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The Buffalo Post

Occasional articles on Native America

The Burial of Elouise Cobell

October 24, 2011 by Mark Ratledge

This piece was published in High Country News, November 28, 2011 (issue 43.20): The Burial of Elouise Cobell

Last Saturday, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blackfeet Reservation on her and her husband’s Blacktail Ranch. There were Blackfeet and Catholic prayers and hymns sung by Hutterite girls and the ever present Montana wind. And it was possible that Napi – the “Old Man” supernatural trickster, troublemaker and ultimate helper of the Blackfeet – was in attendance, too.

Elouise Pepion Cobell was Yellowbird Woman, a Blackfeet Nation member. She was also a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The lead plaintiff in the landmark Cobell v. Salazar and The Department of the Interior. A rancher and Blackfeet banker. And she passed on October 16th in a Great Falls, Montana hospice from a long bout with cancer.

The Blacktail Ranch is on the rolling prairie, near the southern border of the Blackfeet Reservation and within sight of the peaks of Glacier National Park. When Cobell drove the thirty miles north to Browning to work as Executive Director of the Native American Community Development Corporation, she passed Starvation Ridge, where during the winter of 1883-84 twenty percent of the Blackfeet Nation starved to death because of inept Indian Agents responsible for providing treaty rations.

cobell_serviceLG

And Cobell often drove the 100 miles to Great Falls to fly to D.C. for her work as the lead plaintiff in the largest class action lawsuit in history. That was to settle the mess of lost and destroyed records and lack of accounting of Indian Trust lands and payments by the Interior Department over the past 100 years. The case ran for 15 years and was all but settled for $3.4 billion – and the appropriation signed by President Obama – when she passed away.

Last Saturday, Hutterite girls in bright blue and purple taffeta dresses and scarves sheltered out of the wind on the west side of the small ranch house. They had arrived in a yellow school bus from the Birch Creek Colony, their home as members of a communal branch of Anabaptists. The Hutterites were neighbors and here to pay their respects, like the surrounding ranchers, Blackfeet from all over the reservation and VIPs from Washington, D.C.

The ranch house itself had a lost a few pieces of siding and much paint to the wind over the years. (In this part of Montana, wind blows freight trains off their tracks, and school bus trips are cancelled not because of snow but because the wind will blow the buses over.) Cobell’s MacArthur money went to the long running legal case, not their ranch house or their cattle operation.

The long funeral procession from the earlier service at the Browning High School gym was running behind, so people sat in their cars and waited out of the wind. The gym had been packed with thousands of people for the service, and fire trucks led the hearse slowly through town.

Here it was quieter. The funeral directors unloaded flowers next to a white tipi, poles squeaking in the wind, and lined up folding chairs that the wind blew down. The air was clear thirty miles to the west where the peaks of Glacier were shrouded in clouds that were dumping the first of the winter snows.

In the lee of the house, I talked with a banker who had made the 900 mile drive north from Denver. He had worked with Eloise to form the first Native American bank in Browning in 1987, ten years before the Interior lawsuit was filed.

A neighboring rancher offered me a slash from a pocket flask of whiskey. He joked that he could only sleep when the wind was whistling in his bedroom window. Other ranchers kept their backs mostly to the wind and talked about shipping their cattle to market and with the Hutterite men about fall harvest.

Someone’s cell phone rang. The hearse had gotten a flat tire at Badger Creek, a few miles up the road. People shook their heads. A rancher said, “with what they charge for this, they should have all new tires.”

The ranchers grew more disgusted when they saw a car stop on the highway and a TV news cameraman climb up a small hill and point his camera up the road.

Then two sheriff’s cars pulled in off the highway and past the Blackfeet Nation flag flapping above the mailbox. The casket arrived in the back of a pickup truck, secured with cargo straps. The driver pulled in close to the folding chairs and the casket was carried to the grave.

People laughed, saying Elouise must be laughing at the flat tire, too. And that she would be proud of this simple service and how she arrived at her ranch.

It was well known that Elouise loved Elvis Presley, and she would sing along to the radio on car rides. The earlier service in the gym had life size Elvis cutouts behind the priest and under a slideshow showing Cobell’s visit to Graceland. Sheet cakes from the grocery store were decorated with photos of Elvis and Elouise. The day before, a Browning radio station played Elvis music all day long in her honor.

There was a prayer in Blackfeet and a quiet Blackfeet warrior song sung by one drummer, most of the words snatched by the wind. A cluster of black Angus moaned in the pasture. A priest spoke and then turned to the two dozen Hutterite girls behind him. The girls sang two hymns, words split by gusts of wind: “Over yonder, there will be no parting, no crying…. Rejoicing to see our savior upon his throne…”

The priest sprinkled holy water on the casket. Flowers were lain atop the wood. And when it was time to lower the casket, the people who had been laughing about bringing the casket in the pickup now broke down. A long line formed to greet the family. The funeral directors worked the dirt. People began to drift to their cars.

