Little Flower Parish at 204 1st St. N.W., Browning, MT 59417 US - A Job Well Done!

 BY JOHN MCGILL    (GLACIER REPORTER EDITOR)    Artist-in-residence Sheila Miles has again made De La Salle Blackfeet School in Browning one of her stops, having come to the school Monday, May 10, to work with students on a variety of art projects. She had the fifth and sixth graders making artistic renderings of candy bars for colorful posters on the walls of the school, but the main project this year was making a mural along with the school’s seventh grade class. She said she’d wanted to have something that would depict the Tribe’s history and initially thought of using a board cut in the outline of a map of the reservation. But she finally decided to use one cut in the shape of a buffalo hide, a more traditional means of recording history. She and the students worked for the first couple of days, deciding which events would be shown along a “timeline” they’d posted on bulletin boards. Many events were chosen for the story, including the buffalo days, making tools, the coming of the horse, the Starvation Winter, the smallpox epidemic, determining the boundaries of the reservation, the death of White Calf, veterans in Iraq, basketball and other icons of Blackfeet history and life. The students also included pictures of things that exist in today’s Blackfeet culture – like alcohol and violence – that they’d like to see eliminated, drawn with Xs crossing them out. The students spent the week on the project, and Friday afternoon presented the mural to teachers, staff, friends and relatives in ceremonies at the CCD Center, now the site of DLSB’s gymnasium. Officials at De La Salle report invitations were also extended to members of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council and Blackfeet Community Representatives.