Off the Reservation
As director of NMSU's American Indian Program, Don Pepion may have one of the hardest jobs on campus.
By Jeff Berg
When Christopher Columbus, a former slave trader and murderer, "discovered" America, somehow doing so by accidentally landing in the Bahamas Islands in the Caribbean, he had this endearing comment to say about the native Tarawa people he encountered there: "They would make fine servants. With 50 men, we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want."
The Tarawa people are now extinct.
And so it began.
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Don Pepion in his Blackfeet Indian
garb. (Photo by Linda Montoya) |
History is always told in the voice of the conqueror, and in many cases, the voice of that conqueror continues to delegate and relegate the conquered for many years. So it is among most of the American Indian nations that once inhabited the area now known as the United States. Languages, customs, cultures and entire tribes of American Indians have disappeared since the invasion of peoples from the European continent. During the "500-Year War" that took place across this continent, millions (estimates reach 20 million per century) of North American Indians perished along with their societies.
Even today, corporations and the government continue to try to steal what little pieces of land the tribes have left. Sports team mascots like the Washington "Redskins" perpetuate stereotypes and insults whose equivalent, if applied to African-Americans, could not even be printed in this publication without asterisks or dashes.
It is no easy task for someone to work to help break the stereotypes, to assist in rebuilding dozens of lost cultures and languages, and to aid young Native Americans in their personal quests for a better life through education.
That is what probably makes Dr. Don Pepion's job one of the hardest on the New Mexico State University campus.
Pepion, a member of the Blackfeet (Siksika) Nation of Montana (see box), is the director of the university' American Indian Program (AIP). The program began about 30 years ago, and NMSU currently has around 500 Native American students (New Mexico has an estimated population of 147,000 Native Americans). His departmental budget beyond staff salaries stands at a slim $18,000 a year. Pepion says the program is well supported by current NMSU President Michael Martin. Nonetheless, Pepion has the distinct feeling that the AIP, along with similar programs for African-American and Latino students, is still quite marginalized.
"There are not many resources for partnering within the institution," Pepion says. "Harry Lujan (a past director of AIP) brought in other resources from around the state, and if he had not done that, I would not have taken the job."
NMSU offers a minor in Native American Studies, where Pepion teaches several classes, mostly in anthropology. There are also plans for a $6 million dollar Native American Cultural Center on campus.
Pepion had previously been here as a student in 1975. He met his wife, who is from Los Alamos, while attending classes in Las Cruces.
"It was a quick decision," he says of his return to Las Cruces from Montana. "I was called by Harry Lujan in the summer of 2000, and invited to apply. At that time, I wasn't sure about leaving my position as dean of Vocational Education at Blackfeet Community College."
About the Blackfeet "The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. . . It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races." The Winning of the West,
vol. 4, The Indian Wars,
The Blackfeet Indians, native tribe of NMSU American Indian Programs director Don Pepion, include three different bands: Blood, Kiena (Kaena) and Piegan (Pikuni). Their present homeland straddles the US-Canadian border, with two of the bands living in Canada, and the other living in and around Browning, Montana. It is estimated that there are about 14,000 Blackfeet around the world today. Traditionally, the Blackfeet were nomadic, ranging all across the Plains States, probably after being pushed eastward from Canada, perhaps as far east as Labrador, upon the arrival of the white man. While on the Great Plains, buffalo became their main source of food and livelihood. They also adapted easily and well when horses were introduced to the culture. In 1895, the tribe sold what is now Glacier National Park to the US government, which planned to use it for mineral development. The Blackfeet had usually been friendly with the Anglo invaders for the 50 years prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which trailed through their homeland in 1806. In 1870, the Piegan Band of Blackfeet suffered a horrendous but little-publicized battle at an encampment along the Maria's River in northern Montana. Several different renditions of the battle are readily available, but all center on a white man named Clark (or Clarke—no relation to William Clark of the 1806 expedition). In January 1870, when white and red men were not getting along well to begin with, Clark claimed that a young Blackfeet man had stolen some horses from him. Stealing horses in the Blackfeet culture was done more to gain prominence among one's peers than to gain property, which kind of makes the whole bloody incident that followed a cultural misunderstanding. Clark tracked the young warrior named Owl Child, caught him and beat him in front of the entire Blackfeet camp. To save face, Owl Child recruited some other warriors, found Clark and killed him and several other white men. Shortly