before Lewis and Clark located Camp Disappointment and killed two Blackfeet on the way home. Maybe it goes clear back to the First Peoples who ran buffalo over a cliff at Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump while the Pyramids were being built on the other side of the planet.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The more powerful memory I carry away from that ill-starred language workshop was an hour with Ed Little Plume, an expert Blackfeet speaker. Ed not only speaks the language, he speaks it with particular clarity and style. But in this short class he was not teaching vocabulary. Rather he wanted us to think about the shape of the year, what the seasons meant to us as they followed one after another. He described his boyhood in the Twenties, how the round of the year seemed to begin joyfully when school first let out and then shifted into work when the hay was ready to cut. He spoke of softball leagues on long summer evenings and then the fall coming with geese travelling through. Winter was ice-cutting and soon there was the Christmas Pow-wow... It was all poetry, a golden window on a time when life seemed to be in balance -- not the romantic horse-and-buffalo time, but the pastoral pause before the Industrial Revolution got to the Rez. Ed is a faithful Baptist with a personal Jesus. After a few years of working with Piegan Institute, he panicked and joined a back-to-Jesus Pentecostal group, discarding everything -- including his friends. And yet the land is still there and he still loves it, I feel sure.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">PIEGAN INSTITUTE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell and Dorothy Still Smoking had collaborated many times as grant writers. They had created programs and signed contracts any number of times, but it seemed as though no matter which institution they were dealing with-- tribe, BIA, schools, whatever-- people within the institution would manage to subvert the goals, either out of lack of understanding or in order to gain personal advantage. Yet foundations and governments do not like to give money to individuals: they want a corporate body. Finally Dorothy saw that the thing to do was to create their own institution. She drove over to Darrell's, where he was sitting on the porch, and yelled, "Get in the car. We're going to work." </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After brainstorming they decided the goal to pursue was the restoration of the Blackfeet language. Ed "Red Man" Little Plume was identified by many persons as being the most excellent Blackfeet speaker on the U.S. side of the tribe, so they pulled him into their organization. Others are included as interest and need moved them. For instance, Joe Fisher was cinematographer when they made a video about the Blackfeet language and has continued on with tapes on other vital subjects, like Blackfeet water rights. The group agreed that they would try not to be personality stars, but work as a group. Anyone who hasn't lived on a reservation won't understand how subversive that is. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell and I wrote back and forth, even though I was just thirty miles away -- which is nothing on the Rez -- because it was a way of keeping a record. He was working in Browning to make sense of how to create an effective bilingual Blackfeet program. Also, School District #9 still asked him to present those night classes for teachers who had not fulfilled their Blackfeet education requirement. I trusted him to listen properly, partly because of the Free School experience. I knew I didn't have to be Politically Correct or worry about indiscretion. If he agreed, he said so. If he didn't agree, he hinted tactfully or provided other information. His life was no easier than mine, and sometimes we just blew off steam. But he listened a lot of good ideas out of me, and I was pleased to applaud when he had a brainstorm.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I look back over the pages and pages I wrote in Heart Butte, I see more whining than insight. A lot was hard to understand while I was still in the middle of it. The first insight I ought to have had was that to remain I would have to build a constituency, like any politician. That's what the administration feared I was doing. They expected to have mobs of parents up at the school defending me, and maybe I could have done that, but my instinct was not to involve people in my battles. I didn't want to offer any hostages or start any wars. The first time the Supe told me to resign, I staggered into my senior English class and blurted the truth. In a half hour they had prepared a petition demanding that I be rehired and had thirty signatures on it. I still have that document. It makes me feel great, though it would never have saved my job. (Similar petitions failed to save Mr. Z and Dave West.)</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I tried to stay an observer, uncommitted, but I'm sure my failure to sign petitions or attend war councils was interpreted to mean I had put my money on another player. In faculty meetings I never did succeed in not making faces, muttering to myself like an old bear. In the end, though, I was not clever enough to see how to get past the problem of not revealing other people's secrets in the process of explaining myself. Not just embarrassing things, but major moral betrayals as well as federal felony-level crimes like murder. And I never did figure out how to reconcile the various splintered cultures. I thought I knew what ought to happen, just not how to get there.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AN EARLIER VISITOR TO THE REZ</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I've mentioned that first year my source of Blackfeet information was The Old North Trail by Walter McClintock. The book has since become politically incorrect, since McClintock was a white man. [Also, more recently, a white female historian working from documents damned him for not being more politically active on the behalf of the Blackfeet.] My father-in-law, who came in 1903 when McClintock was still around, had no comment beyond approval. Keeping his scientist's objectivity and staying out of politics, young McClintock recorded many small invaluable details of daily life, ceremonial acts, and ethnobotany-- right down to a puppy he befriended which unfortunately ended up in his neighbor's soup pot. In addition he took photographs, which he later touched up and colored. These materials have recently been reissued. If you wanted to order some seeds for sweetgrass (also called "vanilla grass") or to exactly imitate a Bundle opening, this book would tell you what you need to know. But be warned that imitating a Sacred Bundle will bring you criticism-- maybe bad luck.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I told the kids that the book was their heritage and that I expected them to learn it inside and out. There wasn't enough money for books for every student, so I had a box of them which I passed out and collected, allowing them to be read only in class. In that first year the books were defaced only once, by some lover of horseflesh who drew a mighty member on the belly of a steed in a photo. I performed an operation with WhiteOut. People told me they doubted that the book was easy enough to read, written as it was in a kind of nineteenth century style, but instead I found that many students read ahead of what they were assigned. The weakest readers spent long moments on the photographs. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Darrell hypothesized that many local kids seemed to learn to associate ideograms better than they could sound out words in the English letter-for-a-sound (more or less) way. Partly for fun and partly to respond to that, I made all my workpage quizzes like cartoon puzzles. Instead of the same old list of ten questions, I took a page for each chapter and drew circles or squares with little doodles for clues, like skulls or birds or flowers. The answers went into the spaces. I asked both easy and hard questions. Sometimes I asked for a list of every bird or flower mentioned in the chapter. (McClintock often spoke of a dozen or more.) or had them draw lines connecting the description with the name.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some of the older boys and more of the lazier students failed to find the answers by reading and simply copied them off someone else's paper. But I heard them telling each other the stories and recalling names of characters. They discussed The Old North Trail at least as much as they discussed television, which was all I could ask for. A sort of Old North Trail trivia game developed. By the end of the year the books were disappearing into the community. But then a strange thing happened: people got into trunks and bottom drawers and brought out old copies of the book that they had bought for courses taken long ago. Darrell's idea is that books that are taken must be fulfilling a need and the responsible school would simply buy more until the community is saturated. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the students demanded to know why we were reading books about Indians in English class. "This is English class. We ought to read English books." </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Just what is an English book?"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It's drill. You ought to know that-- you're an English teacher!"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"In what language is this book we’re reading written?"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A long pause. "English."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I look forward to the day you can read a novel written in Blackfeet. I look forward to the day you can write a poem in Blackfeet. Until then, this is English."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SEARCHING FOR A NATIVE AMERICAN CANON</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the second year I assigned each class one native American book. The freshmen read "The Ways of my Grandmothers" by Beverly Hungry Wolf, a Canadian Blackfoot. I knew Beverly slightly since she and her huband Adolph had been coming around in the summers since the early Sixties. Adolph made a home industry of his Good Medicine books, filling them with directions for authentic artifacts and photographs from old negatives. But I particularly liked Beverly's stories, and so did the kids. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The sophomores read "When the Legends Die" which was cheating a little since Hal Borland is not Indian and is mostly known as a naturalist. But this particular book had always been popular among my high school kids. I've read it aloud half a dozen times and only admire it more, though the plot -- involving a faithful relationship between the boy and a grizzly -- is a little preposterous. There is a movie which is enough different for a good discussion of what changes were made due to the media being different and whether they ought to have been made. There's a lot of rodeo in the story and my kids loved rodeo or even just horse-breaking. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Juniors read Oliver LaFarge's "Laughing Boy, a Pulitzer prize winning romance about the Southwest. They found it difficult, more distant from their experience, and I read much of it aloud. The mothers of the students, who often borrowed books, liked this story better and told me they wept over it. Seniors read James Welch, Jr.'s break-through masterpiece, "The Death of Jim Loney" and found it hard to digest. It is more sophisticated than most casual readers are used to, but I think the real problem was simply that it was so close to their own experience that they couldn't get any emotional distance on it. It was material supposed to be secret. Today I would substitute Welch's later "Fool's Crow" or Darcy McNickle's "The Surrounded."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AGAINST THE MYSTIQUE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I was the study hall monitor in the Browning Middle School, one of the more harum scarum girls came to me in a panic before classes started. "I forgot my homework and I'll be in big trouble if you don't drive me home to get it!" She was convincing, so I agreed. It was a gorgeous late winter day, the snow was striped with gold and blue reflections, and on the horizon stood the Rockies in immaculate glory. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Look how beautiful!" I enthused.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She wouldn't look. "I hate it. Everything is too cold. It scares me." She went into her grandmother's house -- I recognized her in the window and waved -- and came back with a hairbrush instead of books and papers. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Where's your homework?"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Oh, I didn't really have any. I just wanted this hairbrush and I knew you wouldn't bring me back down here just for that." A few years later this girl -- probably after a drinking party -- was thrown out of a car late at night on a rural road and left to die of hypothermia. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of the kids hardly had the concept of reservation in their heads except as a substandard place to live, a ghetto. Darrell said to me once, "First we had to teach them to care about themselves. Then we had to teach them to care about their language. Now we have to teach them to care about their land." </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wept. What enormous irony to have to teach people once defined by their ability to live on the land that the very same land is more than blowing dust and dead dogs.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">PURSUING THE INDIAN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the summer of 1995 I had returned to the reservation for a visit and stopped by the cabin of Darrell and Roberta Kipp, where they were trying to restore order after nearby St. Mary's Lake had flooded, ruining their floor. We talked at his picnic table until an envoy from Missoula, a Blackfeet man, came around the corner. A university Native American class was waiting out on the road with their professor, hoping that Darrell would have time to give them some insights into the nature of the Blackfeet. Darrell, suppressing a sigh over the half-done floor, agreed. The professor came slouching down the path and slipped Darrell a packet of cigarettes, a tobacco offering, described in the literature as proper payment for old tribal wise men. (Afterwards I laughed untactfully at this little symbol, not valuable enough to be decent payment for Darrell's time and too contemporary in form to really evoke old-time rules. To be authentic, it ought to have been twist tobacco, which is available. I'm a snob.) The professor, very young, kept his eyes downcast. He'd probably read somewhere that looking straight into the eyes of a Native American is a disrepectful challenge, like staring into the eyes of a wolf. He slumped onto a bench.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the kids came filing down, Darrell carefully asked each name and shook each hand. The kids were white, except for one girl. After a bit of small talk, Darrell launched into his regular spiel, well practised from giving lectures to tourists at the Glacier Park hotels, but he could feel them drifting away. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suddenly he changed tactics and began a sort of autobiography. "I'm going to give you the secrets of my success," he promised, and they all looked up. He told about leaving after high school graduation with a couple of friends, determined to go to college in Billings. In the Sixties Montana state colleges were obliged to accept anyone with a Montana high school diploma, so there was no problem about admission. The difficulties became apparent one by one. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first was entering the gym for registration, into a chaotic mélee of students struggling to get classes they wanted. "There's only one way to do this," announced Darrell to his cohorts. "We will pretend we are the most handsome young men ever to enter this gym." The tactic worked and they were soon signed up for the basics. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Who is paying your tuition?" asked the registrar. They managed to get the tribe to pick up the tab. "Where are you staying?" They hadn't thought about it, but the school had places. "How are you going to pay your room and board?" Again, they hadn't thought. Pretty soon they had jobs mopping the floors. They tried to be good at it, to do it with pride as the Jesuit brothers who had taught their parents would have have wanted.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By this time the group from Missoula -- undoubtedly far more filtered, guided and subsidized than Darrell had been -- was riveted. The conclusion to his talk was the same advice he gives to the reservation teenagers. "Listen," he said in his best old-wise-man voice, "Look people in the eye! Shake hands! Find out people's names, remember them, and use them correctly! Show up on time and do your work without complaining! Stay clean! Keep your word! Be brave! Have dignity! Never get into a place too small to get out of." The students' faces were full of light. Several hours had passed. The group left with shoulders back and heads up, all except the young professor, who sighed deeply. I had the feeling he had hoped for something more arcane, mysterious... privileged. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The paradox of it all left me gasping.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-74261061297566201102013-08-10T14:46:00.002-06:002014-09-02T16:54:25.865-06:00DON'T TELL NOBODY<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">DON'T TELL NOBODY</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Whom do you call bad? --Those who always want to put to shame.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>What do you consider most humane? --To spare someone shame.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>What is the seal of liberation? --No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Nietzche</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">DISOBEYING THE CODE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is a politically incorrect book. The only people who are "spozed" to write authentically about native Americans are native Americans. But no Blackfeet could say what I'm going to say without paying an exorbitant price in criticism, lost opportunities or maybe ostracism. Perhaps no Blackfeet could achieve as much objectivity about some things or have the kind of background that I do, coming from the outside and having no blood ties. The Blackfeet love their tribe and would want them to look good for outsiders.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reader must remember always that I am white, that I am tied by marriage (and then divorce) into a prominent white family with local roots back to 1903, and that I am female, all attributes which mean that I have been excluded from some aspects of the community and included in others. Even my former husband, Bob Scriver, does not want me to tell about some of these things. He feels it is dangerous, sacreligious, and tempting fate. Our deepest differences have been about what should be hidden and what should be shared. Perhaps this is because he was born and brought up in Browning. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If I have got some things wrong, I am not surprised. If I have got some things right, then I am grateful. My goal is to be as honest as possible. But remember that I'm not telling you everything and that I am disguising some events and people in order to protect them, particularly the students. If the reader hears criticism of me and of my writing, it should be weighed for what it is and where it comes from. Maybe it’s right.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No doubt there will be an outcry of criticism. Ruth Beebe Hill used to visit us every summer when she was writing Hanta Yo, so I watched carefully the attacks on her. Of course, she claimed to know the Sioux better than the Sioux did, to be absolutely authentic, to be the quintessential expert. I can't say I felt bad about the fate of her book. But I did like her idea of translating her whole book into Sioux and then back again to English, as a sort of filter to eliminate European ideas. I wish I were capable of something so pure.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The most unbreakable taboo on the reservation is never to tell secrets to outsiders. The definition of "outsiders" is situational. They might be anthropologists, rival tribes, white men, men of any kind, the other side of a quarrelling family, uninitiated persons, or someone outside of a romantic relationship. Inside the community, secrets are a powerful economy: one can swap inside information for advantage and one can destroy enemies with misinformation -- or the truth. From before the whites came, "outsiders" have been kept from knowing certain things for strategic reasons. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And from the beginning all the outsiders have wanted to become insiders, to know the secrets. During the first year I taught, my seventh graders were asked by a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York City to fill out a questionnaire. It came by mail. The grad student wanted to know all sorts of things the kids considered embarrassing: "Is your mother married to your father?" "Do you have any relatives in jail?" "Do you get drunk?"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Do we have to tell the truth?" they asked.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It's up to you. You're answering this questionnaire, not me," I said.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They wrote, tongue in cheek, "Well, it's tough to study when I've been awake all night because I share the bed with my aunt and her boyfriends keep making noise and moving around." "Every single member of my family is in jail, and I can hardly wait until I get there, too." I didn't know if the grad student had a literature class where they discussed the unreliable narrator. I was disappointed not to hear what conclusions the grad student drew. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bob and I once spent the better part of an hour trying to find out how to paint a ceremonial drum. We knew it was supposed to be red and black concentric circles but didn't know whether the inner circle was black with an outer circle of red, or vice versa. All our questions were answered with: "It depends," or "it could be that way," or "however you want it," until we finally gave up. Once it was painted, our informant told us we got it wrong, thereby preserving his status as an authority.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today's popular literature is often one of revelation: secrets told, confessions made, the truth laid bare. Suppose someone began to write about Blackfeet who really knew the inside stories. Like who committed the many unsolved murders. Or which famous white men left bastards behind them. What would happen? (It is politically incorrect to ever use the word "bastard." Maybe more so on the reservation than elsewhere.) Would it make a difference? Maybe no one will ever understand no matter how many details they have. You've got to have been part of it for a long time before you know which secrets are the vital ones. The truth is more something felt than something known. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In small, conservative, traditionally Catholic, white-dominated reservation towns, the truth is often considered "nasty," suitable only for the Confessional, and so it becomes secret, and then by reverse definition secrets are assumed to be nasty. In a world ambivalent about drug and gay cultures-- sometimes tolerant and sometimes persecutorial-- kids especially have learned to keep their business secret from adults. Today even in the upper middle class families of white America, kids turn to peer groups for explanations and support. Their parents have few clues about kids' lives. On the other hand, those same parents may well have secrets from their families, made easy by "business trips" or "retreats." Certainly the soaps watched across America have plot lines based on this assumption. Revelation and confrontation go together. Blackfeet kids are clued to this.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sneaking around in Montana is entirely different than sneaking around in Manhattan. Genuine secrecy is rarely achieved. People often drive long distances and note what they see. The population is so small that people's vehicles can be recognized. Some even remember license numbers, which are coded by county. Like most, I always had a card with the code on it clipped to my sun visor. (Glacier County's code is "38." Once I chased a car through the streets of Chicago because they had a Montana 38 plate and I hungered to say "howdy" to them. They were trying to escape me -- I had an Illinois plate and they must have thought I was going to rob them. Or on second thought, maybe they recognized me and didn't want me to know they were there.) Much of what is "unknown" is known, all right, just not admitted. People can be close-mouthed, especially about their own peer group, however they define it. But occasionally they redefine their peers. Then secrets come out.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The dynamics of families that contain drinking, drugs, abuse or incest revolve around secrecy. "It's our business. Don't tell nobody. If you tell, I'll kill you." Otherwise, authority figures could break up the family or interfere with sources of money. Anyway, a person needs to preserve some sort of community front and status. But if those same people join the "Twelve-Step Culture" that is now strong on the reservation, their status and friendships will depend on confession. The whole standard of belonging will have shifted to telling.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ancient Blackfeet culture was an organic whole that had developed in adaptation to a specific bison-based economy and nomadic-band sociology. The Neeseetahpee were regulated by stories rather than rules, governed by personalities rather than books, and always disciplined by the pressing need to survive. At the same time that the Blackfeet world was foreclosed by disease and immigration, the Jesuits came to convert them -- by whatever means necessary -- to a whole new system. Their very diet had to change. Their clothes, their hairstyles, their rituals, their houses, their language all had to change abruptly -- enforced by beatings and starvation. At the same time their human blood ties were collapsed by pandemic deaths, confused by accidental and unacknowledged conceptions, and denied by the new notions of "marriage" which excluded such ancient customs as fraternal polygamy. They were not just defeated, but shamed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After that, none could act from that inner feeling of "fittingness" which the Englishmen (on their own cultural terms) called "conscience" and believed was an absolute, culture-transcending guide--but only if it was like an English conscience. Blackfeet had to choose between what they could preserve of the old ways, what they could guess about the new ways, or what they were told to do by the more powerful whites. The missionaries themselves, without quite realizing it, gave muddled information, holding themselves to one standard as religious professionals, the local non-Catholic white people to another standard as secular and profane, and the Blackfeet to a third standard as "savages" or as physically grownup children. Blackfeet learned to be "other-directed," to take their moral cues from others. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But in fact they were not really allowed to imitate white people. No one really wanted them to be upstanding, well-fed, look-you-in-the eye people. An underclass was too convenient, too psychologically rewarding to give up. What is a missionary without a clientele?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When morality is enforced from outside rather than developing from within, people become invested in secrecy to avoid punishment. Behavior like drinking was not just discouraged by missionaries, but also forbidden by secular law on the reservation until the veterans came back from World War II. Yet drinking was a deeply attractive anodyne which some white people advocated as a great good and a legitimate, traditional relief (issuing it to their troops and offering it in religious ceremonies) and still do to this day. White men held to a double standard when it came to Indians, selling them any kind of consciousness-altering muck and criticizing them when they became half-crazy from drinking such toxic stuff. Instead of keeping the warriors numb and happy as the providers hoped, drinking without traditional social structures led to violence and the throwing off of imposed consciences.