Christmas Ad Old Person Fakes Deth So Family Will Visit
Earl Old Person, Master of the Blackfeet Nation, Dies at 92
As the longest-serving elected tribal leader in the state, he pushed for self-sufficiency and greater respect from the federal government.
Earl Old Person, the chief of the Blackfeet Nation who for nearly lxx years pushed for its economical evolution and self-sufficiency and against what he saw as an unreliable, at times untrustworthy federal government, died on Oct. 13 in Browning, Mont. He was 92.
The expiry, in a infirmary, was confirmed in a statement by the Blackfeet Nation, which said the cause was cancer.
Kickoff in 1954, when he was first elected to the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the tribe'southward governing body, Chief Old Person positioned himself every bit a get-between linking his isolated, impoverished Native American community with the residuum of the country and beyond. At his retirement from the council, in 2016, he was the longest-serving elected tribal leader in the country.
He was a regular witness at congressional hearings and a frequent invitee of heads of state around the world. He drank tea with the shah of Iran and spoke at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He urged his tribe to be more entrepreneurial, and he persuaded government officials and venture capitalists to provide seed money for Blackfeet-owned businesses.
"His message is plain," the mag Nation'southward Concern wrote in 1981. "'We don't want your assistance, we desire your business.'"
But Chief Old Person was as ambitious in asserting his tribe's rights against a federal regime that too often ignored them.
In the 1980s, the Department of the Interior began to lease state to oil and gas prospectors in the Badger-Two Medicine region, adjacent to the Blackfeet reservation, in northwestern Montana. The state is sacred to the Blackfeet, only an 1896 treaty ceded it to the federal government.
Main Old Person insisted that the tribe had given only the country rights, not the mineral rights, and he helped lead a xl-yr entrada to render the region off limits to outside interests (leaving open the possibility that the tribe might one day get into the free energy business concern itself). Final yr a courtroom ruling closed the last of the leases on the land.
"Primary Quondam Person was a fierce abet for the Blackfeet Nation and all of Indian State for his entire life," Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said in a statement after the chief'due south decease. "The world is a better place considering he was in it."
Prototype
Earl Onetime Person was born on Apr 13, 1929, in a village outside Browning, only due east of Glacier National Park and within the 2,285-square mile Blackfeet Indian Reservation. His parents, Juniper and Molly (Conduct Medicine) Old Person, were ranchers who spoke most no English. Neither did Earl, until uncomplicated school, and he continued to speak the Blackfeet linguistic communication at dwelling.
His wife, Doris (Bullshoe) Onetime Person, died in 2002. His survivors include his daughter, Erlina Old Person, and his son, Earl Jr. He also had several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but specific information about them was not immediately available.
In 1937, when he was 8, Earl and several other Blackfeet students traveled to Cleveland and New York City, where they performed tribal dances to raise money to build a new church on the reservation. As an adult, he notwithstanding spoke reverentially virtually riding the subway and eating at a restaurant on Broadway owned by the boxer Jack Dempsey.
A decade afterwards, he joined a delegation of Male child Scouts sent to the World Scout Jamboree, an international festival held that year in Moisson, France, outside Paris. He was the sole American Indian in the group, and he pitched his father's tent along the banks of the Seine.
When he returned, he worked as an interpreter in the tribe's land office, and in 1954 a contingent of Blackfeet elders persuaded him to run for the tribal quango. He won, and he remained on the council for the next 62 years, much of information technology every bit chairman, with two cursory gaps when he lost re-election, only to come back a few years afterwards.
Equally the leader of ane of the country's largest Native American tribes, Mr. Former Person became an unofficial spokesman for all of them, a role that ofttimes took him overseas.
In 1971, he was invited to Iran to help gloat the 2,500th ceremony of the founding of the Persian Empire. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, asked him to have tea with him, and he later invited the shah to stand with him as he delivered a voice communication.
But in doing and then a hush settled over the room, and he cut his speech short. Later he asked the interpreter what had happened. Every bit far every bit he knew, the interpreter said, in 2,500 years, no one had e'er had the audacity to ask a shah to stand up up.
In 1978, the family of Jim White Calf, the previous Blackfeet principal, granted him their forebear's hereditary title, making Chief Quondam Person the leader of the 17,000-member tribe.
One of his constant concerns was unemployment on the reservation, whose economy was driven by seasonal piece of work like ranching and lumber. Unemployment at that place could reach 70 percentage in the winter. In 1971, he traveled to Washington, where he met with authorities and business leaders; he returned with more than than $ane meg in seed coin for businesses like the Blackfeet Indian Writing Company, which he opened the next yr.
The company'due south twoscore,000-foursquare-pes manufactory produced millions of pencils and pens a year, selling to corporate clients like Sears, Roebuck. Inside v years information technology was turning a small profit. (The Blackfeet later sold the company, and information technology closed in the 1990s.)
Primary Sometime Person also led the founding of Blackfeet Community College, in 1974, and later on supported the opening of a casino and the Blackfeet National Bank, both on the reservation.
More noteworthy than his business concern acumen, though, was his role as a living repository of the Blackfeet Nation's heritage; he was one of the few people left who knew its stories and could pass on its traditions.
"He was such a profound person, who knew so much about our culture, our history and our community," Karla Bird, the president of Blackfeet Community College, said in an interview. "He was our connectedness to our ancestral ways."
Chief Sometime Person remained a adamant proponent of the tribe's interests in Washington. He said he was suspicious of the government, given its long rails record of broken promises to American Indians.
"We begin to wonder," he said at a 1971 congressional hearing, "if the Great White Father, the president of the United States, and the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal agencies really meant what they were proverb when they said they'd recognize Indian cocky-determination."
Even so, he held out hope for better treatment from Washington. In 1978, he led a report group deputed by the Interior Department to consider creating a cabinet-level position roofing Indian affairs. The group endorsed the idea, but the regime never followed through.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/earl-old-person-dead.html
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