by Lance Foster
The Sorenson Ranch was established in 1872, in a unique partnership between the Sorenson Family and the Piegan Blackfeet people, its unique success based in large part on the happy marriage of miner and rancher Barton Sorenson and Mary Weasel Shirt Sorenson, the missionary-educated daughter of the Blackfeet Chief Weasel Shirt. It is the oldest ranch still operating in Greenway County.
by Mary Scriver
This boy’s name was Cedric Meerkat and he was a Blackfeet boy. Now you KNOW I’ve given him a made-up name because there are no meerkats in Blackfeet country. Not unless somebody imported one. But Cedric did sort of look like a meerkat, always sticking his head up and looking to see what was going on and whether anyone was watching him. He needed to know because he wasn’t always doing what he was supposed to. He was a skinny little guy with more curiosity than anything else.
Outside of his rubber-necking, he was a lot like Napi, who is the trickster figure of the Plains tribes. Napi could just about do anything and he did — usually the wrong thing — and so part of him is also considered a kind of creator. A lot of creation seems like a mistake at first. And Napi was always trying to create babies — or at least you-know-what leads to babies. But mostly he just made trouble. Cedric didn’t so much MAKE trouble as he just got into trouble.
So Cedric was in my English class and he was always writing, but it was never the assignment. And his writing was pretty weird. In those days we didn’t know anything much about dyslexia. Nowadays I would say that his brain development was simply atypical. Instead of writing words, he “wrote” pictures. All day long he drew, but he didn’t draw horses like the other kids. He drew snakes.
They were terrific snakes, not just generic reptiles, but “real” snakes that he knew about from books, since there aren’t many snakes on the high and dry prairie. Some people around here become rattlesnake hunters, looking for them in order to kill them, and even dynamiting snake dens in early spring before they untangle themselves from their hibernation balls and come out to lie on the jumble of stones to warm up. Cedric treated snakes as a design problem. But then he began to understand what a “symbol” was and I became important as a source of information. He could see what a snake looked like, but he was a terrible reader, dyslexic, so he’d just ask me.
“What’s this?” he asked. It was a picture of a bracelet that was a snake swallowing its tail. Ouroboros. I explained about the ancient history of the snake that was “creating itself” and how it meant renewal and sometimes rebirth. I tried to explain how decay in existence — the eating — then became something new — the snake. I talked a little about how a snake sheds its old skin, emerging bright and new, and about how multi-cultural and how deep in history the figure was: Norse, Hindu, Greek, and Egyptian. Big concepts for a junior high kid, but Cedric seemed to understand.
His “back story” was tragic, like many reservation stories. When he and his sister were small, the family had been in a car crash that killed the parents and badly injured the children. Both of them received life-saving transfusions but that was long enough ago that there was no reliable way to separate blood donations carrying HIV virus from those that were not. The chance gesture of the nurse hooking up blood from one donation to the sister and another to Cedric determined their futures. It was the sister who received the virus-infected blood. She died rather quickly over the next few years, her eyes becoming bigger and bigger until they swallowed her up. Cedric sat with her in that time and drew her face, growing up and dying at the same time. Ouroboros he knew from recognition, experience.
One day we read Rikki-Tiki-Tavi and he was worried until I found a biology book that showed both a mongoose and a meerkat and assured him that he was not a mongoose. But I jokingly warned him to watch out for mongooses. Or is that “mongeese?” English is not logical.
Then one day he came to me to ask what a phallic symbol was. While I explained, I saw that his face was changing. The hormones of adolescence were thickening his bones, sharpening his nose, deepening his voice. He would not grow a beard — he was American Indian — but there would be night changes. His dreams would change.
I blushed as I explained, but he didn’t. His lack of embarrassment was not because he had no sense of propriety, no understanding that some things were private, but out of an impatience with false modesty. What was something like sexual maturity in the face of death, especially the deaths of loved ones? And yet over the next months, he didn’t gravitate to girls. I began to realize that he was probably gay.
What future was there for a dyslexic, gay, American Indian young man with no immediate family? But he did have a larger family of cousins, uncles, grannies, aunties, and so on. They didn’t reject him or classify him. Just accepted that Cedric was Cedric.
Then one day he disappeared and I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I wondered if he would seek out HIV on purpose, to follow his sister, or whether he would take precautions so as to survive. Or maybe he would reject sex, pull into himself, avoid relationship. None seemed like very good options. I hoped he’d develop his art.
