There
are two villages called “Birney” in Southeastern Montana. One is on the Northern Cheyenne Indian
Reservation and it is called “Indian Birney” by everyone. The other is ten miles south of Indian Birney
and it is off the reservation. It is
known by all as “White Birney.”
I
spent several summers in Indian Birney, sleeping either on the floor of an old
doublewide trailer or in the desanctified nave of an old Catholic Church. During my second summer in Birney, the group
of teens I was with helped build a traditional powwow arbor on an unused patch
of land just off the main drag. As we
built it, I knew that my kids were getting an experience few of their peers
back East would be able to understand.
They
got to go up into the pine forests on the rocky hillsides of the reservation
and help choose which trees to fell for use as support posts for the double
ring of the arbor. Then they helped
strip the branches, dig the post holes, plant the posts, tamp the dirt, tack chicken
wire overhead, and lay the pine boughs across the top for shade. It was backbreaking labor and my sixteen
wealthy teenagers from the East Coast could not get enough of it. One of my
favorite pictures from that summer is of a sixteen year-old girl from the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. She is holding a
worn and dirty work glove in her teeth, examining the bloody blisters on her
hand, and smiling from ear to ear.
It
rained a lot that summer, forcing us to delay and cancel many workdays. As the final day of our program approached,
we began to seriously think the arbor would not be finished in time for us to
participate in the first powwow held in Birney in many years. Our penultimate day on the reservation was a
fifteen-hour work marathon that left us all simultaneously exhausted and
exhilarated. As the last of the long
lingering twilight drained from the sky to the west, we got it done. The arbor was complete.
Some
of the tribal members who were working with us had spread the word that there
would be a powwow in Indian Birney the next day.
Saturday
morning dawned grey, cold, and wet and a feeling of depressed anti-climax
settled over us all as we began to pack and get ready for the following day’s
drive to the airport in Sheridan, Wyoming and the ensuing flights to points
East. We all kept one eye to the sky,
but the sky just kept raining on our arbor.
My
friend Mike, who lived in Birney, just kept telling me and the kids not to
worry. He said the sky would clear, the
sun would shine, and the powwow would happen.
As morning turned past twelve and into afternoon, the rain kept falling
steady as a drum on the church roof. The
atmosphere grew more and more disappointed inside as kids played Hearts, took
pictures, and copied down each other’s phone numbers for when they got home.
At
three o’clock the rain stopped falling.
By three-fifteen the clouds were breaking up. And by four we were practically dancing as we
set up tables, brewed coffee, and changed into our fancy clothes for the
powwow. By five o’clock more than one
hundred cars had arrived and there were hundreds of Cheyenne tribal members
there to christen the new Birney Powwow Arbor.
Elders showed up and thanked my kids in the Cheyenne language, people
brought out tons of food from their trunks likes clowns from a circus car. When the buffet tables were all set, we had
enough food to feed everyone twice.
My
kids participated in giveaways, grass dances, and circle dances set to
traditional drumming circles pounding out the heartbeat of a culture determined
to survive. Everything stopped at one
point and my kids were asked to line up in the center of the arbor. Each of them was then presented with a
beautiful hand-beaded gift from the tribe as a way to say “thank you” for all
their hard work.
Here
it is fifteen years later and whenever I allow myself to really remember the
details of that afternoon and evening and late into the night, I cry. It was one of the most authentically touching
moments of my life and whenever I need to feel good about the future and about
humans’ ability to bridge cultural divides, I dive into my memories of that
summer and that particularly magical night.
