Fort Belknap College student Charlotte Lame Bull digs for artifacts.

Fort Belknap College is sponsoring an archaeological dig in northern Montana.  While controversial, the project is offering valuable knowledge and skills, argue college and tribal officials.

With a small trowel and much patience Charlotte Lame Bull digs a rectangular hole in the mountains of northern Montana. What she finds are pieces of the past: bits of tools, weapons and pottery used as much as 5,000 years ago. But what she learns is just as significant. Through this exercise in archaeology, she finds a connection to her own heritage and, possibly, a future career.

Archaeological study of native American cultures is nothing new; Indian artifacts have been collected for centuries. But this project, at a site called Bear Gulch, is directed by Fort Belknap College and staffed with its stu­dents, making it one of the few digs to be managed and worked by American Indians.

Archaeology is controversial in native American communities. But in most cases, the criticism is directed not at the discipline itself, but at how it has been prac­ticed. There is wide opposition, for example, to the excavation and removal of Indian remains and artifacts for study by researchers who are usually non-Indians. There have also been calls for the return of artifacts col­lected by museums and universities, especially sacred and funeral-related objects.

But administrators and project directors at Fort Belknap College believe that Indian leadership will pre­vent any collection that is incompatible with cultural values. While the Bear Gulch dig is managed by Ethos Inc, a Montana and Canadian archaeological firm, they are working under contract with the college. A clause inserted by Fort Belknap in the contract requires Ethos Inc and their crew of students to stop work if any evidence of a burial ground is found. Because the site is along an old streambed, this is not likely.

Betty Doney and Gordon Lodge excavate a square cut in hard gumbo.

Prior to excavation, approval was also given by both the tribal council and a group of Assiniboine and Gros Ventre elders. Recalls college President Margarett C. Perez: “Before agreeing to participate in the archaeological dig, we sought the advice of our tribal leaders and elders. I specifically called upon Wallace Chopwood, an Assiniboine prayerman and elder.”

In endorsing the college’s dig, Gros Ventre tribal elder Frank Skinner says that it is time Indians learned the skills needed to do archaeological exploration on their reservations.

Elmer Main, who heads the college’s Native American Studies program, agrees. “Indian college students need to be taught to dig properly, to clean the artifacts and cate­gorize them. We are gaining valuable knowledge from Bear Gulch about a way of life thousands of years ago.” He points to the archaeological richness of the Fort Belknap reservation, noting that because of its remote­ness, the reservation is largely unexplored. “The Little Rocky Mountains hold a lot of treasures,” he says.

A Gros Ventre, Main has been an educator since 1950 when he became the first enrolled Fort Belknap Indian to get a college degree, and also the first to get a master’s. As education officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he sent hundreds of Gros Ventre, Assiniboine and Cree stu­dent to college from the Fort Belknap reservation. He also served as BIA superintendent, and as principal and superintendent for many Montana schools both on and off the reservation.

If the archeology program is expanded, Main would like to see a museum built at Fort Belknap as a repository for artifacts and as a laboratory where the rich history of the north-central plains could be studied.

But for students, the project is already offering rewards. While Charlotte Lame Bull carefully digs through layers of soil, other students work outside a trailer in the gold-mining town of Zortman where frag­ments are cleaned, measured, photographed and classi­fied. Each piece they hold is two, three and as much as five thousand years old.

This hands-on experience could never be matched by classroom study, says college President Perez. “The awareness which has been brought forth could not have been as intense if they had only read about it in a book. To actually see and touch the old pottery, arrowheads and spear points had to be exciting.”

It also demonstrates the connections that exist between different scientific disciplines. Geologic map­ping is commonly done during excavations, for example, and at Bear Gulch there was field analysis of paleotopography, stratrigraph and sedimentation. Climatology, paleontology, palaeobotany, anatomy and even nuclear physics (for carbon-dated artifacts) entered their work. Soil samples were also analyzed for seed content.

The Bear Gulch site was first discovered by a Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist during surveys prior to the paving of a road. This chance discovery has yielded an especially rich source of pottery, butchered bone and notched Oxbow points.

Student Ang Black Crow's bucket is examined by archeologist John Brumley.

“We are discovering the role of Little Rocky plant and animal species in early human habitation,” says John Brumley of Ethos Inc. “We can see by prairie land sedi­ments that the climate has changed three times since the early archaic era.”

He added: “We’re hoping to reconstruct changes in vegetation, hoping to find charred plant remains so we may learn what plants they were using and what seasons had the most intensive occupation.”

Put together, this comprehensive study is offering new knowledge about everyday life for native Americans thousands of years ago. From the fragments that were found, a better understanding of how the inhabitants lived, hunted, manufac­tured tools and cooked emerged. By extension, there is also a better understanding of how they related to their environment.

“I know there are fears among Indian people regarding such research, and maybe some archaeolo­gists have to change,” says Brumley. “But I have always felt archaeology could make major contributions for Indian people.”

Beverly Badhorse is the institutional development director for Fort Belknap College. A practicing journalist for over twenty years, she has written for the Miami Herald, Dayton Daily News and the Mexico News in Mexico City, among others.