Word: blackfeet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reconstructed Fort Union Trading Post, built in 1829, near the confluence of the strategic Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in the northwest corner of North Dakota. Fort Union served as a linchpin in John Jacob Astor's lucrative beaver-fur and buffalo trade with the Assiniboin, Crow and Blackfeet Indians. In its halcyon days, which lasted a quarter- century, the post dominated the upper Missouri from behind an elegant, whitewashed palisade. Annual steamboats brought artists and ethnologists. The bourgeois, or superintendent, maintained a splendid table, and French wine flowed in an imposing residence topped with a bell tower. With its bastions...
...trick is to keep your energy up," says Jerry Midder-Rider, 32, a veteran fire fighter from the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Mont. "You just work, sleep and eat." Midder-Rider is warming himself by a gas heater at a base camp deep in the Klamath National Forest, scene of the worst fires and several deaths. Exhausted after twelve hours on the line, he enjoys relaxing briefly with companions from as far away as Maine and Alaska. "We're all equal out here," he says. "That makes all the difference...
...conquered. The worst is to live through the ordeal that follows: to submit. The suicides, the alcoholism, the mists of despair that today envelop many reservations all seem legacies of a colonial past that won't go away. "Winter in the blood" is the way James Welch, the Montana Blackfeet novelist, describes the consequences--a freezing up of the Indian psyche in the face of daily deprivations of the spirit. "I was," he writes, "as distant from myself as the hawk from the moon...
...Person journeyed to Washington to seek help. Federal officials suggested that the Blackfeet make pencils and offered financial aid amounting to about $300,000. An investment broker put Old Person in touch with private investors in the Northeast willing to provide more seed money. With a grand total of $500,000, including $101,000 of their own capital, the Blackfeet launched the company...
Though sales started slowly at first, today some 300 of the 500 largest U.S. industrial companies supply their employees with inexpensive, disposable Blackfeet products. Sears features the Indian pencils and plastic pens in some of its catalogues and sells more than 8 million of them annually. The U.S. Army and Air Force distribute Blackfeet wares in their PXs worldwide. With sales last year of $5.1 million, the company earned a net profit of $175,000. The business supports 100 jobs on a reservation where unemployment still hovers near 50%, and Chairman Old Person confidently plans to borrow more money...