Along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
June Blog
This month: News; Museum of the Plains Indian;
the Baker Massacre on the Marias.
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June
News:
From the 6/12/08 Billings Gazette: Brown criticizes lease delays Republican gubernatorial candidate Roy Brown criticized Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer Wednesday after the state land agency postponed selling some oil and gas leases along the Rocky Mountain Front. There is little reason to explore on the Front; there is so much to loose for so little to gain. Explore for gas and oil where it makes sense - in already discovered fields - and make them more efficient. Conserve. Look to alternate energies. From the 6/12/08 Helena IR: Seven Lazy P Ranch owners offer to sell land to state One of the Rocky Mountain Front’s most spectacular private ranches, the Seven Lazy P, could become Montana’s newest state park. Joe Maurier, parks division administrator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said Chuck and Sharon Blixrud has been in the guest ranch business for about 50 years and are ready for a break. This is huge potential to preserve grizzly bear habitat and travel corridors at the mouth of the Teton River Canyon. There is no more recent news as to how the FWP Commission initially voted in the meeting about acquiring the ranch. From the 6/11/08 Helena IR: Rocky Mountain Front leases deferred The state land agency has deferred selling a batch of oil and gas leases along Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, after conservation groups and state wildlife officials raised concerns over drilling. Mary Sexton, DNRC director, said that “This gives some folks time to look at alternatives,” she said. “We didn’t want to rush anything where people didn’t have any input.” The race is now on to find an exchange or some kind of buyout of those leases, something like what happened in the past with the federal leases. At least there's a chance for a trade or buyout up front rather than possible buyouts being years down the road after the leases have already been granted. From the 6/04/08 Cut Bank Pioneer Press: 'This is not bear country' - Grizzly surprises rancher "It's the first time I've ever seen a bear out here. This is not bear country," said J.C. Seewald, whose family owns and operates Landslide Farms northwest of Cut Bank. "There's no way he was more surprised to see me than I was to see him," said Seewald of the encounter last week. Not much suprise that a sub-adult male bear was that far east of the Front. Last month a bear was trapped 10 miles west of Wolf Creek. The population of bears on the Front is growing and sub-adults are moving east.
I'm wondering if Seewald will be charged with an illegal kill, because he indicates that the bear didn't charge him the second time. From the 6/03/08 Missoulian: Fight over Rocky Mountain Front reignited with lease auction The decades-long fight over Montana's Rocky Mountain Front is heating up again, with wildlife officials and private conservation groups seeking to stop the leasing of state-owned land for oil and gas development. The Museum of the Plains Indian and the Baker Massacre on the Marias. The Falls Creek Grizzly never traveled north as far as the Blackfeet Nation, but the history and stories of the Blackfeet are an essential part of the story of grizzly bears and people living on the Rocky Mountain Front. I've talked a few times with David Dragonfly, acting curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, asking about bear-related art and objects in the archives, and I stopped in the museum last month. (David Dragonfly is a well known Blackfeet artist; see some of his artwork). The Museum of the Plains Indian has one of the most important collections of traditional beadwork, outfits and art in the world, and the interior of the building itself has murals painted in 1941 by Victor Pepion which show stories of a Blackfeet buffalo hunt. (Here's a Missoulian article about the museum from 2006. If you visit the museum, remember that photography is not allowed out of respect for the artwork and design ownerships.) Which brings me to this, because I want to fit this in somewhere: in ranching country, you call, you walk in and introduce yourself. Jump in and help with the work, whatever it might be that day. Join in the talk. In Indian country, I like to listen more than anything else, see what I am offered, and take my time. I'm a stranger, and I try to keep my mouth shut and just listen. I've listened for hours while tribal members have told me about how much well known turn of the century anthropologists like Walter McClintock, Clark Wissler and others missed when they recorded Blackfeet stories and ceremonies; how the ideas of oil and gas exploration are contentious on traditional and sacred lands because of the average 70% unemployment rate and the cyclical nature of work such as fire fighting, hurricane relief and agriculture; how traditional bear stories are still as real as they were hundreds of years ago. And how there is an endless number of people who come to the reservation wanting something and leaving little. (Which has made me conscious of wanting to avoid being one of those.) One winter, I went to a memorial service for the Baker Massacre (also known as the Massacre on the Marias) at the edge of a canyon of the Marias River, southeast of the town of Shelby, Montana. January 23rd, 1870, was a cold winter morning when a U.S. Army unit under Major Eugene Baker moved on the indian camp on the bend of the river below and left 217 men, women and children dead. The survivors walked 90 miles to Fort Benton in the below zero weather, with few clothes and supplies as the Army had burned what was left of the camp. The site of the massacre was forgotten for many years, and after it was located again in the 1970's with the help of Carol Murray, then a student at Blackfeet Community College working on an historical thesis, there has been a service each year. (James Welch, the late Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer gives a good introduction to the Baker Massacre and tells how he and others found the massacre site in his book Killing Custer.) The day of the service this last January wasn't