Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian’s Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice

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Description

In 1879, a Canadian Blackfoot referred to as Spopee, or Turtle, shot and killed a white man. Captured as a fugitive, Spopee narrowly escaped execution, as a substitute landing in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., where he fell silent. Spopee thus “disappeared” for more than thirty years, until a delegation of American Blackfeet found out him and, aided by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, exacted a pardon from President Woodrow Wilson. After re-emerging into society like a up to date-day Rip Van Winkle, Spopee spent the final year of his life at the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, in a world that had changed irrevocably from the only he had known before his confinement.

Blackfoot Redemption is the riveting account of Spopee’s bizarre and haunting story. To reconstruct the events of Spopee’s life—in the beginning traceable only through bits and pieces of information—William E. Farr conducted exhaustive archival research, digging deeply into government documents and institutional reports to build a coherent and accurate narrative and, through this reconstruction, win back one Indian’s life and identity.

In revealing both certainties and ambiguities in Spopee’s story, Farr relates a larger story about racial dynamics and prejudice, at the same time as poignantly evoking the turbulent final days of the buffalo-hunting Indians before their confinement, lack of freedom, and confusion that came with the wrenching transition to reservation life.

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