Word: blackfoot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trying to stare down one looming controversy as the opening ceremonies approach. A tribe of Indians, the Lubicon Lake Band from northern Alberta, is protesting the Games to bring $ attention to a century-old unsettled land claim. "I support their claim," says Klein, who speaks a dialect of the Blackfoot language. "I oppose their methods." Local police and the Mounties are prepared for demonstrations -- and for the ever present threat of international terrorism. Although security experts privately believe the risk posed by terrorists is low, they are taking no chances. The Olympic Village has been surrounded by a double fence...
Little is offered to ameliorate these spasms of despair. Daniel questions his father about the old man's grandparents, a French-Canadian fur trader and a Blackfoot Indian woman. But seeking his heritage only makes the son realize how much of it has been lost. Seeing unknown relatives at his father's wake, Daniel muses: "For me, they brought with them a crude air as of a settlement in the woods of people of strange blood, a settlement which was not really a success." Reconstructing a gathering his family had held some 20 years earlier, he recalls...
...Minotaur. Two linked tents frame a ceremony in a design as elegant as that on a Japanese screen. An Indian family flees from an approaching prairie fire whose stylized billows Charles Burchfield might have envied, across a field of endless prairie grass that Andrew Wyeth might have emulated. A Blackfoot chief stares at the viewer with the arrogance of long command-and the despair of one who knows his nation is doomed...
...Indian dancers performed for Queen Victoria and later for France's King Louis Philippe. He lived grandly and, despite his success, always just beyond his means. He published two volumes of his adventures, illustrated with his own drawings and displaying an exuberant narrative style. He described the Blackfoot-Crow country as a land "where the buffaloes range with the elk and the fleet-bounding antelope; where wolves are white and bears grizzly; where the rivers are yellow ... the dogs are all wolves, women are slaves, men all lords." All this was imbued with a sympathy for the Indians shared...
While the western look has cantered around for years, its popularity beyond the prairie is a fairly recent phenomenon. As for the redskin connection, it came not from Sioux or Blackfoot country or even from Seventh Avenue but, curiously, from France, where le peau rouge has always been an object of romantic fascination and, lately, of fashionable imitation. French visitors are among the most avid customers at the growing number of U.S. stores that specialize in such Indian artifacts as beads, bandannas, belts, jewelry and even earrings of mallard, quail and pheasant feathers (available at Manhattan's Tepee Town...