Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee working on series of books

By Maggie Plummer

ST. IGNATIUS — One of the most extensive tribal oral history archives in the United States - including hundreds of audio and video tapes, thousands of pages of translations and transcripts, and thousands of historical photos - is housed in the offices of the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee here.

From the archives, which represent more than 30 years of interviewing, storytelling, translating, and transcribing, is now flowing a series of books. The first in the series, "The Salish People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition," was published in 2005 and has been praised in book reviews.

Another in the series is an upcoming place name book. The Culture Committee's research for that book has already been the source for several other place name projects around the Flathead Reservation.

It's all part of the Culture Committee's job: to preserve, protect, and perpetuate the traditional culture and language.

Upcoming committee publishing projects are:
    • a book about the Swan Massacre, due to be finished this summer and published by October 2008;
    • the aboriginal territory place names book, also being referred to as the Ethnogeography of the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people, in the works since 1993 and due to be finished next winter and published a year later; and
    • a four-volume comprehensive history of the Salish-Pend d'Oreille people.

The Swan Massacre book, which the committee's Tribal History Project is trying to have published by the 100th anniversary date of the massacre (October 2008), is possible because of the late elder John Peter Paul, whose father was the first victim of the massacre and whose mother was pregnant with him at the time.

John decided a few years before he passed away that the Culture Committee should produce an accurate book on the incident, as an important part of tribal history. That was a big change for John, since until that time he had felt that the incident remained too sensitive for treatment in a book. Beginning in the late 1990s, he allowed the Culture Committee to record his knowledge of the event for inclusion in the book.

In 1997, John and other elders, along with Johnny Arlee's cultural leadership class from Salish Kootenai College, traveled with the Culture Committee to the old hunting campsite near Holland Lake. The trip was funded by a grant the Culture Committee received from the Montana Committee for the Humanities. John and the Culture Committee subsequently returned to the site several more times.

The information gathered for the Swan Massacre book was used by the Culture Committee in 2001 as the basis for the Tribes' successful effort to remove the name of the warden from the website and index of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The committee's next book due out is the ethnogeography, which will include approximately 550 place names, encompassing an area from eastern Montana to the Columbia Plateau in Washington.

This "atlas" will describe, for each place name, the general location, the Salish word and English translation, and the history of tribal use of the area. It will be also be illustrated with extensive maps and photographs.

Many of the images come from the Culture Committee's extensive field trips with elders to places throughout Salish and Pend d'Oreille aboriginal territories. Those trips have been funded in part by grants from the Montana Committee For the Humanities, the Lower Flathead Valley Community Foundation, and Indian Education For All funds through Salish Kootenai College.

Last, but far from least, will come the committee's four-volume overall tribal history. The first volume will cover the traditional way of life; the second volume will include the time of changes, i.e. horses, guns, and non-native diseases, through the time of the Black Robes coming; volume three will span the time of the 1855 Hellgate Treaty up to the turn of the century; and volume four will cover the years from the allotment act and the opening of the reservation to the present.

All of the books are expected to be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

"The committee has been working on the place name project for many years, with many people," culture committee director Tony Incashola said. "We have a responsibility to be accurate. We're responsible to the people, our elders, our ancestors, because once that information is out there, that's it."

In other words, they're trying to do it right. "Often, information that's put out there is inaccurate," he pointed out. "I think...some people have deadlines, and they try to get information out in a hurry."

Thompson Smith, the consultant working on the books with the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Elders Cultural Advisory Council, said it's not only about accuracy, but also about making sure that the perspective of the tribal elders gets across.

The books rest upon the elders' stories and information; the elders also carefully review the books' content in meetings at the Longhouse.

"The books, ultimately, are the product of the elders themselves," the Culture Committee states in the introduction to their 2005 Lewis and Clark book. "The tribal elders are both authors and editors of the books."

It is a time-consuming process, but essential to what the Culture Committee is producing.

"We have been gathering information from the elders for over 30 years," Tony said in a recent interview. "We're here to gather everything and produce our projects. Hours get donated to get what we have. People need to understand the process. We're not trying to keep the information for ourselves. On the contrary, everything we're doing is about trying to get it out there.

