Before Lewis And Clark

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Figure 2
A Painted tipi—Assinboin, (undated)
Edward S. Curtis

The Chipewyan. The Western woods Cree. The Sarsi Vol. 18, Plate 633
Special Collections, Mansfield Library, The Unibersity of Montana, Missoula

Figure 3
Chiefs of Montana
1882. © 1995-2007 Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, J. N. Choate, photographer, X-32151.

Group studio portrait of eight Native American men, chiefs of Montana (Piegan or
Blackfeet), (identified with nine names), top row, from left to right: Running Crane,
White Grass, Tail Feather, Coming Over the Hill, and Young Bear Chief; bottom
row: Four Horses, Little Dog, White Calf, and Little Plume.

T o Lewis and Clark, the Indians along the Upper Missouri were nearly
invisible, their presence made palpable only through traces and remnants, signs
and portents. For those Indians who made their homes in what is now
northeastern Montana (the Gros Ventre, the Blackfeet, the Assiniboine, the
Cree, and the Sioux), Euroamericans were not entirely alien.
Assiniboine/Chippewa historian and storyteller Joseph McGeshick says, "The
Assiniboine had been in contact with Whites for fifty years before Lewis and
Clark . . . initially coming in contact with Frenchmen . . . working for the
Hudson's Bay Company."1
In the late eighteenth century, too, the Assiniboine and Blackfeet had suffered
the first of several devastating visitations of European diseases, against which
they had little or no resistance. As Princeton historian Andrew Isenberg writes,
"The rise of the nomadic, equestrian, bison-hunting Indian societies of the
western plains was largely a response to [the] European ecological and
economic incursion."2
Richmond Clow of The University of Montana elaborates:
The Plains culture was a relatively new mode of life for Indians and was an
adaptation to the rapid expansion of colonial settlements. . . . The Plains culture
lasted only about two centuries and does not characterize the way Indians lived
for centuries before its emergence in the late 1700s. Before then . . . many of
the Plains nations such as the Sioux belonged to cultures that were related to
the farming and mound-building communities of the Mississippi Culture (a.d.
800 to 1500). Nevertheless the Plains cultures flourished during the 1700s and .
. . much of the 1800s and lasted until U.S. authorities pacified the Plains
Indians and placed them on reservations.3

After The Expedition

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A mong the last regions of Montana to be settled by Euroamericans, the Upper

