May 1977 Anthropology and Life

Anthropologically speaking, May was absolutely nuts and served as an accurate reflection of what our lives were to be for the next year and a half. Our work at the mission was a twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week proposition. It sure wasn’t a job. For one thing, we were getting paid $50 a month; and room and board. In addition to all our formal duties (teaching in the grade school, driving the bus, cleaning the school, phone duty, recreation night duty, breakfast program, arts and crafts, music), we were always on call. There were emergencies around every corner that arose at the mission or in the community, and we were constantly having to respond to all of them. The preparations for the Catholic Indian Congress, which was going to take place in June, was taking over our lives. I was spending enormous amounts of my time helping Mike with all these preparations and with building the infrastructure that was going to be needed to accommodate between 1,000 and 1,500 people at the mission. I was also still teaching GED and at the Urban Rural program.

Susie and I were totally immersed in the community. We were close with so many families and most of these people had complicated lives. Everyone has a complicated life, but when you add in severe poverty and trauma, complication takes on a different character. The crazy shit that was going on around us was constant.

As previously noted, I am not filling my stories with the binging that was going on in the community. I don’t review all the marital and relationship problems which were endemic, or the challenges parents were continually experiencing with their children and grandchildren. I’m doing my best to keep the personal stuff personal. Susie and I are, by nature, saps. We can be emotionally drawn in at the drop of a hat. So, while I am avoiding writing about all these difficult matters, they consumed a tremendous amount of emotional energy and time in our lives. If I’d had the time to be depressed, I would have been depressed.

When I read back through my fieldnotes, I can only conclude that I was smoking packs of cigarettes and drinking gallons of coffee every day. Good thing the trading post always had cigarettes. I don't know how I found the time to sleep. What we crammed into a day is beyond astounding. In addition to the activities mentioned, I was spending hours every day recording all this life experience into my anthropological fieldnotes.

I cannot imagine that Margaret Mead or Franz Boas had a fieldwork experience that looked remotely like what Susie and I were going through.

Looking back at this experience as a 74-year-old, I can honestly say that I have absolutely no idea how we pulled all of this off. Our relationships at the mission were way more complicated than any relationships we had with people in the community. We were so close to families in the community. People were very accepting and honest with us. If there was ever an issue, we heard about it, and we worked through it. I would have to say that our relationships with people in the community were pretty healthy. There was a ton of mutual respect, care, and in many cases, love.

That was not always the case at the mission.

Susie and I were as close to Mike as two unrelated people could be. We formed a mutual support system that kept us sane over those two years, and resulted in a lifelong friendship. We were also very close with Bill who was getting ready to leave the mission at the end of the summer. We were not as close with Brian. We had a respectful relationship with Brian. He had been at the mission for a very long time. He knew everything and everyone and had the most responsibility of all the volunteers. It was hard not to have great respect for Brian. He was quietly involved in everything and was a primary reason that the mission stayed afloat.

After Sisters Kathleen and Laura moved to Lodge Pole, Susie and I moved into the green trailer at the mission with another volunteer. She was a very spiritual person and had a close relationship with Father Retzel. I believe that she developed a significant distrust of Susie and me. She was pretty dubious about what we were doing at the mission and was not enthralled with my research. I think being Jewish only accelerated and intensified her distrust. And being very close to Father, she regularly shared her concerns with him. We know this because we experienced the result of her feelings in our relationship with Father.

It was no great surprise to anyone at the mission that I was an anthropologist doing anthropology over those two years. It was also no great surprise to anyone that Susie and I were Jewish. Not Jew-ish or Messianic Jews or confused Jews of any variety. We were plain old regular Jews. All this information was shared with everyone at the mission before we were accepted and arrived. Everyone had a lot of time to ruminate over what this might mean over this two-year period of our service in the Jesuit Volunteer Corp.

Bill, Brian, Mike, Susie and I were very close with families in the community. While we lived and ‘worked’ at the mission, our lives were very much community-centric. This woman didn’t share that same approach while she was at the mission. Her life was more centered at and with the mission. Living with her was not difficult. We sort of stayed out of each other’s way.

She only served at the mission for one year and moved out some time after the Catholic Indian Congress. Her influence on Father Retzel’s perspective on the Jewish anthropologist, however, didn’t dissipate much after her departure.

We had a wonderful relationship with Sisters Laura and Kathleen. They were supportive, and we became good friends. Susie and Kathleen shared the arts and crafts activities, and she had encouraged me to get involved in teaching GED and teaching anthropology in the Urban Rural program.

