The furthest west I’d been was to St. Louis when my brother was teaching at the University of Missouri. I could count on one hand the number of times my family took overnight vacations. A stay in a hotel was a luxury my family just didn’t have the money to afford. My folks were resourceful and so we took lots of day trips. Given all their financial limitations, we had lots of interesting experiences. But I was never very far from home, and I had never seen mountains. And the only times I was able to see out to a horizon was when we were swimming in Lake Erie or looking out at the lake from Municipal Stadium at a Cleveland Indians’ game. When you live in the suburbs and don’t travel, you see great horizons when you are looking at a National Geographic. Why the mention of horizons? Because living in Montana for two years totally transformed how I think about and experience a horizon.
I had no experience making a 1400-mile trip on the road. Everything about this experience was going to be an adventure.
I completed all my requirements from the anthropology department at Ohio State. I passed my generals and defended my research proposal. I had applied for lots of grants to support my research. I barely was able to get enough to pay for the gas to leave town. Susie and I got married in June. We then spent the rest of the summer preparing for two years in Hays. We knew that we were both going to be teaching at the mission school, so we had to arrive before the beginning of the school year. We were aiming to get to the reservation in early August.
My in-laws were amazingly generous and wonderful people. For a wedding gift, they leased us a Ford F-250 four-wheel drive truck and they had a hop cap installed. They also got us a CB radio for our travel. Looking back on the entire experience, they must have been pretty concerned about their 21-year-old Jewish daughter who had been married to me for ten minutes heading out to nowhere Montana on an Indian reservation to work at a Catholic Mission. They did what they could to help us prepare and to ensure that we were going to have a safe experience.
Susie's dad was very active in the national Jaycees. He contacted a person from the local Jaycees in Billings and made a connection with him. I vaguely remember him being Crow and that he was involved in some way with the Indian judicial system and law enforcement. He periodically made trips to Ft. Belknap and he would stop in to visit with Susie and me. Susie's parents also made a trip to visit us during the summer between our first and second years at the mission. We made a trip to the Crow reservation for the parade and rodeo. The gentleman I am referring to also attended these events with us. He was a good guy. Susie's parents made a few trips out to visit us. They were doing their best to keep tabs on Susie. Lou loved the experience we were having, and he thoroughly enjoyed his visits with us. We took him to see some spectacular places.
At the end of the spring quarter of 1976, Susie was still going to be about 20 hours short of being able to graduate. Her degree was in folklore. One of the professors in the anthropology department taught classes that were being offered toward the folklore degree. We were able to arrange with him for Susie to do an independent study to complete her degree and university requirements. Everyone involved realized that Susie living on the reservation for two years and supporting my fieldwork research was going to amount to way more than the twenty credit hours she needed.
As it turned out, Susie did as much as me in conducting this research. More than anything, successful anthropological fieldwork is dependent on the researcher’s personality and character. Susie is a warm, sweet, generous, and kind person. The people in the community loved her. She developed wonderful relationships with everyone. My fieldnotes were as much a product of her work as mine. Getting her bachelor's degree done from this experience was a no-brainer. She wasn't happy about missing the graduation ceremony from Ohio State, and I felt badly about it.
Susie’s parents came out for a visit during our second year to join us for a Thanksgiving celebration. We drove to Billings and spent a weekend with them for the holiday. During that visit, we made our way to a clinic for Susie to get a pregnancy test. It came back positive. It is possible that she had been pregnant for fifteen minutes, because Aaron was born early in July. Susie’s pregnancy became one of her most profound contributions to our research. It also created so many unanticipated consequences. I’ll save the bulk of these for other blogs, but I do want to mention some of these here. All of it was mind-blowing in all directions.
Because of Susie’s pregnancy, we were exposed to so much more information about pregnancy, delivery, child-rearing practices, and gender roles than we would have been otherwise … by a longshot. Per the Malinowski approach to fieldwork guidelines, I could announce that if you are a female anthropologist, you need to be pregnant while doing your fieldwork. If you are a male anthropologist, you should bring a pregnant woman with you into the field. This information will be sorely lacking if you do not. Susie’s pregnancy became a focal point of our relationship with all the adults in the community, including a baby shower that the women held for her/us before we left for home. If I had the energy, I could write a book on these subjects. I don’t. And I sure couldn’t have done my dissertation on this subject matter because I was required by my committee to shoehorn this enormous amount of information into a science project, like how do volcanos work.
