From Gros Ventre to A’aniiih

I’m going to be taking an extended break from the blogs I’ve been posting with my contemporary photographs and notions about all the universe. For a long time, I’ve wanted to share photographs and stories from my two years of research and working in Hays, Montana on the Ft. Belknap Reservation. It has taken me decades to get to this place; working through all the photographs and finding the time to devote to this writing.

The most logical way for me to present this series is to do so chronologically. Some of the stories will be represented in the photographs. Many of them will not. But both the stories and photographs will be published as they occurred from August 1976 until the end of May 1978.

What I am presenting is dedicated to my children and grandchildren, and to my family and friends who we shared our lives with in Hays, Montana. It is a labor of love for me.

Hays, Montana - Ft. Belknap Reservation, November 1976

Before My Fieldwork Research (March 1970 – August 1976)

I knew I wanted to be a cultural anthropologist in the spring quarter of my freshman year. That was in 1970. I took an introductory course because I needed the social science requirement and that was the only available option. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. I also took wrestling that quarter to meet my physical education requirement. Who volunteers to take wrestling? I spent ten weeks getting pummeled by sweaty men who were much larger than me and were smoking a lot less dope. I’m pretty sure I got an A out of pity. I also got an A in bowling. I don’t think in my entire life, including during this course, that I ever scored anything higher than around 130. I did, however, have an exceptional grasp of bowling theory. And that entire conception speaks volumes about academia.

There were no computers in 1970 so registration involved going to the gym and walking around tables covered with index cards representing all the classes that were being offered that still had openings. Seniors registered first; freshmen got what was left, like wrestling and cultural anthropology.

I knew at the time that to be an anthropologist, I would need to get a doctorate. I was good with that commitment. I was all in on postponing the real world for as long as possible. What I didn’t know was that I was going to be in college for 14 years. I graduated from Miami University with a BA and major in anthropology in 1973. I entered the graduate program in anthropology at The Ohio State University in that same year. After passing the three days of comprehensive exams, I was awarded an MA in 1974. I was accepted into the PhD program that same year. I took my general exams and passed my language requirement in 1976. In my program, we were required to have two specializations and an area specialization. My specializations were psychological anthropology and culture change. My area specialization was the indigenous peoples of native north America. I then developed and defended my dissertation research proposal. In August of 1976 I began my fieldwork research. I completed this research in June of 1978. I was in the field for two years. Upon returning to Columbus, I began the work of analyzing two years’ worth of qualitative information, i.e., 10,000 pages of handwritten fieldnotes on yellow legal pads. All this paper had to be organized in some way for me to do this analysis. When this process was completed (which took a couple of years), I began writing my dissertation. At the time, OSU had a requirement that graduate students had to complete their dissertations within seven years of finishing their general exams. I took up two of those years in the field. It took every single day of the remaining five years to finish the writing which I did at the McDonalds in the basement of the old student union every Saturday with large cups of coffee and many cigarettes. I actually needed to obtain a one quarter extension on those seven years to go through my dissertation defense.  

Perhaps the most amazing part of this endeavor was that about midway through this writing, I knew that the chances of my getting a tenure-track academic position were somewhere between not good and impossible. The economy through the 1970s was not good. The recession had the effect of discouraging students from choosing majors that required a decade of education that offered limited career opportunities with not the greatest of financial rewards. There is basically one employment avenue for cultural anthropologists, and that is academia. If there are no majors, the faculties begin to shrink. Added to the shrinkage, anthropology departments since the beginning of time were loaded with white guys (except for Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict). Affirmative action pretty much assured that for quite a while, when there were open positions, women and minorities were going to receive preference in hiring. Most of my fellow students didn’t take seven years to complete their degrees, so I had the benefit of watching all the white guys not getting jobs in academia. They were finding work outside of academia to make a living, and their employment often had not a shred to do with anthropology.

While the writing was on the wall, I finished. I was haunted by the notion that I had invested so much of my life to this academic goal. So, I drove myself to get it done. Equally amazing, I have no regrets whatsoever. I loved those years and the experiences, and I loved becoming and being an anthropologist.

When I started my graduate school program, I was single. My wife, Susie, and my children, Aaron and David, attended my graduation in 1983. When I returned from the field in 1978, I was teaching anthropology courses at OSU. In 1980, I started working for the state of Ohio. I had an adjunct position at Capital University for about 12 years. I was given one of the faculty of the year awards in 1996. I must have been entertaining. I was offered an adjunct teaching position at a James Brown concert by the chair of the anthropology/sociology department of a small liberal arts college. I declined. I retired from the state of Ohio in 2011.

When I started graduate school, I was 22 years old. When I went into the field to do my dissertation research, I was 25. When I completed my doctorate, I was 32. I had very limited life experience when I started. I had a bit more life experience when I finished.

I haven’t the slightest idea what cultural anthropology is all about today. I lost touch with the discipline. While I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m going to guess that cultural anthropology has made some drastic changes. I can’t imagine that it exists in the way I knew it through the 1970s and 1980s.

I was aware of many shortcomings in the discipline while I was a student and a researcher. Over the years and through some wisdom that comes with age, my perspective on cultural anthropology has evolved.

I love cultural anthropology. I love the time I spent in academia. I love the time and the experiences we had doing the fieldwork research. I loved and love the people. We made lifelong friendships.

While I was preparing for my general exams, my advisor suggested that I consider specializing in the study of Israel. He thought it would be easier for me to get research funding than my interest in Native Americans. I thought about it for ten minutes. Being Jewish and being raised in an orthodox family, my life was immersed in Judaism. I was raised in what was essentially a Jewish ghetto in Cleveland Heights. Did I want to make Judaism and the Jewish people my vocation? There is so much irony in the way I was thinking about all of this, because anthropology has pretty much relinquished the study of cultures to the people who belong to those societies. I would have been a natural. I decided to stay the course and follow what I loved. Again, no regrets, but it certainly would have made my life easier had I studied the Jewish people in the land of milk and honey. It certainly would have involved far less complication and guilt than what I experienced in the study of our indigenous peoples.

While I was in the field doing my research, my advisor decided to leave anthropology and went to law school. So much writing on so many walls. Some people practice serial monogamy. I began the practice of serial advisors. I could write a dissertation on the peoples and cultures of graduate school. I won’t. Not invested. It is a very nutty and dysfunctional proposition. I loved the learning process. I always have and I always will. Looking back on the experience, I would have to say that I received very little help or support from the faculty in my department. They weren’t all that helpful in the teaching gig or the preparation for research and they were entirely useless when it came to finding employment. They developed an exceptional ability to look very sad while you discussed with them the lack of employment opportunities.

While the following stories have nothing to do with the price of fish, they so aptly reflect my life during graduate school. I would hate for these stories to be lost; I’d have them bronzed if that was possible.

Being in graduate school for most people meant living for some years in poverty. It wasn’t the same thing as being poor because everyone anticipated that the advanced degree came with good jobs and good salaries. Not the greatest of assumptions for cultural anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s who were white guys. Fortunately, I had lots of great practice not having money from growing up in my family. My needs were simple. I didn’t spend any money on clothes. I never went to a fancy restaurant. And most of my entertainment came from being with friends and smoking their dope.

For the first two years of graduate school, I lived in a small apartment on North 4th and Chittendon. The place had one bedroom and no air conditioning. The campus area has never been a safe place to live. This was true in the 1970s and it is true today. My youngest son went to Ohio State and lived in an apartment on 3rd Street. He was held up twice at gunpoint. The university has increased its prevention by adding security stations in the area, i.e., after you’ve been robbed, beaten and/or molested, they’ve made it easier to call the police. In my time in college, you were entirely on your own; before, during and after being mauled.  

Susie and I at my apartment on North 4th and Chittendon.

North 4th is a one-way street that has a lot of traffic. In the spring and summer when I would leave my front door open, there was always a lot of soot in my living room from cars and trucks. There were 18 accidents directly in front of my apartment. I know this because my neighbors and I kept track. My neighbor upstairs was a graduate student in political science. My next-door neighbor was a graduate student in philosophy. We were an entire apartment building of irrelevance. One of the accidents was a semi that flipped onto its side and slid up the street. It had been loaded with paper boxes. There was paper flying all over the neighborhood. That was pretty spectacular.

