In the 1870s, a Salish Indian brave
named Walking Coyote led a handful of bison calves from the Great
Plains westward to the home of his people in Montana’s
Mission Valley. Some traditions say he did so because he saw that
Europeans were hunting the beast to extinction.
Bison
proliferated in the lush valley, which eventually became the
Flathead Indian Reservation. By 1900, the herd numbered about
1,000, while by then, the 60 million bison that once roamed the
plains had virtually been exterminated.
But the federal
government had fixed ideas about how the Salish and Kootenai tribes
sharing the Flathead Reservation should live. Officials forced the
Indians to sell their bison, in1906. After giving160-acre
allotments to each tribal family, the government sold the rest of
the real estate to non-Indians.
Tribal members quickly
found themselves a minority on their own reservation.
In
1908, the American Bison Society convinced President Theodore
Roosevelt to set aside a National Bison Range. The government cut
18,000 acres out of the heart of the reservation, paying the tribes
$1.56 an acre, and ironically, some of the bison sold to Canada
were shipped back.
Today, the tribes want to complete the
circle and manage the descendants of those same beasts. Regulations
set forth in the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance
Act Amendments of 1994 allow them a chance to do just that. It is
not as though the tribes would own the bison range now run by the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A federal manager would remain in
charge, and the agency would maintain oversight of all “inherently
governmental duties,” which have yet to be defined.
But
the proposal for Indian involvement has met stiff opposition among
the tribes’ non-Indian neighbors. Since the 1970s, when the
tribes first began flexing their political muscle, they have
stepped on a lot of toes: They established shoreline rules for the
southern half of Flathead Lake and began taxing docks. They took
over the local power company. They negotiated a deal with the state
to sell their own hunting and fishing permits. They forced
irrigators to keep instream flows that would support local
fisheries during drought.
Most non-Indians who spoke
against the tribes at a public hearing in May couched their
protestations in politically acceptable terms. Away from the
microphones, some couldn’t hide their anger.
“The
government keeps giving Indians money — and where to they go with
it? To the bars,” a woman told me.
Tribes across the
country are watching the negotiations. The Department of Interior
has identified 19 wildlife refuges that have geographic, historical
and cultural ties to Indian tribes, as well as 34 parks and
national monuments, including Montana’s Glacier National
Park. In Alaska, every refuge and park — except Denali National
Park — is eligible for some type of Indian management.
There ?s no doubt the Fish and Wildlife Service is doing an
excellent job running the National Bison Range and its other
refuges. Even with dwindling financial support, the National Park
Service somehow manages to keep toilets flushing and wildlife
relatively safe in our parks. So why fix something that isn’t
broken?
Because the unemployment rates across Indian
Country is a disgrace — reaching as high as 70 percent to 80
percent on some reservations. Hiring Indians to work in parks and
refuges located in their backyards may not open up many well-paying
jobs, but it will be a beginning. And if they don’t have the
skills right now — tribal members can be trained just like
everyone else.
As for the Salish and Kootenai,
they’ve shown a commitment to wildlife conservation. They
were the first to establish a wilderness area on tribal lands —
90,000 acres in the Mission Mountains — and they reintroduced
endangered peregrine falcons, trumpeter swans and leopard frogs to
the reservation.They held up reconstruction of Highway 93, the
busiest road in Montana, until the state agreed to incorporate
wildlife over-and underpasses in the design.
I had to
chuckle when a non-Indian speaker at the public meeting complained
that Indians thought they had some “special connection” to the
bison. Tribal council leader Fred Matt put it simply :
‘’We took care of the bison, and they took care of
us.’’
Maybe 100 years from now, if mad cow
disease ever spreads from Canada throughout North America and
prompts the slaughter of herd after herd, the descendants of
today’s ranchers will understand what it means to lose a
resource that informs every aspect of life. It would then be our
lot to yearn for a symbolic connection.
Mark
Matthews is a writer in Missoula, Montana. He produced this opinion
piece for Writers on the Range, a syndication service of High
Country News (www.hcn.org).
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