1. WHO WAS CHARLES M. RUSSELL’S BLACKFOOT NAMESAKE?

Charles Russell - A Piegan Flirtation

On February 20, 1917, Russell F. Tharp was born in the wake of this western expansion and in the midst of the allotment period. His parents, Josephine Wright and George Fredrick Tharp, resided in Polson, Montana on the Flathead Reservation. Ironically, Russell Tharp was not Kootenai or Salish, but instead because he was a child of Blackfoot Josephine Wright Tharp, he was a member of the Blackfoot nation, specifically the South Piegan Band (Amskapi Pikunni). Genealogically, Josephine’s side of the family was South Piegan, and Russell’s great grandmother, Mary Ahkahtah (Blown-Up) who was a full-blooded Piegan, is reported to have been the sister of Black Weasel, the “last civil chief of the Blackfoot Tribe.

Fred and Josephine named their son Russell after their close and dearest friend Charles M. Russell (Charlie), a Western painter and Montana resident. Their close relationship began when C. M. Russell and his wife, Nancy Russell, housed Josephine through her high school days in Polson. The possibility that Josephine was attending boarding school on the Flathead Reservation might explain why she was living in their home. The Tharp relationship with C. M. Russell lasted until Charlie’s death in 1926.

Russell Tharp (left) and Jack Russell (Nancy and
Charlie Russell's son)

Although Fred and Josephine raised Russell on the Flathead Reservation, Russell never became incorporated into the tribe. In the early years implementing the reservation system, the membership of the Flathead Reservation included all people living within the border of the reservation. In 1910, the federal government gained control of determining tribal membership on the Flathead reservation. According to the policies of the Dawes Act, all tribal members received allotments of land up to 160 acres. The descendants of these landowners then became the only members of the tribe. Therefore, Russell could never become a member of the Flathead Reservation despite spending his entire adolescent life among the “true” Flathead Indians.

Russell, however, did find membership on the Blackfoot Reservation. The blood relations of his mother gave him immediate acceptance into the tribe. In his youth, he was given the Indian name of A-put-skinny-suke-mopi cowboy) at a Powwow in Browning, Montana. Although Russell was extremely proud of his heritage, he refrained from expressing his cultural and spiritual attachments to the Blackfoot Reservation.

The suppression of these family ties can be attributed to social influences during his childhood and teenage years in Montana. Many of the Native Americans born at the beginning of the twentieth-century faced major cultural, economic and social changes. Federal policy, missionaries, and education programs stimulated these changes. Assimilation and cultural genocide agendas of missionaries and federal education programs played a key role in forming the psyche of this new generation of Native Americans. Scattered throughout the West, classrooms of missions and boarding schools acted as the locus of social influence.

Written by Dr. Clancy J. Clark