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In today's drug-connected world, alcohol, cocaine, meth or pot are understood as addictions that can only be addressed by confession among equals. Therefore, the reservation has acquired an intricate web of AA or Alanon groups which link people in the enterprise of reformation by sitting them in circles to talk about what they have done. In that ironic way Twelve-Step dogma has turned The People back to their traditional ways of self-regulation. A few white people have joined these circles -- by definition white people with a history of alcoholism or drug abuse or with families dominated by such use. The frankness of the people in the meeting, protected by a pledge of secrecy towards outsiders, increases investment in the legitimacy of the pattern. They join in the secrecy because their own confessions are hostages. Sometimes they are very useful hostages in an economic way.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Social pressure shapes confessions to be like those of the others. A kind of group conscience forms and soon amounts to a political force. Certain well-paid jobs can only be held by recovering addicts. What is meant to be resistance to group pressure forms a new group pressure. And what was once totally secret-- at least in theory -- is now revealed to a privileged audience which can leak the information in a strategic way without ever checking for factuality.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SPLITTING THE IMAGE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To a white, Black or even Asian outsider, native Americans may seem all alike, though the outsider likely may be mistaken even about which people are native and which people are not. Another uninitiated grad student who visited my class was disappointed that there were not more Blackfeet students in it. But actually only the white-blonde daughter of the principal was totally Caucasian. He could identify her, but not the others.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When a whole people are seen as "monolithic" and rather mysterious, a phenomenon takes place that we might call "splitting". That is, the outsider either angelicizes the people, seeing them as "noble savages" with instinctive mystical connections to nature, or demonizes the people, seeing them as degenerate drunks incapable of self-control. Outsiders become invested in such stereotypes and are angry if contradicted. Whole shifts in the history of philosophy are involved. Nature itself has been seen as Eden sometimes and as Hell Itself other times.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Young people yearn to believe in the truth of the Natural Nobleman so that he or she can identify with them and perhaps dream of escaping to live with them. But who can be like Disney's Pocohantas? She's a cartoon. At the other extreme the small town county commissioner hangs onto the illusion that Indians are not as good as others so he or she can justify looking down on them, perhaps even cheating and excluding them from ordinary entitlements like a purchased meal in a public restaurant. Audra Pambrun, who was awarded recognition as the National Nurse of the Year, told me once about traveling across the state by bus and not being able to get food for herself or her baby. When I took a Blackfeet debate team to Havre in 1962, we could not get served except in an "Indian" cafe. The kids wouldn't let me raise hell.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because these extreme pictures are so intense, even Native American people are resistant to having their stereotypes challenged, especially by outsiders, and so they collaborate to present to anthropologists, tourists and writers whatever it is they want to see. The perceiver does not easily waken to the understanding that the shifts are coming from their own inner emotional needs rather than the actual reality.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not every white family in Montana has a past they can be proud of. Such embarrassments as bootlegging, horse stealing, claim jumping, insurance swindles, murder, prostitution and so on are often the root of prosperity. In any small town one hears about the scandals of men who step out on their wives, who cheat each other or the hated government or their bank; the women who secretly drink or entertain male company; the subcultures of gays or druggies or political activists; the "accidental fires" and unsolved murders. Therefore most whites around a reservation have little interest in total honesty when it comes to history. They know that an absolutely legal accounting of their very land ownership is dangerous.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the reservation such activities are even more potent, in part because Native Americans exchange news about white people in the same way that servants exchange news about the gentry upstairs. White people tend not to notice Indians because they "don't matter." (In the same way, older low-status white women often know a great deal because high status men see then as having no power or importance and therefore talk openly while the women go about their typing or dusting.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On reservations legal jurisdictions are hopelessly confused, law enforcement agencies are drastically underfunded, and the FBI is so unmotivated that murder and rape go uninvestigated and unpunished. One of my best students from the Sixties, from a large and powerful family, got mixed up with a bad crowd at Indian Days and was beaten so badly that one eye popped out of his head. The act happened in the Town of Browning, which whites assert to be a pocket of state jurisdiction within the ambiguously tribal/federal jurisdiction of the reservation, but the young aggressors were from a Canadian Reserve where the complexities among tribe, province and country were even less defined. In the confusion, the assault went unaddressed. In such situations, people take the law into their own hands.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Rape is hardly seen as a crime by the FBI, especially if it is Indian-on-Indian or among poor people. In 1995 a group of Blackfeet women petitioned their federal senators to somehow enforce the investigation and punishment of rapes, a demand made necessary because attacks on women are seen by many (both Indian and white) as inevitable and trivial. News of them travels by gossip, which soon becomes distorted. Only the rapes of high-status women (which rarely happen) are prosecuted. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Inversely, drug pushers are only prosecuted if the pusher is low status and inconvenient to the real suppliers, who often enjoy prosperity-based status. (It makes sense that drug vendors want dependable distributors and that drug vendors would be prosperous. Success in the criminal world is not so different from conventional success.) Having a nice house and dressing well are markers for "good" people, because success is conflated with virtue. "Good" is "lookin' good." This is a national phenomenon, not peculiar to the reservation.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Newspapers print inaccurate accounts of reservation events and often don't mention them at all. To a white person in a Montana city, reservation politics hardly seem to matter unless they affect natural resources. No reporter is eager to drive three hours to get a story in a place where he or she has no contacts. Anyway, newsprint right now is so expensive that newspapers are skimpy: very little news of any kind trickles in among the advertisements. People keep police scanners on all day in an attempt to understand what is happening. It helps to have a friend who works in the emergency room of the hospital.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is as much graft on reservations as anyone would predict where the biggest sources of money are impersonal institutions and the people are needy. In the beginning it was white people acting as superintendents and herd bosses who lined their own pockets. Even the missionaries came away richer. When the big Flood of '64 swept through the reservation, one priest was trapped in a tree because he had been trying to save his private cattle herd. Often today it is the local tribal people themselves who bleed the schools, the BIA, the tribe, the Indian Health Service-- never enough to make real trouble but enough to be fired if caught or confronted. In most cases, enough people know what is going on to blackmail their own share and to be able to threaten disclosure if that becomes convenient. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The federal government itself has over the years "lost" millions of dollars of tribal assets because of "confused book-keeping." Let me repeat: millions of dollars of money belonging to the Native American people have not been embezzled or diverted, but simply LOST through bookkeeping confusion and omission on the part of the federal government, their voluntary protector and trustee on grounds that Native Americans would only lose their money if entrusted with it. The ironies can be bitter.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">OVER-TURNING THE MONEYCHANGER’S TABLE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the Res, if one does begin to get close to a guarded truth, a most common defense strategy is uproar: instant escalation to denial, counter-accusations, and protective lies accompanied by outright uncontrollable physical destruction. Cursing, furniture-throwing, threats, producing weapons, calling on punishers to help --all in the interests of creating so much confusion and fear that whatever might become known will be hidden. When in 1995 the tribal business council made a deal giving power to the state authorities without first consulting with the people, a middle-aged woman at the ceremonial signing upended the congratulatory punch bowl onto the papers and politicians. (I wish I'd been there.) Unfortunately, that's usually about where things end, because no one knows quite what to do next. In this particular instance the tribal council knew what to do: award a $50 per capita payment. Criticism vanished, except for a few diehards who complain so much that no one listens to them anymore.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the most dangerous sides of secrecy is the encouragement of lies. First of all is the institutional lying Orwell called “doublespeak,” where the school or tribe simply “reframes” the reality into whatever fits their convenience. Cranking up restrictions on kids is called “structuring experience.” Signing away tribal property is called “maximixing relationship with the larger community.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But more serious, because it is more private, is the common practise among kids of lying. They lie to escape trouble, to promote their own importance, to make life more interesting, and to protect others. That in itself is not particularly remarkable. But they lie with such forcefulness and skill that they sometimes lose reality. It is one thing to lie, knowing what the truth is, and a much crazier and more dangerous thing to lie and begin to believe it oneself. That is by definition insanity.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And perhaps most troublesome for a change-agent, people on the reservation have learned to deny and suppress any criticism. They kill the messenger, asserting that any bad news is simply unacceptable and must be hostile. “My mother says you are not to talk about my family.” “I forbid you to even think of me.” It happens because facing the truth is simply unbearable. A change-agent must provide the strength and safety to be honest-- including for himself, or else all the changes will be confused by mirrors.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">PLAYING GOD</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In recent decades among intellectual circles people have begun to question whether the truth is something knowable. If every human witness is biased, if every bit of evidence is interpretable, if payoffs for particular outcomes are generous, if memories exist unconsciously, how can anyone ever really know what happened? Most people do not share such scepticism, because they prefer to think that there is a Truth, which they, specifically they themselves, firmly grip.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suppose I really had access to the actual, God-certified truth about Heart Butte. Would it be legitimate to tell who deals drugs, who escaped a grand jury indictment for lack of evidence, who molests their children, who is gay? (Acts of homosexual intercourse are a felony in Montana.) What might the consequences be for them or even for their victims? People might lose relationships, lose jobs, be branded for life by accusations from a single person acting out of a conviction that what amounts to gossip is true. People might use what I said in twisted ways to hurt each other. People just simply might not understand. A Montana lawyer who read this manuscript advised me against publication, saying that the Heart Butte people had already been shamed enough. But what do they have to be ashamed of, really? Why don’t the white people have more cause for shame? And why does anyone assume that Heart Butte is any worse than any Montana hamlet with a low income -- which is to say, most small prairie towns?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The principal tried to control me by hinting that I was lesbian. In the end I was blackmailed into resigning by students willing to twist incidents so I appeared a sex-obsessed celibate, an old woman who beat up kids. They were not entirely aware of what they were doing. They simply knew I would get in trouble if they reported I answered questions about sex or if they reported that I struck them, however lightly. They were joined by parents who knew I knew their secrets from twenty years earlier. Women who recently had confided being molested in childhood or students who had come for advice about gay relationships had second thoughts. Maybe their secrets weren't safe. I was a liberal, committed to not being judgmental about such matters, while paradoxically also being committed to judging opressors, dishonesty and secrecy. They had no concept of “liberal.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fundamentalist ministers have been "outers" who accused sinners from the pulpit and even called for them to be excluded from congregations, "shunned" by their own families. Sins are seen as catastrophic, condemning the sinner to eternal Hell. Before teaching at Heart Butte, I found as a minister I soon became privy to so many secrets, and almost everyone had such similar secrets, that I simply could not remember what was or was not privileged. The "secret" that cause the most actual trouble when I spilled it was that someone was moving, which seemed innocent to me but had serious overtones to the mover. People seem attached to the notion that their secrets and their crimes are unique. They would rather believe that I would expose them than understand that others had secrets just like theirs. And they were singularly unresponsive to the assurance of forgiveness, cherishing their evils as part of their identities.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet are not different. They would like their own massacre to be the ultimate atrocity, not one among the many. They are no different than Jews who claim sole custody of Holocaust. They would like their own suffering to be deserving of recompense, not part of the greater human pattern of suffering. And they would like their secrets to be their own, never disclosed and never repeated to outsiders.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If Heartbreak Butte is to be a helpful book instead of a destructive one, then I think I must take some confession and repentance on myself. Mostly my short-comings were not having enough patience, enthusiasm, energy, insight, generosity or whatever. I was lazy, angry, greedy, slothful and mouthy. I have always struggled with a nasty temper. (That stereotype red hair!) These seem like trivial enough faults, but the results are discrediting. If I am going to open the community to scrutiny, then I must also open myself and share the consequences of whatever outsiders think about it.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SUPPRESSING OLD-TIME RELIGION</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Secrecy became a necessity for faithful Blackfeet when the United States Government, fearing that religion would become a source of revolution forbade all Native American ceremonies. Since unsophisticated white Christians define all non-converted people as "pagans" who will burn in Hell, and do not understand that the "Sun Worship" of the Blackfeet is a coherent and complete religion, the measure seemed reasonable to unsophisticated whites of the time. Even today it would be possible to find both whites and converted Native Americans who would agree that the old-time Blackfeet religion should be suppressed.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since the religion was rooted in the land and the Blackfeet remained on that land, the rituals and materials of worship simply went secret. The old ways continued, though with fewer and fewer people and less and less understanding. The secrecy that preserved them was salvific, even in the Christian sense, at least from a liberal point of view. To be able to worship as one's ancestors have is an act of salvation. But few young people were taught these ways. When a high school student daringly described his bedroom and the Thunder Pipe Bundle that hung over his bed, I hardly knew what he meant. When I asked Blackfeet people I knew well, most of them could remember some similar object which frightened them because their grandparents treated it with awe, but few knew what it really was or what it meant.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE USES OF REVELATION</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An anthropologist would give Heart Butte a made-up name and use some kind of code for informants. But everyone in Heart Butte, which is where it matters, would know exactly whom I meant. I remember that a Cosmopolitan magazine writer came to town once and wrote an article about the kind of men Indian women liked. She got some good quotes from a woman called "Cherry." It was pretty easy for us to guess that she meant Peaches. But I've tried to disguise or generalize some things. There's no need to always name names. I've mixed two or three people into one and made up people who don't exist, though none who couldn't exist.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes secrecy is worse than the truth. I have to believe that family secrecy that hides abuse -- beatings, sexual abuse, addictions and deprivations -- is the deepest wrong. I sometimes think drinking per se isn't the root cause of Native American problems -- although I recognize that it damages health both physiologically and by causing accidents -- but rather it is the violence and the resulting need for secrecy among family members that stops growth and repeats tragedy. It's impossible to heal this damage without open honesty, but I'm not convinced a book-keeping approach to total revelation is very helpful. Who cares who did what to whom, unless it means finding a way out of the damage? How will Native Americans ever come to feel like they are just like all the other Americans until they realize that every family -- even mine -- has its battles with alcoholism, drugs, poverty, and the rest of the litany that is often pinned on tribes? We are all struggling with the same repetitious problems.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Other secrets that deserve uncovering are the political patterns that grow into paralyzing tangles on reservations. Once I was talking to a representative of The Nature Conservancy about some issue and she asked, "What does the tribe say about it?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"What do you mean by the tribe?" I had to ask. "The Tribal Council, the elders, the reservation population, everyone who is enrolled? Do you mean the ranchers or the unemployed or the school community? Each of those bodies has quite different opinions." Even someone so sophisticated and close to the reservation was thinking in terms of movie-like chief's councils.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People from the outside world rarely ever figure out the shifting alignments within the Native American communities. If I could describe how these secret-trading economies work in a way that doesn't expose individuals specifically at Heart Butte School in 1989-91 but alerts people to reflect on the present, then maybe the risks would be worthwhile. But I don't have much inside information I could really prove. I could only speculate from outside. I can hear the lawyers rubbing their hands together.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Beyond that, I would hope to describe Heart Butte people in their ordinariness, their yearning for normalcy and predictability, and their uniqueness as individuals. I can't do that without talking about people who are real. Some will be convinced I'm talking about them, when in fact I am not. In the end I can only hope they will forgive me and that no harm will come of it. I mean to hold them up as friends and colleagues, people of dignity and achievement even in tough circumstances. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SEEDS GROWING UNDERGROUND</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is yet another reason to keep some phenomena quiet, but it is a happy reason. Just now it is possible to see many small beginnings on the Blackfeet Reservation. Some of them are quite public and others are happening without much notice. Many a small enterprise with a bright future has been inaugurated on the Rez, only to be pounced upon by so many opportunists that growth will be too fast to sustain. There has been no time for what is called "a learning curve." At first experience comes hard and takes some reflection to understand.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Individual success stories have been so freighted with expectation and so accompanied by demands from those less successful, that the human beings involved have become confused and even borne down to failure. It seems to be hard for everyone in contemporary culture to understand that success is sustained by work. The successful poet or painter needs time to work, and so does the successful businessman. Much of that work will be boring and repetitious: stock inventory, totting up figures, carrying supplies.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I talk to people in counselling after trauma, I often suggest that they not be too quick to re-focus, too eager to edit, too intent on weeding their garden. New situations mean new opportunities, but in their infancy it is easy to confuse troubles with advantages. When I do a wedding, I advise the newly married couple to go up the aisle and directly into a room where they can be alone together for five minutes, to bond and to gather their wits before the celebration of the event -- all that cake-eating and garter-throwing. These are the liminal (threshold) times, unstructured and seeking a new way of being. It is important to provide shelter, safety, just for a little while.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Native Americans in particular seem to attract do-gooders, anxious to help but not anxious to take the time to listen. When it comes to respecting the peoples' right to choose their own way and travel at their own speed, New Agers rushing in to create Medicine Wheels where no one much wants them can be just as much a pain in the butt as the original fire-and-brimstone Jesuits </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Over the past three -- nearly four -- decades I have known the Blackfeet, I have become convinced that they can find their own way. In fact, no permanent change can come about without involving the whole tribe, however it may be defined. Certainly no one can define them but themselves, whether they decide on blood quantum, residence on the reservation, formal enrollment, ability to speak the language, or some other criteria. What outsiders can do is to ensure democratic process; a little extra boost for the smallest, weakest, eldest; and to keep the federal and state agencies honest. That ought to be enough work for anyone.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The public schools on the reservation are a key to the Blackfeet future. The people must decide what it is they want those schools to do. Then ways can be found to reach the goal. So long as the people are divided, the carpet baggers will be there to profit from the confusion. Secrecy -- quiet little deals behind the scenes -- are exactly what carpetbaggers love. It's easy to corrupt people one at a time. Especially when they are only there to make money so they can collect their pension and spend it somewhere else.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some whites have stayed on because they never made enough money to leave. Some, like Bob Scriver, were born there and can't imagine living anyplace else. Some, like myself, would like to live there but can't make a living. Many have stayed because they loved the place and the people, and many who have left still love the Blackfeet Reservation. That is no secret.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-44292643791199609382013-08-10T14:45:00.002-06:002014-09-02T16:54:58.649-06:00IN THE MOVIES<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="font-size: 24px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">IN THE MOVIES</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Where is our Indian Spike Lee?</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Tim Giago</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THUMBS UP, THUMBS DOWN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tony, the boy who wanted to liberate the Doc's horses, loved John Wayne beyond all other heroes. His all-time favorite movie was “The Cowboys,” an account of John Wayne taking a cattle herd to market with only boys for crew. The climax of the movie is the Wayne character stoicly walking away from the bad guys while those varmints slowly shoot him to pieces. When we got to this part, though he'd seen it many times before, tears ran down Tony's face. "Don't cry," he would say to the others. "This is only a movie. It's not really happening." None of the others were crying.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not many movies about Native Americans were around on tape in 1989 and many of the ones available were old. Recklessly, I plunged into the mass of them, ordering one after another and enlisting the kids in critiquing them. We screened “The Searchers,” which is praised by critics as being so meaningful and enlightened. I thought that since John Wayne was the hero, at least Tony would like it. But the movie turned out to be unintelligible for these Blackfeet kids. They simply couldn't grasp the plot line. All the assumptions of the screenwriters now seemed so cock-eyed that we couldn't figure out why things happened. Wayne's obsession with his niece, his determination to kill her if she had "turned Indian," his preoccupation with "honor" and so on -- it was like watching a foreign film.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Canadians, presumably a foreign country, actually produced movies closer to our experience and more appealing in their philosophy. The kids loved ‘Where the Spirit Lives,” an account of a young girl kidnapped and kept captive by a Church of England boarding school. She fights hard to keep her culture and identity and one woman teacher is sympathetic but helpless. The kids had heard these kinds of stories from the older members of their own families, so to them it had the ring of truth.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They also liked “I Heard the Owl Call My Name” from the book by Margaret Craven, who was a Montana writer. The story is about a young, fatally ill priest who is sent by a wise supervisor to a coastal Indian village where he comes to understand life in time to die with dignity. The feel of that coastal village was very much like the earlier reservation I knew when more of the old people were still living.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the all-time recurring favorites was “Alkali Lake,” the name of a small community in British Columbia where universal alcoholism was gradually replaced by reform because of one stubborn woman who stopped drinking, got her husband to stop, and then -- one-by-one -- converted everyone else. The drunken priest is driven out and the bootlegging shop-owner is also punished. Always there was a lot of debate about whether Heart Butte could do the same thing, but the consensus was that Alkali Lake was a truly secluded town and could control who came in and out. Heart Butte, the claim went, was too close to civilization. (This was the opposite of the usual opinion.) Just the same, we all saw this movie several times and people came back and back to it in a hunger to see how it could be.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My own all-time favorite Indian movie was also Canadian, but no one ever heard of it. “Loyalties” is about two women in a small far-north bush community. One is a white doctor's wife and the other is a local native woman who is hired to help her, but who gradually slips into being more friend than servant -- mostly because she never sees herself as a servant. This was my first acquaintance with Tantoo Cardinal. In the story she is unmarried with kids, but has a boyfriend. One scene shows them frankly in bed, smoking and talking about life in general. I can't think of another straightforward scene of contemporary Native American adults in a moment of nondramatic privacy and intimacy, just like everybody else. This is definitely a woman's movie and the plot crisis hinges on the white woman choosing between protecting her husband or her good friend's Indian family. It is a real ethical dilemma, presented thoughtfully. I never showed it to the kids. I wouldn't have known about it except for having lived several years in Saskatchewan.