The 1,000-year-old drum used by the Chief Cliff Singers is going to have one more story to tell, the Missoulian’s Vince Devlin writes here.

The Kootenai group announced yesterday that its 12 members – along with their ancient drum – are heading to the Winter Games in Vancouver that start next week:

The Chief Cliff Singers will perform on Friday, Feb. 19, at the 2010 Aboriginal Pavilion – also known at the Chiefs’ House – in the center of Olympic activity in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia.

They’ll be singing and drumming for dancers from Canada’s Ktunaxa Tribe at the pavilion, which will feature Indigenous performers daily throughout the Games’ Feb. 12-28 run. Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, born on the Piapot Cree Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan, kicks off the Chiefs’ House performances for the Four Host First Nations, sponsors of the pavilion.

“They’ve invited us up many more times, but it’s hard. All these guys have jobs and it’s tough to schedule,” says Cliff leader Mike Kenmille. “But the Olympic Games? I didn’t hesitate, I jumped when they invited us to do it live with them.”

Gwen Florio

Julie Cajune watches a class Wednesday morning at Nkwusm, the Salish language school in Arlee where she is director of development. Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian)

ARLEE – Julie Cajune isn’t sure which is more remarkable – how she came to be awarded a grant from the foundation of cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg, or what she’ll be able to do with it.

The grant, worth $1.4 million, will cover three years, and Cajune will use it to develop some ambitious tribal history materials in a variety of media, including film.

Cajune, currently director of development at Nkwusm, the Salish language school in Arlee, loves to talk about that.

But the fortuitous series of events that led to the grant is almost a story in itself. Much had already happened before Cajune’s phone rang last summer and, out of the blue, and a Kellogg Foundation official urged her to develop a project and apply for a grant:

Howard Zinn had written a book.

Huilan Krenn had moved to the United States. From China.

Joan Melcher had written an article, about Cajune and a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal history she had worked on, for Miller-McCune magazine.

Krenn is the key. A relatively new U.S. citizen, she works for the Kellogg Foundation. When she read Melcher’s article about Cajune, a light clicked on.

Krenn had recently finished Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which tells the story of her adopted nation “from the bottom up” – from the viewpoint of working-class citizens, immigrant laborers, women, blacks and – yes – American Indians.

Or, as Cajune puts it, “It tells the parts of American history that aren’t told in the history books; challenges the mythology that is still taught in our schools.” That, she says, includes textbooks that present Indians “as, at best, a backdrop, and, at worst, a stereotype.”

When Krenn called Cajune, she wanted to know if Cajune was familiar with Zinn.

Familiar?

“I’m out here in rural Montana, sending random notes and messages to a man I’ve never even met,” Cajune says of Zinn. That the Boston historian would take the time to reply “always amazed me,” Cajune says. She was not only familiar with his work.

Cajune considers Zinn one of her heroes.

To have someone from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ask her if she was interested in expanding on his methods to tell the story of American Indians was not just an opportunity, but an honor.

Cajune submitted a proposal. The foundation sent it back.

“They liked the proposal,” Cajune says, “but they said it seemed limited in scope. They encouraged me to be more bold, to go ahead and dream big.”

And so she did.

***

The result: The American Indian Center for Policy and Applied Research will be established, with offices at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, where Cajune will set about producing “authentic tribal histories in a variety of media.”

Perhaps her two most ambitious projects will be producing a “parallel history” of the United States as seen through the eyes of Native peoples, and a film about sovereignty.

The book, she hopes, will help Montana teachers incorporate a more accurate story of Indians in their curriculum.

State law, she notes, requires all students be educated about the first peoples who lived in what is now Montana.

But too often, Cajune says, that means studying Indian dwellings – “They’ll make tepees and pueblos,” she says – or reading about Sitting Bull or Geronimo.” She doesn’t blame teachers – “How can I teach what I don’t know?” she asks – but the bottom line is the same.

