Missing Persons in the New West

By Marjorie Smith, 5-22-06

With all the fascinating stories and commentary we read on NewWest, it strikes me that there is one perspective we rarely get. In fact, with the exception of the story a couple weeks ago about the Apache Indians demanding the return of Geronimo’s skull (if it can be proven that the Skull and Bones Club at Yale has it) we rarely read anything in these pages about the Oldest West – the Native Americans. It’s almost as though the dire predictions of George Catlin and Karl Bodmer have come true.

Bodmer and Catlin were artists who traveled throughout the West in the nineteenth century and specialized in painting the faces, lives and costumes of the Indians they encountered. Both men – and many of their contemporaries – believed that Native American cultures would soon become extinct. Catlin considered his art a memorial to native peoples.

Fortunately, the Indian people have not become extinct but their cultures have certainly become peripheral to most Americans. Where 140 years ago, the very survival of the tiny settlement at the east end of the Gallatin Valley which had been christened Bozeman depended upon the establishment by the U. S. government of Fort Ellis to protect settlers from raids by Indians, today this lifestyle boomtown of the Northern Rockies has only the slightest awareness of the other cultures our ancestors plopped themselves down beside. (Let’s see – there’s that gallery just off Main Street called Indian Uprising, and there’s the big powwow every year at the university, but beyond that most Bozemanites are probably more aware of Black athletes playing for the Montana State University Bobcats than they are of the Indians who make up six percent of the population of Montana.)

Some years ago I enrolled in a class in Cheyenne language at MSU. At the time I was teaching beginning Japanese through Bozeman’s adult education system and it occurred to me that I would be a much better teacher if I re-experienced the disorientation an adult feels studying a language that bears no resemblance whatsoever to her native language.

The Cheyenne class not only provided me that experience, it had some other benefits. I had spent the previous two decades in Asia, on Pacific Islands and in cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and it felt very odd to be living in a community inhabited almost entirely by white people. The Cheyenne class had more Indians than whites, and for a few hours every week, the other white students and I had the valuable experience of being in the minority in our own hometown.

The other thing I gained from the class was an insight: I wake up every morning in Montana and just go about living my life: prioritizing what needs to be done, planning my day. I never stop to think, “I am a white American woman. I am of German-Swiss extraction.” But some of the people in that Cheyenne class – the seven or eight Indians – could rarely get through a day without having to think, “I am an Indian dealing with the dominant society.”

It’s true that I am a little more conscious of Indians in today’s world thanks to a freelance editing/research project I just completed two weeks ago. I was hired by MSU English Professor Alanna K. Brown to create a glossary for her major opus, the collected letters of the Okanogan Indian writer Mourning Dove and her white mentor, a farmer/scholar named Lucullus V. McWhorter.

Alanna has been working on her book for over two decades and I felt very fortunate to play a small part in the last few months of the project. I began by tracking down a few unfamiliar terms used in the correspondence. For instance, when Mourning Dove complains about using an “invisible writer,” we discovered that what she was dealing with was a borrowed typewriter that had been made before the machines ballyhooed by Underwood in 1896 as “visible writers” had revolutionized typing. In the older machines the typist was unable to see what she had just typed.

I was immediately curious about the personalities discussed in the correspondence and the other people who wrote to McWhorter (who apparently saved every letter that ever came his way as well as copies of some that he sent out). In tracking these people down, I gained a vivid picture of life in eastern Washington State (as well as in northwestern Montana and southeastern British Columbia) between 1916 and 1936.

One impression is that there was a fascinating cast of characters inhabiting and writing about what was the New West 90 years ago: a Canadian socialist and theosophist, people deeply involved in spiritualism, the first Indian admitted to practice law in Washington State as well as the first Indian newspaper reporter, a defrocked Methodist minister evicted from Kansas for preaching that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was not necessarily ungodly – all in all, a fascinating bunch of people.

But another thing that struck me was how large a part the culture and plight of the Indians played in the daily lives of the white people involved in the correspondence. There was a degree of awareness of those other nations that we rarely see today.

Granted, I am comparing apples and oranges. Because of his passion for Indians and their culture (in addition to the years he spent getting Mourning Dove’s work published, McWhorter had been adopted into the Yakama Indian tribe in gratitude for his work helping to protect the tribe’s water rights) McWhorter naturally corresponded with many people with similar interests. If I had the tools of the National Security Agency and could eavesdrop on the email and phone calls of people working in the Native American Studies department at MSU, I would surely uncover webs of white people with as much awareness of Indian issues as McWhorter’s friends and correspondents had.

But it does seem a little sad that in the New West of today, we have very little opportunity or excuse to think about how current issues – spiraling growth, disappearing family farms, education, health, affordable housing – appear to the folks who once devised very different ways to deal with survival in this landscape we love so well.
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