With the Franciscan nuns, we did what we were told and avoided any kind of conflict with them. Susie was close with Sister Benno and spent time in her classroom teaching the kids music. Sister Giswalda was the principal of the school, and we worked closely together. She was supportive and kind to me.

Our relationship with Sister Bartholemew was not good. From the start, she was interested in converting Susie and me to Catholicism … the one true religion. I was more amused than annoyed by her beliefs and activity, but she did get under Susie’s skin. She was pretty much irritating to everyone – her students, people in the community, and many at the mission. She was the most recent and last arrival of the Franciscan sisters. The Franciscans had been at St. Paul’s Mission for decades, teaching about four different generations of Gros Ventre and Metis in the community. The sisters were concerned about the future of the school because they were old, and they were unable to attract any teachers from their order to come to Hays. They were so grateful when Sister Bartholemew appeared. That gratitude translated into the benefit of the doubt in regard to her behavior in the convent and school. She was in constant arguments with everyone and caused lots of turmoil.

The Passover Sedar Susie and I held at the mission was sort of the last straw for Sister Bart. For all the Christians sitting at the Sedar with us and going through the Haggadah, it served as a profound lesson about Jesus’ last supper. For the Jews, it is the story of our freedom from slavery in Egypt. For Christians, it is the story about Jesus’ death and resurrection and the origins of the Eucharist – the whole body (matzoh) and blood (wine) thing which is central to the Passover Sedar service. The experience set off alarm bells in Sister Bartholemew’s head as it explicitly connected the dots for her about Jesus being a devote Jew. Christianity does an amazing job of stripping the Jew out of Jesus, as he never converted to Christianity. There was no Christianity during his time or for decades afterward. There were only confused Jews who had an interesting interpretation of the messiah, as there are today. The Passover service ends with the hope and prayer that the messiah will someday arrive.

As we were leaving this service, Sister Bart made a point of stopping me and announcing, in a rather arrogant and belligerent tone, that the messiah had already arrived.

After this experience, Sister Bartholemew's concern about our presence at the mission became more urgent and intense. It was shortly after this Sedar that she asked me to no longer teach her children at the school. Whenever someone in the community would ask us to sponsor their child for first communion or confirmation, Sister Bartholemew would rapidly jump in to pull the plug on it. No one else at the mission ever intervened. We just rubbed her the wrong way. Fortunately, she was easy for us to avoid.

Even after we returned to Columbus, Sister Bartholemew would regularly send us literature from the Jews for Jesus movement. She was relentless and not in a good way.

We had no relationship with Brother Ryan (until the very last day I was at the mission).

Our relationship with Father Simoneau was good. When Susie and I first arrived at the mission, he was the first person we met and he helped to get us acclimated. Father Simoneau was a character. I really loved talking to him. He became very ill during our first year at the mission, and we had very little contact with him after he left to care for his health.

How we managed time was nuts. How we managed all these complicated relationships was nuts. How we managed all our roles at the mission and in the community was nuts. How Susie and I managed our relationship was probably nuts. It was all nuts. And reflecting on all of what was going on around us in May sort of demonstrates all this craziness. May was nuts.

Susie and I left the mission and reservation for the first time in late March and early April. We went on a trip to Florida with Susie’s family. Upon our return to Ohio, we drove to Cleveland to see my parents and to visit with my grandfather and grandmother.

The first night of Passover in 1977 was April 2nd. We went to a Passover Sedar at my Aunt Sally’s house. This was usually where we held the Sedar as my Zadie (grandfather in Yiddish) lived with their family. My Zadie was 92 years old and had been fighting bladder cancer for years. It was horrible for him. He suffered in so many ways. He was old and his fight with cancer had taken so much out of him. My Zadie was the spiritual head of our family, and he always conducted the Sedar. He was a very orthodox Jew. The Sedar was a four-hour experience. We were all concerned about how he was going to have the strength to make it through leading the service. Miracle upon miracles, with a clear mind and a strong voice, Zadie conducted this last Passover Sedar. It was a blessing that Susie and I were in Cleveland to share this experience. I don’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, but I vividly remember being at the table with my Zadie for this service.

We returned to Montana shortly thereafter.

