As the catalogue to this new exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts points out, the artistry of the peoples of the Great Plains had to be functional, given their semi-nomadic nature.
So they created beauty for everyday use, on their clothing, their homes, and their implements, according to this story by Eric Newhouse.

The exhibit “breaks new ground,” associate curator Joe Horse Capture writes in the catalogue. “This is probably the first time a major art museum has held an exhibition devoted to a specific Native American tribe and curated by members of that same tribe. Tribal members also wrote the catalog.”

The catalog is dedicated to Horse Capture’s dad, George Horse Capture, who moved back to Great Falls from Washington, D.C., after retiring as senior curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. The elder Horse Capture also
contributed a historical and cultural narrative to the catalog, as did tribal artist and teacher Sean Chandler.

“Our tribe has always been a small one, and we lived in Canada for hundreds of years, so compared to other, larger tribes we are little known,” he wrote. “But many of us have earned college degrees and with the help of our elders over the years have located and gathered information from the four corners of the earth to provide this glimpse of our history and aspects of our culture.”

The exhibition includes a century-old hide war shield made that had belonged to Bull Lodge, a warrior and holy man, and am A’aninin shirt made from an animal hide and decorated with strips of beadwork down the chest and back and along the arms, Newhouse writes.

Many of the items were donated by Richard Pohrt Sr.

“Later in life, Pohrt gave objects that were sacred to the A’aninin back to the tribe,” Horse Capture says. He had considered himself as a caretaker of these powerful objects and felt compelled to return them. Such a close and personal relationship with a tribe is rare among collectors.”

Gwen Florio

Here’s the companion piece by the Missoulian’s Jamie Kelly to our previous post about the casting call for the movie adaptation of James Welch’s “Winter in the Blood.”

Once upon a time, James Welch dreamed of seeing his words become pictures.

That was 26 years ago when Welch was first approached about turning his debut novel, “Winter in the Blood,” into a movie.

“My diary from that night says, ‘We went to bed giggling,’ and then we fell asleep giggling,” said Lois Welch, a retired University of Montana literature professor and widow of James, one of the most celebrated Indian novelists and poets in history.

James Welch, who was Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, and also Irish, died of a heart attack at the age of 62 in 2003. His work was lauded by critics the world over as deeply resonant not only of the Indian culture about which he wrote, but of all people.

“Winter in the Blood,” released in 1974, got its highest praise from the New York Times Book Review, easily the standard-bearer of literary criticism in the country.

Shortly afterward, the novel was “optioned” by a film agency that sought to turn it into a motion picture.

Trouble is, it never happened.

But it has a second chance now.
Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to our colleague Joe Nickell for this one. He posted the notice on his Nickell’s Bag blog:

Casting Director Rene Haynes (“Twlight Saga: New Moon,” “Skins,” “Into The West,” and “Dreamkeeper” will conduct an open casting call on Valentine’s Day weekend, Feb. 12 and Feb. 13 on the University of Montana campus in Missoula.

Here’s what’s so exciting for us here at Buffalo Post: He’s making a movie of “Winter in the Blood,” the novel by the late Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer, James Welch. “Winter in the Blood” is about a young man on northern Montana’s Fort Belknap reservation, and it’s one of our favorite among Welch’s books, which is saying something.

The casting call for the movie will take place between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. in the University Center, Room 312. It seeks Native American men and women in their mid-20s through mid-50s for both speaking and non-speaking roles.

Even though it’s a very different kind of story, we can only hope the actors in this movie will see the same sort of success following the young Native actors who comprise the Wolfpack in “New Moon.”

Gwen Florio

The January issue of Smithsonian magazine features this story on what it calls a “breathtaking” collection of 88 quilts stitched by members of Northern Plains tribes.

The National Museum of the American Indian is home to one of the largest such collections, and the article focuses on those acquired from a collector named Florence Pulford.

Pulford, a San Francisco Bay area homemaker, first got interested in quilts of the Plains tribes in the 1960s. According to NMAI curator Ann McMullen, these quilts—many bearing a central octagonal star—functioned as both ritual and practical replacements for Plains Indians buffalo robes. Bison hides had grown scarce as herds were hunted nearly to extinction in a campaign to subdue the Plains tribes during the late 1800s. Missionary wives taught quilting techniques to Indian women, who soon made the medium their own. Many of the patterns and motifs, McMullen says, “have a look very similar to [designs painted on] buffalo robes.”

