Kutenai

Bill B. Brunton

The term, “Kutenai,” is one spelling of a word of uncertain etymology. Others include “Kootenai,” “Kootanay,” and “Kootenaes.” These probably derive from a Kutenai self-designation, ktunaxa, which has been transcribed many ways throughout ethnographic reporting. Another term, ksanka, is also used as a self-designator.

The Kutenai define themselves in terms of the course of the Kootenay River and its environs. This places them in southern British Columbia, northern Idaho, and northwestern Montana. They see themselves as divided into two segments, based on their location along the river: up-river (Upper Kutenai) and down-river (Lower Kutenai). Up-river is defined as above Kootenai Falls, near Libby, Montana. In addition to off-reservation settlement, Kutenai people reside on reserves in British Columbia (Columbia Lake, St. Mary’s, Tobacco Plains, and Creston) and in the US on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and on the Kootenai Reservation near Bonners Ferry, Idaho).

Never a large group, the Kutenai population, based on the limited data at hand, seems to have hovered around 1000 people for the period 1880–1950, with approximately half residing in the US and half in Canada. One estimate suggests that the population at contact might have been as high as 4000. In 2010 there were 895 self-identified Kootenai counted in the United States; in Canada in 2016 there were 1114 registered Kootenay, 480 residing on designated reservations.

The placement of the Kutenai language into one of the recognized phyla of North American languages is uncertain. If not an isolate, the most probable inclusion would be with Algonquian and Salishan. There are two recognized dialects of Kutenai: Upper and Lower. These differ mainly in lexicon.

First contact with Euro-Americans came in 1792 when Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay trader and surveyor, met some Kutenai east of the Rocky Mountains. Kutenai relations with others at that time varied predominantly from distant to hostile, and remained so until reservation times (1855). They were particularly hostile toward the Blackfoot (Piegan) and the neighboring Salish. Even the Plains Cree, with whom they had somewhat friendly relations, were regarded with suspicion. The introduction of the horse intensified hostilities as it enabled the Kutenai to more effectively exploit the western Plains, which brought them into increasing competition with the Blackfoot. The fur trade (as of 1807) intensified this again as the Blackfoot were guarding their middleman trading prerogatives, especially with regard to the trade in arms. Well-armed Kutenai, now accompanied by eastern Interior Salish like the Flathead, were able to effectively raid and exploit the western Plains at the expense of the Blackfoot. Traders also brought Christianity, even bringing with them Iroquois who had been converted to Roman Catholicism, which eventually led to the establishment of the St. Ignatius mission in 1854. Contact with Whites brought decimating European diseases like smallpox and diphtheria, resulting in dramatic population loss. Cultural, social, and ecological disruptions visited upon native peoples of the area by Euro-Americans were mitigated somewhat for the Kutenai, whose isolated location on the northern extremity of the Flathead Reservation insulated them somewhat and allowed them to remain more traditional and communal than the Salish. In 1897 the Jesuits, in seeking to eradicate gambling and the aboriginal religion, forced the destruction of Kutenai medicine bundles and gambling equipment. The bundles handed over by the Kutenai were fake. Kutenai religion went underground from that point forward.

1974 saw the Bonners Ferry band of Kutenai declare “war” on the United States government so as to reclaim lands lost in the 1855 treaty, which paid more attention to the up-river people in Montana. Their action resulted in the establishment of the Bonners Ferry Kootenai Reservation. In 1981 a proposal to build a hydroelectric dam on the Kootenay River, which would have flooded Kootenai Falls, was met with unified resistance by the Kutenai of Canada and the United States, effectively ending the project.

Although speculative, there has been a suggestion that the homeland of the Kutenai is in the circumboreal region to the north of the Northwest Plateau. Another assertion by some is the possibility of a Kutenai origin in the western Plains (the “Plains Kutenai” legend). Most probably, the legend derives from stories about the decimation of a small band of Kutenai by smallpox in 1730 when they were seasonally out on the Plains. Their survivors returned west to the Kutenai homeland.

