 Okay, so it is my great pleasure to introduce our new faculty member, Bill White. Bill is now an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and he is a historical archaeologist. His research has focused on race and ethnicity in the American West. He has recently become interested in heritage conservation and community-based archival research. He also works for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He has two children, Lydia and Cyrus, I believe, and they are around. It's great to have Bill and his family at the bottom of the community. So please welcome Bill. Okay, thanks for coming and sharing your lunch here with me. I want to talk a little bit about a project that I'm actually trying to finish up from when I worked at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at Arizona. It's work that we did at the Blackfeet boarding school in Montana, near Browning, Montana. But before I go any further, I have to tell you about this guy, Mouse Hall. He's one of the toughest guys I've ever met. He actually went to the boarding school and he was very integral in helping us identify features and the location where buildings used to be at and the general layout of this facility. As I'll explain in a few minutes, the boarding school has changed over time. It's still actually a boarding school that services the Blackfeet community. Mouse went there. He used the things that he learned at the boarding school to become a professional bronc rider and cowboy. And now he runs, he's in his 70s and he runs horse tours in Glacier National Park still. So these are the kind of people that in the course of this work we came across that went to the school. They're the ones who are willing to talk with us and they're the ones who had memories about the place. So the interpretation of the boarding school that you're going to get is coming from folks like Mouse that went through the process and the things that they have to say about it. So the research really reflects their experiences. My participation in the project, it focused on buildings here at the school facility there in case you didn't know in Northern Montana that's where the Blackfeet reservation is and the boarding school is actually on their reservation land. It's about 16 miles away from Browning, Montana and I'm going to focus mainly on the historical period. However, this landscape has been used for a long time by the Blackfeet. It's an important part of their heritage there on the reservation. And as I'll explain, it's also important in their movement to reclaim their own heritage and to take over cultural resource management on their reservation. So the landscape has been used for a long time for multiple different reasons. There used to be, there is a buffalo jump. The archeological remains of one there on the boarding school property and it was subjected to archeological investigations in the 1950s and then again in 2014 as the Blackfeet did a cultural resource management project there at the boarding school facility. So my role was to participate in oral histories and to document historical buildings that are still left on the facility. But my part in this large, much larger project, this process of research at the boarding school site is ongoing and it's got a lot of moving parts. So there's a concerted archival research program going on by the Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Office. They are very active in reclaiming their own heritage and going through archival documents is one of the things that the tribe does. So part of my research involved that, but I really just built upon a wealth of knowledge that they had already amassed. Archeological investigations, this is one of the several archeological projects that the Blackfeet worked on in the last 10 years. It's one of a couple different ones that I worked on with the Blackfeet over the last few years when I was at Arizona. And the Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Office has their own cultural resource management group, but they also have a partnership with BARA, the Bureau of Applied Research and Anthropology at Arizona. So one of my colleagues at BARA did the zoo archeological research on the bison-related prehistoric component to this part, and I did building inventory, which is part of the landscape documentation, but also historical artifact analysis. So landscape documentation, this is something that's important to the tribe. It's moving resources away from individual sites and atomized resources into an overall and more comprehensive understanding of the way they lived on the land. They're starting to move into documenting more landscapes and create traditional cultural landscapes that they can use to protect their resources in a more holistic way that includes archeology, but also includes their tribal knowledge. So my role, I recorded 15 extant buildings and some building remains there, and I'm currently working with my old advisor creating the traditional cultural landscape form for this project. And then the oral history component. In addition to doing archival research, they're also finding old oral histories that were recorded on tapes and digitizing them and using them for projects like this. So there's several different oral history projects that have been conducted on the reservation. In 1978 there was a project recorded about people who went to the boarding school. The Cut Bank boarding school was one of about three boarding schools that existed on the reservation and several that existed before that. So the boarding school experience is something that a lot of Blackfeet went through. So I tried to do my best to listen to those interviews and