Native Americans Take Lighthearted Approach to Dispel Indian Myths

When a woman in Kalispell, 100 miles to the west, phoned the Museum of the Plains Indian here to ask how much danger she would face if she drove onto the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, curator Loretta Pepion fired off a tongue-in-cheek retort.

“You’re from Kalispell and you’re afraid to come to Browning?!” she asked. “I’m afraid to go to Kalispell. You’ve got your Nazis, your Freemen. . . . I’m deathly scared of the Flathead Valley!”

Mission accomplished. The next week the caller visited the museum.

Her assumptions did not offend Pepion. After 30 years at the museum, she has heard every bizarre question that could possibly be asked by tourists, many of whom have never before seen an Indian, much less set foot on a reservation.

Directors of visitor centers and museums on Montana’s other reservations report similar encounters with summer visitors.

“They think we’re still living in tepees,” said Frankie Johnson, who runs the gift shop at Fort Belknap’s visitors center. “They don’t think we have cars.”

On the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, tourists regularly ask, “Where are the flat heads?”

On the Fort Peck Reservation in the northeast corner of the state, passersby often seem surprised to discover that tribal members live in houses, said Curley Youpee, who manages the Fort Peck Tribal Museum.

“There’s a number of them that feel Indian people should be living in tepees,” Youpee said. “They say, ‘What’s going on here? Why don’t you Indians live off the land?’ ”

As far as some younger visitors are concerned, the cowboys and Indians rivalry lives on.

After he saw two tribal members at Fort Belknap approach the visitors center toting a buffalo robe, one young lad refused to get out of his parents’ car.

Not every visitor is uninformed about Indian culture. The reservations welcome tourists from Germany, Holland, France and Japan, many of whom are well steeped in American Indian lore.

“All in all, people are very sensitive to the plight of the Native American,” Youpee said, “because many of them have read and experienced newscasts that describe the most impoverished places in America as Indian reservations.”

Sheryl Miller, a professor of anthropology who was visiting the Museum of the Plains Indians one recent afternoon, said people expect to see Indians living in tepees and wearing feathered bonnets because most movies and Western art depict an image of Indians that’s nearly a century old.

“We don’t tend to see Native American peoples watching TV, jumping in their car and going to the grocery store or getting up to get a drink out of the refrigerator,” Miller said.

Sharon Hyslop, a California resident who was once married to a member of the Fort Belknap tribes, says friends half believe her when she jokingly tells them she’s going back to the reservation to “sit around the tepee and eat puppy soup.”

When wacky queries do surface, Indian officials are usually able to shrug them off. They advise staffers not to take offensive questions personally. And they ask them to try their best to answer even the nuttiest questions with a straight face.

“You think, well, these people don’t know,” Youpee said. “You can’t be sarcastic.”

Sometimes, though, “It’s hard not to b.s. ‘em,” as Sonny Shields, tourism coordinator for the Fort Belknap tribes, put it.

After staring for some time at several mannequins sporting flowing headdresses, a foreign visitor once asked David Dragonfly, museum technician for the Museum of the Plains Indian: “At what age do they start growing their feathers?”

“Twelve or 13,” Dragonfly responded with a poker face that concealed his own astonishment.

When tourists claim that their great-great-grandmother was an Indian princess, it usually goes unchallenged, even though “most of the time it ain’t true, ‘cause there were no Indian princesses,” Dragonfly said.

But Pepion, whose museum sees as many as 80,000 visitors a year, can’t let some comments go unchallenged.

She recalled the time an older woman followed her family inside the museum only to announce that she had no desire to learn about Blackfeet culture because “it was so bloodthirsty.” Pepion responded by ticking off the names of all the non-Indian countries that were engaged in war at that time.

“We’re no more bloodthirsty than anyone else,” she told the woman.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” said the woman, who then turned around and left.

Pepion realizes most tourists mean well. She’s been guilty herself of asking simplistic questions. The first time she met an Eskimo, “I couldn’t wait to ask him, ‘Do you still live in an igloo?’ ”

Her sense of humor runs deep. When comedian Jonathan Winters dropped by the Museum of the Plains Indian several years ago, he asked Pepion if she was a Blackfeet, and she assured him she was.

“Here, I’ll show you,” she said, pretending to take off her shoes.

“Now you’re pulling my leg. You don’t really have black feet,” she quotes Winters as responding.

By far, the most popular question asked on reservations is:

Where are the Indians?

“You’re looking at ‘em,” is the typical response.

Tourists aren’t always satisfied with that answer, however.

“They’ll say, ‘No, the ones that are all dressed up,’ ” Johnson said.

One recent visitor to the Flathead Reservation kept insisting that a staffer at the People’s Center in Pablo give him directions to where the Indians lived.

“They ask: ‘If this is a reservation, why are there so many non-Indians?’ ” said center director Toni Hendrickson, who explains that white people may own land on the reservation as well.

In Browning, tourists have asked Pepion: How come all the people downtown are drunk?

“The street people are very visual. They’re right out there,” Pepion tells them. “You don’t see the hundreds of people at home playing with their kids, taking them on picnics, doing ordinary things.”