Senator Dan Salomon, a Montana legislator from Ronan, “has never, been so mad”.
I read Sen. Salomon’s quote in an article about a bill proposed in the 2023 Montana Legislature that would have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. The bill died in committee. Again. All the Republicans on the Senate Education and Cultural Resources Committee voted against it.
The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Senator Shane Morigeau representing Missoula, who is a member of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes, opened the hearing by briefly describing atrocities Christopher Columbus and his men directly perpetrated on indigenous people in the West Indies and the Caribbean. What he said wasn’t sensationalistic, it wasn’t untrue, and it wasn’t inflammatory. You can watch it here. Sen. Morigeau simply stated well-known and widely accepted historical facts that came directly from Columbus’s own personal journals and firsthand written accounts of Columbus’s life and exploits.
These historical facts, which anyone can look up, are apparently what made Sen. Salomon so angry. The following is an article excerpt from Montana Public Radio:
Sen. Dan Salomon, a Republican from Ronan, said the bill’s sponsor killed the bill himself with his description of Christopher Columbus during committee testimony.
“He starts off with, and I think I can quote, with accusing Columbus of rape, beheadings, amputations, slicing torsos into sex trafficking, you can imagine where this hearing went in a hurry. I have never, in my experience, been so mad,” Salomon said.
From my perspective, it would be like getting angry at a descendant of someone who died in the Holocaust for describing what happened to their ancestors.
Weirdly, Sen.Salomon didn’t seem angry in the hearing and made no comments about the bill after all the testimony was given. All 40-ish people who gave testimony were in favor of changing the holiday to Indigenous People’s Day, including a group of Native youth from the Blackfeet Tribe. No one spoke in opposition.
However, Republican Sen. Daniel Emrich from Great Falls did offer a bizarre line of questioning for Sen. Morigeau in which he asked whether or not indigenous people also committed atrocities and wouldn’t having a day for “them” also be problematic?
I think it’s important to get the most obvious thing out of the way so we can move on. Christopher Columbus did not discover anything. People were already here and had been here for thousands and thousands of years.
Columbus wasn’t even the first European to run into this continent with a ship. Here is a direct quote from the book, “Who Was First? Discovering the Americas,” by historian Russell Freedom:
For a long time, most people believed that Christopher Columbus was the first explorer to “discover” America—the first to make a successful round-trip voyage across the Atlantic. But in recent years, as new evidence came to light, our understanding of history has changed. We know now that Columbus was among the last explorers to reach the Americas, not the first (emphasis added).
One of the last, not the first.
Now that we’re all on the same page regarding historical facts, we can get back to the hearing.
Sen. Salomon’s emotional reaction could be the result of one of two things as far as I can imagine: he either believes that Christopher Columbus was being slandered by Sen. Morigeau, or he believes that it shouldn’t matter what atrocities Columbus and his men committed, and he should be celebrated anyway. I’ll leave a little room for a third option: that the Senator was struggling with internal, moral discomfort and it manifested as anger.
Let’s put Sen. Salomon aside for a moment, because I don’t think his reaction or opposition to replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day is atypical in Montana. In fact, we know it’s not. All Montana Senate Republicans, except for Jason Small, who is Northern Cheyenne, voted to block the bill from a floor vote, which is essentially voting against it. And for numerous past legislative sessions, they have voted against it.
There are three things I’ve been pondering since this hearing.
First, it is not uncommon to hear white Montanans say Native Americans should get over what happened to them because “it” happened a long time ago. “It” refers to hundreds of years of war, displacement, death, violence, disease and loss. I’ve heard it firsthand, but this type of sentiment is also all over social media.
I’ve always been confused by the people who say Native Americans should “get over it and move on.” Meanwhile, white Montanans, especially those of us who are descendants of homesteaders, get to celebrate our history and talk about how it has shaped us. I’m allowed to take pride in my great-grandparents’ homestead in Conrad, MT, but an indigenous Montanan is expected to move on from the past?