add that to the analysis and the technical report. So the talk today is just an excerpt of this technical report. If you guys are interested, I have the PDF of it. We finished it last year, but I'm working on an author about indigenous resistance to colonialism. That's an edited volume. And my friend, Brandy Bethke and I, were working together on a chapter for that about this project. The traditional cultural landscape form is currently being created through people at Barra, but also through the Tribal Historic Preservation Office there in Browning. So that's an ongoing process because as you'll see in a few minutes, places like this are part of a much larger archaeological site complex, multiple complexes together, that have both cultural and traditional knowledge and archaeological information. It's all rolled into one. Before I can go on to talking about the boarding school, I have to address the fact that it was used as part of the bison hunting tradition for the Blackfeet. So the Blackfeet are a bison hunting tribe, and they have been for thousands of years. Archaeologists have known that for a long time, that bison-related sites and features exist on the reservation. They've actually been tested and documented. So this work is just a continuation of other work that's already gone on. However, we're moving into a more of a collaborative regime where the Blackfeet are either in charge or strongly influencing the research that's going on. The goal is for Blackfeet to take over the control and the recording and also the interpretation of these kind of sites. And along with that is kind of a movement away from individual sites as a State Historic Preservation Office might identify to whole complexes, trying to understand the way of life on the landscape. So this is from a series of articles that came out about Catoius, the Catoius site. If you're interested, it's kind of at the forefront of bison hunting, prehistoric land use. There's several different articles that are going on. At the same time or soon after Catoius work is when we moved on to the boarding school site. A lot of times the features that are associated with bison jumps are recorded as individual sites or features or even if they're generous site complexes. So that a lot of times has to do with the way Section 106 works or the way site recording works in cultural resources. There's a certain amount of distance away. If they're too far away, then they're not part of the site. If it's on private property, then it's not part of the site. And so we know about bison hunting complexes, but a more holistic understanding is starting to come out as we look at how these landscapes relate together on the landscape. So it's understood that the black feed and other plains tribes used a series of blinds and different layers of blinds and also landscape features, the location of grasses, the time of year. There's a very, very elaborate system of cultural knowledge that goes into bison hunting before the arrival of the horse and even with the horse. These complexes that have been recorded are part of a much wider use in a life way. And really that's kind of where the archaeology, at least as far as the black feed, are participating. That's where they're going. It's kind of difficult to, you know, we're all used to seeing the buffalo jump where there's a hill and then at the bottom is, you know, a processing site or a site where there's many different bison and then at the bottom of the hill there's other processing sites. And a lot of the ethnography has focused on what happens after they've gotten the bison. So all the discussion of how the meat was shared and how it was processed and everything. But much more rare is the discussion of features on the landscape like these ephemeral cairns, blinds, other teepee posts, other places where they lit certain different kinds of dung or wood to guide the bison for multiple days the whole herd towards the jump. Not all groups did this. On the southern plains they don't necessarily have the same kind of bison jumps. But in Alberta and in Montana, this is something that people like the black feed did. And there was significant investment in the landscape. They spent a lot of time building this and changing it over time. As the grass has changed, as the distribution of animals came and went, they used different pieces of the blind to navigate herds across the landscape. So the landscape production when it comes to bison hunting is associated with transhumans on the land. And people are investing in the land for a long time, thousands of years, in certain cases at certain jumps. Okay, the boarding school. As I mentioned before, the cut bank boarding school still services the black feed tribe. The work that I'm talking about, there's a newer building that you can see there, an H state building that was constructed in 2015. And the cultural resource management that was done by the tribe was focused on excavations right there. That location was bison processing location. So that's where the bison were taken from the jump that's nearby at the cut bank boarding school property and processed there for fat rendering, but also for meat and other elements that they used bone tool production. Now I could not make this visible, but for miles away from the actual bison jump that's there on the school property are cairns, blinds, teepee rings, other features. And this doesn't show you the topography too because when I come from Idaho where there's mountains and you can look and see the Glacier National Park and the Rocky Mountains right there, but the land undulates and there's a lot of different features that don't really show up here. We're looking