Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

How History Looks Now: A Kalispel Encampment, 2009
September 2009

This fall marks the 200th anniversary of Kullyspel House, the first trading post built by North West Company fur agent and surveyor David Thompson in what is now the U.S.A. If you figure the period of European contact as beginning with the 1780-81 smallpox pandemic of that swept across the North Columbia Country, and ending with the 1846 boundary settlement that severed the traditional ranges of the Okanagan, Lakes, Kalispel, and Kootenai tribes, Thompson’s initial circle of trade houses falls right in the middle of that tumultuous period. Native cultures see little to celebrate in such an event, but certainly recognize the coming of the fur business as a moment that changed their history forever.
In the summer of 2008, the seven bands that make up the Kootenai nation, currently living on reserves and reservations in British Columbia, Montana, and Idaho, marked Thompson’s stuttered arrival with an encampment at the confluence of the Moyie and Kootenai Rivers, and in doing so provided a template for the way education and tradition could help make sense of the world we live in now. In 2009, the Kalispel tribe took the initiative to recreate the encampment of Kootenai and Salish-speaking peoples that David Thompson encountered where the Clark Fork River meets Pend Oreille Lake in late September, 1809.
This 2009 David Thompson Bicentennial event for the state of Idaho began in the town of Hope, on the shoreline of Pend Oreille Lake, at the old Litehouse Restaurant. State historian Keith Petersen pointed out that it had been exactly 50 years since David Thompson’s Idaho sesquicentennial was celebrated in the very same restaurant, graced by the presence of many of the Northwest’s most distinguished male historians and attended by local ladies “in period dress.” Much talk at that 1959 meeting focused on the location and importance of David Thompson’s Kullyspel House, erected on the Hope Peninsula in the fall of 1809 and generally recognized as the first proper structure, with chimneys, to be built within the present border of Idaho.
The 2009 gathering revisited some of the same territory as that sesquicentennial. Various presenters traced David Thompson’s long journey from Hudson Bay to the Pacific, explained the economics of the fur trade, and explored the intrigue surrounding the exact location of his North West Company trade house. But this year’s event covered many other issues as well, and the variety of voices set Mr. Thompson’s story firmly within the wider context of the place that he visited.
The word “Salish” epitomized this new perspective. Barely mentioned in all those 1959 papers, the term appears throughout David Thompson’s writings and maps of what became north Idaho, western Montana, and eastern Washington. He spelled it Saleesh and may have pronounced it saw LEESH; these days it is most commonly heard as SAY lish. Thompson used it to distinguish related bands of what we today call Salish Bitterroot, Flathead, Pend Oreille, and Kalispel people; he also recognized the common bond between what modern linguists call Kalispel Salish and the language of the Spokane tribe, as well as the close relationship of other Interior Plateau tongues such as Coeur d’Alene, Okanogan, and Columbia Salish. On his large maps of western North America, Thompson designated the rivers we call the Flathead, Clark Fork, and Pend Oreille collectively as the Saleesh River: a single drainage inhabited by people who share ancient and intricately related language and culture.
This Salish thread was reflected in the primary sponsorship of the 2009 gathering by the Kalispel tribe, and provided the touchstone for the entire four-day event. Thus a day-long teacher’s workshop included not only sessions that studied David Thompson the man, but also examined his trade relationship with these tribes, and demonstrated how elements of their interaction can be integrated into all levels of core school curriculums. In a generous afternoon session, Kalispel tribal elder Francis Cullooyah explored the history of Salish people along the shore of what Thompson called Kullyspel Lake. The fact that the lake and the traditional tribal lands Cullooyah was talking about lay just outside the restaurant window added considerably to the power of his words, as did an evening canoe paddle around the Hope Peninsula.
A Thursday symposium provided close details on exactly what David Thompson did see when he was in the Salish country, from travel routes to surveying methods. Then Flathead elder Johnny Arlee broadened the scope of Thompson’s spare daybook entries by telling stories that demonstrated the humor and spiritual cohesiveness of a traditional Salish life. From explaining chokecherry galls as the poop of gluttonous Grizzly Bear to contemplating the religious connotations of Fox reassembling a dismembered Coyote, Arlee made the tribal oral history come alive. Francis Cullooyah then drew upon those same themes to comment on the profound effects of David Thompson’s fur trade world on Salish life, emphasizing both the cultural practices that have been lost and the spirit that has been retained.
In late afternoon, the campers moved from the Litehouse Restaurant to the lower Clark Fork River, where an expansive meadow soon held both a replica fur trade encampment and a line of large teepees erected by tribal leaders and teams of participants. For the following two days a series of workshops and walks studied traditional tribal skills and language, natural and human history, fur trade bushcraft, and some serious cooking. All the while a Kalispel earth oven, placed in the middle of the action, baked a gunnysack full of camas bulbs and moss (black tree lichen) between layers of skunk cabbage leaves, cedar bark, and the heated stones of twin underground fires.
Meals served during the encampment included tribal foods from both past and present. Main dishes ranged from elk stroganoff to Indian tacos, from fry bread to traditional backbone dumplings. Francis Cullooyah’s Salish prayers of thanks, delivered before each feast and then spoken again in English, addressed the events that were taking place in the context of tribal history. After supper on Friday evening, his stories culminated in a session by the Frog Island Singers that included both traditional and new songs and dances.
On Saturday morning the classes continued in a variety of forms, each one different from the day before. As more than one participant pointed out, the craftwork was secondary in importance to the simple acts of sitting, listening, working with hands, studying the woods: “Sharing”, as Francis Cullooyah said in his lunchtime prayer, “so that we can all keep learning together.”
Late Saturday afternoon, the separate groups came together to witness the uncovering of the camas oven. Women leaders worked the layers of dirt, stone, coals, cedar bark, and skunk cabbage out of the pit to reveal the flattened sack of camas and moss. Flopped down beside the meat rack and sliced into squares, the result was a richly-scented mixture of steamed black moss surrounding a nougat of camas chunks—brownish-white, soft, and nutritious.

Over the next two years, similar encampments will follow Thompson’s route from the Clark Fork to the Columbia and on to the Pacific. If all goes well, the Spokane tribe will host next summer’s gathering at the confluence off the Little Spokane River; in 2011, the Confederated Colville Tribes will come together around the drowned Kettle Falls. Each encampment will reflect the particular culture of its place, and there is no way to predict the ebb and flow of what might happen at them. Although David Thompson will not be there, the changes that he initiated will color the proceedings. But perhaps more importantly, all the people whom he first met in the North Columbia country, in all their dynamic diversity of culture and language, will be there to sing another welcome song.

Drawing by Emily Nisbet, from an 1898 photograph by J. A. Lieberg of a Kalispel encampment at Indian Meadows on Lake Pend Oreille (courtesy Bonner County Historical Society)

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