“It’s based too much on crafts, it’s not tribally specific and its accuracy can be pretty questionable,” Cajune says. “How can we give teachers a road map, so that we can produce an essential understanding of Montana tribes? By the time anyone graduates high school in this state, they should understand about our diversity – that Fort Belknap is different in history and culture from the Northern Cheyenne.”

History, Cajune says, is the story of human beings, as told by human beings, meaning that it is all subjective.

“No objective history has ever been written,” she says. “We hope to get teachers to think about that. How do you present competing narratives? It’s not just Indians, it’s women, it’s all kinds of people” who might have different takes, and have been affected in vastly different ways, by the events that have shaped our nation.

Sovereignty, meantime, is a subject vitally important to tribes that has been tackled in books, which is why Cajune wants to tackle it in a documentary film.

“There are lots of books on tribal sovereignty,” Cajune says. “I’ve looked through volumes of papers on sovereignty, but your average teacher probably won’t, or read a book. I’ve attended conferences on the legal side of sovereignty, and the eyes can roll to the back of your head.”

Cajune wants to talk about it through the stories of elders and ancestors.

“The inherent right to exist in my homeland,” she says, “to exist beyond imaginary borders that separate Idaho and Washington and Oregon and Montana. The divine right to exist, to speak your language, to raise your children, to educate your children, that we’ve had from time immemorial. That inherent right, that sovereignty, I think people will understand because you have the same right I have, to live where you want, to speak your language.”

After her rewritten proposal was unanimously approved by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation board and she was awarded the $1.4 million on Jan. 21, Cajune couldn’t wait to

e-mail Howard Zinn.

“I wanted him to know how his work was impacting my life, and my community,” Cajune says. “The opportunity exists to do something, and I feel an urgency. I think there are open hearts and open minds in Montana, among educators and the general public, people who are willing to and want to hear these stories.”

It means a great deal to Cajune to know Zinn got her message. Six days later he died, at the age of 87.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation:

Established in 1930, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and southern Africa. For more information, visit www.wkkf.org.

A banner with feathers from the Veteran Warrior Society of the Flathead Nation is draped over the flag and cremains during a burial ceremony at Fort Harrison last summer in Helena, Mont. (Clare Becker/Helena Indpendent Record)

“This is a rare opportunity to honor Montana’s Indian veterans, and all veterans, as well as to honor the important work of retaining native languages,” said Society Director Richard Sims.

The Smithsonian created the exhibit to tell the story of Indian Marines and soldiers who used their coded native languages as a weapon against U.S. enemies.

The Navajo code talkers during World War II have received the most recognition, but the exhibit shows that Native Americans were first enlisted to relay messages in their own languages during World War I.

Marines and soldiers from 16 tribal nations served as code talkers, including the Assiniboine, Sioux, Navajo, Hopi, Cherokee, Chippewa and Cree.

The exhibit also addresses the irony the Indians faced as they transitioned from Indian boarding schools, where they were punished for speaking their native languages, to being honored for using that language as a vital secret weapon in combat.

Montana has the opportunity to bring the exhibit to the state because the historical society is an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees member George Horse Capture of Great Falls initiated the exhibit when he was a Smithsonian curator, and will serve as guest curator of the Montana exhibit.

The historical society plans to launch the exhibit in Helena in April and then take it to the state’s reservations. The society is also working with tribal veterans’ representatives and tribal councils who want to contribute in their own way in honoring and celebrating their warriors during each four-day event.

The society is seeking sponsors to help cover the $35,000 to $40,000 cost for creating and presenting the traveling exhibit.

Boxer Marvin Camel still wears his world champion belt. (Kurt Wilson/Missoulian)

It’s been more than three decades, but in all that time, no one in Montana has managed to do what Marvin Camel did: Win a world boxing title.

Camel fought in the 1970s and ’80s as a cruiserweight, a class between light heavyweight and heavyweight. Things were different then. Famed boxing promoter Don King saw no problem with letting out an on-mic war whoop when Camel – who is Salish, from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation – entered the ring in one of his title bouts, Missoulian reporter Vince Devlin writes here.

