Defining a Nation
Ancestry, language and tradition are the
distinctions that make a person Blackfeet

Story by Katja Stromnes
Photos by Lem Price

In 1934, when the government agent came to the Blackfeet Reservation, he told tribal leaders to identify the Blackfeet people and put them on their rolls.

So the Blackfeet Tribal Council sat down and set the criteria to be Blackfeet. Then they called forth their people. In a book the Blackfeet signed their names and those of their deceased family members.

From that day forward, the council said, an Indian must have a parent or a grandparent in the book to be a tribal member. But in 1962, the federal government added a provision, saying anyone born into the tribe must also have a quarter Blackfeet blood to claim membership.

"Western law has us broken down into pedigree," says G.G. Kipp, a Blackfeet ceremonial leader. "But that's not our traditional way."

What makes someone Blackfeet is not just blood quantum, Kipp and others say. It's language, cultural habits and lineage, according to Conrad LaFromboise, director of higher education for the Blackfeet tribe.

The native view, he says, implies that if people can look at their family history and identify Blackfeet ancestors, then they are Blackfeet.
Blood quantum as the only measure doesn't bode well for the tribe's future.

"Numerically, that's going to work out to zero at some time," LaFromboise says, citing intermarriage.

So to Blackfeet like Kipp and LaFromboise, safeguarding a distinct people means more than checking blood quantum.
And in a world where some Blackfeet children have their own web pages to display their lineage, it's a task that isn't easy.

"We can go many places to learn to be a western man, a western woman," LaFromboise says. "Where can we go to learn to be a Blackfeet man, a Blackfeet woman?"

He says the task starts with approaching the elders, the grandparents who know the language, because Blackfeet language is at the center of what it means to be Indian.

"The language was lost," says Molly Bullshoe, a 73-year-old retired school teacher, remembering a time when Blackfeet was the common tongue. "There are just a few who talk Blackfeet fluently."

Leo and Molly Bullshoe speak Blackfeet to each other, but English to their 11 children and 66 grandchildren. Their second language was learned more than 70 years ago in Indian boarding school.

"When I was 6 years old, I was put in the mission and I thought I'd never see my parents again," Molly Bullshoe says. "In the mission, if we talked Indian, we got punished. I couldn't speak a word of English. But I had to learn."

When the couple met and began to raise their family, they feared repercussions if they taught their children anything distinctly Blackfeet.

LaFromboise says for the first half of this century most Blackfeet children were sent to missionary schools. While some remained in schools on the reservation, many were sent away. Their language and religion were forbidden.

On the reservations, the federal government also banned Indian ceremonies and traditions and LaFromboise says many people took them underground.

"They wanted the Blackfeet to put away their heathen ways and be christianized, civilized," LaFromboise says.

Once the government realized its termination and assimilation policies had failed, the Bullshoe family, like many others on the Blackfeet Reservation, revived tribal ceremonies and no longer kept them hidden.

The two styles of life solidified by the elder Bullshoes are what Leo Bullshoe thinks kept the family together through poverty and hardship.

"The good couple pulls together," he says of his marriage of 50 years. "It makes everything nice. Our happiness."

Today, many of the Bullshoes' children are raising their children on their parents' land in the same way - with elements from both white and Indian culture.

The Bullshoe clan lives in farmhouses on the land of their ancestral clan, the Lone Tea Drinkers. For 24 years Molly Bullshoe taught school, eventually teaching culture and language classes.

"I thought, well, an Indian teacher would know how to help an Indian kid," she says. "That was my goal. Because some Indian kids don't get the help from other teachers."

Her own grandchildren are learning things about their roots that her children didn't. Granddaughter Elizabeth Bullshoe, 11, recently asked her grandma to teach her the tribal language. Her grandmother proudly answered yes, but told her it would take time and patience.
The child's pride in her heritage is a trait uncommon in her parents' generation.

"I grew up in the John Wayne era," says Willie Crawford, the son of a traditionalist, who now openly practices Blackfeet ceremonies. "Indians were always the bad guy. At one point, I was ashamed to be an Indian, but I am getting my dignity back."

His grandmother, too, would not speak Blackfeet to him when he was a boy.

