Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

Priorities

The Tribal Councils in 2021 and 2022 identified the top issues for the government to address.

Cultural values focuses on integrating traditional cultural values and languages into daily life. They work to foster business ownership among tribal members. They have the ability to direct necessary resources to combat homelessness, hunger, and addiction. They facilitate earning opportunities and jobs for tribal members. They have proclaimed climate change to be a risk and have multiple avenues for mitigation and adaptation. They can direct resources toward addressing mental health.

Early territory

The Flathead and the Pend d'Oreille both agree that the Flathead once occupied a large territory on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. This tribal homeland included the present-day counties of Broadwater, Jefferson, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow, Madison and Gallatin and parts of Lewis & Clark, Meagher and Park. This was about the time when they got the first horses.^{: 303–304}

The tribe consisted of at least four bands. Respectively, they had winter quarters near present-day Helena, near Butte, east of Butte and in the Big Hole Valley.^: 309

The Salish (Flatheads) initially lived entirely east of the Continental Divide. They established their headquarters near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Occasionally, hunting parties went west of the Continental Divide but not west of the Bitterroot Range. The easternmost edge of their ancestral hunting forays was bordered by the Gallatin Range, Crazy Mountain Range, and Little Belt Range.

Nearby peoples

The Salis-Tunaxe lived immediately to the north of the Flathead. There was no sharp line between the two tribal territories, and the people in the border zone often intermarried. Further north lived the Kutenai-Tunaxe (Kootenai-Tunaxe). To the east of them lived the Salisan tribes' common enemy, the Blackfoot.^: 304

West of the Rocky Mountains lived the Pend d'Oreille, in the territory around Flathead Lake. The south of them was occupied by the Semteuse, in a relatively small area. The numerous Shoshone semi-surrounded the Salish from the northeast to the southwest.^: 304 It seems the Salish did not know the Comanche and Kiowa at this time. They may have been regarded as bands of Shoshone.^: 317

Later well-established plains tribes like the Sarsi, Assiniboine, Cree, Crow, Gros Ventre, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux lived far away. They were unknown to the Salish.^{: 304 and 321.}

Horses and the changed life of the Salish

The Salish got horses from the Shoshone,^: 350 with horses changing the life of the people. When they had had only dogs, the Salish had paid no special attention to the American bison,^: 345 which they had hunted just like deer and elk. Newly acquired mounts made it possible to overtake the American bison and the secured meat and skins could easily be carried by packhorses. All other hunting game became less important.

Before they had had horses, the Salish had lived in conical tents covered with two to four layers of sewed tule mats, depending on the season.^: 332 The tipi soon replaced the old lodge. Instead of rawhide bags of many shapes and sizes, the women made parfleches from now on.^: 327

Forced west of the divide

Both the Salish-Tunaxe and the Semteuse were almost "killed off in wars" with the Blackfoot^: 317 and further reduced by smallpox.^: 312 Some of the survivors took refuge among the Salish. With the near extinction of the Salish-Tunaxe, the Salish extended their hunting grounds northward to Sun River. Between 1700 and 1750, they were driven back by pedestrian Blackfoot warriors armed with fire weapons.^: 316 Finally, they were forced out of the bison range and west of the divide along with the Kutenai-Tunaxe.^: 318

First contact

The Flatheads lived now between the Cascade Range and Rocky Mountains. The first written record of the tribes is either from their meeting with trapper Andrew Garcia, explorer David Thompson, or the Lewis and Clark Expedition in September 1805. Lewis and Clark came there and asked for horses, but they eventually ate the horses due to starvation. The Flatheads also appear in the records of the Roman Catholic Church at St. Louis, Missouri, to which they sent four delegations to request missionaries (or "Black Robes") to minister to the tribe. Their request was finally granted, and a number of missionaries, including Pierre-Jean De Smet, were eventually sent. The Flatheads are also located in Sula, Montana.

Hellgate Treaty

The tribes negotiated the Hellgate Treaty with the United States in 1855. From the start, treaty negotiations were plagued by serious translation problems. A Jesuit observer, Adrian Hoecken, said that the translations were so poor that "not a tenth of what was said was understood by either side." But as in the meeting with Lewis and Clark, the pervasive cross-cultural miscommunication ran even deeper than problems of language and translation. Tribal people came to the meeting assuming they were going to formalize an already-recognized friendship. Non-Indians came with the goal of making official their claims to Native lands and resources.

Isaac Stevens, the new governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Washington Territory, was intent on obtaining cession of the Bitterroot Valley from the Salish. Many non-Indians were already well aware of the valley's potential value for agriculture and its relatively temperate climate in winter. Because of the resistance of Chief Victor (Many Horses), Stevens ended up inserting into the Treaty complicated and poorly translated language that defined the Bitterroot Valley south of Lolo Creek as a "conditional reservation" for the Salish.