From the beginning, Susie spent a great deal of time feeling nauseous. It became impossible for her to continue the hot breakfast program for the kids at school, as she was too busy throwing up. The mission was very understanding about the situation. They were also realizing that the health insurance coverage they had for their volunteers didn’t cover anything about pregnancy and delivery. We were totally on our own in that regard. And at that time, we were each making $100 per month. The closest hospital was the Indian Health Service Hospital at the Agency which was thirty miles away. In the wintertime, it could have been located on the moon. Often it wasn’t safe to travel on those roads during the winter because there weren’t very many homes located along the way and there wasn’t lots of traffic, or any. If you slid off the road, you could be stuck for hours in subzero temperatures. And we couldn’t use the Indian Health Service Hospital anyway because we weren’t Indian. We had to go to Havre for Susie’s medical care, which was ninety miles away.
We did qualify for the WIC program and Susie was able to shop for items that we wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Being on the reservation, we learned about all the government programs that help people in poverty. We also learned what happens when our representatives in Washington cut these budgets or terminate these programs. My entire experience over those two years and since has pointed me towards one conclusion – we suck mightily. It has become a cornerstone of American folklore to ascribe poverty to laziness and other personality and character flaws. That folklore is supported by the central values in our culture on independence and self-reliance. In most cases, these are myths that help us to feel better about the responsibility our greater society and we as individuals who make up that society, have for causing much of that poverty. There is a very direct connection between all the different and multitude of ways we've totally screwed these people and the extreme poverty that is endemic on most reservations. We own the circumstances that have caused this poverty, and we don't care, and we don't want to think about it. And that, by the way, is the reason there are politicians (including those who sit on school boards) who want to scrub the facts from history so that white children don't have to feel bad about what their country and their ancestors have engaged in to advantage themselves in our country to the detriment of others (i.e., the indigenous peoples who were in our way and the ancestors of slaves who we have only fairly recently acknowledged are fully human). I get why we do it ... and, as noted, we suck mightily.
The women in the community often observed and told us that the way I treated Susie was vastly different from how they were treated during their pregnancies. They weren’t treated differently by anyone, and expectations didn’t change. They were expected to haul water and firewood and did all the things women were supposed to do regardless of how they felt. They often told me that I was treating Susie with kid gloves. And I definitely was. She was really sick, and I felt horrible for her. I’m not allowed to throw up, so I’m highly sensitized to someone who is doing so, daily and for a good portion of the day.
I never experienced culture shock when I was in Hays. It happened to me when I returned to Columbus. As noted in my previous blog, if life had progressed differently, I would likely have stayed in Montana for the duration. I loved everything about the way of life there and I was about as comfortable, satisfied and happy as a person could be. I knew how to be relatively poor, and my needs were simple in those days. I loved the people and the way of life, and Montana is the most beautiful and awe-inspiring place I’ve ever been.
We spent the month of July packing all of what we thought we would need for the next two years. Besides our clothing and what we would need to set up a household, I had to gather all of what I would need for my fieldwork research. As noted in my previous blog, I purchased all my camera equipment and as much film as I could afford. I purchased a new typewriter. I also had to buy all the supplies I thought we would need. I had lots of notebooks and yellow legal pads. I also bought boxes of Bic pens. A close friend used to marvel that he’d never seen anyone ever run out of ink while writing with a pen. He noted that he watched this happen to me over and over. We spent a lot of time with Mike, and he often saw me working on my fieldnotes. Many years after, he told me that he had vivid memories of my using up Bic pens and enjoyed telling his kids about it. The callouses on my writing hand were really something. I also had many pads of thin 8” x 5” paper, and boxes of carbon paper.
