The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (37 page)

And yet the Clarke story also shows that, even as the social space for bicultural people contracted sharply after the end of the fur trade era and the period of rapid national consolidation during Reconstruction, some individuals still found room to maneuver in the quickly dividing worlds of their mothers and fathers. Take the cultural ambidexterity of Horace Clarke, who served on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council (the tribe’s governing body) in the early twentieth century while simultaneously pursuing entrepreneurial ambitions and sustaining close personal relationships with some of Montana’s leading white citizens. The same was true for Helen Clarke, seen in her journey from the Broadway stage to elective office to the Indian Service—“white” occupations all—before returning at last to live among the Piegans, whom she counseled and supported to the end of her days, her racial in-between-ness remarked upon frequently (and often favorably) by white residents of the Treasure State. And McFee would surely have identified John Clarke as a “150% man,” married to a white woman and with countless non-Indian friends and customers, but dedicated to preserving Blackfeet craft practices and transmitting his knowledge to younger native artists, ensuring that such customs survived even as men like him—born at the tail end of the halcyon buffalo days—grew scarce on the reservation.

Nevertheless, even as the Clarkes and others of mixed Piegan-white ancestry embraced both halves of their heritage, “the mania for cultural uniformity” persists in northern Montana, as it does elsewhere throughout Native America. Visitors today can sense it at either edge of the Blackfeet Reservation, whether in East Glacier Park or Cut Bank, but according to some it has taken root, ironically, among the residents themselves. This “blood-ism” discriminates against those who are actually, or are perceived to be, of lower blood quantum, and it promises to intensify because—with a casino that opened in 2006 and with renewed interest, owing to hydraulic fracturing, in the oil reserves underneath tribal land—there is more at stake now than mere identity.
⁸
As a result, walking in two worlds—one red, the other white—will continue to pose challenges for those people in between.

Notes

Prologue

1
    The best historical treatment of the event is Philip Goldring, “Whisky, Horses, and Death: The Cypress Hills Massacre and Its Sequel,”
Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History
21 (1979): 41–70. More satisfying (though fictional) is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s wondrous novel
The Englishman’s Boy
(New York: Picador, 1996).

2
    James Welch,
Fools Crow
(New York: Penguin, 1986), 156–58.

3
    There are, of course, notable exceptions to this general rule, chief among them two works by Gary B. Nash: “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,”
Journal of American History
82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 941–64; and
Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999). See also Thomas N. Ingersoll,
To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2005); Theda Perdue,
Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South
(Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003); and Theresa Schenck, “Border Identities: Métis, Halfbreed, and Mixed-Blood,” in
Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories,
ed. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2010), 233–48. Most recently, Anne F. Hyde’s reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century West as a region of families, many of them mixed, has recast our understanding of native-white intermarriage. See her
Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011). It is worth noting that there is a fine and growing body of literature that examines the complex legacies of interracial marriage among peoples of African, Indian, and white ancestry in Oklahoma. See, e.g., Tiya Miles,
Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt,
Black, White and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); and Fay A. Yarbrough,
Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

4
    See David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich,
Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2004).

5
    On the Bents and other families of mixed ancestry, see Anne F. Hyde, “Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848,” in
On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest,
ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012), 93–115.

6
    I have been inspired in my narrative approach by a number of exemplary works, most especially John Demos,
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(New York: Knopf, 1994).

Chapter 1: Cutting Off Head Woman

1
    Pierre Clément de Laussat,
Memoirs of My Life to My Son during the Years 1803 and After,
ed. Robert D. Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978), 88–91, quote p. 90. A nearly identical ceremony took place in St. Louis on 9–10 March 1804, once word of the transfer at New Orleans reached communities upriver following the reopening of traffic after the winter. See Anne F. Hyde,
Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011), 1.

2
    Numerous volumes deal with these events; this account relies upon George C. Herring,
From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 101–14, quote p. 106.

3
    The literature on the Louisiana Purchase is enormous. Particularly helpful to this telling are Peter J. Kastor,
The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004); Roger G. Kennedy,
Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003); and Robert Morgan,
Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2011), esp. pp. 1–44. For the importance of the Louisiana Purchase in securing American claims to the eastern portion of the continent, especially the Ohio Valley, see François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in American History, 1754–1815,”
American Historical Review
113, no. 2 (June 2008): 647–77. See also Eliga H. Gould,
Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012).

