Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian’s Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice - Hardcover

Farr, William E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806142871 ISBN 13: 9780806142876

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012

Synopsis

In 1879, a Canadian Blackfoot known as Spopee, or Turtle, shot and killed a white man. Captured as a fugitive, Spopee narrowly escaped execution, instead landing in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., where he fell silent. Spopee thus “disappeared” for more than thirty years, until a delegation of American Blackfeet discovered him and, aided by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, exacted a pardon from President Woodrow Wilson. After re-emerging into society like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Spopee spent the final year of his life on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, in a world that had changed irrevocably from the one he had known before his confinement.

Blackfoot Redemption is the riveting account of Spopee’s unusual and haunting story. To reconstruct the events of Spopee’s life—at first traceable only through bits and pieces of information—William E. Farr conducted exhaustive archival research, digging deeply into government documents and institutional reports to build a coherent and accurate narrative and, through this reconstruction, win back one Indian’s life and identity.

In revealing both certainties and ambiguities in Spopee’s story, Farr relates a larger story about racial dynamics and prejudice, while poignantly evoking the turbulent final days of the buffalo-hunting Indians before their confinement, loss of freedom, and confusion that came with the wrenching transition to reservation life.

About this title

About the Author

William E. Farr is a Senior Fellow at the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Montana, Missoula. He is the author of The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945: A Photogaphic History of Cultural Survival and Julius Seyler and the Blackfeet: An Impressionist at Glacier National Park.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806142871
• ISBN 13: 9780806142876
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312