Modern Blackfeet

`

Modern Blackfeet

Montanans on a Reservation

Malcolm McFee
Introduction by Andrew R. Graybill

148 pages
16 photographs, 2 maps

Paperback

January 2014

978-0-8032-4643-0

$25.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

December 2022

978-1-4962-0954-2

$25.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

Modern Blackfeet sheds light on the politics, economics, society, and especially the acculturation of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana. The Blackfeet Reservation has an established government and an active and diverse population that has long supported itself through ranching, industry, and oil and natural gas exploration. Malcolm McFee shows why, as a result, policies and programs based on simplistic assumptions of assimilation are doomed to failure.

The results of McFee’s long-term research among the Blackfeet in the 1950s and 1960s make it clear that acculturation is not simply a linear process of assimilation or a one-way cultural adaptation to the impact of Euro-American culture. He reviews the changing policies of the U.S. government, which were directed initially at the destruction of all native customs and values, then at the promotion of Blackfeet self-government, and eventually at the threatened termination of their status. Finally and most important, McFee notes that racial identity on the reservation today is explained more by values and behavior than by biology and thus divides the community into a white-oriented majority and a smaller, Indian-oriented group dedicated to preserving the tribe’s traditional lifeways.

Author Bio

Malcolm McFee (1917–1992) was a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon from 1965 until his retirement in 1982. Andrew R. Graybill is the director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies and associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Nebraska, 2007).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Preface
1. Introduction to the Blackfeet
2. The Blackfeet Reservation and Its People
3. Horse and Buffalo Days: 1850-1880
4. Dependency and Readaptation: 1884-1970
5. Intratribal Diversity
6. Social Interaction
7. Values
8. Status
9. The Future
References
Recommended Reading

Also of Interest