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Clearcut”, which found an audience even in the States among environmentalists, didn't come out until I had left Heart Butte, but I wish I'd had it earlier. It is a trickster story, but from a "tree-hugger" point of view so that most of the bad stuff -- human "de-barking" (not getting out of a boat, but having one’s bark peeled off) -- happens to the plutocrat timber-clearcutter. Graham Greene makes a wonderful trickster, but the character I fell in love with was a little Native American girl who gradually converts the liberal lawyer's briefcase into a Sacred Medicine Bundle by carrying it around, putting Significant Objects into it.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The contrast to the realistic Canadian movies might be the Raquel Welch movie, “Walks Far Woman,” which some girls claimed they admired because the main character is independent. I can't comment on the love scenes because I watched the movie in Browning as part of a junior high "film festival" for Native American Days and the supervising teacher hit the fast-forward everytime we came to any kissing. The plot is suspect: the heroine's kicked out of her own tribe, stays with the Sioux, has a baby, loses it, loses her Sioux husband, ends up with a white man and her descendents become US soldiers. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Besides “The Searchers,” I had two other popularity failures. One was “Soldier Blue,” which was meant to comment on the Vietnam War. Some shots of atrocities-- a child on fire running, a head rolling towards the camera, a man being executed by a revolver to the side of his head-- were re-enactments of famous film shots of the war most American people viewed on the network news while eating supper. The kids found them shocking and repulsive. They had no memory of the Vietnam War and certainly had not seen the original atrocity pictures. They just saw terrible things happening to "themselves," the Indians. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The truest subtle betrayal of the People that I saw in that movie and tried to explain, was that real American Indian actors were not used except for one scene in which a woman is stripped naked and raped. No Anglo actors were asked to be nude. This was racism on the part of the producers, and I thought I was very clever to spot it, but the kids couldn't understand what I was talking about. They just hated the movie--were genuinely shocked. To understand that they had no frame of reference, I had to go back in memory to an art show at the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. The curator, Ramon Gonyea, who was an Onondaga and a trained anthropologist, had painted an Asian woman screaming in the style of Picasso's "Guernica." The title was "My Lai," which made no sense to me: who’s "Lai?" A tourist finally explained it. The news in Montana had not spent much time on Lieutenant Calley's Vietnam massacre. At least the tourist didn’t have to tell me that Gonyea’s sympathy for the Vietnamese came from parallel Native American history. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other flop was one of my favorites, “Journey Through Rosebud.” A young idealistic whiteman stumbles by chance into the tangled lives on the contemporary Pine Ridge Reservation and barely survives. His hero-with-a-fatal-flaw Sioux friend dies. When I saw this movie the first time in the Seventies, still fresh from teaching in Browning, I was overwhelmed with admiration and called the screenwriter by using L.A. information. He was startled, saying he didn't think anyone had ever seen it at all. The version I showed the kids had been re-edited. The kids didn't hate it-- they were just totally bored. The movie was shot at the beginning of Indian Empowerment, so there was a lot of political talk. Unless there was an explosion, a fist-fight, or a shoot-out on screen, the classroom was full of movement, talk, and covert poking and tweaking. If the fidgeting were suppressed, they went to sleep. I forced the older kids through some detailed worksheets about what happened, why, whether it was true-to-reality, and so on, but they bucked and objected all the way.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“A Man Called Horse” and its sequel, “The Return of a Man Called Horse” didn't attract much interest, though the author of the original story, Dorothy Johnson, had lived just over the mountains and once spoke at a Browning High School commencement. “The Big Sky” was more interesting, though by now the movie is so old that many scenes are ridiculous, like the sling-shot method of loading a deer carcass onto the riverboat which Guthrie himself thought was ludicrous. Some kids liked “Winterhawk,” or “Wind Walker,” which are beautiful romantic stories, the 19th century stereotype. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We never found tapes of “Stay Away, Joe” (starring Elvis Presley!) or “Billy Jack,” which I originally saw the Browning show house with a roaring, appreciative audience. But a tape of “Pow-Wow Highway” surfaced from among the kids and we all loved it. It's a "picaresque," meaning an on-the-road, episodic cliff-hanging story starring "Philbert," who is a kind of Holy Fool (I would use Parsifal as a comparison) who takes off with the others to rescue a sister. It's a low-budget -- and some say a low-class -- movie, but we all loved it. Then I tried reading the novel out loud and discovered what it was that David Seals, the writer, was complaining about when he said the movie censored his book. At first I was editing out the rougher language as I read, but soon I had to stop because the actual plot line was too raunchy. Still, it had a lot of energy and looking for the book lead me to some other less shocking but equally picareque novels like Thomas King's tales of the Alberta basketball players. “Medicine River” is on videotape now. It was filmed on the Canadian Blackfoot rez.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since I left Heart Butte, there have been other valid movies about Indians. The Canadian film loosely based on Kinsella's “Dance Me Outside” is particularly powerful in showing how young people depend only upon their peers for help and guidance, sometimes with tragic results. Two movies came out of the Wounded Knee II events, one a documentary and the other, “Thunderheart,” a fictionalized parallel. Both are full of energy and ideas. These films are not just for entertainment, but also for reflection. They would be fascinating to discuss with the whole town at once. “Where the Rivers Run North” is probably a little too mature for young students -- not because of sex and violence, but because it is thoughtful about the relationship between Tantoo Cardinal's character and Rip Torn's character, about time passing, opportunities missed, and what endures in old age.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE MOVIES COME TO THE REZ</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Blackrobe” and the James Fenimore Cooper movie, “The Deerslayer,” began to move focus away from the stereotype epitomized by the horse/buffalo culture of the Plains Indians, and illustrate the earlier lives of Eastern woodland Indians. Butch Lunak, a local Blackfeet rancher, was by now an established stuntman with lots of work. School house rumor had it that Joey Tatsey was going to be Uncas, but that was wrong. Just the same, the kids always knew what movies were hiring real Indian actors before I read anything about it. One seventh grader carried around her father's casting directory, a kind of yearbook produced by an association of Indian actors. It was just in these years at the end of the Eighties that movies took a leap forward when it came to native peoples. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1973 a school bus of hippie types had showed up in East Glacier briefly, scouting sites of a movie that turned out to be “Heaven's Gate.” Local people were in it, but mostly whites in Glacier Park and on the west side of the Rockies. The story was about the Wyoming sheep-versus-cattle wars, and no Indians were featured in the plot or appeared as extras. My students of the time wrote some stirring accounts of range wars, but we only heard rumors of how badly extras were treated -- mostly by too much waiting under trying conditions. The movie, of course, was a notorious flop.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Movies had been made in Glacier Park before. Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan made “Cattle Queen of Montana” at St. Mary's and Bob Scriver's generation would confide what a dirty mule-skinner's mouth that Barbara had, but what a total charmer that Ronnie was. Even Shirley Temple once made a movie in the park and was given a fabulous and authentic buckskin dress as well as a name.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WARPARTY</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1987 the cast and crew of “Warparty” came to the Blackfeet Reservation, making a lasting impact as a local event. The main actors were Hollywood second-generation youngsters: Matt Dillon's younger brother, Kevin; Will Sampson's son, Tim; and Billy Wirth who had been in “The Lost Boys.” This movie also turned out to be about lost boys. A nearly unknown actor named Rodney Grant played a sidekick to the main villain, a white man who was a tracker of criminals. Actually, it was hinted that the relationship was more than just being friends, but that was a minor subplot point.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Everyone all the way down to Choteau, where some scenes were shot, became excited about being extras, or loaning furniture, or providing housing for cast and crew. That summer I was visiting in East Glacier where I often ended up eating breakfast at a table near the stars or the animal wrangler. The latter's conversation was more interesting. The waitresses were intelligent, pretty, self-confident mixed-bloods from Browning area ranches. At first they made it a point "to give those young men their space," but after a few weeks of getting to know them, the girls began to mother the young actors. "Now, you clean up your plate! And you'd better have some orange juice."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The producing company was Hemdale Film Corporation which originated in England and moved to LA in 1980. They were staying in rented summer cabins, some of them back up into the trees away from town. One morning an assistant director didn't show up for work. Someone called his cabin. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I can't come right now," protested the unhappy man.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Why not?"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"There's a bear standing on my front porch."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Well, then go out the back-- climb out a window-- just go around him and get in your pickup and get over here!"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Well, I can't."</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Why not?"</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"There's another bear in my pickup." We locals repeated this tale with gusto.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Warparty” was about young Indian men confronting racist feelings still left over from the wars of a century earlier. Few locals had read the script, and even people in individual scenes were unclear about how they all fit together, but everyone was high on the possibilities. Bob Scriver loaned bronze sculptures to dress up the Museum of the Plains Indian. I'm not sure that he realized the scene was one of theft from the Museum.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The writer of the film, Spencer Eastman, was working on an original idea, rather than adapting a book, and took the time to consult people like Jackie Parsons, a Blackfeet woman and Tribal Judge who ran the Crafts Store at the Museum of the Plains Indian. He died of cancer in 1988, before the film was released, which might account for the amount of re-cutting and mysteriously delayed distribution. The producer Bernie Williams described the movie as "an intelligent, sympathetic awareness movie." Other opinions differed rather sharply. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the plot, a small group of boys get into trouble during a re-enactment of an Indian battle when they more-or-less accidentally kill a white who has been harassing them. They escalate from being actor-warriors to being real renegades full of violence. The white authorities hunt them and and kill them. That's it. Those film aficionados who defended the movie spoke in terms of fatalistic Samurai films. Those who criticized it talked about violence and promoting hatred. There was also a Neo-traditional critique of a drunken Holy Man who raised a lot of hackles in the traditional circles. "No Holy Man would drink," they insisted, though they knew some who did.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I first saw the movie in Choteau, where the audience was mostly white. Their reactions would not have been comfortable for my students. They were not exactly rooting for the renegades. Several times more I watched it on tape with Heart Butte kids, who picked up the new (to them) epithet "prairie nigger" with glee and used it constantly. (It was more popular even than calling their enemies, "you Cree!") One day, having just watched the movie again in another class, Augie Eaglespeaker said to me, "You know, Mrs. Scriver, after you watch this movie a lot of times, it doesn't seem so good after all." I could have hugged him. I only wish that more of the young men had felt that way.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was a movie by outsiders who used local people for their own cynical statement of existential despair, offering death as the only deliverance. It was a perversion of Asian ideas, imposed on a stereotypical version of the reservation. I'm sure the producers felt that including a “berdache” as an Indian scout for the Great White Hunter was witty of them. (In the movie of Guthrie's “The Big Sky “ the “berdache” had to be converted to a half-wit. Strangely, today, making fun of a mentally disabled person is widely considered more despicable than accepting a gay person!) No doubt the writers thought that the cycles of breaking-in, running, and killing were exciting and innovative. They had no consciousness of what they were tapping in the local kids. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE REZ KIDS DANCE WITH WOLVES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the last spring I taught, when the drug counselor was there and had enough clout to get things done, she decided that we should go as an entire school to see “Dances with Wolves.” She was madly in love with the movie-- as were we all. It was the “Star Wars” of that decade. Somehow she managed to talk the movie theatre in Great Falls into a special private matinee and to talk the school board into a school-wide bus trip. There had just been a major highway accident that had killed three parents. We badly needed some new focus.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Two buses were enough for all the kids old enough who had permission from home. They were wary about the theatre, having been scolded and ejected from there in the past. Coming in as a group, looking around in the darkened auditorium to see all their classmates at once, awed them. They were on their best behavior. As soon as the movie began, we hardly moved or breathed. We were sore-hearted over the skinned buffalo carcasses and we danced with the wolf.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The end of the movie was hard to take-- not the very end where the People have managed to escape a little longer -- but all the animalistic behavior of the army beating up Costner. Even the violence-lovers among us were quiet. It was days before kids began to talk about bits and pieces.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They pretended sophistication. "Didn't that white woman know enough to comb her hair?" they said. Except for that, it seemed to have escaped us all that the central romance was about two white people -- not about tribal people at all. We had been drawn into the surrounding vision of an untorn culture, a way of life still whole and meaningful. Personally, I was deeply moved by the Graham Greene character's struggles to understand what was happening so he could help his people survive it. Once again I admired Tantoo Cardinal, who this time got to make love under a buffalo robe. A lot of women went nuts over Rodney Grant but almost no one linked his performance in this movie with his berdache part in “War Party.” I thought that was too bad, since comparing the two roles revealed how much he was really acting. At the end of the movie, when the shining Spanish helmet was taken out of its wraps, I got cold chills.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">STILL WAITING FOR THE MASTERPIECE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Much has been written about Indians in movies and most people realize now -- at least in an intellectual way -- that Indians are not as they have been portrayed in the movies. They are far more various, distributed along the usual human spectrums. And they are not still living in lodges and wearing buckskin. Just the same, few movies show them as modern, educated, successful people. We like our Indians comfortably "in the cupboard," like the stereotypical little figure in the supposedly juvenile movie “The Indian in the Cupboard.” [This movie has been savaged by those who analyze patronizing assumptions. “Our people are not little Jiminy Cricket characters with no lives and homes of their own.”] In other words, movies are mostly about unassimilated Indians, because what would be the point of showing an assimilated Indian? How would we even know he were Indian if he wore no feathers or buckskin? “The Broken Cord” is an exception, but the focus was a disability especially common among Indians, another stigma. Indians in the movies are rarely like the Indians I have known in real life. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">From “The Searchers” to “Dances with Wolves” one romantic thread of the movie-Indian genre has been counter-assimilation by whites to the idyllic Native American side. In the former movie it is Natalie Wood who has no wish to return to white life, though her family considers her to be living in hell. Dunbar, of course, longs to be a part of the tribal community from the first moment he spots them. Much has been written about the early portrayals of Indians as red devils circling the wagons, but not so much has been analyzed about the continuing insistence that early Native American life was innocent and noble -- more so than any other culture. Good Indians are always like children. Small, innocent and non-threatening.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BLACKBOARD MOVIES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The young and the French have always felt that film was valid as a form of literature and to be taken as seriously as books. Much serious criticism and cultural analysis comes from film. The medium is so vivid and now so portable, that as an English teacher, I don't see how it can be excluded. Films are often illuminating in a useful way.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For instance, looking back on my short teaching career at Heart Butte, I began to reflect on the genre of "schoolteacher movies." “Blackboard Jungle” was filmed in 1955, when I was a sophomore in high school. My alma mater, Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, was just beginning to include blacks and at that point we tended to see them as noble pioneers rather like the Sidney Poitier character. It's interesting that Poitier's film career began as a classroom rebel-- though a natural leader. Recently he has been celebrated as a teacher again in a television feature return to his “To Sir With Love” teacher-persona. Both Poitier and Glenn Ford-- as well as the teachers in “Dangerous Minds,” “Stand and Deliver,” “The Water Is Wide,” “Dead Poets Society” -- are stereotyped as teachers in a way parallel to the way Indians are oversimplified. Movie teachers are always dedicated, resourceful, tough, unprejudiced, and able to turn the tide of student resistance in one clever lesson. For Pfeiffer the inspiration is a comparison of Bob Dylan with Dylan Thomas. For Ford it is an inquiry into the motives of cartoon characters -- Jack and the Beanstalk and the doomed giant. None of them have very good administrators. The break-out picture of the teacher genre is “Mr. Holland's Opus.” Mr. Holland trudges along, making mistakes, having the occasional bright spot, and doesn't even realize how well he has done until the day of his retirement. That's much closer to reality.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is a sub-genre for schoolrooms, a thread that goes back to an Annie Oakley movie I remember from my childhood. Annie is somehow teaching a one-room schoolhouse of ruffians. The biggest bully defies her and she whips out her sidearm, forcing him to put his ink bottle on his head so she can shoot it, drenching him in ink. After that he is too ridiculous to be a threat -- according to the script. Some scriptwriters prefer to have the subdued bully become the defender of the teacher. Recent versions of this thread replace the teacher with an administrator armed with bullhorn and baseball bat. Thus the story moves over to the genre of the strong man who subdues the savage frontier. We're back to big dogs eat first.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In reality today there is a huge taboo on ever using force or even forceful language on young people. Teachers and administrators do it-- because it is sometimes the only thing that works-- but if they are challenged by parents, if public opinion is mobilized, they are through. Everyone feels good about force, so long as it used against someone else's kids.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">EDUCATION FROM THE MISSIONARY POSITION</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The tale of the redeeming teacher is revealing when applied to Heart Butte. Recently I rented a tape of “Blackboard Jungle.” My moment of insight came when Glenn Ford is tempted to leave his teaching job at an inner-city all-boys trade school, but first he goes for advice to his wise old mentor at a "mainstream" suburban school. Ford and the older man tour the classrooms where shining young people are hard at work making a future. The sound track throughout is "The Star Spangled Banner" sung by the kids. There it is! Movies about teachers who redeem and bring order are basically about assimilation. The problem kids are always "other:" immigrant, poor, dark, or weird. The teacher makes them become like us. Think about “Tea and Sympathy!” Public education is meant to impose a common fund of knowledge, skills and attitudes on pliable and willing students with a bright future as mainstream Americans. This is the meaning of America for immigrants. But not for the people who were already here. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Education is always seen as such an unmitigated good that it is hard for most of us to understand that Indian education has always been focused on the elimination of identity -- on annihiliation. For native Americans, who did not come to this country by choice and who WERE this country before we came, education was meant to be a cheaper way to get rid of them than killing them -- this was explicitly stated. Schools were intended for religious and cultural conversion to white ways -- just a kinder, gentler form of extermination, one that liberals could support. Much of school life is simply conditioning. "Do what I say, or I'll put you on detention." On the Rez it is the assimilationists, most often mixed bloods, who like the movies about principals who force conformity.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In only a few decades, the Poitier character in “Blackboard Jungle” would look to some like a sell-out, an Uncle Tom, a fool trying to act white. It would be Malcolm X who revealed him -- or maybe they were really the same figure -- Malcolm is that classroom leader who now claims his own goals. Blacks would want to stand alone, not in the white charmed circles. Black Power was soon followed by Red Power. Tribes wanted their own schools, their own curriculums. Major plans were made.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But already we have fallen back from those times, partly or maybe mostly because the larger culture has become pessimistic. The end of the Cold War and the reorganizing forces in cyber-society have thrown many assumptions into question. Post-Empowerment Native American young people are all too aware that their future is not necessarily bright. Even Native American graduate students who have found a place in the academic upper reaches refer constantly to “Bladerunner” and other cyberpunk classics as what they expect the future to be. In fact, many upper and middle class white young people have the same vision of coming apocalypse. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Teachers come to places like Heart Butte believing that, as in the movies, they will have found a simpler past when people were patriotic and kids were willing to work-- the way Bob Scriver remembers his band members. On some level the new people believe that they can be redeeming teachers-- I confess I did! Somehow they will invent that transforming lesson that makes all the lightbulbs come on. Once in a while maybe we were really there. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And I, among others, believed sincerely that school could protect and strengthen the Blackfeet identity, including their language. But the kids themselves--no matter what was taught-- felt that their identity was being taken, even by a simple request to sit down or be on time. The parents insisted that they be assimilated so they could make a living -- better unRed than dead. It was the parents, through the school board, who hired white men or assimilated Indians to be the tough missionary bosses. But to the kids, being grownup and being like white men were both selling out to the enemy. They sneered at their parents for wanting them to be what their parents had never managed to be: white. The collision was inevitable, even though the terms were never clear. Everyone had a strong sense of righteousness and a determination to make things happen their way. There was no willingness to discuss, much less terms in which to frame the dilemma, because it was too dangerous to talk about.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is where religion enters the fray: the teacher functions as a missionary, striving for conversion. The Democratic Ethic -- the ideal of the melting pot -- takes on the urgency of salvation. “Black Robe” narrates this story, as does “The Mission” and even “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” where -- parallel to the disastrous attempt to convert indigenous people -- a key character, "Moon," re-assimilates to the Native American way. Re-assimilation -- native people, converted to white ways, but then returning to their heritage -- is an Empowerment theme. This theme proposes that Sovereignty is both desirable and possible in the face of all demands by the larger world. Tribes claim their right to be small internal entities, self-determined, entitled by treaties. And the students claim their right to be their own small, internal determinations. Teacher and curriculum are disempowered.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MY ROLE MODELS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Probably my personal deepest model for teaching is “Anne of Green Gables,” a child's book. Anne is a Canadian character and therefore does not promote the melting pot but rather the "mosaic" of many peoples. She does not address Aboriginal People, but she does address the deep loneliness of a person without family or community. She so loves the little town of Avonlea with all its eccentricities and inconveniences. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A slightly more sophisticated model for me is the New Zealander, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, whose books “Spinster” (fiction) and “Teacher” (non-fiction) were combined into a movie with the latter title. Her indigenous students were Maoris. She values in them exactly the things she is supposed to be eliminating: their creativity, their dramatic home lives, their energy. It comforts me that though she was thrown out, as I was, her ideas became quite popular for a while. Her books sell well! I tried to teach as I thought these two troublesome but inspired women would teach.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Leaning heavily on the Canadian films, one could organize a pretty good film course about teaching Native Americans. Canada has the model of the British Commonwealth, each unique location entitled to its color and myth -- so long as the Queen is revered. Recent Canadian films don't address the "assimilate or die" question or the escape to Eden fantasy. The Canadian understanding of wilderness, partly because their land is farther north, is that it is simply dangerous-- human community is the only protection. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Canadian aboriginal films turn on universal moral dilemmas. In “Loyalties” the red woman and the white woman face a common threat out of friendship and love for their children. In “Clearcut” the romantic hero struggles to understand that violence is sustained by his own determination to force justice. In “Medicine River” the man who has gone off to live a global life returns to be taken back in by his hometown roots, not quite against his will. In “Dance Me Outside,” a young woman commits murder in order to protect her lover. These are human themes and do not suggest that an idyllic life can be found by running away to some pristine place. They do not teach the inescapable violence and fatalism of American films like “Billy Jack” or “Geronimo” but end in earned community. Rather than demanding any particular belief system, these Canadian stories restore religion to universal moral force and awe at creation. Universal moral questions are at the heart of education in all cultures. Education and religion in the sense of moral world-view are always entwined. Or they ought to be.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For those Native Americans who have successfully assimilated to the dominant small-town rural white culture, the task of re-assimilating back to old tribal ways is often just too much. For other tribes, even as they have become ready to teach their own language and worldview, the old culture has nearly gone. Amskapi Pikuni are lucky that a great reservoir of their ways has persisted in Canada. But looking to the Canadians means giving up that dominant United States patriotism so characteristic of small American-side prairie towns.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Perhaps film can be one of the ways we teach ourselves how to keep our allegiance to our most central and unique selves at the same time that we also stay open to the new world culture that is coming out of the Internet, cell phones, faxes, video, and economic integration. We are ready for new visions.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-13520305562403460482013-08-10T14:43:00.002-06:002014-09-02T16:55:31.611-06:00DON'T TOUCH ME<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">DON'T TOUCH ME</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us, ashamed of ourselves; of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">RACE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In his book, “Teaching American Indian Students,” Jon Reyhner (who was once the principal and director of the bi-lingual program at Heart Butte though he was not a Blackfeet speaker) points out that there is often confusion between culture and race. A culture is a way of life -- a set of assumptions and strategies-- that grows out of place, economics and history. A race is a genetically related sequence of people. A culture is learned and supported by a community and can be racially inclusive -- that is, whites can learn to be "Indian" and vice versa. If either red or white people were born in China, they would grow up in the Chinese culture. Racial heritage is physical and individual, a given at birth that can't be changed. One still shows one's genes in one's face. [Not ALWAYS as a current television show investigating genes shows. The host, a strong representative of Black Thinking, turns out to be more white than he thought and Jewish at that!] In a culture of trust genetic differences don't matter. In a culture of suspicion, every small difference can become a source of hostility.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Terry Tafoya works with racially Native American youngsters who have been adopted, often by progressive white professionals. Everything is fine until the child comes to puberty. At the point of beginning reproductive activity, "white" kids and their parents draw away, and the child becomes suddenly conscious of being different. Does the difference mean "genetically flawed?" Not as smart, prone to alcoholism, hiding a "wild" streak? The obvious questions attached to adoption become sharpened when teenagers realize that they were probably given up by their birth mothers because that young woman was in trouble. Could they inherit that trouble? Was she a drunk? Was she raped? If they went looking for her, what would they find? Our understanding of what is inheritable and what is taught is still shaky.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But we don't always recognize Indians. A friend was speaking of some adopted Guatemalan youngsters. I quoted Terry Tafoya to her. "Oh, these are not Indian children," she protested. "They're Guatemalan." She had no awareness that many of the people coming this way from Mexico, Central America and South America-- riding the bus to work with me every day -- are certainly Native Americans, sometimes speaking only their tribal languages-- not Spanish. They have left their "reservations" just as whites urge the North American Indians to do. There are so many of them, they may end up assimilating whites! Alarmed whites are already nearly a minority in some states. Richard Rodriguez says, "The American indigenous people are taking the continent back-- one dish-washing job at a time."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even when Indians are recognized, people are uncertain how to react. There is a story about an Indian man who joined the army in the days of discrimination. The sergeant was sorting the recruits. "All you Negroes fall out and stand over there!" he shouted. "All you White people fall out and stand over here!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Indian man stood still, waiting for a command. "What's your problem?" bellowed the Sergeant.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Where should I go, Sir?" asked the Native American recruit.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The sergeant stood scratching his head. On the one hand it was clear that the man was dark. On the other hand, the sergeant believed that Indians were the First Americans, not slaves. In a black-and-white world, where does Red go? "Damned if I know," he finally admitted. "Go either way, I guess."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even subtle thinkers forget that Native Americans are not like any other immigrant group, regardless of all the Bering Strait theories. The reason is that of the immigrant groups, every single one has left the land that formed their culture. Blackfeet, at least, occupy the same prairie where they evolved their buffalo culture, their social structure, and their assumptions about the nature of the universe. This is an advantage, not a handicap.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE SIXTIES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In some ways life was simpler in the Sixties. Righteous violence was accepted without much question. Montana teachers were allowed to strike children as punishment so long as we did it in private but had a witness. The principal routinely paddled the worst of the boys in his office and kept the paddle prominently displayed. One day in my first year of teaching a brazen young fellow was left in the principal's office to contemplate his coming punishment. Instead the boy turned on the P.A. system and began sending mysterious whispers and grunts into all the classrooms. When the principal returned, the boy didn't have time to switch the P.A. off, and soon indignant howls of pain were broadcast through the building. Order was remarkably good for weeks afterward. And everyone knew what order was: being on time, staying in one's seat, putting up one's hand, lining up, not talking back.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The tall, beautiful art teacher was from Cut Bank, seemingly the home of enviable white oppressors but actually a roughneck little oil town with record low temperatures. For the complicated reasons junior high girls have, this glamorous woman was alternately fawned on and persecuted by students. One day the office/storage area where she kept supplies and objects for still-lifes acquired a terrible stench. A search revealed that someone had deposited a personal tribute, still warm and direct from the source, in one of the still-life vases. The donor was never identified.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The teacher's disposition deteriorated. She occupied the other side of the tiny duplex shack where I lived. Wind yearned at the eaves and rattled the chimney pipes of our muttering gas heaters. Our plumbing was always just about to freeze. Mice got trapped in our bathtubs. We had no telephones. One of the coaches fell madly in love with the art teacher and came late at night to bang on her door, begging to be let in. She and I arranged a signal system of wall-knocking in case there was real trouble. In the end she began obsessively painting a huge blue room with a person huddled in the bottom corner. Then she began to hallucinate floating blue spots and her mother came to get her.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Before she went, she had a confrontation with a student, a tall grinning young man whose performance in my own room consisted of carefully printing his name at the top of the paper and then planting his forehead on it for a nap. I never figured out whether it was out of contempt, or because he never got any other chances to sleep, or because I was a lousy teacher. Maybe his I.Q., which was recorded as barely qualifying him to attend school, happened by some chance to be accurate. (I always mentally added twenty points to every I.Q. I read in order to compensate for the cultural handicap. I was much impressed by the case of a little midwestern girl who failed an I.Q. question because she identified a drawing of a shell as a pasta. Having never been to a beach, shell pasta was what she knew.)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In any case, the art teacher, armed with a ruler and made legal by my presence, confronted her amiable defier who expected to be slapped on the palm or possibly his back end. Instead, her eyes narrowed to fiery slits and she whipped the ruler across his face, where the thin brass edge cut a line dotted with bright blood. I was frozen. I don't know what I would have done if she had tried to strike him again, but she didn't. No parent ever came to object. Even the student didn't object, but went on grinning-- which might have been what infuriated her in the first place.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As it turns out, we only imagined some kind of consensus in the Sixties. Looking back, I recall that I was rough with kids-- giving out slaps on shoulders, hair-pulls and pinches, though none with much force. The only time I used real force in my own class was when a boy punched a much smaller girl in the nose, spurting blood everywhere. The class had only been in the room for a few minutes and I was taking roll without any hint that there was trouble brewing. Evidently the girl had been taunting him under her breath. My first reaction was that the boy had gone crazy and, coming up behind him, I thumped him as hard as I could between the shoulderblades to knock the wind out of him. Then I twirled him around and threw him against the wall hard before he could catch his breath. By that time he was shocked enough to be towed to the principal's office.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A few years later this incendiary, handsome, young man came back to the high school to threaten the principal, whom he believed had done something bad to his younger sister. The principal, a former football coach, stood at the top of a flight of stairs trying to talk to him while another coach -- the same one enamoured with the art teacher -- grappled with him, yelling "Get out of here, you sunnuva bitch, or I'll tear your goddam head off!" The hall was otherwise empty except for me. I yearned to intervene somehow, to be the rescuer, but was afraid of getting hurt. The principal was a good one, a man who as a history teacher had organized the first real textbook for Blackfeet about their own tribe. The coach was a fool but in this case he was preventing an assault by threatening to perpetrate one. This boy was trying to protect his family in the way he thought grown men did.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Years earlier, in the first February of my first year of teaching, a below-zero day hushed my classroom. Snow flew outside the window. My view was tar that had been splashed on the brick wall of the gymnasium when the roof was repaired. While the students were writing, I stared out the window, wondering whether those tar Rorschach blots were going to start writhing. A student nicknamed "Small Fry" came to my desk. He was a slender little fellow who once told me solemnly about the time his parents locked him in the house and went on a drinking binge that lasted a week. He remembered this as "the time I nearly starved to death" and told how he was so young he couldn't open cans in order to survive. There were few cans anyway.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the quiet classroom he leaned his elbows alongside mine and began to talk softly about spring. He told about how his grandfather always dug a garden and how the earth smelled when it was spaded up full of worms. He wondered how his pony was doing out there on the prairie in the cold and looked forward to riding again in a few months. And he talked about the taste of his grandfather's raspberries. The boy was full of poetry. He became a father, an artist and an alcoholic. Now he is dead. The memory of him is not. He was the younger brother of the boy who wanted to beat up the principal. Love dwells side-by-side with rage.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One angry Friday afternoon I said to my all-boy lowest-track class, "If you kids don't shape up and learn, you will be dead before you are twenty-one." Over half are dead or in prison now. One became a tribal judge. In the eighth grade he wanted to be a rodeo announcer and practised talking into his fist while the other boys bucked their hands around the desktops, trying to dislodge the tiny cowboys they made from copper wire and seated on miniature accurate-to-scale leather saddles cut from old gloves. They held their hands with the thumbs on top and the movements they used were the old sign-talk gestures for riding off, an eloquent and unmistakable gesture old-timers use to this day. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE SEVENTIES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When Bob Scriver divorced me in 1970, I went back to teaching in Browning for a couple of years. The students were entirely different, brash and mouthy. The young boys smacked me on the shoulder to show they liked me. The older girls piled their babies on my desk for me to watch while they went somewhere. We heard a lot of rumors about A.I.M. The kids demanded the right to dictate their own course of study and they were taken seriously.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Nevertheless, the students threatened to strike and gathered in the auditorium to make speeches. The only person they would listen to was Bill Haw, the high school counselor who had just arrived from Detroit with a degree in Rogerian psychology. He spent hours turning them around by listening, trying to feel what they felt. When people talked about kid suicides, they often said that the kid "just wanted attention." Bill would say, "Yeah. Dying for attention. Why not give it to them? Doesn't seem like much if it will keep them alive." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop was sponsored by the Tribe and Bill Haw ran it. A lathe, a potting wheel, a kitchen for the sandwich shop, and GED workbooks converted one of the huge old government warehouses into a school. Terry McMasters, an English teacher; Brent Warburton, who later made the stained glass windows for both the Holy Family Mission Church and the Browning Methodist Church; Paul Kingston, no longer a priest; and a number of other Peace Corps types from Haw's days as a Christian camp director gathered in a pocket of energy that lasted several years. State officials visited, noted the babies tucked comfortably into pulled-out filing cabinet drawers once filled with bureaucratic files, and they approved. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Free School finally broke apart because people saw it as a cash cow and forgot the original purpose. Haw went to Alaska. Wiley Welch's health took him down a short fatal path. Kipp left for Harvard. Brent made a living as a short-order cook. Terry became a professional ceramicist in East Glacier. The rest wandered off.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">THE EIGHTIES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By 1989 when I returned to teaching Blackfeet for the third time, I was fifty and the people who had been in my earliest classes were in their mid-forties. We had become peers. Some of them remembered me warmly and some bitterly. The new kids had no idea who I was -- they saw me as an outsider. The oldest one had been born in 1973 just as I drove out of Browning, blind with bawling, to go start a new life with what belongings I could cram in a van. Now that I had come back, I wondered where I was.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was a little shocked at how different the kids looked physically. They had been slender and fond of bright cowboy togs and boots. Girls had worn dresses and skirts so short they frostbit their legs in winter, but now they wore almost the same thing as the boys. It seemed as though everyone were a big, heavy person in black sweats with hoods and giant tennis shoes. Their t-shirts were emblazoned with the emblems of heavy metal/ acid rock bands. They seemed to be identifying with city ghettoes instead of western small towns. No boundaries existed for these kids. They went where they wanted to, did whatever they felt like, and used words that would have gotten them suspended in my earlier classrooms. But they rarely left the Rez. They were big frogs in a small pond.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Times change and though many people tend to think of Native Americans as somehow unchanging, they too become different. The larger society has very little awareness of how Blackfeet have transformed over the years, how they too fought in the World Wars and raised their families, found work and survived cancer or heart attacks or diabetes. We don't realize that they buy computers and play the stock market. Reflecting on contemporary reservation life is close to impossible for middle-class, educated white people, simply because they have no experience of Native Americans except through the media or limited encounters with individuals. Even living as a white colonialist, in the days when the white Browning community had control and thought of itself as an elite, was quite different from being a teacher in Heart Butte where white people were still considered outsiders, visitors, even trespassers. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the Seventies empowerment movement brought back to memory the massacres and land-loss the native people have suffered, many of them became resentful. The grief and horror is still not resolved, and it is hard for white people to face their role as the enemy: killers of babies, starvers of old people, smashers of a civilization. But most of the elementary kids at Heart Butte were politically innocent, openly reacting to the physical differences that makes race such a convenient way of putting people in categories. Junior high is when the awareness hits that Blackfeet are different.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most white people don't think much about how exotic their physical attributes might seem to other races. We feel like "the norm" to ourselves. The first reaction I got from the men in their forties I had taught in junior high was dismay. "Oh, Miss Strachan! Where has your red hair gone?" (They were too polite to inquire about where my waistline went.) My hair, now thin and curly as soapsuds and red-turned-white, was a great fascination to the Heart Butte kids. Little girls loved to perch in the bleachers behind me and play in it, though the Blackfeet teachers scolded them. I wasn't sure whether the disapproval was because they thought playing in my hair was improper, perhaps offensive, or because they thought the two races shouldn't touch. Maybe it was a reaction from years of white people snatching their children away from contact with "dirty Indians." Or maybe it came from the strategy of denial, suppressing all comment on difference in hopes of denying the difference itself. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One little girl in particular would run to me and throw her arms around my knees -- her head was only as high as my waist. She begged to be picked up and if I were standing next to a fence she would climb up and then across into my arms. I loved holding her, but again the Indian teachers and aides would scold and remove her. My fantasy was that they were afraid I would steal her, and indeed many white people love Indian children the way they love puppies and want to take them home. When I taught in Browning in the Sixties there were several old-maid primary school teachers who took children home to give them baths and feed them. Sometimes their do-goodery seemed a little over-intense.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One morning I was in the school office when the little girl who liked me to pick her up came in looking for help. In her soft voice she said something I couldn't make out. Too small to see over the counter, she curled her tendril fingers up over the edge for me to look at. The very tips of the fingers were cut off. "My grandmother cut my nails," the little girl confided in her tiny voice. "But she don't see good and now they hurt." I shuddered to think how tender those raw little tips were. I sent her to the school nurse, but my impulse was to hold her a long time and to kiss those fingertips. If I had done such a thing, the act would have seemed a criticism, an accusation of the grandmother. It might have opened the door for the removal of the child from her care.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Portraits of Native Americans define a whole school of painting: Couse, Charley Russell, Sharp, Winold Reese. Even a non-artist could see the beauty and charm of the students. Their skins were soft fawn, their eyes gleamed and their hair hung like heavy black satin. It was hard to resist the temptation to rest a hand on them, put an arm around them. But some had been so taken advantage of that they would reject any touch with anxious fury. Anyway, even in white society the media has so poisoned physical contact that no teacher can touch students without risk. Many of these kids were as sensitized as if they had been badly sunburned-- both physically and psychologically-- and could not sustain an ordinary contact without flinching. Even a glance could make them wince and protest. "Stop looking at me!" One boy shouted, "I forbid you to ever think of me!"</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One Heart Butte girl agonized over her senior prom pictures because she said she "looked too white." Actually, she was a beautiful color but flashbulbs had over-exposed the photos. A newspaperman from the other side of the Rockies came by one afternoon and remarked that when he used to take photos in Heart Butte in the late Fifties, the people were so dark that he could never get features in their faces-- just shadows under their hats. It was an honest remark, but it made us all nervous. Everyone tried not to mention skin color.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the other end of the spectrum from the shy Heart Butte girls, the year I babysat eighth grade students in the Browning junior high school, they would often ignore anything short of physical force. They knew very well that no teacher was allowed to hit them or even to speak harshly to them, and that gave them enormous power. Their goal was to provoke. One teacher lasted only two weeks because a little girl he took by the wrist to the office bashed herself into the lockers along the hall on the way, then claimed the teacher did it. He was labelled abusive and dismissed, though he still has scars on his wrist from that little girl's teeth. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In particular, the middle-class, assimilated, high-scoring kids in Browning -- the cream of the crop -- did not like me. To their minds I was old, fat and underdressed (overshirts and pull-on pants) without a proper hairdo-- therefore I was low-class, fair game for harassing. They lied, argued, misbehaved, used obscenities and balked until I finally brought in a tape recorder, recorded the study hall, and threatened to play the tapes for their parents. Up to this point, the parents had taken their children's word for everything. For a day the darlings pantomimed defiance until I threatened to bring a video camera. Then they settled down, but it was with resentment. I was an oppressor. And I was friendly to the low-status kids.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A few students were outright sociopaths. One particularly street-smart, half-black boy leaned into my face and hissed, "How'd you like me to lick your clit?" When I was his age, I didn't know such a part of anatomy existed. It took me several minutes to figure out what he had said and then I had no idea how to respond. His great-grandfather had been one of the true Old People, and despite the corruption of alcoholism, was a repository of old sacred songs and holy ritual. When I passed this traditional man on the street, he never failed to treat me with elaborate and evidently genuine courtesy. But the kid couldn’t have been all bad because he took tender care of his grandfather.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HANDS-ON DISCIPLINE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day, exasperated with a good-natured but rowdy student who had gotten himself into a kind of spiral of hyperactivity, I reached out with both hands and tousled his hair briskly, as though I were giving him a shampoo. The results were so good in terms of slowing him down, that later I did it again a couple of times. Then one day he ran up behind me in the hall and hooked his elbow around my neck, hauling me along for a few steps. I laughed and was putting myself back in order when JoAnn Clark came storming up. She lit into the student and then turned on me. Once my student, she was now my teacher. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"You must never let a student touch you," JoAnn snapped. She is white, married to her classmate, who was principal at the time and the superintendent since. She is local aristocracy, since her father is a longtime rancher and county commissioner. Her classes run like clockwork. One of her triumphs was a hyper-active student she calmed with doses of coffee. He succeeded in school well enough to embark on a fine military career. She herself was never seen without a mug of coffee. She is a star teacher.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Later JoAnn brought up an incident when she had played the title character in “Molly Morgan,” a John Steinbeck story about a young teacher that I had directed in the Sixties. At one point she had been supposed to walk out onto a platform and pretend to admire a view. Because she didn't wear her glasses and a spotlight was shining in her eyes, she had fallen over the edge, a four foot drop. A real trooper, she had climbed back up and resumed the part, but she had to fake walking because the high heel came off one shoe. She had been truly hurt, but had hid it at the time-- and I, shamefully, had been less protective of her than of the production. I ought to have found some way to mark the edge or cue her. She had complained in rehearsals and I had ignored her, not purposely, but just because there were too many other things to worry about. No excuses-- I simply failed to protect her as was my obligation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A couple of years later, the boy whose hair I tousled in study hall--now much bigger-- once again hooked his arm around my neck and gave me a good head-rubbing-- "noogies." This time we were in the supermarket and everyone looked aghast, but no one intervened. The boy glared into my face and made me understand that he had not appreciated what I had done to him. He had felt humiliated. I was wrong. Again, I had failed to protect him-- from me.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">IN-GROUP, OUT-GROUP</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The junior high students in both Heart Butte and Browning were obsessed with commercial hygiene worries. If you got too close, they yelled, "Ugh! What bad breath! Don't you ever use mouthwash?" Or, "God, you stink!" One teacher was nearly driven out of her job when numerous students objected to her smell-- she was a "granola" who ate soy products, used "natural" deodorants, and didn't wear perfume. The parents of the students went to the administration to insist that their children be protected from this weird-smelling hippy. The principal finally told her she had to "wash proper" and shave her legs or lose her contract. Many old Blackfeet stories are about women who "smell strange" because they are cannibals. Was there some kind of weird confusion of vegetarianism with cannibalism?