at this in 2017. The landscape has changed. A lot of the wooded hollows have changed. The location of grasses have all changed because this is ranching land and farm land. So we don't necessarily see the same distribution of plants or anything, but the goal for miles away from this, I think 27 miles is what we think. There's a series of cairns that would drive bison away from a place where they congregated at a certain time of year and over a series of days they would push them to this point where they would go over the edge and then they would process the animals. In the 1950s, Thomas Kehoe did three excavations there and in 1967 he published the results of those excavations. So the actual buffalo jump is right there in red. There's a road now there, but as I was mentioning before, the system of cairns and guiding the animals towards that exists for miles away. It's unsure how many processing locales were here on the boarding school property because when it was a boarding school it was farm land. So they grew hay, wheat, potatoes and other plants to keep the boarding school alive, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. So we don't really know how many other bison processing locales are there. However, in 2014 the Blackfeet tribe excavated several units in a bone bed and it's believed that that was one of several bison processing areas there. This area where there's buildings in these houses here is part of the boarding school facility plant. So it used to have a series of different dormitories, a hospital, different buildings associated with the principal and the headmaster and the workers who used to work there. And over time those have been augmented or changed. The landscape basically is constantly moving here. And what we see now is the end result of many different episodes of construction and demolition. The boarding school in the early 1900s was constructed at this location and it was known at that time that it was a bison processing area. And one of the goals of the federal government was to get them to stop hunting bison. So to build this right there on top of their facility was definitely a concerted effort. The Blackfeet feel that it was an effort from the government to get them to stay in their same traditional place but change the use of that landscape in a way that was going to turn them into yeoman farmers. In the research, as I was researching different aspects of this project, I found aerial photographs and you could kind of georectify and lay a lot of things on the land that were still there. So this photograph shows the facility in the 1960s and you can kind of see how it overlays and matches to what's actually existing there today. The underlying photo from Google Earth is old. It doesn't actually show the new building that they've constructed there. By the 1960s it continued its educational role but had shaken a lot of its vocational role. It used to be a working farm but the goal was to teach Blackfeet how to not be Blackfeet. By the 1960s the Blackfeet were having a lot more input into it but the institutional buildings and the structure followed a lot of the guidelines of educational facilities across the rest of the country. I mean, I think I went to a high school that looked like that. That's the way they built schools and as I was researching it, that gymnasium in the back that was built in the 1920s. That was how they used to build gymnasiums. This was a common educational architecture. The institutional architectural styles of the buildings there were following in line of what they were trying to create for other students in the United States that were not Native American. That was just kind of the school construction style that followed with other educational building sciences. However, the goal of this one was much different than a lot of the other schools in the United States. A little bit on the boarding school program. It's a very impactful time period for Native Americans in the United States. After hundreds of years of interacting with Euro-Americans, the government decided that it was just going to create a boarding school system in the 19th century and take Native American children to places where they were going to learn how to be agriculturalists. The whole goal, even in the memos from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was to change Native Americans regardless of where they're at. This was just the case for the Blackfeet, but to change them into farmers. It also had another underlying system of allotment or dispossessing Native people of land so that other people could take over that land and use it for different uses that were not necessarily in the benefit of the Native Americans. For the Blackfeet, this was an interesting process. They had a reservation for a long time. A series of different proclamations and treaties and agreements had them cede more and more land until by 1896 they had pretty much the boundary of the reservation that they have today. Going into the 19th century, the Blackfeet suffered from disease. They lost a lot of their bison herds. There were Euro-American ranchers on all sides. They were faced with a lot of situations that were not really helping their tribe at all. However, the Blackfeet in the literature, not only the minutes from tribal meetings, but also what other people have said, understood that education was really important for their children and they wanted schools, they wanted their children to do better than what was going on in the reservation at the end of the 19th century. One response were Christian boarding schools or government-sponsored boarding schools. So the first people on the Blackfeet reservation