The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories (review)

A tribute to the oral tradition as history, these Blackfoot stories are remarkably well preserved and documented by Hugh Dempsey. A scholar of the Nista'api, real people, commonly referred to as the Blackfoot Indian Confederacy, Dempsey is without peer. His attention to oral histories and a wealth of scholarly literature is unprecedented in depth and detail. Attending a rich array of archival sources and oral histories, The Vengeful Wife is Indian history as it should be written. In his lifelong association among the Blackfoot tribes and as a scholar of Native history, Dempsey acknowledges that a Native storyteller, reciting incidents of a century earlier, could include actual conversations that had taken place. He attributes this remarkable accuracy to the integrity of the storytellers as they preserved tribal lore and history telling the stories without alteration and interpolation. With this noteworthy insight, Dempsey proceeds to present sixteen stories, in effect, oral histories that are told with clarity of tradition and triangulated with a wealth of scholarship in a most effective prose.

Ranging from 1775 to the early twentieth century, these stories attend the intrinsic accounts of Blackfoot history. Beginning with a chilling tale of cowardice and betrayal, when a man permits his wife to be taken by enemies in order to save his own life, we learn that the greatest crime among the Blackfoot, even greater than murder, was betrayal. Contributing a story of Medicine Pipes and Fur Traders, Dempsey introduces the reader to medicine bundle mysticism and its spiritual relationship to the land and treaty obligations as the tribe fell into the mercantile era of the fur trade. This tradition of Blackfoot mysticism is likewise evident in accounts of ghosts, sta-an, "fearing something unseen," where Blackfoot eschatology is revealed in the Sand Hills traditions and the ghost dance ritual.

As the topic of homosexual marriages has become a timely issue in American society, Dempsey in "They Acted Like Women" reveals the Blackfoot views of berdaches and warrior women. Reminding us of the egalitarian obligations of a democratic society, Dempsey notes that Blackfoot culture was "democratic enough to permit persons to find their own roles in its society." In another story of contemporary merit, Dempsey recounts "The Bull Elk Affair" of the 1880s when the Blackfoot Nation was occupied by a foreign power and made dependent upon its presumed good will, the perfidy of Indian administrators is revealed. Likewise as we consider the imposition of tribal occupation in "The Rise and Fall of White Calf" when an Indian Agent denies the intrinsic tribal democratic process, the reader is given good cause to meditate on such foreign policies. In between and after, there are several accounts of warfare, great deeds, and foreign meddling in Blackfoot affairs, as well as a tragedy of drunken murder that ends with the murderer's release after twenty years of imprisonment and his return to Blackfoot traditions in living an exemplary life.

The Vengeful Wife is an important contribution to American Indian studies and an exemplary treatment of oral tradition as history. It furthermore conveys a wisdom that speaks through the ages.