THE ORIGIN OF THE PISKUN BUFFALO JUMPS
We are shaped by where we are. What are the forces of the east slope of the Rocky Mountains in the decade counted as 2010–20 and earlier that make us who we are by interacting with us? This is one way to explain who the Blackfeet tribal members are. I propose that anyone who lives here a long time and survives, particularly those who had ancestors who did the same, have become “Blackfeet” in a sense.
Those who leave and don’t remember, have stopped being Blackfeet. This is quite apart from the idea of the tribe as a corporation which allots shares according to provenance (inheritance) rather than “blood.” DNA definitions of tribal inheritance would be horrendous because they would break apart the known order of who is and isn’t included. DNA helixes contain so many genes and so many of them are about the management of a human body, which partly depends upon the steady flow of new mutations and dropping of old ones, that it is not possible to define tribes. Anyway, one expert believes that any family line that has been on this continent more than maybe nine generations probably includes indigenous people.
Sorry, Oprah. Going by her appearance and personality, I figure it’s likely that she descended from the people of the west coast of Africa, because they were the most often captured and made into slaves in America. They tend to be roly-poly and have soft features. When they get enough to eat, they become fat because they use calories very efficiently since in their circumstances in Africa they might not get enough to eat. But they tend to be smart because they were coastal and more likely to be traders, which empowers smart people.
Back to Blackfeet on the east slope of the Rockies. For millennia they lived on bison. At first they were lean and smaller because of hunting them on foot with dogs. Once they learned how to manage buffalo jumps, they grew big. Properly using a piskun involves a lot of people to drive buffalo and process them right down to boiling their bones. This meant careful planning and a high degree of cooperation, coming together for the event, then separating into extended-family based groups that traveled together apart from others. They could join to work together.
The extended families still shape the population. Traveling has been blocked by the rez boundary, but persists anyway. Sometimes it is a circumstance like war industries, and other times government policies move people to cities. Sometimes there’s just no opportunity in a confined space with a harsh climate. But some people have an almost inherited yen to travel. This is a source of growth and adaptation.
But wait — there’s more. “Driving Bison and Blackfoot Science.pdf” https://ufv-ca.academia.edu/Chanelle Marlor” is a paper available through Academia.edu. A professor at the University of Fraser Valley in BC, Marlor is interested in “Explaining knowledge pluralisms; the intertwining of culture and materiality,” a paper that appears on PubMed. Her abstract for this second paper states in part:
“A wide variety of theories explain how social factors influence and shape knowledges. Other theories describe how materialism and social elements coalesce. Largely still missing, however, is an argument that substantially addresses both culture and materiality . . . I develop an explanation of how and why (useful) knowledge pluralisms exist. Using a process-based ontology for theorizing about materialism, I explore how conceptual frameworks and knowledge-making practices become intertwined with materiality. I argue that this intertwining allows for the creation of knowledge while simultaneously resulting in potentially differing knowledges about the same subject.”
Her basic premise about how the People learned to use buffalo jumps a thousand years before there was science or literacy was through close observation and reflection — maybe even some discussion — about how wolves panic buffalo enough to send them over a cliff, since an individual wolf could only bring down a calf or somehow crippled single animal. In other words, this was cross-species intelligence shared and Marlor even suggests that wolves may have collaborated with humans, watching the elaborate preparations for creating scare-alleys from piles of brush and even benefitting from the eventual discard of unused parts, though there was little that wasn’t eaten or crafted by the People. Dogs, of course, were a “second tribe” (the concept of Robert Hall) who participated with both other species and even interbred with wolves.
The really old-time stories say that it was Napi who taught the people about the piskuns and since one of the incarnations of Napi is Coyote, this is easy to believe. In reflection the land itself participates in this harvest of the very herds it sustained, not just by providing the cliffs but also by supplying long valleys of good grass where sub-groups of bison could graze and doze, becoming less wary and forming the right number of animals to run over the bluff at one time.
Marlor read the literature about the jumps, some of which is by people who visited us in the Sixties, all white educated writers who illustrate other “pluralistic” ways of looking at one phenomenon: Schaefer, Dyck, Kehoe. When “Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump” interpretive center, a World Heritage site of outstanding quality, was developed it included both oral Napi stories and academic written material.
In 1962 Bob Scriver and I rode in the annual roundup at the Moiese Bison Range. Direct experience is another dimension. As one rancher remarked, “You can drive buffalo anywhere the buffalo want to go.” In “Bronze Inside and Out,” I described how the guys at the range were reluctant to let us ride — I was the only woman and they didn’t know Bob — but he was “famous”. They assigned us a distant spot and hoped we’d only be backup. But the stampeded herd came straight at us.
The cowboys headed them off and hoped to drive them around the bottom of a high ridge, but instead the herd went straight up the side and over the top. I was assigned to go around the bottom in case of stragglers but was alarmed to realize that the whole herd had circled around and was again headed straight for me. I tried to pull my horse — an old brown relay-racer raised by the Bullshoe family at Heart Butte — off to the side, but he had been used with cattle and had other ideas. He was going to herd these dratted animals. So I screamed and waved my lariat, while the buffs gave me the side-eye and went on around. Later everyone had a fine time mocking my shrill treble screams. Experience is a valid source of information. But writing about experience can go anywhere.
