January 10, 2003

Plains Folk: Blackfeet Tales

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

These are stories for a winter night. Stories with heroes who do the right thing, despite the treachery of enemies, and do it in a vast land, the northern plains, a land with abundant wildlife and muscular elements.  These are Blackfeet Tales from Apikuni’s World, a new title from the University of Oklahoma Press.

The author is James Willard Schultz, a cult figure with devoted fans still today, a century after he wrote his tales. Schultz described himself as a "white Indian." He was born in 1859, son of a prosperous New York merchant.  He was an intelligent boy who nevertheless was listless in school and rebellious about religion. He broke the constraints of military school by going west.  The steamboat that took him upriver from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Mont.--as far as you could go up the Missouri by steamboat--carried him into a new life, from which he would return only for visits.

The new life was a place where cultures met, sometimes collided. At Fort Union and other trading posts of the plains Indians, whites, and mixed-bloods continually renegotiated their places in the commerce and society of the land.  Schultz went native, wedding a Blackfeet woman and fathering a son who would be known to whites as the distinguished artist, Hart Merriam Schultz.  From his experiences, and a healthy dose of imagination, he would write 37 books, beginning with My Life as an Indian.

The stories in Blackfeet Tales originally were published in a magazine, The Youth’s Companion. This is to say, they were written for boys. I would say that a bright seventh-grader would handle them nicely, and likely love the themes.  My original reason for examining the book was that Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize winner who hailed from Eastend, Saskatchewan, wrote of reading Schultz’s tales in the magazine when he was a boy.  Once I got into it, however, I found myself too much a boy to put it down.

Nowadays we have to ask, is this literature acceptable for youth of the 21st century? I suspect many of my academic peers would denounce it as incorrect without reading it. It is, surely, a work of a juvenile white male fantasy.  It is not free of gender and racial stereotyping. Most seriously, it could be construed as a work of cultural appropriation, that is, a case of a white guy ripping off Indian tradition.

It is some of that, but let’s not throw out the boy with the bath. Understand, first, the Progressive times in which Schultz wrote. He takes great interest in the male societies, boys’ and mens’, of the Blackfeet, and makes much of the trials and rituals by which boys became men. This was a time when Boy Scouting was emerging to save American boys from the softness and depravity of urbanization, and when service clubs were forming as a new focus of mainstreet male collegiality. Schultz offered his readers ready-made traditions that would resonate.

Moreover, notice who is the focus of the stories. The main hero is not Apikuni, as Schultz was known among the Blackfeet, but rather his friend, the Blackfeet youth Ap-si. Ap-si shows the greater bravery in the face of the enemy.  Ap-si is the effective hunter and provider. Ap-si seeks virtue in fasting and good works.

There are two limiting aspects of the stories in relation to young readers today. First, they are so many boys stories that girls and women appear only in passive roles. Second, there is persistent reference to the "superstitious minds" of Indians. Schultz postured his work so that Blackfeet males could be offered as role models, but he would not be read as embracing paganism (which would have conflicted with the Christian tenets of scouting). Interestingly, though, the most powerful figure in his stories is a mixed-blood, the medicine man Skunk Cap, who mediates the Indian and white worlds. All these things, it seems to me, are teaching opportunities.

So I’m not going to let white guilt stop me from enjoying a feast of bison ribs and a shiver of heroic danger. The lodge needs meat. Ap-si says, "There is plenty more out on the plains." I’m going with.

###

Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is suitable for printing. 
(1.5MB b&w photo)

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern wearing a hat that is suitable for printing.
(1.3MB b&w photo)