thereafter, Major Eugene Baker, a notorious alcoholic, was dispatched from nearby Fort Shaw to punish a group of Indians who lived in a peaceful camp under a chief named Heavy Runner. When the Blackfeet realized that 200 cavalrymen surrounded them, Heavy Runner produced a so-called "safe conduct" letter, which was ignored. Major Baker encouraged his men to shoot to kill, even after an army scout repeatedly told him that they were at the wrong camp (apparently Owl Child had already fled to Canada). The ensuing slaughter resulted in the deaths of approximately 175 Indians, mostly women, children and elders; most of the men from the camp had left a day earlier to go hunting. Another 140 Blackfeet were captured, and untold others froze or starved to death as they fled the area in below-zero temperatures in a vain attempt to seek shelter at Fort Benton, 90 miles distant. Baker left one company of his troop behind and marched on to the "right" camp the next day. Owl Child's group was by then long gone, heading for the relative safety of Canada. A brief journalistic and political scandal ensued, which was quickly silenced by General of the Army William T. Sherman. He was told and believed (sans investigation) that those killed were mostly warriors, rather than women, children and elders. It should have been obvious that resistance was nonexistent, as only one soldier died that day, a hapless oaf who fell off his horse. Unlike well-preserved and interpreted places where large numbers of soldiers were killed during the battle over Indian land, such as Little Big Horn in Montana and the site of the Fetterman Fight in northern Wyoming, the Maria's River site bears only a stone marker with the history as written by the victors. |
Pepion's father was a farmer near Browning, on the Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana. "He persevered," Pepion says. "Almost all of my brothers and sisters went to college, except for one who is disabled, and another died. I am the only one who practices the language and (traditional Blackfeet) ceremony.
"I didn't grow up using our native language in our home," he goes on. "And I didn't realize that the reason for that was because both of my parents went to an Indian boarding school. They do not take part in many of the traditional ceremonies, either. But they did a great job of adapting and they had nine kids."
Don Pepion has had the inner strength to turn his life around, from a lifestyle that he describes as just short of living on the streets, to working for a major university. Besides being the director of AIP, he is also an instructor, mentor, fundraiser and a sort of ad-hoc stepparent for many native students on campus.
Part of that transformation came from a renewed vision of the world outside Valier, Montana, where he went away to school. Being one of the first to leave the "rez" to attend school in 1964, Pepion was soon a magnet for white kids—who, Pepion notes, showed him "how badly someone could be treated as an Indian."
Insults led to fisticuffs. As Pepion and the four other Blackfeet youth in the school learned the hard way, anything that happened was always their fault, and not that of the Anglo lads.
"I was a shy quiet kid of the reservation, and of course we were picked on because we were 'different,'" he recalls. "I didn't have the cultural skills to speak up to tell someone to leave me alone, and quietness can be seen as weakness. But even though I didn't have the verbal and social skills that I needed, I had the physical skills from being raised in a farm and ranch environment. I started rodeoing (bareback riding) at 14, but strength and courage teamed with being naive can get you in trouble."
It took only six weeks for Pepion and his family to figure that going to school at Valier was not what he should be doing. He was taken back to Browning until his junior year. "I toughened up for my junior and senior years," he adds with a slight smile.
"When I left the reservation in Montana, I hated white people. It wasn't until I came to New Mexico that I learned that there are white people that are good. I had a lot of internalized anger (before then), which probably caused a lot of problems in my life."
So, it follows that the reason that Pepion likes living in the Southwest is "because of the cultures here."
One way in which the federal government used to try to assimilate native peoples to mainstream culture was a type of relocation program. The program was designed to take native peoples from the reservations and offer various forms of job training, which would help them relocate to urban areas. This program, like so many others, often failed, since it failed to take the traditional cultural differences of the tribal people into consideration. Taking a person from a rural setting in a unique and clearly different culture and training them for an office job in San Francisco seems like an idea that is bound to fail.
For some native people such as Pepion, however, it seems to have worked in some ways. "The program started in the 1950's, and was called Employment Assistance," Pepion recalls. "I was trained in accounting, and worked for the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs, a sub-agency of the US Department of the Interior) as an accounting clerk in Albuquerque. All told I worked for three and a half years for the government. But I was young, and I wanted to party, and I ended up losing my job. I got another, but for a while I ended up on the streets, just short of being a street person. It was a very trying time in my life.