Susie had dinner at my apartment on a Saturday evening. After she left, I got into bed. It was after midnight. My bedroom had two windows that were both high on the wall. My bedroom had cinderblock walls. If I wanted to see out of the windows, I had to stand on my bed. When I turned out the light, there was an orange flickering color on the wall opposite one of the windows. I stood on my bed and saw a raging dumpster fire behind my apartment. There was a small parking lot behind my apartment. There was a large Kroger on the other side of a small access road. This Kroger was open 24/7. The loading dock was also next to the Kroger, so I had trucks pulling in to unload bananas at 5:00AM, but that’s another story. The dumpster was about 20 feet from the building, and I was concerned that it was going to catch on fire. I threw on a pair of pants and ran over to the Kroger to tell them about the fire. I approached a manager and told them that I was there to save lives and property. The manager didn’t care. I left. By this time, all the inhabitants of the apartments along 4th Street were outside watching the blaze, because when you are a poor graduate student, this is some prime entertainment on a Saturday night. We didn’t have cable or streaming services in the 1970s. Someone must have called the fire department, and an engine appeared and poured water into the dumpster. They left. The small cocktail party that had assembled in the parking lot continued after the firemen departed.

The dumpster continued to smolder for quite a while. Eventually, a small beat-up car pulled up onto the service road from Chittendon and saw the smoke pouring out of the dumpster. He revved up his engine and took off directly at the dumpster. He smashed into it and pushed it into the Kroger building. As all of us stood there agape and enjoying the drama, the guy stuck his head out of his window and shouted at us, just rearranging the neighborhood. Nothing out of the ordinary for North 4th and Chittendon.

The rearrangement was violent enough to restart the dumpster fire. As it was raging, no one bothered to warn Kroger. The fire department came back out and poured more water into the flames. One of the firemen approached us and noted that the last time he was out there that he didn’t remember the dumpster being up against the building. I don’t remember how we responded to him, but I’m sure it was the kind of informative and brilliant response one might anticipate from a gaggle of graduate students in the arts, sciences, and humanities.

I had a classic red Volkswagen Beetle that I parked behind the apartment. There was so much traffic behind me because of the Kroger and a pharmacy that was attached to it. I noticed one day that someone had scratched the word fuck into the side of the car all the way across the door. I was aggravated, but not shocked. I went to the dealership and picked up a small bottle of the classic red paint and a small brush. What I didn’t account for was the fading that took place from this very old car. The paint was an entirely different shade of red from the original color. I painted the word fuck into the side of my door in deep red, shiny paint. Anyone seeing my car could only conclude that the owner had purposely painted the word fuck across the side of the car, which is what I had, in fact, done.

Susie came rushing into the apartment one day, totally out of breath and freaked out. She told me that the person in front of her at the drugstore pulled out a gun and robbed the cash register. Just another day in the neighborhood.

During my third year in graduate school, I moved in with Susie in her apartment on Norwich near High Street. It was a better neighborhood with slightly less raping and pillaging.

Susie and I at her/our apartment on Norwich.

While I was in graduate school, my sister was at Ohio State working on a degree in occupational therapy. At the time, I was teaching physical anthropology. One day, my sister was sitting in the student union having coffee and visiting with a friend. There was a group of women sitting at a table next to her. My sister did not know and never met any of these women. One of the women turned around and interrupted my sister in mid-conversation. She asked my sister if she was Sandy Siegel's sister? My sister responded that she was, and the woman laughed. She said that I was her anthropology teacher and that we sounded exactly alike.

My sister, Leenie, and I at Ohio State.

(I had enough ears for all of us)

I’ve given lots of thought to what drew me to cultural anthropology. Why did I find it so appealing? Why was I so comfortable in being an anthropologist – theoretically speaking. Practicing anthropology was far less comfortable.

The history of American anthropology involved lots and lots of Jewish anthropologists. The “father” of American anthropology was Franz Boas. He was raised in Germany by parents who were observant Jews. He educated and trained lots of Jewish anthropologists. His graduate students also included Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Kroeber is one of my culture heroes. Woody Allen was also once one of my culture heroes, until he married his daughter (one of my great life disappointments). Kroeber did a lot of work with the tribes of North America and studied and wrote a book about the Gros Ventre. His conception of the culture areas of Native North America had such a strong influence on how I’ve organized my thinking about these tribes; how their environments shaped their ways of life, and the influence of borrowed culture elements between these groups. The people who are organizing the Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian really should take a good look at Kroeber’s work.  

Boas established the concept of cultural relativism. He taught that to understand a culture, you had to study it on its own terms without comparing it to other societies and cultures and without making judgements. He cautioned against the very natural phenomenon of ethnocentrism; the belief that one’s own culture was natural or right or the best. Each culture had its own history and integrity and had to be studied and made sense of from within. So many Jewish values are embedded in the concepts and teachings of anthropology. Above all else, there is an appreciation and empathy that emanates from the shared experiences of minority peoples who have a history of being so monumentally and devastatingly shit upon.

I would add another anthropological skill that is embedded in being Jewish. This is entirely my theory about why Jewish people make for such good anthropologists. I have no idea whether this theory has validity, but it makes perfect sense to me, and that’s all that matters. Since the diaspora, and for thousands of years, Jews have been the strangers in a strange land. We have always been a minority, in most cases, a very small minority among a people who were very different from us. In many of these situations, we survived and existed at the discretion of the people and the society in which we lived. Our culture was always different from the majority culture. We followed the laws handed down from generation to generation in the Torah that dictated relationships between people, between people and our G-d, and everything else, from what we could and could not eat to who one could marry or not marry, to how to conduct business, how to plant and harvest crops or how to care for the poor. The Torah defined a way of life, and that way of life was not the way of the life for the people among whom we lived. We always had the language of the Torah which was Hebrew. It wasn’t a spoken language before the state of Israel, it was the language of prayer. The Jewish people never had an army and were unable to defend themselves. We learned and incorporated many elements of the dominant society. We learned the language and we learned enough to survive by becoming participants of that society. We were enough a part of it to survive but were always apart from it by virtue of following our own laws, values and beliefs.

We made many significant contributions to these greater societies in philosophy, music, literature, medicine, law and in so many other important ways. When things went bad for a society, and the aristocrats needed someone to blame to keep the axe handles and pitch forks from splitting their skulls, Jews made for great scapegoats. We were always different, and from the beginning of time, different has meant threatening on some level and we were entirely defenseless because we were kept so. Different has always been from irritating to unacceptable to the dominant society. Celebrating diversity is a modern phenomenon that has only taken place in complex industrial societies where there is a great need for a workforce, and therefore some tolerance of immigrants. Today, we need immigrants to do our coding and to figure out how to sync our google, Microsoft and Apple calendars. For the entire history of humanity, there was no celebration of diversity.  Diversity involved suspicion and animosity. And even today, we need lots of practice at the idea of celebrating because while we’re regularly introduced to the concept, we are quite feeble at the practice.

History is filled with Jews running for their lives or being indiscriminately slaughtered; after stealing everything we owned. Thus, when Ferdinand and Isabella developed burrs up their butts about everyone needing to be Catholic, the many Jews in Spain ran for their lives or began to practice their religion in the basement. There are so many examples of this kind of discrimination and worse throughout thousands of years and around the world. And it never helped that the Church institutionalized the whole Jews killed Jesus thing. Easter was always a great time for Jews to hide. The Church has been central to propagating some very serious hate of Jews and causing an awful lot of spilled Jewish blood. The Church really needs to find ways to apologize in hundreds of different languages.

We study the society we live in so that we can earn a living and so that we understand the degree of threat. Ignorance could be deadly. We’ve known this for centuries.