Thirty years later, Camel still revels in his accomplishments – even if few in the state remember them.

“Anybody can do what I’ve done,” Camel says, “but in reality, nobody has. I often ask myself, ‘Why me? Why was I chosen to be the first cruiserweight champion of the world?’ I come from a town of 1,500 people, Ronan, Montana, and I’ve won two world titles. There are towns, there are states, there are countries with millions of people that have never won a world championship.”

He wants to share his love of the sport with people in his home. Although Camel has retired to Florida, his brother Ken, also a former professional boxer, wants to start a youth boxing club on the reservation.

Marvin Camel wants to help him with that goal.

“Kenny can give them the ups and downs, the ins and outs,” Camel says, “but there’s one little step he’s got to take that he hasn’t, and I have. He can’t teach them to become a world champion, but I can.”

Gwen Florio

Marvin Camel

World champion Salish boxer brings event home to Flathead Indian Reservation

First Nations eager to use new cross-border status cards
Some First Nations in the Yukon are ready to try secure new Indian status cards, but federal officials have chiefs to list concern before before a pilot program begins, the CBC reports here. The idea is that the card will make it easier for First Nations members to cross the Canada-U.S. border. The cards are to be tested in Yukon communities near Alaska.

Little Shell opposition plans election to replace tribal council
Leaders of an opposition faction within Montana’s Little Tribe of Chippewa Indians are planning an election to replace the existing Tribal Council, the Associated Press reports here. The tribe recently was denied federal recognition, but has long been recognized by the state of Montana.

Gwen Florio

Bud Moran (CSKT photo)

“Any member of the council, if they feel up to it, can make a run for it,” Moran, a Vietnam veteran who is halfway through his council term, told Vince Devlin of the Missoulian (Mont.) here. “I felt James is a good man who I have nothing against. I just wanted a chance to serve as chairman.”

Moran says his priorities will include energy and water rights issues.

Meanwhile, Devlin has also learned that Luana K. Ross will head Salish Kootenai College, taking over from Joe McDonald, who built the school from a small satellite institution offering a few junior college credits in borrowed high school classrooms into the most successful tribal college in America.

She’ll take over July 1, he reports here.

Ross, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, is currently associate professor of Indian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
BOCK

She is also co-director of UW’s Native Voices, a graduate program where students, faculty and independent producers create documentaries about indigenous peoples, and author of “Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality.”

In the forward to the 1998 book, which investigated the high rates of imprisonment of American Indians, Ross recalls growing up across the street from the old tribal jail near Dixon in the 1950s, and how almost every family had seen one or more of its members jailed at some point.

“People from my reservation simply seemed to vanish and magically return,” she wrote, including her godfather, a “wonderfully brilliant man” who had trained to be a Jesuit priest, yet had been imprisoned four times in his life.

“How could this possibly happen to a well-educated, spiritual person?” Ross asked.

Gwen Florio

Scientist and artist Josh Marceau creates jewelry in his basement. (Linda Thompson/Missoulian)

Here’s a young man whose accomplishments, at such an early age, make us feel both impressed and …exhausted!

Only 25, Josh Marceau is a University of Montana doctoral student whose photo already hangs on the wall of fame at the Native American Research Laboratory in UM. Marceau, who is Salish, got his bachelor’s degree at Penn Sate and then came home to Montana – after turning down prestigious graduate programs.

“Turning down Dartmouth and Washington was hard, but it was the right choice,” Marceau tells the Missoulian’s Betsy Cohen. “I want to end up back here, I want to teach at the tribal college.”

Oh, and did we mention his jewelry business? Check it out here, on etsy.com. And read Cohen’s entire story here, or below:

One of Marceau's pendants.

The flame burns hot, and within a few moments, the magical transformation takes place.