to start boarding schools were Catholic missionaries. And then soon after that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created their first boarding schools there on the reservation. Around the same time, there were several different schemes to dispossess land there. There was a railroad scheme through the Great Northern Railway to take away land across the reservation. In the early 1900s, there was an allotment system that was created. And the goal was to get them dependent on rations and also to create parcels of land so that most of the reservation could be opened up for ranching. The tribe knew that even though these efforts had been going on since the 1880s, they knew there weren't enough educational facilities. The state of Montana had actually said there are not enough educational facilities, but because they were on the reservation, the state of Montana was not going to create schools for them, nor were they going to let Native American tribal members go to the public schools off of the reservation. So the goal was to, or families had two choices. If they lived close to a day school, then their children could go to the day school and come home at night. And that was actually what the BIA wanted the most because they wouldn't have to actually take care of children. They would go to school and then come back home. Or boarding schools. The reason why the government increased their efforts into boarding schools is because the reservation is so huge with such a small population, it wasn't economically feasible to manage so many day schools across the reservation. Some families just refused to send their kids to school. They just weren't going to do it. They were not going to let their five-year-old children leave their house and go and live at a boarding school. There were several different ways truan officers and other individuals who co-hurst or convinced families to send their children to schools. So the children who ended up staying at home, they were at a loss. While others were getting an education, they weren't. And even to this day, there's kind of a division between those who stayed at home and who went to school. The Cut Bank School was built in 1904 and it opened in 1905 specifically for the children on the Blackfeet Reservation. Some other boarding schools were open to many different tribes, but this one was just for the Blackfeet. And it had a clearly stated goal to teach home economics for girls and agriculture for boys. And the whole goal was to create a farm and a garden and make it all self-sustainable so that the government didn't have to actually provide rations or anything besides minimal funding to take care of the facilities. All children of all ages who went to the school had some kind of a job. Younger children, the kids who were around five or six years old, had simple chores. The teenagers, they had, you know, they took care of the livestock and they managed the dairy and cleaned all the clothes and cooked the food. The boarding school started off early records. It doesn't seem like there's anything wrong. However, they're coming from Washington, D.C. so we don't really know what the actual Blackfeet in 1905 thought about their children going away to school. There's plenty of stories of families camping right next to the school ground or doing everything they could to stay next to their kids. They'd take them to school and then they'd just stay there and try to get their rations to stay right there. And there's several different efforts to get the parents to leave and not stay right by the school, stay by their children who are at the school, to go back to their allotments. The school wasn't even open for a decade before it was under federal investigation for mismanagement. And when the investigators came from Washington, D.C., they found that there were children who didn't have enough food. They didn't have clothes. The Indian agent there in Browning had a lot of these blankets and clothes, but the children there were going to bed hungry. The animals were not being taken care of properly because children were the ones who were taking care of them. And basically the kids were in northern Montana without shoes or bed sheets on their beds or heating oil to keep their place heated, and they were suffering. So there was a firing of the Indian agent and the people who were in charge, the man still ended up staying in Browning and operating a newspaper and fighting his conviction for a long time, but the school went under different management and the conditions kind of changed. But the school always remained low on funds. The government did not want to give money really at all, and it took a long time to get anything out of the federal government to keep the school going. And that was good for me because there's a lot of correspondence from the school saying, we need money, we need money. These places fallen apart, we need money. And a lot of correspondence back, like, well, we'll wait until the next congressional session. Oh, World War I happened, we don't have the money. Thing after thing kept happening. But it was really the motivation of the people who ran the school, many of whom were Native American, and they just cared about the Blackfeet people, and they fixed the school itself and just took care of it, and things eventually turned around to the point where in the 1930s it was a self-sufficient facility. The children were actually getting education in agriculture, and they were learning the kind of things that they could go on to a vocational school. In the 1950s and 60s, they finally got the money after asking for 40 years to get money to fix the school. They finally got it, and at