Missouri country was considered to be much less appealing than the territory's
mineral-rich areas and lush river valleys to the west. For this reason, beginning
with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the U.S. government set the vast area
north of the Missouri (approximately 20 million acres) aside as the "Blackfeet
Hunting Ground" for the Blackfeet and other tribes—Cree, Assiniboine, Gros
Ventre, and Sioux—then resident in the area.
University of Lethbridge historian Sheila McManus notes that, besides these
tribes' warlike reputations (especially that of the Blackfeet), their location—the
Upper Missouri was far "removed from the major streams of white
transcontinental movement"—contributed to their "late, rapid colonization."
McManus quotes Indian agent John Young: "No Indian tribes . . . have had so
little intercourse with the whites in the past as the consolidated tribes of the
Blackfeet, Bloods, and Peigans [sic]" because of the "out-of-the-way location of
their reservation—no places of interest or importance requiring roads through
it."4
During the 1850s, government Indian agents for the region operated out of Fort
Union, at the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, and then out of
Fort Benton, the head of navigation on the Missouri. At first, the only non-
Indian settlements within the Upper Missouri were a handful of outposts
devoted to the fur trade. The Assiniboine in particular vigorously participated in
the fur trade, exchanging skins and furs for a variety of trade goods.
Stretching from the Canadian border to the Missouri, Montana's northern tier
gradually drew the interest of whites, and in increments, the United States
government whittled away at the tribes' homeland. In 1868, with the second
Fort Laramie Treaty, the government established Indian agencies in the region
—for the Blackfeet on the Teton River north of Choteau (now known as the Old
Agency) and for the rest of the tribes (Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Yankton Sioux,
and River Crow) at the Milk River Agency, near present-day Chinook.
Finally, in 1888, the Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Sioux, and Assiniboine relinquished
their claim to 17.5 million acres (27,344 square miles) of their joint reservation
in favor of three separate reservations. The Blackfeet reservation (1,462,640
acres; 2,285 square miles) was headquartered at Browning, just east of Glacier
National Park; Gros Ventre and Assiniboine made their homes on the Fort
Belknap Reservation (675,147 acres; 1,055 square miles); and several bands
and divisions of the Assiniboine and Sioux Nations settled on the Fort Peck
Reservation (2,174,000 acres; 3,397 square miles), with its headquarters at
Poplar. The second, third, and fourth largest reservations in Montana (the Crow
Reservation is the largest), these reservations remain today the homelands of
these tribes. A fourth reservation—Rocky Boy's—was created by Congress in
1916, as home to the Chippewa and Cree bands of Chief Rocky Boy. Located
just south of Havre, it is, at 120,000 acres (187 square miles), the smallest of
the four reservations in northeastern Montana.
European Diseases
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R estriction to reservations was not the only factor in the shrinking of the
Plains Indians' world. From the 1770s on, multiple epidemics of smallpox,
cholera, and other imported diseases had devastated their populations. As early
as 1844, artist George Catlin asserted in his North American Indians, "The
system of trade, and the smallpox, have been the great and wholesale
destroyers of these poor people."5
Even after the smallpox epidemics of the late eighteenth century (in which both
the Assiniboines and Piegans, for example, lost between half and three-fifths of
their populations), the early nineteenth century brought further horrors. In mid-
summer 1837, the steamboat St. Peter arrived at Fort Union, bearing trade
goods and, undetected, the smallpox virus. The Assiniboine who
brought bison hides to the post soon contracted the disease and carried it back
to their people. Fur trader Edwin Thompson Denig reported that, of the
Assiniboine who came to Fort Union that summer, fully 90 percent died—as
many as 1,100 men, women, and children. Princeton historian Andrew Isenberg
writes, paraphrasing Denig, "Those who died at the trading post were daily
thrown in the river by the cartload. Those who fled the post fared no better.
Lodges in which whole families lay dead lined the trails leading from Fort
Union." This epidemic lasted into 1840. Waves of smallpox further decimated
the tribes of the Upper Missouri in 1848, 1856, and 1869-1870. It is believed
that the population of all Plains tribes fell from a high of 142,000 in 1780 to
53,000 in 1890, in large part because of disease and starvation.6
The impact of these events on tribal cultures was devastating. As Denig said of
one tribal group after its encounter with cholera, "Their former good order and
flourishing condition deranged, they are no more the same people." 7 After 1870
(and the last major smallpox outbreak), the Blackfeet—who had been the most
feared warriors of the Northern Plains—were so weakened that they no longer
represented a threat to Euroamerican settlement.
Bison Decline
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Figure 4
Buffalo Skulls

Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

Buffalo skulls, mid-1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer.

A t the same time, the annihilation of the great bison herds contributed

greatly to undermining the Plains Indians' nomadic way of life. The website for
the Intertribal Bison Cooperative (an effort by fifty-seven tribes to reintroduce
the bison) declares, "The destruction of buffalo herds and the associated
devastation to the tribes disrupted the self-sufficient lifestyle of Indian people
more than all other federal polices to date."8 While there is considerable debate
among historians about the various factors that led to the eradication of
the bison, it is clear that, with the disappearance of the bison, the impact on the
Indians of the Northern Plains was irrevocable. By all accounts, market hunters
had destroyed the last major bison herds on the Upper Missouri by 1883.
Well before that, the reduction of bison herds had begun to affect the health of
some tribes. In his history of the destruction of the bison, Andrew Isenberg
writes:
In the winter of 1846, an Indian agent on the Missouri reported that the
Assiniboines of the northern plains were reduced to starvation. They subsisted
for a time on deer, elk, and wolves, but these were either too few or too
insubstantial to sustain them. After consuming their reserves of dried meat,
berries, and roots, they fell upon their own dogs and horses. 9
Without the bison to hunt, and with the populations of other game species
depleted by over-hunting, the Indians of northeastern Montana found
themselves increasingly dependent on the federal government. Mismanagement
and corruption by Indian agents led to more tragedies. Government rations
were inadequate and often late, and in 1882, 600 Blackfeet died of starvation
and exposure, and in the winter of 1883-1884, 300 Assiniboine starved to death
on the Fort Peck Reservation.
The Dawes Act
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Figure 5
Indian Reservations and Tribes in Montana

1. Blackfoot Confederacy (Pikuni/Piegan, North Piegan Pikuni, Blood/Kainai, and

Blackfoot Siksika); 2. Rocky Boy's (Chippewa-Cree); 3. Fort Belknap (Gros Ventre
and Assiniboine); 4. Fort Peck (Assiniboine and Sioux); 5. Conferated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes (Bitterroot Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai); 6. Crow
(Abs·alooke); 7. Northern Cheyenne (Northern Cheyenne Tribe).
Figure 6
"Indians Farming on Fort Peck Reservation," (undated)
George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-24179.