Not only do Jews practice participant observation (cultural anthropology) as a survival technique, we also have the magic powers to understand a people and culture in a way that the native inhabitants are not ordinarily able to accomplish. Most people who practice a way of life do so without giving it much thought. We are generally unconscious about what we do and why we do it, because we learn our culture in such a way that it feels right and natural. Culture is unconscious for the people who practice it. It is only conscious for people when that culture comes into conflict with another. Then we become aware of the rules for behavior. By definition, the cultures that Jews lived in were in conflict with their own. A few easy examples. The sabbath for most Americans takes place on Sunday. I can’t buy alcohol in Columbus until the afternoon, because I’m supposed to be in Church. We’re making some diversity progress in that all stores used to be closed on Sunday. If I observe the sabbath on Friday night and Saturday, my activities are going to be out of sync with the rest of America. Everything closes on Christmas except for Chinese restaurants and movie theatres. Thus, if you are looking for a Jew on Christmas, those are the first places to look. So much of American culture is different from a Jewish way of life. These differences are obvious, difficult to ignore, and we are constantly negotiating our place in our society and culture. This is nothing new; this is the way it has been for Jews since the second temple was destroyed and we started our journey to everywhere else outside of the holy land. We survived through our knowledge of the people with whom we lived. We had to make sense of their way of life to exist.

Jews have been cultural anthropologists since the diaspora.

My love of anthropology was established and flourished as an undergraduate student at Miami University. My formative years occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The convergence of the revolutionary changes going on in our country socially and politically, with the anti-war movement, and the cultural changes embodied in sex, drugs and rock and roll fit perfectly with my personal value system and my journey as a cultural anthropologist. I was born to be receiving my education during that period, and I have remained the same flaming liberal that I was during those years. I’ve had a ton of life experience since I was 18 years old, but at the core, I am the same person today that I was when I was a student at Miami.

Once I completed my introductory course in anthropology, I announced my major and began taking classes toward that degree. We had a very small department; it was a sociology and anthropology department, and I was taking classes from both sociologists and anthropologists. So much about these disciplines are the same, including their research methodologies and theories. The primary distinction is that sociology involved the study of western, large-scale societies and anthropology involved the study of non-western, small scale and often isolated societies. This distinction is critical to understanding the transition that was underway in cultural anthropology at the time I was beginning and performing my research.

There were essentially two anthropologists in the department. One of them was the chair of the department, so he only taught a few courses during the year. Most of the anthropology classes were being taught by Dr. George Fathauer. 

I wrote the following letter to the editor that appeared in the Miamian Magazine shortly after Dr. Fathauer’s death.  

Outstanding Professor, Exceptional Mentor, Wonderful Man

By Sandy Siegel ’73

Editor’s note: Dr. George H. Fathauer ’40 taught at Miami for 34 years, retiring in 1982. He died in 2007, only a few months after his wife, Johanne Wainwright Fathauer ’42, passed away.

I graduated from Miami in 1973 with a major in cultural anthropology; Dr. Fathauer was my professor and my mentor. When I characterize Dr. Fathauer as my professor in anthropology, I mean that literally. The anthropology-sociology department in those days was quite small, and I took more than three-quarters of my major credit hours from Dr. Fathauer. The breadth and depth of his knowledge and experience in anthropology was quite remarkable. It is more than unusual to have so many courses taken from one professor at a major university. In our case in anthropology, I can say, unequivocally, that our educations and our careers were significantly enhanced by this circumstance.

Dr. Fathauer represented everything good about the academic experience at Miami University. He was a graduate of Miami in 1940; he loved Miami. He was an excellent and well-respected anthropologist. He received his doctorate from one of the premier anthropology programs at the University of Chicago, and he studied under Robert Redfield, one of the most prominent anthropologists of the 20th century. Dr. Fathauer was an anthropologist at a time when people in the discipline knew each other on a first-name basis. He could have taken a position at a large university with a prestigious graduate program and where the focus would have been on the doctorate programs and research. Dr. Fathauer chose to teach at his beloved Miami University and devoted a career to undergraduate education.

He was most definitely a professor from the “old school.” His relationships with students were formal and professional. While Dr. Fathauer lectured to classrooms full of students who wore the uniform of the day — long hair, torn or patched blue jeans, T-shirts — he came to class every day wearing a sport coat. His classes were demanding, and his expectations were very high. His theory seminar was rigorous. There were approximately 10 anthropology senior majors taking his yearlong seminar. He announced at the beginning of the course that his intention was to teach us anthropological theory and to prepare his students for graduate school. Throughout that year, we read a tremendous amount of material and produced a paper each week. I went on to receive a master’s degree and doctorate in anthropology, and throughout my graduate education never learned more or worked harder than I did in Dr. Fathauer’s theory courses.

Dr. Fathauer shaped my academic interests, and he did so with few words. His specializations were Native American studies and culture and personality. Dr. Fathauer did his fieldwork research with the Mohave. His guidance and influence were expressed with encouragement and derived from respect, admiration, and his unbridled passion for the subject matter. My anthropological specializations were Native American studies and culture and personality; I did two years of fieldwork studying a plains tribe on a reservation in north central Montana. After I returned from my fieldwork, I maintained contact with Dr. Fathauer. I came to Oxford on more than one occasion to speak to Dr. Fathauer’s anthropology classes about my fieldwork research experiences.

Dr. Fathauer was a gentle man. As an anthropologist and as a Native American expert with a very close and emotional connection with the Mohave and other tribes, it caused him some considerable conflict and discomfort that the university he so loved should have a nickname that from his perspective was insensitive and racist. Dr. Fathauer regularly made this discomfort known to the university administration and he explained his rationale for the need to make the change. He did not make these protestations in a public way; that wasn’t his style. I have no doubt that he felt quite gratified when Miami adopted the new nickname and mascot.

George Fathauer was an outstanding professor, an exceptional mentor, and a wonderful human being. He touched my life in the most profound ways; he shaped my academic career, and he influenced the ways I make sense of the world around me. Miami’s reputation for exceptional undergraduate education has been built on the dedication and devotion of teachers such as Dr. George Fathauer.

Sandy Siegel ’73 of Powell, Ohio, is president of the Transverse Myelitis Association.  https://www.miamialum.org/s/916/22/Interior.aspx?pgid=1411&gid=1&cid=26353

About a year after this letter was published, I received a phone call from a gentleman who told me he was Dr. Fathauer’s nephew, and that he was raised by George and Johanne. He wanted to thank me for the letter and told me that I totally nailed my characterization of his uncle. I was more than delighted that he took the time to make the phone call and my mind was completely blown.

While I was preparing my fieldwork research proposal, I was under intense pressure from my advisor and dissertation committee to develop a project that was dressed as a scientific study. If I wrote the book about graduate school that I’m not invested in writing, there would be large sections of the publication that characterized the bizarre relationships graduate students have with faculty. On the surface, these relationships appear as friendships. Good friendships occur between people of equal status. Equality is not at all a function of student and faculty relationships. Students are not only subservient to faculty; they are subject to the whims and fancies of faculty. If relationships go sour between a student and a faculty member or members, you can’t just transfer to a different program and university. You get this one shot to get your degree. If you must leave a program or get forced out, you carry the stench of cooties with you, and you are cooked. No other program wants you because you carry the stench of ‘troublemaker’ or ‘academic ne'er-do-well.’ Graduate program faculty have a tremendous amount of power over students. You can have a friendship with people who have that kind of power over you, but it will be an unhealthy, unsatisfying, and dysfunctional friendship. We didn’t have google maps in those days, but there wasn’t any confusion about one’s location as a graduate student; you lived neatly under the faculty’s collective thumb.

There was so much going on in the discipline at the time that from my perch felt very confused and disingenuous, i.e., trying to sell cultural anthropology as science. The reality is that the closest it comes to a science is that it is considered a social science for the purpose of academic requirements. From my perspective, cultural anthropology is as much a science as is philosophy or history. It isn’t. For me, it all comes down to the magnitude of influence of the human instrument. 

