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Crowfoot fit everyone's image of the noble Indian leader
By JOHN KALBFLEISCH,
The Gazette
September 27, 2009
"Crowfoot, chief of the Blackfoot Indian tribe, and his brother, Three Bulls, arrived in this city yesterday, and are established at the Richelieu hotel."
- Gazette, Thursday, Sept. 30, 1886
Crowfoot had never seen anything like it. And neither, for their part, had most Montrealers. The sprawling city of Montreal, the largest in Canada, was as strange and exotic to the celebrated Indian leader as he was to its citizens.
Crowfoot, or Isapo-muxika to his own people, had been brought east from today's Alberta as a reward for his loyalty. The previous year, he had refused to allow the warriors of the Blackfoot confederacy, of which he was paramount chief, to join Louis Riel's rebellion. Interior Minister Thomas White, previously editor of The Gazette, arranged the tour for Crowfoot's party, which included the great missionary priest Albert Lacombe.
In fact, it was the whites of Canada who preferred to see Crowfoot's decision as an act of loyalty. For Crowfoot, it was something much less abstract.
Riel was fighting against massive white settlement of the Prairies and the loss of the traditional Indian and M?tis way of life. Among Riel's allies were chiefs who included Crowfoot's own adopted son, Poundmaker. Though Crowfoot was deeply sympathetic to the cause, he knew it was a lost one.
The Indians and M?tis faced a profound threat. But Crowfoot calculated that resistance to the settlers, to the spread of the railways and ultimately to the force of the white man's arms risked an even greater disaster. For him, avoiding the warpath was a matter of practicality, not principle.
Nevertheless, White and the rest of Sir John A. Macdonald's cabinet were grateful. So, of course, was the Canadian Pacific Railway, to say nothing of all those white settlers. Bringing Crowfoot east on tour would be a way to say thank you and, more cynically, to demonstrate to him that he'd made the right decision. The wealth, the power, the crowds of white people everywhere he looked would make it even clearer that change in the West was inevitable.
Crowfoot was then 56 years old, of medium height and "active as a catamount." His expression was fierce, The Gazette continued, but he had "a sweet smile which takes away much of his original repulsiveness." His dress was colourful, and with it he displayed several government medals as well as a hawk's head emblematic of his chiefly authority. He fit everyone's image of the noble Indian leader.
The Richelieu Hotel where Crowfoot and his party were put up suited him very well. It was "in every way much more desirable for a permanent abode than his family wigwam," he let it be known, "and, better than all, everything was free."
Crowfoot spoke neither English nor French, so his words were filtered through the mouths of interpreters. Combined with the widespread way that whites viewed Indians, it made for a certain amount of condescension.
Thus, "after beholding what civilization had done and could do, he was obliged to acknowledge how ignorant and poor he and his people were." At Father Lacombe's urging, he lifted his hat "just as a 'paleface' might be expected to do, while Three Bulls hid behind a fan and smiled in a manner that the squaw of the paleface might imitate but could not outdo."
Crowfoot was f?ted at a bazaar to raise money for the new Roman Catholic cathedral. He saw Montreal from the top of the mountain. He received a delegation from Kahnawake. At the CPR's head office, he was presented with a lifetime pass on the railway.
He was very good at telling his hosts what they wanted to hear. Every Indian should consider the white man his best friend, he said. He was sorry for many things he'd done in his younger days, and now knew it was wrong to fight. He refused to accept two rifles the Kahnawake Mohawks wanted to give him, saying "he knew too much now to desire any implements of war."
Yet surely he had a pretty good idea of how he was being used. On returning West, he again could see the humiliations and worse that government officials continued to hand out. He might well have wondered if he had been right to spurn Riel after all.