Everyone knows, even if you only have been in Montana for a week, that white Montanans earn some extra political clout if our families have been here for three or four or five generations. That benefit certainly hasn’t been extended to Montana’s indigenous people who have been here over 10,000 years – about 400 generations or more.
I knew my father’s grandmother, who emigrated from what is now western Russia and homesteaded in North Dakota. Some of my Northern Cheyenne friends’ grandparents fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
My experience and thinking has been shaped by my Native friends who have shared with me their memories, knowledge, and history of the land. I can’t be ignorant and pretend that colonization and war on this land happened a long time ago. The erasure of Native American experience and history in our state is alive and well. One only has to look at the debacle that was the Visit Billings “Onward Pioneers” tourism campaign to see the complete disregard and disrespect that is shown Native Americans in many of our communities.
Second, the impacts of colonization, white settlement, and assimilation have not ended. For instance, the repercussions of the U.S. government policy that forced Native kids to attend religious boarding schools are ongoing. Tens of thousands of Native American children were brutally taken from their families and made to attend religious boarding schools where the children were starved and whipped, often sexually abused, and forced into manual labor (what I call slave labor) between 1819 and 1969. Again, these are well-known, accepted, historical facts.
The concept was the brainchild of Brigadier General Richard Pratt. The essence of the Indian boarding school was cultural assimilation, boiled down in a phrase Pratt coined: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” To accomplish this, children were taken from their parents and often moved hundreds of miles from their home to live and attend school at a boarding school. Government funding enabled religious schools to function. Every essence of Native culture was stripped from these small children, and they lived difficult lives full of school, prayer, work, punishment, and hunger.
Montana State Library
I wonder if Sen. Salomon would also get mad if someone testified about the abuses suffered by Native Americans at these “schools.” Can you imagine having your child forcibly taken from you and sent to a “school” where you knew they would be abused and there was a good chance that you would never see them again?
Third, Native Americans serve in the U.S. military at higher rates than any other demographic. Since 9/11, nearly 19 percent of Native Americans have served in the armed forces, compared to an average of 14 percent of all other ethnicities. Native American men and women risk their lives for a country that, until very recently, actively tried to eradicate or assimilate them.
Here is my question.
Should we take one day a year and celebrate Christopher Columbus or should we take that day and instead recognize the culture, connections, contributions, experiences, military service, and lives of the original stewards of this land that we all love?
Who deserves our collective attention and recognition?
Could this be one small step in reconciliation?
For me, the answer is pretty obvious.
Greetings friends!
After taking a couple years off, I’m happy to announce that I have a 2023 EOB calendar available. The calendar is 8.5 x 11 in full-color with fifteen photographs of eastern Montana. $10/calendar plus $5 shipping.
I’ve kept the price the same since I started making the calendar in 2015, to cover costs of calendar design and printing. I don’t do this to make money, only to provide some eastern Montana goodness to everyone that is needing it in their life.
Shipping will begin immediately after I receive the calendars from the printers (date TBD but soon). You will get them before Christmas.
If you need faster shipping or would like to set up a time to pick them up from me in Billings, please contact me directly at alexis.bonogofsky@gmail.com.
AND…if you order a bunch and the shipping is going to be more than $5.00, I’ll reach out and let you know how much it will be.
Please give me some time to get them to you! I do it all myself and I’ve got other jobs so it takes awhile to get everything out the door.
The cover this year is really special to me. It is not only one of my favorite landscape photos I’ve ever taken but the ranch I took it on is one of the most beautiful places in Montana. It is a photo I captured in 2015, right after I bought my first camera. This ranch in southeast Montana is now for sale. I know I’ll probably never get to take photos there ever again, which breaks my heart.
The calendar is dedicated to Nick Golder (1934-2022).
As always, thank you all for your support and community!
Ways to Order:
PayPal/credit card: Click on the link below to purchase with PayPal. You do not need to have a PayPal account to use this method.