If they told you that you had to create a science project, they weren’t looking for a debate. I won’t torture you with a discourse on the scientific method. You don’t control any variables in anthropological research. There aren’t any great experiments. Testing hypotheses is a dicey proposition. The easiest way I can explain this is to say that science involves many important methods to control for bias. Studies are often designed to minimize or to try to eliminate the influence of human bias. Even Boas realized that it is difficult to keep the brain uninvolved in observing, recording and analyzing human experience. You can be aware and sensitized to these biases, but to keep them separated from how you think and make sense of the world around you is a tall order … or near impossible. That is why stuff like blinded studies exist so that scientists can’t do what human beings do.

Let me give you the best of examples. Language is much more than just the way we communicate with each other. Language and culture are basically the same thing. Language is the way we make sense of our world. The categories that are reflected in words define the way we organize our perceptions of the social and natural environment. It determines our relatives and the specific relations, how we define what is food and what should not be eaten, what happens after a person dies, how we characterize a greater power, and everything else about a way of life. If I really wanted to understand and make sense of another group of people, I would have to start by learning their way of life in their language. By doing a study of a people from one’s own language, you are already a giant step away from understanding their way of life. Not too much objectivity in that proposition.

It gets worse. I am going to make sense of what I observe based on who I am and my life experiences. Anthropology recognized that notion and used a specific example to demonstrate just how this bias works. It was known as the Redfield – Lewis controversy. To simplify the explanation, both anthropologists studied the same village at different times. One of them loved rural life and his descriptions of the village were idyllic. The other was a city kind of guy and characterized the same village in different and less glowing terms. The lesson from this controversy was keep yourself out of it; like that’s going to happen. I always thought that if you really wanted to understand the context of what an anthropologist was describing, you should probably begin every publication with an autobiography so that we understood something about where you were coming from (all your biases). And you better not leave anything out because there’s no objectivity if you leave out all the dysfunctional aspects of your personality.  The human instrument permeates every molecule of anthropological research, as is the case with the humanities. I’m okay with owning that fact and taking this research for what it is … a very human endeavor that attempts to help us all better understand the way of life of a people who otherwise we would know nothing about. That feels worthwhile enough for me, bias and all.

A hallmark of a scientific study is that it is replicable. If I prove a hypothesis by performing a specific study, it needs to be able to be performed by a different person or group and they need to arrive at the same results. Being able to pull that off in anthropology is a difficult proposition because no two individuals are going to experience and describe the same phenomenon in precisely the same ways. We might be able to get in the same ballpark, if all our planets are aligned, but we’re not going to get the same precision that one might expect and demand from science.

I can’t remember ever sitting down to read my entire dissertation after I completed it and I defended it with my committee, which at the time was composed of all the faculty who hadn’t left for law school or didn’t hate my guts. It was too painful to read. I was hounded by the directive of doing science while I was developing my research, while I was doing my fieldwork, while I was analyzing the thousands of pages of observations and while I was writing. I knew what I was doing wasn’t science, and the pretending made for a challenging experience. I was forced to construct an experience based on the directives given me by all of those who controlled my academic life. What they sought was not the experience I had.

I tried to administer a values survey while I was in the field which was driven in large part by the need to placate their need for science. The entire endeavor was a failure and a gigantic waste of my time and all who were kind enough to participate. The survey analysis would have given me some numbers to publish which would have made my work appear a bit more science-like. As the results from this survey were crap, I never bothered to either analyze or publish any of it. The only numbers in my dissertation research were the page numbers.  

I wanted to publish an ethnography and call it a day. I could have written a 500-page ethnography without looking at a single fieldnote. It wouldn’t fly. An ethnography is a description of a culture and society. For a society that was experiencing a tremendous amount of rapid change, it would have been a valuable piece of work both in anthropology and for the people in the community where we lived. I tried to gently make that case to my advisor, but it was a no go. I did include a much shorter ethnography than I had preferred. I did hand my advisor a 500-page draft at one point, and he said that he would read it after I got it down to 250 pages. That wasn’t very nice. He said that I could write the magnum opus after I completed my dissertation. What he wasn’t considering was that the discipline of cultural anthropology was imploding and particularly for the ever-popular white guys. Once I completed my work, and the doors of academic opportunity closed, there was going to be no magnum opus or any other kind of academic frivolity. This was my shot, and it evaporated. I suppose I could write the magnum opus today. I was directed by my life experiences to write it about the patient experience with transverse myelitis. Not sure I have any more opi or opuses or opera within me. I don’t know if my advisor hated me by the time we were done, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t like me.

We did have a complicated relationship. He was a former Jesuit priest, married to a former nun. Thus, he had a unique understanding of our research on the reservation which included our working for the Jesuit Volunteer Corp at a Catholic mission. Susie and I had dinner with he and his family after we returned from our fieldwork. During this dinner, Susie went into labor with our first child, Aaron. Shortly after I completed my doctorate, my advisor was diagnosed with cancer, and he passed away. I often think about him. I feel badly that our relationship might not have been particularly good for his health and well-being. Oh, well (to quote Nancy).

My reading committee wanted science and thus I cobbled together a project that didn’t feel entirely horrible and satisfied their requirement. They wanted a problem addressed in my research. Unfortunately, from my perch, they were the problem. Consequently, while I think there are some good parts to my dissertation, they can be difficult to find amidst the remarkably bad scientific crap.

Why science … because that is where the money was. If you had any chance of funding of research, at the time, you needed to present a scientific study. It’s always about the money. I always felt as though there was intrinsic value in understanding something about our neighbors. I was naïve. These people were stuffed away on reservations in large part so the rest of us didn’t have to see them or think about them; and so that we could steal all their land (and their way of life). Unless you live in a town outside of a reservation, that program has worked well. I’m sure there are lots of people today who would love to see all our minorities relocated to reservations or Martha’s Vineyard. 

As regards my abbreviated academic career, I never felt any resentment or animosity about the state of affairs. Anthropology departments, as many academic disciplines were filled by a majority of white guys. During the 60s and 70s there was an awakening about the lack of sensitivity toward diversity. In a field like anthropology, this problem was magnified as we’re sort of the study of this diversity. As our shame increased, so did the options for white guys decrease. I was realistic and sane enough to understand, appreciate and accept this process. I was just born at the wrong time. In hindsight, it was really for the best.

My specialization was Native Americans. My experience was the Plains Tribes of Native North America, and my specific research involved the Gros Ventre or A’aniiih. Pursuing those interests throughout an academic career would have caused me an abundance of conflict and discomfort. I felt it while I was in the field, and it only would have increased substantially in the future. When I started putting my research proposal together and planning my fieldwork, I began to observe signs that changes were taking place in the discipline. As I was young and at the beginning of my career, I wasn’t thinking about either the ultimate significance of these changes or the logical and inevitable results that would take place.

The Tribes that live on the northwest coast of North America are fascinating. Their location and the great abundance of stable resources allowed them a sedentary existence and to develop highly complex cultures. Nomadic peoples don’t design and carve totem poles because it is unwise to be shlepping around a gigantic tree. I became interested in these societies early in my studies. As I began to research the possibility of living with one of these tribes to do my work, I began to learn that the tribes were demanding final editing rights to any articles or books being published about their societies. Today, what I have to say about this process is “good for them.” This is their right, and it is wonderful that they are controlling their own narrative. Over the years it has been butchered by “outsiders.” They have the right and it is in their best interest to “tell their own story.” If one were engrossed in the fantasy of anthropology being a science, they might point out that the greatest potential bias in research could possibly come from the ultimate insider. Objectivity might be better served by a trained professional from the outside who is able to experience the society and culture in a broader and comparative context. Well, cultural anthropology isn’t a science and who better to really understand the culture than those people who were socialized in it, and particularly when they speak their native language, as this critical importance of language was noted above.