Our primary research methodology was participant observation, and the meat and potatoes of our work were fieldnotes. As soon after a conversation or observation, Susie and I would come back to our trailer and write out the note in detail on the yellow legal pads. We were involved in so many other activities at the mission and in the community that it wasn’t often possible for us to drop everything and write up our notes. We both developed an uncanny ability to remember details of a conversation or observation. It is quite amazing what the human brain is capable of when it comes to memory and processing information. And as a 73-year-old, it is equally amazing how quickly those uncanny abilities begin to evaporate. Today, if I don’t write it down, it is gone.
Through these blogs, I will describe all the activities that Susie and I were engaged in besides doing this fieldwork, which, by the way, is a full-time job. The kids in the community sometimes referred to me as helter-skelter. It is something of a miracle that we were able to complete all of what we set out to accomplish.
I was creating two sets of fieldnotes. Given that we were doing everything manually and without computers, our process and the results were fairly sophisticated. George Murdock, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh founded the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. He was interested in being able to do cross cultural studies from all the ethnographic research anthropologists had conducted on many societies around the world. His Ethnographic Atlas eventually catalogued about 1,200 cultures. All the information was organized in Human Relations Area Files; a paper system organized by topic. The backbone of this organizational structure was a coding system that was published as the Outline of Cultural Materials. Murdock developed a numerical coding system such that each specific cultural element or topic was assigned a number. It was a very detailed system and covered every topic imaginable. The anthropologists who worked on this project organized all this ethnographic material so that a researcher could select a topic and perform cross cultural studies across many societies. For instance, if a researcher were interested in comparing avunculocal residence patterns across different societies who engaged in this practice, they could find all these materials located in one place to do this work. This system seemed ready-made for me to use in organizing all this qualitative information. I took a copy of the Outline of Cultural Materials with me to Hays.
Susie and I would write out our notes on the legal pads. We included as much context as possible, including our physical location, whether it was a first-person observation or whether we were being told about an event by someone else. When we had the time, which wasn’t often, we would sit at the typewriter and create the final fieldnotes. We would categorize the topics included in the note, look up the appropriate codes in the Outline of Cultural Materials, and type those numbers at the top of the note. We then created one more copy for inclusion in the chronological system. All these copies were made with carbon paper. We would then sort the notes in both systems; the one by the number codes or topics and the other by the date the observation or conversation occurred. As we could never keep up with the process, we came home with thousands of pages of notes on yellow legal pads that needed to be typed and organized. That process took me almost two years to complete (while working a full-time job and raising two young children). It was insane.
We also needed to keep everyone anonymous in these notes, so we developed a numerical coding system for each person that appeared in our observations or conversations. We had a notebook of this coding system and referred to it whenever writing up the fieldnotes. There are no names in these notes, only the numerical codes.
The process would have been so different today, and I think about it often. We would have plugged in our laptops, written the fieldnote one time and then used a keyword lookup or search for the numbers to find and organize the topic we were studying or writing about. No Bic pens, no legal pads, no carbon paper. And it would have taken at least two years from the process.
When I started my research, I was so concerned that I wasn’t going to come home with enough information to write a dissertation. Part of that concern emanated from the fieldnotes being so topically scattered and not amenable to seeing any coherent structure in all those thousands of observations and conversations. The ultimate reality is that qualitative information is just unbelievably difficult to work with and analyze. Given how diligent we were about the process, we just had an overwhelming amount of information to manage. And doing all of this with a full-time job, two young children and a marriage that was becoming increasingly challenging for both of us, the overwhelming part of this was only magnified. I was also beginning to accept that I wasn’t going to find a full-time academic position as an anthropologist. Qualitative research is not for the weak of heart. (And it isn't ordinarily science!)
We had no idea at all what we were going to find when we got to Hays. We had no idea what kind of access we would have to stores. I’m trying to imagine that Amazon makes deliveries to Hays. I’ll have to ask my friends. That thought just occurred to me. It took until the 1950s before they had paved roads and electricity.
