Spring 2003
CONTENTS

Home, Heart & Education

Lucille and Iliff McKay were married in 1942 and about every two years another baby came. Eventually five children shared a bedroom in the frame house on Second Avenue in Browning. One might attribute it to their Roman Catholic faith, or to the times—big families were common in those days. But today another reason becomes as clear as the stark beauty of the Rocky Mountain eastern front edging their town: They were raising leaders and educators for the Blackfeet tribe.

“Being the baby of the family, I heard more often than anybody else, ‘go to school, go to school, go to school. Get your education,’” says Joe McKay.

“They had in their home many elders of the tribe,” Joe continues. “My dad was on the tribal council, so I heard this not only from my parents, but from the older Indians—the true traditionalists—‘You have to go to school and learn what the white man knows. You have to understand the world from his perspective.You have to come back here and teach us and help our people, so we can survive.’ That was always the message I got.”

That message was instilled in one generation of McKays and has become a simple expectation for the next. This story begins when Lucille entered UM in 1941 as a bright-eyed freshman, exhibiting, no doubt, the same open, friendly manner she exudes today in her eightieth year. Lucille has fond memories of people she met at UM and days playing timpani in the marching band. The United States’ entry into the Second World War ended Lucille’s formal education—her brother, who was to serve in the armed forces, came and escorted her back to the safety of the reservation—but Lucille always remembered with fondness her “one year of coed.”

“I always recommend that they go at least one year to get the experience,” she says. Lucille’s five children stayed much longer than one year, all of them receiving undergraduate degrees and most garnering advanced degrees. And they’ve made learning a sort of team sport, with members of the McKay tribe often pursuing degrees together. In 2000, six McKays received degrees from UM. One of Lucille’s sons, Mike, his wife, and two children had left a secure life in Browning in 1994 to pursue degrees at UM and succeeded in their team approach to education by earning bachelor’s degrees while his two older sisters and a niece garnered master’s degrees.

A remarkable closeness ties this family together and to the Blackfeet reservation. All five of Lucille’s children—Diane, Mary, Tom, Mike, and Joe—live in Browning, as well as many of her grandchildren (Mike commutes between a job in Browning and his family in Missoula.) Lucille’s home still is the gathering place. Her sister, Marie, now lives with her and Mary’s house is across the street and down a few doors.

Seeing Lucille with her children, you know immediately that she is the treasure of the family. “We all meet here almost every day for lunch,” Mary says. “We come here and cook lunch for Mom. Lots of times there are grandchildren there, too.” But the closeness isn’t just about family. Mary and Joe will say similar things when asked why the McKays gravitate back to Browning, despite earning advanced degrees and skills that open many job markets to them.

Mary explains: “It’s hard for us to understand why other people want to leave home. When we leave home, we want to come back. I’ve thought about leaving and living someplace else. But why would you leave home when your family is here, your heart is here, the most beautiful country in the world is here, the most wonderful people?” Joe adds a coda to that: “We never left home but for one reason—that was to return.”

Lucille returned to the reservation, married Iliff, and proceeded to raise a large family while working full time, first in the courthouse at Cut Bank, in retail stores in Browning, then as a clerk for the Blackfeet Tribal Credit Program. Eventually she became director of the program.

The McKays also owned and operated the Junction Drive-In in Browning from 1954 until 1997. Mary reports that one of the reasons her parents bought the drive-in was to provide a place for their children to learn a work ethic. “We all worked there—from the time we were old enough to pick up the trash from the ground. That was our first job. Then we’d wait on the cars. We did all the jobs—carhop, cook, managing the drive-in—as did many other young people in Browning.” Today Tom and Diane are applying for a loan to reopen the drive-in.

Mary proudly takes down a plaque and signed letter from President George W. Bush. Lucille and her late husband were honored last fall by the National Summit on Emerging Tribal Economics as two of the first Indian small business owners—and for inspiring other tribal people to establish small businesses.

“She’s been a real role model and inspiration for not just us [her daughters] but for a lot of women on the reservation,” Mary says. “She was a career person before it was the thing to do. She really broke ground in a lot of respects.”

Lucille lost her husband in 1979 and on retiring in 1988, first pursued a passion associated with her strong faith. With Marie, she made pilgrimages to many European countries. The highlight, Lucille remembers, was the beatification of a Mohawk woman who may be named the first Indian saint, Karteri Tekakwitha.

Then Lucille and Marie went on the powwow circuit. “From March through Labor Day—all over the western states and Canada—every single weekend, they’d powwow,” Mary remembers with a laugh. “I just loved to powwow,” Lucille admits. That passion garnered her another award and a beautiful trophy: the Golden Age Traditional Dance award.

Joe is another dancer in the family. Sometimes people are surprised to see Joe, a lawyer who consults for the Blackfeet Tribal Council and has his own practice in Browning, dancing at powwows and other events. “I tell people when I’m out dancing that I couldn’t be a lawyer if I wasn’t a dancer,” Joe says. “I would have gone crazy a long time ago.”

