If I had any doubts, the jig was up the afternoon that our Regional Park Managers quarterly meeting morphed into a Missouri River float trip. We had assembled in moderately rustic facilities at the Beartooth Wildlife Management Area. I’d bunked in a simple cabin and found my way to the SST (shorthand for Sweet Smelling Toilet in FS or FWP lingo, which is shorthand for the U. S. Forest Service and Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks). I’d contributed to the discussion and hadn’t embarrassed myself with city clothes. But when I realized that our final afternoon would be spent rafting, I wanted to slink home. But we had carpooled.
The first serious difficulty appeared as crew leaders picked passengers for each raft– and I was clearly going to be chosen last. The float was not meant to be educational or scenic. It was a much anticipated and traditional water war. Crew leaders wanted aggression and strength—so as to “man” the water cannon already placed in each raft.
About the third bend in the Missouri, already soaked, I got to remembering that the Montana Historical Society was advertising for an Operations Chief.
Two years prior, I’d left a perfectly wonderful post as the Society’s Education Officer. Fish, Wildlife, and Parks–after decades of casual care for their historic and prehistoric resources–had created a visitor services/cultural resource position. Good on them, I thought. And applied. Thinking that my previous experience would prove just the ticket.
In fact, it proved just the ticket to being hired but not for maneuvering well given the agency’s temperament and behaviors. FWP needed a person to hike up hill and down dale, jaw with park managers about camp hosts and chronic wasting disease, handle the mechanics of historic site documentation, and periodically stand on some rock and yell “NO.” I brought theory and words and procedures.
Which meant that too many of my days were devoted to skimming park planning documents; writing comments that would be ignored; taking familiarization trips; attending the agency’s blizzard of training sessions, meetings, and trendy self-evaluation seminars; reviewing contracts; speaking occasionally to this group or that about why historic resources were important.
I worked with some very good people. Mostly men, of course. Well-intentioned. Cordial. Trying to do right by some incredibly significant sites and buildings: Lewis and Clark’s Three Forks of the Missouri and Traveler’s Rest; the ghost town of Bannack; Crow Chief Plenty Coups’ house. But still always out-of-their primary element.
Familiarization forays were magical: all the dinosaur-laden stone gargoyles of Makoshika; the architectural delicacies of Elkhorn’s standing structures; the scenic breadth of the Madison Buffalo Jump; the twists and rolls of Belt Creek as it wound its way through Sluice Boxes mining remnants.
In fact, my introduction to Sluice Boxes occurred on a day-long raft trip—spring cleanup and knapweed patrol. All of which went well, until the Parks employee—somewhat woolly-headed anyway– accidentally steered us into a big rock. I catapulted out of the raft. The incident became: park manager drowns central office woman. A foreshadowing of things to come.
Central office employees in FWP suffered the same stigma as most headquarters employees do. We made a questionable amount of money. We were mostly talk and title. We had no line authority over day-in-day-out decisions. With the exception of capital projects—construction, significant remodeling, site development—activities that needed major funding. There we had some authority.
Which brought me to the First Peoples’ Buffalo Jump State Park (at the time called Ulm Pishkun). FWP had owned only the upper plateau across which bison were driven toward a cliff edge. Through a series of small marvels, the agency had just acquired acreage near the bottom of the jump–the artifact-rich processing area–and enough money and additional land to build a small visitor center.
While FWP could manage basic construction contracts, staff had little experience creating exhibits. Hence, they’d thrown a boatload of money to a big, out-of-state interpretive design firm—which employed no historians or archaeologists or Native people.
As I started to get my FWP legs, Ken Soderberg, the visitor services guru, realized how generic, empty, and misdirected the fancy firm’s ideas were for the exhibits. Fortunately, only in preliminary form.
I’d already found a kindred spirit in Ken. He had solid credentials in park management, didn’t shy away from water sports, and came from a really creative family—skilled in music and theater and wordsmithing. In other words, Ken was already a bridge between my background and that of the park managers.
I more than agreed with Ken’s assessment of the design firm’s empty thinking. And we gathered the courage to break the contract and begin our own planning.
We first had to determine what the exhibit’s goals should be. And after some serious research, Ken and I determined that our task was not just to showcase the mechanics or timelines of the jump or the “products” buffalo offered. But to give visitors a way to understand the cultural framework, the spiritual practice that native peoples employed in hunting buffalo. The calling—the summoning–of a being so magnificent, so powerful, so needed that each part of the ritual was sacred.
We then hunted for and found Krys Holmes whose understanding and writing skills matched those goals. I culled Dave’s shelves and the Society library for sources that gave us detailed descriptions of how the buffalo and buffalo jumps featured in the lives of Plains natives. I’d been to the Canadian Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site and could reach out to staff there. I knew First Nation’s cultural leaders here in Montana—critical voices and memories.
I valued researching in traditional sources and less conventional ones. To the extent I could, I worked to step outside the twentieth century and see our landscape and its resources through very different cultural eyes. The trips between Helena and Ulm were their own immersions in beauty. Ultimately, Krys and Ken and I zeroed in on the words and images that seemed worthy of the place and the people.
The Visitor Center’s dedication occurred after that water war on the Missouri. I did not attend. Instead, I had applied and was hired for that Historical Society position.
But reports of the event came back to me. The ceremony included a moment—unscripted–when the crowd–agency staff, community leaders, tribal participants, ranchers—circled the building. And reached for each other’s hands as First Nations elders offered blessings for the buffalo and for the Center’s mission to create an understanding of Plains people.
*****
Turns out I’d leapt from the proverbial frying pan into a scorching fire. Or from a turbulent river into a typhoon. That’s another essay. Meanwhile, FWP found their way to hiring an archaeologist whose skills and heart matched the opportunities and problems that the defined the agency. Still, maybe I was there at the right time. ©