An A’aniiih person can be trained in sociology and anthropology as easily as a white guy and they can apply all the research and analytical approaches that have been employed by the white guys since the inception of fieldwork research. Is a historical account of the civil war written by an American in some way diminished by their ethnocentric bias? The answer to that question is that most of these historical accounts and analyses are written by Americans and few question the validity or authenticity of these works. We take them for what they are … one person’s review of the information and how that person makes sense of these events and experiences. We acknowledge that the historian picks and chooses what elements to highlight and which to diminish or ignore. We can gain insights and learn valuable information while accepting that a different historian can have a different take on the same experiences; one person’s manifest destiny is another’s pillaging and stealing of land and a way of life. All of life is about the spin, from the bible to the most highly sophisticated science. Being a responsible human being involves constantly being aware of the human activity of spin and working at uncovering reality, whatever the hell that might be at any given time and place.

My reading committee discouraged me from doing my work where the people could exercise final editing rights on a dissertation. Clearly, they wanted the exclusive ability to torture me throughout the process and didn’t want any interference from the people who knew best about what I was studying. My committee was concerned that this review process might delay me from getting done quickly. Like this could drag on for nine years instead of the seven years that it took for me to get the writing done. These were not easy times, but as these were the times I was living in, I wasn’t focused on just how precarious all of this was for me.

As the entire world was being colonized by western societies, cultural anthropology was allowed to flourish. Some pith helmeted white guy or Margaret Mead could readily appear in a small village in the middle of colonial anywhere and spend enough time to gather material for a great story about a small-scale, isolated, non-western people. These descriptions or ethnographies were so interesting to so many because they were about people we knew nothing about, and they were so different from us. We love the exotic and different whether we read it in National Geographic or the Enquirer. As the world came to accept what colonialism meant to the world and all the destructive consequences that have resulted, it began to decline. What do you mean we have to pay for all your valuable resources? Much of it began to die in the 1940s.

It is better for the A’aniiih to tell their own story. They have the greatest investment in that story. It is important that I clarify where I am on this entire subject because it has become quite controversial in our society, and not just in anthropology. I believe it is perfectly legitimate for a white guy to tell the A’aniiih story as they see it. I believe that a white man can write a great novel about black women. I believe that Ken Burns can produce an important documentary about the Holocaust, even though he is not Jewish. I believe that a person can portray a paralyzed person in a movie even though they are not paralyzed. Everyone has a perspective that has worth regardless of their own life experiences. It comes down to the story and the way it is told. For me, it is about where we are today. Today, we are amid the many years of ignoring the A’aniiih’s ability to tell their story or the opportunities for a paralyzed person to get a good acting role in a film. Until we’ve rectified these injustices and facilitate these opportunities, we have to recognize the righting of these wrongs. I hope there will come a time when these opportunities have been satisfied sufficiently that white guys can have their say without the sensitivities that I believe are rightly placed. All of life is about the timing.

Right discipline, wrong time.

Right woman, wrong time.

Brilliantly funny joke, wrong time.

And as Vonnegut might say … and so it goes.

I was naïve in the mid-1970s, and I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the issue. I had just spent seven years drinking the anthropological Kool aid. I was into this entire endeavor hook line and sinker. My goal was to spend a minimum of one year in the field doing my research and then developing my specialization in the indigenous peoples and cultures of North America.

I had studied under the consummate professional who was a traditionalist. I was going to follow in his footsteps. I wanted to be in the field for at least a year and I was going to do my fieldwork on a reservation. How I was going to make that happen was going to require some significant magic. The whole proposition of fieldwork and research in anthropology is just an amazing process. I took one research methodology course in graduate school. It was totally worthless. I learned more about fieldwork research in my bowling class. The primary research technique in cultural anthropology was participant observation. You live among a people and participate as much as is possible in their way of life and you objectively observe and record those observations. Then you return home and write an interesting and brilliant story. Some academic institution hires you because you have such wonderful stories about your adventure, and you live happily ever after. How you get from graduate student to the happiness part is a total mystery. Even Dr. Fathauer didn’t reveal how any of this is done. As regards methodology and research, one is entirely on their own to figure it out.

How do you arrange to spend a year among any group of people? Why would they just accept a stranger to live with them, let alone share their way of life? Again, when non-western peoples lived under the thumb of the western colonial powers, they didn’t have much choice in the matter. The times they were a changing. I was offered no guidance nor any help from my faculty in getting this figured out.

There were very few sources of funding to do fieldwork. At the time I was applying for funding, the US economy sucked. Inflation and interest rates were very high, and money was scarce. Money for anthropological research was non-existent. It became clear to me that I was going to need to work while I was doing my research. I began to research work opportunities on reservations anywhere in the US. One of my fellow graduate students and a good friend was a priest in the Great Falls Diocese. I discussed my concerns with him, and he offered to help. He knew all the priests on all the reservations in Montana. He spoke to a colleague on the Ft. Belknap Reservation. The Jesuits ran St. Paul’s Mission. They had an elementary school that covered grades 1 through 8. He asked the priest if they would be interested in volunteers who could teach at the school. He arranged for me to have an interview with the priest who ran the mission, and with the sister (Franciscan) who was principal of the school. The interviews went well, and we were accepted into the Jesuit Volunteer Corp. Our teaching and volunteer positions were also approved by the school board president. All of them understood that I was a cultural anthropologist who was coming to the reservation to do my dissertation research. There was no confusion among any of them about what exactly that meant. I was not the first anthropologist to show up in Hays, Montana. A priest had done fieldwork among the Gros Ventre in the 1940s and one of his students also did fieldwork after him. Both wrote ethnographies about the Gros Ventre.

The priest had passed away, but his student was still alive. I contacted her and told her about my plans. We communicated periodically throughout my work. There is an unspoken rule in anthropology that you get in touch with the people who preceded you in a community. It isn’t a request for permission to be there, but there is an implicit show of respect to do so. Dr. Flannery was so gracious about my doing this work and was very supportive. I was grateful. She had a very positive experience in the community and her work left positive feelings in the community about this kind of research.

We were hired to begin our work in August 1976. We knew next to nothing about the community nor what we were going to need to live there. Our volunteer commitment to the Jesuit Volunteer Corp was two years. We were going to receive room and board and $50 per month. We were going to set up a home in Hays for two years. We knew that the winters were cold. We had no details about our living arrangements. How we were going to prepare meals or wash our clothes was a total mystery.

The School Board President was Ray Gone. Ray was Gros Ventre. He was about my father’s age and was also a proud veteran of World War II. He reminded me of my father in some important ways, and we became very close with him and his wife, Irma, and their children. Our connection to the Gone family developed very quickly. Ray spoke to me often about my research and had a keen interest in my work. He and Irma were very protective of Susie and I and accepted us into their family in a sweet, kind, and generous way. The relationship we had with the Gone family began during our two-year stay in Hays and has lasted for a lifetime. We still consider the Gone’s to be our family.

What is a fieldnote? How do I structure it? How do I ensure the anonymity of the people? How do I observe? What should I observe? What should I record? How do you analyze so much qualitative information? We had no guidance in any of it. The visual I had about doing this research was that you get parachuted into an isolated community with no preparation nor any sense at all about what you are going to do or how you are going to do it. A major part of doing this research is figuring out what you are supposed to do and how to do it. And that description, by the way, is the furthest thing from science.

We had electricity and indoor plumbing. That was fantastic. All the people spoke English as their first language. That was also fantastic. We worked at a Catholic Mission school. That received mixed reviews. Almost everyone in the community was Catholic and had some kind of relationship with the Church. Even if they never came to mass, the mission had one of the only telephones in the community and people showed up to play bingo on Thursday nights. But the Church was also responsible for causing a great deal of pain in this community, so there were significant bad feelings associated with the place and the people who worked there. We had to negotiate all these very complicated experiences and feelings.

Beyond those complications, we were Jewish. An older gentleman in the community once said to me that he was so confused because he didn’t know that there were Catholic Jews. While I could have waxed poetic about Jesus, I chose to accept his confusion and we moved on to another subject. Everyone knew we were Jewish. The Jesuit priests knew, the Franciscan Sisters knew, the Dominican sisters knew, the other Jesuit volunteers knew and all the men, women and children in the community knew. When you live in a community of 600 people, everyone knows everything about everyone. I think the only person who didn’t know we were Jewish was a Jesuit brother. Everyone was afraid to tell him.