"But we're also making sure that we do that in a careful way that honors the trust the elders placed in us. We promised them that we would be the ones who would put their information out there. Our elders were taken advantage of in the past, by scholars and book authors. The Tribes, the people, didn't get anything back."

Here is how the introduction to the Lewis and Clark book describes the process:

"The Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee, originally called the Flathead Culture Committee, began its work by simply calling together the most culturally knowledgeable elders and then recording their stories - in the Salish language - on virtually every aspect of tribal culture and history.

"The establishment of the culture committees made it possible, for the first time, for elders to be interviewed in their own language by younger tribal members who were fluent in their language and knowledgeable about tribal history and culture. That climate of trust and familiarity prompted the elders to share the histories, the creation stories, the songs - the great oral literature that had been passed down to them from time immemorial. In succeeding years, culture committee staff members painstakingly translated the interviews into English, while others revisited the tapes and transcribed them in the written Salish language...then all of this material was computerized, indexed, and organized."

Without those original tapes of 1970s interviews with tribal elders, "we'd be lost," Tony said.

That's another thing: now that those critical original tapes are aging, the committee is also trying to save them and other things, by upgrading the material. "We have to keep them protected," he said. "Cassettes get old, and discs age, too. We have to make sure we don't lose them. Sadie Peone, the Historical Collections Manager, has been doing a great job trying to preserve that material.

"We're racing against time, too," Tony continued, "because those knowledgeable elders are disappearing. It scares me to realize there are only a handful of elders left who are knowledgeable in our language and culture. We lose them it's going to be lost forever."

Committee members have done thousands of interviews over the past 15 years, in addition to hundreds of tapes before that, according to Thompson.

He notes that Committee staff member Josephine Quequesah continues to work on translating tapes and Chauncey Beaverhead enters the translations into computers. Salish Language Specialist Shirley Trahan, meanwhile, spends part of her time creating bilingual transcripts, writing out verbatim the Salish spoken on the tapes. As a result of that work, wherever the books draw from the elders' stories, they are presented in a bilingual format, with parallel columns of Salish and English.

All four of the books also draw from an extensive collection of documents gathered during decades of research in many archives, including the Montana Historical Society, the University of Montana, the National Archives, and the Jesuit Oregon Province Archives.

But the core of each book is the story-telling of the elders.

The Culture Committee also has a collection of more than 12,000 historical photos that help the Tribes document traditional sites, camps and people. Those images provide an important part of each of the books, and are being organized and digitized by Sadie.

Then there's the urgent job of preserving the Salish language.

"We want people to know the original purpose and goals of the committee," Shirley Trahan said, "to preserve the way of life, culture, to protect it. That's how the culture committee came up, so things would be shared in the right way. Some things are too sensitive, they have to stay within the Tribes."

Thompson shares an office with elder Felicite "Jim" Sapiye McDonald, Translator/Advisor for the culture committee. "Jim is a true Salish scholar," he says of his officemate, "guiding the whole process, advising us on many issues, and answering endless questions. She is so dedicated, and we are so fortunate that she is still working, at 84 years old."

Thompson notes that Jim is constantly re-listening to the old tapes and reviewing documents, refining and refreshing her vast knowledge of history, culture, and language.

He also points to elder Mike Durglo, Sr.'s extensive work on the aboriginal territory place-name project, which is vital for protection of tribal resources.

Tony stresses that all of the members of the Elders Advisory Council, and staff members, play important roles in shaping the projects. Gloria Whitworth, Office Manager, is the receptionist and keeps paperwork in order while the Longhouse facility is managed, maintained, and cleaned by Richard Alexander, the Maintenance Technician.

Active members of the Elders Cultural Advisory Council include Louie Adams, Bud Barnaby, Hank Baylor, Clara Bourdon, Alice Camel, Mike Durglo, Sr., Octave Finley, Sophie Haynes, Dolly Linsebigler, Felicite McDonald, Noel Pichette, Pat Pierre, Stephen Smallsalmon, John Stanislaw, Eneas Vanderburg, and Janie Wabaunsee.