And everywhere he looks there is color - not the garish stains of modern dazzle, but deep and satisfying colors bled straight from the earth, from stone and from stem, from root and fruit and flower.
“This,” Norman says finally, “is an incredibly important and impressive collection.”
“These are high, high quality,” Norman says. “They made things beautiful, because to them life was beautiful. This tells you that at one time, we were an independent people. Not dependent like we are today. Anything we needed, we made, and we made it beautifully. We see this today and we understand who we could be; we understand the potential of what is possible.”
Norman is an artist on Montana's Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and when he's not making drums and rattles and traditional art, he chairs the Museum of the Plains Indians Artists Association. That group, he said, has recently galvanized in an effort to save Browning's famous museum, home to a collection known worldwide.
“If all this disappears,” Norman said, “we lose our knowledge of who we are, and we lose the ability to see our potential.”
The problem, of course, is money.
The Museum of the Plains Indians was built back in 1941, at the tail end of the Great Depression, with a mission to preserve and present the art, history and culture of the Plains Indian people. Its mission statement recognizes the museum as a “major cultural institution,” home to “world-renowned collections,” and promotes education and research as well as exhibition.
But according to acting curator David Dragonfly, it's been decades since that mission was fully funded, and now the museum itself is on the chopping block.
The dirt beneath the displays is tribal land, and the building itself is owned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But the museum's operation is administered by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
And therein lies the rub.
The board, strapped for cash and with too much on its plate, is looking for ways to fund a crackdown on counterfeiters of Indian artifacts. The board's $1 million annual budget is quite nearly halved by the three museums in its care - the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Oklahoma, the Sioux Indian Museum in South Dakota and the collection in Browning.
Housing items from Blackfeet, Kootenai, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux, Assiniboine, Arapaho, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Chippewa, Cree and other Native cultures, the Museum of the Plains Indians runs - if barely - on about $138,000 each year.
It might not be much, but the Indian Arts and Crafts Board wants that money. The current plan is to close the doors Oct. 1, 2007, then break up the collection, returning many items to donors and sending the rest to storage in Washington, D.C.
“It's like someone coming into your home and cleaning out all your family heirlooms,” said Mary Lukin, a Browning native now home after many years living in Bozeman. Tuesday, she was visiting the museum yet again, a pilgrimage she has made countless times.
While working at Montana State University, Lukin said, she learned a whole lot about student retention, among other things.
“If you have a strong sense of who you are,” she said, “then making any kind of transition is just so much easier. You're much more likely to succeed.”
“This,” she said with an encompassing sweep of her arm, “is who we are. It's a living culture. We're not from the past; we're of today.”
Today, the museum is quiet, except for a wild winter wind that thunders down off the Rocky Mountain Front, howling, moaning, crashing in waves that roll across brittle-brown prairie to break against the thick museum walls.
Inside, the chill air actually vibrates with each blast, and feathers sway ever so gently behind protective glass.
On their own, says artist Valentina LaPier, those feathers are simply so many plumes of history. But when touched by the art, myth and ritual of culture they become language, “a visible image, a tangible image, a three-dimensional image of our reality.”
Likewise, she said, the whole of the collection is far greater than the sum of its parts, all existing in a broader context that is culture.
Outside, she said, that raging wind is surely alive. Inside, the fabulously decorated displays are just as surely alive.
It is difficult, LaPier said, to connect directly with the vast and inaccessible landscape beyond the museum doors. But inside are representations drawn from that landscape, accessible reflections made by humans to speak to humans.
Visitors recognize a bit of the life behind the glass, she said, “and you take it out the door
with you.”
Indeed, it's impossible to look at that reservation expanse in quite the same way once you've walked the halls of Dragonfly's museum. Once equipped with the language, the brown hills come instantly alive, thronging again with buffalo, with endless encampments.
But what if you were to leave the museum and open the doors not onto a Montana reservation but rather onto the steaming streets of Washington, D.C.?
“Then you lose the language,” Norman said. “The art is without context.”
Many spoken languages from Indian cultures, Norman said, “are in a desperate situation,” on the verge of extinction. “But you know what's hard to make extinct? This. This collection right here. This is a visual language, and it could save the rest of the culture.”
At the center of this visual language is a word that is verb and noun and adjective and adverb alike: buffalo. He is here in horn and hide and sinew, his rawhide fringe snapping in the wind, his heavy robe a borrowed warmth, clothing, shelter, food, life.
He is here in the Einiskim “buffalo stone,” here in a horn bowl, in the narrative of art and ritual. He brings the wind inside, crosses the divide.
“The art was like the buffalo,” Dragonfly said. “It was inclusive of our lives. Then, they turned us into farmers.”