I had been looking for a rancher I knew who grew up on the nearby Two Medicine River and who knew Elouise when they were both young. He told me later that he had stopped by the hearse with the flat on the hi-way and offered his respects. He had planned to stop at the ranch for the burial, he said, but could see that Napi, the trickster and the troublemaker had intervened.

Maybe Napi wanted to make a point? But what was it? Did he want to keep Elouise around for a bit longer?

I only knew Elouise from an interview the previous April in her office in Browning. I had gathered around an office PC with staffers and watched some sudden court proceedings streaming from D.C. And then waited as she made a conference call to her attorneys, discussing strategy and quietly laughing at the ineptness of the oppositions’ attempts to derail the $3.4 billion settlement.

She showed me a painting of Mountain Chief on her wall and told me that “maybe I was born with my great grandfather’s Mountain Chief’s genes, and wanted to fight for justice. And it never left my mind that you have to stand up for what’s right.”

Mountain Chief had long fought the whiskey traders and homesteaders’ incursions on the shrinking reservation in the late 19th century. But that had brought the US Army to the bottomlands of the Bear River on a thirty-below January morning in 1870 to massacre the Blackfeet and break the back of the Blackfeet nation. The Blackfeet retreated to a smaller reservation, and for many years were afraid to mention the massacre and defeat of the great tribe of the northern plains.

Now the Cobell settlement may be in jeopardy, with Cobell gone, the federal government facing budget cuts and new legal appeals that are challenging the long-sought deal.

A relative of Cobell’s died of cancer the same she passed. James Mad Dog Kennely had been waiting for the small amount of money the lawsuit settlement would bring. He made and sold beaded bracelets to supplement his Social Security checks. Because of the mess of the Indian Trust system, he got an $89 annual royalty check for $6,000 worth of oil pumped from his land.

In Cobell’s office that day I was there, taped to the back of her computer monitor was a small piece of paper. I remember glancing at it often during the half hour I sat and listened. It was placed there for me – and anyone else sitting in that chair – to read.

It read:

first they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.

 

Copyright ©2011 Mark Ratledge, All Rights Reserved.

2010 Bear River (Baker – Marias) Massacre Memorial

February 23, 2010 by Mark Ratledge

My 2/23/10 The Buffalo Post article (Also printed in the 3/10/2010 Glacier Reporter)

Update January, 2016: Blackfeet Community College hosts a seminar each January 23rd, while visits to the site on the river take place every four years. The next site visit will be in 2020.

Update January, 2014: The Blackfeet Tribe now prefers to call the massacre Bear River, referring to the location on the Bear River – the traditional Blackfeet name for the Marias – and to remove, from the Blackfeet’s historical and spiritual perspective, Col. Eugene’s Baker’s name from the massacre.

The Blackfeet Tribe and students and faculty at Blackfeet Community College are still presenting a seminar each January 23rd at the college, but visits to the site are now only taking place once every four years. The next site visit will be in 2016.

Update June, 2012: The faculty at Blackfeet Community College who worked for many years to recover the history of the Bear River Massacre – Carol Murray and Lea Whitford – turned the responsibility of future memorials over the the tribe in 2012).

(story links and more information at bottom of page)

A PowerPoint presentation put together by a Blackfeet Nation member is bringing to light new descendants of survivors of the Baker Massacre – more traditionally known as the Marias or Bear RIver Massacre – a chapter in the history of conflict between the U.S. Calvary and the Blackfeet Indians that took place 140 years ago on the Marias River a few miles southeast of the present town of Shelby, in north-central Montana.

21gunsalute

Since 1987, faculty and students at Blackfeet Community College and Blackfeet tribal members have gathered near the Marias each Jan. 23 to commemorate the massacre and the survival of their relatives.

Two days before this years’ commemoration, Blackfeet Tribal member Bob Burns presented his PowerPoint at the college during a seminar about the massacre. His great- great-grandfather – Chief Heavy Runner – was killed during the massacre, and he is descended from Heavy Runner’s lone surviving wife.

On Jan. 23, 1870, Chief Heavy Runner and his band were camped in 30-below zero weather in the sheltered river bottom land of the Marias River. The U.S. Calvary, under orders issued by Gen. Philip Sheridan and under the command of Major Eugene Baker approached the camp that dawn, looking to arrest a Blackfeet Indian named Owl Child, who had killed a white trader named Malcolm Clarke.