Around 1800 the two general divisions of Kutenai society and culture, Upper and Lower Kutenai, were divided in to a number of distinct bands that had their principal winter villages at specific points along the course of the Kootenay River. For the Upper Kutenai, there were the Columbia Lakes or Windermere Band, the Fort Steele Band, the Tobacco Plains Band, and the Libby-Jennings Band, named for their post-contact locations. The Lower Kutenai comprised the Bonners Ferry Band, which at that time included the Creston people. The Libby-Jennings people became the Dayton-Elmo Band after reservation times, residing on the northern part of the Flathead Reservation along the western shore of Flathead Lake near Dayton Creek. Elmo, Montana is their primary settlement. When not in winter villages, Kutenai families were part of an ebb and flow of small to large groupings organized around resource exploitation at various locales. Kutenai individuals and families can also be found living on other reservations and in predominantly white communities of the region.

The Lower Kutenai utilized mat-covered long houses typical of the Plateau, while the Upper Kutenai utilized a tipi-styled conical lodge comprised of close-set poles for winter occupation or covered with brush or bark for the summer. Later, after the introduction of the horse and an attendant shift to a more Plains-styled culture, the housing shifted to a hide-covered tipi.

The subsistence economy of the Kutenai, based on a broad-spectrum strategy typical for Plateau cultures, differed by degree between the two major social divisions, with up-river people relying more on hunting while down-river people were more dependent upon fishing. In both cases the pattern was one of shifting of locales in coordination with the availability of resources. The differences between up-river and down-river divisions increased after the introduction of the horse. Hunted animals included deer, bison, antelope, moose, caribou, elk, and mountain sheep and goat, as well as fur-bearers such as beaver, muskrat, bear, and lynx. Hunters used the bow and arrow before contact, and firearms after trade was established. Avifauna such as cranes, ducks, and geese were taken with nets, particularly by the Lower Kutenai. Fish taken with woven traps and fishing spears included salmon, trout, sturgeon, suckers, and whitefish. Camas (Camassia sp.), bitterroot, berries (chokecherries, gooseberries, huckleberries, raspberries, currants), tree lichen, and pine nuts were harvested, as well as medicinal plants such as stinging nettles and willow. There were bison hunts each year undertaken by the Upper Kutenai during the early and late summer, and a winter hunt on snowshoes in the sheltered valleys on the eastern side of the Rockies. The Lower Kutenai hosted communal deer hunts on the islands of the lower Kootenai River in the fall.

Commercial opportunities in the remote area inhabited by the Kutenai are scarce. Income comes mostly from wage-labor and timber-related enterprises like Christmas tree harvesting. Tax-free smoke shops generate income from non-Indians wishing to avoid high tobacco taxes.

In addition to tipis, manufactures included hide and bark-covered canoes, spruce-root basketry, woven fish traps and weirs, tanned-skin clothing, pottery, stone pipes, snowshoes, fowling nets, leister and detachable-point fishing spears, and earth ovens.

Before contact with Whites, trade would have been limited to the few groups with which the Kutenai had friendly relations, like the Plains Cree. Later, with the fur trade and the introduction of the horse, this activity expanded to Euro-Americans and groups like the neighboring Salish, eventually including even the Blackfoot after the 1855 Treaty. Trade was often set in the context of “trading partners,” often defined in terms of female dyads.

Younger adult males were the principle hunters and defenders. They cared for the horses. They also helped the women with heavier tasks. Females were responsible for domestic activities like food preparation and caring for children. They gathered plant resources and processed them, along with the products from hunting and fishing, into finished goods ready for consumption or other use. Grandparents and older siblings helped out with child care and socialization.

Bands exploited river valley areas adjacent to their winter villages, as well as areas away from the river with members of other bands and peoples when resources were seasonally concentrated. Thus, there was no strict ownership of land or its resources by Kutenai bands or family groups. Rather, there were “use rights” that were shared with others through mutual cross-utilization. With the advent of the reservation system, the Kutenai on the Flathead Reservation first gardened communally before being forced to accept allotments. Much of the allotment land has been alienated from individual owners through sales and leases.

