BROWNING — Seven Indian reservations ring Montana’s rim like islands in a river of mainstream culture. After resisting decades of concentrated effort to erase those islands, the tribes there are asserting their historic place on the map.

For historians like Carol Murray, the fear is: Are they too late?

The walls of Murray’s tribal history department office at Blackfeet Community College are papered with maps that show history poised to repeat itself. They chart the legacy of the Dawes Act of 1887, and its pernicious nibbling of the Blackfeet homelands.

Most Montanans have never heard of the Dawes Act. But if you’re one of the state’s 66,000 American Indians, that old bit of federal law is like knowing cancer runs in your family.

Murray was researching her tribe’s history for the state Office of Public Instruction, near the end of a two-year effort to reintroduce the state’s seven tribal nations to its 144,000 public school children. While exploring what happened to thousands of acres of lost Blackfeet homesteads a century ago, she saw a pattern that threatens the future existence of her tribe.

Before the Dawes act, tribes owned all their land communally. The federal law forced them to accept allotments of land by family, like white settlers did. Murray found 228 families that settled on land outside the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. They’d get behind on their taxes and lose their property. Then, they’d discover they weren’t enrolled members of their own tribe. So, the 30,000 to 50,000 acres they had owned were no longer Indian land.

Today the process is working in reverse. Murray said under current Blackfeet enrollment rules, reservation residents must be at least one-quarter Blackfeet for their property to remain part of the reservation. Dip below that through intermarriage or sloppy record-keeping, and a family’s land could lose its reservation status and become just like any other part of mainstream Montana.

Murray is 17/32nds Blackfeet. It says so on her tribal ID card. Her children will meet the one-quarter “blood quantum” rule, but her grandchildren might not. There’s still time to change the rules of tribal enrollment or land trust ownership. But to fix a problem, you must first see the problem.

Self-education

Before Murray started working on the tribal history project, the Blackfeet had virtually no way to see. Until recently, the main textbook for the college’s own Blackfeet studies class was “Blackfeet Indian Stories,” by white author George Bird Grinnell in 1913.

Murray embodies a fair amount of recent history herself. She was president of Blackfeet Community College for nine years, leading its evolution from classrooms in a drafty roller rink to a modern, nine-building campus with 500 students. After taking a break to teach in middle school, she now directs the college’s tribal history department. That “department” didn’t really exist until two years ago, when Murray was hired for the OPI project.

All seven of Montana’s Indian reservations took part in the Tribal History Project, delivering books, DVDs, posters and Web sites for the state’s elementary and high school students to study. Nearly all of them found themselves, like Murray, starting from zero.

“We’ve learned so much how valuable history is,” Murray said. “I can see this (land-loss) being repeated, and if that happens, the tribe will lose and the people will lose. The education of our own people is way more important than the education of the school children of Montana.”

Lay of the land

Federal policies like the Dawes Act are one of the few common threads that run through the seven reservations and more than a dozen tribes now living in Montana. Yet they’re a flashing sign that American Indians aren’t simply a source of folklore and powwow dancing. As University of Montana history professor Harry Fritz put it, “You must put them in the modern age as participants not just people who are acted upon.”

“You can’t understand Indians and Indians in Montana without understanding Indian allotment,” Fritz said. “If we were to go back and trace the distribution of every square inch of land on those reservations, it would just be explosive.”

Mainstream Montanans have little awareness how paperwork and policy bind the lives of their Indian neighbors. Spend time on any of those seven reservations, and you’ll hear a constant chatter about per capita payments, registration appeals, council committee agendas and enrollment deadlines. Membership in an American Indian tribe determines health care, housing, tax rates and scholarships. It’s way beyond the Sons of Norway or “Kiss me: I’m Irish.”

Mainstream Montanans have paid scant attention to the swirling undercurrents of present-day Indian presence. Should Glacier National Park replace some of its Blackfeet landmark names with Kootenai titles? Who owns the water necessary to develop coal seams in and around the Crow or Northern Cheyenne reservations? How much say should the Salish have over the reconstruction of U.S. Highway 93 north of Missoula?

And what happened to those thousands of acres of Blackfeet homesteads? How about the millions of acres the U.S. government allotted to various tribes by treaty, before reneging on the deals?

The tribes don’t agree on this either. One of Murray’s history projects was the creation of a deerskin map of Montana, with each tribe’s territory marked in color. It’s a beautiful piece of work, except the Crow also have a map laying claim to much of the Blackfeet hunting ground. And Salish historians have place-name records of eastern Montana landmarks they say predate the arrival of either the Crow or Blackfeet.

To paraphrase the late Montana historian Dave Walter, when cultures meet, it’s not going to be the pretty picture you wanted it to be. But as the earlier sage George Santayana warned: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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