Nakona Wasnonya Yuhabi/Assiniboine Knowledge Keepers: Indigenous Archiving from the 19Th Into the 21St Centuries

NAKONA WASNONYA YUHABI/ASSINIBOINE KNOWLEDGE KEEPERS: INDIGENOUS ARCHIVING FROM THE 19TH INTO THE 21ST CENTURIES by JOSHUA BEN HOROWITZ B.A., The University of California Santa Cruz, 1994 M.Ed., Dominican University of California, 2003 M.A., Dominican University of California, 2008 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2014 © Joshua Ben Horowitz, 2014 Abstract This dissertation investigates the ways that Assiniboine peoples have kept bodies of cultural knowledge alive for their people from the reservation period in the U.S. and Canada in the late nineteenth century to the present. I intend to contribute to the archival turn with what I would call a nascent theory of Indigenous archiving. By focusing on Assiniboine people, I describe five Indigenous methods of keeping knowledge alive for their communities, including oral tradition, ceremony, sacred sites and territoriality, written texts, and artwork, as distinct from the Western methodologies of archiving. I contrast Assiniboine perspectives of archiving with what settler society collected and said about Assiniboine culture and history, and then explicate the differences between these settler and Indigenous points of view. This historical investigation of archiving Assiniboine knowledge illustrates relationships that range from animosity to reciprocity between Assiniboine and settlers regarding what it means to archive Assiniboine knowledge. This dissertation examines archives as bodies of cultural knowledge, archiving as an action of preservation, and Assiniboine cultural practitioners as archivists or what I call keepers of cultural knowledge. Throughout this dissertation I examine Assiniboine archiving as a set of interrelated processes. I suggest that the Assiniboine have employed a constellation of Indigenous archival processes that, in particular instances, worked in synchronicity in sustaining a degree of Assiniboine cultural identities, cosmologies, and a sense of peoplehood that has both undergone change and experienced continuity over time. I show that this constellation of archival processes mitigated previous damage caused by the ways of collecting by settlers, including those methods used in the disciplines of Anthropology and History, the universities that house them, and colonial museums and national archives. I demonstrate that these ways of archiving show the potential for Indigenous peoples to work with settler archives to support their own cultural preservation and to decolonize settler efforts through reciprocal relations (repatriation, managing or working with exhibitions), such as tribally managed archives and museums. This dissertation is based on extensive archival research and oral interviews with Assiniboine people on reserves in Montana, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. ii Preface This dissertation is based on archival research and twenty-two oral interviews conducted entirely by the author, Joshua Ben Horowitz. The oral interviews were approved by the University of British Columbia’s Research Ethics Board [certificate #: H09-01307], under the title Nakona Knowledge Keepers, with the Principal Investigator, Dr. Coll Thrush. The author conducted archival research in Washington, D.C. in June of 2010 under a fellowship from the Tribal Heritage Research Project, as a Fellow and founding member of the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums, at the National Archives, the National Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives, including the Cultural Anthropology Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center. The author also researched Canadian expedition journals and Assiniboine texts at the Newberry Library during my 2010 Summer Institute fellowship at the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. iii Table of Contents Abstract.…………………………………………………………………………………...ii Preface.…………………………………………………………………………………...iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv Acknowledgements…………………………………………………..……………………v Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...vi Chapter 1: Introduction, The Storage Locker at Fort Peck…………………………….….1 Chapter 2: Azana (The Light), 1832, and the Present…...…………………….…………35 Chapter 3: Wiotijaka (Medicine Lodge), 1880 to 2012 ……………………………........69 Chapter 4: Wamakashka Istima (Sleeping Buffalo Rock)...............................................107 Chapter 5: Assiniboine Literacy - Land of Nakoda…...………………...………….…...142 Chapter 6: Assiniboine Knowledge Keeping through Artwork.…………………….….182 Chapter 7: Conclusion O’ihage (The Ending of This Story)………………..………….215 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………227 Appendix A: Interviewee Bios……………..