4
    Adam Arenson,
The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011), 12; Jay Gitlin,
The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010), 13–21.

5
    Gary E. Moulton, ed.,
The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery: The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004), xiv–xv.

6
    Ibid., xxi–xxvi. See also James P. Ronda,
Lewis and Clark among the Indians
(1984; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002).

7
    See John C. Ewers,
The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains
(1958; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 3–18; and Oscar Lewis,
The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, with Special Reference to the Rôle of the Fur Trade
(New York: J. J. Augustin, 1942). See also the work of two Canadian scholars: Hugh Dempsey, “The Blackfoot Nation,” in
Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience,
ed. R. Bruce Morrison and C. Roderick Wilson (1986; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 381–413; and Diamond Jenness,
The Indians of Canada
(1932; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), 317–24. Some scholars emphasize also the distinction between North Piegans (living in Canada) and South Piegans (living in the United States).

8
    Moulton, ed.,
The Lewis and Clark Journals,
l–lii, 340–46, quote p. 345. For the Piegan perspective on these events, see
Two Worlds at Two Medicine,
DVD, directed by Dennis Neary (Browning, Mont.: Going-to-the-Sun Institute and Native Pictures, 2004).

9
    In July 2006 a group of Blackfeet held a ceremony commemorating the bicentennial of the event. As the participant George Heavy Runner noted, members of the tribe hoped that U.S. officials might attend and offer an apology, explaining, “That’s a way of healing and moving on.”
Great Falls Tribune,
18 June 2006.

10
    For excellent surveys of the period, see Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); and Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

11
    For the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West, see Stephen Aron,
How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996). See also Colin G. Calloway,
The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

12
    See R. David Edmunds,
The Shawnee Prophet
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983); Gregory E. Dowd,
A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991); and Colin G. Calloway,
The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). For recent accounts of that most obscure and overlooked conflict, see Alan Taylor,
The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies
(New York: Knopf, 2010); and Nicole Eustace,
1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

13
    See Robert Martin Owens,
Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

14
    See Howe,
What Hath God Wrought,
203–42.

15
    Quoted in Peter Bernstein,
The Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation
(New York: Norton, 2006), 319.

16
    For the meaning of Napi, see Betty Bastien,
Blackfoot Ways of Knowing
(Calgary: Univ. of Calgary Press, 2004), 226. Bastien explains, “
Napi
is representative of the fallibility of man. He reminds us that to do things that are wrong will result in negative consequences.”

17
    George Bird Grinnell,
Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a Prairie People
(1892; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003), 203–4; Clark Wissler, “Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indians,”
Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History
, Vol. 5, pt. 1 (New York: Published by Order of the Trustees, 1910), 20–52.

18
    For the best description of Plains Indian dependence upon the buffalo, see Andrew C. Isenberg,
The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

19
    L. James Dempsey,
Blackfoot War Art: Pictographs of the Reservation Period, 1880–1920
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 7.

20
    Grinnell,
Blackfoot Lodge Tales,
227–28. The anthropologist Shepard Krech III offers a more skeptical view of native efficiency in using all parts of slaughtered buffalo in
The Ecological Indian: Myth and History
(New York: Norton, 1999), 123–49.

21
    The informant was Saukamappee, a Cree Indian who had lived among the Blackfeet since he was a boy. He told this story to the Welsh fur trader and cartographer David Thompson, who as an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company spent the winter of 1786–87 in a Piegan camp at the base of the Rockies. J. B. Tyrrell, ed.,
David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784–1812
(Toronto: Champlain Society, 1916), 334. For more on Thompson’s fascinating and tragic life, see D’Arcy Jenish,
Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003). For translation, see Bastien,
Blackfoot Ways of Knowing,
214.

22
    N. Scott Momaday quoted in
The West,
DVD, directed by Stephen Ives (Arlington, Va.: PBS Home Video, 1996).

23
    John C. Ewers,
The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, with Comparative Material from Other Western Tribes
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955), 20. Ewers’s book remains the classic account of the transition to equestrianism by Plains Indian societies.

24
    Thompson’s informant Saukamappee was one of the armed warriors. See Tyrrell, ed.,
David Thompson’s Narrative,
330–34; John C. Ewers,
Indian Life on the Upper Missouri
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 35.