that time it changed from getting all Blackfeet children to stay there to just kids from broken homes. The Blackfeet had their own public school system by that time, so a lot of kids went to public school. There were Blackfeet schools. The children who stayed at the boarding school were those who were having troubles at home, and they needed a place that was stable where they were going to get food and be able to survive. I think the biggest thing to think about the actual mission of the school and how it affected the Blackfeet is it did not destroy their culture. It didn't change them. It made them adapt to a whole new world, but they remained Blackfeet. By the 1920s, little children could actually go to tribal schools. They didn't have to go to the boarding school anymore. The boarding school still remained kind of a job-core type facility where children learned trades. Many of them went on to other larger schools like Carlisle Vocational School when they became teenagers, and folks like Maus credit the things that they learned at the boarding school, however harsh it was and the fact that he had to leave his family notwithstanding, he credits his time there at the boarding school as the kind of influential part of his life, and what he learned there in taking care of animals is what allowed him to have a business and continue into the present. So the boarding school still is a facility. It's kind of managed by the Blackfeet, but it's funded by the BIA, and they don't have a farm there anymore, and most of the farming features have been destroyed or they're covered in brush or all the materials were taken away and used in a different building, but it's still a place today where Blackfeet children go to learn. Okay, going back to the landscape thing. The Blackfeet are no different than anyone else when it comes to creating landscapes. The elements of the natural world exist without us, but our interpretation and the way we feed that landscape is cultural. It's based on the way that we perceive the world. Places like the boarding school have layers of different interpretations and different landscapes that are on top of each other. This talk only uncovers a tiny bit of the total meaning of this place to the Blackfeet, and it also only scratches the surface with the way that they internalized and lived on this place, this is the same place for thousands of years. At the heart of it is just a natural desire for us to separate our space, separate our bodies from space. That's the motivation really for landscape production, but also it's culture specific. The only way that you can understand these kinds of landscapes is by talking to someone who actually interpreted them. My activity is there, recording buildings and talking about the boarding school are totally different than mouse's memories and the way that mouse feels about it, and those are totally different than all the other people who went to that school. If you don't interact with individuals within their own culture, it's difficult to read these landscapes. When it comes to the traditional cultural landscape creation process, the legal process for getting it coded under the National Historic Preservation Act, the advisory council is very clear that you can't create a cultural landscape unless you involve people from that culture. The Blackfeet's activity and involvement in this process is integral to making that cultural part of the landscape. The activities that the Tribal Historic Preservation Office there in Glacier County, their activities are important to making it the kind of a property that's not only important for its values for archaeology but also its values for the Blackfeet people. People like mouse lived on this landscape. Hundreds of years before him, there were other people who lived on this landscape. They used this landscape to do their everyday activities of life. I think we're all familiar with these crazy philosophical ideas. Anthropologists crank them out all day, especially from France. But at any rate, there is a certain level of truth to it. The place that we act and do our activities of everyday life, not only are they landscapes, but they're the things that are necessary to our own identity. The Tribal Historic Preservation Office, their goal of changing the interpretation or being the ones to contribute to the interpretation of their own land, that's part of them asserting their own identity. And the boarding school was not a pleasant phenomenon. However, the activity and the knowledge that comes along with them, learning how to control their own resources and learning how to assert their own ethnic heritage, that is important. So people like mouse are really the key that all of this revolves around. We can't understand this place without people like mouse. And that's what a lot of the new archaeology about bison hunting, that's what I think it's really including, especially if you read the literature about Catoius or the things that are going on in Albertat's head smashed in or some of these other locations, adding that tribal knowledge, whatever we're allowed to know from the tribe, what we're given access to, putting that into the archaeological interpretation, that's basically the new way of thinking about landscapes. It's not just us reading Bordeaux and writing it all down in a technical report. The place where the boarding school is at and where the bison jump is at and all of that stuff, they're places where the black feet have been, they have always been at that place. There's archaeological evidence that suggests they have been there for thousands of years. However, the things that are going on there now are different in a lot of