……..…..………………………...………243 Appendix B: Question…………………………………….…………………………….251 Appendix C: RISE/IRB Intro Letter and Consent Form..………….………………….. 255 iv Acknowledgements This dissertation was made possible by the intellectual support and guidance from my Supervisor, Coll Thrush, as well as my committee members Paige Raibmon and William French. I also gained much insight on becoming a historian from professors of the History department, including comprehensive examination preparation with Joy Dixon, coursework with John Roosa, Tamara Myers, and Tina Loo, and advice from Daniel Vickers, Alejandra Bronfman, Carla Nappi, and Michel Ducharme. I learned from my fellow graduate students at University of British Columbia. In addition, I am grateful for the support of my fellow faculty, and the students and staff at Dominican University of California, including especially professors Martin Anderson, Christian Dean, Phil Novak, and Leslie Ross. The funding fellowships and scholarships from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia enabled me to complete my coursework, exams, research, and the writing of this dissertation. My gratitude also goes to the Charles Redd Center of Western Studies of Brigham Young University of Utah for a summer research grant I received in 2012. At the summer institute at the Newberry Consortium of American Indian Studies in 2010, I learned a lot from professors Cary Miller, David Beck, and Scott Stevens as well as the other students in that cohort. It has been my honour to be a founding member of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) since the founding in 2009. Special thanks go to Susan Feller and Melissa Brodt, as well as my colleagues in the Tribal Heritage Research Project from 2009-2012. Thanks to Assiniboine people, such as Jeff Cummins, Robert Four Star, the late Rudolf Oliver Archdale, Larry Smith, Harry Beauchamp, Jr., Wilma Kennedy, the MacArthur family, the Lonechild family, and many others, this dissertation hopes to serve Assiniboine communities. In large part, I owe my deepest gratitude to all the interviewees who consented to interviews, and also to those that considered this project in conversation, including Kenny Ryan, Joseph Miller, Larry Wetsit, Tommy Christian, and the Medicine Lodge society members, and also David Reed Miller. Foremost, I am grateful beyond words to the patience and emotional support of my wife Arlene Horowitz, my father, Mardi Horowitz, and my family (including Kui). v Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my lovely wife Arlene McMurray Horowitz. This dissertation is also dedicated to Harry and Dennis Beauchamp, who passed away in the summer of 2010 much too young, and to the Beauchamp family. Note: In the summer of 2010, while I was researching and participating in the Newberry Consortium of American Indian Studies Summer Institute in Chicago, I received a phone call from an Assiniboine-Mandan friend of mine, David Chase, who lived in Polson, Montana. He told me that his nephews, Harry Beauchamp III, 15 years old, and his brother Dennis Beauchamp, 9 years, drowned in a tragic accident after Harry tried to rescue Dennis, who had fallen into an irrigation canal near a lake in St. Ignatius, Montana. They were both Assiniboine from Fort Peck through their father, and Salish- Kootenai from the Flathead Indian Reservation through their mother. I knew Harry since he was a baby when I lived with his parents in Pablo, Montana, in 1996. His father, Harry Beauchamp, Jr., adopted me as his brother Assiniboine way, and little Harry always called me minekshi (for uncle). Harry was a true inspiration for everyone that knew him. From his earliest age he learned everything he could about his Assiniboine cultural practices and passed that onto others, always respecting his elders. He was a representative of The Youth Tribal Council of Fort Peck Assiniboines and a Firekeeper at the Medicine Lodge. I was very proud of Harry and honoured to be one of his uncles. I dedicate this dissertation in part to their memory and to all the Assiniboine youth that wish to carry on with the important cultural knowledge that their elders may teach them. vi Chapter 1: Introduction There’s a lot of these things that have never been written about the Assiniboine. This history is ours. People of my age now and my brother Carl, we’re preserving this. We’re documenting it. We’re finding out where all our archives are. We’re building a database so that there’s kids down the road, our children, our grandchildren [who will] want to know about our people, it will be there. – Robert Four Star1 Relics of the past cross all the cultural boundaries that lie between past and present, and when they do they

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