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I remembered that in the Sixties one student had been in the town jail and was driven up every morning by the police in order to attend classes. Truly he did stink of drunks and sweat. There were no showers at the jail-- barely were there functioning toilets. Phil Ward arranged for the police to put him through the gymnasium showers every morning and got some spare clothes somewhere. The miscreant was not particularly pleased to be clean. He was used to himself. Smell is a status marker -- but which smells mean what? Teachers sometimes complained that some kids smelled smoky or greasy, but I always sort of liked those smells, associating them with camping.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Heart Butte girls often reeked of cheap perfume, especially the kinds like baby powder. (My own favorite is Estee Lauder's “Aliage,” which one boy said made me smell like a mushroom.) Their hair was so full of gel and spray that it felt like wire and the favorite female "do" was long bangs in a kind of curly pompador in front and great sheets of straight hair in back. Both sexes wore t-shirts, keeping out-sized jackets around them much of the time. Then they would get to playing basketball, discard their coats, and never come back for them. They would set out on long winter bus trips in light jackets, which would mean suffering -- even death -- if the bus heaters failed. Their attitude was that if anything happened to them, it would be the fault of the adults.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Huge rubbery sneakers, never laced all the way up and in various stages of destruction, burdened every foot except when they wore cowboy boots. They liked sweats and often swapped clothes around, sometimes out of necessity since they stayed with each other on short notice. Kids didn't talk about where they "lived," but where they "stayed." Most carried athletic bags of clothing and personal grooming supplies which seemed to crowd out their school books. The latter turned up any old place.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Heart Butte there were fewer of one reservation sub-group: daughters of middle-class Indians. They kept the same hair-styles as the other girls, but had enough money for the clothes they saw on television, with pantyhose and sometimes heels. They were very much like the elite white girls I had taught decades earlier, except that they were conscious of their Indian heritage and could speak about it eloquently, though their participation tended to be as well-dressed pow-wow princesses. It was hard to imagine them camping out. They felt whites were universally prejudiced, but they didn't have much use for low-class Indians either. They weren't pure Blackfeet--their parents often had met at federal Indian schools so that they were mixed tribes. They were frequently athletic stars.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">GETTING SICK</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The girls' bathroom at Heart Butte was always a great center of commotion. The girls used enormous amounts of paper towels, so the Doc -- in order to save money -- replaced them with hot-air dryers, which were not fast enough to dry hands in the breaks between classes. Anyway, the girls didn't like the dryers because they were so loud, so they either wiped their hands on toilet paper -- which now disappeared in such quantities that only cardboard cores were left by lunch -- or simply stopped washing their hands. The liquid soap dispensers dripped on the floor, so when the janitor got tired of cleaning that up, he removed all but one. One day after school I used the facility and saw that one toilet stool was leaking -- not for the first time -- so that a pool of dirty water formed at the lowest spot on the floor, which was not over the drain but right under the single soap dispenser. You had to wade to get soap.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">About this same time we had a quick epidemic that was or wasn't hepatitis. (Danger on the Rez is always ambiguous. The source is always elusive-- blame whomever you resent.) Mostly it centered on one family, whose kids might or might not have been involved in drugs and/or sex. Even though it was said not to be hepatitis, some people were asked to have gamma globulin shots and a team of public health nurses came out to give us a stern lecture about "fecal-oral contact." For the rest of the week the students gave devastating imitations of uptight nurses saying "fecal-oral." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One senior boy in particular had always thought that "feces" was one of the funniest words he knew. He was fond of a speaking of a "fece" in the singular. I had made the rule that they could not use four letter Anglo-Saxon terms for bodily functions, but they could use the Latinate fancy words. He was also fond of saying "flatulate" and "expectorate," accompanied by demonstrations. He liked to say "fuck," but I wouldn't let him. "Do not say 'fuck' in my class," I said, hoping that my saying the word would take it out of the magic category. I said he could use the term "copulate," but he never mastered it. What a relief.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The high school boys in particular came into the classroom in the morning hawking and spitting to dispose of the night's pleghm. Some of them spat as much as a pint into the plastic-lined wastebaskets where it dried and circulated into the air. In the second year the drug and alcohol counselor, who was Blackfeet, finally managed to get the administration to investigate the air circulation. It turned out that half of the intended ventilation intakes up under the roof had been blocked at some time in the past in order to keep down heating costs. Unblocking them improved the air quality considerably, though we never did overcome the smell of art materials, home economics projects and limited science experiments. (Real experiments could not be done because the necessary venting had never been installed.) When athletic uniforms were washing in the home ec machines, the odor of sweat and detergent swirled through the school.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The stubborn old janitor wasn't too particular how he tested the water source. Sometimes he just didn't and sometimes he was gone. Constant surges of "flu" went through the school population. We all had mild diarrhea a good share of the time, sometimes intense enough to be miserable. (The boys had lots of jokes about what they called "the Hershey squirts.") We were in cow county, where people got manure on their boots and jackets, tracking it into the carpeted classroom where the corners were soaked with surreptious shots of tobacco juice. We were in beaver country so almost surely the water carried giardia. Babies were always with us and people weren't too careful about their disposable diapers. Everyone who used the Indian Health Service was full of antibiotics much of the time, a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant germs. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BUT HE'S MY COUSIN</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Any taboo against touching between students did not apply in spite of every classroom showing a poster saying, "Keep your hands to yourself." In fact, they regularly violated each other's spaces-- crowding, striking, pinching, seizing-- sometimes in rough play like young littermates but often in trespasses that verged on violation. Even the young boys lying down liked to put their heads in girls' laps. Hands wandered. The Doc insisted that children should never be allowed to lie on the carpeted floor. They should sit in desks, he felt, and the desks should be in rows with assigned seats. He often lectured me on this because I let kids haul their desks around so long as the configuration fit the task at hand. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Wild tag was the favorite occupation of pubescent kids and the slippery-floored cafetorium was the perfect place for it. Next best was the cement outside the entry. When I was assigned lunch duty, which theoretically meant preventing the sliding, slapping, lifting-off-the-floor collisions, I decided to take my assignment seriously and yelled at the kids when they did it. The Doc immediately emerged from his office to forbid me yelling. "Just write down their names and I'll put them on detention," he said. I soon had thirty names scribbled on the back of a paper napkin. He did half-heartedly put them on detention and after that they all behaved, but only on the days I was the lunch monitor and only when I could see them. One woman complained that she was spending a fortune on the chiropractor because the boys kept hauling her daughter around by the head, twisting her neck.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They thought I was terrifically unfair. When one kid in a plaster leg cast was clouting other kids with his crutches, I took them away, sat him in a chair and put the crutches in the office. In five minutes he had them back from the office clerk, his cousin. By the end of the year we had had dozens of sprains and a few broken bones. People muttered about suing, but no one did.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The kids explained to me seriously, "It's all right for me to do that to him/her-- she's my cousint." Family lines were carefully noted and if someone came over the "cousint" line, that meant the "cousints" of the afflicted person would beat that someone up. This is the ancient order-keeping mechanism of tribal peoples: "My brother/father will beat you up." And they did. At least it worked for those who had strong families.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes things escalated. One boy refused to leave a particular girl alone. This boy was a star athlete but otherwise -- in my opinion -- pretty much a sullen, sneaky boy. The girl was a straight A student and a good athlete who was expected to be a credit to her family. The girl's male relatives warned the boy off. When that didn't work, they caught the boy and shaved him -- everywhere. He was so humiliated he had to stay home for weeks -- at least until he had eyebrows again. This boy always got the girl off to the side somewhere and talked to her intently, almost nose to nose, now and then hitting her on the back or arm as though he were a stallion nipping a mare. I found that abusive and offensive, but the other kids said I didn't understand. "They're really in love," they pointed out. "They can talk to each other." Their voices filled with longing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the end, the girl began to be chubby and took to wearing her long winter coat through all her classes. Then she suddenly lost weight but hung onto her coat, clutching it around her as though chilled all the time. Thin, bereft, almost transparent, she still let herself be hit and dominated by the same boy, but she seemed infinitely sad. I decided abortion was finally breaking through the Catholic taboo. I wished the taboo on contraception had been broken first. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LOVE AS A FOUR-LETTER WORD</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Coming from a liberal church background, my rhetorical context was sometimes out of whack. One kid challenged me, "Why do you want to come around here and try to make me better, anyway? What do you care?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I love you," I explained.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Eauughh! I don't want sex with you! You're an old woman! That's disgusting! You must be some kind of pervert." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My romance with Bob Scriver thirty years earlier struck these kids as unnatural. Bob was now nearly eighty. "He's old. What did you want to marry him for? Why don't you get rid of his name? How can you divorce him and keep his name?" The modern liberal practise of staying friends with former spouses had not reached these little towns.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Hey! I only married him to get this name," I joked. "I'm not going to give it back now! It's mine to keep-- I like it! It means writer."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Eaauuuugh! That's awful. That's really cold to marry someone for their name."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc had a different take. Someone had told him about the past superintendent who turned out to be gay and how he had installed his "cousin" in the adjacent teacherage and cut a convenient doorway in the wall. Homophobic Doc was soon enough re-telling the story with some improvements. In his version the doorway -- which was in fact in the married housing and had been resealed-- was between the apartments of myself and Miss Pickletoes. He knew better since, while waiting for his house, he himself had stayed in the apartment Miss Pickletoes later occupied. It became clear to several that the Doc was saying Miss Pickletoes and I had a perverse relationship. This might not be serious in San Francisco, but in Montana homosexual relationships are a felony.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Miss Pickletoes instantly produced a boyfriend. Unfortunately, no one was very impressed with him, especially after they found out he had made her a long buckskin skirt with flower designs beautifully beaded around the hem. "Eauuugh! What is he -- some kind of pervert?" And the older women said, "He don't look much like he's going to earn a living." At least the kids decided that, unnaturally fond as Miss Pickletoes' attentions to her German shepherd were (she kept it in a dog house and petted it a lot), she probably was not having relations with it after all. She told me that she kept a loaded .357 magnum revolver at bedside in case of rapists. A male friend had taught her to crouch in a corner with the cocked gun steadied on her knees in front of her. She feared rape always, even when she wasn't on the reservation.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After one big kid threatened to beat me up , set my car on fire, murder my cat, and so on, I got him alone and leaned into his face, hoping to seem strange and threatening. "If you touch me or anything of mine, I will kill you, " I hissed. "And I know how to do it so no one will find out." He believed me and never came within ten feet of me again. I thought the whole thing was sick but necessarily effective. I had no gun. Or even a bat propped behind the door. What made the threat convincing was the number of quite actual mysterious deaths in the area. In that young man's reality, revenge was simple protocol.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Doc had other fascinations. He was fond of saying that full-bloodedness meant nothing -- if he brought ten gorgeous blonde Swedish girls to Heart Butte, there wouldn't be a full-blood Indian in the next generation. When told this was insulting, he failed to see why. His own rail-thin wife was platinum blonde, although the second year she suddenly went flame red. Their relationship did seem to suffer. We could hear the insults being hurled.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She took classes at Blackfeet Community College, which the Doc ridiculed for having a muddy, weedy, improvised campus, and she occasionally came to my apartment to borrow books. One night she showed up clearly anxious and wanted to know if I had any books on physical abuse. I didn't and she was incredulous. "What, you're a minister and you don't have any books on physical abuse?" She wouldn't come in and she wouldn't leave, but teetered on the threshold trying to tell me something without saying it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don't know whether the Doc had hit her or she was trying to warn me about being accused of classroom violence or whether she really believed I was beating kids. Surely she was not interested in discussing whether ministers should be social workers. Maybe it was the Doc who hit HER. After that she was often gone "visiting" out of town. As soon as the Doc's rather nice "double-dip" retirement was settled, she divorced him. Montana is a fifty/fifty alimony state. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">OLD WOMAN'S BODY</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The sexual focus of my own secret life was menopause. I'd never been pregnant (which the kids thought was highly unnatural) and now, passing fifty, my cycles were becoming sluggish. My gynecologist put me on .625 daily mgs of Premarin with periodic .10 mgs cycles of Cyrin, on the theory that causing the uterine lining to slough vigorously would bring my troubles to an efficient end and prevent cancer. Thus monthly I had to make desperate flights to the faraway women teacher's restroom to cope with the consequences. Long past monthly PMS, I was taken by surprise when the new drug-induced mood swings seized me. Early in the month doses of estrogen had me purring to myself like an old setting hen, but by the end of the 28 days I was cranky and slamming objects. "Whatza matter? You on the rag again?" snarled the onset-of-testosterone junior high boys, rolling their eyes at the depravity of female anatomy and hoping to suggest they knew all about it. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ancient tribal taboos about menstruation seemed to have persisted. The guidance counselor used my room for a class during my planning period. He kept what passed for order in part by allowing students to rifle my desk for art supplies and paper. I threw a fit. One boy, a very responsible good student, didn't see why anyone shouldn't have access to my desk at any time. "What could you possibly have in there that I couldn't know about?" he asked. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I decided to be honest. "My stash of Kotex." The boy practically fell over backwards. He was appalled. His safe little world of neuter teachers exploded. In a while he transferred out of the class and he never really spoke to me again.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the younger boys weren't above violating taboos. For a while they took to shouting beestinah at each other in the hallway, until I asked the teacher of Blackfeet, a dignified woman truly of the old culture as well as the new one, what the word meant. Amused, she gazed at me evenly and said, "Oh, you know-- down there." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Penis?" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Oh, no!" She had the giggles now. "The woman's. . . .you know."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I pinned down the boys and told them they were not to shout "vagina" at each other in the hallways, even if it was in Blackfeet. "What's a vagina?" they asked, truly mystified. "Cunt," I said firmly, hoping to seem clinical. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Oh." They slunk off.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"And besides," I lectured on, following them. "The old-time Blackfeet did not find sex dirty and did not use sex words for curses. Be true to your heritage." They rolled their eyes some more.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That was the end of it, except that sometimes I would overhear them lecturing someone who had just transferred to Heart Butte. "Old time Blackfeet did not think talk about sex was dirty." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">YOUNG MAN'S BODY</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day I ordered <i>"Au Revoir, Mes Enfants</i>" on video. My idea was to get them past the Blackfeet holocaust and the Native American experience with Catholic boarding schools to a more universal understanding. Therefore I would show this movie of a young boy in a French Jesuit school during World War II and his inadvertent betrayal of his Jewish friend. I'd forgotten that the boy has wet dreams and that during the bathing scene he is caught enjoying himself in the bathtub. Nothing is shown, only implied. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The younger boys spotted it at once and turned to me with jaws dropped. "Did he...? Was he...?" The movie was in French with subtitles and from then on the poorer readers were desperate to know what the subtitles said, especially when the hero read from Arabian Nights. They soon checked the library for the book. No copy was there, not even a children's expurgated version. None of them had ever seen a movie with sub-titles before, or even a dubbed foreign film. I hoped -- and I think it did happen -- that their store of human images was expanded and that their thoughts were haunted, however briefly, by boys caught in a desperate world entirely European.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Maybe the most interesting aspect of this little story is that the same boys who were so intrigued by this movie had watched -- I suspect -- many triple X movies taken off the porn satellite channels. I watched a few myself to see what it was all about and found them boring. My hope was that the boys themselves, if they were exposed to truly thoughtful stories, would also eventually become bored.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CROSSING</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A men's informal group was the "Heart Butte Beauties," a cross-dressing basketball team. Cross-dressing has long been a source of merriment on the prairies and my own family's albums show aunts and uncles wearing each other's clothes and bent over with laughter. One long-ago summer afternoon when nothing was happening, my mother and aunt switched my clothes with those of my male cousin and took photos of their one-year-olds in drag. But there was a meaner streak at Heart Butte. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Beauties challenged the male high school teachers, several of whom were young and fairly good athletes, to a basketball game. None of the administration showed up. Probably none were invited, since the Supe, the Doc and Churchill would never have been able to run one lap around the gym. Anyway, they were football players, anchored, confrontive -- not the leaping, long-armed, ball-juggling types the local former high school basketball stars were. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the Beauties came prancing out in dresses, the teachers were a little taken aback. One Beauty put the basketball up under his skirt and approached the newlywed wife of one of the best teacher players. "Do you know where your husband has been sleeping, honey?" he lisped. "Well, look what he's done to me now!" Such jokes continued, which is not unusual, but things got a little rough. The Beauties began to threaten to de-pants their rivals. The teachers fell or were elbowed. Bruises appeared. Pretty soon the teachers made excuses and went on over to their trailers and apartments without using the communal school showers as the Beauties did. Next day they spent time hanging out together reassuring each other and trying to figure out how to handle the future. To the women they denied that anything happened, even the ones who were there.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I believe that an honest inquiry -- were it ever possible -- would find that a few local men would as soon take a man as a woman. Some had prison histories, some no woman would have anything to do with, some hated women as a category so much they would sooner have a sheep. The kids knew who they were, feared them, and sometimes became their victims. Once in a while I was told bits. One boy wrote a daring essay in which he described holding a younger boy down and urinating into his mouth. But other times he wrote about smuggling girls into a bunk-house through a secret tunnel and keeping them captive. (When I saw a photo of this boy in kindergarten, I realised he was probably FAS.) Another boy wrote about raping a girl and was coy about whether he made it up or not. To the males, almost universally, sex was a matter of dominance and status. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To the females, as in the larger culture, sex was submerged in "love" which meant deliverance into a safe and privileged life. Sex/love meant a house and babies, plus a small income from ADC. But the baby was usually defined as a "gift" from the man, which obligated the woman to give him money. Only a few women could stand up to the father of their children enough to exclude him from the house.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the same time, among the more sophisticated students a gay identity was respected as natural and legitimate. They knew about national organizations of Native American gay people ("two-spirited people") and had off-reservation contacts. A few were paired. Their relationships often struck me as maternal, even though the pairs I knew about were male. They seemed more about love than sex. I only knew one "out-of-the-closet" gay Blackfeet person, a former student not in Heart Butte.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The administration and school board totally denied the existence of sexual considerations, except to snicker about it among themselves. The only female janitor was fired because she refused to work alone late at night. She was replaced by a man who suspected of participating in the gang rape of a girl later dumped from a moving car and critically hurt. "I had to hire him," said the Doc when teachers objected. "He was the only one who would work late." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then he told about a girl being raped by a classmate beside the swimming pool in a nearby white school, implying there was no use in being cautious-- even white schools had problems. It was simply the nature of things. After that the other two administrators stopped telling the Doc anything, because he was injudicious in repeating them. He never understood the context. The Supe and Churchill needed the support of their peer administrators and the white folks of Pondera County-- which meant that the code of secrecy should be extended to cover them. But they didn't mind giving away the secrets from Browning, especially if they put down Native American administrators.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">CONFUSIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On the first day of Heart Butte High School classes, I knew enough to do a lot of listening at first to see what was going on. Since only a few students had showed up, I decided to interview them separately. I assigned some easy reading and called each person up to a table where I was creating a card file. I was after life-patterns, level of experience, and so on. Most had never been out of Heart Butte, but one had spent a year in Boston, which she found scary and depressing. One had spent a year in a hospital as a small child. I discovered one who had previously "sat" through classes I taught -- in a sense -- because his mother was pregnant with him. She had been a good student and still functioned as a pillar of the church.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then my interview game ran away. A tall fellow, boyfriend of a nurturing and very pregnant girl, confided, "I gotta tell you there is someone here in the school I hate so much that I'm gonna hafta kill him. I can't control myself." In my summer of hospital chaplaincy and half-dozen years of congregational ministry, I had heard some frightening confessions from people, but exactly this problem had never arisen. I thought he might be making melodrama, but couldn't take it for granted. I whisked him down the hall to the counselor, newly returned to the school after special training in Bozeman. "This boy is afraid of becoming a murderer by day's end," I announced and took a seat to see what would happen and to make sure the kid stuck to his story. The counselor was plainly stumped. The tall boy smiled. I learned a lot more about him later. It was melodrama, but there was a grain of truth in it. [The counselor managed to stick it out in Heart Butte for the next 17 years and his students sent an article praising him to the local newspapers. He tells me that now he would know what to do.]</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When his girlfriend gave birth, this boy was miserable because he wanted the baby for himself. "If only she had had twins," he sighed. For a while they fought and he was pushed away from the family. Later he got her pregnant again. She still refuses to give him one of the babies. Thank goodness.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Falling in love was seen as an overpowering and ecstatic experience, giving birth was the creation of an amazing new possession (and also a handy political weapon if the father's identity was ambiguous), and marriage was a necessary compromise for the sake of prosperity. The soaps everyone watched never showed long-term marriage or ordinary day-to-day relationships. All was up and down, endless melodrama with a small cast of characters. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte was just as full of stories as of their denial. There were the Indian men who married white teachers for their income and nice apartments. There were drunks, both male and female, who beat up their whole families. And so on. Most people were not like that, but the ones who were supplied many stories. The school board chair made a great fuss about drunkenness and then nearly lost an arm in a drunk-driving accident. The administration made a declaration about the school being tobacco-free and a week later I arrived at school early to discover the Supe enjoying a cigarette. I had wondered why he always had so many room deodorizers in his office. "Don't tell on me," he begged.