On the Origin of Tepees by Jonnie Hughes

Author:Jonnie Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Free Press

PART IV

Who’s Driving?

11

A Beginner’s Guide to Tepee Taxonomy

Among the Crow

To get from Last Stand Hill to the village of gleaming white tepees below, we have to head back to I-90 and head north for one exit. We get off the freeway at Crow Agency, the settlement that operates as the capital of the Crow Tribe Reservation. Descending on the slipway, we fall in to a traffic jam of scrappy cars full to the brim with Native Americans: elderly, children, youths. There is a hum of activity. Weaving in and out of the cars are other families on foot. The local launderette has a line stretching out around the convenience store. The convenience store is managing its customers on a one-in, one-out basis. We barely move in the mass of cars. I catch the eyes of a number of Indian faces: those long proud noses, those hitched-up cheekbones, dark skin, and dark eyes. The buildings in this area lack the finesse that Ads and I’ve become used to in the white, Anglo-Saxon “ranch world” up above this valley. Plaster drops off the walls. Garbage lines the sidewalks. Stray dogs patrol. Young braves strut past us and stare. It’s a little intimidating but, given how the West was won, entirely understandable.

The car shuffles on through the town. We blindly follow the Crow crowd, and before we know it, we’ve actually come out the other side, into fields that sit among the cottonwoods down by the river. And that is where the tepees are. Raising our eyes from the road, we see them all around us, in their hundreds. Lined up in makeshift streets, each with a car in front. Up close, the tepees are huge, and set against the greasy green of the cottonwoods and the azure of the afternoon sky, their canvases glow a bright cream. They show the asymmetrical cone typical of this kind of shelter, appearing to sit back on their haunches, content in the sun, but they seem more upright than the Sioux tepee I saw in the Journey Museum, and much taller. Of course, these are made of canvas—a significantly lighter and cheaper material than the traditional buffalo hide—so it’s not surprising that they are bigger in volume than the museum specimen, but this species of tepee is definitely supposed to be taller. The height is accentuated by long lodgepoles that stick up into the sky above the nest as far as they reach down below it, so that they assume the hourglass silhouette I spotted from Last Stand Hill. The lodgepoles are clearly a matter of pride. Each tepee owner has stripped his poles so that they gleam like bone, and they wave for attention, many accentuated with red ribbons flapping from their tops or with their feathery dead pine foliage left intact, to catch the eye. The poles are loosely gathered in the nest, clambering over one another in their urgency to soar skyward. They look wildly, deliriously untidy. The Crow, I decide, like their

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