good health, bad health it's all the same to the Blackfeet Indians

good health, bad health it's all the same to the Blackfeet Indians

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

thoughts on " Obamacare health insurance"



Once the Blackfeet Indians of Montana would use the jumping routine to drive the buffalo over the side of a cliff. Everyone would drag and carry meat and bone back to camp or scrape, sort and puncture to make treated hides for tee-pees and new vestments or if they were a chief or medicine man get to eat some buffalo tongue, a real delicacy.

The ancient way of life changed drastically for the Blackfeet Indians of  Montana and Alberta Canada after the Europeans came to their homelands. The tribe became fierce and affiliated several times with other native Americans previously enemies or rivals but even when they got horses and rifles try as they might they couldn't adopt economically to the changes brought on by the onslaught of European settlers hungry for land and obsessed with making something of themselves in their new homeland.

Today the American portion of the Blackfeet Indians live on reservations and 95% of them live in poverty. The total living in poverty would be higher but luckily there is oil and gas under the land they live on resulting in the usual and customary divisions between rich and poor.

Good health, bad health it's all the same for the Blackfeet Indians these days. Poverty is a real drag. Everyday you get a little older and less able to cope with the changes coming at you but the good news is you don't have time to worry about small pox, or measles or other assaults on your immune system brought about by challenges to your health because you are in a running battle with the economic forces silently but obstreperously destroying your ancient way of life.