Reflecting on the situation, it is remarkable just how totally in the dark we were about the circumstances we were about to experience. Our acceptance into these positions at St. Paul's Mission came relatively late in my academic work. I was scrambling at the end of my academic career to learn as much as I could about the Gros Ventre. There was almost no information about the contemporary culture or the community of Hays. There was no internet, so we couldn't google anything. We were literally walking into the great unknown. We only had a few conversations with one of the priests at the mission. He was the director. His focus was almost exclusively on the spiritual needs in the community and not so much on how many pairs of pajamas we might want to pack. We knew that we were going to be living in a trailer, but we had no idea where it was located. There were no photographs for us to look at which would have given us any clue at all as to how the community looked and where the pharmacy, bank, bowling alley, movie theatre and restaurants were located.
We packed enough to set up a kitchen. We packed our menorah and Shabbos candles, our mezuzah, a yarmulka, a kiddush cup, the hanukkiah and candles, and a couple of Haggadahs and prayer books. We packed our personal items. I packed the books I thought we would need. We filled up the back of the truck with boxes. It wasn’t very much stuff, but it was about everything we thought we would need. Those were the days my friend. We boxed up and moved all our life necessities for two years into the back of a truck. Today, I wouldn't be able to shoehorn just my electronic equipment into the back of a truck. Simpler times.
Susie taking a break from packing in our apartment on Norwich.
I practiced with the camera a bit before we left. I mostly took photographs of Susie and her sister, Sharon. Susie also worked with the camera.
Susie and I in front of our apartment
I got a haircut before we left. I had longer than shoulder length hair while I was in school. I had no idea at all about the expectations for teachers in the mission school, so I thought it safe to get a haircut. Yes, that is a haircut. After I saw how many of the traditional men wore their hair on the reservation, I was back into a ponytail as quickly as my hair could grow. I also did some experimenting with black and white film.
Susie in black and white
Susie at the farm ...that's actually a nice photograph for not having a clue about what I was doing with the camera
Susie's parents had a farm in south central Ohio. It was such a beautiful place, and we would drive out there regularly. It was located in the Darby Creek flood plain and was being share cropped by a neighboring farmer. Susie also got a haircut before we left. She wanted to keep life simple for herself. As noted, we had no idea at all what our lives were going to be. We didn't know if we were going to bathe in a tub or the creek near our trailer.
We gave ourselves about three days to make the trip to Hays. Just before our departure, my folks made the trip down from Cleveland to say goodbye. We had no idea when we would be back in Ohio and when we would see them again. There was no email and long-distance telephone calls were too expensive for us. Most of our communications were by letter. We also started using a tape recorder and sent the tapes by mail back and forth with my parents and with my sister.
We left Columbus at 5:00 in the morning on Friday, August 6th, 1976.
My mom and dad with Susie, behind our apartment in Columbus and in front of our truck
(we recently celebrated my mom's 99th birthday)
There was no GPS or MapQuest. We just had regular old maps. We made the trip out west using routes 70, 80 and 90. Route 90 would get us into Billings and the reservation was about three hours or 180 miles north.
Upon the advice of Susie's parents, we made a stop to see the Corn Palace. Pure Americana. We also stopped at Wall Drug because it is near impossible to ignore the signs on Route 90. I have no memory of stepping foot into the Corn Palace and we didn't buy anything at Wall Drug.
The one and only Corn Palace
We drove all day Friday and Saturday. We couldn't make any hotel reservations because our trip to Hays was in total free flow mode. We had no idea how often we would stop nor how many miles we would try to drive in a day. Going through South Dakota in August without a hotel reservation basically means that you are going to sleep in your truck. We stopped at a few hotels along 90 and everything was booked. There were no cell phones in those days, so the only way to find out if there was a vacancy was to pull off the road, enter the hotel and ask. After figuring out that we weren't going to find anything, we decided to keep driving. I remember sleeping for a bit at a rest area, but we drove through much of South Dakota all Saturday night. We saw the Badlands during a full moon in the middle of the night. That was spectacular. It's on my bucket list to see the Badlands during daylight.
When we finally arrived in Rapid City, we pulled into a Howard Johnson's parking lot and Susie and I slept there in the truck for a couple of hours. We then went into the hotel and got breakfast.