In the community, no one really cared that we were Jewish. Our religion caused more confusion than consternation. The people generally had an interesting take on religious diversity as the Church had done a spectacular job of squashing their traditional religion. The people in the community had a unique perspective on religious liberty.

It took just enormous guts for the priests and sisters to accept us as mission volunteers. We were the first Jews to work at the mission and I have to think that we are the only Jewish people who have ever worked for the Jesuit Volunteer Corp. In the two years we lived and worked at the mission, our faith was never an issue. We experienced no prejudice or discrimination at the mission or in the community. If anything, there was an abundance of interest and curiosity. Only one sister made it her crusade to convert us to Catholicism. Her fervor was such that I concluded that she must have believed that she would receive holy bonus points if she could snag herself a couple of Jews. She continued to send us literature from Jews for Jesus even after our departure. None of the other sisters or priests or volunteers communicated any interest in our conversion.

Beyond being Jewish, it took some serious guts for the priest and Sister Giswalda (the principal) to accept a couple to work at their school and the mission. After all, the nuns and priests were sort of not at all about the couple thing. We got that figured out in grand fashion when Susie got pregnant, and we learned that the mission had health care coverage for us that lacked any kind of maternity coverage. Most of the employment/volunteer opportunities that Susie and I were finding were associated with religious institutions. Most of them weren’t interested in couples. One of the offers we did receive had Susie and I living in different dorms. As newlyweds, we thought that wasn’t a great idea. We knew that we needed to be married. We had been living together while we were both in school, but we knew that working for a Catholic mission was going to require that we be a married couple. Looking back at this entire experience, that they accepted us as a Jewish married couple is truly remarkable. I know that my interest in traditional religious rituals made one of the priests uncomfortable. If I attended a spirit lodge or peyote meeting, I could literally see him shutter with anxiety. We represented the Church while we were in the community. He might have regretted our being there on occasion. We never got that vibe from the sisters. They were really accepting and appreciative of our work and participation at the mission and school.

While there is a paucity of teaching that goes on about methodology or research in cultural anthropology, there is a great abundance of stories that are shared about what goes on with anthropologists in the field. The more isolated and non-western the society, the more outrageous and incredible are the stories. These stories are spread far and wide in the discipline and are passed down from generation to generation. Fieldwork research is an adventure and the more exotic the experience, the more interesting the stories. I would characterize these stories as the folklore of anthropological fieldwork research. These stories are entertaining; they reveal very little about what you are supposed to do in the field or how you are supposed to do it.

To be fair, I’m not sure fieldwork research is teachable. Every situation is so different. Every society is different. The natural and human-made environments are so different. Every anthropologist is different. A primary aspect of doing the work is figuring out what the work is supposed to be. If you lack creativity, flexibility, adaptability, discipline and drive, you are basically screwed. Also, if you are shy, you are screwed. If you lack social skills, you are screwed. If you don’t know how to communicate, you’re screwed. If you are arrogant and self-centered, you are screwed. If you have no sense of humor, you are screwed. If you can’t laugh at yourself or be self-deprecating, you are screwed. If you have a personality disorder, you might not be screwed, but your work is going to turn out to be more interesting than it should be. I learned none of that in a classroom. I learned all those things from doing fieldwork research for two years.

So, what’s the deal about doing fieldwork research for at least a year. This is a standard in anthropology. Or I should say that it was the standard, because I have no idea what is going on in cultural anthropology today. One of my favorite anthropological stories involves where this one-year thing derived. Before Bronislaw Malinowski did his research, it was common for a pith helmeted white guy to pop in on a society accessible by virtue of some colonial activity somewhere in the non-western world, spend enough time to learn something about the people and then return home to write some fascinating work about a group of exotic natives.  

Malinowski was a Polish born anthropologist who went to study the Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific. After he arrived, World War I broke out and he was stuck there until the war ended. After he returned, he made a case for why fieldwork should encompass the time he was forced to endure by virtue of being stuck there. It would be as though I made a two-year commitment to the Jesuit Volunteer Corp, performed a two-year study in the field and then announced to all future students of anthropology that you need to be doing your research for a minimum of two years. Fortunately for Malinowski, what he was forced to do actually makes a lot of sense in the real world of anthropological fieldwork research. Seasonal changes that impact subsistence practices are going to be annual. Those changes are likely also going to impact the social and ritual/religious cycle. Thus, if you need to experience everything possible about a people, a minimum of a year is important for research. Malinowski made many important contributions to the field of cultural anthropology. One of the most important involved this lesson about fieldwork research.

Spending a year in the field or two years, is a considerable commitment of time. If you are serious about your work, and I was as serious as they come, this is the only way to do it. I was so serious, in fact, that I didn’t experience culture shock when we arrived on the reservation. I experienced severe culture shock after two years when we returned home. Being on the reservation in many ways felt like home.

Even in the 1970s when we were doing our research, there were members of the A’aniiih tribe who were anthropologists. I learned about George Horse Capture shortly after we arrived in Hays. George was an anthropologist at Montana State University. George and I corresponded during the time we were doing the work and he was kind, generous and supportive. The tribal chairman at the time we were on Fort Belknap was Jack Plummage. We received his permission to be on the reservation and to do this research. He was also supportive of our research. Jack also held a degree in anthropology and was intimately familiar with the nature of fieldwork research. Both were interested in our capturing the culture as it was undergoing rapid and dramatic change. George’s son also received a degree in anthropology and in history. He joined the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian Institution in 1994 and served for more than a decade.

There was always a strong interest in the traditional culture and the language among people in the community. That interest took on a professional character through the work and activism represented by the Horse Captures and those that followed in their footsteps in both anthropology and history.

I would characterize the time we spent doing my research as a transitional period. It was transitional for the people we lived with, and it was transitional for the discipline of anthropology. Change is constant, but the changes that were occurring for the Gros Ventre and for cultural anthropology were profound.

It is difficult for me to imagine that western anthropologists are dropping in on any non-western peoples announcing that they plan to live with them for a year and study everything about them. I’ve read stories about missionaries who have shown up in some remote jungle to settle among some native community. Before they’ve had the opportunity to announce that they’ve arrived to save everyone, they’ve been killed. And there you have it. The natives figured out colonialism and exploitation.

Acknowledging that I have no idea what is going on in cultural anthropology and that I have no idea what I’m talking about, it is such a stretch for me to imagine that anthropologists are doing the kind of work we were engaged in during the 1970s. In some ways, I sort of feel as though I could have been the Ishi of cultural anthropologists. Who could possibly be spending two years in the field on a reservation or in any other small-scale, isolated, non-western community.

If I’d gone the Israel route, I would have had lots of struggles, but guilt would not have been one of them. My Native American route involved lots and lots of discomfort and guilt. As noted, our research involved participant observation. The participation parts were incredibly important in helping us to feel less yucky about the observation part of our fieldwork. We became an integral part of the community. We came to love the people. So many of our friendships became so close that we felt as though they were family. This proved to be the case through the many years of our relationships even after we moved back to Ohio. One of the strongest values among the A’aniiih is generosity. We were the recipients of generosity in so many ways and on so many occasions. It would have been almost impossible not to find ways to reciprocate, and particularly because we had developed such close relationships with those around us.

The observation part was emotionally and psychologically challenging. We developed amazing skills at remembering details of events and conversations such that we were able to record them in our fieldnotes. I had running themes haunt me while we were doing this work. I often felt like I was doing the work of a reporter; attempting to objectively observe and record the events that were going on around me. And at the most difficult moments, I felt like a spy. It was hard and it sucked. How do you engage in this kind of activity with people you love and not feel conflicted and emotionally distraught about it? I think in some ways, we accommodated some of these complicated and disquieting feelings by not writing about the people. I published a dissertation – the paper that sucks and is too painful to read – and I/we never published anything else. It has been almost 50 years since we did this work.

During my time on the reservation, I also developed some serious internal conflicts regarding the work I was doing. Life on the reservation was difficult. The people who lived on Ft. Belknap had experienced the worst type of trauma for generations. We stole their land. We stole their language. We stole their way of life. We often stole their children from them. The stealing was done with the greatest cruelty. Our tactics were inhumane. We killed off their food supply to make them entirely dependent and then we used that dependence to force them into doing what we ordered.