really winter: it was almost clear and nearly 50 degrees, with high thin, white clouds, and we were knocked around by 60 mph winds out of the west. Chinook weather, it's called - the mid-winter winds that melt the snow. I drove out with an old friend from Blackfeet Community College, following the long line of cars and pickups east towards Cutbank and Shelby, watching the Sweetgrass Hills move past to the north. About a hundred people had come out for the memorial, and most of them were gathered out of the wind on the lee side of their vans and pickups and along the side of a school bus, which brought students out from schools in Browning and from Blackfeet Community College. That day I talked with Jerry Buckley, in his 60's and in his full Army uniform and decorated with medals. Before the memorial service, we had put our heads into the wind and made our way back from the edge of the canyon to the side of the school bus. I said I wasn't used to wind like this, being from the valley town of Missoula. He took it in stride, maybe because the Browning area being one of the windiest places in Montana, where freight trains are blown of their tracks once or twice a year. The Blackfeet have always called this river the Bear River, he told me. Deep cuts from rain and wind have formed gullies and coulees 600 feet down to the flat bottom, where the river curved against the sides and had left the remains of old channels through the years. The canyon is out of the wind of the prairie, and would be a good travel path from the mountains of the Front. Of course, grizzly bears used to live on the prairie, right here, and all the way to what is now North Dakota, and possibly farther east. I had read before that Meriwether Lewis named the river "Maria's" for one of his cousins, assuming the river had no name, which was one of the assumptions of the Corps of Discovery: that all the country they saw was unknown, unnamed and mostly uninhabited. The Blackfeet knew the Bear River had a name and stories connected with it long before our idea of recorded history. Somewhere along the way the plural lost the apostrophe and the pronunciation changed, and now the river is the Marias (Ma-rye-us). Jerry had pointed down into the bottom land of the canyon, and said it had been clear cut in anticipation of the rise of water from the reservoir formed by the Tiber dam, but the water hadn't risen that far because of the drought. Before that, he said, it was a beautiful place, and would have been a good place to camp in the winter, out of the wind and warm from the sun. As far as we could see eastward down the canyon, the winds whipped up slow moving clouds of dust. That's where the camp was that the Army was after, he said. The Army wanted to arrest a group of Blackfeet suspected of killing several whites. But that dawn, the drunken soldiers raided the camp anyway, ignoring their own scouts who said it was the wrong camp, killing Chief Heavy Runner as he waved a treaty document that said safe passage, and 216 other men, women and children. Gathered in a half circle behind the wind break of the bus were school children, college students and teachers, young mothers with babies, kids in hip-hop clothes with Blackfeet designs, elders, singers in traditional outfits, and a few out-of-towners like me. After the elders were seated and wrapped in blankets against the cold, we heard the history of massacre over a loudspeaker, and stories about how the survivors traveled in the winter to the nearest army fort, not knowing if they would be killed, too, when they arrived.
It almost felt like it was raining a little the way the wind blew grit and bits of grass around. We smudged with sweetgrass, and buried pinches of tobacco in the dry grass and dust at our feet after we prayed, for the survivors, for ourselves, for the future. We had loaded 217 rocks in a pick up earlier at the college, and now we formed a line and passed the rocks by hand down over the rim of the canyon. On a little bench below they were arranged in a circle on the ground, open to the east. Then, near noon, and everyone started packing up to leave. I crouched out of the wind behind a pickup and got a photo of the canyon with my cell phone. The scale of the prairie doesn't show, of course, or the feeling you might get on the edge of the canyon after hearing the stories. But I was told in all tragedy there has to be some lightheartedness. Someone said the wind was 80 mph when they drove through Shelby, and we joked about it being a good day to drive to North Dakota; you could get there on half a tank of gas. We round danced to the drum and singers and laughed and tried not to step on the cactus. The elders laughed about earlier when they had to ask around the grade schools kids for a butane lighter for the sweetgrass. The Baker Massacre is to be remembered yearly as an important event in the history of the Blackfeet, they said, but not as a weight holding back the future of their children. Back to The Plains Indian Museum: David told me about the new Glacier Peaks casino next door, a business venture by the tribe that will bring in hundreds of jobs, about his own artwork in the upcoming Charlie Russell Museum art show in Great Falls. The most important news was the museum itself: it has been on the federal budget chopping block for several years. Operated by the The Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the Department of the Interior, the museum and two others - the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Oklahoma, and the Sioux Indian Museum in South Dakota - are already underfunded to properly maintain buildings and collections, oversee the enforcement of laws against fake Indian Art, and promote genuine artwork. The collections are crammed into the building. The roof leaks. We talked in a back storage room that serves as his office. If the museum closed, no one is sure what would happen to all of the art and objects - everything might disappear to a museum back east, and I say disappear because if the collection isn't in Browning, it won't be accessible to the Blackfeet. I had called because I had found references in some anthropological articles to a bear knife being in the collections. Bear knives were once numerous among the nations of the Blackfeet Confederacy but