Years later I was driving from Montana over to Seattle to visit my sister. I was tired from the end of school and had already had way too much coffee, so maybe that’s why I stopped at that Snake Pit on the Idaho border that I usually passed up. It was touristy and sensational. I’d been told that some people stopped there just to see the snakes eat, because they ate small live mammals. That snuff film mentality seems to be everywhere.
“Are the snakes being fed now?” I asked when I bought my ticket.
“Naw, you’ve missed it. They don’t eat very often,” said the bored young woman.
The exhibit space was a sort of barn with a lot of glass cases around the edge, sort of like an aquarium. In the middle was an open pit, sure enough, and in it was a huge boa constrictor or python — I can’t tell those big squeezing snakes apart. It made me think of Cedric. I looked across the pit and there he was.
For a minute I thought I’d imagined him. I wasn’t even that sure he was Cedric. He was with a few other fellows, dressed in metal-studded leather motorcycle outfits except that Cedric’s wasn’t black: it was dark purple and the sleeves were missing. His arms were covered with tattoos of snakes, coiling around and around his arms and each other. His hair was bright blue and stuck up in a spiky crest, more like a tropical bird than a snake. He had a pierced nose, lips, eyebrow, and ears — and he was wearing black lipstick.
I remembered that I’d seen a short row of motorcycles outside, each of them airbrushed with amazing designs, many dragons with iridescent scales or fiery birds: maybe phoenixes. The young men seemed happy but other-wordly. They laughed and pointed out the lump where the big snake’s last meal was digesting inside it.
I wasn’t sure it was really Cedric until I saw that he’d recognized me. The other men turned away to leave, but Cedric lingered just a moment. He didn’t come over — just raised a hand in salute and I saw he was wearing a silver bracelet shaped like an ouroboros. He grinned, a strange effect in a face with black lipstick, and then he left. I heard the motorcycles kickstarting outside.
The rest of the drive across eastern Washington went quickly, as it always does if you have a lot to think about.
by Lance Foster
Pierre-Auguste Grenois was a metis furtrapper who passed through the Greenway area in 1793, returning to establish Apekuni House to trade with the Blackfeet in 1795. The drawing is from 1812, by an itinerant peddler, artist, and preacher by the name of “Father Badger” Jones; Jones wandered through the region, often shouting to himself as “moved by the Holy Spirit,” and was considered “touched” and was thus left alone by the Native tribes. In 1813, Grenois died of smallpox and Apekuni House was abandoned.
by Mary Scriver
At first the horseback Indian thought that the patch of yellow on the prairie was just flowers, but it wasn’t quite the right season for that size and color of flowers, so he went a little closer in order to investigate — though not close enough for the patch to be dangerous. It was some kind of garment. Sprawled. No sign of a person. Had it been discarded? Was it a trap?
He got off the horse and let it graze while he hunkered on his heels and scanned the situation. No signs of a person — footprints, other objects. He wished for a long stick to prod it. Maybe there was something underneath. There had been a rain shower earlier in the day and little puddles sat on the material, not soaking in as would happen with normal garments. If it were valuable and someone had merely lost it, that person would return and they probably would not be Indian.
Yellow was a valuable color. Only important lodges were painted yellow because the color came from a fungus that was hard to find. Therefore, this garment must have significance.
He took his horse to the top of a nearby ridge and sat watching for the rest of the day, but no one came. When it was nearly dark, he went carefully back. The yellow garment had not moved. He grabbed the cuff of one sleeve and jerked. Nothing leapt out. Nothing was underneath except a dry patch of grass. His horse snorted and pulled back, then leaned forward to smell. It seemed sceptical, but unafraid.
He counted coup on the garment, yelping. Then grabbed it and jumped on his horse, which panicked from all the flapping around and took off for camp at a run. By the time they got to the circle of lodges, the horse had settled and was content to graze with the others. By now the Indian was also more confident and rolled the garment up as though it were any robe. Except that it rustled and crinkled and had a strange crisp texture and smell.
His wife was very curious about the garment but he forbade her to touch it. They had been hoping for a baby — they had not been married long — and he was afraid that the garment would somehow affect her fertility. He asked her to make a rawhide case, cylindrical, to keep this mysterious thing in and she did a good job. Then he painted a design on it and kept it hanging at his place, across the fire from the door.