Disillusioned, nearly blind, weakened by tuberculosis, he died in 1890. His last words have often been quoted: "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
http://www.montrealgazette.com/Crowfoot+everyone+image+noble+Indian+leader/2038776/story.html
By JOHN KALBFLEISCH,
The Gazette
September 27, 2009
"Crowfoot, chief of the Blackfoot Indian tribe, and his brother, Three Bulls, arrived in this city yesterday, and are established at the Richelieu hotel."
- Gazette, Thursday, Sept. 30, 1886
Crowfoot had never seen anything like it. And neither, for their part, had most Montrealers. The sprawling city of Montreal, the largest in Canada, was as strange and exotic to the celebrated Indian leader as he was to its citizens.
Crowfoot, or Isapo-muxika to his own people, had been brought east from today's Alberta as a reward for his loyalty. The previous year, he had refused to allow the warriors of the Blackfoot confederacy, of which he was paramount chief, to join Louis Riel's rebellion. Interior Minister Thomas White, previously editor of The Gazette, arranged the tour for Crowfoot's party, which included the great missionary priest Albert Lacombe.
In fact, it was the whites of Canada who preferred to see Crowfoot's decision as an act of loyalty. For Crowfoot, it was something much less abstract.
Riel was fighting against massive white settlement of the Prairies and the loss of the traditional Indian and M?tis way of life. Among Riel's allies were chiefs who included Crowfoot's own adopted son, Poundmaker. Though Crowfoot was deeply sympathetic to the cause, he knew it was a lost one.
The Indians and M?tis faced a profound threat. But Crowfoot calculated that resistance to the settlers, to the spread of the railways and ultimately to the force of the white man's arms risked an even greater disaster. For him, avoiding the warpath was a matter of practicality, not principle.
Nevertheless, White and the rest of Sir John A. Macdonald's cabinet were grateful. So, of course, was the Canadian Pacific Railway, to say nothing of all those white settlers. Bringing Crowfoot east on tour would be a way to say thank you and, more cynically, to demonstrate to him that he'd made the right decision. The wealth, the power, the crowds of white people everywhere he looked would make it even clearer that change in the West was inevitable.
Crowfoot was then 56 years old, of medium height and "active as a catamount." His expression was fierce, The Gazette continued, but he had "a sweet smile which takes away much of his original repulsiveness." His dress was colourful, and with it he displayed several government medals as well as a hawk's head emblematic of his chiefly authority. He fit everyone's image of the noble Indian leader.
The Richelieu Hotel where Crowfoot and his party were put up suited him very well. It was "in every way much more desirable for a permanent abode than his family wigwam," he let it be known, "and, better than all, everything was free."
Crowfoot spoke neither English nor French, so his words were filtered through the mouths of interpreters. Combined with the widespread way that whites viewed Indians, it made for a certain amount of condescension.
Thus, "after beholding what civilization had done and could do, he was obliged to acknowledge how ignorant and poor he and his people were." At Father Lacombe's urging, he lifted his hat "just as a 'paleface' might be expected to do, while Three Bulls hid behind a fan and smiled in a manner that the squaw of the paleface might imitate but could not outdo."
Crowfoot was f?ted at a bazaar to raise money for the new Roman Catholic cathedral. He saw Montreal from the top of the mountain. He received a delegation from Kahnawake. At the CPR's head office, he was presented with a lifetime pass on the railway.
He was very good at telling his hosts what they wanted to hear. Every Indian should consider the white man his best friend, he said. He was sorry for many things he'd done in his younger days, and now knew it was wrong to fight. He refused to accept two rifles the Kahnawake Mohawks wanted to give him, saying "he knew too much now to desire any implements of war."
Yet surely he had a pretty good idea of how he was being used. On returning West, he again could see the humiliations and worse that government officials continued to hand out. He might well have wondered if he had been right to spurn Riel after all.
Disillusioned, nearly blind, weakened by tuberculosis, he died in 1890. His last words have often been quoted: "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
http://www.montrealgazette.com/Crowfoot+everyone+image+noble+Indian+leader/2038776/story.html