The collection began with an invitation to the Pulford family from Frank Arrow, a Gros Ventre man who worked for them, to visit him on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. There, according to the story by Owen Edwards, Pulford was given a quilt as a gift. She was so struck by the work – and the way the quilts were made from scraps – that she began supplying quilting materials to women on the reservation.
Pulford would then sell the quilts, and return profits to the women.

More than a quarter of the quilts in the collection are by Almira Buffalo Bone Jackson, a member of the Red Bottom band of Assiniboine on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. Jackson died in 2004 at age 87.

Gwen Florio

The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes who live on Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation, and the Northern Arapaho and Shoshone tribes on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming have long sought the several dozen bison corralled in holding pens for nearly four years now after straying beyond the borders of Yellowstone National Park.

Ranchers fear the park’s bison carry brucellosis, a disease that causes stillborn calves. For years now, when bison go outside in the park in search of winter forage, they’ve been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease.

But some bison, after being declared disease-free, were spared. They’re the ones in the holding pens, and the idea is to use them to repopulate public and tribal lands across the West with free-roaming bison, writes the AP’s Matthew Brown, here.

However, those animals apparently will be relocated to a Montana ranch owned by billionaire Ted Turner, under a recommendation made by state and federal officials.

Turner already owns about 50,000 bison, and his restaurant chain Ted’s Montana Grill serves buffalo burgers. But Turner Enterprises general manager Russell Miller says the Yellowstone bison won’t be served up on a bun, and that the genetically pure Yellowstone bison will be kept separate from the others on his ranch.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks administrator Ken McDonald tells Brown that giving up bison to Turner’s ranch was not his preferred choice, and that his agency already is getting “a lot of backlash over the whole privatization thing.”

The tribes’ applications were judged insufficient, but officials say they’ll be given first choice the next time bison are available.

Gwen Florio

Is it just us, or is “Get over it” one of the more offensive phrases in the English language? Nona Main says she hears it a lot.

Main is Gros Ventre, from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana, and she says people often tell her that the racism she perceives is all in her head, according to this story in Indian Country Today.

“A lot of that goes with the fact that a lot of people think that we have a victim mentality,” Main says. “And they say, ‘Get over it. It happened a long time ago.’ It didn’t happen a long time ago, it’s still happening. I’m not trying to play the victim, I’m trying to educate you about what’s going on in my world so you guys can stop treating people this way. I don‘t treat you that way.”

Main was part of a panel discussion on racism in Montana. Titled “There’s an Elephant in Our Community,” the event was sponsored by Not In Our Town, an organization against racial discrimination, and the Unitarian Universalist Fellow-ship church at MSU-Billings as part of American Indian Heritage Day. Main is a student at MSUB.

She says comments on the local paper’s Web site are an example of where negative stereotypes of American Indians prevail whenever there is a story about them.

“If you go on there, and you read the things that people say on there, you feel like saying, ‘Why can’t these people come up to me and tell me that to my face rather than hide behind a computer with a name that nobody knows you by? Can you come up to me and tell me that to my face what you think of me? Can you do that?’ And I don’t think any of them can.”

On this particular point, we heartily concur with Main.

And speaking of Indians in Montana, members of that state’s congressional delegation say they’re moving quickly on a bill to grant federal recognition to that state’s landless Little Shell Band of Chippewa. The tribe, whose 4,300 members live near Great Falls, Mont., has been formally seeking recognition for three decades. Today, the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned them down.

“It kind of hurts, naturally, but it’s not the end of the line,” Little Shell elder Roger Salois, 72, tells the Associated Press, here. “…But we’re still together, and we’re still Little Shell.”

The Little Shell have proven their persistence. Now it’s time for the state’s elected lawmakers to do the same.

Gwen Florio

Vernelle Chase, an enrolled member of the Gros Ventre Tribe of Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation, has been named the Minority Advocate of the Year by an Oklahoma group.

That state’s Native American Business Center cited Chase’s work as tribal liaison for the Flintco Companies’ Native American Division headquartered in Tulsa, according to this Indian Country Today story.

“Anybody can raise a building, but being the world’s largest Native American construction company comes with a lot of responsibility,” Chase says. “We pride ourselves on providing diversity training for our employees and utilizing our experience to honor our commitments to projects with cultural sensitivity and relevance.”

Flintco’s Web site touts its work on the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, N.M.; Fort Defiance Indian Hospital, Fort Defiance, Ariz., and the Santa Fe Indian School.

Gwen Florio