Research takes students on personal journeys

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Research takes  students on personal journeys
By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian 
      
Three weeks ago, five University of Montana students embarked on  an academic 
reconnaissance mission to Washington, D.C.

Funded by the  Smithsonian Institute, the young researchers were given a 
month to accomplish  the following objectives: Explore the National Archives and 
locate all records,  documents, recordings, photographs and artifacts 
pertaining to Montana's Indian  tribes.

Make copies of significant findings and map the vast collections  where the 
history is found so others can pick up the trail and find the material  over 
the many summers it will take to copy and bring Montana's Indian history  home.

For  students Wilena Old Person, Helen Cryer, Miranda McCarvel, Eli 
Suzukovich III  and Glen Still Smoking II, the colossal assignment is both an academic 
honor and  a personal journey unlike any they have ever undertaken.

Entombed in the  windowless caverns of the Smithonian's National 
Anthropological Archives, where  the air is stale and the landscape is dominated by 
floor-to-ceiling filing  cabinets, are the stories of their ancestors - the stories 
of an early Montana  few people know.

Add to that prestigious repository all the material  regarding Montana's 
tribes stored in the Library of Congress plus the National  Archives, and the 
information-gathering possibilities quickly overwhelm even the  most dogged 
archivist.

“It's overwhelming and exciting,” said Miranda  McCarvel, whose grandparents 
homesteaded in eastern Montana. “There is so much  to find and go through 
that we all have to remind ourselves to take a deep  breath and that you can only 
do it a day at a time - and that it's worth  doing.”

Just how massive is the project?

Eli Suzukovich put it  this way: In just one Bureau of Indian Affairs file 
covering the time period  1881 to 1907, an estimated 2 million pages contain 
information about water  rights irrigation, land sales, and correspondence 
between Indian agents and the  Federal Indian Commission.

Given the mountains upon mountains of  material, the hunt can easily become 
daunting, said Suzukovich, who is of Little  Shell and Chippewa-Cree heritage. 
Luckily, just when the research starts  becoming tedious, a thrilling nugget 
of history is overturned and that gets  everyone re-energized.

Sometimes the discovery is an academic treasure,  sometimes it is far more 
profound, like finding the late-1880s deportation  orders of the Canadian “
half-bloods” also called the “Red River half-bloods” of  his Cree relatives.

Such academic work, Suzukovich said, quickly becomes  a personal matter.

“It can be a little emotional,” he said. “You are  looking at records of 
somebody you are related to and it's kind of cool to see  those chapters of your 
family's history you didn't know about.”

Glen  Still Smoking said words don't really explain how he felt when he 
unearthed an  1889 letter written by his great-great-great-great-grandfather 
Mountain Chief, a  Blackfeet chief who wrote about a situation regarding his father, 
also named  Mountain Chief.

The letter, addressed to the Commissioner of Indian  Affairs, states: “The 
Mountain Chief and Lame Bull - Two Piegan Chiefs made a  treaty at the mouth of 
the Judith River Mont. With Gov. Stevens, about 1855. The  Mountain Chief was 
my father. When he died I turned over his papers and medals  to Agent 
Armitage, he gave me a copy of the treaty which I have since lost. ...  I write to ask 
if you can get me a copy, as I would like very much to have  it.”

According to their family story, all of Mountain Chief's belongings  - 
including the treaty - burned when fire destroyed his home, Still Smoking  said.

Two other letters from Mountain Chief were found, each asking for a  response 
from the commissioner.

“At first, it took me by surprise that  the federal agents didn't follow 
through,” he said, “but then I wasn't so  surprised.”

Still Smoking said he's not sure if Mountain Chief ever got  his wish, but he 
understands why his ancestor made multiple attempts for a  response.

The 1885 treaty in question was the Blackfeet tribe's first  with the United 
States, he said, and that time period was filled with great  changes for the 
Blackfeet and all Montana tribes.

“Mountain Chief wrote  this letter after the Blackfeet had subsequently sold 
the Sweetgrass Hills but  before the agreement to sell the land that is now 
Glacier National Park and the  Badger Two Medicine lands,” explained David Beck, 
a UM professor of Native  American studies and adviser to the student 
researchers. “It would have been  important for tribal leaders to have copies of the 
treaties when they were  arguing for their rights, and among other things, the 
1885 treaty had created a  99-year common hunting ground for many Plains 
tribes down in the area where  Dillon is now.”

A few days later and in a different file, McCarvel came  upon a disturbing 
1892 letter written by Z.T. Daniel, an Army physician at the  Blackfoot Agency, 
who tells of collecting Indian bodies from graves, which he  sent to the Fort 
Assiniboine and eventually became part of the Smithsonian  collection.

