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Alternations between ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ verbs in Blackfoot signal neither an aspectual shift nor the addition or suppression of internal arguments. Rather, ‘transitive’ morphology formally licenses DP objects; ‘intransitive’ morphology allows NP, CP, or no object. The relevant morphology, which constitutes v, also determines animacy and theta‐role of the external argument.

This chapter explores the important biopolitical role that listening to the sounds of the other has played in the twentieth and early twenty-first world music culture industry (WMCI), in both its academic and commercial guises. It examines bodies as sites through which the other’s sounds resonate, and the deeply libidinized practice of listening that American consumers have been trained in through the technological developments of the last hundred years. Through its increasing domestication by the gramophone industry and the ascension of the bourgeois woman, the target market for the machine’s home use, chapter one also argues that the WMCI is intimately tied to the feminization of listening. I examine the domestication of sound both among collectors and among listeners as a process that brought Native and African American noises under discursive control, rendering them legible “phonographic subjects.” This practice fed the desires of feminized, domesticated listeners who not only sought exotic sounds on the phonographs that replaced the pianos in their parlors, but also a new domesticated other on whom the white female listener had a social leg up.

Dogs played an important role in the social, cultural, and economic life of peoples inhabiting the Northwestern Plains of North America for thousands of years. Despite functioning as pack animals, guards, religious figures, and even companions, dogs were never as integral to Blackfoot culture as the horse became. To date, researchers have most often characterized the relationship of Blackfoot people and their horses by framing the horse as an “upgraded model”—a “new and improved” dog. While prior experience with domesticated dogs did help facilitate the incorporation of horses into the daily lives of the Blackfoot people, this chapter argues that it is the fundamental differences between dogs and horses that prove to be one of the greatest sources of cultural change between the pre- and postcontact periods. Through a framework that integrates archaeology, history, and contemporary ethnography this chapter identifies these key differences in order to better understand how the horse fostered new and dramatically different conceptions of domesticated animals that in turn had significant effects on the use and value of dogs within equestrian Blackfoot culture.

This chapter engages with the short film Bihttoš (Rebel, Canada and Norway, 2014), by the Sámi and Kainai Blackfoot filmmaker Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, as a cinematic invocation of multiple elsewheres. Set in the three settler states of Norway, the United States, and Canada, this film is not about those states. Instead, it narrates an Indigenous story situated elsewhere from the spheres of mainstream, settler culture that are often the presumed standards. In this sense, Bihttoš is not so much Canadian and Norwegian as it is Sámi and Kainai/First Nations–or, indeed, trans-Indigenous. The film’s vision is divided between one colonized Indigenous space (the Blood Reserve) and a parallel but distinct experience of colonialism elsewhere (Sápmi), and the experimental documentary traces the ways that these geographically disparate experiences inscribe themselves on the same individual: the Sámi/Blackfoot “Elle-Máijá”.

This chapter explores the historical relationship between Indigenous Americans and wolves illustrated through the stories of Indigenous peoples of North America, especially on the Great Plains and the Intermountain West. Tribal accounts have not been previously employed in scholarly examinations of the origins of “dogs” or studies of domestication. All the Plains tribes examined closely (Cheyenne, Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee, Shoshone) have stories characterizing wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that directly taught or showed humans how to hunt, creating reciprocal relationships in which each species provided food for the other or shared food. Indeed, evidence from tribes suggests a coevolutionary reciprocal relationship between Homo sapiens and American Canis lupus that existed until at least the nineteenth century.

This chapter emphasizes the diversity in the licensing environments of the subjunctive and concludes that the subjunctive is not a natural class in terms of one modality, or one type of subjunctive crosslinguistically. The author argues that it is not possible to define the subjunctive as a category on the basis of a predictable, uniform interpretation or form. Wiltschko points out that the fact that the subjunctive is not a universally uniform category indicates that it might be more promising to a develop a formal typology for categories that is not based on their substantive content or traditional categorical distinctions. In the case of subjunctive, Wiltschko suggests that what unifies the subjunctive across languages is that they contrast with the independent assertive clause-type represented by the [+coin] (coincidence) feature. This feature may be valued through different strategies across languages.

This essay looks at nineteenth-century treaty-making between Blackfoot peoples and the U.S. and Canadian governments. All parties initially saw treaties as assertions of their own sovereignty over the Northwest Plains. Hall argues that the two treaty regimes were interrelated in significant ways and that the human costs of the transformation of Canadian and American sovereignty in this period were ultimately devastating for Blackfoot peoples in both economic and cultural terms (an outcome they did not foresee or believe they had agreed to).