“I think it’s my favorite part about jewelry making,” said Marceau, grinning. “I never get tired of watching the melting part.”

This alchemy takes place most evenings in a basement apartment where Marceau lives with his wife, Ellen. Here, the 25-year-old artist creates pendants, earrings, rings and other lovely items which he sells on the artisan Web site, www.etsy.com.

By night, he draws inspiration from heartfelt sources: his love for Montana’s natural beauty, Ellen’s love of Celtic designs, his life experiences growing up in Ronan, his Salish heritage.

By day, Marceau is a University of Montana doctoral student who spends most of his time in a chemistry lab, pursuing his degree in biomedical science, and helping to understand and cure human diseases.

“It’s hard to separate the two – chemistry and art,” Marceau said as he carefully poured the liquid silver into a bear-claw mold, which he crafted from the real thing.

“They are so closely fused.”

Marceau is a rising star in this specialized field where chemistry and biology come together, and already has a place on the wall of fame in the Native American Research Laboratory at UM.

It is here that he works on a NASA-funded research project studying extreme organisms to better understand the limits at which life can exist.

Collected from volcanic hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, these ancient, rare life forms may one day help scientists like Marceau unlock the mysteries of viruses.

That Marceau toils at such unique work, and does so with infectious intellectual curiosity, comes as no surprise to those who have watched his evolution from childhood to scientist-artist.

It all makes some kind of sense, said Marceau’s father, Lawrence, a residential counselor at Kicking Horse Job Corps Center in Ronan.

Like the self-repeating patterns found in molecules, snowflakes and Celtic designs, which Marceau finds so intriguing, the scientist’s own natural proclivities have long been obvious.

“Josh started reading the backs of shampoo bottles at an early age,” Lawrence said. “And he was always really interested in what went into things.”

At 16, Marceau, who was a home-school student, worked into a full-time job at BFI, where he was in charge of the safety data sheets and keeping current with any dangerous chemicals the garbage collectors might come in contact with.

There, he become proficient with blowtorches and fixing broken diesel equipment.

“I always knew I wanted to go to college, so I worked full time and took a class at Salish Kootenai College every quarter, and saved my money for college,” Marceau said. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I decided to take a physics class, which led me to a chemistry class, and my chemistry instructor was also teaching silversmithing, so I took that as an elective.”

As one interest led to another, Marceau continued to reveal his knack for science.

“I was pleasantly surprised when Josh and his brother, Caleb, came into my physics class at SKC,” said Michael Ceballos. “Most students who come into the class don’t have a strong math and science background.

“But these two brothers worked really hard, did all the homework, showed up for class and did really well. I was really impressed by them.”

So impressed, Ceballos hired the brothers in 2006 to help him build the country’s first-ever Molecular Biology and Biophysics Research Lab at a tribal college.

“I remember telling Josh that I didn’t know what he was getting paid at BFI, but that I could get pretty close to that amount,” Ceballos said.

Marceau remembers not dwelling on his answer.

“It was great deal for me,” he said. “To get paid to be in a laboratory seemed like a good deal.”

With the lab up and running, the brothers helped Ceballos get a huge project under way – a federally funded study of a feline virus similar to HIV.

The experience led Marceau to nationally recognized research and awards.

“Once I started doing that work, I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “But SKC only had a two-year program and Michael really encouraged me and Caleb to go on and get our bachelor’s degrees.”

Inspired by Ceballos, Marceau found the confidence and direction to continue his intellectual exploration.

Both he and Caleb were among two of the nation’s seven standout science students to land a prestigious National Institutes of Health scholarship.

The award gave Marceau $20,000 a year to get his bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Penn State.

It was a big move – far from the life he knew – but it allowed him to work with some of Ceballos’ colleagues and collaborate on projects from afar with his mentor as the Native American Research Laboratory moved to UM.

When he went east, Ellen went with him, and so did his silversmithing tools.

There, he taught his new friends how to make jewelry – how to transform solid silver chunks into liquid and liquid into solid.