ways than what was going on thousands of years ago. In some ways, this whole boarding school program ended up strengthening them because they ended up getting the money to do cultural resource management that will help them manage their own resources as they write these reports and do more archaeology. They'll be able to assert themselves when it comes to the management of their own archaeological resources. So the boarding school was designed to destroy the black feet culture but it actually didn't and in some ways it may have strengthened it. Not everyone agrees that the boarding school was a good phenomenon. However, people like Maus and the other 1978 oral histories that I listened to talk to that came even after this historic period at the boarding school, many of them do attribute their activity and their education that they get there as being a turning point in their life and something that actually helped them. Of course, we have to remember those people are the ones who went after the federal investigation. We didn't interview anyone who was there in 1905 that didn't have anything to eat. All of those people have passed on so the next round of people who came through that boarding school they have a completely different interpretation. So their cultural knowledge and their understanding of this place is different than if we had asked someone who came from that first round. The school and heritage conservation and the interpretation of landscapes under a black feet lens that's all the next generation of what the black feet are going to do. That's the way that things are working on the reservation right now and as far as I know the projects that are in the works are underway right now in the country. They have this heritage conservation and they're interpreting the landscapes they're interpreting the stuff that's at the heart of what they're doing right now. Their participation in cultural resource management even though they're working under federal rubrics they're taking the opportunity to reclaim their heritage and that is really kind of a testament to their own resilience and their ability to survive things like the boarding school and their current condition of the reservation today. They're tough people and they're doing the very best that they can to stay black feet. So none of the people that I really owe a debt of gratitude are here however the people from the Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Office who allowed me to participate on this project I can't thank them enough Mouse Hall and all the other folks who gave us their memories of being at the boarding school invaluable memories those are integral into the interpretation of this landscape and then Brandy Bethke and Maria Nieves-Daneo my colleagues back in Arizona in Oklahoma we're still working on it and we will keep going until the next project comes along. Thanks everybody for coming we've got a few minutes for questions I'm here, feel free. When boarding schools were intended to kill the indigenous language Canada still made speakers black but what's happened in Montana? So you are exactly right language destruction was a key element in the whole boarding school process I'm not sure if so like I said some families never sent their children to the boarding school and a lot of those families they only knew black feet in those early ethnographies from the 1970s those kids went to school and they were 7 or 8 years old and they didn't even know English they only know black feet, they didn't know how to write they didn't know any of the stuff that the boarding school was trying to teach them they do speak black feet language there I don't know any of it I can't pronounce it but they still do speak it and I'm not sure if it's because others from Canada because you're right the tribe is split between the United States and Canada I'm not sure if it's the Canadians or if it's just it was maintained there but they do still speak black feet yes thanks I wanted to ask the same time in terms of boarding schools do you have a sense of how unique this boarding school was compared to others operating at the time because it seems, I mean my understanding at least the way they operated in Canada was to get rid of Native American culture to inculturate them into something very different but this seems to be a bit of a different scenario at least in the latter years of its operation it's only different in the fact that it's the black feet its functionality and all the things that they were supposed to do the daily schedule of all the activities, the punishments for speaking black feet all of those things still existed the black feet though just resisted as all there is to it and but you mentioned it was even run by members of the black community some of them were Native American however I couldn't figure out how many of them were black feet but there are staff lists and they just list Indian as the ethnicity or white so I do know in some of the grievances or the files, there's thousands of files that have been digitized on this thing there were complaints from people whose child went there and they were complaining through the tribal council there and Browning assumed that oh and then you see their name on the staff list so it's assumed that they were black feet but who isn't black feet is its own thing as well they were just listed as Native American but really the people who over time they got a staff that cared about the children and that was really the difference yeah, oh I'm sorry one city that's coming up that I think would be really informative comparatively is Mountain War Reservation that later became a Japanese American and incarceration spot