Check: If you’d prefer to pay by check, please send it to: 2020 Tired Man Road, Billings, MT 59101. Please include your email just in case I need to contact you.
Venmo: You can Venmo me but don’t forget you’ll need to email me your address for shipping.
There are many spots on the floor in my kitchen where the linoleum is worn through and I can see the wood underneath it and I’m sure when people see it all they see is old, stained linoleum that needs to be replaced. Sometimes all I see is old, stained linoleum that needs to be replaced, too. But sometimes, I see my sister and I laying on the floor wrapped in blankets watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on a tiny black and white television with rabbit ears and tinfoil wrapped around them to make the reception better and a turn dial and a long orange extension cord running through the mud room and out the front door which is plugged into a gas generator humming in the distance but not loud enough to stop us from hearing Santa tell Rudolph that he gets to lead the sled that year because of his red nose.
My whole family, including eight dogs are in the kitchen because the power and the heat are out and we have one space heater which is plugged into the generator too. The floor is cold but we have pillows and blankets and we are in our pajamas and the word happy is inadequate to describe the emotion I am feeling.
And then somehow years have gone by and I am pulling up old flooring in the same house in my bedroom, right behind the kitchen. I am sitting on the floor with my niece Lila and she is running her hands over the wood planks that have miraculously (after days of me on my hands and knees pulling, prying, swearing, sanding and oiling) made an appearance under layers of carpet and plywood and all manner of things my parents used to cover up the original floor to make my bedroom more quiet and less old and less cold and less likely to get slivers in my feet.
The ceiling fan is pink. Lila and I both agree that it too, must go away, along with the carpet.
I want to ask Lila if she wants to lay on the old cold wood floor with blankets and pillows and dogs and watch cartoons on a black and white tiny television with rabbit ears and poor reception even though it is a month past Christmas and it’s 70 degrees out in January. I know she would say yes because she loves me but I don’t have an old black and white television with rabbit ears so instead she asks if we can listen to “Memories,” I kid you not, by Maroon 5 over and over again on my phone until she gets bored of watching me work and singing along and asks if she can ride the four-wheeler in a circle around the farm yard.
And right before she leaves the room to go ride the four-wheeler that makes my dogs and me crazy, she asks me how my dad, her grandpa, died because she can’t remember. And I can’t remember if my sister has told her yet how he died and I wasn’t sure what to say just like the time my nephew asked me how babies were made and I couldn’t remember if my sister had told him that yet and I didn’t feel ready to explain suicide or sex to the big eyes staring at me and so I tell her his heart stopped beating which is true and she nodded and said, “oh yes, I remember now.” I don’t know what she remembers but I’ll need to remember to ask my sister about it.
I will be ready next time.
We stand up and I grab her hand and remembered just days earlier when we were walking on the side of a highway and I was holding on to her, just as I was now, because the alternator had gone out in the truck and so we walked to some hot springs in a valley that people consider paradise but with all the development lately I wonder if it will be paradise to anyone in 10 years, but regardless, we go to the nearest hot springs and wait for help to arrive because, friends, if you are going to break down, being a mile from a hot springs is a pretty good place to do it.
As we walked through the snow, on the side of the highway, she looked up at me and said, “this happened because you said I had to build character today,” and my love for her spilled out over onto that highway and I didn’t even get mad that none of the cars driving by stopped to ask if we needed help or a ride and I didn’t even wonder what Montana was coming to until later in the day when I started to wonder.
But today, I’m not wondering about anything, I’m just with my niece in my old farmhouse feeling grateful for all the footsteps that this old, beat up floor has held up for three generations of my family and dogs and cats and a couple baby goats and oh yes, that one goose Cheep-Cheep that my mom had as a pet and mice and spiders and all the creepy crawly things that take refuge in our house when winter sets in because it is, after all, an old farmhouse, built in pieces, room by room, and there are holes and cracks and all manner of ways for life to find a way in.
