WHITE WOMEN LOVE BLACKFEET WRITING

The title of the talk linked below is “The Geography of the Blackfoot People” and it was given by Brian (Barney) Reeves in the Lethbridge College library. It depicts via slides places along the 49th parallel and into Glacier National Park. Barney tells the stories attached to each place and what the significance and results are until this day. He is very familiar with the terrain, since he was born in Lethbridge (about 130 miles north of Valier) and lived in Waterton Lakes, which is the Canadian side of Glacier National Park.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFX5Yyt2km8&list=PLq3FHSyK-fcwU90awaPR8OrLCJcyf1Bi9

Reeves begins his talk by referring to George Bird Grinnell, Walter McClintock, and James Willard Schultz. These three men wrote early books about the Blackfeet that became very popular and defined how the people were seen at the end of the 19th century. They used the stories of the people, but either they or the editors left out quite a bit to make them more appealing to the readers of their magazines and books.

These readers were white, often female, mostly well-heeled, and had a penchant for stories about tourist-worthy places, which is characteristic of Victorians. Indeed, the genre goes back to the first tall-masked ships bringing back tales from trading partners around the world. When I called up “Blackfeet” on an early version of Google, what I got in return was “tourist places.” Schultz appealed to people who loved Westerns — battles and so on. The success of these men have led too many people to think that identifying something as “Indian” would increase sales and therefore value, but the main way to define these books was mostly by Napi stories.

Let’s look at the steps in creating a book. Someone creates a “manuscript” or narrative. Early storymakers were oral rather than being writers, but perhaps someone came along and wrote them down, then claimed them as their own and looked for publishers, which are really the key to the early books. At their own cost they transformed one version into many by printing them, binding them, distributing them, promoting them. It was up to them to decide what would make a profit, how many copies to print, which stores to send them to, how to get them reviewed, and to pay as little as possible to the authors.

Part of the author’s pay depended on making themselves seem unique, exotic, privileged, and insightful. Maybe a little naughty. The white people loved reading about tribal people that way. Another way that sold well was writing like “Stay Away, Joe,” disreputable, funny, and poverty-stricken Tobacco Road, Dogpatch, sorts of stories. The writer who was most read by other Indians was John Tatsey, “the law” in Heart Butte, who wrote a scandalous column in the Glacier Reporter about his culprits. Important people thought these were true and funny, so Mike Mansfield had them read into the Congressional Record. Someone gathered them into a book called “Black Moccasin.”

Now everything is changed. Publishing businesses have collapsed right and left, partly because they’ve lost track of their audience, but also because of the cyber-revolution. Anyone with access to a computer can put their writing online directly in front of the public. But it’s likely to be raw, unedited, and hard to find.

Nevertheless, the rez People who could never afford books and had no bookstores anyway, can now read anything, even things in their own language. But it’s unclear what to write. The Napi stories have been told in many versions. James Welch wrote mystical rez stories about young men that those white women loved. When he wrote about Indians in prison or a detective story, the books didn’t sell. So he went back to the Grinnell/McClintock/Schultz pattern of the 19th century.

In the Seventies the principal G.R. McLaughlin — before the computer — had the idea of using copy machines to make books and created a big fat bursting book of copies from every piece of writing about the Blackfeet he could find. They were a hodge-podge and they were strictly illegal, but it a grand sweeping gathering of things to read that were relevant. He himself never wrote anything.

Today a lot of indigenous writing is influenced by the time the government tried to get everyone to move to the city but then abandoned them there so that they interwove with Blacks and others like Maori or SE Asia islanders. Black culture became powerful in those years and people from tribes like the Blackfeet picked up on their music and styles. Even white people got pulled into this vibrant ghetto world. It has never diminished. But it has never been entirely assimilated into the Rez mindset either.

This is partly because reservations, esp. the big ones, are multiple: some rodeo folks, some small business people, some excellent athletes, health recovery people, etc. In some ways Thomas King on the Canadian side has done a better job of mix and match but, alas, he is honored but not enrolled. Of course, he had a Cherokee grandmother. For a while he lived in Lethbridge. His Wikipedia entry is pretty interesting and kicks up a lot of issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_King_(novelist)

So what kind of writing might the indigenous people themselves want to read? What might make them write their own stories, maybe collaborating as the Heart Butte 7th graders did? (“One Windy Day”) How would they find each other?

How would they find out “how” to write their own way. Maybe they won’t write novels. Maybe they will write banter, like what appears on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe it will be the stories of their families. Maybe it will be poems. They will learn according to what they read. So much of teaching rez kids has been about conformity and not just conformity to standard English across the world, but conformity to the standards of Montana — that’s what gets the praise and prizes. Maybe conformity to just what’s standard in Starr School or what people like to read in the ranches along Badger Creek. Where do they get “permission” and why would they need it?

Some will leap to video and there the possibilities are even broader. Puppets? I had a student once who invented three characters: a stapler, a scissors, and a fork. They were in a big argument, jittering and turning. How did that fork get there? We’ll never know. The vid never quite got made.

So much we’ll never know unless someone writes it down or videos it. Think how much we’ve learned about dogs from Robert Hall. And learned Blackfeet at the same time. People want to learn Blackfeet and the spoken language is easier than written. Unless you can find something you really want to read.