Author details tribal life before Glacier Park was created

Centuries before the first cars wound up to the summit of Going-to-the-Sun Road, the Kootenai would ascend Logan Pass by standing on each other’s shoulders — inching up the cliff shelves to reach buffalo that roamed the east side of what is now Glacier National Park.

In her newest book, “People Before the Park,” Missoula-based anthropologist Sally Thompson delves into the relationships between Glacier and the region’s Indian tribes before it became a national park in 1910.

Through seven chapters, she compiled the oral histories of the Kootenai and Blackfeet, along with written accounts from early explorers and anthropologists such as James Willard Schultz and Claude Schaeffer, who spent time with the tribes.

The bulk of the book comes from the ceremonies and oral histories of the tribes, passed down through successive generations.

“That’s what helps keep a place alive,” Thompson said during a talk last week at the Conrad Mansion in Kalispell. “You have a name, but you have the story that gave the name, and then you can tell your grandkids that travel that way.”

Logging Lake, on the park’s west side, was called “Where there’s a Big Beaver” by the Kootenai. They knew the Apgar area as “A Good Place to Dance” and present-day Sperry Glacier was “Wild Rhubarb Blossom Ice.”

To the Blackfeet, the Hanging Gardens were originally “Where the Bigfoot [Caribou] was killed” and the St. Mary River was “River of Many Chiefs Gathering.”

The tribal lunar calendar also underscores the importance of the park’s natural resources to those who used it before white settlers arrived: February is “when cubs are born,” June is the “time of high waters” and both July and August have multiple names referring to what berries become available.

“Everything is related,” Thompson said, adding that moose was deemed best to hunt and consume when the serviceberries began to ripen.

Thompson said the project’s origins lay with Jack Potter, the park’s chief of natural and cultural resources, who asked her to write a book documenting the tribes’ historical relationship with the land.

As she began meeting with leaders from the Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes, Thompson said they opted to participate in order to set the record straight on the cultural value they placed on the park — particularly the Kootenai, whose history with the iconic landscape had been long overshadowed by the Blackfeet’s.

“I had some trepidation when I was to go and say, ‘Hi, I’m a white anthropologist and I want to write a book about you guys in Glacier National Park,” Thompson said.

But when she presented her vision for the project at a meeting with representatives from five of the seven Kootenai bands in Yellow Bay, the former head of the Kootenai Cultural Committee helped convince the others to participate.

“She stood up and said, ‘Our silence has cost us,’” Thompson recalled. “It was a really exciting day, and a good beginning for something we could do together to make that information available.”

Thompson stressed that it’s not her book — it was a collaborative project, and more than half the book is made up of two chapters authored by each of the tribes, describing their lifestyles and world views.

While the Pend d’Oreille, Salish, Cree and Metis also moved through the area at various times, Glacier’s pre-park history was dominated by the Kootenai and Blackfeet traditions.

During the formative discussions, both tribes wanted the project to dispel some of the oft-discussed wars fought in the area.

“One thing I really loved, is independently on each side, [Tribal leaders Vernon Finley and G.G. Kipp] both said, “Too often people want to write about our battles and our bad relationships, the warriors of the plains. Let’s not go there,’” Thompson said.

Smoky Rides at the Door, a Blackfeet tribal elder who served as an adviser to the project, said that for all the interest in the historic conflicts, they made up perhaps 2 percent of their total interactions.

“There were wars over Camas,” he conceded. “That’s not a lie.”

But, he noted, they were generally the result of miscommunications between the two groups and intensified only as white settlers began pushing them off their traditional lands and restricting them to an increasingly small footprint.

“That’s one of the fallacies the movie industry really got wrong,” his wife, Darnell Rides at the Door, added.

She noted that Blackfeet had not originally fished, used canoes or gathered rice, but learned those skills through their many amicable interactions with the Kootenai.

The book also avoids the politically contentious issue of the Blackfeet’s claims to Glacier National Park.

In the preface, Thompson wrote that Blackfeet contributors “chose to set aside the difficult political situation that exists between the Blackfeet and Glacier Park,” and instead “to focus on the rich traditions that come from the mountains and that remain the fundamental underpinnings of Blackfeet culture.”

For Thompson, who lives in Missoula, some of the most important concepts outlined in the book relate to the tribes’ connections to the land around them. Their oral histories, as with many other indigenous people, emphasize that they are provided for and protected by a creator, and it is their duty to in turn protect his creation.

“I love seeing the uniqueness of the people and their relationship to the environment they live in,” she said. “They live in a wealthier world than I do, and it’s enriched my life in Western Montana.”

Proceeds from “People Before the Park” benefit the Montana Historical Society, which published the book. Hardcover or paperback copies can be purchased from its website by visiting app.mt.gov/store/cart?storeID=mhsonline.

The book is also available in local shops and bookstores in and around the Flathead Valley.

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.