Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

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What I remember best about celebrating New Year’s Eve in the old, log, Round Hall at the fairground at Crow Agency is the pemmican: dried meat pounded into powder, mixed with sugar or honey, berries, fat or tallow, and squeezed into a hard lump. In the old days, and in some of the new, it was made with buffalo meat. The woman who gave me some, one long-ago New Year’s Eve, used dried beef. Sarah was grey-headed even then, a fierce and good friend. She told me my first raunchy Old Man Coyote story when I still believed that grandmas wouldn’t tell stories that could make a twenty-something blush.

The pemmican was such a treat that I almost burned-up the motor on my Cuisinart figuring out how to make it at home. One year I designed a health-food version with dried and shredded venison, buffalo and june berries, just a tinch of raw agave nectar and Rapidura sugar, saturated throughout with organic bacon fat. The result was crumbly but oh-so-good. My daughter Rose and I shared it with neighbors and friends. We saved some for ourselves. Rose favored the sweet june berry version and snuck it out of the refrigerator until it was gone. I preferred the bite of the batch flavored with buffalo berries.

I haven’t been back to the Crow Reservation for a New Year celebration in decades. When I asked Frank, Rose’s father and my former husband, about pemmican, he said that people who make it give it to clan uncles, or people they care for. It feels good to think of Sarah caring for me. I lost touch with her and she died some years ago. I have a photograph of her doing bead work at the Crow Arts and Crafts Coop where I met her. She taught me to bead that summer of 1974, the first I spent on the Crow reservation. Wednesdays we sold three dollar Indian Tacos to Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal workers, handing them out the sliding side window of a tiny white clapboard building in Crow Agency’s one-block downtown. Always while we worked she told me stories, befriending the young outsider, expanding my world view. Behind the silver-framed glasses she wore to help her see the tiny beads she used in her work, her eyes sparkled as she described the cache of gold lost in the Big Horn Mountains by a long-ago desperado, about the Little People and how they stopped a train over “to” the Pryor Mountains, or stories of people and places from her youth.

Frank says that the New Year really begins with Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, the point where the earth begins to wake toward spring and summer. Then, starting in the last days of December and continuing through New Year’s Eve there are dances at Crow Agency, community dances with pow-wow drumming, and feeds sponsored by each of the six on-reservation districts. The feeds I remember included meat, macaroni, coffee, and fry bread made with baking powder dough, not the grocery store freezer department dough most folks use now. The log Round Hall that Frank’s grandfather helped build has been torn down and there is a new multi-purpose building to hold the dances. I can’t picture it. I still remember the smoke-filled dusty dark of the Round Hall, the small interior stuffed full of people, their voices raised, laughing, everyone speaking Crow. And me, both a part of that and apart from it.

Each of the six nights before New Year there is still dancing and socializing, a remembering back to other times, to grannies and grandfathers, aunties and uncles, long gone. Each night there are people who “give away,” political and spiritual leaders, people in positions of authority, who thank their community for that honor by offering gifts like vibrant Pendleton blankets and fringed dance shawls to esteemed relatives, clan uncles, friends and colleagues.

On New Year’s Eve itself they don’t sing Auld Lang Singe, but a drum group will sing a round dance song. A round dance is just that – a big circle of people making a kind of sideways shuffle-step, moving in a clockwise rotation. When you round dance, you look around and see familiar faces, the varied faces of community, so that even if you’re a stranger, you know you’re a part of something larger than yourself, connected with this group you dance with. After midnight, after the round dance, the women and men form two separate lines that rotate past each other, face to face. They reach across to shake hands, or to kiss, “and whatever.” That’s what Frank said when I asked him to help me remember. I wanted to know about the “and whatever.” He laughed.

The point of this all, aside from the celebration of community, is to give thanks for life. Thanks for making it through another year’s challenges, for being perched on the cusp of another’s opportunities.

I think of New Year as more of a welcoming, calling forward a hope of new and better things. And then the year tips forward, minutes becoming hours becoming days and weeks, spinning season to season, a tide of inevitable change that carries me with it.

But that’s not why I wanted to share this story. I share it for the remembering of the pemmican and Sarah’s friendship. For the gifts that came and come to me from Crow. My daughter. The surprise of friendship with Frank after so many years of estrangement. So much that enriches the fabric of my life.

I tell it in honoring: it’s important, here in Montana, to remember the heritage of this reach of earth. In the midst of the astonishing influx of newcomers there are traditions much older than we, communities who bring their celebrations forward, generation to generation, in the best way they can, the old folks offering the young that context for who they are, teaching them about how to become good community members.

So, on this New Year’s Eve, eat good food. Laugh. Celebrate. At the same time, remember. Resonate with the rich and diverse heritage we have as human beings. Then take that knowing with you in to the New Year.

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