Charlie Fisher holding court

I drive a supply truck for Glacier National Park. Anything from toilet paper to shotguns for the rangers. Depends on what they want me to move. I have to bring the season passes over to where people buy them, big-time. The park has about a million visitors a season.

I grew up locally. Here in the town of Babb on the Blackfeet reservation. Life in Babb was strange because we didn’t have no television in the 50s. Then we got channel 7 from Lethbridge. Canadian TV. Hockey.

Then I went to a boarding school in ’57. It was called Blackfeet Tribal Boarding School. It was like going to prison. I was in there for 15 minutes and I got in a fight over a dime. A dime. I fought a second-grader. I was seven years old. They sent me to boarding school because they didn’t have no school in Babb. I stayed there till ’61. Then I come back to Babb and we had a school in Babb then. The boarding school was like prison. Very much like prison. There was sexual problems. There was everything problems. But I was a nice little boy that escaped all that shit. There weren’t really teachers. They would just put us on the bus to Browning.

Once you got to Browning, then you had the option to get your big five-cent writing tablet with your little pencil. But no! The best thing to do was to get in a gang and go down and rob Schmidt’s. That was the place where they had the candy bars and stuff right on the first counter. I was the fence. I’d go in and ask for Car & Driver magazine while the other boys would take the cinnamon bears. But we paid for that later. We got caught. But the repercussions were nothing, just feeling guilty of crime. I was an altar boy. My confirmation name was Luke.

Now I live in St. Mary’s along the lake. I love it. I used to live in Bozeman and go to architecture school. But I was drafted number 30. I ran my four-year deferment out and I had to go. So I joined the Guards. That was a basic mistake back in 1972. I could have went to the Air Force and done three years’ purgatory with those guys on computers.

But I like working for the Park Service. I was working for the Park Service even back then. Doing the same goddamn shit that I’m doing now. And I’m doing it till the end of my life.

In 1961, Bill Anderson lived on the lake back here. We used to set a net. Old Bill would come over and we’d set a net. He said, “This boy knows his onions.” Russian. Bill Anderson was a Russian. A very bald-headed Russian strong guy. But he was a good man. But in like 1960, the Blackfeet tribe tried to sell lots on the lake to the Canadians from Lethbridge. All these people over there. Who are good people. So they bought all the stuff. Then in the early 90s, they told them, “No more $60 a year. You guys have to pay $2,000 a year for your lots.” They boogied. The Canadians. They sold their lots to the tribe. What I own is just a recreational lot. I pay $60 a year for it, which is a good price. My dad built a house on my lot. A log house, it was built in, shit… ’88 or something like that. My family goes back to 1900. They built my grandma’s house, the Black Shack, in 1900. That little log cabin outside here is from the 1920s. I got a 25-year lease in 2003. The tribe does OK by us with the recreational leases. Commercial lots, like what Kip has here for the bar, are harder to get.

Before the park was even established, this was called Old Town St. Mary’s. That goes back to the mining books. They will show you. It was Old Town St. Mary’s.

Where I come from, see… Melinda Wren had adopted 11 kids. Snake Woman from Canada was her mother. Snake Woman married a man at Fort Union. But Melinda adopted James Henry Fisher. Now there’s two Fishers going on here. Donald is my first cousin. I get these little things from the government that say I own one-eighth of an acre. You know, I get checks in the mail for like 19 cents. Some of the land they were giving us back in the 20s, you couldn’t do anything with it. Sure, they might find dinosaurs on it now, but you can’t do anything with it. Those checks come pretty good now, though. A check for nine cents. Because there’s like 90 of us for one piece of land.

We’re assimilated to the point where we don’t even know our people anymore. How many generations did it go down? Five? And then you’re looking for your grandkids and your great-grandkids. But who are they? They’re not enrolled. My sister’s kids aren’t enrolled. I am.
The U.S. government is going to say, “For the public health, we have to give so much money to the Blackfeet tribe to take care of these people.” And a lot of these women have ungodly amounts of kids. But they do that to the state. They want to increase the enrollment.

We could find the guy in Kenya whose DNA is responsible for all of us, the Indians and the whites. Civilization started in Kenya. DNA. They’ve been doing it. It’s real surprising.

The first time, in 1833, that we had a smallpox die-out, all the Indian bands died. But they saved a bunch of Arapahos. What you get from the Arapahos is Mexican women and black people. Curly-haired black people. Slaves. Niggers is what I’m trying to tell you. The Arapaho are in Colorado. Or in New Mexico. Santa Fe was a mission. Where did the horses come from? Horses were worth more than women. Any horse that you could get that could run a buffalo down. Anyone that can get a buffalo is worthwhile. That’s why the guys painted the horses. Not paint—put a brand on ’em. Fingers. A half moon. That was the biggest thing. Then the Crows would come up and steal from the Blackfeet, the Blackfeet would steal from the Crows. That was the Native American’s bane: They fought amongst one another. Jealousy. Big-time. It works the same way right now. Partisan in congress. Partisan or bipartisan? Democrat? Republican? What are you gonna get? Fighting.

Kip’s Bar has been here since I’ve been here. His dad was Joe and his mom was Sarah Lewis. They’re Cree. Chippewa. From Canada. The 49th Parallel cut the tribe in half. The tribes don’t know boundaries. You can go back to the Magna Carta in England. That’s when they set it up that you would own a certain lot and pay taxes to the guy that ran the… not the serf… the… lord. You would pay taxes to the lord. That’s where all this comes from. See, Indians own territory but there was no boundaries. But then when the United States and Canada made the 49th Parallel…

Now they’re arguing over St. Mary’s canal. Big-time. That starts up here in Mini Glacier and goes into Canada and then goes back into the United States. A million-dollar project. It feeds more than 14,000 people and 100,000 acres of farmland.

Africa? The DNA? Hell yeah, I’ll go on that one tree. But then another guy goes, “I have a different tree that comes off under the guy from Kenya.” And they’re looking for those people. There’s branches that break off of the tree and they’re looking for those. They thought they would be up in… not Antarctica, but… Arctica. They found Genghis Khan’s DNA. They tracked Genghis Khan down to DNA. They found him in Mongolia. The funniest thing about Mongolia is that some of those tribes in there, when they painted their teepees? It was the same as Algonquians. Geometric designs. Which is real strange. Geographically, they got a lot of theories on that. I figure they had the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. We can basically track that down. The coast was 100 feet below. Like Seattle, San Francisco, Eureka were 100 feet below. They’re finding stuff that might be where those people came over. Then they found this guy in Washington. A Eurasian. South of Spokane.

CHARLIE FISHER