now are thought to only exist in museums. (The Confederacy are the North Pikuni, the Kainai Nation, and the Siksika Nation in Alberta, and the South Pikuni - Blackfeet - in Montana.) Made with a blade of metal traded from whites and the jaw bone of a grizzly bear for the handle, a bear knife was one of the most powerful ceremonial objects. Walter McClintock, Clark Wissler and others who spent years with the Blackfeet recorded accounts of bear knife holders and transfer ceremonies. I wanted to find out if there was a knife at the museum, and if I could see it. David said he could look up the catalog number, but it would be next week, because the computer was down. If the knife was here and not out on loan I would have to call his manager at the Arts and Crafts Board, in Washington, D.C., in order to get permission to examine it. I said that was fine. I called D.C. the next week and talked with his manager, explaining what I was working on. I said I wasn't in a hurry to look at the knife, and he said that was good, because the museum was understaffed and backed up on work. David called a few days later. He said a bear knife is in the collections, but it is a bundle, not a knife by itself. He said right away that he would like it if I didn't want to open the bundle. I said right away I didn't want to open it. From the academic standpoint, a bundle is a bag made of hide containing animal skins and parts, dried plants and other objects, each represented with songs and stories. In the traditional sense from what I can understand and what concerns me more, a bundle contains the world. A bundle can be properly opened only when each knot is sung off the bundle and each animal or plant inside is in turn, sung into life. I once went to a bundle opening, and I don't want to say much about it, except it was an all day ceremony and was mesmerizing in its ceremony and importance. (Walter McClintock, Clark Wissler as well as others document turn of the century bundle openings in their books). The bear knife being a in bundle was something I didn't expect, even though I have expected boundaries, and it's a boundary I won't push. I'm interested in what I can learn about the Blackfeet and bear traditions, but what I can't learn is just as important to know. There's no need for me to want to open a bundle in the wrong way. In more recent years and books, bundles have been opened and photographed in highly detailed fashions. There is much disagreement concerning the ideas that a bundle without an owner and without its songs is still alive; if a bundle opened and photographed is then dead, having lost the importance of privilege; if bundles in archives can be brought back to life on the outside. Maybe the bear knife bundle will never be opened again. Maybe it is a "dead" bundle, one that is not owned and one for which no one knows the songs. But in my opinion, at least it is in Browning, not hidden away in a museum back east, not lost in a private collection. (Much has happened since the following article was written, but for much more background on bundles and the complex issues involved with museums and the sale and ownership of bundles, see "Troubled Bundles, Troubled Blackfeet: The Travail of Cultural and Religious Renewal" by William Farr, in the fall 1993 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History; and the letters responding to the article in the summer, 1994 issue. May ≈ June ≈ July: Pine Butte Swamp Preserve If you like what you have read, consider a tax-deductible contribution to me
for a box of micro-cassettes for my tape recorder and a stack of reporters notebooks to scribble in.
"Montanans are crying out for relief from skyrocketing gas prices and high utility bills, and the Schweitzer administration just delayed important state natural gas leases in Teton County," said Brown, a Billings senator.
In response, Schweitzer campaign manager Harper Lawson said it's no surprise to see a former oil executive like Brown wanting to drill on the Rocky Mountain Front. "If Big Oil Roy had his way, we'd probably be drilling in Glacier National Park," Lawson said.
“They’re really proud of what they’ve done there, though, and want to see the land preserved while still offering the kind of opportunities they provided,” Maurier said on Wednesday. “If we can make it happen, it would be a great opportunity.”
He’ll bring the proposal before the Montana FWP Commission today to see if they’re interested in pursuing the purchase, which would include spending some of the $10 million allocated by the Legislature last year through the “Access Montana” bill.
“The ranch is in a very, very special area,” Gene Sentz said. “The Nature Conservancy bought the ranch just a mile over the hill to the south in 1979, and the BLM’s (Bureau of Land Management) Blind Horse Outstanding Natural Area borders it on the north.”
Four tracts along the Front were pulled at the last minute from a lease auction held Tuesday by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. They totaled more than 800 acres, including about 520 acres within the Blackleaf Wildlife Management Area in central Montana north of Great Falls.
Sexton said conservation groups or other interested parties could offer an exchange of other lands with comparable minerals. If that doesn’t happen, she added, the leases “will be up again in six months.”
Seewald shot the grizzly, first with a .22 and then later with a .338, after he came upon him unexpectedly around sunset on Wednesday, May 28, about a mile from his home. Seewald was checking cows when he came up and over a hill and nearly ran into the bear, which was feeding on a dead cow.
It's been a year and a half since drilling opponents declared victory on the picturesque, wildlife-rich Front. In December 2006, Congress approved a permanent ban on energy development from federal land in the region. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent by private groups and the government to purchase conservation easements and buy back leases held by energy companies.
However, the leasing of minerals beneath state-owned lands continues. At least 8,400 acres in the shadow of the front's towering mountains already are under lease. Another 700 acres will be auctioned June 10, by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
