In this tribal backstory, Ronald references his primary source – two traditional Blackfeet Indians, Floyd Heavy Runner, War Chief and Medicine Man Pat Kennedy. What follows is a brief overview of the tribal structure which recognizes five branches and two branches which are adopted subtribes from outside of the original tribal line.

The focus of this brief history was the defrauding of the Blackfeet people of their sacred lands by four individuals, one of whom was a traitor chief. He describes the political structure of the tribes as theocratic and republican and makes the point that the US government insisted on viewing the tribe as autocratic. From my reading of the history of American expansion, this was the formula: to pretend that we were dealing with kingdoms rather than tribal confederacies and tribal republics. Such traditional tribal systems are much more stable than the American republican system, based as it was on the ancient Roman system which utterly failed to forestall empire and tyranny.

West refers to an incident in 1855, when a chief named Little Dog gave mapping information to a railroad and was then killed by chiefs enforcing the law. He goes on to relate how in 1895, the Blackfeet chief, Three Suns, “would have visited death by the stone hammer, smashed their skulls, upon White Calf, Joe Kipp, James Willard Schultz, and George Bird Grinnell, as the prime Blackfeet associated players, for the part they played in the theft of Blackfeet lands.”

The picture we see painted is of local, tribal law being trumped by federal law that permitted a whiskey trader, an artist, a traitor chief, and an “Ivy League type” rich boy to steal the sacred heart of the land and sell it, with their self-serving, misrepresented claims going down in history as an objective record of events. As someone who was on the ground as the race purge of 2015 swept across the portions of Baltimore that I frequent, now looking back through the media lens which declares that it was a noble uprising, and only a drugstore was burned and a mall looted, it is easy to believe that one hundred years could do even more to obscure the truth in the hands of the same ruling class. If in one year we, as a nation, have come to believe an absolute lie fabricated from whole cloth that is counter to the truth, while those who lived through it still stand and speak in their thousands, how hard is it to imagine that a hundred years could similarly cloak a lie?