“I have gotten the crania off at last. I shipped them today.  ... There are 
fifteen of them,” Daniel wrote. “The burial place is in plain  sight of many 
Indian houses and very near frequented roads. I had to visit the  cemetery at 
night when not even the dogs were stirring. This was usually between  12 a.m. 
and daylight. After securing one (a head) I had to pass the Indian  sentry at 
the stockade gate, which I never attempted with more than one for fear  of 
detection.”

Daniel explained his hunting coat had large pockets and  was good for 
carrying and hiding the stolen skulls. “Nearly every time I saw  wolves who howled at 
me, they were always near the dead bodies,” he explained.  “The greatest 
fear I had was that some Indian would miss the heads, see my  tracks and ambush 
me, but they didn't.”

With just one week remaining in  their inaugural mission, the students are 
uncovering more than Beck could ever  have hoped.

“This is just an amazing crew of students,” he said. “They  have been very 
enthusiastic and conscientious and really engaged in what they  are finding.

“What they are doing is incredibly hard work. You don't find  gems of 
information every single day, and what they have found so far is  incredible.”

Everyone involved with the research had an inkling the  project would take 
several years to complete.

Now that they've gotten a  good sense of what the archives hold, the enormity 
of their quest has become  exceedingly clear.

“It's obvious we are at the very beginning of a very  long journey,” Beck 
said.

With continued funding from the Smithsonian's  American Indian Program, which 
gives each student researcher a modest stipend  and an airline ticket, and 
with additional funding yet to be determined, the  project will likely take 
eight to 10 years to complete.

Copying and  converting all the materials into digital format that can be 
accessed by  computer will be costly. But whatever the price tag may ultimately 
be, the  expense is worth the opportunity for full public access to a 
remarkable and  critical part of Montana's history, Beck said.

As the materials are  copied and brought back, they will be made available to 
Montana's tribes for  their own records, and turned over to UM's library for 
public use.

UM's  library will instantly gain world-class stature when the stories and 
knowledge  come out of storage back East, Beck said.

Few people have the time or the  resources to comb through the national 
archival repositories, and much of  Montana's Indian history between 1881 and 1907 
- which covers critical issues  such as the establishment of boarding schools 
and the end of bison on the Great  Plains - can only be found in microfilm and 
individual documents that are  strictly controlled by the National Archives, 
which is difficult to  navigate.

“Once these documents are up on the Internet for all to see,  there's no way 
to know how it will change things,” Beck said. “So much of the  material has 
a very real personal connection to people alive today, and we will  never know 
all the impacts this project will have.”

>From the sidelines,  Jason Younker is cheering on the Montana researchers.

He led a crew of  University of Oregon students on a similar journey in the 
1990s, when the  Smithsonian's JoAllyn Archambault, director of the National 
Museum of Natural  History's American Indian Program, provided the same funding  
support.

“From my perspective, you know you are Indian but there's equity  in paper 
truth,” said Younker, a member of Oregon's Coquille tribe who now  teaches at 
the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“When you are actually  reading these documents and seeing the name of your 
family, you become very much  attached to those who not only recorded it, but 
proud someone took the time to  memorialize your family.”

There's no way to know the ripple effect of his  team's successes in finding 
and making public the once-buried history of his  tribe.

But in recent years, dozens of master's and doctoral theses have  sprung from 
the material, several books are in the making, and Indian history in  Oregon 
is being re-written. He expects the same will unfold in Montana when the  
material becomes available at UM.

“You have all these memories floating  around about tribal people and their 
history and what actually happened, and  then you have the history books that 
don't necessarily portray the personal  connection and the personal histories,” 
Younker said. “When you sit down and  read these fantastic documents, you 
realize that history has stolen from you the  truth and you get a new sense of 
what actually happened.

“There are a lot  of Native people that felt incomplete because who are they 
to challenge history  texts and historic interpretation - and now you have a 
brand new voice through  old documents telling a slightly different story in a 
different time  period.

“We can all learn from that.”

Emboldened by their research  and excited for future discoveries, the UM 
students are making their own history  by taking every advantage of their unique 
assignment.

Last week, they met  with Montana Sen. Jon Tester, and this week they meet 
with the rest of Montana's  congressional delegation, Sen. Max Baucus and Rep. 
Dennis Rehberg.

“We  are telling them how important this project is and that is should get 
funded  until the work is done,” said Wilena Old Person, granddaughter of 
Blackfeet  Chief Earl Old Person.

Old Person said she was inspired to help arrange  the meetings with the 
delegation after finding in the archives letters her  grandfather wrote to the 
nation's top political leaders.

“I was excited  to see how he influenced not only Blackfeet tribal history 
but the tribal  history of Montana,” she said. “And this project is going to 
take a good amount  of years, but it's important to all of Montana.”

Reporter Betsy Cohen can  be reached at 523-5253 or at 
_bcohen at missoulian.com_ (mailto:bcohen at missoulian.com) . 



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