On the 7^th of IYAR (on the Jewish calendar), my Zadie died. It was Monday, April 25^th, 1977. He had so much influence on me. I was very close to my Zadie and Bubby. We saw them every weekend and had dinner with them on most Saturday evenings after Shabbos. While he had a profound influence on my Jewish identity, he also taught me so much about morality, ethics and values. He wasn’t perfect … but it was sure hard to tell that as a child and young adult. He lived a remarkable life. He grew up in a shtetl (a small village) outside of Kiev. He served in the Czar’s army in the cavalry. He came to the United States without an education or trade and without understanding a word of English. He suffered so much tragedy and loss in his life. So many of his family members were killed for one reason … they were Jewish. He was a very spiritual and pious man and lived his life consistent with everything that is taught in Judaism. My grandparents made this perilous and courageous journey to America. They are the reason I am here and have been given all the opportunities that America offers. And they didn’t come to America for the economic opportunities … they came here running for their lives.

Susie and I returned to Cleveland for his funeral.

May his memory be a blessing.

5-2-77  

Susie and I went to visit Ray and Irma. Irma got up from the kitchen table and put a card in front of me. It was a sympathy card. It was signed from the Gone family. That was so sweet of them!

Susie’s mother went into the hospital and Susie went back to Columbus to be with her.

5-5-77

I was visiting with Edith, and she told me that I could eat at their house until Susie came back. I told her how much I appreciated it. I’m sure that I didn’t because I wouldn’t have had the time. Edith asked me when Susie would be getting back. I told her that Susie was taking a Greyhound bus from Billings to the DY bar on Tuesday and would arrive at 1:00.

5-13-77 

Irma came over at 6:00 to visit us, and to welcome Susie back to Hays. About 15 minutes later, Ruth came in. She came up to the mission with Lyle when he came up to play ball. Just after that, Carletta came in to visit. She was waiting for Matt and her father. They were going camping in the breaks this weekend.

5-14-77  

After Frosty and Tiny’s wedding, Susie and I went to the reception at the Hays Community Center. Margaret was very involved in putting the food together for the reception. We sat at a table with Margaret and ate dinner with her. Margaret came to Hays as a volunteer for St. Paul’s Mission. She was one of the first volunteers from the Jesuit Volunteer Corp. She is a teacher. She married Clarence Cuts the Rope. Frosty was a Cuts the Rope. Margaret was his aunt.

Margaret said that she knew I was doing research, and she said there were a couple of things she wanted to tell me.

A lot of people here don’t understand what a first and second cousin is. In the old times, people would never marry a cousin. They wouldn’t even marry someone from their clan. Things have changed. Now people marry cousins. It’s hard to understand traditions here. Another thing is that some people have confused the Gros Ventre of Montana with the Gros Ventre called Hidatsa. The Hidatsas have the same language as the Crow and the Gros Ventre have the same language as the Arapaho. They used to be the same group. The Gros Ventres are not the same as the Hidatsas – someone made a mistake. The Gros Ventre don’t like to be confused with the Hidatsas.

5-24-77  

Pat went to the graduation at Flandreau. She’s the Ft. Belknap representative at the school. “I met a woman afterward and she asked me what kind of Indian I was. When I told her I was Gros Ventre, she said I’m the only Gros Ventre she’s ever met. Not many people have heard of the Gros Ventre.” I told Pat that it might be that not very much has been written about the Gros Ventre. She said, “Well, you will have to write a big book about us.” She and Gordon laughed. Gordon said that from what he’s read about the Gros Ventre, they were pretty rowdy, they were always in battles. I told Gordon that the Gros Ventre haven’t changed much. (They laughed).

I only wrote a dissertation and never wrote the book. Pat and Gordon were serious about my responsibility for teaching people about the Gros Ventre. Kroeber wrote about the traditional Gros Ventre in the early 1900s. He was a student of Franz Boas, the father of American Cultural Anthropology. And Cooper and Flannery also wrote about the traditional culture of the Gros Ventre from their work in the 1940s and 1950s.

What I am doing with my stories in these blogs is describing aspects of Gros Ventre (and French Chippewa Cree and Assiniboine) life in the 1970s. My blogs are presenting a great deal more information than I would have been able to publish in ‘the big book.’ I hope I am satisfying Pat and Gordon’s request.

5-27-77

I had a long talk with Father today. He is afraid that my research is going to be destructive for the present efforts of the mission. He feels that the past history of the mission, if brought out and recorded, would hurt these efforts in the community. I tried to lessen his fears by explaining my intentions in detail and by describing the nature of anthropological research and our ethical approach. He said he would feel better if we got together and prayed about it occasionally. I said that would be all right.

I can’t remember ever getting together with Father to pray about my research after this encounter. His concerns remained. (It was hard enough just to do this research without devoting any time to praying about it).

