Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1986
Abstract
Tribal histories usually rely upon archival documents and oral traditions for source material. This book adds another source: the lens of a camera. The Reservation Blackfeet offers approximately 200 photographs as a reliable, visual record of tribal cultural change. "Here are windowpanes," suggests Professor William E. Farr of the University of Montana, "that looked out on the past ... [as] fixed, rectangular glimpses ... " Blackfeet tribal history is complex. Once the dominant tribe in present-day Montana, they were seduced into the white man's world during the buffalo robe trade of the 1830s. In 1855 they agreed to a sizeable reservation, but beginning about 1870 white pressures for grassy plains vacated by the declining herds of buffalo increased. Conflicts arose, and the United States Government in 1873 and 1874 decreased Blackfeet tribal lands. The Starvation Winter of 1883-1884 once and for all turned the Blackfeet tribe of warriors and hunters into reservation braves. In succeeding years the tribe suffered further land reductions and endured a federal Indian policy that attempted to merge the red man into the mainstream of American society. Meanwhile, the Indians found comfort in the practice of their own culture. In time the New Deal programs of the 1930s would reconfirm the Blackfeet's faith in themselves.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 6:4 (Fall 1986). Copyright © 1986 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.