But it's hard to imagine a farmer wearing that fierce necklace, studded with grizzly bear claws. It's hard to imagine a farmer draped in that Ghost Dance garb, in that warrior's medicine shirt.
It's hard to imagine a farmer's wife carrying her babe on that intricately beaded cradle board, a farmer's daughter playing with that stick doll.
And that, finally, is the real power of this collection in this place. It is not an exhaustive example of any one part of Indian life, but instead is a cross section of everything from tools to toys to utensils to religious artifacts. Very little is without function, art for art's sake, we call it. Instead, line, form and content - sometimes symbolic, sometimes lyrical, sometimes abstract, pulled from nature and from dream - grace the work of the day, fit snug in the hand.
Snakeskin wraps a chokecherry bow here, and there the diamondback design is pulled from the rattler and beaded into a pair of moccasins. The sun, radiating out in golden orange, explodes across a ceremonial horse's mask, and you can almost smell his steaming breath, still sweet with sagebrush.
Arrows, knives, hammers, clubs, berry mashers, all ornamented with feather, quill, skin, hair and pelt. A delicate bracelet of fish vertebrae, perhaps strung for a secret lover. Drums, rattles, pipes. A whistle carved from eagle bone, that could take flight at any moment. An effigy, big medicine, a spoon shaped from mountain sheep horn, a rawhide bowl, a colorful dress that still dances, rattles, still charms.
“As far as encompassing the lives of the Northern Plains Indians,” Dragonfly said, “this is as good as it gets.”
Outside the museum doors, discarded tires pin down roofs against winter's wail. Dogs wander bleak streets, and the hardscrabble hills look worn thin, like the skin over an old woman's knuckles.
Glacier County, home to Browning and the Museum of the Plains Indians, is the second poorest in a state known for its poverty. Yesterday's careful geometry of independence seems here replaced by a haphazard and often hopeless reliance.
“We cannot, cannot, afford to lose this collection,” Norman said. “It's a positive force. It's our hope.”
Already, Montana's congressional delegation has joined the fight, vowing to keep the museum open.
“The museum is a significant attraction for tourism and has the potential to be a tremendous educational resource,” Sen. Conrad Burns wrote recently in a letter to the Interior.
The state's senior Republican promised that “under no circumstances will the museum be closed and its collections shipped to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.”
But despite all the bluster, no one has put forward a specific plan for maintaining the facility. Some - particularly those at the Indian Arts and Crafts Board - have suggested giving it over to the Blackfeet tribe, but even tribal members don't think that's such a good idea.
In a referendum back in 1993, Norman said, the tribe asked its members about taking over the collection. More than 80 percent said no.
“Tribal business operation doesn't have a very successful history,” Norman said, adding that people remain concerned about management, fiscal responsibility and political looting.
Continued federal oversight remains the best option, he said, even though under the status quo Dragonfly already has lost technical curators, scientific staff, anthropologists and archaeologists. Much of the collection remains
in storage, in a building with a bad roof and
$2 million in repair needs.
Perhaps the state's university system wants to get involved, Norman said. Perhaps other museums - such as Kalispell's Hockaday - are willing to help out. Perhaps nearby Glacier National Park has an interest. Perhaps the Plains Anthropological Society can ride to the rescue.
“It just makes me angry,” Norman said. “The federal government built this, took on the obligation. Now, they want to back out of their responsibility. It's nothing new. When they want to dump some debt, they dump it on the Indians. Same old story.”
Every summer, Dragonfly collects a few bucks each from the 15,000 or so folk who flow through his museum. The money, though, “goes back to Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I have no idea what happens to it.”
If he could hang on to the gate receipts, he said, and if he could get the gift shop back up and running, and if he could get the collection catalogued and inventoried and photographed for publication, then maybe - just maybe - he could make a go of it.
“But there's just no money,” Dragonfly said. “We don't get any revenue. It all goes to the Big Chief back east, and it doesn't come back.”
Edie Hopkins, for one, doesn't care to go back east to explore her culture. The Browning native - long since moved away from the reservation - returns home every now and again, and each time she visits the museum “to see what it's all about, and to make a connection with home.”
She's drawn especially to the dresses, the soft skins beaded and belled and draped with so much care over the featureless mannequins. She calls it “today's fashion,” and when looked at in just the right way, the diorama does take on the substance of the catwalk, Blackfeet style, centuries old and yet fresh as that wind outside.
“This isn't the past,” Hopkins said. “Every time I come, I see something new.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-332-2870 or mjamison@missoulian.com.
Photographer Tom Bauer can be reached at 523-5270 or tbauer@missoulian.com.
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