After breakfast on Sunday morning, we made our way to Mount Rushmore. I was expecting to be underwhelmed by this place, but I was not. Standing in front of this mountain is awe-inspiring. Seeing these enormous faces so realistically depicted and carved into the side of a mountain was amazing. I had never seen a mountain, let alone something like this.
At the time, I understood little about the Black Hills or the Lakota. Over the years, I've learned a lot. We really need to stop trying to scrub facts from history books. Children and adults need to learn about the true story of this place, and then we should face up to doing the right thing and making this right for all the people involved.
I recently completed Rebecca Clarren's, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance. It is a fascinating account of a Jewish family and community that homesteaded in the Black Hills. It is a history about how this land was stolen from the Lakota, how these families benefitted from owning this land, and what Judaism teaches about how we reconcile and find peace with this injustice. Owning and accepting historical truth, and then finding the ways to apply justice is the only way our nation can grow and become the people our aspirational ideals ask us to be. Ignoring facts only keeps us bound to repeatedly making the same mistakes and falling so short of our best values and ideals, e.g., return all the national parks and wildlife areas to the tribes and let them charge us an entry fee, including giving them all the concessions for the lodging and other services.
Mount Rushmore - Reflections are a thing in my contemporary photography. It is amazing that I saw this with my aesthetically challenged 'eye' in August 1976.
I love this photograph of Susie. If I took it today, I would either focus on her face or I would capture her entire body. I sure wouldn't cut her in thirds as I've done here. I promise not to critique all the thousands of my images. Kodachrome film is beautiful.
We made a stop at the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the cemetery.
Battle of the Greasy Grass as it was known to the tribes
Battle of the Little Big Horn Cemetery
We left South Dakota and started making our way up I-90 toward Billings. We were going to try to spend the night in Billings and then head up to the reservation the next day. We were thinking this was going to be our last night in familiar surroundings before arriving in Hays and the mission - like a town of 90,000 people in the middle of nowhere Montana was familiar surroundings. We were slightly freaked out by the notion that we weren't going to be able to find a hotel room in Billings. As we entered the east side of the city, we got off the highway and found a payphone. We got into the telephone book and found a Holiday Inn Hotel that was located on the opposite, west side of Billings. For those of you who have no idea what a payphone or phone book might be, feel free to google it. I didn't take any pictures of these artifacts.
When I called, the hotel told me that they had one room left and that they would hold it for us for a half hour. We went running back to the truck and got back on I-90. We were concerned because we had to drive to the entire other side of Billings in less than a half hour. I probably drove about one hundred mph. We arrived after five minutes. It was a great lesson about the size of cities and towns in Montana. It was also an interesting lesson about speed limits in Montana. On Sunday evening, we had a meal in a restaurant and a good night's sleep in a hotel bed.
We got up on Monday morning and headed north to St. Paul's Mission in Hays, on the Fort Belknap Reservation.
These are the Big Horn Mountains. We were anxious to get to Hays, so we didn't want to stop very often to take photographs. Thus, these two photographs include the dashboard and compass from our truck. I won't be submitting these images to any photography contests. Pauline and I visited the Big Horn Mountains in 2017 with our dear friend Sara who is a neuroimmunologist in Billings. This range is just off the Crow Reservation. It is a beautiful area.
Big Horn Mountains
This was our very first view of the Little Rocky Mountains. For so many reasons, this mountain range became central to our lives during our two years in Hays. I have so many photographs of these mountains; we spent so much time driving and hiking on the many roads and trails. This is the first of many photographs. From the view, our location was just next to the DY Bar where we turned onto Route 376 heading north up to the reservation.
Little Rocky Mountains
This is another view of the Little Rockies from Route 376.
