Blackfeet Indians Summary

In 1871 a story was published in The Wisconsin State Register of Portage, WI, detailing the story of a boy being a captive of Blackfeet Indians for seven years. All of his family with the exception of him and his younger sister had been brutally killed in a raid. His father was killed and scalped, his mother was gutted alive, the infant was impaled on a fence, and his two older sisters (aged 20 and 21) had their hands and feet nailed to a wall, killed and scalped. After travelling an unknown distance the Blackfeet and their captives made camp. The boy’s left arm and the girl’s ear were cut off as a way of branding the prisoners. After this the Indian band split up and the boy never saw his sister again. The boy was castrated and physically
He explains that first; ethno historians have to be able to understand each culture and the conflicts that arise “without imposing the parochial standards of their own day on the past.” And second, ethno historians are forced to make an assessment of the meaning of these conflicts to the contemporaries. Betty Bastien, a professor of native studies and member of the Blackfeet tribe, sought to provide an understanding for the Blackfeet ways of knowing their history in her book Blackfoot ways of knowing: the worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi. Gathering primary documents of the Blackfeet is next to impossible since they had no belief in writing history and did not even focus on literacy as late as the beginning of the 20th century. Bastien’s book discusses the passing of knowledge in the Blackfeet tribe, “As we are sitting here listening to each other speak, our words come from our hearts, from the way we live. In other words, we didn’t borrow our knowledge from anybody. What we are talking about is something we know. White people would say, we heard it from the horse’s mouth.” Due to the Blackfeet beliefs and lack of written history, it is imperative to rely on oral history when considering Blackfeet