PackratNest - book review by Martin Murie
Review by Martin Murie
This is a book that had to be written, because if it hadn’t we would be left with an important gap in art history. Gaps are hard to fill with the real stuff: authenticity. This book is a work of authenticity. Two talented people, Bob Scriver and Mary Strachan met and married and for more than ten years worked together in and at the making of art from the ground up.
Bob, musician and band leader as a youth in Browning, had that feel for art; he could grasp the architecture of animal and human bodies from his life as hunter, horseman, taxidermist and western hands-on worker.
It was hard physical and mental work, casting bronze. The book is organized around precarious stages, from the first plastilene model to the final patina of that wonderful changeful metal, bronze. Each stage leading to the pour of hot, molten metal to the subtle working of the cooled bronze to bring out color and patina, form the armature of the book, but there are other themes too that move back and forth in time, small town daily life; the lives of white settlers on Blackfeet land; lives of Blackfeet men and women, the eastern world intruding.
I got lost in the genealogy sections. I always get lost in those places, but I picked up key relationships along the way and Mary’s comment on the small western town, my early habitat, got me into gear.
“Culture, especially in a small town, can be a hard mold, forcing compliance with local custom. But always there are fault lines, boundaries, visible and invisible, where the local norms are susceptible to being broken open.”
Mary, “still trying to be a writer,” had a column in the “Glacier Reporter” called the Merry Scribbler. When she exposed the mayor of Browning’s illegal extension of city water to his motel outside town limits, the mayor called Bob in, gave him an ultimatum. Make his wife quit writing or be fired from the magistrate’s job. “Get that woman under control.” Bob quit the magistrate job, but Mary quit her column too. Cont….

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