There is a thing that happens when you are a writer and something really bad is happening (like, for instance, a global pandemic). People ask you if you’ve been writing. The answer is no. I haven’t written one word. I’ve been gardening and planting my fields and cleaning out chicken coops and tearing down walls in my house. Writing? Not so much.
It feels like if I am going to be a big W writer during a big P pandemic I need to write about it, which is the reason I’ve written nothing for months.
But then I was out planting potatoes with my niece Lila the other day……
In fact, I am out planting potatoes and she is wandering around wondering when I am going to be done so we can go play.
I am wondering when did it get so hot out and how did the soil get so compacted and why didn’t I put straw around the border of the garden last fall to keep the goddamned grass from creeping in and where did that thistle come from?
What I am trying to tell you is that I am not an easy going gardener and there are people who say they enjoy it and they are liars, I’m certain of it.
Lila is attempting to lure me out of the garden with talk of turtles. She is telling me she saw turtles on a log in the slough. I know what log she is talking about and she knows how much I love turtles and how much I love watching them sun themselves and the sound they make as they slide into the water when they are startled and the sparkle of the sun on their shells if you are quiet enough and still enough to be present when they re-emerge after they have decided it is safe to return.
I am attempting a no-till garden to improve my soil and supposedly it will make it so I’ll wake up one day and will love gardening but all I want to do right now is start my orange Kubota tractor, put the disc on it and drive it straight through the chain link fence and plow the whole thing up. Is that something gardeners say? I’m not a big G gardener so I’ll say what I want.
Lila is feeling the potato seeds and asking me what the white nubs are on the skin. I tell her they are the potato’s eyes and she looks at me startled and almost throws it to the ground and I wonder if she thinks the potatoes can see like we can. I hope that she does.
I am feeling a light dusting of sheep and goat manure covering my body from hauling buckets up from the loafing shed to my garden in the skidsteer. When I fill the bucket up inevitably some of the dried and aged shit blows back in my face and sticks to my sunscreen and all one can do at that point is just let it happen because my dad took the door off the skidsteer when he bought it because it just gets in the way he said.
Lila tells me I have dirt on my face.
I tell her it’s manure.
Lila asks me what manure is.
I ask her to look at it and give me her best guess. She leans down and sees the little goat and sheep pebbles, scrunches up her nose and says ewwwwww until she runs out of w’s and then runs out of the garden with my dogs bounding behind her.
I watch them run through the field and pay as much attention as possible because I need to remember this exact moment because there is nothing better than right now.
A little later she bounds back into the garden with the dogs panting behind her and starts helping me plant the potatoes. Pretty soon she is as dirty as I am and her face is streaked with manure and sunscreen and sweat.
When we are all done for the day we sit in lawn chairs on the basketball court and watch the sun go down over the river and she asks me if we are all going to be ok and I tell her what you tell kids, that of course we are all going to be ok and she nods, in that special way that Lila does when she is satisfied with my answer to her question. Then she asks what we should talk about.
I tell her we should talk about what we are grateful for and she tells me she is grateful that I make her get her hands dirty and that manure isn’t so bad after all and she loves having a farm.
And my love for her spilled out all over that basketball court and I forgot about the pandemic and the heat and the weeds and the compacted soil and the falling down fences and all of the work I have to do on the place and all of the work we have to do in our world to teach our kids, (or more often than not, our kids teach us), that humility and courage and humor and love are what will save us not lies and anger and ego and hate.
Then she asked me what I am grateful for and, of course, we all know what I said.
A couple of months ago, I was driving back from a hunting trip in southeast Montana and a billboard in Lockwood caught my eye. The text reads: Onward Pioneers. The photo is of a man wearing a backpack overlooking a beautiful Montana vista with the Visit Billings logo prominently displayed.
I immediately went to the Visit Billings website to see if this was a one-off billboard or if it was part of a broader tourism campaign. It’s not a one-off.