Victor put his X mark on the document, convinced that the agreement would not require his people to leave their homeland. No other word came from the government for the next fifteen years, so the Salish assumed that they would stay in their Bitterroot Valley forever.

After the 1864 gold rush in the newly established Montana Territory, pressure upon the Salish intensified from both illegal non-Indian squatters and government officials. In 1870, Victor died, and he was succeeded as chief by his son, Chief Charlot, aka Charlo, Claw of the Little Grizzly. Like his father, Charlot adhered to a policy of nonviolent resistance. He insisted on the right of his people to remain in the Bitterroot Valley. But territorial citizens and officials thought the new chief could be pressured into capitulating.

In 1871, they successfully lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant to declare that the survey required by the treaty had been conducted and that it had found that the Jocko (Flathead) Reservation was better suited to the needs of the Salish. On the basis of Grant's executive order, Congress sent a delegation, led by future president James Garfield, to make arrangements with the tribe for their removal. Charlot ignored their demands and even their threats of bloodshed, and he again refused to sign any agreement to leave. U.S. officials then simply forged Charlot's "X" onto the official copy of the agreement that was sent to the Senate for ratification.

Over time, the real reason for the Hellgate treaty meetings became clear to the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people. Under the terms spelled out in the written document, the tribes ceded to the United States more than twenty million acres (81,000 km²) of land and reserved from cession about 1.3 million acres (5,300 km²), forming the Jocko or Flathead Indian Reservation. Conditions had become intolerable for the Salish by the late 1880s, after the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad was constructed directly through the tribe's lands, with neither permission from the native owners nor payment to them.

In November 1889, Charlot signed an agreement to leave the Bitterroot Valley. Inaction by Congress delayed the removal for another two years. According to some observers, the tribe's desperation reached a level of outright starvation. In October 1891, a contingent of troops from Fort Missoula forced Charlot and the Salish out of the Bitterroot and roughly marched the small band sixty miles to the Flathead Reservation.

The three main tribes moved to the Flathead Reservation were the Bitterroot Salish, the Pend d'Oreille, and the Kootenai. The Bitterroot Salish and the Pend d'Oreille tribes spoke dialects of the same Salish language.

A dispute over off-reservation hunting between a band of Pend d'Oreilles and the state of Montana's Fish and Game department resulted in the Swan Valley Massacre of 1908.

Allotment Act

In 1887, the United States enacted the Dawes Act, otherwise known as the General Allotment Act. Under this new law, all reservation lands could be segmented into parcels and distributed to tribes based on their enrolled membership and heads of households. Land that was not allotted to a tribal member was subject to being sold to the federal government with the purpose of repurposing the land for public use. Because tribal members were now granted their own parcels of land on the reservation, they had individual rights of ownership. Many members sold their land to non-tribal members during the Great Depression and through World War II, leaving the reservation to seek work off the reservation in nearby states. This resulted in the reservation no longer being solely occupied by the Salish and Kootenai tribes.

National Bison Range

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislature that allowed for 18,700 acres of the Flathead Reservation to be sold to the federal government for use in establishment of the National Bison Range at a rate of $1.56 per acre. This national refuge for bison was an effort of the federal government to preserve the severely diminishing bison herds that resulted from westward expansion, over-hunting, and poaching.

In 1971, in the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, Montana v. United States court case, the US Court of Claims deemed that the 1908 seizure of land for the National Bison Range was unconstitutional, particularly because the land was purchased significantly below fair market value. The land was not transferred back to the tribe. Instead, the court awarded the tribe a rate of $14 per acre, based on the fair market value of 1912, which resulted in a total reward of $231,548.

Tribal Termination

Though marked for termination in 1953 under the House concurrent resolution 108 of the US federal Indian termination policy, and the Termination Act, the tribe resisted the government's plans to terminate their tribal status in Congressional hearings in 1954. With the support of Montana State Senators, State Representatives, and the unanimous and unified Tribal Council and its members, the Salish and Kootenai Tribe defeated the measure and were able to maintain the tribe's federal status.

The Civil Rights Movement throughout the 1960s was widely supported by tribal members. Vic Charlo, a descendent of Chief Charlo, led many efforts to diversify tribal government leaders and encourage the Council adopt more policies to support poorer members of the tribe. The Tribal Council also faced widespread scrutiny by members who sought to terminate the tribe liquidate tribal assets in order to disburse the funds and resources to its members. Tribal liquidation was widely supported by many members who moved off-reservation, to places such as Washington State, Idaho, and other locations in search of work. These members argued that aside from their per-capita payments, they received no other benefits from the tribe because they did not live on the reservation. The termination and liquidation movement failed to earn enough votes to overcome Tribal Council objections.