Documents of Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai Indian History (series)

Edited by Robert Bigart and Joseph McDonald
Salish Kootenai College Press (2019-2021)
6 volumes

Review by Fred Noel

The six-volume series, “Documents of Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai Indian History,” edited by Robert Bigart and Joseph McDonald, presents documents chronologically from 1845 through 1920. It includes governmental correspondences, Montana newspaper articles, personal journal entries, and letters. These compelling and firsthand accounts are an invaluable introductory resource for anyone conducting Salish tribal research.

The volume titles alone deliver a broad survey of tribal historical events, and they include: “Sometimes My People Get Mad When the Blackfeet Kill Us”; “You Seem to Like Your Money, and We Like Our Country”; “To Keep the Land for My Children’s Children”; “Indians Were Prosperous”; “Us Indians Don’t Want Our Reservation Opened”; and “We Want Freedom and Citizenship.” These documents provide insight into tribal economic challenges, law and order, relationships with settlers and clergy, intertribal conflict, government relations, everyday Native life.

The ever-present themes of oppression, injustice, adaptation, and perseverance are the backdrop to this collection of documents. For example, there is a document detailing how a Salish witness to a crime was put in jail to ensure their court appearance but was then robbed and beaten by fellow inmates, as jailers failed to intervene. There is an account of a Pend d’Oreille hunter who, after having been ambushed along with his fellow hunters by their enemies, amputated his own badly wounded leg as his fellow hunters would not do so. Another document relates the story of Salish Chief Charlo and an elder, emphatically detailing their tribes’ actions to protect Bitterroot settlers during the Nez Perce conflict. Chief Charlo and the elder hoped to remain in their Bitterroot homeland rather than be relocated to the Flathead reservation, as was being directed by the U.S. government.

These primary source documents clearly show their authors’ biases and mindsets. A newspaper from 1895 illustrates the intention of settlers, business elites, and government officials to promote the opening of the Flathead reservation to settlers through the allotment process proposed by Senator W.H. Smead. The senator and his proposals were promoted in promising and positive terms. Smead would eventually become the Flathead Indian agent three years later.

Much tribal, reservation, and Montana history can be learned from these documents, and they will easily surpass expectations for historical researchers. In these times of increasing ancestral land acknowledgements, with growing organizational and personal interest in tribal histories, these collections provide readers with engaging details about Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai Indians that would have remained difficult to access in their archival forms. The volumes provide this easy access to primary resources, and anyone with an interest in understanding Montana, the land, and its people more personally will benefit from this series.

Fred Noel is the D’Arcy McNickle Library director at Salish Kootenai College.