The new Visit Billings tagline is: “Today is ours for the taking – tomorrow too.”
There are two more billboards that I have personally seen. One is between Laurel and Billings with the text, “Conquer New Endeavors” over a photo of a little girl eating ice cream.
Then, there is the other one. When a friend told me about it, I thought, no, it can’t be possible that Visit Billings would put up an Onward Pioneers billboard on the Crow Reservation. I wanted to double check so I drove out there to see for myself. I passed the Little Bighorn Battlefield and didn’t see one but I kept driving to Lodge Grass.
On the way back I saw it, right before Garryowen, very close to the place where the 7th Calvary was hoping to wipe out the rest of the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota Tribes.
The billboard has the words onward pioneers overlaid on a photo of three young women in a wildflower meadow on top of the Beartooth Pass.
Someone thought this was a good idea.
Manifest Destiny
Let’s take a step back into history and talk about Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a term used to describe the 19th century doctrine or belief that it was the country’s divine destiny and right to expand westward to fill the American continent. The philosophy drove U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans from their land and genocide that followed. My family benefited from it. Both sides of my family homesteaded in North Dakota and Montana.
The language being used by Visit Billings is the same language that was used to justify the genocide of Native Americans: onward pioneer, conquer, take, it’s ours. Words have definitions. Words have histories. Those words in this geographical place cannot be used without putting them in this context.
Today is ours for the taking, tomorrow too. All I hear in that statement is: the land is ours for the taking.
Manifest Destiny is a concept inextricably tied to race; the Visit Billings slogan makes me wonder what groups of people were meant to be included in the word “ours.” Judging by the website’s photos they are using in this campaign, it means white men, white women, and white families.
The very few photos of Native Americans I could find that are included on the website are from Crow Fair, as if that is the only thing that Native Americans do, as if they aren’t a part of our community, as if they aren’t people who mountain bike, hike and eat at restaurants (see every other photo on the website).
Onward History Buffs
Let’s take a trip to the history section of the website. This page features six pioneers: Yellowstone Kelly, Lewis and Clark, Calamity Jane, Preston Boyd Moss and Frederick Billings. The paragraph about Lewis and Clark doesn’t mention Sacajawea, who was the only reason they were able to do what they did. So much could be said about this.
The fact that no Native Americans are included in the main profiles is not shocking, considering the pioneer/conquering theme of the campaign. Visit Billings is right about one thing: Natives weren’t pioneers. Native Americans were killed or forcibly removed from land so pioneers could settle here. I guess that is an inconvenient fact that doesn’t really fit with the theme.
Native American culture gets a couple of grammatically bothersome and factually inaccurate paragraphs at the bottom of the history page in a swipeable banner.
The Northern Cheyenne Reservation, established in 1884, boasts many notable attractions including a historical buffalo jump, burial sites of Indian Chiefs, Custer’s last camp before the Battle of the Little Bighorn and St. Labre Indian School.
Where do I begin? First, I’m pretty sure the background photo being used for the Northern Cheyenne paragraph is a photo of members of the Crow Tribe during Crow Fair. Prove me wrong. I’ll admit it if I am.
Second, burial sites of Northern Cheyenne leaders who brought their people home after being forcibly removed to Oklahoma are not tourist attractions. My brain almost exploded when I read this. I’ve never heard a Cheyenne “boast” of them. I have heard many stories of bravery and loss and hope, however. I’ve heard my Cheyenne friends talk about how their ancestors fought for them and went through unimaginable hardships to return their people back to the Tongue River country.* What I haven’t heard is any Northern Cheyenne say that they should commercialize and advertise the graves of their ancestors.