Baker assumed the camp was Mountain Chief’s, who reportedly was sheltering Owl Child, but both had already fled to Canada. But two Indian Scouts working for the Army told Baker they recognized that the camp belonged to Heavy Runner, who was on good terms with the U.S. According to historical accounts, Heavy Runner heard a warning shouted by one of the scouts, and ran toward Baker, waving a written agreement that guaranteed his band’s safety.

But Heavy Runner was killed, and the resulting battle turned into a massacre of 173 Blackfeet, mostly women and children, because most of the Blackfeet men were away hunting buffalo. (The fatality numbers differ between military records and Blackfeet histories.) Some of the prisoners were then released on their own into the Montana winter after they were discovered to have smallpox.

Later in 1870, The Military Department of the Dakota defended the military action, saying “It is to be regretted that in the attack on the Camp, some women and children were accidentally killed but the number was very greatly overstated in the newspaper account… emanating from unreliable sources of information in Montana.”

In an interview, Bob Burns said that the Baker Massacre “wasn’t a battle; it was a war crime.”

This Jan. 23 along the Marias River, Lea Whitford, chair of the Blackfeet Studies Department, welcomed tribal members, descendants of Heavy Runner, two school bus loads of high school students from Browning and Bigfork, Mont., and members of the Blood Tribe of Canada, one of the four tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

After driving down a winding, on- lane dirt road, participants gathered around two bonfires in the zero-degree weather and blowing snow. Whitford began the commemoration by saying how important this day is for the Blackfeet, and that everyone at the commemoration proved “the Blackfeet are survivors and always will be survivors.”

For the first 23 years, the annual commemoration was held on a high bluff on the south bank of the river which looked down into the brushy bottom. But the owner of the private ranch land began restricting access when an agreement over the sale to the Blackfeet of an easement couldn’t be reached.

For the last three years, the annual commemoration has been held on the north bank of the Marias, on land administered by the Bureau of Reclamation. The Blackfeet Tribe has a five year permit from the agency to gather.

During this year’s two-hour commemoration, the Blackfeet Nation Color Guard presented the flags of the Blackfeet Nation and gave a 21-gun salute to the victims. The Crazy Dogs Society, traditionally a warrior society tasked with protecting the tribe, honored new members and Iraq war veterans.

Whitford and Carol Murray, past Blackfeet Community College president and current Tribal History Project director, told stories and shared perspectives.

Whitford said that many people have written about the tribe, and “we always come down here and share the stories and the ceremonies, but it’s time that the people out there learn about it and hear our side of the story of the Pikuni (Blackfeet).”

Murray told the story of Long Time Calf. She said at the time, “She would have been about an 8-year-old girl. She picked up her 2-year-old niece, and ran barefoot over on the south side of the river. When they started shooting, they shot her brother…. She swam the river with this little one hanging on her back. She walked for two days and two nights north to the camp across the Sweet Grass Hills.”

Murray continued, asking the audience to “think about the strength that we should have every day for our people when there was an 8-year-old girl, running barefoot right where we are standing today.”

Whitford said she envisions building a tribal memorial to the massacre by 2012, and asked tribal members for feedback. In 2007, the Montana Department of Transportation placed a historical sign on Highway 2 a few miles north of the river, telling the story of the Baker Massacre, the first such collaboration between the MDT and the tribe. Whitford said that the Toole County Commissioners have been very helpful with the commemoration each year, clearing snow each Jan. 23 from the road to make the site accessible during the harsh Montana winter.

Burns’ PowerPoint became an unexpectedly important part of this year’s commemoration. Some tribal members came forward for the first time and identified themselves as descendants of the surviving children of Heavy Runner. Burns said the massacre is little known outside of the Blackfeet world, and within the tribe, it has been difficult to identify descendants of survivors.

Recounting stories of the massacre, Burns said, “One of the things that was really wrong with this whole thing it was really a war crime by the United States government, and they tried to call a war to get away with it. All who was in camp were old people and women and children.”


Story links and more information:

  • Blackfeet Community College bfcc.edu
  • James Willard Schultz’s book Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life Among the Indians – Google Books has an account by Bear Head.
  • The late James Welch write about the massacre in his book Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians – Google Books.
  • The State of Montana put up a historical marker, described in the book Montana’s Historical Highway Markers – Google Books.
  • From The Bozeman Daily Chronicle Sunday (1/22/2012) Blackfeet remember Montana’s greatest Indian massacre –
  • Indian Education for All – Model Teaching Unit (Secondary Level) for James Welch’s Fools Crow from the Indian Education for All Program, Montana Office of Public Instruction (OPI).
  • Blackfeet Reservation Timeline – Blackfeet Tribe from the Indian Education for All Program, OPI – Montana Office of Public Instruction
  • Lesson Plans: Blood on the Marias: Understanding Different Points of View Related to the Baker Massacre of 1870 with primary documents from the Montana Historical Society
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