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Originally appears in the Summer 2016 issue
by Jennifer Ogden
Two high school boys stood at the doorway of my second story art room guiding a life-sized bison sculpture over the fire escape railing and onto a pallet fork attached to the extended arm of a Bobcat. The bison’s final destination would be a biennial K-8 Art show at a nearby mall for which we had created a “sculpto-picto-rama” range land habitat installation in the larger-than-life style of American sculptor, Red Grooms. Our custodian laughingly interpreted the boys’ bison marshaling signals in order to ensure a safe landing for our papier mache animal onto the parking lot adjacent to the school while a handful of excited teachers and students recorded the event on their cell phones. When art mixes with heavy machinery there is simply a little more excitement in the air. As it turns out, it takes roughly nine months to gestate a bison in the wild AND in the art room.
An important purpose of art is to revitalize and celebrate the themes and ideas we think we already know all about. This project is based on the story of a herd nexus; a tale that many Native residents know about but is not widely known amongst the general local population. I didn’t know about it myself until I explored our school’s treasury of Indian/Bison-related books and found a children’s book by Joseph Bruchac called Bison Song and followed up with individual recollections and accounts from the Montana Writer’s Project compilation, I will be Meat for My Salish.
Montana is an inspirational muse with dramatic natural scenery, abundant Public Land and a storied past. It doesn’t take a lot of adjustment for students to experience their home state differently with each new peek through the classroom kaleidoscope. As the sole Art teacher in a rural public school in western Montana I pursue opportunities to tap into themes that underline what it means to be from our special place. I am fortunate that my fellow teachers are willing collaborators when it comes to enriching Science, English or History units. The following story is one example of an ambitious art unit where all of those subjects converged.
A Bison’s Worst Day
The idea for the bison exhibit began in October of 2014. Our Victor School 7th and 8th graders were slated to attend the annual Bison round-up at the National Bison Range (NBR) in Moeise, MT, where one of our science teachers had done some field work during his college years. The NBR is a federal wildlife refuge located on the Flathead Indian Reservation, which is one of the seven reservations in the state of Montana and home to the confederated Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’ Oreille tribes. The reservation spans four counties and boasts farms, wetlands, range land, and the sweeping wall of the Mission Mountains. We programmed a full morning of exploring this place. Our students had the opportunity to sketch, observe herd evaluation by the ranger crew, and interact with the natural history and interpretive displays.
Large observation platforms were erected at the round up site so that observers and buyers could watch the thinning of the herd, an annual two-day event that ensures grass resources are not depleted and keeps the head under 500. Some animals are sold to nearby ranchers and others are donated to local Indian residents and neighboring tribes. The wild animals are herded in small batches into cattle chutes to be studied by wildlife biologists. Each is weighed and has blood drawn in order to test for disease, and then is either culled or kept. It is more or less the worst day of an NBR bison’s year but is widely celebrated by an estimated 900 school children from western Montana who travel to Moeise to witness the event.
Native Trails and Games
After seeing the bison up close, we bussed our Victor School students to a nearby State Park containing historic sites. One of our school’s social studies teachers led a writing activity and students toured the museum and roamed the park trail system. The afternoon highlight was engaging in Native endurance games such as Run-and-Yell and Shinney. Shinney is similar to field hockey but uses two tennis balls knotted inside a tube sock. The double ball is tossed and caught on the end of a sturdy willow stick. Playing it can be rather rough and tumble but our students took to it easily!
Practical Magic
When we returned to school, we were full of information and images—and a new story to tell. Upstairs in art class the 8th grade students engaged in guided practice, drawing from differently posed photographs of bison. Using their directly observed images and classwork, they drew and painted the figures in multiples on thick watercolor paper, giving the animals’ woolly coats texture by blowing soap bubbles into wet brown paint. They were later cut out and composed on big grassy landscapes stamped from yarn-wrapped wooden blocks dipped in yellow and green tempera paint.
We divided the art production into two main tasks. Seventh graders created large cut-out bison figures and made an 8′x12′ acrylic-on-canvas backdrop, learning layered landscape techniques which depicted range lands using various illusory aspects of optical perspective. Eighth grade sculpture teams planned the exhibit and chose Bison Range animals to sculpt in papier mache, a tradition as old as the invention of paper itself. With this technique, you can conjure virtually anything using paper and paste—so the price is usually right, and that is magic.
