Summary

Treuer opens this part with a visit to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana where he listens to Red William Hall, a tribal elder, talk of life in the 1930s and 40s. Hall tells of tribal customs, the raiding tradition and how it is not stealing, of how in his boyhood in the 1930s the bodies dead from smallpox in the 1890s could still be seen on scaffolding in the trees, placed there in the Blackfeet way (240). He tells of privation before the New Deal and how life improved under Roosevelt, of inter-Indian animosities and of boarding schools and the war, in which Native adversaries fought a common enemy and forged a common identity. He tells of the coming of the cattle industry and how Indians learned to herd stock. “Indian lives didn’t change in spite of...