I n 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Allotment Act, which while it may have
been well-intentioned, led to further losses of territory for most of the tribes.
Scholars disagree about the motivations behind passage of the act. Some
believe that western speculators sought to open more land to white
development; others assert that the act was fueled by eastern reformers who
"deeply believed that communal landholding was an obstacle to the civilization
they wanted the Indians to acquire," and had little faith in the government's
ability "to protect the tribal reservations from the onslaught of the whites,"
thereby leaving the Indians without any landholdings at all. 10
With the intention of making Indian people self-sufficient through agriculture,
the Dawes Act granted 160 acres of reservation land to every Indian head of
family, 80 acres to single people over eighteen and orphans under eighteen,
and 40 acres to single people under eighteen. The government later allowed
non-Indians to purchase the reservation lands not allotted. As scholar Jeanne
Oyawin Eder, an enrolled member of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Fort
Peck, writes, this further breaking down of tribal homelands "continues to anger
many Indians." A history of the Fort Peck tribes notes:
Finally, the Congressional Act of May 30, 1908, commonly known as the Fort
Peck Allotment Act, was passed. The Act called for the survey and allotment of
lands now embraced by the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and the sale and
dispersal of all the surplus lands after allotment. Each eligible Indian was to
receive 320 acres of grazing land in addition to some timber and irrigable land.
Parcels of land were also withheld for Agency, school and church use. Also, land
was reserved for use by the Great Northern (Burlington Northern) Railroad. All
lands not allotted or reserved were declared surplus and were ready to be
disposed of under the general provisions of the homestead, desert land, mineral
and townsite laws.
Today, on the Fort Peck Reservation, 395,893 acres are tribally owned;
individual tribal members own a total of 509,602 allotted acres; and non-
Indians own 1,268,505 acres.11
Leonard Carlson, in his book, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land,  writes that the
Dawes Act had six primary goals: to "break up the tribe as a social unit,
encourage individual initiative, further the progress of Indian farmers, reduce
the cost of Indian administration, secure at least part of the reservation as
Indian land, and open unused lands to white settlers." While the promotion of
farming among the Indians was a stated goal, historian E. A. Schwartz notes
that "on a majority of reservations, the amount of land required for allotment
under the Dawes Act far exceeded the amount of tillable land" and the
government offered little assistance to the Indians in their transition to an
agriculture-based economy. And just like other homesteaders, Indian farmers
often found that 320 acres were simply not enough to sustain a family farm in
this arid land. Schwartz concludes:
What was most significant about Indian policy after the Dawes Act was not that
it forced more Indians to become assimilated. . . Perhaps what was most
significant was precisely what had been most significant during the four
centuries before the Dawes Act: the continuing loss of Indian lands. 12

Water Rights
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O ne bright spot for the new Indian agriculturalists, at least in the long term,
had to do with access to water. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court established, in
its decision in Winters v. United States, that Indian tribes have a "reserved"
water right that has precedence over most other rights and does not need to be
exercised in order to be retained. The Winters Decision originated from a case
brought against the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indians on the Fort Belknap
Reservation and having to do with water rights on the Milk River.
In the spring of 1905, reservation superintendent William R. Logan reported,
"We have had no water in our ditch whatever. Our meadows are now rapidly
parching up. The Indians have planted large crops and a great deal of grain. All
this will be lost unless some radical action is taken to make the settlers above
the Reservation respect our rights."13
In an unprecedented move, the Justice Department asked a judge to issue a
restraining order against the non-Indian settlers upriver, forbidding them from
diverting Milk River water if such diversion interfered with the water needs of
the Fort Belknap Reservation. The affected settlers filed suit to overturn the
restraining order, and after traveling through the lower courts, the case reached
the nation's highest court. The Supreme Court upheld the judge's order, but
refused to determine a "specific and permanent volume" as the tribes' right.
This landmark decision would take many decades to sort out, but it did firmly
establish that most U.S. Indian tribes possessed permanent water rights and
gradually, over the next century, in final determinations of these rights for
many tribes, including those on the Upper Missouri.14
Indoctrination
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E ducational efforts to further assimilate Indian peoples were often aimed at

stripping away tribal cultural traditions and, especially, languages. A federal
commission noted in 1868, "In the difference of language to-day lies two-thirds
of our trouble. . . . Schools should be established, which children should be
required to attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the
English language substituted." This attitude resulted in efforts to convert the
Indians of northeastern Montana to Christianity, outright banning of such
traditions as the Sun Dance, and the sending of Indian children to boarding
schools far from home.15 The president of the Native American Bar Association,
Richard Monette, has said:
Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding schools where
recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours
without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest
earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp
rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on
the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and
chlorine solutions for uttering Native words.16

