Lawrence Abbott Interview with Alfred Young Man

LAWRENCE ABBOTT INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED YOUNG MAN (co-authored by Alfred Young Man 1996) LA; I'd like to start with some biographical background. You were among the first group of students to studyat IAIA. AYM: Wow! I'm going to have to dredge up some ancient personal history here. I became sidetracked when I was fifteen or sixteen years old when I was on my way to Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota with my older brother and some other Montana Indian kids to learn a trade, auto mechanics or something like that. This was all a part of that disastrous 1950s government Relocation policy. Well, Flan- dreau didn't have any space for us so we were sent to Concho Indian School in Oklahoma to await transfer, placement, in another BIA school whenevera space became available. After a month or so at Concho it was announced that there was a new kind of school opening in Santa Fe called the Institute of American Indian Arts. The BIA promptly bussed some of us more promising "art" students to Santa Fe, all without bothering to ask us if we even wanted to go. I spent the next five years there, from 1963-68, and as things turned out was fortunate enough to have been among the original crop of students. In the beginning I didn't know anything at all about art. I was just a young reservation kid and didn't even know what an artist was, never heard of Picasso, or even that I was considered by the powers that be to have potential as an artist. Like all Native children I was told that I had some kind of a special talent, some kind of "aboriginal artistic chromosome," as Rennard Strickland would say today. There were students at IAIA from all over the U.S. and even some from Canada, some my age and some older, up to about 21 years of age, who were chosen to start up this new art school. The The Canadian Journal ofNative Studies XVI, 2(1996):315-362. 316 Lawrence Abbott campus was housed on the site of the old Santa Fe Indian School which was also once the home of Dorothy Dunn's famous Studio School of Indian Painting which she established in 1932, something about which I wouldn't have the faintest clue until much later in my career as an artist. I thought that the campus was very nice, as far as BIA schools go, but it was still a BIA boarding school and we all had to conformto the ideology of the government regime of the day. Most of the thinking students were at odds with what the bureaucrats thought Indian art was all about so from the very beginning we were in for a fight with some very entrenched ethnocentric attitudes. In spite of all that, we were given some freedom, as far as was possible, to explore who we were as artists, and most importantly, the idea of Indian art. Even then people were asking, what is Indian art? How do you do it? Are we Indians? Are we not Indians? And so on. These questions among others, seem to be as perennial as thegrass. I used much of my time at IAIA to play around with the ideas undergirding those questions. Ironically, towards the end of the 60s, the hippie movement began to rapidly come into its own and all sorts of lower, middle, and upper- classWhite kids were self-occupied with trying to redefine the rules and customs of an outdated political system and social etiquette laid down by their grandparents' parents and their own parents, what with being urged to "tune in, turn on, and drop out" by Harvard professor Timothy Leary. Hippies, in general, used the political antics of de- bunking and then redefining the conservative ethics and social affinities of their own society with regards to marriage, common law, drugs, music, sexual morality, war, and so forth. There was supposed to have been some kind of social revolution going on. With hindsight and from the Native perspective nothing seems to have fundamen- tally changed. In the ultimate paradox, their parents were simultane- ously trying to hammer home to my generation, the rules, manners, and customs of their civilization as they had done to previous generations of Indians. They were doing this by way of eulogizing their own ethnocentric government policies, theories basedin scien- tific racism, and by stressing all those things that were supposed to make the savage Indian child "civilized." This obviously profound irony was lost, of course, on the administrators and teachers at IAIA for many years. It was not lost on the students, however. Interview with Alfred Young Man 317 LA: Where did you live beforegoingto the Institute? AYM: I grew up in East Glacier Park, Montana, a small village located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. It's more commonly known as the gateway to Glacier National Park and is situated on the eastern slopes;the foothills, of the RockyMountains. We were one of several Indian families living on the periphery of this, predominantly White, town which numbered less than one hundred people nine months of the year. (Back in the 70s we would'vecalled this town a "hamlet," aka Cold War Vietnam jargon. I wonder whatever happened to that term?) We alwaysseemedto be at the lowerend of the social pecking orderand I pretty much grew up an outsider. We lived in what I can only describe as a shack and we had to use an outhouse year round. We were situated across a deep ravine through which ran a glacial mountain stream named Midvale Creek that swelled to a sizeable torrent during spring runoff. I hauled many buckets of drinking water day in and day out from that creek. So we were pretty much set apart from the rest of the population, culturally and geographically. We were connected only by a narrow two-lanecar bridge. The rest of the town who had the "civilized" benefits of indoor plumbing and central heating could look across the river at "those poor Indians living over there" and feel superior. My earliest memories of East Glacier are those of experiencing the pangs of racism and having to beg for left-overs from the restaurant of the rustic multimillion dollar Glacier Park Lodge which was then owned by the Great Northern Railroad which delivered tourists to the Park each summer for recreation, adventure, and pleasure from all points east and west. The Blackfeet, who would come to East Glacier from Browning or elsewhere on the Reservation, would set up their tipis in the pines where a space was especially cleared for this purpose, get dressed in their best traditional beaded outfits, and welcome the tourists for a few dollars. I got to know many of the old people and their children in this way and they treated me more like one of their own, in contrast to the negative White attitude. I didn't know it at the time but these Elders and their children were one of the primary attractions to the Park,in addition to the beautifulscenery of course, for the hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars every summer. And they got virtually nothing in return. Nevertheless, my family, as Cree, were almostalways considered to be outsiders on the Reservation. This was normally very subtly insinuated. Today we'restill considered by some Whitesand Black- 318 Lawrence Abbott feet to be "foreigners" in spite of the fact that back in the 1930s my grandfathers and grandmothers had arrived on the Reservation through an historical deal made with the Blackfeet and the US. government for Reservation land in exchange for commodities. That is a story by itself. We still own large tracts of land, legally, around the St. Mary area and the details of that transaction are on file with the BIA somewhere. Crees have few rights on the Reservation and we constantly run into jurisdictional problems with the Feds and the Tribe who don't really know whatto do with us. Most of us are enrolled at Rocky Boy, mid-way across stale, but we don't really benefit from that association in any fundamental way although we do visit our relatives from time to time for summer pow-wows and sun dances. For instance, I've been trying to get eithertribal council to put running water and an indoor toilet in my mother's house in East Glacier but neither of them wants to take the responsibility. They shove the problem off on each other. That's fairly typical Reservation politics around there. In the meantime my 85 year old mother has to use the outhouse all winterlong and haul her drinking water. My childhood sentiments were initially formed by my grandfathers and grand-uncles who periodically held sweatbaths back in the hills of East Glacier, away from the prying and curious eyes of the locals and tourists who no doubtthought they were practicing some kind of superstitious primitive savage religion. Looking back over the litera- ture of that era therewere some very fanciful theories, indeed, written about who Indians supposedly were. Anyway, I spent my formative years speaking a childhood kind of Cree.My father was what is today commonly termed "shaman" or "medicine man" (we prefer to call these special kind of people Indian doctors) but he died when I was only two years old so I neverreally got to know him. I basically grew up fatherless. At the age of six I was taken away to attend the Cut Bank Boarding School north of BrowningwhereI had to get my long hair cut off, like all Indian kids of the time, get dosed in insecticide powder, was issued a pair of blue coveralls with a little trap-door at the back and quickly learned that we were to speak English only or face the dire prospect of corporal punishment if we refused.

Load more