I'm going to get into this in other blogs, but it is worth a mention here. The Little Rocky Mountains were once a part of the reservation. If you look at a map of the reservation, you will notice that the western and eastern boundaries are straight and almost parallel lines. The northern boundary is irregular because it follows the course of the Milk River, which originates in Glacier National Park and flows east through Montana. The southern boundary of the reservation had once been a straight line, but then gold was discovered in the mountains, as explained in this historical marker, and our government figured out a way to screw the tribes out of this land. Thus, the southern boundary is a straight line interrupted by a notch which represents the location where gold was found in the mountains. Also as noted in the marker, the miners were using cyanide to leach the gold from the ore. The mission creek that runs from these mountains should be the most pristine supply of water known to humankind. There are no factories or pollution - there's absolutely nothing for miles that could pollute this water. Oh, except cyanide. Aren't we special? For those homes that didn't have indoor plumbing while we were in Hays, they couldn't use water from the creek; they had to use the well located in front of the Indian Health Service Clinic in Hays. The mining companies have scared and destroyed areas of the range and then declared bankruptcy and didn't reclaim the land.
Why wasn't the federal government - the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior - watching over the interests of the tribes? Good question ... one that has been asked repeatedly by the tribes over the many years they've been screwed in every direction.
This is Route 376 heading north to Hays and the reservation. There was some road work being done and there was a flagman that stopped us. After we came to a stop, I had the weirdest sensation of movement. I couldn't shake the sensation, and I was concerned that we were moving, and I was going to hit the flagman. This memory left an indelible impression. I ascribe it to being in such a wide-open space for the first time in my life, and my brain was adjusting to this new perspective. Or I was delirious from anxiety.
Route 376
We arrived in Hays, made the right turn onto the road that would go through town and up to the mission. I have no memory of driving through Hays and to the mission, but I have no doubt that my brain was being processed in a waring blender.
We arrived at our new home in Hays, Montana, in the afternoon on Monday, August 9th, 1976. We spent about $120 on gas to get from Columbus to Hays. This truck got between eight and ten miles per gallon.
This is one of the first photographs I took at the mission. This is one of the original mission buildings. It has always been a Jesuit mission. The first sisters who taught at the mission school were Ursulines. They offered the only schooling on the reservation under an arrangement with the federal government (never mind the whole church and state thing in the constitution). During the two years Susie and I were at the mission, this building was our bus garage. I'll have many stories to share from my times as a school bus driver. This building burned down some time after we left Hays. Given the difficult memories so many people had from the early days at the mission when assimilation was the fundamental goal of the 'education' process, I would not be in the least bit surprised as to how this building met its demise.
One of the last vestiges of the original St. Paul's Mission
This is a view from the mission looking south. Below the ridge of the mountains is the mission cemetery. To the right is mission creek that ran out of the mountains, through the west edge of the mission land and then through Hays.
This is a view of mission ridge, looking east. That is the corner of the mission school on the left side.
When we made the left turn from the Hays road into the mission, we had no idea where we were supposed to go. We hadn't spoken to anyone for a while. One of the volunteers walked by us, said hello, and then directed us to the rectory. That is where we found Father Simoneau. Besides the Franciscan sisters who were in the convent, Father Simoneau and Brian were the only ones at the mission. We were the first of the new volunteers to arrive. Father told us that we would be living in a trailer up at the canyon about a mile from the mission. The trailer was owned by a family who lived for most of the year in Seattle and only stayed in their trailer during the summers. They wouldn't be leaving for a couple of weeks, and so Susie and I would be staying in the trailer at the mission where the Dominican sisters usually lived. The sisters had left the reservation for a few weeks. He told us to pull our truck (with all our belongings) behind the trailer where we would be staying.
He assembled a collection of government commodity foods into a box and then sent us on our way to figure out how to survive until further instructions might be forthcoming. How we were to put together a meal from this collection was a challenge equal to any contest found today on the Food Channel.
Our truck sitting behind our temporary home in the green trailer
Consistent with our entire experience with the mission, we had not a shred of an idea about what was going on. As we had been living out of suitcases during the three-day trip from Columbus, we only took the things we needed into the trailer, along with our box of commodity food. We also didn't see anyone from the community. We were on our own, except for Socks, the mission dog. So, we had time to settle in for the few weeks we would be living in the green trailer, and we had some time to hike around in the mountains. The neighborhood was a whole hell of a lot nicer than North Fourth and Chittendon. And so the adventure began.
Susie and Socks in front of our temporary home
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