"She was definitely afraid the government was going to come in," he says. "My grandparents talked about the missionaries. They made them kneel on broomsticks for hours if they spoke their own language. They'd get stuck in a room for days."

Not only was the language lost, so were family artifacts.

Crawford's father, Rice, still mourns the loss of the family's Beaver Bundle, stolen from an uncle 40 years ago. Bundles are made from the soft skin of an animal underbelly and hold inside the family's sacred objects.

They are the most sacred tool of ceremonies that take place after the first thunderstorm of spring. Passing on the meaning of the bundle's contents, and thus the meaning of the ceremony, isn't learned in one sitting, Rice Crawford says.

The elders know it takes years to teach the ceremony and parts lost will never be recaptured.

Many artifacts were sold or stolen during a period in which a flourishing market in Indian artifacts coincided with crushing reservation poverty.

People were starving, especially during the Depression, Leo Bullshoe says. His family survived on government rations as Leo watched his father's cattle and horses sold so the family could survive.

"Tradition died," says Molly Bullshoe. "In those days, it was tempting to hustle for money." More artifacts disappeared as times got tougher.

Today Blackfeet like Rice Crawford attempt to carry on tradition in ways that meld with modern life. They use traditions from the past to make a living in the present. The Crawfords spend their winters selling teepees and drums they make in the ways of their ancestors. And the family has taught traditional ways to their five grown sons, who will pass them on to their children.

Another traditionalist, Floyd Rider, is a healer. In his sweat lodge, with the help of his ancestors, known as the "grandfathers," he uses prayer and ceremony to strengthen those who seek his help.
Rider has never been afraid to practice his cultural traditions because, unlike many Blackfeet children who were sent away to school, Rider was kept home to work on his grandfather's ranch.

Raised Catholic, Rider says 30 years ago he awoke to traditional healing ways on a four-day fast. He decided to ask the Creator and the grandfathers for the ability to heal, and in exchange, he promised to never refuse anyone in need.

Some say he works miracles, but Rider says healing relies on faith.
He uses his sweat lodge several times a week. It's a long and low lodge covered in thick orange carpets. It sits under a tent above the Two Medicine River at the dead end of East Glacier's main paved road.

"What you see out there is the only good thing up here," Rider says, gesturing away from the road and across the river to the deep mountains where he fasts.
He says it might take a miracle to keep tradition alive on the tough reservation caught between two worlds.

The devastation of a lost of self respect and a government policy of relocation hit a generation of adults. Encouraged by the federal government, many Indians moved from the reservation to find employment. Still others were mired in a rising epidemic of alcoholism. Renewing a tribal tradition, the elder generation stepped in and filled the gaps in family life.

In the late 1940s and '50s, this take on family cultivated a phenomenon called "grandma-babies" that persists today.
Grandma-babies are children born to parents who abandoned them. LaFromboise says the grandma-baby originates from old traditions of people passing their babies on to elders if they were having a streak of bad luck.

Bob Tailfeathers, dean of student services at Blackfeet Community College, says it's common.

"In my family right now," says Tailfeathers, "my sister's considered grandma ... with the little kids. It's a respectful thing."

A number of those Blackfeet raised in distant missionary schools grew up to abandon their own children, LaFromboise says, and a spiral of devastation began.

"You can imagine the sterile setting," LaFromboise says. "It is not the same as growing up with your mother and father."

The children raised by grandparents reaped the benefits of growing up with those who practiced traditions privately at home, says Rod Goss, a 42-year-old Blackfeet grandma-baby.

"In the Indian way, you only learn by observing," he says.
Goss says he learned how to interact traditionally by watching the elders.

Blackfeet culture and language moves through family bonds that surpass decades of forbidden ceremonies.

And blood quantum, the stark remnant of the federal government's definition of Indian, won't prevent Blackfeet people from defining, in their families, memories and traditions, what it means to be an Indian.

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Rice Crawford stands on a small tepee cover above the emblem of the "bleeding buffalo skull," a symbol of his family, which is present on every tepee cover he makes.

Floyd Rider watches two of his grandsons at play outside his East Glacier home.

Floyd Rider.

Naomei Crawford feeds her disabled daughter, Roberta, a snack at their home in Heart Butte.