Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • FA L L 2 0 1 6 56 art classes in Butte, and eventually at- tend Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York, at the age of 19. Elizabeth Davey was able to com- plete her degree in only two years. She returned to Montana, met and became engaged to Arthur Lochrie. e two married in 1913. Arthur Lochrie was a banker who was supportive of his wife's interests, which allowed her to pursue her art career. Lochrie taught art, painted mu- rals, and did landscape painting with some success. In 1931, she began to produce the work for which she is most recognized: her portraits of American Indians. Lochrie's daughter Betty McGlynn describes how this came about: e Lochries attended a bankers' convention held in beau- tiful Many Glacier Hotel. At that time the Great Northern Railroad paid members of the Blackfeet tribe to pitch their teepees in a cottonwood grove near the big lodge, in exchange for staging a "war dance" to entertain guests in the evening... One afternoon Elizabeth left the conven- tion to sketch near the teepees. A Madonna-like Blackfeet woman happened by and the two greeted each other in sign language. For both there was an instant rapport, the begin- ning of an enduring friendship. e woman Lochrie had met was Gypsy Bull Child; her husband was Blackfeet Chief George Bull Child. rough this friendship Lochrie was able to develop personal relationships with other members of the Black- feet, many of whom she painted and many of whom she was able to befriend. Something about Elizabeth Loch- rie, perhaps it was an artifact of her intimate childhood acceptance among the teepees of the Cree, enabled her to transcend what she herself recognized as the usual distrustful attitude of these Indians. Lochrie was invited by the Bull Childs to become an adopted member of the Blackfeet tribe in the true traditional Blackfeet ceremony. She was given the name Netchitaki, translated as "Woman Alone in her Way." It was a fitting name. From this point on, Lochrie devised a regular schedule of traveling by herself each summer to visit Indian tribes throughout Montana, painting and sketching the people, observing and documenting their traditional practices in loving and respectful detail. She improved her portraiture by studying painting with Winhold Reiss, who had started an art school at St. Mary in Glacier Park, and she deepened her understanding of her subject by taking classes in anthropology. In an era when such independence was considered unusual for a woman, she drove her Cadillac unaccompanied into some of the most remote and unpaved corners of the west. She kept exhaustive records of what she saw. Among her papers in the Montana Historical Society archives are boxes full of sketches, descriptions and biographical details about her por- trait subjects. She studied "comaki", as she called the Blackfeet language, learning several dialects and some Crow. She kept a record of words and phrases as she learned them. She was an accepted observer at numerous Sun Dance Wee Kee, oil on paper Mary Grand Eagle, oil on canvas Elizabeth Lochrie on right

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