The McKay family’s broad educational roster includes degrees from most institutions of higher learning in the state, with UM playing a dominant role. (Mary feels the need to explain why two of Diane’s children attended Montana State University: they pursued degrees in nursing and agriculture. “That’s their excuse,” she says.)

Both Mary and Diane, who received master’s degrees from UM in ’00, have taught elementary school in Browning for thirty years; Mary recently retired but still does consulting work while Diane continues to teach.

Joe attended Eastern Montana College before transferring to UM to get a degree in business administration. When he was about to graduate, a visiting business law professor took him aside and said, “You should go across the street before you go home.” Joe’s response was that “three years is too long to wait to go home.” The professor noted that his tribe was holding significant gas and oil reserves that were going to be developed. Joe remembers that conversation distinctly: “He told me, ‘when your people sit down across the table from people from Chevron and Amoco, on the other side of the table are people who are getting paid a lot of money to not be your friend. Unless someone on your side understands what they know, you’re not going to get the benefit of your tribe’s resources.’”

Joe did cross the street to UM’s law school. And it wasn’t long before he put what he was learning to practice. At that time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs would hold public auctions for the gas and oil leases. “We couldn’t sit down and negotiate our own agreements,” Joe explains. So, in 1981, when the tribe attempted to negotiate outside the boundaries set by the BIA, Joe challenged them with a lawsuit, bringing the issue to the forefront and contributing to the passage of federal legislation, the Indian Mineral Development Act of 1982, which gave tribes the power to enter into their own agreements.

At the law school Joe found a mentor in the late Professor Marge Brown, a woman who would become “like a second mother” to him. And it was there he faced possibly the biggest challenge of his life. Although gifted in math (he’d been recruited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on graduation from high school), his public speaking and writing skills were not strong. After a few semesters, he was taken aside and told if his writing skills did not improve, he would be asked to leave.

This was a huge blow that might have ended his time at UM. Instead, Joe says, “I walked down the hall to Marge Brown’s office and told her. She said, ‘Let’s get to work.’” With her help and tutoring from volunteer Joan Jonquil and another law professor, Barry Burke, Joe improved his writing skills and was finally able to go home the summer of 1983.

He carried with him degrees in business and law. And he was ready to help his tribe. He served on the tribal council from 1984 to 1986 (and again from 1992 to 1994) and began practicing law. In 1986 Joe was named president and chief executive officer of the Blackfeet Writing Company. Joe describes how in two years he turned what he considered a “social welfare program” that was losing $800,000 a year into a company that employed more than 300 workers and was making a profit.

When the tribe decided to acquire a calendar-making company to merge with the Blackfeet Writing Company, some members were convinced the council should direct the company, not Joe. The result, he says, was the Blackfeet Writing Company floundered and eventually went out of business. “During that time I was featured in Success magazine and Dun and Bradstreet Review and other kinds of places, but never [got the recognition] from my own tribe,” Joe says with a hearty resignation. It’s clear that sentence is something he’s chewed on over the years.

Joe still is a key player on the reservation, with much of his work having to do with tribal and Indian law-related issues. He has negotiated eight oil and gas leases that have generated somewhere from $8 million to $15 million for the tribe.

Like Lucille, Mary attended UM one year, living as her mother did in Brantly Hall. When asked about her memories of the time, her face focuses and it’s clear her thoughts are not as sunny as Lucille’s. “I went in 1964, just pre Civil Rights,” she says. “I remember being surprised at the way I was viewed there. I never realized that people would not accept me because of where I was from and because I have a different color skin. That surprised me a lot. I was raised to be really proud of who I was and really proud of what I was. And I didn’t understand.”

She talks about seeing signs in Brantly Hall calling for babysitters, a job she felt quite competent to do. But the signs clearly stated, No Indians. “It made me realize how brave my mother was,” she says. Mary’s response was to get involved. She was among the group that formed the Kyi-Yo Indian Club and remembers how the name was chosen. “We thought the name should be like a bear, because of Grizzlies. But how do you say bear in all the different tribal languages? The valedictorian of my high school class suggested Kyi-Yo, the Blackfeet name for bear. We decided to be democratic and vote, and luckily there were more Blackfeet there that day.”

Mary transferred to Eastern the next year and received her bachelor’s degree from that college. But in 1998 she and Dianne, along with Dianne’s daughter Ann, decided to pursue master’s degrees through UM’s Extended Studies Cohort program, which was tailored to address the needs of teachers and students on reservations. Instruction was conducted through interactive television, with instructors also traveling to Browning and students spending weekends and part of the summer at UM. Mary was very happy with the program, today calling it “an excellent professional development model.” And her experience on campus was not the same as in 1964. “There’s a lot more diversity there now,” she says.

The world of the McKays is at once normal and extraordinary, peopled with quiet, contained individuals who are driven, warm, intelligent, mysterious, mischievous, but most of all driven. What began six decades ago with one spirited Indian girl’s “year of coed” has transformed into a complex cascade of education and training that shows no sign of slowing or diminishing.

Diane recalls a recent conversation with her daughter Ann, who related a conversation she had with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Kelsey. They were taking a field trip to Missoula and they talked about what college she might go to. “Just like you expected us to go,”Ann said to her mother, “I expect her to go.”