and then was reinvented as a new space and we were out there mapping it with her you know you mentioned in your stories that there really weren't anybody that survived for the bad times of that morning school but there were landscape marking processes that you could when working closely with community partners as the community that you can actually map in here are some ways that the community dealt with being the kinds of forces that we can't understand archaeologically necessarily but you can see them and map them and make them a part of your understanding of that boarding school landscape because at first we were talking about it with folks whose houses were not too far from the site and were like what about this stuff that seems like they're dealing with evil here and more about the kinds of brutal interrogations of Japanese Americans that was happening later but how much more of that stuff she wanted to get into maybe it was something that you guys could talk about because your stories may be harder to find it may not be harder to find or the people we talked to didn't have the rights to tell us about that knowledge so that's kind of that ends up happening a lot of times that things are come across but you're just asked to talk to someone else because this person doesn't have the rights to talk about that thing you had a question yes that was a fascinating talk thank you so much and it actually has a lot of overlap with my experiences with the Ainu people in Hokkaido so as an archaeologist I think what's interesting is how what you presented tied to material culture and also a question about the language I don't know do you have any ideas of how many people still speaking the language oh yeah I don't know how many people speak black for you so I think how the language played the role in terms of the identity and how that was tied to the material culture and what could we potentially do as archaeologists and ethnographers to find a link back to the landscape issue I would love to know your perspectives that's a tough one right because the the talk I just gave is focused on my work of recording the buildings and the ethnographies behind that and then the archaeology focused on excavations at the bone bed and even the 1950s work is focused on the bison hunting the prehistoric so there's a big disconnect between the prehistoric activities and then what we know was happening during the historical period so I don't know how what the role the language played but I do know that at other boarding schools on the reservations the Catholic ones I'm not necessarily talking about prehistoric archaeology I'm more interested in about people's perception of their material culture and things that they were using as part of their daily life and I'm sure that boarding school is forcing them to abandon their traditions but I'm sure that the way they use material culture there must be some different perceptions and how that may be reflected in ethnography how we can tie that back to the archaeology that's an interesting question I'm struggling with my Japanese fortunately I didn't have to answer that one right we can talk about both but as an archaeologist I think it would be an interesting question how would you present it to be tied back to the study of material culture and I'm sure that this is probably there's still some opportunity left to get some additional information along the line but 50 years from now that would be difficult and also we can talk about the language teaching like English was a class that children learn their ABCs and there's plenty of memories of learning English and not knowing any English and then other students would tell what's the name for that, oh that's grass what's the name for that, tree and then they learn their ABCs they fondly remember learning their ABCs and the fact that they didn't know English when they went to school yeah that's an interesting question yes no, however the excavations came across like butchered cow bones and other you know rib eye bones that are probably from the kitchen so you don't really have a sense of no, not really there's a trash mound re-recorded that was like one story tall that was where they incinerated the garbage and put it there for 50 years but we didn't dig into the trash mound we recorded the feature it's covered with grass is that a sanitation measure of the incineration one of the things when you incinerate trash it's not just the health thing but you're also removing the ability to recycle or use things creatively that have been discarded you're exactly right about that so it would be difficult to answer that one because a lot of times schools had incinerators and that was just kind of how it was in the 1930s yeah yeah, so it'd be difficult to talk about the purposeful destruction of things as separated from the mechanics of a school from that time period yeah it allows you to enforce sort of sanitation and tract disposal practices but you're also removing it's like the with the enslaved housing forms in the 1840s where the reason for living up houses was to improve air flow improve health measures but it also conveniently enough removed all the private spaces that were used in the floors so you can have these things that are working in multiple ways to enforce behavior yeah, you're right, the effort the desire of the school was to turn them into farmers and they were not supposed to be hunters hunting was man, fishing was man they were supposed to grow dairy cows the school was so powerful that that school clocked right down to this other really important economic landscape that had climaxed that was really and I've not seen that really talked about the ways that