Native ways

By NANCY KIMBALL

Full-blood Pend d'Oreille shares knowledge of culture, language and drumming

The Daily Inter Lake

Stephen Small Salmon likely was a year old when he learned to walk.

He started dancing when he was 2.

Sixty-five years later, he's still doing both.

"Many, many years I danced," said the full-blood Pend d'Oreille Indian from Ronan. "I'm a championship dancer."

Small Salmon also is a 40-year drummer and lead singer of his own drum group, a teacher of his native Salish language and an elder in the Salish-Pend d'Oreille-Flathead Advisory.

In his plain-spoken style, Small Salmon's simple statement reveals much about his pride in his heritage, the land he grew up on and the traditions he is determined to pass along to a younger generation.

It's not just because he feels the obligation. It's because he loves where he's been and where his people can go.

"I'll keep doing this 'til I'm gone," he said.

WHAT HE has the most fun with for now, he confessed, are the powwows.

"I like to go dancing," he said, "I like to drum, I like to eat fry bread."

Small Salmon is a familiar fixture to anyone who has ever visited the Arlee Fourth of July Powwow.

Elementary children at the Thanksgiving feast at the Flathead County fairgrounds have seen him drumming and dancing, and have heard him talk of his culture.

Spectators watched him at the Indian relay races during the Northwest Montana Fair this summer in Kalispell.

In years past he danced in more than 20 powwows annually.

"But not anymore. I do about 18, I'd say. I'm just guessing," he said.

His beaded outfits - "I like to call them outfits, I don't call them costumes" - can weigh 60 pounds. "You can feel it after a couple hours of dancing," he said. Yes, he gets worn out, "but by the (next) weekend I'm all dressed and ready to go."

Small Salmon's beaded outfits have become somewhat of a legend.

"I get people to bead for me, and I pay them good money," he said. "I draw good designs and they bead for me. Mom used to bead my vests and aprons."

His cuffs, parts of the leggings and moccasins also are beaded. He has three outfits now - a blue one his mother made 40 years ago, one that's black, yellow and red and another with a war bonnet, vest, leggings, "like a real chief," he said.

"I like the black and red and brown and white and yellow on my outfit because they really stand out to me," he said. "I don't go with animals, I go with the colors I look good in."

ONE COULD argue that dancing is in his blood.

Born in the St. Ignatius hospital to Mitch and Mary Beaverhead Small Salmon, he grew up a few miles south of Ronan, across the canal at the foot of the Mission Mountains. He now lives in the other family home about a mile away.

"My mom used to talk to me about my grandfather," Alexander Beaverhead, his mother's father. "He kind of raised me when I was a kid. We all used to live together. We lived there on the hill," he said of the Missions. "I call that the hill."

They lived together in a one-story house, he and his grandfather sharing one side of it.

"He really favored me, and I was like the spoiled child. He took me under his wing," Small Salmon said. "My mom said I was really spoiled."

His mother told him he was 2 years old when he started dancing.

"I fixed you outfits and you just loved to dance," he recounted in his mother's words. "Your grandfather took you dancing."

"Then at 9 or 10 o'clock my grandfather took me back to the tepee and rubbed my legs and put me to bed," he recalled.

When Small Salmon was 8 or 9 years old, his grandfather caught pneumonia and died. His mother took him back in, and he lived out his childhood in the house on the hill.

THE DRUMMING tradition became a part of his life about 40 years ago. He now heads his own drum group - the circle of people who beat a large communal drum to keep the rhythm and call the songs for dancing.

"And I call my drum Pondray," he said, unconcerned about white people's spelling, "because I'm full-blood Pondray."

Small Salmon visits schools, teaching how to make bustles and chokers, demonstrating the language.

"Sometimes it's about telling stories, telling stories about being an Indian, how do I live, how did the old Indians live. Old, like in tepee times, like Lewis and Clark times, when the priests came down here like the black robes and the French men. That's why we're all Catholics here. I'm Catholic, and full-blood Indian. In 1939, the priests made us all convert so the family did it."

He's been in commercials, on posters, in magazines, and photographs of him have spread around the world, he said. He plays a role in an upcoming movie about Montana 1933 moonshine, in which "I mess around with a grizzly bear," he said. "My wife tells me I look good in the picture, she says the camera likes me."

GENERATIONS OF his people have spoken Salish, a clicking language full of consonants, all but incomprehensible to the ears of the typical white person.

Everyone used to speak it in his community. Today, he estimates only about 45 still do.

So, after a decade of teaching with grade schools, high schools and Head Start, he signed on four years ago with Nkwusm, a tribal-run language-immersion school in Arlee.

He teaches the Salish language to 14 of the youngest learners, the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds. "They are a lot smarter than we were back then," he said.

"I teach…grandmas, dad, uncles - it's six hours of speaking nothing but Indian."

Difficulty of the Salish language is no obstacle to his students.

"The kids pick it right up," Small Salmon said. "I'd rather teach the little ones than the grownups, because if they can't say it they bypass it."

As he teaches the language, so he teaches the Indian ways.

"Sometimes I take them out to the mountains and teach them the woods and the medicine that's there, the Indian medicine," he said.

He also has adults in the Nkwusm drum group and planned to take his "little ones" along for a session of drumming for the elders at their monthly meeting on Friday.

"I thought I would bring the kids down and see what we are doing, do some drumming and make them feel good, and do some dancing," he said.

Every day, he said, they drum for a half-hour at the school, "and they want to sing, too. They memorize them all," learning the songs for dancing and jumping and waking up and playing stick games - and even the war dance songs.

IN TYPICAL fashion, Small Salmon has a straightforward explanation for why he does it.

"Because I'm a full-blood Indian," he said. "My elders told me, when we're gone you have to carry it on. I'm just doing it."

But it's important for the younger children, too, he said.

"They can recognize themselves as being Indian, and the pride in the Indian," he said. "They can say, 'Hey, I'm Indian. I can even talk Indian and do anything.'"

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com