One day when he had been hunting, he returned to find that his wife was in the lodge and had put on the yellow garment. At first he was very angry, since she should have more respect for his belongings, and he went to her, grabbed her by the neck and intended to choke or shake her — but then the feel of her slender neck, the pulse in it, her delicate ears and sliding hair, all moved him so that his fingers slipped up to cup her skull and his thumbs rested more gently on her jawbone.
Then he realized that she was not wearing anything under the garment and that she had been singing a song: “Oh, pollen-colored garment, make me bear fruit.” Responding, he made love to her that afternoon while she rustled and crinkled in the yellow stuff. Now and then after that, they would take out the garment and she would wear it while they made love. When the baby was born, in the fall when the aspen were the same color as the coat, she cut a strip off the hem of the garment and sewed it onto the baby’s carrier.
Now the garment seemed to be a part of their marriage, a key to fertility. Others heard about it and asked to borrow it. At first they were reluctant, but finally they had pity and agreed to let others make love wearing it. Nearly always, it worked. The wife, who now had several children and had made space in the lodge for second and third wives who did most of the work, beaded the garment with red stripes and attached small round pocket mirrors to the front.
One day she realized that one pocket had something deep in it and pulled out an envelope with a letter inside it. Neither her husband nor anyone else could read a letter or had even handled one, though they knew what it was. They felt that it was part of the power of the coat and put it back in the pocket. The wife sewed it shut and attached duck feathers to it. Ordinarily, water animals were not used to decorate, because they are too powerful, but this material seemed to bead up water in the same way that ducks did, so there was a harmony, a relationship of function. Over the years the coat became quite splendid with embellishments.
When the oldest son of the couple was about eighteen, he was badly wounded in a rash attack on enemies. Though he was brought home, his life was in serious danger. His parents pledged that if he recovered, they would offer the yellow garment to the Sun at the annual ceremonies. Both came to pass and, with the healed son watching, the coat was attached to the big main forked trunk at the Sun Lodge, so that everyone saw it up there, bright yellow and winking with light from the little mirrors. It was not tightly wrapped and the strange waterproof material waved in the wind. Everyone agreed that it was a highly significant and efficacious sacrifice. When they went on their way at the end of the ceremony, they looked back over their shoulders to get one last glimpse.
Years later a Metis guide was accompanying a cowboy who was looking for a place to establish his own small ranch. Build a house, find a wife, start a family. That’s what life was about. “Look down there,” said the Metis, as they topped a ridge. “You see that framework, that round circle of poles with rafters tied to the center?”
“What is it?” asked the cowboy, who had grown up in New England and came to the prairie partly in search of his lost father, who had gone West and never returned.
“Sun lodge. It would have been covered with leafy branches to make shade for ceremonies. Very holy.”
“Let’s go down there and look.”
The Metis didn’t much want to — he was superstitious — but he went along, a little behind the cowboy whom he considered reckless. The cowboy was waiting for him alongside the center pole. Up in the top was something yellow.
“Look! It’s a slicker, an old yellow slicker, with a lot of stuff attached to it.”
“Better leave it alone. It’s an offering. Bad luck to disturb it.”
“Aw, I ain’t afraid.” He stood on his saddle, which made him tall enough to drag the slicker down. Then he had to jump for the ground because his horse was afraid of it. “Look at this thing! Amazing! Pretty tattered, too.”
He spread it out on the grass, properly, with the shoulders at the top, sleeves out to the sides. “Kinda short. Been cut off at the bottom. Maybe so as to be better for riding.” He saw that one pocket was torn, showing a corner of paper. The material was so rotten with age and weather that he could easily tear the slit open and take out an envelope.
The Metis noticed the cowboy’s face go white and his hands begin to shake. Looking around for lightning or a predator bird and seeing none, he asked, “What’s the matter.”
“My father’s name is on this letter. I think the handwriting might be my grandmother’s.” Slowly, he wiped the envelope on his shirt front, though it didn’t need wiping. Carefully he reached inside the old yellow envelope and drew out a sheet of folded paper.
“What does it say?”
“Dear son, I hope by now you have received your father’s old fisherman slicker. He won’t need it anymore since he is sick in bed and will never rise. We’ll bury him next to your wife. Sure do wish you were nearby so you could be with him just one more time. But we must all seek our destiny. Please write. We’ve heard nothing from you but will send this with a man who says he’s going to the same territory. Be careful of Indians.”
The cowboy stood holding the paper to his chest. All these years it had been kept dry in the slicker pocket, but now the paper was spotted with tears as its holder sobbed.
The Metis tactfully rode off a little ways and got off to let his horse graze and to let his friend have space for his grief.