“A lot of my designs came out of experiments – of thinking what would happen if I did things differently,” he said. “And most of my designs came from learning what happens to certain metals when you provide different stressors – when you heat something up and cool it down and heat it up again.”

“It was a great stress relief, and great thing to do in the winter there,” Marceau said of his jewelry-making hobby. “I got a lot of inspiration from vines there, because that’s what grew there, but it was good because vines sort of go well with Celtic designs because they are simple repeating designs with graceful curves.”

In and around the bench science and the artistry, Marceau’s work again caught people’s attention.

Custom orders started rolling in for his jewelry, and powerhouse universities starting recruiting Marceau to join their post-graduate and doctoral programs.

Dartmouth, the University of Washington and others came calling. Penn State didn’t want him to go, Ceballos said.

“Josh comes from a close-knit family and he wanted to come home,” Ceballos said. “And we wanted him to be a part of NARL at UM.”

Professionally, it was as good a choice as any Marceau had before him, because the heady NASA-funded and National Science Foundation research the UM lab is working on will propel Marceau’s career, Ceballos said.

Marceau is now in the first semester of his five-year doctoral program. When he’s finished with his academic work Ceballos hopes his student will leave again for more learning – and then come back for good.

“I would like to see Josh come back and help increase the level of science students in tribal colleges,” Ceballos said, “or take over as director here.”

Josh likes the plan he hears spill from Ceballos.

It’s an expectation the two have hammered out for his future, one that he wholeheartedly embraces.

Yet, of all the people in his life, Marceau is the one who seems most surprised by how things have turned out.

“I never dreamed it would go this way,” Marceau said.

“Turning down Dartmouth and Washington was hard, but it was the right choice,” he said. “I want to end up back here, I want to teach at the tribal college.”

If the lessons of science hold true, then Marceau will follow his pattern, coming full circle to Ronan.

There, he will teach chemistry and inspire his students through silversmithing, just as his instructors inspired him.

“I think silversmithing puts the fun back into chemistry,” Marceau said. “It gives chemistry a sense of discovery.

“It’s great to learn theory, but to actually apply it and make something beautiful out of raw materials is really great.”

Reach reporter Betsy Cohen at (406) 523-5253 or by e-mail at bcohen@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Linda Thompson at (406) 523-5270 or at lthompson@missoulian.com.

Marie Cowen's life story is about more than the Thanksgiving dinner she started for hundreds of people, more than about the thousands of teddy bears she collects. Read on. (Tom Bauer/Missoulian)

Marie Cowen, of the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, has seen more than her share of sorrow – starting with her removal from the reservation at the age of 9, when she was sent to boarding school in South Dakota.

Vince Devlin of the Missoulian follows the twists and turns of her story far better than we could do. Read it here. It’s a great kickoff to Thanksgiving week:

RONAN – This started out as a feature story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner and the 82-year-old woman, Marie Cowen, who started it a dozen years ago.

When you walk through the door of Cowen’s home, however, it’s hard to see the turkeys for the bears.

Cowen, it turns out, has been collecting teddy bears for 15 years, buying most of them at garage sales, and to say she’s taken her hobby seriously doesn’t begin to cover it.

The bears are everywhere in Cowen’s little home off Terrace Lake Road east of town, every shape, size and color you can imagine, on virtually every shelf, table and wall in the place – somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 of them, she estimates.

“If you want to count them, go ahead,” she says.

She and a granddaughter once tried, beginning with the teddy bears in Cowen’s bedroom.

“When we got to 2,100, I said, ‘Enough,’ ” Cowen says.

They weren’t even done with the first room.

She wanted to start collecting 15 years ago, and had a reason for doing so. But what she wanted to collect, she didn’t know.

Cowen says she was rummaging through items at a garage sale one day when she stumbled on a cardboard box filled with stuffed teddy bears and a sign – 25 cents apiece.