Hitler learned some of his most malicious rationale for the treatment of Jews by observing how America treated its indigenous peoples. We also gave him some of the most vicious tactics for how to accomplish his sinister goals. Let that sink in.

These people were never dealing with the cream of the crop of American society. Whether it was Indian agents or clergy or police, the reservation was a place to hide whites who were for whatever reason found to be unacceptable in the greater society. The people on the reservation often had to deal with the very worst of us.

I came to believe that if my work wasn’t directly involved in improving the quality of life of these people, I was wasting their time and mine. They deserved better. We forced these people to live on these reservations. We owe them a meaningful way to earn a living with dignity. At the time I was living on Ft. Belknap, the unemployment rate was very high, and many were living below the poverty level. The magnitude of social problems was staggering.

We also owe them some kind of restitution for all the land that was stolen from them. Even when we negotiated the purchase of their land, we always swindled them, and we always broke our agreements. If we did an accounting going back to our first screwing of these people, we likely owe them trillions and trillions of dollars. We know the history of every single treaty and we also know every single instance of our cheating these people. It wouldn’t take a court case to resolve – we would only need to review all the historic records. What we do is pretend that none of these problems exist and live our lives. We suck.

Why we? Because every single American has directly benefitted from moving our indigenous communities the hell out of our way. As I’ve said before, look down at your feet. You are on their land.

We aren’t going to give them back New York. So perhaps we should give them all the federal lands, including our national parks and wildlife areas, and let them charge us for entrance. And then we should figure out how much money we honestly own them and pay up.

I concluded that I didn’t have any great answers to all the incredibly complicated issues that swirled around these people’s lives. I cared about them deeply and loved many of them. I was just left feeling badly about all of it … the horrible history they had with us and the difficult contemporary problems that our government and our society almost totally ignore. It’s so much easier to deal with if we don’t have to see it. It’s given me a lifetime of feeling demoralized about all of it.

I am writing this blog to share with our family and friends. It isn’t an ethnography, and it is not an academic work. It is a description of the two most wonderful and exciting years that we spent in Hays, Montana, at the foot of the Little Rocky Mountains on the Fort Belknap Reservation. I want to share our adventure and I want to share all the photographs we took during that time. I will be writing about the people we lived with and the experiences we shared with them. I will be writing about their way of life because that was such an enormous part of the experiences we shared. Our friends and ‘family’ were proud of their culture, and they were eager to share so much of it with us.

So many of our friends are gone. When I have visited the reservation in the past, I make a point of going to the mission cemetery or to the other places that my friends are buried and I say Kaddish for them. I bring my Yarmulke. We have been saddened many times by these losses. We want to be sure that we share this record of some of the most meaningful relationships we’ve had in our lives.

For me to write a blog about our experiences and to share the many photographs we took during those two years, it felt as though I needed to start with this context. It is absolutely the case that the way of life described in my dissertation was helping to preserve a way of life that was undergoing rapid and drastic change. This attempt at science was not of the greatest value, but the ethnographic portion could be helpful as a historic record. The photographs I took during those two years are also important from that historic perspective.

As noted, the years we were on the reservation was a transitional time. It appeared as though it was a time of loss with an increasing reliance on pan-Plains culture as a foundation for the Gros Ventre Tribal identity. So much of the traditional way of life was either gone or was being lost. At the time we were on the reservation, there were so few native speakers of the A’aniiih language. We had no sense that in the years after our departure the people would become very much involved in a recapturing of some of their traditions and their language. In the years we were on the reservation, no one referred to themselves as A’aniiih. Few would refer to the White Clay People, which is the English translation of their traditional name. Gros Ventre was the name used officially and by the US government and by almost all the people. That is not the case today. We sure didn’t see that coming, and it has been such a positive process.

I believe that anthropology has made a tremendous contribution to humanity by describing the ways of life of people who we would have never known about otherwise. We also captured these ways of life while most of them were experiencing tremendous change due to contact, and in so many cases, exploitation by the western world. I will always believe that there is intrinsic value in understanding all of humanity. These were beautiful and meaningful societies before we disturbed or destroyed so many of them.

Cultural anthropology has also generated for humanity some world-class great stories. There is no doubt that we learn so much about ourselves when we take the time and effort to learn about those who think differently and behave differently from us. While it feels perfectly natural for me to think that all the universe revolves around my head, I know on some level that this is not the case. I don’t hold all the answers; nor do the people with whom I identify or the group that I am a member. There are different ways to think, to believe and to behave. By being open to learn about the great diversity of humanity, we learn something about how we fit into what it is to be Homo sapiens sapiens. That is a good thing. That is an important thing. That is a valuable thing.

I hope that you enjoy the stories. I hope that you learn something about the wonderful people who we came to love. I hope that you learn something about yourself.

There are a few more housekeeping issues that I would like to discuss as an introduction to the blog. At a university, if you are going to do any kind of research with human subjects, you are required to submit to a committee all the ways you intend to protect these individuals. Even referring to the people in the community in which we lived as human subjects sort of says it all from the yuckiness perspective. To meet this ethical standard, we worked to protect the anonymity of the people in the community. We did so by not using names in our fieldnotes. We reveal no one’s identity in the fieldnotes or in my dissertation. When you live in a small community, if you say much of anything about anyone, people are going to recognize who you are speaking about or referring to. Thus, care was taken to avoid too many references that would expose an identity and most of what I wrote about was done in more general terms. To ensure that we protect people in the ways just noted, the fieldnotes will be destroyed.

Do I have this same obligation in doing this blog; protecting the anonymity of the people with whom we lived in Hays? My conclusion was to describe my experiences without being able to write about specific people would strip too much of the emotion and meaning from these experiences. I am not writing an academic work. I am writing stories, and I would not write anything that might hurt or embarrass any of these people I love. While I am an anthropologist, this blog series is not academic anthropology; I’ve been away from that approach for more than forty years.   

The people we lived with referred to themselves as Gros Ventre. The people we lived with referred to themselves as Indians. In the most positive sense, they often referred to a traditional way of thinking or believing or behaving as ‘the Indian way.’ We mean absolutely no disrespect by writing as we learned from those with whom we lived. They never referred to themselves as A’aniiih or Native Americans or indigenous people. We are describing the time in Hays and on Fort Belknap between August 1976 and June 1978.

I went into the field with no knowledge of photography. As I was preparing to go into the field, I didn’t own a camera and had to scramble to purchase one. I had recently completed my general exams and had to prepare and pass my language requirement. I had to finalize my dissertation proposal and defend it with my committee. I was making final arrangements with the mission and school trying to figure out what we were going to need to live in the field for two years and conduct this research. And I was doing the best I could to prepare for an impending large wedding. Susie and I were married in June and left for Montana in August. Trying to figure out a camera to purchase, learning how to use it and then learning photography was not receiving any kind of priority.

Our wedding, ten minutes before leaving for Montana.

I had a close friend who was a photography and videography major in the art department at The Ohio State University. He had been one of my anthropology students. We remain good friends. He took me to Cord Camera and held my hand while I purchased a Canon Ftb camera, and a 35mm, 50mm and 200mm lens. I also purchased as much Kodachrome and Ektachrome film as I could afford, which wasn’t much. I was told by my friend to use the Kodachrome film for all my outdoor shots and Ektachrome for indoors. I followed his guidance without fully understanding the chemistry behind this advice. This slide film comes in rolls that permit either 36 or 24 shots. Those numbers dictated how much I was able to shoot at any event or in any situation. I often finished a role with shots of our dog so that I could get another roll into the camera and send the film off to the developer. I had a lot of shots of our dog, and many of them are entertaining. I will be publishing these images of our dog and will include the very tragic ending to this beautiful creature’s story. My life has been incredibly interesting, complicated and full of unmitigated heartbreak.

