This is not the Ivy League: A Memoir by Mary Clearman

Abstract

 Reviews referencestothediverse tribesandbandsandto the government’s forced concentration of them within the reservation during the late 1800s. Although Arnold’s personal opposition to termination is apparent, she mostly adheres, with admirable discipline, to a position of respect for all sides of the debate. At certain points, readers might benefit from a more pointed exposition of the confusions and contradictions that ran through many protermination arguments.But non-Indian scholars like myself might reflect on Arnold’s tacit modeling of the old cultural value, shared and noted throughout the Plateau region,of respect toward fellow tribal members, even at times of fundamental disagreement. As the author notes, this traditional standard of behavior often was sorely absent during the termination struggle. The net effect of Arnold’s narrative strategy may be that future generations of Colvilles, and future generations of scholars, will see this book not only as a valuable work of tribal history but also as a document of Colville cultural continuity. Thompson Smith Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir by Mary Clearman University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. 222 pages. $24.95 paper. Readers encountering Mary Clearman Blew for the first time will find much to enjoy in these loosely connected essays chronicling the author’s childhood on a ranch on Montana’s Highline, her forays into various outposts of academe, and her complex, sometimes tortured , family relationships. Readers familiar with Blew’s earlier memoirs, especially All But the Waltz (1991) and Balsamroot (1994), will retrace some familiar territory but will learn more details and gather fresh insights. Like writers such asWallace Stegner,Ivan Doig,and William Kittredge, Blew memorably evokes western places and landscapes. She is also notable for her perceptive character sketches and her ironic, mocking (sometimes selfmocking ) tone. I took a personal interest in Blew’s descriptions of her undergraduate years at the University of Montana,as I arrived there just after she left.There was no similarity in our private lives — she was experiencing marriage and motherhood while I was cloistered in a dorm — but we both studied English and Latin and had some of the same professors. Additionally, she reminded me of the pleasures and idiocies of being a woman undergraduate in Missoula in the early 1960s. (But did we really have to wear heels, hose, and a hat on Sundays? Surely not!) After leaving Missoula, Blew went to graduate school at the University of Missouri and then had a brief sojourn in Bellevue, Washington. While her husband taught junior high and her children were in school, Blew felt trapped in one of“those anonymous apartment buildings within a labyrinth of freeways” (p. 3). Salvation of a sort was offered by Northern Montana University in Havre. When Blew nervously arrived for an interview,“in her dark green linen dress and her teased hair and her false eyelashes,” it turned out that“news of the PhD glut ha[d]n’t reached northern Montana,” and the chair of the English Department was desperate to hire someone — anyone, even a woman — with a doctorate to help the department keep its accreditation (p. 9). He hoped Blew would be willing to come to that stark backwater, not realizing that she had grown up in a similar landscape: “endless shades of gray. Sagebrush on low hills and cutbanks, shadows of clouds, emptiness between earth and sky” (p. 8). Like many such institutions, Northern was chronically underfunded and understaffed and had something of an inferiority complex for  OHQ vol. 114, no. 1 being so isolated. (“This is not the Ivy League, you know,” said one of her new colleagues, thus providing this book with its title.) The college, however, did have the saving grace of solid teaching, and Blew was satisfied enough in that respect,although she had a keen eye for the foibles of her colleagues.There was the sexist chair of the department,“for whom women did not exist in academe”except as“useful takers of notes,” who was fond of rolling his eyes and asking, “What do women want?” (p. 102) There was “plump, chuckling Mr. Keller, puffing on his pipe, who taught British literature...