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The Buffalo Post

My occasional articles on Native American issues and News

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

Nkwusm Works to Preserve Salish Language

July 6, 2009 by Mark Ratledge

My 7/06/09 Indian Country Today Media Network article Nkwusm Works to Preserve Salish Language

ARLEE, Mont. – Nkwusm, a Salish Language immersion school on the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Arlee, Mont. had its first graduation June 12.

Three boys and one girl, all 14 years old finished their language immersion program and next year will move into the public school system.

Located in an old bowling alley built in the late 1970s, the school has renovated the building into classrooms, and a capital campaign is in progress to raise funds for a new building. Inside, the classrooms look like any other school, except for the Salish alphabet on the walls and artwork depicting Salish cultural activities, and the sounds of children talking and singing in Salish. The school itself is operated by the Nkwusm Salish Language Revitalization Institute, a nonprofit formed in 2003 to research, promote and preserve the Salish Language.

In 2002, while working as an administrator for the Ronan Public Schools, Julie Cajune, Nkwusm’s development director, received a 2002 Milken National Educator Award. She also works on the Montana Tribal History Project to gather tribal histories for curriculum development. Montana is the first state in the nation to require the teaching of American Indian history in public school classrooms. At Nkwusm, she works to develop the institute’s fundraising and awareness with the public about teaching methods and the nature of classes.

nkwusmLG

“Students get a basic curriculum as in any preschool, such as science and math,” Cajune said. “But we also teach songs and other cultural things that the community does.” She said each class has an instructional aide, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education, and a fluent Salish speaker.

The immersion aspects include intensive instruction in Salish for the younger 30 or so students. “We feel that reading skills from one language will transfer to another, so our third and fourth graders start an English literacy program, but until third grade, we teach Salish reading and writing for emergent literacy learning.”

Salish is an endangered language – with around 50 fluent speakers among the Montana Salish, and the Kalispel in Washington State and the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, two other dialects which are closely related to the Salish Nkwusm teaches – and it can be difficult to get fluent speakers interested in classroom teaching.

But Nkwusm is continuing to grow. Cajune said this fall they are starting an adult education program. “Our classroom teachers will spend half a day in immersion so the adults will be able to use Salish in all of their conversations.” Increasing the number of fluent speakers is critical for the survival of the language, because the community has lost 35 fluent speakers over the last four years.

By the end of five months, Cajune said the adults will have conversational fluency so they won’t have to use English at all in the classroom. In another two years “we will saturate the staff, and then we’ll have 20 staff who are conversationally fluent.”

In revitalizing Salish, one of the major concerns is the state of the vocabulary. Patrick Pierre, 80, one of the fluent speakers, knows the full, older language, which is much richer in meaning. Many people speak in the newer, abbreviated form of the language. “People have been shortening the words in order to talk faster, but we are committed to teaching the long, older language,” Cajune said.

Nkwusm had a graduation pow wow the day after school ended for the year, and there, Pierre said many Salish speakers used shorter Salish words like “slang,” and he worked with them to teach the full language, where there was much more meaning than the shortened vocabulary, what he called “kid” Salish.

Proud of his students, Patrick was in his full dance outfit for the pow wow. “Now, I want to see these students graduate from high school as fluent speakers.”

One of the co-founders of Nkwusm, Chaney Bell is the curriculum specialist. He has produced CDs of language lessons and several language books. He is also involved in filming and recording the fluent speakers in all kinds of cultural activities.

He said that with starting a tribal language program, “there’s always political things; both positive and negative. But what we do is concentrate on the positive, because what we’re doing is very long term. We’re going to keep working and also be respectful and supportive of others, and we hope that all the community issues will work themselves out.”

He said that because even English is a changing language, “for us to decide what written Salish will be right now is impossible, and we feel the problems with the written forms will work themselves out over the next 30 or 40 years.”

Another cofounder of Nkwusm and the current executive director, Tachini Pete has worked the last 10 years on the latest dictionary the school published, which contains the original forms of Salish vocabulary and examples of their use. He developed the computer fonts for word processing in both Salish and Kootenai, which are in use at Nkwusm and available for download on the school’s Web site.

Nkwusm gets 70 percent of its funding from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes and the rest from private support and foundations. The school just finished holding its first fundraiser in Missoula (25 miles south of Arlee) earlier this month, and raised more than $100,000. The school also received a major three-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

At the graduation pow wow, a drum group sang an honor song for the four graduates and their families after the Veteran’s Warrior Society color guard lead the grand entry. It was a small pow wow, but Nkwusm’s goals are nothing short of producing many graduates who are fluent in Salish and cultural traditions, and from now on, each graduation pow wow will be larger than the last.

Story link: Nkwusm – Salish Language Revitalization Institute.

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