Third, let’s take a moment to talk about the “establishment” of reservations. The reservation system was created under the assumption that if the Native Americans who survived the genocide of their people, could be confined to one particular geographical place, they would become “civilized” and assimilated. For many years, they were not permitted to leave, except by permission, and those who left without this permission were arrested and punished or killed. So, if by “established,” Visit Billings means that a group of people were forced onto a piece of land, imprisoned on that land, and then had their children taken away and sent to boarding schools to be assimilated, then yes, I guess the Northern Cheyenne Reservation was “established” in 1884.
Then, Visit Billings tackles the apparently difficult task of describing the Crow Tribe.
Established in 1851, the Crow Reservation’s original name was the “Apsaalooke,” which in native tongue means ‘children of the large-beaked bird.’ Over time, this misinterpretation turned the tribe into the “Crow.”
The Crow name is an English mistranslation of their tribal name which is Apsáalooke. Apsáalooke is not their “original” name. It is their name.
Mistranslation didn’t “turn” them into anything. They are still the Apsáalooke. Also, see my previous comments on the establishment of reservations.
Onward Roadtrippers: Dead Indian Pass
Take in panoramic views at Dead Indian Pass and the rich history of our state along the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway. Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce Indians out of Yellowstone National Park and into Montana along this same route in 1877.
Another one for those History Buffs, Custer’s Last Loop takes you along the historic path of the Indian Wars. Stop at Fort Custer, Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations, and Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, to name a few.
There are a couple things here that jump out at me. The first being is that it seems Visit Billings’s idea of including Native American history and culture in their campaign is to only include events and places that involve battles or efforts of the U.S. military to pursue Native Americans and kill them or put them on reservations.
Native Americans have been here for 15,000 years, if not longer. The last couple hundred years of war, settlement and genocide is not their only history. And if anyone is going to write copy about Native American culture for the Visit Billings website, it needs to come from the Tribes themselves, not the intern.
I don’t know about you, but the proximity of the words “Dead Indian Pass” to “the rich history of our state” seems completely out of line, as is describing Chief Joseph’s attempt to save his people from being slaughtered by the military as little more than a day hike.
Can I just put in a request now that the Nez Perce Tribe renames that pass to whatever they see fit?
What’s next for Visit Billings?
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this entire situation. How did this happen, Visit Billings? Tell me how it happened. I want to know.
It’s not my place to say what should be done; that’s for Native American members of our community to decide, but I will tell you a couple things that seem important to do.
The Billings Chamber of Commerce should officially apologize to all of Montana’s tribal nations, especially to the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Tribes. I’d expect it to be a real apology, not an “Oops, we didn’t know.” This campaign doesn’t contain some innocuous mistake; this campaign is a manifestation of the structural and overt racism that exists in our community.
Visit Billings should immediately remove all the materials associated with this campaign: website, travel guide, billboards, and whatever other content has been created. That content should be archived and used as an anti-racism teaching tool for schools, organizations, and businesses.
Then, during their next stab at a tourism campaign they need to involve the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and Crow Tribe. It would also be nice if the photographs that were used showed the actual diversity that Billings and the surrounding area has, not just pretty, fit, white people recreating outside.
I have an idea for a new slogan though.
Instead of “Today is ours for the taking – tomorrow too” we should just go with “Billings – we have a lot of work to do.”
I want to apologize to all of my Native American friends, because in no way is what I wrote adequate to address this topic. This issue deserves more from someone who can speak from the depth of personal experience about the racism and exclusion that is so interwoven into Montana culture that this was allowed to happen. I hope that someone better suited to write and speak about this topic will do so.
*On a cold winter night in January of 1879, Chief Dull Knife and 140 Northern Cheyenne people broke out of the Fort Robinson barracks in Nebraska, where they had been held in captivity, starved and beaten, and began their journey home, to the Tongue River valley in southeastern Montana. The ancestors of the Northern Cheyenne people fought for their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren in the middle of winter, starving and without supplies. The United States military hunted them down and killed many of them; men, women and children. Descendants of the outbreak survivors tell stories of children imprisoned in the barracks using their fingernails to scrape frost off the windows for water.