This chapter establishes that not all languages have a grammaticized mass/count distinction and consequently we have to distinguish between ontological properties associated with nouns and categorical properties associated with a functional category dominating these nouns. It is argued that the categorical properties associated with the mass/count distinction are tied to a functional category identified as nominal inner aspect. This category can host the feature responsible for the mass/count distinction (i.e, [± bounded]). It is further shown that languages lacking a categorical mass/count distinction come in at least two varieties. They can lack the functional category which may host the [±bounded] feature (Halkomelem). Alternatively, they can associated a different feature with inner aspect. In particular, it is shown that in Blackfoot [±animate] associates with inner aspect. Consequently, in this language, it is animacy, rather than mass/count which serves as the nominal classification device.

This chapter explores the concept of contemporary rock-art making as a form of repatriation. According to Blackfoot culture the making of rock art is considered a sacred act that involves communication with the spirit world. Current policies help protect existing, tangible rock art, but at the expense of continuing the intangible heritage of communicating with the spirit world. Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is in the process of creating a new policy which would allow the making of contemporary rock art in a traditional sense.

Outside the mainstream of North American archaeology and academic anthropology, a few of Franz Boas’s students listened humbly to Indian people in their communities, instead of sitting in hotel rooms querying selected men from a schedule of topics. Frank Speck (1881-1950) was one of these; his student Claude E. Schaeffer mentored Tom Kehoe to listen to Blackfoot people as guides and teachers for archaeology in their homeland. I learned from Tom when I married him and we collaborated in archaeology.

This chapter describes how a rural agricultural community in the Blackfoot River watershed in Montana used collaborative decision making to reduce conflicts with grizzly bears. Through effective communication, regular meetings, and partnerships, a host of on-the-ground projects were implemented through the Blackfoot Challenge, a grassroots watershed group, that significantly reduced conflicts with grizzly bears. The effort focused on changing people's practices and behaviors, not changing their value systems, and emphasized protecting human safety and livelihoods. The chapter explores the specific ways that collaborative decision making was carried out and offers numerous field-based lessons and recommendations that will be useful to natural resource managers in facilitating human-grizzly bear coexistence.

Violence across the Prairies helped to develop new ideas about border control and made them possible. Canadian and American conceptions of territory required erasing all other pre-existing forms of territorial organization. That process relied on a kind of violence and suffering that occurred in parallel to warfare. Erasure of Lakota, Dakota, Cree, and Métis boundaries became possible as famine, drought, deprivation, and demographic disruption forged a new order across the West. In the span of only a few decades, the geopolitics of thousands of miles of territory shifted. In 1874, Canada and the United States had just finished surveying and placing boundary markers across the Plains. Less than two decades later, the Canada–US border had become one of the most significant boundaries in the region.

Two neighboring Algonquian languages, Blackfoot and Plains Cree, differ as to how spatial expressions are represented structurally. Blackfoot it- is an adpositional element occurring within the verbal complex, radically discontinuous from a location-denoting DP; Plains Cree -ihk is an adpositional suffix to a DP, with which it forms a morphological unit. This chapter argues that the contrasting behavior of those morphemes is a function of two factors: (i) which head of the adpositional extended projection each morpheme realizes; (ii) whether or not they have undergone a transcategorial shift—dubbed “mutation”—in the lexicon. This mutation approach applies, for example, to the [PERSON] nature of Blackfoot INFL and to the [TENSE] use of source-denoting Plains Cree adposition ohci and its occurrence within the verbal complex. The emergent category status of adpositions is implicated, too.

In Blackfoot, a Plains Algonquian language spoken in Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA, sentience, rather than telicity, is a primary determinant of argument structure. Subjects of transitive verbs, non-core objects of transitive verbs (benefactives, malefactives, sources, etc.), and primary objects of ditransitive verbs are all subject to a strict sentience requirement. This chapter follows Ritter and Wiltschko (2015) in assuming that the strict sentience requirements on argument structure are part of the grammar (i.e. part of the “narrow syntax”) of Blackfoot, and formalizes sentience as a feature that is subject to selection, a feature-checking operation, much like AGREE. This proposal correctly predicts that (a) not only agents but also causers must be sentient in Blackfoot; (b) sentient objects (not bounded ones) serve as both initiators and delimiters of events; (c) like event types, nominal types are distinguished by sentience, rather than boundedness; and (d) eventiveness is correlated with sentience, rather than dynamicity.

This chapter contrasts two methods of creating an elicitation plan. The no-nonsense method results in an elicitation plan in which the consultant is systematically presented with context-utterance minimal pairs, with no attempt at making a narrative connection between succeeding examples. This methodology maximizes the elicitor’s for collecting true minimal pairs, but is often boring and mentally straining on the language consultant. The second method embeds the context-utterance minimal pairs in a natural, overarching storyline. This method often induces pragmatic and stylistic flairs on the part of the language consultant (and hence is less successful at collecting true minimal pairs). This chapter argues that the second type of elicitation plan is nonetheless preferable, as it (i) yields stronger and more reliable judgments and (ii) is better at detecting extra-sentential factors that may affect a morpheme or construction’s truth/felicity judgments.