My original research proposal was to study the ways St. Paul’s Mission influenced acculturation among the Gros Ventre. It became obvious that as ‘employees’ of the mission, writing a detailed account of how the mission changed Gros Ventre culture was going to run into some ethical concerns. My dissertation advisor was a former Jesuit priest, so when I ran my concerns by him, he was sympathetic about my altering my dissertation research. I was going to concentrate more on tribal identity and not focus as much on the mission as an acculturative agent. I was in no way, however, going to ignore this critically important history of the mission as a primary acculturative agent.

The stories about this role of the mission were shared regularly by people in the community. The elders and their children often told the stories about the ways the mission changed their way of life and destroyed their language. That we were volunteers and worked at the mission caused not a shred of reticence on anyone’s part about sharing these stories and the anger and resentment they felt about this history. In fact, that so many people understood my anthropological research, they wanted to be sure I had a detailed and clear understanding about the role the mission played in the destruction of their language and culture.

As I discussed in my introduction to these blogs, there were extremely positive outcomes from the work done by the mission, and there were unbelievably negative outcomes from the mission’s efforts. No one in Hays was confused about both perspectives.

In retrospect, and also given the times we live in, I find Father’s concerns both unfounded and offensive. First, I wasn’t learning about the mission’s work in the community (going back to the late 1800s) from books or articles. I heard all these stories from people in the community. The people in the community weren’t learning anything from me; they were the source of what I understood about all the horrible things the mission did to purposely destroy their language and so much of their traditional culture. And they spoke about all of this often enough that it was evident that they held the mission accountable and were angry about the mission’s role in acculturation. They were equally aware that the mission gave them a good education, and many of them benefited greatly from this education. And for those who identified as Catholic, and that was most of the community, the mission also supported their spiritual and ritual life. That was also recognized by everyone.

As one might expect, the people’s thoughts and feelings about the mission were very complicated. They saw all the bad and they recognized all the good.

My writing about it wasn’t going to be a revelation to any of them, and would not have changed their thoughts and feelings about any of this. Father’s concerns were unfounded, and they were also short-sighted and dangerous.

If you don’t recognize and accept mistakes, you cannot atone for them. The Church has a centuries long history of sweeping their mistakes under the proverbial rug. This approach has been short-sighted and dangerous, and it has resulted in so many horrible tragedies. By continuing to deny and avoid dealing with their history of horrible behavior, he was perpetuating both the denial and the inability to atone and change. Let’s forget that all of that crap happened and move on from here … la, la, la, la, la.

Father never made clear for me what the present efforts of the mission were that I might interfere with by regurgitating in my writings what people from the community were sharing with me.  Whatever those efforts were, the people in the community were already dealing with the conflicts they had in their thoughts and feelings about the mission. The anger and resentments were ever-present while we were educating their children at the mission school and while they were having their spiritual and ritual needs met in the Church.

I was irritated by Father’s concerns at the time. Looking back at this experience and now living through Trump’s presidency and his desire to Make America White Again, Father’s approach and the Church’s history make me angry. Ignoring history, denying history, and writing history to change reality doesn’t alter the facts. You can tell me that slavery wasn’t so bad or that the Nazi’s didn’t really kill six million Jews; it won’t change the fact that slavery was America’s great atrocity or that the Nazi’s killed six million Jews. What it does is give people the latitude to deny our history and responsibility for its present-day impact on our society. There’s a reason Germany created a law against holocaust denial. They understood how and why people would want to deny what they did.

We ignore history and facts at our peril.

If you deny it, you can bear no responsibility nor have any motivation to make things right. The people in Hays, and on every reservation who had missions across the country and in Canada, did not have experiences with the cream of the crop of the Church.

There were nuns and priests who abused women and children. Sexual abuse was a thing. The Church knew who these people were. Rather than throw them out of the Church, they tucked them away on Indian reservations. There’s a reason the Diocese of Great Falls went bankrupt from all the law suits that came their way from people who were abused on reservations. The Church caused enormous harm to people by playing an active role in destroying the traditional Gros Ventre language and culture, and they caused tremendous personal harm and trauma to people from the violence and abuse that they brought to people through their centuries-long history of denial.

If you don’t own it, you can’t atone for it. And if you are unable to atone, you cannot change and repair.

Father was a product of his Church, and he was a part of this insane, destructive and dangerous ideology and practice. I have no doubt that Jesus would have been totally demoralized by the whole gig.

I have my own issues with the Church. More Jews have been tortured and slaughtered in the name of ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ than any other rationale. It has happened for centuries to Jewish communities around the globe, and it happened to my own family. The Catholic Church has been intimately involved in the torturing and killing of Jews for centuries. Ferdinand and Isabella were not outliers.

