Montana's Worst Natural Disaster

28. West, Flood, 38. The normal discharge at the mouth of the Mississippi River is about 610,000 cubic feet per second.

29. By afternoon Superintendent Grissom was able to arrange for a plane to make an emergency survey to determine whether any survivors were still in need of rescue and to assess damages. He had also requested assistance from Malmstrom Air Force Base, but the weather was too bad for helicopters to fly. Ibid., 25, 28-30.

30. "Report on Civil Defense Activities in Montana during Flood 8-15 June 1964," typescript report by the Montana Office of Civil Defense, copy in MHS. White categorically stated, "The record also should make it clear that most of the destruction in the valley occurred before the dam broke." Bureau of Indian Affairs, "Blackfeet Flood," 22.

31. Norris, KSEN sound recording.

32. West, Flood, 15.

33. Bureau of Indian Affairs, "Blackfeet Flood," 32.

34. Ibid., 36.

35. Browning (Mont.) Glacier Reporter June 18, 25, 1964; West, Flood. The September 17, 1964, Browning Glacier Reporter announced that 129 new homes were under construction in Browning and were expected to be "installed on site" before winter.

36. Browning (Mont.) Glacier Reporter, June 18, 1964; Trish Kuka, assistant to Chief Earl Old Person, telephone conversation, August 11, 2003. Martha Hall's body was not found until July 15.

37. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 5. See Arnold Krupat's "Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature," in The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture (Lincoln, 1996), 30-54, for a detailed discussion of this process.

AARON PARRETT is assistant professor of English at the University of Great Falls. Ashgate Press recently published his The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition (2004), a critical history of narratives about traveling to the moon.

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