White Clay People, Life Interrupted

White Clay People, Life Interrupted
Part III

By Brenda Norrell
Special to Navajo Times

HAVRE, Montana – Memories of the Seven Generations Singers Drum Group on the Kumeyaay Nation in California, travels in Greece and completing his autobiography in Mashantucket Pequot territory, are the solace of Jim Main, Jr., whose childhood was spent in the idyllic mountains of his Gros-Ventre homeland in northern Montana.
"Those were chapters in my life's book," Main says from the other side of the glass, with his long grey ponytail trailing to the waist of the orange jumpsuit, at the Hill County Detention Center in Havre.
Main has been charged with murder in the November 25, 2006, death of a man in a Havre home and scheduled for trial in January, 2008. Main maintains his innocence.
In this bordertown, positioned between Fort Belknap's Gros-Ventre and Assiniboine lands and Rocky Boy Chippewa Cree lands in north-central Montana, American Indians are watching to see if a fair trial is possible.
Rose Main, Jim's sister, has just driven two hours from their Gros-Ventre homeland to visit her brother in jail. Rose's time and energy is stretched between caring for her father, Jim, Sr., in the
last stages of congestive heart failure, and her mother, recovering from multiple surgeries.
Rose’s brothers, Harold Jiggs and William “Snuffy” Main, have also been making the long journey to Havre to visit their brother.
Jim Jr. served as the primary caregiver for his mother, Vernie White Cow Main, before his arrest. Jim Jr. had traveled with his mother by train for her parathyroid surgery in St. Paul, Minn. Later during recovery, her intestines ruptured and her respiratory illness became
severe. Jim Jr. taught himself nursing skills to care for her.
However, even in the worst of times, the Main family remembers the best of times. In the Havre Detention Center, Jim Jr. remembers those good years. When Jim Jr. was hired as a youth counselor for the Kumeyaay, little did he know that the hollowed-out cottonwood trunk, which he fashioned into a drum, would give birth not only to a new wave of young Indian
singers, but also to a renaissance for Bird Singers.
During his decade in southern California, his Indian family expanded.
"I was like family to most of those kids," Jim Jr. remembers with a smile.
While working at the La Posta Substance Abuse Center with Kumeyaay youths, he organized the Seven Generations Drum Group, with the youngest singer only four years old. After performing locally with support from Kumeyaay Bands in southern California, the young group of singers was in demand. They appeared across the southwest, from the California Indian Leaders Conference in Reno, to national Indian youth conferences.
Jim Jr. learned about life in the borderzone and the Kumiai living across the international border in Baja, Mexico.
"The people are so poor on the other side of the border," he said. While in southern California, another door opened for Jim. This time it was the opportunity to travel to Athens, Greece, and perform with some of Indian country's finest dancers.
However, while the Greeks opened their hearts to the Indian performers, trip sponsors panicked over financial arrangements as the money poured in. The sponsors fled the country, leaving the dancers to fend for themselves.
Now, Jim Jr. remembers one of the newspaper headlines, "Cowboy leaves Indians stranded in Athens."
However, the emergency brought out their best. "It pulled us together and the leadership came out. It opened the doors."
The Greeks responded with an outpouring of admiration and aid for the stranded group of Gros-Ventre, Assiniboine, Navajo, Apache and others who gained notoriety for their dances and cultures in Greece.
Remembering the performers, adored by the Greeks, Jim said, "It was almost like a rock band." Jim remembered the screenplay he coauthored with French playwright. He smiles remembering the allure of Hollywood, where he appeared a few days as an extra on film sets. However, looking back, he says Hollywood was not his destiny. His travels took him to the Cannes Film Festival in France.
Jim Jr.'s brush with Hollywood and his travels, along with the history and culture of the Gros-Ventre, White Clay People, are detailed in Jim Jr.'s recently finished autobiography, which awaits publication. The next chapter in his life is filled with emotion.
"I came home to stay with my folks. They were both terminally ill," Jim Jr. said of his return to his family's home, surrounded by a warm flowing creek where the family trapped beaver and rode the wild horses coming down from the mountains.
Before his incarceration, Jim Jr. spent six months caring for his mother. He changed the fluid bag of his mother and kept the wood fire going in the cold. Already, his father had a close call with life and death, when he survived open-heart surgery.
Suddenly, at the Hill County Detention Center, Jim Jr.'s 20 minutes for the visit is up. The telephone of the visiting cubicle goes dead.
Walking out of the waiting room, Jim Jr.'s sister Rose looks back at more than a dozen Indian women, surrounded by children, all with faces lined with grief.
"You should have taken a picture," she says. "All those Indian women lined up there. It tells you who is here in jail."
The Gros-Ventre, White Clay People, survived the smallpox epidemics brought by the whites, which nearly decimated the tribe. The White Clay People survived the starvation that resulted from the eradication of the buffalo herds, which covered the Plains like dark rolling waves.
For the Main family today, their spiritual belief gives them hope and strength.
In the old stories and ceremonies of the White Clay People are the lessons: Be kind to the horses, for they represent kindness; the bitter cold that comes in winter also brings healing to the land and suffering brings appreciation and one closer to the Great Spirit.
The stories tell how the buffalos' hooves kept the plains plowed and the hooves carried the grass seeds, sowing new grass. These stories tell how the smallpox came and swiftly killed thousands. The Plains were covered with the bones of the buffalo and the remains of the White
Clay People.
Driving across the peoples' ancestral lands, Rose remembers the story of the white man who told the White Clay People that he was bringing them a gift. He left a box full of rags and vanished. When the people gathered for their gift, opened the box and sorted through the
stained cloths, they pondered what this gift was, unaware of the smallpox – the harbinger of death – within.
Driving across Fort Belknap and close to her family home, Rose tops a hill, looks out and remembers that it was here, where the highway cuts across the sloping hills, that the burial sites of the White Clay Peoples were bulldozed when the highway was built. The remains of her
people were scattered.
However, riding across this land with her father, there are good memories too. There are stories of traveling for the promotion of Indigenous rights and memories of breaking horses, hunting deer, basketball and hand games.
The joy is short-lived. Between visits to her brother in jail, Rose finds her mother seriously ill. Once again, in the night, Rose gives her mother a breathing treatment, places her socks and scarf on her head, and the heavy navy blue coat on her shoulders. Then, her mother
is hospitalized.
Once again, Rose gives her father his shot and medications at the nursing care facility. Once again, Rose returns home late in the night, after 1 a.m., worried how she will raise the $25,000 for her brother's bail, so Jim could be released until the January trial.
In the morning, Rose grinds coffee beans and makes wheel bread, turning the circular dough, with the hole in the center, in the iron skillet. She turns on the radio and powwow sounds fill the morning air.
One the table are Jim Jr.'s pencil drawings, which are now being made into a calendar, and Jim's autobiography awaiting a publisher.
Once again, Rose begins again.

UPDATE: There is new evidence in this murder case concerning one man arrested, Kim Norquay, Jr., who feld the scene and the woman, Melissa Snow, who lied to police officers:
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071115/NEWS01/71115023/

Photos: In Jim Main Jr.'s room at home on Big Warm Creek on Gros-Ventre land in Montana, Rose Main looks at a poster of the Kumeyaay's Seventh Generation Singers that her brother helped organize. (Photo 2) Rose looks through her brother's autobiography. It holds the history of their people, the White Clay People, along with the Main family history. Photos Brenda Norrell

Part I: In Montana, Indians are guilty until proven innocent
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2007/11/in-montana-indians-are-guilty-until.html

Part II: On Big Warm Creek, living as a free people
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-big-warm-creek-living-as-free-people.html