On the Periphery of History

A reflection on family, memory, and what it means to carry stories that history forgets.

Montana remembers selectively.

Names like Culbertson, Chouteau, and Sherburne line its history books as traders, builders, founders. But I come from men whose hands were just as bloodied by labor, whose feet just as firmly planted in the soil. And yet, outside of family stories, their names are rarely spoken.

My father's ancestor, Armell, walked among the Pikunii long before treaties or railroads carved the land. He wasn’t just a translator; he was a bridge. A white man who lived with the Blackfeet and helped Isaac Stevens during the railroad survey. Father Point, the Jesuit missionary, even drew his portrait in a journal. There’s a creek still named after him. But Armell could not write. He left no letters, no autobiography. He could trade and translate, add and subtract, but could not leave a record in his own hand. And so, history, as it’s usually told, forgot him. Grandma said he and Pine Woman were the first church sanctioned marriage in Montana and their marriage certificate is sealed in the cornerstone of the Catholic Diocese in Helena. And still, it remains hidden. It seems everything about our history is covered by something.

My mother’s grandfather, Frank Stevenson, drilled the first oil well in Montana, on the banks of the Swift Current River. He mined the land in what would later become Glacier National Park. He named Ptarmigan Pass. He became one of the first rangers in the park after the government took his land. But nothing bears his name. Instead, they named the lake after his rival, J.B. Sherburne. The same lake that still leaks oil from Frank’s forgotten well.

No monuments. No textbooks. Just family memory and a scarred land that remembers what people forget.

This has shaped who I am. Maybe there’s jealousy in that. I’ll admit it. Not for wealth or power, but for the absence of acknowledgment. For the way history erases the people who shaped it from the margins. For the way their stories were allowed to disappear, as though they never mattered.

Even among the Pikunii, few names survive outside of oral history. Mountain Chief. Heavy Runner. Chewing Black Bones. Owl Child. These are the ones remembered. But what of Red Lodge Pole? What of Far Up the Hill?

They appeared in early census records. That’s all we have. No interviews. No written accounts. No statues. But they live on in me.

Far Up the Hill was Pine Woman’s father. Red Lodge Pole, her grandfather. It’s said Far Up the Hill gave his elder daughter to Armell in marriage for a gun and trade goods. When she died of disease, he gave Pine Woman to replace her. That was a father’s right then, to find a husband who would provide and pay the bride price. It wasn’t shameful. It was survival.

That’s all I know of Pine Woman’s family.

But I know what came after. Her descendants still walk these valleys, and their stories echo through my own. I may be the first to write them down. Not because I’m better or chosen, just because I have to. Because silence is a second death. And they are worthy of memory.

I struggle with my life.

Because I was born the first child in my line not to be a tribal member. Not because I rejected anything, but because the lines on a government ledger didn’t reach far enough. Blood wasn’t enough. History wasn’t enough. My birth came one generation too late, on the wrong side of a boundary that forgot the names of men like Armell and Far Up the Hill.

So I stand on the periphery still.

Too native to be white. Too white to be native. Carrying a lineage I cannot legally claim, but feel in every step I take on this land.

I’ve watched other stories be written, celebrated, canonized, while mine, ours, drift like smoke, carrying prayers to the Above ones.

But not anymore.

If they won’t carve our names into stone, I will press them into pages. If they won’t build our monuments, I will build memory.

I will tell the stories of Pine Woman and Red Lodge Pole, of Frank at his oil well, and his wife Alfreda and her fifteen children, of the quiet strength of those whose names survive only in breath and blood.

I am their echo.
Their reckoning.
Their return.

This is not a story of bitterness.
It is a story of refusal.
And refusal, is remembering that lasts.