schools are really co-opting the landscapes and places to try to impose a different world onto those places that was really cool yeah, and that's like the second rendition of that school because it was originally built near kind of a marshy area and it just failed, it was hard to get to it and people couldn't get students there and they couldn't get supplies there they chose that one because there was a road that used to go right through there plus it was by a creek for water I believe you had a question and then we'll go this way yeah, this work kind of is creating the history of the school in a lot of ways in the oldest building that's kind of still used that gymnasium that I showed they don't use that anymore they don't really know what to do with it but they haven't torn it down and there's other houses that are still used that were built at different time periods and we didn't go into anyone's houses in the office that's where I got that 1960s picture they do have a picture of it but there's not really a history of the school or any artifacts or any trophies newspapers mentioned that they had a band that won some awards students would take their animals to 4H that they raised there at the school and they'd win awards for that too mm-hmm yeah, that's a good question it's a combination, the funding comes from the BIA and the Department of Interior ultimately because they have to do compliance work for the expansion of the school the tribe, because they have a TIPO that is doing this kind of work they have people who are maybe principal investigators or archeological technicians that work on projects like this so the excavations that were done on the bone bed that I didn't really talk about that was conducted by Blackfeet archeologists many of whom are tribal members there's an effort to try and mix it between tribal members and non-tribal members with tribal members kind of getting the preference so the archeology is being handled and managed by the tribe that's funded by the federal government and then in the case of the specialized analysis like building inventories or zoo archeology they don't have people who are doing that so that's where BARRA comes in because they have a long-standing partnership oh no, through the tribe not just the TIPO but also my advisor and just BARRA's mission for anthropology is to find elders or other knowledgeable people and ask them if they're willing to contribute and so then that's kind of who's willing to contribute and will they come to the site I'm fascinated with something I've read years ago about planes of buffalo hunters being confined to reservations and how they had to deal with the new animals buffalo were gone and now they have cows and cows and buffalo and they had to kind of transform cows into being buffaloes and so I was wondering if through the bone the faunal analysis there's any evidence of the black feet actually treating cows like buffalo or any documents talking about gosh kids are treating the cows like buffalo they're pushing them we've got to stop that or we think that can't be done or that's perfectly fine I don't know what they say well there's a combination of things with that question the children that went to the boarding school even in 1905 the herds had been decimated to the point where maybe some of that cultural knowledge might have been either weakened or not really being continually passed on the government so there was a goal of the school being its own self-sustaining entity but those children were tribal members so they got rations a certain amount so a lot of times the cow it's believed at least that the cow bones that were there and the sheep possibly sheep maybe deer were being supplied by the tribal headquarters because the school operated a dairy farm so they weren't really making cheese and they also had a garden so they weren't specifically ranching these children they weren't slaughtering the cows killing them maybe slaughtering the cows there's no indication that they were slaughtering the cows there and the beef bones were already cut and butchered with a saw they were already sawed so not by the children I don't know I never found any information that they were butchering the cows so focusing on this location there was no indication that they were putting any of the bison technology so the the bison is kind of not just an animal it's also a force and so it's not it's not the same right the behavior of the cow and the animals also examples of them transforming the cows calling the cows spotted buffalo and yes it's not it's not the same thing but they and link two different worldviews there's documents of them writing about how the indigenous people would call them spotted buffalo and how they'd hunt them bow and arrow them to kill them and stuff like that so I just learned there was any hint in this early intensive non unindigenization process any hint of that going on here with the animals no we didn't find any and I didn't find any in the literature I spent all my time reading government records and complaints 40 something thousand letters but I know what you're talking about and because I don't know black feet language I don't know if they are doing any of that if any of the behaviors of them being ranchers is related at all to their activities I don't know mouse would probably know he knows almost everything okay got it yes they're mainly feral anyway but a dairy cow is a really domestic animal it's been manipulated all the time it's in close contact if they were encouraging ranching there would have been all kinds of possibilities for transforming into at least something that was a recognized by the structure yeah okay I think thanks