Recovery And Renewal

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D espite poverty, alcoholism, and other related social ills, these losses of
tradition and language need not be irretrievable. As poet M. L. Smoker, an
enrolled member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, writes:
"What are we native to? All along
I have said it was the landscape and the language
wrought there according to wind and need.
But I have begun to change my opinion, not of where
and who I come from, but of how
we might establish a particular resonance:
As in  coyotes  and stones and the full
relationship between thought and deed.
The "fantastik" we all might choose—if given the chance—
to name ourselves over again.17"
Figure 7
Darrel Robes Kipp

© 2005 Ron Seiden

Darrell Robes Kipp received the 2005 Montana Governor's Humanities Award in
recognition of his role as co-founder of the Browning-based Piegan Institute and
Nizipuhwahs (Real Speak) Center, which focuses on language immersion for
Blackfeet students from kindergarten through eighth grade.
Assiniboine/Gros Ventre/Chippewa educator and poet Minerva Allen, in a 1989
interview with oral historian John Terreo, championed the teaching of traditional
Indian culture and language as a kind of inoculation against the dangers and
seductions of modern life. "There are surveys now," she told Terreo, "saying
that the kids or Indian adult students who kept their traditional values tend not
to go into drugs and alcohol. And . . . the kids that have not been raised in the
traditional way or have not been involved with parents who are really
responsible, they tend to lose their identity."18
In a collection of folktales she compiled,  Allen recounts a cautionary tale, "Ring
Tail" (named after a relatively recently adopted round dance). The anonymous
narrator says:
This old fellow went out looking for his horses. . . . I guess he fell asleep on the
side of a hill, and there was a bunch of prairie chickens dancing over on top the
hill. . . One of them came down. That was his dream. This prairie chicken came
down and sang one song to him. He caught the song right away. . . . that next
day was to be a big dance. Fourth of July down at the Agency. Nobody believed
him. Just him and his wife use to dance that. All around here, these people
would laugh at him. He told these people, "What I'm doing is going all over the
world, this dance." By golly, he told the truth. It did go all over the world. . .
Yeah, he fell asleep on this side of a hill, and there was a bunch of prairie
chickens dancing on top of the hill and one of them came and gave him this
dance.19
This tale can be seen as a parable that precisely delineates the challenges that
Indian people face today, expressing the value of staying attentive to traditional
ways—and at the same time, underscoring the need to remain open to
innovation within a living tradition.
Just as powwow dancing has taken Indian people around the globe, so have
self-directed educational efforts and cutting-edge entrepreneurial initiatives
aided the Indian peoples of northeastern Montana in their drive to reinvent
identities and retain cultures. Cultural leaders like Minerva Allen on the Fort
Belknap Reservation and Darrell Robes Kipp, founder of the Piegan Institute on
the Blackfeet Reservation, have done a great deal to make this happen. So have
tribally owned businesses like A&S Diversified (A&S stands for Assiniboine and
Sioux) on the Fort Peck Reservation, with its commitment to "demonstrating the
ever-expanding capabilities of the Fort Peck economic community." 20 By
teaching traditional ways and native languages, by looking both forward and
backward, these leaders have made an enormous difference. At Fort Belknap
College, they call this "Weaving Traditions and Technology."
The creation of tribal colleges in the 1980s reinforced the trend toward self-
education, and this process was hastened in 1990, when Congress passed the
Native American Languages Act, which asserts "the status of the cultures and
languages of native Americans is unique and the United States has the
responsibility to act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of
these unique cultures and languages."21  Meanwhile in Montana, the Indian
Education for All legislative initiative included monies for the research, writing,
and publication of full histories of each tribe in the state, further emphasizing
the importance of Indian peoples' unique contributions to the culture of the
state and the nation.
For northeastern Montana's Indian peoples, the past two hundred years have
been challenging, at best, and often brutally destructive, but the future—
because of these inspiring tribal educational and economic initiatives—begins to
look decidedly brighter.