The Fountain Theatre in Mesilla will host a "Non-Columbus Day Celebration" on Saturday, Oct. 6, at 1 p.m. Featured will be Native American singer Yolanda Martinez, Native American singer and flutist Randy Granger (see the May 2006 Desert Exposure), short films relating to Native culture, and the 75-minute documentary film, American Indian Homelands. Cost is $3; free for Mesilla Valley Film Society members. For more information, call 524-8287 or 522-0286. November is Native American Heritage Month. For events at NMSU and WNMU, see the next issue of Desert Exposure or visit www.nmsu.edu and www.wnmu.edu. |
"One of the problems with the program was that when we (Native Americans) ended up in urban areas, we ended up in typically low-income places. And the nightlife in that part of town made it a rough place to be. You had to survive the best way that you could."
His generation of Native Americans are products of the 1970s, Pepion notes. That was when a group called the American Indian Movement (AIM) started bringing the poverty, discrimination and social issues of native peoples to the forefront of the news.
Among their other activities, AIM was involved in such highly publicized events as the "second" Wounded Knee, a standoff on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota that resulted in the shooting deaths of several AIM members and government agents, the takeover of the abandoned federal prison at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and the occupation of the BIA headquarters in Washington, DC. AIM was indeed able to bring the to light with these more radical activities, but, as in the past, the offers made by the government in response were no more valid than the treaties that had been made years before. All treaties made with American Indian tribes have been broken, most of them within a few years of signing.
Pepion later worked as a clerk for the Indian Health Service (IHS), and it was at this point in his life that he needed a change in direction. He says, "In the process I had decided to do something with my life, and going to college was what I needed to do."
Ending up at NMSU, paying his own way for the most part but with the help of a scholarship from the tribe, Pepion began the transition from party-goer to program director.
"People still believe that Native Americans students get their way paid all through college," Pepion adds. In fact, although many native nations, including the Blackfeet, now fund and support their own community colleges, any native student wanting to attend a non-tribal college generally faces the same financial challenges as other students. The Blackfeet Nation, however, will pay for half of the tuition of a student who attends a school such as NMSU.
Pepion was president of Blackfeet Community College from 1993-96. As president, he was able to get the college accredited for the first time—another issue that faces tribes that try to bring higher education home for potential students.
"In my studies, it seems that state land-grant universities (such as NMSU), are more conservative and less likely to change. The lifelong-learning concept is still not here, and adults wanting to go to college later in life"—as Pepion did—"have a difficult time in doing so. It is a reflection of the institution—not wanting to change and not articulating with their own community colleges."
Sometimes even the tribes hold themselves back by trying to become too much like what the dominant society has wanted them to become, he adds. "At times we have internalized so much of what has happened to us that once the conqueror is gone, we do it to ourselves. It is going on internally—wanting to be like the white man—and it can become chaotic without our own society."
Pepion's readings have helped him to realize the further and continuous effects of that conquest that occur even now. "The oppression has indoctrinated the (Indian) people into a whole other belief system, that is not part of their culture. It gives them cause to reject their own culture, including the language. How many times do we see words like 'savage' or 'inferior' and what happens when kids see those kinds of things?"
He cites another example: When Blackfeet people try to get an appointment at the Indian Health Service hospital, the appointments are made for when it is convenient for the native hospital staff. Pepion feels that things were better when the IHS was run by non-Indians, one of the few times that the dominant culture was better at doing something. Slightly irritated, he says, "It is inhumane how people are treated. It blew me away—we have our own people in there, and we are treated better by white people!"
The educational system in the US is also more difficult for indigenous children to grasp, Pepion believes. "Native Americans don't do well with standardized testing, but can do well in college. There is a way of knowing and believing that doesn't fit well with the educational system of the country. We can be on the cutting edge of research and how they (Native cultures) learn, but when it comes to the pragmatic part, they can't adapt to the system, even with the 'equipment' to redesign."
As an instructor, Pepion also gives considerable thought to how he conducts his classes. "Lecture may not be the best way of learning for many students. I've been in lecture halls that hold 300 students. If you have more than 30-40 students, it is a real challenge. I've learned my job as a teacher, and I don't like that term ("teacher"); I am more of a 'facilitator of the learning process,' assisting people to learn. Individuals have different styles of learning. In tribal colleges, the ideal classroom would allow students to come in and out and get what they wanted or ask for needed help to learn at their own pace, not encumbered by laws."
Pepion's method of teaching, both in and out of the classroom, leans on an interesting blend of traditional culture and untraditional techniques.
"How do you know where you're going," he asks with another of his quiet smiles, "unless you know who you are and where you've been?"
Senior writer Jeff Berg lives in Las Cruces.