Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 48 e Baker Massacre—what many Black- feet call Bear River Massacre because they would rather not speak Baker's name—is still too vivid and raw for Guardipee to paint. Pepion has never painted it either. But that event joins Guardipee and Pepion in a com- mon task as artists: Celebrating Blackfeet identity and remembering what has happened in the Blackfeet country of Montana and Canada. eir art is rooted in the land where the bands of the Blackfeet confederacy have lived for generations. "e land is very significant. You've got Sweet Grass Hills, you've got Glacier Na- tional Park," Guardipee said. "We considered that was where the Creator lived. And we have Chief Mountain there, which is our sacred mountain. So when you see my art, you'll see these triangle designs with dots in them. ose are mountain designs, they represent the backbone of the world, which is now Glacier National Park. It's a very, very significant place to us." LEDGER ART: A DEFINITION Guardipee and Pepion, who are relatives, both grew up in the Browning area, where Pepion still lives, and both studied at the In- stitute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Guardipee lives now in Issaquah, Washing- ton, near Seattle, but revisits Montana often. ough neither Guardipee nor Pepion confines himself to a single genre, both are known partly for their work as ledger art- ists. e term "ledger art" comes from 19th century warriors' practice of narrating their exploits by drawing on any kind of paper they could acquire, including settlers' account books. Plains Indian warriors once drew those two-dimensional pictures on animal hides. But whites realized that Plains tribes had adopted a new medium for their art when they began to recover paper ledgers contain- ing warriors' drawings from battlefields on the southern Plains in the 1860s. Early ledger art was largely about individu- als' accomplishments in battle or the hunt. e genre grew after the U.S. government confined men of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Comanche and Caddo tribes at Fort Marion, Florida, in the 1870s. ere the art- ists learned that the mainstream culture was interested in their drawings—not just about battle, but about Plains village life. Ledger art went dormant as artists of that generation died, but it revived in the last decades of the 20th century. Many contem- porary artists still use historic ledger paper, making their art into a kind of dialogue with the history recorded in those documents. For example, one of Pepion's ledger draw- ing shows a Blackfeet warrior on a green horse plunging a lance into the shoulder of a buffalo, and the wounded animal is lung- ing toward a paper-straight horizon marked Cash, one horn hooking a handwritten nota- tion of a deposit by a certain Rob't Newton. It's a page from a merchant or banker's ac- count book from the 19th century, originally intended for noting the transactions of people with ordinary names such as Nell Gar- field—how the West was settled, line by line, transaction by transaction. But the superimposed image of the green horse and rider chasing the bison across the page is a 21st century Blackfeet artist's repur- posing of the commercial documents of an earlier era to show that the Northern Plains, the Rocky Mountain country, can't be reduced to names and numbers in columns. e buf- falo culture of the Blackfeet confederacy still flourishes in Pepion's art. T HEY ARE TWO ARTISTS WHOSE WORK FOCUSES ON THE BLACKFEET PEOPLE IN MONTANA, but there's one story from Blackfeet history that neither of them has painted: a tragic case of mistaken identity that played out on the plains near Shelby. It happened January 23, 1870, as troops of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry led by Major Eugene Baker were looking for a Blackfeet leader named Mountain Chief—a great-great uncle of Montana artist John Isaiah Pepion, as it happens. A member of Mountain Chief 's band had been accused of killing a white trader. But Baker made a colossal blunder: He thought he'd found Mountain Chief, but instead his troops attacked a peaceful village led by a man named Heavy Runner. ey killed about 200 people in one of the most shameful incidents of the Indian wars. Montana-born artist Terrance Guardipee is descended from Heavy Runner through one of his sons, Last Gun, who escaped the slaughter. Blackfeet creation story www.distinctlymontana.com/blackfeet191 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL by LANCE NIXON Black Horse Medicine, Grandipee Black Horse Medicine Hat, Grandipee

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