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One person was able to relate directly and effectively with Blackfeet people. Mr. Z's wife, Dot, took care of the babies of the student-mothers. Having no children of her own but being from a solid Minnesota farm family background, Dot fed, cleaned, rocked and sang for the babies, and as often spent time with the mothers, sympathizing, soothing, trying to talk through problems and find solutions, giving out hugs. Pretty soon the mothers and aunties were dropping by to visit with Mrs. Z. and she knew more about what was going on in the families than any teacher. Long after the Z's had been driven off the reservation by the Supe, they still took some of those children for vacations, teaching them to fish and buying them new clothes. Over the years the families of the children called them for help and spoke of them as relatives. Of course, they sometimes asked for money.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After a few years, relationships became trickier. The former students were older and harder. Sometimes they played tricks on the Z's. The little kids became wilder and didn't remember their old caretaker as well. It left the Z's feeling touchy, hurt.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HONESTY AS A TABOO</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was on the fertile ground of sex and violence that the Supe built his case against me. I spoke of sex frankly. When a boy asked me what "smegma" was, I told him and also advised him to keep it cleaned out so he wouldn't get cancer of the foreskin. When a girl asked me why sex outside of marriage was wrong, I told her that there were two reasons: a womb is a specially fertile and protected place meant to nourish a baby and therefore it is particularly prone to infection; and her own feelings during this time of her life were so tender that she should not confuse them with a physical relationship before she was wise about making choices. (The girls said, "Oh, you make it sound so awful." I was abashed.) </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When kids asked me how to become good lovers, I said the most important sex organs were the brain and the skin, so they should protect both with good nutrition and careful safety practises. When a girl asked me if I thought she was depraved to want to feel her boyfriend inside her, I said, "No, not depraved. But don't hurry. Wait until later, when you're older. It will be even better than." She didn't believe me.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The school board said to me at my last hearing, "Do you have special training? Are you certified to teach about sex?" The hospital is the great counter-authority on the reservation, privileged to violate taboos in the name of preventing death. The church has a real but more dubious authority. "Yes," I asserted. "I am an ordained minister, trained to do marriage counselling." They stared. None of them had realized this, though I had acted as the local Methodist Mission minister the year before I was hired in Heart Butte. I would have added that I had actually attended a Masters and Johnson workshop in Chicago, except that no one would have recognized the names. If they had, they would have assumed the worst about what happened there. (The worst that happened was that the lady next to me developed five o'clock shadow.) Their next assumption was that I must have gotten into trouble some way -- been thrown out of the ministry. Why else would I come to a place like Heart Butte?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Supe summed it up neatly. He knew I had consulted a lawyer. "If you start a lawsuit, you will probably win it. But it will take years and you will never teach school in this state again. You will have a huge debt." He frankly intended to smear me.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The violence charge came in part from rough-housing with the youngest boys. When they got wild, I would get them into a corner and turn my back on them so I could pin them for a few minutes without using my hands. Usually, this helped to quiet them, but now I think it was a stupid thing to do. Also, a big boy-- really a young man-- had arrived in class in a rage, yelling "Fuck," and throwing chairs. It looked to me as though he might be on drugs and totally out of control. I grabbed him hard by the arm and dragged him out of the room, fearing what he might do to the other students. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Did you touch him?" demanded the Doc. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I certainly did. My responsibility is to protect the students, even from each other, even at risk to my own safety. I expect to control my own classroom, whatever it takes." He couldn't disagree. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">GUILTY FORCE</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Probably my most guilty use of force was with that second seventh grade class. They were expert at taunting, refusing, and bedeviling their parents and their teachers. I grabbed their arms and put them in their desks. In a while, they learned to scream, "Ooooh! You hurted me and you've left a mark on my arm! I'm bruised!" They said they told their parents, but no parents arrived. By that time, the end of the second year, I was too tired to care or do anything about it. I was exhausted, crabby and fatalistic. It was a great temptation to really hurt someone. I would have preferred that it be an administrator. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once the same boy who was shocked by my Kotex stash told me about the teacher who preceded me. A former Marine, he had also resorted to grabbing the kids hard. Once he put his fist through the blackboard -- they showed me the place, which was indeed dented. I knew another teacher had been fired when a student pulled a knife on him and was forcibly disarmed. This was ruled to be a fault on the part of the teacher.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another very large Heart Butte boy, emotionally young for his age, was in the habit of bullying others. I was fond of this boy, but I couldn't seem to reach him with words. One day I lost patience and slammed into him sideways with my shoulder, like a football player. "How do you like it?" I demanded. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had forgotten about the metal chalk tray, which connected hard with his hip-bone. "Mrs. Scriver! You've hurted me! I thought you were my friend!" His voice shook and his eyes brimmed with tears. He never really trusted me again, though I apologized. I felt like a rat. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The final incident that sealed my fate in Heart Butte came from the son of one of the teachers. The whole family was having a rough few years. This particular boy was probably the brightest one of his family, but also the most defiant and the laziest. He'd been on detention a dozen times with no effect. His mother had heard so many complaints from me that she was beginning to attack me back to shut me up. On this day he refused to get his book out, talked back, and so on. In frustration and to make a point in my lecture to him, I gave him a rap on the chest with a closed fist. Instantly, he leapt to his feet and announced he was going to get me fired. "Fine," I said. "You just march right down to the office and do that." So he did. Or so he thought. For a while he was a great hero among his peers.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the ensuing confrontation the boy's father and mother met with myself, the boy and two principals, Cheever and the Doc, neither of whom said anything at all during the meeting. The father ripped into me, one of his worst accusations being that I had said all Indian men died before they were forty. He felt that I was not reporting facts, but putting a curse on his family. The mother said very little. She was not completely sure how things were going to turn out, I think. She often worried about losing her own job, though she had tenure. Mostly, she accused me of hating her family, "having it in" for her family. She knew that I knew many family secrets. Many of them she had told me herself by way of explanation, pleading to have bad behavior excused.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After shouting and threatening me for most of the meeting, the father turned on his son. "I'm sick of your behavior," he yelled at the boy and proceeded to rip his son up one side and down the other. Shortly we all sat exhausted and staring. One of the principals must have dismissed the meeting. I went to the bathroom. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In a few minutes I came out and went to pass through the cafetorium back towards my classroom. The father was standing in the thin mountain light coming through the big windows around the school entrance. We stood far apart with long shadows stretching from our feet across the polished floor towards those misty, air-brushed warriors on the wall. The father looked as lonely as any human can be. "You don't know how it is," he said quietly. "You don't know how bad I was when I was young and how hard it has been to give all that up. We've worked so hard." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He had been one of my students in the Sixties. I did remember how bad he was. I knew as much as anyone could from the outside. "Don't be ashamed," I said. "Be proud of your real accomplishments. That's the best thing you can do for your son." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He put on his cowboy hat and left. The image that stays with me is that lone man standing there, exhausted by the fury, unfocussed and uninformed, that was the only way he knew to fight back against what he thought was destiny. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-89517344960296759182013-08-10T14:41:00.002-06:002014-08-28T12:43:47.635-06:00BECOMING WILD AGAIN<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BECOMING WILD AGAIN</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Truth is a pathless land.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Jiddu Krishnamurti</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>as though it were deadly to us. </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>But the soil is all of the earth that is really ours.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Wiliam Bryant Logan</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A culture does not stand still, but is always moving and changing like a river, responding to what is around it and within it. The Amskapi Pikuni culture cannot be frozen in time, put in a box or a book or a movie or a museum. There will never be a definitive description of what it is to be Pikuni, because that changes over time.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Blackfeet, <i>Neetseetahpee</i>, are more than frybread, stickgame and beads. They are not just the remnants of warriors who once lived in tall lodges set up in circles on the prairie. Fundamentally, these are people shaped over the centuries by the prairie. They know how to endure, to laugh, to love babies, to aspire to walk in the sky and marry stars, and to fear for their future if the rules are broken. Now that the world has changed so drastically, the problem has been sorting out the rules again. It is a problem we all share. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is non-assimiliated autochthonous culture? First of all, historically it was "wild," in the Gary Snyder sense of "self-regulating." If we are moving to this new meaning and away from a Euro-centric view of Native American culture, then it is necessary to move to an eco-centric definition of "wild."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Wild" alludes to a process of self-organization that generates systems and organisms, all of which are within the contraints of -- and constitute components of -- larger systems that are again wild, such as major ecosystems or the water cycle in the biosphere. Wildness can be said to be the essential nature of nature. As reflected in consciousness, it can be seen as a kind of open awareness -- full of imagination, but also the source of alert survival intelligence. The workings of the human mind at its very richest reflect this self-organizing wildness. So language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is not that a certain kind of human beings were in control in the old days, but that the culture was constantly supported, guided and sometimes severely edited by the land itself. The words were there to say how to live on this land. No other culture from some other land intervened in an overwhelming way, though influences were felt, particularly after Europeans arrived on the continent. Because of natural ecological forces over thousands of years, equilibrium had formed and feedback consequences existed to keep extremes from swinging out into destruction. Being "Indian" was not a matter of race so much as sharing a culture that had developed over millenia and blossomed, even mushroomed, when enriched by the horse and metal. The Pikuni themselves used their language as a marker: if you could speak like them, it was more important than how you looked. The criterion was cultural, not racial.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The difference between the ancient Blackfeet culture and the modern reservation culture is that today things are changing too quickly for a harmony, a natural feedback system, to form. And yet the first impulse most people have is to suppress change, to restore control. Things are "on the boil," a phrase which happens to be a European root for wildness as a word. "Wilding" is what delinquents say they are doing when they rape and destroy, thinking that predation is all there is to ecology. In fact, it is the Euro-American colonialist conviction that Indians are "wild" and therefore will run out of control if not governed by "civilized" people that has set up the false opposition of "assimilated" to "unassimilated." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today Euro- and Afro- and Asian- and every other kind of hyphenate genetic group in the United States is as much on the boil as the “American Americans.” It is not that one elite group must teach the rest of us the "right way," but that we must all find a new way. To succeed, as Gary Snyder points out, we must find that new way within the larger planetary "wildness" of weather, geology, ecologies, and cosmic forces we hardly realize exist. (In the 1800’s there was a sunstorm so violent that its electromagnetic impact made the telegraph lines melt. What would it do to our communication satellites?)</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">More than that, we each must find our way back to the self-regulating "wildness" of independent, open awareness -- not for the sake of aesthetics or even personal satisfaction, but in order for human beings to survive on this planet. "Alert survival intelligence," Snyder calls it. I feel sure that part of that will be the strengthening of tribal community wovenness.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A new Pikuni culture is coming into being, one that participates in world culture. It is the retrieval and articulation of millenia of stories, religious philosophy, and artistic distillations in many media. Of all the forces that go unseen and yet ferment into energy, this is the strongest. It is here that people get the courage to start new institutional forms and to look for money boldly in other places than Washington, D.C. Libraries need to be built and maintained: on computer with Internet access. Scholarly sophistication that is not confined to one or another discipline can find new ways to retrieve and understand very old concepts. Because scholars around the planet can agree on methods and respect ideas that are heuristic, this is another way that Pikuni can claim standing as "Real People," a nation. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So far this effort has had to be separated from the schools, even at the level of the community college, because it is destroyed by the kind of opportunism that targets public instutions. Schools on the reservation tend to exclude the very white people who know how to recover nearly lost silent cultural languages. They are seen as a threat to the existing order who take jobs that would otherwise support a local family.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">EDUCATION AS EXTINCTION</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Education is obviously a great cultural force, not only sustaining culture, but also changing and even extinguishing it. The sharpest question of all has been how to reconcile conflicting cultures without genocide. There are two kinds of genocide: that which causes the physical death of people and that which slowly snuffs out their way of life by displacing it with our own. Like the appalling extinctions of species through the displacement of habitat, it is the slower way that is the more deadly and final. Contemporary materialism, media-driven, eliminates more Native Americans than the U.S. Cavalry ever did. Darrell Kipp says wryly, "If these kids were to have Sacred Bundles, the contents would be athletic shoes, VCR's, and the keys to a pickup." [This is already out of date -- surely an iPod ought to be in there!]</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The dilemma seemingly presented by the task of educating young tribal members is whether to let them be what we think of as "Indians"-- and therefore crippled economically, even second-class citizens -- or to assimilate them so that they are "white" except for their appearance. But this is a false dilemma. By going back to the source of the culture -- which is always the land and always preserved in the language -- and by opening up to the new future that all human beings must find on this planet, "Indian" education can be freed to be both inspiration and tool. None of us will be the same tomorrow. We must create a new culture.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People of the land should be leading us. All our cultures are challenged by our increasing detachment from the sources of our food and fuel. Ultimately our teacher is the planet itself. Reservations, because they are still circumscribed and have a potentially self-regulating polity, can become cutting-edge cultures: the old folded into the new in the way that has always meant human renaissance. Almost secretly, this has already begun. [There are wind turbines whirring in Browning.]</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A psychiatrist once said to me, “I don’t see why you would even want to live in a place like Browning. You tell me how dangerous it is, how difficult life is. Why stay there when there are better places?” His question released an answer I didn’t know I had: “If something happens to me in Browning, I know who did it and who his people are. I can be angry at a known individual with a face and tell him so. In fact, I can tell his grandmother on him and then he’ll be in REAL trouble!” The grandmothers aren’t so powerful as they once were, but community pressure still exists and no lives are secret. The reservation world is a human-sized one. There is no need to resort to television personalities to create the impression that we don’t live among strangers. Someone once remarked that human beings have probably evolved to handle true relationships with a hundred people, maybe a few more. The reservation is that kind of world.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the other end of the scale, when people recommend reforms to schools, they rarely take into account the broadest political, historical, geographical, and ethnic factors. No one wanted this book to include talk about the Cretaceous Era, though that prehistoric eon still affects the high prairie in the form of weather, soil types, fuel sources and valuable fossil bones now being "rustled" off Blackfeet lands. Such broad ideas are considered dangerous, likely to entangle everyone in unmanageable problems. But this is because of limited educations that have provided no coherent framework for big ideas. We have been stuck with too many unconnected facts and concepts. We know a lot, but there is no ordering principle.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Over time, communities form some kind of habitual way of seeing "school." But the schools, particularly when they pursue goals that will change the community, can be a disturbing influence. Communities don't want the schools to be troublesome. The educational establishment does not want change that will displace those now in power. Kids don't want change -- they don't even want to grow up. Parents want school to be what it was when they were kids. All these groups conspire without realizing it to prevent change. Schools that don't change become destroyers, chains, suffocators, but as someone has remarked, “Change has no constituency.”</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People do not get elected to school boards by being unpopular, so only popular changes are supported by the board. This is why athletic programs so easily dominate schools. The most popular platform is always the Status Quo, because change necessarily means that some of those who are now powerful will lose, and some of the present weak will become strong. Only if enough people feel they are losing can change begin. We are getting close to that point now. And all the time the small world tries to be consistent, the larger context is slowly evolving.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In most communities, tax payers are effective monitors who want results for their money. Specifically, they want graduates who can be successfully employed so as to share the tax burden. A school that awards at graduation empty boxes with no real diplomas inside is a scandal. A town that cannot sustain ordinary businesses because of burglary and disorder from unemployable young men cannot grow and succeed. Mothers who are children cannot shelter their babies. Families sustained only by welfare checks cannot function.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the school is not supported by local tax-payers -- as in the case of federally subsidized local reservation schools -- but is only guided by local vote-getters and family heads, the school staff has a formidable task of education. Leaders must educate the community to do what is unpopular -- like maintaining universal high standards no matter whose child gets flunked -- in the interest of a long-range benefit. At the very least they must present a coherent plan and goals that are truly helpful to the community rather than to themselves, the employees of the school. Most of all, they must resist acting as parents who let the true parents remain children. This is a lot to ask. It can only be asked of leaders who will stay and share the outcomes. Leaders need to be allowed time to build-- not discarded at the first sign of conflict. A culture accumulated out of broken beginnings is no culture at all.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">REJECTED INSIDERS</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte people don't look any different from other <i>Amskapi Pikuni </i> The prejudice against them that comes from the reservation is not racial, but micro-cultural. Heart Butte is a community that is twice-stigmatized: once by the surrounding white community and again by the larger reservation which calls it "inbred." The people become overinvolved in defending themselves but still accept a bad self-image. They invest in secrecy, denial, a show of material goods, and putting down other people. These strategies only lock them more tightly into their isolation and self-criticism. On the rest of the reservation the same strategies have the same effect. In the small towns around the reservation the same pattern repeats. No one sees the uselessness of reassuring oneself by putting others down.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Culturally assimilated Native Americans on reservations preserve their racial genetics and entitlement to affirmative action. But some have converted to "white" culture, hoping to be seen as more "responsible," "just like whites." Their reward is economic preference, because the most "white" are still the first to be hired. Those who wish to taunt them call them "Apples" (red on the outside, white on the inside) or "Uncle Tomahawks." Many stay within a Native American context on reservations or in Bureau of Indian Affairs jobs, because they preserve their advantages there in a way they could not in the white mainstream. Moving from one reservation or job to another as troubles develop, the "Apples" never really leave a hybrid culture of mock assimilation -- partly mainstream and partly Native American. Lately -- because being culturally authentic has increased in value -- people want to hire “real Indians” for one reason or another. These adaptable Indians have suddenly taken crash courses in the most obvious cultural markers. Then we have the very scrubbed, very arrogant, marvelously dressed pow-wow princesses. Few of them can sustain interest and energy long enough to learn the language, which is its own reward.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This limited experience erodes their confidence. They never experience success and acceptance without the shield of being "Indian," and yet they are excluded from the traditional Indian community. The price they pay came clear to me when one of the Apple school administrators I had fought with dropped dead of a heart attack. He was younger than me. He had lost his way.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">GETTING REAL</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All rhetoric aside, what practical measures should this small village school address now that it has a new building? How will it withstand the constant withdrawal of federal funds? How will it find and keep excellent teachers? When will it shape a curriculum for young people with aching hearts, no longer children but reluctant to become adults? How can the Nitzitahpi keep hold of their pasts while not being trapped in it?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the most basic issues for Heart Butte to address is the quality of administrators. Idealistic and school-wise administrators like Phil Ward seem to have disappeared and, frankly, he was an assimilationist in the same way as my Scots grandparents. That is, his effectiveness came in part from his conviction that a good education was universal, basically European and meant to provide economic viability. Far too many white administrators today not only have bad educations but, more seriously, don’t even know they are poorly educated. They own paperwork that says otherwise. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One winter the Native American administrators-- all of them men I knew as youngsters-- were in a celebratory mood and went drinking as buddies. Out of boozy generosity they decided to pull a white administrator into their circle so they came to his house. Seeing that they were drunk, he refused to come out. (He was a person of stiff religious scruples.) So the men began to throw snowballs at the house, harder and harder until they broke a big picture window. Then they ran off guffawing. They were lucky not to have been shot by a panicked outsider flashing back to John Wayne movies. If those same men had been pelting my house, I would have grabbed up a broom and gone out to do battle, converting it all to comedy. But never in a million years would those men have gotten drunk with me. I could walk into any of their houses -- often have -- and had coffee, but not liquor. In those days I was seen by them as local, unlike the luckless white administrator who soon moved on.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The school can hardly leave the state education system and one would not want to recommend that it did, but state-level authorities need to give special attention to reservation schools. In the past, the people in the Office of Public Instruction assigned oversight of "Indian" schools have been neither boat-rockers nor change-makers, nor has anyone wanted them to be. In order to preserve correct politics, the overseers of reservation schools are often assimilationist Native Americans, old buddies with the people they ought to be disciplining, anxious to look good for whites, completely out of touch with truly indigenous people. It is not a case of a fox watching the chicken-house, but of the high status chickens being given formal permission to peck the low status chickens while sparing their friends. Whether administrators are Indian or not counts less than whether they are competent or not.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There are alternatives to total administrator control. Robey Clark, a former student of mine who now works with the Northwest Education Labs in Portland, tells me about a program called "Onward to Excellence" that is a process for calling out vision. It involves the entire community in setting goals, staying research-based, and redefining success by creating a school culture. In short, the model is ecological and self-governing. The program sets up short-term goals, like getting as many students as possible attending in the first ten days of school (which are often the most crucial for success) or running a refresher scholastic camp in late August at the same time as the athletes begin their training. These strategies create long-term success in school. Still, such programs will only soak up cash and energy unless the community and the administration support them-- insist upon them in the face of long distances and bad weather. Otherwise, they will tucker out like so many other ideas from the past.