Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

"Look at My Hair, It is Gray":
Age Grading, Ritual Authority, and Political Change
among the Northern Arapahoes and Gros Ventres
ABSTRACT
The pre-1934 political developments among the
Gros Ventres of Montana and Northern Arapahoes
of Wyoming are compared to elucidate the
differing ways in which they responded to the
major political reorganization imposed upon
them. The divergent patterns of response reflect
differences between the tribes' age grade systems
in interplay with differing contact experiences.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.—My fieldwork and ethnohistorical
research on the Northern Arapahoes
was supported primarily by a Doris Duke grant
in 1969-1970, a grant from the Faculty Research
Foundation of CUNY in 1974-1975, a postdoctoral
fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution
in 1976-1977, and a postdoctoral fellowship from
the Center for the History of the American Indian,
Newberry Library, in 1977-1978. My fieldwork
and ethnohistorical research on the Gros
Ventres was supported by the American Philosophical
Society in 1979 and by a grant from the
National Institute on Aging in 1980.
Introduction
When the Northern Arapahoes of Wind River
Reservation in Wyoming and the Gros Ventres
Loretta Fowler, Department of Anthropology, City College of the City
University of New York, Convent Avenue and 138th Street, New
York, New York 10031.
Loretta Fowler
73
of Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana meet at
intertribal celebrations, they delight in the fact
that their dialects are mutually intelligible and
that they can often identify common ancestors.
But they may just as often remark on the apparent
differences in contemporary Gros Ventre and
Arapahoe ethos; for example, native political
leaders point to the contrasts in tribal politics.
Reservation superintendents also have indicated
that there was a basic contrast between Arapahoe
and Gros Ventre political behavior during the
twentieth century. By the time tribal government
was reorganized under the provisions of the Indian
Reorganization Act of 1934, the Gros
Ventres are viewed to have replaced traditional
political culture with Western representative democracy.
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials
attributed the change to extensive intermarriage
with Whites (Berry, 1973). On the other hand,
Arapahoes are portrayed as a people anxious to
"modernize" politically but unable to learn new
ways (Elkin, 1940). Differences between Gros
Ventres and Arapahoes offer the Plains scholar
an excellent opportunity for controlled comparison,
for these two peoples are of common origin
and once lived in much the same manner. However,
the observations of BIA personnel do not
explain adequately how and why the two tribes
differ politically. While it is apparent that by the
1930s clearcut differences existed between Gros
Ventre and Arapahoe political cultures, the differences
cannot be identified and understood in
terms of differential cultural or biological assim-