The US congress recently proposed legislation to define antisemitism. Tucked away in this proposed law was a carve out that allowed Christians to blame Jews for killing Jesus without it being considered antisemitic. The long and the short of it is that I have no idea who killed Jesus. On Earth One if Jesus had died of natural causes, Christians would be screwed. They would be permanenty stuck with their original sin, and upon death, they would, therefore, become high grade fertilizer. So, please take a moment to let that all sink in. Christians need this story. It is the story.

I have not ounce of guilt or discomfort about being candid and honest about St. Paul’s Mission’s role in the acculturation of the Gros Ventre. And I also recognize all the good that the mission has accomplished, including the contributions that Susie and I made in this history of the mission in Hays and on Ft. Belknap.

5-28-77  

While I was visiting with Gordon and Edith, Bertha came over to see her sister, Edith. During our conversation, Bertha asked me if she could review my fieldnotes from the Gros Ventre Treaty Committee Meeting. Her request led us to a long conversation about my research. I will present my conversation with Bertha in a different May blog about Gros Ventre culture change. By May, most people in Hays knew about my fieldwork research. Most of these people didn’t care one way or the other, but for those who did care, they had a lot of interesting things to share with us.

Observation is a learned practice. So, too, is developing one’s memory. Both Susie and I developed an amazing ability to observe and then record those observations in great detail in our fieldnotes. And those details included entire conversations with people. The only times we were out of our trailer taking notes was at formal meetings, such as the Treaty Committee meetings, or at educational programs. We were able to do so, because there were other people taking notes. Aside from these more formal occasions, we made our observations, held our conversations, and then as soon as was possible, went to our trailer, sat at the kitchen table and wrote down, from memory, all of what we experienced. Again, the details we remembered were remarkable.

What is even more astounding to me is that looking back at this as my 74-year-old self … I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember what happened forty years ago, and I don’t remember what happened yesterday. Names. Forgetaboutit. I remember my six grandchildren’s names. I don’t remember any of their birth dates. I am doing well when I can narrow them down to the right seasons, but I don’t always get those right either. If it isn’t on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. If I don’t make a note about it, it is gone.

Bertha, Madeline, and the other Treaty Committee members knew the quality of my notes and they relied on them after the meetings to check the accuracy of their own notes and memories. My notes were thorough, and they were accurate. I could write quickly, and recording these notes in real time made a difference. Afterward, I was able to review my notes and then rely on my memory (the one I no longer have) to make additions and corrections.

These meetings were critically important and not just for the financial impact. The business of the treaty committee and the relationship between their work and the community reflected some important dynamics in the tribe … both positive and negative. While it was really such a simple thing, it was gratifying to think that we were making a significant contribution to the tribe and the community by sharing our notes with the committee.

5-30-77  

Some of the people in the community joke with me about my research. And I’m able to joke with them. Since Irma brought up that anthropologists are interested in everything, including sleeping habits, Irma and Edith joke with me that I’m still trying to find out their sleeping habits. It’s a running joke. Edith and Gordon are always on me about being so busy. They sometimes ask us to come over and visit. They know that I’m recording anything that is of significance that they tell me. If I say to them, “don’t tell me anything important,” they laugh, but they know what I mean.

My fieldwork hung over Susie and I like a cloud that never dissipated. It was a very intense experience, and it lasted well beyond our time on the reservation. These 10,000 or so pages of handwritten notes had to be organized in some fashion so they could be analyzed. It is hard to imagine how all of this was accomplished before the advent of computers. But it was.

In my decades-long friendship with Mike, he often laughed about never having seen anyone run out the ink of a Bic pen. And he watched me run out of ink, pen after pen, on a regular basis. He was so impressed with this rare and odd behavior that he would tell his sons about it. I remember developing a huge, thick callous on the middle finger of my right hand from writing.

I included Mike in the acknowledgements of my dissertation. When it was completed, I sent him a copy. After watching me writing 10,000 pages of notes, he told me that he laughed when he received my 250 page dissertation. (My advisor handed me back a 500 page draft and told me he would read it when it was 250 pages). Periodically, when I would speak to Mike, he would ask me where all that information went. Well, Mike, it is in these blogs.

May his memory be a blessing.

5-30-77  

Johnny McMeel came over this morning to talk to Mike. He asked Mike, are the Jews still living here?

I don’t have it in my fieldnotes, but I have no doubt that Mike and I laughed hysterically about it. The Jews would hang around for more than another year. (Without Sister Bart's blessings).