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Amskapi Pikuni</i> need to know their own reservation. At a recent Tribal Council meeting, some action was proposed at "Palookaville," but no decision could be made because no one on the Council knew where or what Palookaville was. It was the place the sheep-shearers ("palookas") camped when the south reservation was full of sheep flocks -- when Ivan Doig and his family ran sheep there. Decades ago, when the corrals were still upright, Bob Scriver showed me where it was-- near Heart Butte where the “inside road” branches off to East Glacier. I daresay that the same Tribal Council member who couldn't find Palookaville would be well able to guide himself around Washington, D.C. to the better restaurants. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the Pikuni hope to keep their identity, one of the highest educational priorities I could recommend would be the creation of a geography of the reservation. I would accompany it with a heavily experiential natural history class. By experiential I mean classes going out to look at the land, walking around on it, getting an old person to tell what happened there. Find the tree that was once a grizzly and, before that, a fierce warrior. Find Red Blanket Hill, a place so loaded with power as to be respected, even feared. The rancher who uses that land keeps his cows off it. Learn that story. Find the locations of the burial houses and the great boulder erratics considered holy by the Old People. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some of this is already being done. A teacher in Browning has written a natural history of the reservation to be used as a textbook. Now, beyond knowing the stories of their land, the local people can learn the science of what is there. Where are the mineral deposits and how did they get there? What are the grizzlies feeding on? Where are the fossils exposed? What is the depth of the water table? Can giardia be controlled? Every study of the reservation land, water, weather, plants or animals should be archived accessibly and taught to the young people.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Former students often remark that because they look "Indian," people expect them to know "Indian stuff." The very least the schools ought to supply is a simple history of the last four hundred years in the tribe's life. Research and materials are vital, exist in quantity, and only lack publishing. People have been coming to the Reservation to study the tribe for years, but not until the past decade -- when Piegan Institute began to build an archive of scholarly work -- has there been any way for local people to read this work or even know that it existed. The material now only found in a legal brief prepared for a lawsuit against the United States ought to be expanded, balanced, and shaped into a book. It is a close accounting of two cultures pitched against each other.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The third need is for a civics course that addresses Native American government and law. Partly this is a matter of understanding treaties, and partly there should be resources for wise organizational design in the coming years. The experience of all authochthonous peoples needs to be compiled and analyzed. What are the safeguards against corruption, the doors to innovation?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The fourth need is for a grounding in economic theory on reservations. When contemporary Heart Butte people speak of being a "sovereign nation," they tend to see the concept as meaning "we're the boss." They do not expect any drop in federal support. In truth, until Blackfeet as individuals and as a tribe develop a sustainable economy that fits the givens of North Central Montana--which is a place of harsh climate, varied soils, difficult transportation, mineral potential, and majestic beauty -- they will always be a client people, a "third world." No one will really respect them until they can pay their own way. This is not an easy task, even for white men with good bankers. Ask the many ranchers along the High Line who exist only through federal support as expensive as that given to the reservation. And yet when the locals think of providing jobs, their first impulse is a factory with people filing in the door, a model from the urban Fifties.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The people most likely to sabotage economic development are assimilated people who have lost from their hearts the old cultural obligation to support the whole tribe. In its place some keep the prideful family obligation to elevate their own relations, especially if they have enough powerful relations to keep them in their offices. Some care for no one but themselves. Next most dangerous are those who collaborate with the State of Montana to breach the borders of the reservation, eventually erasing it. Yet it is unrealistic to expect the reservation to exist without reciprocity. These are puzzles that outsiders can't solve.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The libraries of the reservation schools ought to be packed with the high quality Native American literature. Videos of the best movies, particularly the Canadian ones with serious themes and Native American actors, ought to crowd out the images of drugs and perversion sold by Hollywood. Young people need stories and role models that help them to understand and to grow, markers for truth and courage.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Add more training in media literacy (particularly resisting materialism and breaking the soap-opera myths of violence and sex), fund the study of video-making with the reservation ecology as the subject, and all kinds of computer skills including the Internet. Chuck Jonkel, the famous expert on bears, has always said that kids could make excellent nature videos. They don't have to go out looking for grizzlies. Weather, grouse, lichen, geology -- the laboratory is all around them. The Nature Conservancy would love to help if they could figure out how. It's only a matter of time before someone provides a go-between. Often this is the sort of thing an informed outsider with a grant can do.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">COMING OVER THE HORIZON</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Change cannot be prevented. After the blizzard that sealed off Heart Butte for more than a week, a local citizen group formed. They began to petition for practical changes: a snowplow stationed at Heart Butte, satellite clinics for dental work and babies, satellite BIA agency offices as they once had in the past. I would like to see them insist on a Pondera County Library branch, like the one the East Glacier Women's Club maintains in Glacier County. A few strategic snowfences, or maybe some bull-dozing, could get rid of the three or four bad places in the road that still make them impassable when the wind blows in winter. If this citizen group can keep from squabbling and splitting up, they will find many solutions, some from outside and some they can do for themselves. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte might consider petitioning to be included in Glacier County, instead of existing as a tiny part of Pondera County which plainly does not intend to be of help. The trouble with that strategy is that Heart Butte could be seized upon as a minor appendage to the School District #9 empire. There has been talk of making Heart Butte School into a special "remedial" school, a separate track for trouble-makers. The forces of basketball load Heart Butte with kick-outs from Browning and Valier who thirst to play ball but don't qualify because of scholastic or discipline problems. The Heart Butte kids tend to come from "full-blood" -- some would say "backwards" -- families. Browning, in some minds playing second-class to Cut Bank, likes to turn around and look down on Heart Butte. These dynamics don't make for good teachers, good students, or satisfied parents. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But what if Heart Butte were a magnet school, a truly experimental school that specialized in <i>Amskapi Pikuni </i>culture? What if the new high school facility were used by the Nature Conservancy or the Boone and Crockett ranch just to the south to present world-class conferences about the issues of the surrounding wilderness? What if Heart Butte contracted to educate tribal members who are now growing up off the reservation in cities? What if they even accepted white students or European students in order to teach them the Old Culture, the ways of the high eastslope mountains, "drumhead earth." Include a physical conditioning program: track, hiking-- okay, even basketball.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Somehow Heart Butte has got to find a way to be its own school without playing second fiddle to anyone else, white or Blackfeet. This means study, reflection, inclusive conversation over a long period of time, and probably some occasional imported experts of one kind or another. It would be a rare superintendent who could visualize the process alone and persuade everyone to follow it out. People are used to wanting instant results, cutting whatever corners are necessary. Contracts are too easy to break. Maybe some outside agency that the whole community can trust would be able to guide the process: some university education school or even the Canadian Treaty 7 (Blackfoot) Education Committee, the Grandparents from the North.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But nothing is really going to work for Heart Butte, until the village gets real about its future. For such a small community it is remarkably complex and contentious. Every major family will have to be included somehow. The churches, which have been faithfully willing to stand side-by-side, must continue to work for family communication skills, noble goals, and simple trust, and the more charismatic religious groups need to be brought into the picture. Citizen skills need to be encouraged and supported. There must be a better way to communicate than picking up gossip at the post office.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The tendency in Heart Butte is for the townspeople and parents to decide what sounds great, assign it to someone else (like teachers), and not come back until it's time to pick the whole effort apart. To change this, everyone local must at least know what's going on, and hopefully be part of it. Let everyone risk. Teachers are hard pressed to create meaningful lesson plans, keep a classroom on task all day, monitor lunch, grade papers, build curriculum, participate in professional organizations, continue to educate themselves, run the athletic programs and other extra-curricular activies -- and still preserve their own family life. If so many parents are unemployed and without money, let them donate time, knowledge and caring.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heart Butte is in one sense a very old place, but in another sense it is also a uniquely post-modern place where the issues are the same as those that concern the whole world: the impact of drugs on society, ecological integrity, the reconfiguration of labor and economics, the nature of family, interfacing cultures, the proper uses of institutions, and the healing of residual trauma from history. The location of Heart Butte on the threshold of the Rockies uniquely qualifies the school for a re-valuing of the land.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the most crucial questions of our times, in my opinion, is whether human culture is something that merely happens in spite of our intentions or whether it can be deliberately formed to be both sustainable and just: "self-regulated." The Blackfeet are a people already deeply changed by the impact of outsiders determined to eliminate their culture. When smallpox-contaminated blankets were given to them, they became victims of deliberate biological warfare. Today they know they are still at the economic mercy of a government once willing, even eager, to kill them. Even if the legally owed payments to the Blackfeet were maintained, other subsidies--"welfare" even-- is the only way that many can survive. Though the letters to the editor in the local paper speak defiantly of self-determination, the Blackfeet remain a client people controlled by bureaucracies, some of them internal. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the face of the Baker Massacre and the Starvation Winter, Heart Butte has basically adapted to a rural white context -- that is, prosperity and propriety are what counts and all the effective models are in the past. In fact, the whole village is fundamentally committed to a small-town, nineteenth-century view that may be as close as this country has come to having a unified culture -- a dream many still yearn for. It was in WWI, which some say was the end of the nineteenth century, that the United States first became a World power and in WWI that the Blackfeet were able to fight alongside citizens, though they were still technically only wards of the government until they were granted citizenship in 1924. Times were good in a modest way until the Great Depression. It is exactly this concentration on a nineteenth century world view that makes the reservation an attractive place for white people uncomfortable with the rate at which we are hurtling into the future. This is the same view shared with the small white towns around the reservation. But is it realistic?</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By the time I left Heart Butte, if you had gotten me drunk (and I was and am careful not to drink), you would have heard rage focussed on white administrators. The object of the rage is different for different folks, but very few people can suffer the frustrations and tragedies of a reservation -- partly prison camp, partly colony, partly time-capsule, partly ghetto -- and not feel rage. This can be healthy -- rage is energy for change. It got this book written. But it can go out of control.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At a literary conference in Eastend, Saskatchewan, boyhood home of Wallace Stegner, I "facilitated" a conversation between James Welch, Jr. and Rudy Wiebe, a writer from Edmonton, Alberta. Welch is a gentle and conciliatory person, but Rudy Wiebe is not afraid of rage. (Ironically, since he has a reputation for being contentious, his major work has been a biography of Big Bear, a pacifist patriarch of the Cree who was finally hanged by the government.) "I'm sick of all this talk about healing," said Wiebe. "We are not healed and we should not claim to be healed." To him, we are doing too much covering up and not really cleaning out the wounds. The audience, mostly local ranchers, was shocked-- but I agree. We settle for the appearance of healing.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When about 1977 Dennis Banks and others of the AIM group were arrested in Oregon for transporting dynamite in a Winnebago, my minister at the time, Alan Deale, agreed to be Banks' release monitor. Wounded Knee was recent, and liberals were quick to align themselves against the FBI before they even had any facts. Banks took our pulpit one Sunday and made a fine speech. But afterwards a little old lady expressed to me her worries. "Do you think they're innocent?" she asked me. "I wouldn't want to obstruct justice. But if they're really innocent, it's all right." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The point, of course, was that the trial had not begun, so what we were protecting was the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, a key concept in our democracy. This was particularly crucial because South Dakota wanted Dennis Banks back to be tried for Wounded Knee. In a South Dakota prison at that time, Banks might easily have been killed. Probably none of us, even Banks, could really sort out the tangle of intentions, deeds, accidents, and victories. But the little old lady wanted privileged knowledge, a God's eye view, to judge before the trial. If we wait to be irreproachable, nothing will happen. (Banks jumped bail and went to California where Governer Brown refused to extradite him.) We must be willing to make mistakes.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Leonard Peltier has been in jail these many years over an unproven crime. Instead of addressing whether the man got a fair trial, everyone wants to be omniscient enough to know what really happened. The energy for trying to free him comes mostly from those who believe he is innocent of murder. When I talk to people about teaching on the reservation, the attitude I hear in their questions is, "Well, what do they deserve? After all, they were savages. Now they're a bunch of drunks. Why should we do anything for them?" This is why Native Americans are afraid to be honest about their problems: they become the justification for turning away.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the village of Heart Butte is interpreted in historical terms as once being a Blackfeet band or coalition of bands who travelled together through the hunting/gathering cycle, generally returning to this easily recognized and comfortable spot for much of the year and finally staying there, then underlying this "white-style rural village" are patterns hundreds of years old. Mountain Chief, Young Running Crane, Heavy Runner and Little Dog were chiefs -- patriarchs -- in the earliest contact with whites and their names endure as European-style patronyms. The band system was an elastic one that allowed dissenters to go apart to cool off or to turn their aggressions outward on hunting or raiding out-group peoples. At the same time, community pressure mostly kept abusers and thieves in check. The harshness of weather, the difficulty of obtaining enough food, the need for a dependable social support system, were all order-keeping forces that wove the ecology through the people, creating a culture that succeeded.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The farflung coalition of tribes that ended up split by the U.S./Canada border has not yet been dispersed. The Treaty 7 Blackfoot education committee came en masse to visit Heart Butte-- not pushing any agenda, but just getting acquainted. In their midst was an Alberta reservation business owner who was Japanese. The committee was secure enough in their identity and goals to include him without a fuss. (In Browning people who were our enemies in World War II are still vilified in letters to the editor. There is no awareness that the senator who has done most to help Native Americans recently is Senator Inouye, a genetic Japanese.) In Canada education is regulated by examination. Long ago the realities of class distinctions were accepted, though mitigated by a strong sense of fairness and of excellence as an entitlement. The larger Canadian context is sensitized to culture differences, adamant about educational standards, and inclined to leave reserves alone. The reserves themselves have been maintained communally, rather than divided into homesteads. This has proven to be a more fortunate combination of forces.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Alberta Blackfoot educators are outside the career remuda of assimilated Native Americans in Montana, who swap inside jobs through recommending and hiring each other. Canadians compete with a different circle and therefore can be more frank. Admirably, they remain tactful, but what they say is taken seriously. No one can accuse them of not being entitled by culture, since they are still the main reservoir of Blackfoot ways and language, nor race, since they are less intermarried with whites than the American part of the coalition. The weak Canadian economy has begun to push Canadian Blackfoot into School District # 9 and Blackfeet Community College jobs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A broader source of help has been Pan-Indian organizations, particularly when they have connected educated members of tribes across the country. To their credit, Turner Enterprises has produced a series of tapes, each centered on one large area of the United States, which investigates contemporary, scholarly, tribal thought. When they had gathered a circle of racially and culturally native leaders and thinkers, the producers simply asked them to talk about their history and ways. Educated, articulate, and in mid-life, the speakers are completely outside of any stereotypes and firmly grounded in their own experience. When watching the tapes in sequence, differences from one ecology to another sharpen. Though every speaker is intense -- and after the talking has continued for hours, tragedy darkens the faces -- many are funny, joking in the tribal way. Few whites ever get to know this kind of person intimately. Educators headed for reservations should watch this set of tapes.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Beyond that, a world-wide network of native language speakers and original peoples has formed. I hear tribal people expressing concern for the “reindeer people,” and was rather startled to see on the news that the native Laplanders live in structures very like a Prairie Indian lodge. The nomads of the high Tibetan plateau often look Native American. In New Zealand the Maoris began to develop methods for preserving their old language, which they taught to the Hawaiians, who are Native Americans who never were allotted reservations. It is the Hawaiians who encourage and guide the Blackfeet Immersion Schools. Then the Blackfeet reach out to other tribes across the West to repeat the pattern.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I believe that the New Blackfeet will come in part from new technology and the ability of the students to achieve through it. When the genius computer expert arrived at the Moccasin Flats Blackfeet Immersion school, I was surprised that he turned out to be one of those Browning study hall renegades. Then I reflected on his good grades, his reliable mom and dad, and his hard-working grandmother. He was always intelligent-- he just needed some way to apply it that held his attention and let him grow. American Indians in Science and Technology is one of the most effective Pan-Indian organizations and their publication, Winds of Change is an eye-opener.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Head Start, the one federal program that has gone through crisis after crisis without losing sight of the goal, has endured on the reservation. In the earliest years the children of white teachers dominated the groups, but helpers became more and more resourceful about finding the kids who weren't coming because no adult was getting around to making it possible. Instead of getting mad and giving up, volunteers went to the homes, washed the kids' faces, tucked them into t-shirts and jeans, and fed them at the program. Slowly, slowly, the kids became more confident and skilled. These first Headstart people are the ones graduating from college now.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not all white people are oppressors. There is a small contingent of white "granolas" and craftsmen who have quietly settled in on the Rez to edit the weekly newspaper, run motels, raise organic crops, offer massages, and operate cafes. They are romantic, all right, but they aren't afraid of work or thinking. Powerful people from beyond the reservation take an interest and become increasingly deft at putting money where it will help. The churches have always worked hard and are still a source of parenting classes, 12-step groups, devotions of all kinds, and food co-ops -- to say nothing of bringing in work camps during the summer to improve housing and learn about Blackfeet. It's hard to think of a better exchange than a mid-western city kid getting to know an old Amskapi Pikuni person by weather-proofing and painting their house. Both are enriched by stories to tell. The old people do not find it demeaning. In their view the youngest have always been obligated to help the oldest.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In large part the Pikuni are benefiting from the energy of the generation I taught in the early Sixties when post-war confidence and the seeming unity of the larger culture allowed enough consensus to stay organized. In the Phil Ward years we were steady-- we got the job done day after day, year after year. Many of those students have earned multiple degrees and have succeeded in the wider world. Now in midlife they often return home and, after their first shock at the changes, hunker down to work on the problem. Sometimes the first problem is figuring out what it means to them to be Blackfeet.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of the most remarkable people from my first seventh grade class is Mike McKay, who has developed a comedy routine by impersonating reservation types such as "Sister Girl," an outrageous old woman with her stockings falling down who tells it "like it is." Poking fun at social stupidity and contradiction is as old as human beings and a way to tell the truth to people's faces. I take it as a sign of maturity.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the end, countervailing forces and competing images will play themselves out within the overarching ecological metaphor. Those who survive will not be the wealthiest, the strongest, the most powerful, the most beautiful, the most assimilated-- but rather the ones who are adaptable, "fitting," and able to find new paths. Then people will sort themselves out into patterns with niches for many types. But it will take many years and some people will be lost. I'm fearful that some of them will be people I deeply care about.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Blackfeet as a microcosm should be intensely fascinating for the planet. We all ultimately face the same challenge. If the Blackfeet can find a way to fit their population to their windy, sun-bleached land, to preserve the integrity of their east-slope rawhide environment, and to weave a new self-regulating Wild Way that includes and guides all the people regardless of race, then they will not only have saved themselves, but also will have become the heroes for the rest of us that we yearn for them to be.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AMSKAPI PIKUNI</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The newest Amskapi Pikuni school is The Moccasin Flat Blackfeet Immersion School, Amskapi Pikuni I Pausin Eskenimatoyis, The South Piegan Language School, The Speaking Language (Sound) of the Piegans. There has never been another school like it on this reservation. In fact, only a few years ago, before Senator Inuoye's new law was passed, teaching the native language was technically illegal. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Founded by grant writers working through Piegan Institute, Moccasin Flats Immersion School is incorporated by them as a non-profit organization able to administer funds specifically for Blackfeet language. The students pay tuition, fortified by scholarships. During the years at Heart Butte and afterwards I kept in touch by mail with Darrell, addressing him as Apenake Peta (Morning Eagle) Kipp, one of the members of the Piegan Institute, wrote back his own reflections as he made his own discoveries. We joked about the letters being published someday, so I saved them. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">His first letter was written on April Fools' Day a number of years ago. He found the administrators of his bilingual program in the schools were unreasonable. They were clinging to meaningless workshops, avoiding the actual doing of anything but pushing papers around-- probably for fear of failure or maybe because they didn’t know how to make theories real. Fed up, Darrell simply walked over to the primary school, asked for time in a classroom, and started teaching them to speak Blackfeet. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A very old Nitzitahpi technique of educating little kids while sitting around the fire on winter evenings is making one's two hands into puppets and having them talk to each other. Darrell wrote: </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I brought two puppets to class (Tsiki [boy] and Kokonowa [girl]) and found myself amazed... [In one session] the kids learned the following words: the names of all the towns even remotely close to original territory, five rivers and creeks (cricks), plus in the best tradition of mimics spoke crystal clear at least two active voice sentences (no "them things...") and internalized: nisto, kisto, Pikuni, Siksikawa, Kainah, Tsiki, Kokonowaw and Oki. Signed themselves crazy for all the words. Words, words, words were flying around the room. Once in a while the kids got excited enough to run towards me, hopping up on their little chairs to get closer, and I put my big number ten shoe up in the air to hold them off. Who said anything couldn't be done? It still works. Just do it." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Later this is what he said:</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I really felt some sharp-edged insights and blazing truths were floated in front of me during the last few months as I sat in a tiny chair in front of fifteen or so children, and used every sign and Blackfeet word I knew to make them electric. Several times I just turned my head and spoke to myself quietly, 'Wow. This is brainy, heavy stuff happening and for a fact hardly anybody knows as well as me this one moment." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">During this same time period Darrell and his wife, Roberta, had moved into Darrell's mom's house, because he had promised his mother she would never have to go to a nursing home. He continues in the letter: "Today, earlier, I sat at the table upstairs and ran through one of my favorite patters with my mother and her aunt, Annie Running Wolf, ninety plus, and a long-time resident of your fine village Heart Butte. I treated them young and they responded amazed with good laughs and Wow looks of what a treat this is. Roberta said, 'They think and hear better in Blackfeet.'" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sometimes he got frustrated and went outside to rake up trash, "the highest trash pile outside a garbage dump" or to cut down the knee-high grass: "I have this fantasy that I'm revealing the golf course that once existed under Browning, but I go around any mint, sage or other plant that looks as though it might once have been native."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In another place he says: "Last year I did five twenty-minute TPR [total physical response] workshops with fifty kids each... We did 'nistowa, Amskapi Pikuni' [me, South Piegan] and 'saukumapi [boy] ki [and] akikoan [girl]... All I really did was couple the words with the Indian signs. By switching back and forth between the boys and girls: 'saukumapiks; aniwa nistowa amskapi pikuni' and using the sign; then 'akikoanix..' etc. Last week I stopped at a friend's home in the evening and immediately two small-faced, dark-haired girls holding blonde Barbie dolls ran towards me, stopped, cupped their right hands against their cheeks and, in unison, said, "Nistowa, amskapi pikuni." I am a South Piegan. Proudly.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When construction had barely begun on October 21, 1994, the Institute members and the builder gathered at the empty lot on Moccasin Flats, faced the sun of the autumn equinox, and held out their arms to the sides. That became the alignment of the east wall of the school, a little offset from what was expected when the foundation was poured, so that the east wall is slightly jogged from square. On the south side is a heat-sink wall of sand. In back is room for supplies and the archives of the Piegan Institute. This is not just a program. This is a long trajectory through time and space.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A VISION</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The summer after I was forced to resign from Heart Butte, the Methodist organist rented me his tiny yellow "mother-in-law" house behind his photography studio, separated by a hedge of caraghanas so old that the trunks were as thick as my wrists. In the wind at night they knocked together like warriors' staves and on the long hot afternoons the pods dried and exploded open, making soft fusillades of tiny dry peas against my screen door. I kept the screen door hooked. I was just down the hill from the School District #9 administration building. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First thing in the morning, against the stone retaining wall behind my little house, old men would gather to welcome the sun. They sounded like birds out there, telling stories and laughing. I would stand at the window with my cup of coffee, trying to overhear. Sometimes they spoke, Apikunipuyi.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the middle of the day middle-aged drunks came to sit under my shady hedge and share Big Bear Bear, fortified malt liquor in quarts. Around lunch time younger men, just out of high school, would come with fast food in sacks to eat and hoot at the high school girls going downtown on lunch break. Cars would speed in and out and dust would settle on my rooms. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Late at night when things had quieted down, a very few older men came to the empty lot next door. They sat at the foot of a big security light pole and "sang Indian," sometimes keeping the beat on a log with sticks. They were my lullaby.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One night at the end of summer, after even the singers had gone and dawn getting close, I woke up and looked out the window. One man was sitting out there, silhouetted against the white stucco hardware store across the street. He was just sitting and gazing, as though he were on empty prairie, one knee drawn up and his arm out straight resting on it. He was autochthonous, indigenous, of the place, the land, and many long times running into each other-- always going on. It was easy to imagine him long ago, relaxed in some high place, watching for a vision or perhaps just watching, wondering if there ever might be a time of no more buffalo.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One of Darrell's recent letters began with quotes from Emerson: </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis; therein is human power." "We dive and reappear in new places." </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The little yellow house where I stayed belongs to Blackfeet owners now. It is occupied by a young mother and her child. Next door, where the photography studio once housed the negatives of portraits of old-time Blackfeet, the Piegan Institute has a workroom, a think tank. Dorothy Still Smoking works on her Ph.D. upstairs. I wonder if the men drinking in the caraghanas ever look up at her window. I wonder if she ever sees that lone dreamer just before dawn.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 19px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-55389750548905762812013-08-10T14:40:00.001-06:002014-09-02T16:56:25.155-06:00ALWAYS GOING BACK<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>AFTERWORD</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>"None of this vivid natural performance is exceptional; </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>it is normal, and universal. </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i> And so is the political vigilance it takes to be a member of this place.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>In one sense it is all just more layers of text </i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>on the rich old narrative of wild nature."</i></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">--Gary Snyder</span></div>
</div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">ALWAYS GOING BACK</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In May of 1996 the ground was broken for the second Blackfeet Immersion School. It is called "Cuts Wood School," after an old story about a boy who has secret sources of power that he brings to his people. The location is just down the street from the house that Thad Scriver brought his bride to live in, the house where she gave birth to Bob Scriver. She has been gone for many years. I don't have any idea how she would react to the idea of a Blackfeet Immersion School. But she was very much a rural, nineteenth-century person who understood one-room school houses and she was Canadian. The Scrivers had the same stubborn belief in education that my ancestors had on the South Dakota and Manitoba prairies.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So many of the Immersion Blackfoot teachers are from Canada that they "take tea" instead of mainlining coffee. In fact, on Mother's Day in 1996 the students gave a little tea to honor their mothers. The food, rather than traditional sarvisberry soup, was fresh strawberry shortcake and each small student went to a table to assemble a shortcake especially for their mother, their grandmother or their almost-mother. When I drove over to visit in late May, Darrell acted it out for me, recalling the children's talk amongst themselves in Blackfeet.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"My mother likes lots of whipped cream," remarked one. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"My auntie is always on a diet. Not much whipped cream."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I'll just sprinkle a little sugar on this one. My granny loves sweets."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is the culture that is forming: nourishing, tailored for the individual, and a conflation of customs based on service. The real point was the pride and competence glowing in the faces of the children, who knew who they were, what they could do, and who they belonged to. Through the whole first school year, none had dropped out. In fact, there was a waiting list.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On this trip I wanted to take more photos of Heart Butte, but at first the weather was rainy and even snowy. Then one morning I woke at dawn to a ringingly blue sky arching over immaculate mountains and a finally greening prairie. I went out the "inside road," stopping to get out and then driving on with the window rolled down. In the town all was quiet. I doubled back, up and down the creekside roads. I took photos of the new high school, ready for dedication in a few days.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was Memorial Day weekend, the traditional day for branding and castration. At Crawfords' ranch behind Heart Butte School many people were clustered around the corral full of bawling cattle. At the house I found the three Crawford daughters-in-law on the sofa in a row: Floy, who is Blackfeet; Charlene who is blonde; and Jane who is quite English and earning a degree at the Blackfeet Community College. All three are beautiful women, artistic, resourceful, tough when necessary, and good cooks. They were enjoying the pause between getting the big noon meal ready and actually feeding the crowd. A steady stream of little kids arrived at the door, politely asking to use the bathroom.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Christie Crawford was one of the stars of my novel-writing seventh grade. Her first child, handicapped by a brain hemorrhage, smiled and wriggled next to Floy. She will start regular kindergarten next fall. In Heart Butte everyone is mainstreamed. When Christie came in from carrying water to the cowboys, she held out her arms to me for a hug, then went to the back bedroom and returned with her second child: a husky, healthy boy. Plunk he went into my lap, where he twisted around to stare at this new face. "His name is Che," said Christie. "You know, for the boy in our novel!" </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It's hard to go back without being able to stay. The Z's and I write back and forth between us, dreaming of a world that might have been, one that we wouldn't have to leave. Wouldn't it be great to watch Che grow up, to share the joys and sorrows of all "our kids," see bears on the mountainside, invent new ways to teach? </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Heart Butte is already changing even more. The fifty HUD houses we had talked about when we applied for the high school will be ready by fall. They fill up the space across from Thompson's store and the post office. That means as many as several hundred new students at the school, not counting the growing population along the nearby river valleys. The Catholic Church is planning a million-dollar church and conference center. There is talk of pulling down the little old Heart Butte School with its tall windows. Otherwise it will have to have serious reconstruction to be safe.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The new superintendent's manufactured home is twice as big as any house in town and has a spacious deck across the front. More teacher housing has been added. Whoever lives in my old apartment has put a "pizza-pan" television receiver on its wall, to pick up 500 channels from a satellite. It's easy to imagine a time when the growing school and the growing town will meet on the hillside. But the fence around the schoolyard was closed and locked. There is a fence around the watertanks, so no one can get in to unbolt them and no kids can play horseback tag using them for "home."</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jon Rehyner, who was there seven years before me, describes a quiet hamlet where he lived in the old teacher housing in town and walked up the hill to school every morning, crossing the creek on a board. Jack Holterman, who taught decades earlier at the unconsolidated Swims Under School at Badger Creek, has a whole different set of memories. He was the only teacher in a one-room schoolhouse with rooms for living in the back. A highly educated man with a degree in Spanish and an interest in history, Holterman taught shy rural kids who spoke Blackfeet as a first language. His notes on the Blackfeet language have become the first book published by the Piegan Institute. Bob Scriver's students, now retired, come by the studio to say hello when they are in town. Many of them still play their instruments in small pick-up bands. We are a shadowy procession of former teachers.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">None of the kids I taught in Heart Butte has graduated from college yet, but a few have begun to take college classes. Most of them will need several tries, especially if they leave the reservation. Blackfeet Community College makes it easier to get a handhold. About half of the first seventh grade and half of the eighth grade made it through to high school graduation. Nearly all of them have babies. Some are formally married. Quite a few have tried military service, a few washing-out early and others thriving.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One is in a federal penitentiary, serving time for murder. He didn't want his story told here, but I write to him. He says, "Send books." He claims he is writing screenplays and an autobiography, which I hope is true. I remind him that in this decade of his youth, his twenties, he will be eating, sleeping and washing regularly, getting exercise and earning a degree. When he gets out, about the same time I will retire, many of his classmates will be dead and others will be unrecognizable: fat, maimed, fried by drugs or booze, unemployed. This young man may be getting a better deal in prison than his classmates did in public school. It is becoming a national pattern.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">ONE </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">BY ONE</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I do not think of the people in Heart Butte as Indians or Blackfeet, much less as "Hairy Noses." (Enough people in the area were Metis with mustaches that the epithet stuck to the whole community.)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> To me they are individuals. Some of them made me very angry and others made me rejoice. I don't feel neutral about very many of them. We shared intense times and now we are attached.</span></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I remember seeing red-headed Ernest Arrowtop on horseback with a wet new-born calf over the front of his saddle. He was towing the confused new mother with a rope and his face was incandescent with pride. That was the first calf he ever delivered by himself. Ernest was one of my best writers. When the class was assigned to write about what would make Heart Butte better, he found the answer simple: build a rodeo grounds.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I remember being invited to tell a story at a grade-school conference in Browning and choosing the Robert Browning version of The Pied Piper. A few days later a little girl came up to me in the store, tugged my sleeve to get my attention, and asked if I were the lady who told the story about rats. I admitted I was. Producing a little brown rodent folded out of construction paper with a yarn tail, she tucked it into my pocket. She grinned, showing two huge front teeth any rodent would be proud of. Her dark eyes flashed pride and fun.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not all the memories are comfortable. I sat on the gym floor with one of the senior boys, who explained to me that I had ruined his life, and felt my stomach shrink into a knot. It probably wasn't true. This boy's father was talking to me when G. R. McLaughlin announced over the Browning High School speaker system that President Kennedy had been shot. This boy doesn't get along with his father. He hopes to have a better life and I think he will. He was the first to figure out the computers at Heart Butte. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One recent Indian Days I was walking around the dance arbor in the dust and came upon one of my most intransigent students. He had just graduated from high school. “Oh, I’m so pleased!” I exclaimed and shook his hand. He smiled shyly. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Behind Heart Butte School rises the actual Butte itself. It exists because it is of harder rock than whatever once surrounded it. Thrust up in cataclysm, the Rockies were carved by glaciers and are still being worn down by weather until what remains is only the most durable geological structures. Heart Butte has endured. Nature's way is to create extravagantly and then to edit mercilessly. </span></div>
<div style="min-height: 17px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">The people here are numerous right now, but there is erosion and not everyone will survive. Rightly done, education will not lead to extinction but to salvation. We who have taught there keep every student in our hearts. We would not want to choose which to save or which to lose. We can only hope to work towards educational goals that could save us all, the entire planet.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7726203094475014279.post-58517973573195193592013-08-10T12:50:00.002-06:002014-08-28T11:52:49.370-06:00HEART BUTTE SCHOOL YEARBOOK 1990-91<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIbAL3Ta_y6w2dXSUGnDsTTLIxuezC2msQCY-uTmJkPPaR_RloRpEErpzkMjnAqGf0-cFj6q9KTvNj3wgeF6PThjQXv92S6gHY_K7nLna7yxshA8ODXYAgejw2iMG8aVU2A5QrAWyI5fM/s1600/HB440.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIbAL3Ta_y6w2dXSUGnDsTTLIxuezC2msQCY-uTmJkPPaR_RloRpEErpzkMjnAqGf0-cFj6q9KTvNj3wgeF6PThjQXv92S6gHY_K7nLna7yxshA8ODXYAgejw2iMG8aVU2A5QrAWyI5fM/s640/HB440.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_SzspjzZ71yO9lHxMEMp04W4oN8jampZ9T4TnV8jVjXmwqPDu9l3W14BKh_824pRVd668gmc08v_2Zj025nlf6GTVZlF7wRtXgHRXg9vm_RDF3iyb3_CEslmvv8HP3EneTeZN8z61GOA/s1600/HB441.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_SzspjzZ71yO9lHxMEMp04W4oN8jampZ9T4TnV8jVjXmwqPDu9l3W14BKh_824pRVd668gmc08v_2Zj025nlf6GTVZlF7wRtXgHRXg9vm_RDF3iyb3_CEslmvv8HP3EneTeZN8z61GOA/s640/HB441.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJaz8V3pOqYKzxqMSULVNUZ8ZmST-i2K_hm_GLZcl1gIO_QYkzSVaNCl1_LjuBgvoXNWSJA4rHOdsF_6oZf6sSwm2-iwo6AzYyI78c-R3YAEIftRoQcigE9UYWpZnK5NfGt0mN7Y9IJMY/s1600/HB442.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJaz8V3pOqYKzxqMSULVNUZ8ZmST-i2K_hm_GLZcl1gIO_QYkzSVaNCl1_LjuBgvoXNWSJA4rHOdsF_6oZf6sSwm2-iwo6AzYyI78c-R3YAEIftRoQcigE9UYWpZnK5NfGt0mN7Y9IJMY/s640/HB442.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLTME52BZedLIV6Sn_uRGvXotRp46m9ykR3JAUiWhiZF7W5FJO1FEbwAAJu3AEuyIHzHihcdGG_oda940AUlelpqmmqhD2OkGbxvuvWCI-72lYsArw85TNXW3ezuovVpFc1dmFhx_SMg/s1600/HB443.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLTME52BZedLIV6Sn_uRGvXotRp46m9ykR3JAUiWhiZF7W5FJO1FEbwAAJu3AEuyIHzHihcdGG_oda940AUlelpqmmqhD2OkGbxvuvWCI-72lYsArw85TNXW3ezuovVpFc1dmFhx_SMg/s640/HB443.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqTALPFN3hNWAMXnXbyEeMUF9aYDqOCQQMvYUaClrH5z3SErNmD6oMqB4KkoX_yqf6uUo-Lo7EC9GCI_8nOOPxmtPakxPPaYP6m3DFscnjv0FDsDe6r64moJKKxKlyFML-Eho287dFFmc/s1600/HB444.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqTALPFN3hNWAMXnXbyEeMUF9aYDqOCQQMvYUaClrH5z3SErNmD6oMqB4KkoX_yqf6uUo-Lo7EC9GCI_8nOOPxmtPakxPPaYP6m3DFscnjv0FDsDe6r64moJKKxKlyFML-Eho287dFFmc/s640/HB444.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrNWZjM88wJvcMruC1BrLqQE4PrE88ei_tmklug1MkQJMQaMOACU1wo4esSFc6SGRd2uP0XDA5QnA_9cDiHo-4qV-xWyaC1bMJWECrA8Az02novGBygn8mlzs9-ASydWzQct8YJozEeI/s1600/HB446.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrNWZjM88wJvcMruC1BrLqQE4PrE88ei_tmklug1MkQJMQaMOACU1wo4esSFc6SGRd2uP0XDA5QnA_9cDiHo-4qV-xWyaC1bMJWECrA8Az02novGBygn8mlzs9-ASydWzQct8YJozEeI/s640/HB446.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKYliJRE45srCzxGt_MVDbL7WfvMr0UJnJqjRv2M_THpm7Fs8mHcmyZQ_8Ym5JCceQhjl1YKnJeGms_6MAKLzwwKpKU4_XuZgpBEpOvLI7BHoDCOkFJQrjXa0UPSqJPYPtMpvCHTrfX6A/s1600/HB447.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKYliJRE45srCzxGt_MVDbL7WfvMr0UJnJqjRv2M_THpm7Fs8mHcmyZQ_8Ym5JCceQhjl1YKnJeGms_6MAKLzwwKpKU4_XuZgpBEpOvLI7BHoDCOkFJQrjXa0UPSqJPYPtMpvCHTrfX6A/s640/HB447.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGHtunKnIPGRF8WyVIToaiQx3o-qSJIM7D53i1kr66FN61-_dcuchpHgDBtwfvIDaM-z08tXL4zvd9Qcs-b-RgaDDnYhu7uJB7yydosvW23FRYKjRrXdod6sDEwbiUwZTKXCb8GhommM/s1600/HB448.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGHtunKnIPGRF8WyVIToaiQx3o-qSJIM7D53i1kr66FN61-_dcuchpHgDBtwfvIDaM-z08tXL4zvd9Qcs-b-RgaDDnYhu7uJB7yydosvW23FRYKjRrXdod6sDEwbiUwZTKXCb8GhommM/s640/HB448.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvj2dlWe7BdUNCYnO44kgysJlUUXiUmcnnwksnO6hxfO4gxetUvJYHurtNE2bffQf8-744C6kJPJLZW7ZaZxXn4j6KUOquQwo0DTW2QrFPlH7c1OEia3tgOSS3QmfrtJ19oxNt7jwjMBM/s1600/HB449.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvj2dlWe7BdUNCYnO44kgysJlUUXiUmcnnwksnO6hxfO4gxetUvJYHurtNE2bffQf8-744C6kJPJLZW7ZaZxXn4j6KUOquQwo0DTW2QrFPlH7c1OEia3tgOSS3QmfrtJ19oxNt7jwjMBM/s640/HB449.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgni-tt56NtFAXIVwBeia8ICkJvkmKyooFssP6Yd72QRptwpL6b7W_cNPM1qK4f5Fze6-JrFlBSJ5EmSIhF0RZ9Nzum2MliLfvf-zGJt8w4u4RixrmIxPKO16yxua2Jja9LK072qUQV_0M/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgni-tt56NtFAXIVwBeia8ICkJvkmKyooFssP6Yd72QRptwpL6b7W_cNPM1qK4f5Fze6-JrFlBSJ5EmSIhF0RZ9Nzum2MliLfvf-zGJt8w4u4RixrmIxPKO16yxua2Jja9LK072qUQV_0M/s640/3.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgomFDVBgp3RPE2p-05Wr-hnMHK68ZDlou0Ir5qYYMp64eRddYJYa6reBCvZSh6fKj5mk8mRcwzQDu771TjSDBTNoXwReExIMMU2VNmEOh7GnZdEQAQh-F2kQJekD1Duk1hIie1dE379_M/s1600/FOURTH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgomFDVBgp3RPE2p-05Wr-hnMHK68ZDlou0Ir5qYYMp64eRddYJYa6reBCvZSh6fKj5mk8mRcwzQDu771TjSDBTNoXwReExIMMU2VNmEOh7GnZdEQAQh-F2kQJekD1Duk1hIie1dE379_M/s640/FOURTH.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGaa6dmtU5JUmkv5FXkDr8_Cm7nYUUVTYNjycc57ZmFjsyqlMmPvvkrYRnL4W-pgYiiSb_A2ao78CAEmQ6TXZ4MajrylmtTt5-aWVQD4gHiAKgUYz2WSxOlCArjVogqbVE1qxODorV1zs/s1600/FIVEA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGaa6dmtU5JUmkv5FXkDr8_Cm7nYUUVTYNjycc57ZmFjsyqlMmPvvkrYRnL4W-pgYiiSb_A2ao78CAEmQ6TXZ4MajrylmtTt5-aWVQD4gHiAKgUYz2WSxOlCArjVogqbVE1qxODorV1zs/s640/FIVEA.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVBcO-tpWjv26fILgXZ0iGPDJXQdqFjTBYliV0IiIS7AvpoX6MVibhN6R48O1zB3_OjU0fg7M2UaYsxheTKeMBd4BS1OGx_QyyUYMzngZ4K15PTwdSSB17wvetLIM8t15V1TBNSaoezM/s1600/FIVEB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBVBcO-tpWjv26fILgXZ0iGPDJXQdqFjTBYliV0IiIS7AvpoX6MVibhN6R48O1zB3_OjU0fg7M2UaYsxheTKeMBd4BS1OGx_QyyUYMzngZ4K15PTwdSSB17wvetLIM8t15V1TBNSaoezM/s640/FIVEB.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx8BiOCNFUMDnQiNp7uPOUek7vAXMWLGumLgyGhwQ1M3m25pUNF9TuGdqP-JaI4G7XS9SCnB3QxauJnAbSf3DumgPqoGbQM_66-nnzXEtueoet9daarWMn5Tpui8PjOLaH3rcvzILDrNs/s1600/SX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx8BiOCNFUMDnQiNp7uPOUek7vAXMWLGumLgyGhwQ1M3m25pUNF9TuGdqP-JaI4G7XS9SCnB3QxauJnAbSf3DumgPqoGbQM_66-nnzXEtueoet9daarWMn5Tpui8PjOLaH3rcvzILDrNs/s640/SX.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOJmq0mAS8-rJgEJe2w_vHjvvCsUhtUupmu0Sw5AuyYA_1PWvKpQ2mRCQ2R29MRYqu_7TYqL9XqIbTtO5GaeVMcUEambwIflql0BNl9ksdG5bV8keYyjsNzL9mTufQYBovD8AiV6aULRI/s1600/SEVEN.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOJmq0mAS8-rJgEJe2w_vHjvvCsUhtUupmu0Sw5AuyYA_1PWvKpQ2mRCQ2R29MRYqu_7TYqL9XqIbTtO5GaeVMcUEambwIflql0BNl9ksdG5bV8keYyjsNzL9mTufQYBovD8AiV6aULRI/s640/SEVEN.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsCkUThkG_f0BAt71QgYDKj9nxH_OcO7C6ZqAYQoxM9xqwoRlFew130gSQyi_hC8MvYH5Wb0QCS1kZTj_xhDPAaQo0Rn2omBF0gChM2xp_uz342u0XjkL0LQQeJ9E-3q6QPjjWRGS0ZSs/s1600/EIGHT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsCkUThkG_f0BAt71QgYDKj9nxH_OcO7C6ZqAYQoxM9xqwoRlFew130gSQyi_hC8MvYH5Wb0QCS1kZTj_xhDPAaQo0Rn2omBF0gChM2xp_uz342u0XjkL0LQQeJ9E-3q6QPjjWRGS0ZSs/s640/EIGHT.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjprhHUiBQnDnLAO-jWH3cALgGxhlk44gLnvCp4gC-WOTY5_BZm5vmjlw_EW0rWNN0OOwnD65ROmGYYQ-GudZ81qAkbjeclz5vK7nGg9Hup41HLMFldkMT_ahFHxZ34_euBEZ6HUDxM1zg/s1600/HB457.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjprhHUiBQnDnLAO-jWH3cALgGxhlk44gLnvCp4gC-WOTY5_BZm5vmjlw_EW0rWNN0OOwnD65ROmGYYQ-GudZ81qAkbjeclz5vK7nGg9Hup41HLMFldkMT_ahFHxZ34_euBEZ6HUDxM1zg/s640/HB457.jpg" height="640" width="460" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtIyHcq-BDT0y0aMmNqpqn5vMtXFViN3loUSI-FTryNcaqMAX0xExtcmgbbrujNkbIYGrNO8LLAjQLx_gdKdHcLmTY9wVw0WN5YKnV38prJFlP7GTxabmnRgSNh5rv0nC0d0z3mXnJPVo/s1600/HB458.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtIyHcq-BDT0y0aMmNqpqn5vMtXFViN3loUSI-FTryNcaqMAX0xExtcmgbbrujNkbIYGrNO8LLAjQLx_gdKdHcLmTY9wVw0WN5YKnV38prJFlP7GTxabmnRgSNh5rv0nC0d0z3mXnJPVo/s640/HB458.jpg" height="640" width="465" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirKhOf6G5WWsMmCBaKNhf9UqiWhUJry2Uceb_6yL8YSyJ8A7OYL0e8GpYu4V6VGoRRj4Ce1a131pDCDnpVnv6P-xWMVYr9ybMc31boMO9rClmZmLP0STuBpaSTFxZv6D3P_vb4CbYn5co/s1600/HB459.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirKhOf6G5WWsMmCBaKNhf9UqiWhUJry2Uceb_6yL8YSyJ8A7OYL0e8GpYu4V6VGoRRj4Ce1a131pDCDnpVnv6P-xWMVYr9ybMc31boMO9rClmZmLP0STuBpaSTFxZv6D3P_vb4CbYn5co/s640/HB459.jpg" height="640" width="444" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPi0Vf6JdIGVMcgrClSwl6IOdHbioHzU4ypLC7pWff1TsBK0kgKKBCyvyNOK0oWpMd00frLhS9avWwCivi4UlbijDjI_IzCT77swjXdS-Kelup4P2jGOzbzz1EGv7o0sbkcjSPRQvhSN0/s1600/HB461.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPi0Vf6JdIGVMcgrClSwl6IOdHbioHzU4ypLC7pWff1TsBK0kgKKBCyvyNOK0oWpMd00frLhS9avWwCivi4UlbijDjI_IzCT77swjXdS-Kelup4P2jGOzbzz1EGv7o0sbkcjSPRQvhSN0/s640/HB461.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYe4PvxcmyMK1g1EleXz7bBQlXbD1p_4NOEm_bhK4A0uU-8BR1rKWjN6PQO_IrgXu5Wk_39X_qweWYX5h6_a1Cvo6Qb5Qf2w7lmoIMT8nM5_8DslVgkFrPCjXulptrcvUMl6j_4nUMJh0/s1600/HB462.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYe4PvxcmyMK1g1EleXz7bBQlXbD1p_4NOEm_bhK4A0uU-8BR1rKWjN6PQO_IrgXu5Wk_39X_qweWYX5h6_a1Cvo6Qb5Qf2w7lmoIMT8nM5_8DslVgkFrPCjXulptrcvUMl6j_4nUMJh0/s640/HB462.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghZp3_DSN2w_F5DIvp_dPrCTEcKxZH-lnPVbaIhG-lXuD2S2MsGofbY7PHE7OxdLxvn-r0eoTQwTvrKf_9TmLAO4-s3C8Ifx6roDTNzvooLVlOfwwOFq2HD4NeeIQlFOc2jlnMoLKyXWo/s1600/HB463.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghZp3_DSN2w_F5DIvp_dPrCTEcKxZH-lnPVbaIhG-lXuD2S2MsGofbY7PHE7OxdLxvn-r0eoTQwTvrKf_9TmLAO4-s3C8Ifx6roDTNzvooLVlOfwwOFq2HD4NeeIQlFOc2jlnMoLKyXWo/s640/HB463.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhONa7I0BYvcrCIt1z0GFXQ1MxD9-OQxCreYUtm7Tr6spJH7XaazlPrqmDL4w0f866xYO3e7uzO87binnMvKLNIlqJgVOBq1hxdswGB4dfDb53bFwwaYcF3OzCPE1VquIoGTgCbWWte0cE/s1600/HB464.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhONa7I0BYvcrCIt1z0GFXQ1MxD9-OQxCreYUtm7Tr6spJH7XaazlPrqmDL4w0f866xYO3e7uzO87binnMvKLNIlqJgVOBq1hxdswGB4dfDb53bFwwaYcF3OzCPE1VquIoGTgCbWWte0cE/s640/HB464.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6DJ0Ca9tLTiMf6InL_oW6oe9JVCU-RvNm6nCCJWrP5QkNhaSfciYzsHqcgwyVt4IjrJ-ND-ZiYWVUkmmHHrbTYRH2DqmSzFlXvH4oCa5fCoIieQDhox-BMiDUO8FC9TR4ihxXd6jK58/s1600/HB465.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6DJ0Ca9tLTiMf6InL_oW6oe9JVCU-RvNm6nCCJWrP5QkNhaSfciYzsHqcgwyVt4IjrJ-ND-ZiYWVUkmmHHrbTYRH2DqmSzFlXvH4oCa5fCoIieQDhox-BMiDUO8FC9TR4ihxXd6jK58/s640/HB465.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0QfyIGJDd6o-6uYGY2U5TqY_s8CucF5hnfKFqnKuSYJQVf5xwUHd6AJmYj14NdFp0dW5GUdxRMpnuvDpGf-puP-k3DuGL_KAHEBPHsXkF-xTqtrkPv0ZK2waiBaOUYcgcAnrce6jiTFM/s1600/HB466.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0QfyIGJDd6o-6uYGY2U5TqY_s8CucF5hnfKFqnKuSYJQVf5xwUHd6AJmYj14NdFp0dW5GUdxRMpnuvDpGf-puP-k3DuGL_KAHEBPHsXkF-xTqtrkPv0ZK2waiBaOUYcgcAnrce6jiTFM/s640/HB466.jpg" height="640" width="496" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRh-n8T20lw6iOEOqivh7-4B5X45aDKYwtu9aGKpby9R6rgI-61q6kv5rz0q03Oigh8j0bQ02Gy_xfBhJK3ilDuh5gwXnXQumwgz4TAWMeiDey7llSedZVNDvoHT8dbCZ4QfwL_0zenOI/s1600/HB467.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRh-n8T20lw6iOEOqivh7-4B5X45aDKYwtu9aGKpby9R6rgI-61q6kv5rz0q03Oigh8j0bQ02Gy_xfBhJK3ilDuh5gwXnXQumwgz4TAWMeiDey7llSedZVNDvoHT8dbCZ4QfwL_0zenOI/s640/HB467.jpg" height="640" width="489" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjAeNhTh6orP9lh97BUvY6stWRcTlCd0cNe459D4FcRisg-cc551oR9uhdguQ7wUyeoOd9u8jCVZU0nt04qICF7QTHltMvgCEa0DMydIy6PZHeQDFRn73K036b61ItklVXj1B1BY9ZqBM/s1600/HB468.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjAeNhTh6orP9lh97BUvY6stWRcTlCd0cNe459D4FcRisg-cc551oR9uhdguQ7wUyeoOd9u8jCVZU0nt04qICF7QTHltMvgCEa0DMydIy6PZHeQDFRn73K036b61ItklVXj1B1BY9ZqBM/s640/HB468.jpg" height="640" width="486" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7DJp-3H9yNK-u43HoNvaQbLlPHAM87sHa8oKFCk_fJ2LCZNulgdBF_wIvsUSAkT7_WETxPSyBfbUAjGMpu67GDpa3_6vyOPZzpy0TOny3W5M9Mz1s5wVEDMKi6xb6cRRHsDgslwzML7M/s1600/HB469.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7DJp-3H9yNK-u43HoNvaQbLlPHAM87sHa8oKFCk_fJ2LCZNulgdBF_wIvsUSAkT7_WETxPSyBfbUAjGMpu67GDpa3_6vyOPZzpy0TOny3W5M9Mz1s5wVEDMKi6xb6cRRHsDgslwzML7M/s640/HB469.jpg" height="640" width="486" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0