Somehow, I figured out that I needed to send the film to Palo Alto for developing. I took all the indoor shots without a flash. The absence of flash and the paucity of images of adults are both explained by the same phenomenon. Most people did not want their photograph taken. There was some traditional folklore regarding a concern about when a portrait was taken that it might also capture their soul. That wasn’t, however, what was driving the concern about photographs. I believe that there was a greater concern about what the photographs were going to be used for. These people had been so severely abused and exploited that they just didn’t trust what white guys were going to be doing with these images. They were already highly sensitized about all their clothing and beadwork and other material culture that was sitting in museums somewhere that they believe was taken from them without either permission or compensation. It was difficult for a person to look at me when I took a photograph and there was no smiling.

It took a long time before people became more comfortable about me showing up with a camera. Taking photographs of adults remained uncomfortable for the duration and the marked difference between the numbers of photographs we captured of children as compared to adults is obvious. That photography became a bit more comfortable over time was evidenced by the fact that I was asked to be a wedding photographer at two such occasions, and I have a photograph of our slide projector on the kitchen table at Ray and Irma’s house at Christmas dinner. I vaguely remember showing them many of the slides I had taken after we finished dinner. People knew we were taking lots of photographs.

The lack of flash caused me two major photography headaches. I had to shoot incredibly slow to get any kind of exposure and I had to try not to move. I couldn’t control whether the subject was moving, because they didn’t want their picture taken, let alone receive any kind of instruction from me about holding still. I couldn’t bring attention to myself by using a flash, and a tripod would have been impossible. Fortunately, my friend never got around to talking to me about a tripod. There was no manipulating ISO’s in the olden days. Film came with built in film speed. I did the best I could with shutter speed and wedging my body into walls to anchor myself. I then sent my film to Palto Alto where they had a process to push up the film speed to help me with exposures.

Everything that I took indoors came back a bit underexposed because I could only shoot so slow and not get everything blurred out. Everything that I took outdoors came back a bit underexposed because Kodachrome film has amazingly rich colors, as is described in the song. One of the ways this deep saturation is achieved is by having the film a bit dark. It works, and the colors are beautiful. But the images can be underexposed. And as I didn’t know what I was doing, I wasn’t compensating by changing the exposure.

What we learned on the reservation was so valuable. The audio recordings from the interviews we conducted and from the singing we taped are invaluable. There is nothing more compelling than the photographs we took during those two years. I am looking forward to sharing our stories and I am looking forward to sharing these photographs even more so. The images speak so much more clearly about our experience than even our best words. The value of these images is magnified by the fact that there weren’t many people, or any people, walking around with cameras. People struggled to feed their families, to heat their homes, and to provide for the most basic of human needs. Purchasing a camera and film and then paying for the film to be developed was not a priority for most. It is different today because everyone has a cell phone. So, they’re all shooting images and video. Susie and I were each making $50 per month. A considerable amount of that money was being used to buy film and to have it developed.

When I retired, I had already completed digitizing the 3,500 images with a Minolta slide scanner. I knew nothing about digitizing slides, but I went to a camera store and very fortunately, had a conversation with a knowledgeable photographer. He suggested that I scan the images at the highest resolution the scanner would allow and then to save each one as a TIFF image. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he did come across as having spent considerable time at the burning bush, so I left and set about following every bit of advice he offered. I now understand his advice. The TIFF images are not compressed as are JPEG images and I was able to save them at 600 dpi. I love that I was able to save all this information in each image, but it made for a very slow process. Each of the files are about 30 mb.

I was primarily motivated to start taking photography courses at Columbus State Community College because I wanted to learn enough about Photoshop to do the best I could to repair the images that were repairable. Not all were. I started taking classes in the photography program in 2011. I enrolled as a good as gold student. In Ohio, when you turn 60 years old, you can take college courses without having to pay tuition, so long as there are seats available. You don’t receive any credit hours, but I was interested in learning, not finding a job as a photographer. During my first year in the program, I developed an interest in photography. I was taking one course each semester, including through the summers, and I was learning a ton and falling in love with photography. I was taking classes in photographic art and design, night photography, studio and environmental portraiture, macro and I did manage three classes on photoshop, including one devoted to layers, and a Lightroom class. Those proved invaluable. Since 2011, I have become proficient in the use of Lightroom and Photoshop. I have also learned to use the NIK programs. Finally, I started using Topaz Sharpen AI, which proved to be incredibly helpful in repairing many of the blurred images caused by my movement or the subject’s. I have been able to fix a lot of the movement and many of the exposure issues.

Over the two years we were in Hays, I did almost all my photography with a 50mm lens. Oftentimes, it wasn’t possible for me to be changing lenses in the middle of an event. I had to plan what I was going to be doing with my 36 or 24 exposures, and it was ordinarily the case that the 50mm was the safest bet to accommodate most of my photography. My guess is that I shot with the 50mm well more than 90% of the time. The harsh weather in winter and the length of winters also made changing lenses difficult.

When I look at these photographs today, it can be painful. I went into the field as an anthropologist, and not as a photographer. I knew the photographs were important, but the images were not my priority. I knew nothing about composition. I had never taken a photography course or an art or design class. I was way too busy with my bowling and wrestling. To be kind to myself, I’ll describe what I was doing as documentary photography. I’ve learned so much over the past decade that when I look at my images with a critical eye, it is not unusual for me to emit an audible groan. Often, I hear what the hell were you thinking in my head. It is painful.

I had to make the photography process as mechanical as possible because I didn’t understand the most basic relationship between film speed, shutter speed and depth of field. If you lack that fundamental knowledge, you become very mechanistic and hope for the best. Composing an image was the least of my concerns. I was focused on finding stable objects to lean against.

One of the most interesting phenomena for me has been to see glimpses of my natural way of seeing the world. In the stacks of these thousands of slides or files, I will run across an image that looks very similar to one of the images I might take today. I have a “way” that I see the world and the way I compose an image. I get a charge when I see this “way” coming from me when I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing with the camera almost 50 years ago.

My father grew up in Cleveland in a very poor family. His mother and her family came from Lithuania. His father and his family arrived from Poland. They came to America during one of the many cycles over thousands of years when Jews were being harassed, pillaged and killed. They came with nothing. They didn’t know any English and they had no skills. They made the best life possible for their six children. All of their fourteen grandchildren went to college and many of them went on to advanced degrees.

My father grew up during the depression. My father grew up in a small world. When the war broke out, he and all my uncles went into the military. My father was in the Army Air Corp as a cryptographer. He was shipped overseas in one of the thousands of liberty ships in the convoys that were dodging German submarines across the Atlantic. He returned home on an aircraft carrier. He was stationed in Naples, Italy shortly after Mussolini met his demise. He also spent some time in Sicily. Italy was not a vacation destination during the war. They picked to fight on the wrong side, and the people and the country paid for it during the war. Much of my father’s experience was very difficult and he went through some horrific personal tragedies. And yet, my father saw a world that he’d never even known existed during his childhood. In many respects, my father had an adventure that dramatically changed him, and he wore those changes, good and bad, for the rest of his life.

My ‘father’ on the reservation, Ray Gone, had similar experiences that caused similar results. When speaking to Ray about his life during the war, I often made the connections between him and my dad.

While living in Hays, I also often thought about my own adventure within the context of what my father had experienced. We were about the same age, and we both had our worlds opened in ways that were impossible for us to even image and that changed us in the most transformative ways for an entire lifetime.

I am so looking forward to sharing this incredible two-year experience with you. I am looking forward to reminiscing about my extraordinary time among the most wonderful people who I respect, admire, and love.

For all of those that I loved and lost … their memories should be a blessing.

And on that note ... this entire experience has become even more emotional for me. Pauline and I went on a vacation to Montana in 2017. During our trip, we spent two days at the Hays Pow Wow which was held in a meadow up in the spectacularly beautiful Mission Canyon. We were also visiting a close friend who I met while working at St. Paul's Mission in Hays. Mike, and his wife, Ligia, lived just off the Rocky Boy Reservation in the Bear Paw Mountains. Pauline died in an accident two days after we left the pow wow.

Her memory should be a blessing ...