“I said, ‘I think I’ll try bears,’ ” she says. “There can’t be that many kinds, and I only want one of each.”

Seven thousand to 8,000 mostly different bears later – just a few of the bears were purchased as sets of twins – and Cowen can tell you there seems to be no limit to the varieties of teddy bears in the world.

But, like we said, this began as a story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner Cowen started in 1997, and that story is as interesting as her overflowing teddy bear collection.

Cowen was born in St. Ignatius, but was taken from the Flathead Indian Reservation in 1935 as a 9-year-old and placed in a boarding school in South Dakota.

“They wanted to make a white woman out of me,” she says, but adds that she loved the school. She returned to the reservation, married young, but her third child was born prematurely and with polio. Doctors told Cowen and her husband the girl needed a moister climate, so the family moved to Oregon.

Cowen lived in Portland for 47 years, and didn’t make her way home to Montana until the 1990s.

She opened Marie’s Café – now the Ronan Café – in 1997.

“I was old enough to retire when I started it,” says the grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of four, and that first year she decided to cook up a free Thanksgiving dinner for some of her customers.

“There were probably 25 or 30 people I figured had no place to go,” she explains, “so I put up a sign.”

Cowen says there was a blizzard that first Thanksgiving, when she bought three turkeys big enough to feed 35 people in case a few more showed up than she expected.

A few more?

“They were lined up around the block,” she says. “I ran out of turkey and trimmings real fast. We were down to licking the bottom of the bowls. I turned on the grill, and made hamburgers for everyone else. I don’t know how many people we had that first year, but it was well over 150.”

The unexpected response not only didn’t deter Cowen, it convinced her that a lot of people didn’t have anywhere to go over the holidays.

So a month later, Cowen did it again, offering a free Christmas dinner – and this time cooking half a dozen turkeys and two or three hams, as well as everything else, from salads to pies.

She did both again the following year, but the dinners became so popular they got to be too much for her.

“They were just too close together, and too much work,” she says, “so I dropped the Thanksgiving dinner, and just did Christmas for the next seven years. By the last one, I knew how old I was getting. I’m glad I’m short, because my bottom’s close to the floor for when it hits the ground.”

On her last holiday dinner – the event had long since been moved to a community center – Cowen served more than 900 people.

She spent a week making all the salads, potatoes and pies, cooked 19 “huge” turkeys – the largest one a 49-pound bird, donated by an area farmer, that required a custom-built baking tray – and 17 hams.

“People don’t have family around like they used to,” Cowen says. “Their kids grow up and move out of state because we don’t have the work here. I think it’s the loneliness that gets to them. Really, I think they mostly came for the companionship. I could have served them bread and water, and they still would have enjoyed it.”

But – the cheeseburgers on that first Thanksgiving notwithstanding – a complete holiday meal they always got.

In return, Marie Cowen got the memories.

There was the father who showed up with three small children one Christmas Day.

“The kids were all so neat and clean,” Cowen says. “I asked them, ‘Was Santa Claus good to you?’ ”

Their heads, she says, all dropped. One of them softly told her, “Santa Claus didn’t come to our house this year.”

Their father pulled Cowen aside and explained. Their mother had abandoned the children three or four days earlier, and they had been placed in foster homes. The father, who lived in Washington, had come to get them as quickly as he could, and had arrived Dec. 25. Someone at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Headquarters told him if he wanted to feed the kids that day, Marie Cowen was the woman to find.

“I felt this high,” says Cowen – who only stands 4-foot-10 1/2 as it is. (”I like that half-inch,” she says later. “I need it.”)

“Well, I was about ready to cry,” she goes on. “I passed the hat, and everybody donated money to help them get home. Then we packed them a big lunch to take with them.”

Somehow, she also found a toy for each child.

A few years later, Cowen was walking down the street in Ronan. She kept hearing someone call her name, but when she turned, she saw no one she recognized.

Finally, the man caught up to her. It was the father of the children.

