EDUCATION NOTES ON THE REZ

When DRK and Dorothy Still Smoking planned the Piegan Institute, one branch was to be dedicated to finding and bringing back all the hundreds of studies of Blackfeet that had been done by academics over the years. They were pretty successful and gathered many.

As the years went by and other tribal members needed references for papers for their own courses, they came to borrow what they could, promising passionately to bring them back. They didn’t. Now they are dispersed everywhere, maybe lost. The same thing happened to books I loaned.

I stopped loaning anything. I made people sit at a table in my house and look at what I had. DRK’s policy was Asian or pacifist — to just accept and forgive.

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There is a gap between a society that values only what keeps them alive because they are always in need, so they hoard whatever they can, hide it if necessary — and a society with a communal sense of information, literature and research. These guys would happily share sweats, weed and music, but hide some college thesis about their people.

They defended themselves by saying the researchers got it wrong anyway. They often copied and violated copyright law, saying “it’s only print. Print is everywhere. Anyone can have print.”

The thinking, the composition, the genre, the structure of the piece and its context, were not anything they could see so no wonder they couldn’t learn to do these things themselves. It took a while to get them to understand, even to see. They didn’t think these things existed.

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I ended up reading books out loud. Over the years I must have read “When the Legends Die” half a dozen times. I read Ivan Doig’s autobiography, “This House of Sky”, in part of which he saved a herd of sheep headed for a buffalo-jump near Heart Butte. It was during a terrible thunderstorm and he fell in the mud and swore to go to college. I asked him why he never wrote about the Heart Butte people and he said it was up to James Welch.

After that, if he saw me, he left. But he did write a book about a Black man in Montana, “Prairie Nocturne”. Nobody bought it. He went back to pinafore epics. Ten years later, one of the Weatherwax boys who had seemed to sleep through my reading was able to ask particulars about Doig’s autobiography because he heard it.

I bought a dozen books of maps: atlases and Rand McNally highway maps, and I stapled maps of the terrain to the walls which were drywall never painted because we were in the partitioned former shop. The same kids who did not read would spend hours tracing those maps and studying the photos in the dozen grizzly books I bought.

I wondered what the difference was between print and maps. It was probably experience, many repeated episodes of drawing with a stick in some mud to tell a friend where to find elk — without many words and no print. If they knew there were books that told how to find elk on the east slope, they might read them.

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When I was supposed to be evaluated by the administration, I was lucky. It was the most literate of them, the “sports director” who had once taught history and read my time-line of history book while he babysat detention in my room. So I taught that hour in a way I had never done before: I made a graph of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner and gave them a barrage of facts. They’d never heard of these guys.

“You never taught that way before!” they objected, incredulous. I passed the evaluation. He was just another football coach but his age group saw those three authors in magazines all the time. He saw them as a proper thing to teach. He was a ponderous man, as big athletes tend to become, but basically still intelligent. Someone told me much later that he was in serious financial trouble, turned down for a big loan meant to keep his house somewhere else.

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In the end it was the woman who chaired the school board who fired me. She had rigged it with the parents of a student who opposed me. Both parents had been students of mine in the early Sixties. Their student had been removed from their home because of abuse, but no administrators knew that.

Neither did they know about an underground ceremonial connection dating back just as far, nor would they have understood or been impressed by it. I knew far more than I could say about unsolved murder cases and stalking. It was knowledge they could not afford to know. It scared them. They demanded my resignation. I went to the front desk and typed, “I resign.” Signed it.

That superintendent had trouble with a defiant boy who tried to defend his younger brother, who was a victim of fetal alcohol abuse. The superintendent bragged that he had that aggressive boy hand-cuffed and removed by an officer. He was twelve.

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