Page 23 - 2020 Russell Catalogue

C.M. Russell Heritage Award
dAvid Mccullough
Literature
chief eARl old PeRSon
Statesmanship
David McCullough has had a long and distinguished career as an author, historian, narrator, and lecturer. His books possess the dual attributes of painstaking scholarship and unparalleled accessibility. To read a David McCullough book is step through a doorway into the past.
Photo courtesy of Great Falls Tribune
Chief Earl Old Person
has been an impassioned ambassador for the Blackfeet Tribe. At the urging of tribal elders in 1954, Old Person ran for and was elected to his first term as a tribal council member. At only twenty- five, he was, and still is, the youngest tribal member ever elected to the Blackfeet tribe’s most powerful legislative body.
McCullough is a two- time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Truman and John
Adams, both of which have been adapted by HBO for a television film and a miniseries, respectively. He has also
won the National Book Award twice, first for The Path Between the Seas, which describes the creation of the Panama Canal, and second for Mornings on Horseback, which tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt,
the twenty-sixth President of the United States. The latter title also won McCullough his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries, including The Civil War by Ken Burns, and the 2003 film Seabiscuit.
“I think it’s important to remember that these men are not perfect,” McCullough stated regarding John Adams. “If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn’t be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.”1
Between 1964 and 1969, Old Person won his first seat as chairman of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, became president of the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest, and served for two years as president of the National Congress of American Indians, a pan-tribal organization founded in 1944 to combat the U.S. government’s termination and assimilation policies.
Old Person’s appointment as chief of the Blackfeet is his most humbling and personally gratifying achievement. According to the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the last principal chief of the Blackfeet, Chief White Calf, died in 1903. During a formal ceremony in 1978, the family of James White Calf bestowed the tribal chieftainship upon Old Person.
Old Person has remained a tireless advocate for the advancement of the Blackfeet people. The University of Montana has awarded him an honorary doctorate of human letters and endowed a $5,000 scholarship in his name for Blackfeet students attending the university. In 1998, he received the Jeannette Rankin Civil Liberties Award. One year later, the University of Lethbridge awarded him the first Christine Miller Memorial Award for Excellence in Native American Studies.
When he retired in 2016, Old Person had held public office for fifty-six years, longer than any other elected official in Montana history.
David McCullough received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, in 2006. His most recent title, The Pioneers, published in 2019,
tells the story of the first European American settlers of
the Northwest Territory.
Todd Leopold, “David McCullough brings ‘John Adams’ to Life,” June 7, 2001, CNN, http://edition1.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/ books/06/07/david.mccullough/index.html.
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