“He gave me a big hug, and told me that was the best Christmas they ever had,” she says. “The kids never forgot it.”

Those are the stories that kept Cowen going. But as the crowds approached 1,000 and Cowen approached the age of 80, she decided it was time to retire.

Others eventually stepped in and revived the community Thanksgiving feed Cowen had started back in 1997. This Thursday, the Ronan Community Volunteers and Ronan Area Chamber of Commerce expect several hundred people for dinner at the Ronan Community Center.

Back to the bears, which you can’t ignore, even while Cowen talks turkey.

She may not know how many bears she has, but she knows every bear she has.

“You lose your key?” she asked a grandson one day.

Indeed, the boy had, and had hoisted himself through his grandmother’s bedroom window to get back in the house.

“How’d you know?” he asked.

“You knocked some bears off the shelf when you climbed through my window,” she told him.

“But I put them all back,” he protested.

“Not,” Cowen said, “in the right order.”

Move a single bear – and sometimes her children do, just to mess with her – and Cowen will know it. When neighborhood children bring friends over to show them the collection, the kids warn their pals not to be tempted to sneak one out with them because “the bear lady” will know if even the smallest one has gone missing.

The stuffed teddy bears, Cowen discovered, also serve as remarkable insulation. Her house stays toasty warm, and the loudest party or siren outside can’t be heard inside.

The teddy bear collection has its genesis in a sad story. Cowen lost two of her five children in 1999, both to alcohol and drugs. Diana died in January of that year; John in September.

The idea to start collecting something – anything – had been born five years earlier, Cowen says, as a mother-daughter project she hoped would give Diana a new focus.

“It was so hard to watch her kill herself with booze,” Cowen says, and while Diana did join in the hobby, she didn’t quit drinking.

Her surviving children wonder what they’ll do with the thousands of bears once Cowen is gone.

“My son Bill asked, ‘What are we supposed to do with these when you die?’ ” Cowen says. “I told him, ‘I’m going to leave them all to you, for all the mean things you did to me when you were young.’ ”

That, one hopes, is a long ways off. Meantime, Marie Cowen remains either the easiest, or hardest, woman in the world to shop for.

Easy? Just get her a teddy bear.

Hard?

It has to be one she doesn’t already own.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or vdevlin@missoulian.com.

“Fried bread, sweat lodges and Nintendo Wii”
That headline in the Sioux City Journal grabbed us. What the heck was it all about? Turns out to be this story about students at the Augustine Indian Mission School on the Winnebago Indian Reservation south of in Sioux City, Iowa. They were talking about how they’d celebrate Thanksgiving.

Tribes see loss of oil, natural gas royaltiess
Here’s a worrisome Bloomberg News story that says: “plunging oil and natural gas prices and a drop in revenue from lease sales cut the money sent by the United States to tribes, states and the Treasury Department by more than half in fiscal 2009. “Lower energy prices drove down royalties and sapped industry demand for leases,” it says.

McK'la Gonzalez

Gwen Florio

Yolanda Page reads to her 4-year-old daughter, Kooper, from a book given to her by the StoryMakers program. (Tom Bauer/Missoulian)

It’s a pretty simple equation: Kids who read – or are read to – early and often do better in school. But that can be hard to achieve in far-flung tribal communities, where poverty and geography conspire against it.

Enter – at least in Montana – the StoryMakers program, which puts children’s books in the hands of families in both reservations and rural communities.

“Buying books for your children in today’s economy, when people are struggling to keep the lights on, their houses warm, buy food … this gives them the opportunity to have something they can share with their child,” says Jeanne Christopher, director of Early Childhood Services for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation.

As the Missoulian’s Vince Devlin tells it, here, Christopher is part of several “citizen teams” StoryMakers use to get a new slew of books in the hands of an average of 6,000 children in Montana every six months.

For more information on the StoryMakers program on the Flathead Indian Reservation, contact Jeanne Christopher or Malissa Morigeau at (406) 676-4509.

Gwen Florio