The student sculptors visited the school library in order to research the average measurements pertaining to “lifesized” (and perhaps more importantly, “art room door width”) bison. They followed a simple technique of cutting out corrugated cardboard animal silhouettes with craft knives. Separate leg shapes were offset (think shoulder and hip areas) from the core body shape by wooden blocks so that the armatures were free-standing. Students rounded out the animals using crumpled newspaper and tape and unified the forms with “skins” comprised of several layers of paper and glue. Our resource teacher loaned us his office shredder for turning scrap paper into long, thin strips which we mixed with art paste and applied in a thick mixture to the top knot and cape area of our bison. All the figures were finished with acrylic paints in local color or mango leaf art paper sealed with polymer medium. The ongoing project took major time and commitment, and my art room began to resemble a zoo clinic with animals standing patiently on tables being ministered to by clusters of middle school students.
As the middle school students’ bovine figures developed in my classroom, it became a school-wide project. The kindergarten students created table-top bison with wool and yarn wrapped capes and white clay horns. My 5th graders enhanced their John James Audubon unit by researching what birds inhabit the National Bison Range and depicted, cropped, and enlarged bird portraits on Montana highway maps. We learned that the list of birds commonly found at the NBR is long and impressively diverse. We were nearly ready to begin arranging the life-sized “sculpto-picto-rama” display which would tell our viewing public a most compelling tale.
A Strange Green Ark
After the Victor School custodian piloted the life-sized bison sculpture onto the pavement below my art room, it was loaded onto the back of a work truck along with two calves, three deer, an entire prairie dog town, a skunk, a fisher, and various other animals. The papier mache members of the Walking Coyote Family were wedged into the extended cab of the mint green Forest Service truck, with the sitting sculpture of Joseph shoulder-belted into the passenger seat (causing more than one highway traveler to do a double-take). The lodge pole pine framework for our backdrop was strapped to the top of the animal mish-mash for transfer to the K-8 art show venue in the mall. Finally, with a team of helpers, we set up the art display that would be seen by well over 3,000 visitors—art patrons who learned, perhaps for the first time, a true story of loss and renewal told by young Montana artists.
The Walking Coyote Family: A Surprising History
In 1882 U.S. bison populations numbered just two-hundred. It was federal government policy to forcefully drive Native Americans onto reservations after removing what was the most sustaining cultural food source, and open up the nutritious grasses of the range to cattle outfits, railroads, and subsequent white settlement. Indians bore witness to devastating changes in their traditional ways while a wholesale slaughter was being conducted of the largest land mammal in North America, sometimes by guns aimed through open train windows. The shaggy brown symbols of the American west lay lifeless while pale amber bison calves stood bawling next to their mothers. But a few people kept watch over those orphaned offspring. They approached the confused animals, stroking their faces. They breathed into the nostrils of the calves, imprinting a foster bond. These few living calves were led away from the devastation and into a new future.
Seven orphaned calves were led by Samuel and Mary Walking Coyote and their son, Joseph. The Salish-speaking Pend d’Oreille family brought their sparse little herd over a high mountain pass into the Mission Valley. Six calves arrived safely at the Flathead Indian Reservation. They eventually were in the care of two local Metis ranchers, Michel Pablo and Charles Allard, and soon proliferated as the “Pablo/Allard Herd” before increased pressure from homesteaders caused range fragmentation. It is worth noting that the herd was a source of pride and interest to local Native residents, and it is believed that the animals were kept from roaming out of the valley by watchful individuals.
In the early 1900s, the herd was again displaced and persuaded with great difficulty to board rail cars and taken to Buffalo National Park, a brand new refuge in Alberta, Canada. President Theodore Roosevelt was convinced by the American Bison Society, among others, that the U.S. needed to preserve the bison as a living western legacy. He designated three refuges for this purpose, and descendants of the Pablo/Allard herd were returned (at the Society’s expense) to Montana where the 18,800 acre National Bison Range on the Flathead Indian Reservation currently serves as one of America’s oldest wildlife refuges maintaining protected habitat for bison and a myriad of wild animals.
Jennifer Ogden is an artist and K-12 Art Educator from the Bitterroot Valley in rural western Montana. She teaches at Victor Public School, the Missoula Art Museum (MAM) and SPARK Arts Learning. Jennifer recently co-taught “A Cabinet of Wonders” with naturalist, Lisa Hendricks at MAM, and is in the inaugural Montana Teacher Leaders in the Arts program for the Montana Arts Council and Office of Public Instruction. A Montana Natural History Center “Forest for Every Classroom” alumnus, Jennifer uses place-based education with her Victor School students, extending the classroom to include the abundant public land located in the Bitterroot Valley.