Kinship was bilateral and generated no lineages or clans. Households were the primary functioning social group and were based on co-residence of individuals united by marriage, descent, and economic cooperation. Bands consisted of extended families connected by marriage and kinship; they cooperated economically and shared residence in one of the named winter villages.

Kutenai kinship terms reflect a distinction between “close” kinsmen for whom there are specific terms, and “distant” kinsmen for whom there is a general term meaning “my relatives.” There is no terminological distinction made between distant kinsmen who are related by blood and those related by marriage. For close kinsmen, sex of relative, generation, sex of speaker, reciprocity, and relative age are marked with varying degrees of consistency. An interesting feature of the terminology is the merging of alternate generations (grandparents and grandchildren), reflecting an affectively warm, co-equivalent relationship between these reciprocals. On one’s own generation, “older-than” and “younger-than” (relative to ego) distinctions are made terminologically, with a merging of siblings with first cousins. Terminological merging also occurs between great-grandparents and great-grandchildren.

Kutenai marriage was informal. Parents might try to influence their children to select someone of whom they approved. If a son or daughter accepted their parents’ choice, he or she would announce this to the parents of the intended spouse. Acceptance was considered to be marriage. The same procedure was followed when the young people were making their own choice—acceptance was considered a marriage. Another variant involved a young man sneaking into the bed of his desired paramour. If she did not awaken her parents, this was understood as an acceptance and the couple was considered married. In any event, there was no official ceremony signifying marriage. However, both families made gifts to the new couple. Polygyny was practiced (often sororal), as were the sororate and levirate.

The primary Kutenai kin-based residential group was the “household,” an extended family comprised of a husband and wife, their unmarried children, their married daughters with their husbands and children, and an occasional married son, his wife, and their children. This group shared a lodge and fire, and cooperated economically. Under reservation conditions the extended family continued to be important, but without the matrilocal tendency. There is also a tendency toward nuclear families.

Inheritance was not formalized for the Kutenai. Property of a deceased person would be distributed to close kin and friends.

Socialization was the primary responsibility of parents, parents’ siblings, grandparents, and older siblings. The socialization process was balanced between the more formal authority/respect style found between adjacent generations and within one’s own generation (older and younger siblings), and the gentler, affectively warm style typical of alternate generations.

Although Kutenai society is strongly egalitarian, there were recognized strata, some of which came after significant Plains cultural influence. The Kutenai recognized a broad, two-fold division of people into the categories of “those with power from a vision” and “those without power.” The latter were regarded as extremely unfortunate people, without much social merit. Since spiritual power was thought to be necessary for success, those without its blessing were poor indeed and could not contribute to the well-being of others. Those with power from a vision were in a position to make a contribution and so were valuable to others. Warriors were regarded as especially important, as was the village leader; both distinctions most probably came late and after extensive Plains contact. Additionally, Kutenai society was cross-cut by sodalities. Probably deriving from Plains influence was the “Crazy Dog” society, comprised of men who received power from Dog and were relentless warriors in battle. The “Crazy Owl” society was a female sodality that functioned to ward off epidemic diseases. Finally, there were shaman’s sodalities, organized around conducting specific ceremonies.

Overall, Kutenai social organization should be described as informal and flexible—even fluid. The largest recognized “unit,” that of Kutenai identity, was and is based on language. The Kutenai language is a functional isolate in the sense that neighboring peoples such as Salish speakers and the Blackfoot do not understand it. Kutenai speakers take pride in this and speak openly in front of non-Kutenai with the assurance that their conversation is private. There are two dialects of the Kutenai language, which match their two geographic divisions: Upper and Lower Kutenai. Within these geographic and cultural divisions were the band designations which were named for winter villages. The bands were made up of households which were extended families with a matrilocal bias. Households were the main functioning social units of Kutenai society. The household makeup of any given band was not always consistent from year to year. Households often shifted their winter village location to take advantage of some perceived benefit, making bands more fluid than fixed. While defined in terms of a winter village grouping/location, bands might re-form during the summer in order to exploit some resource.

While generally egalitarian, the Kutenai had leaders. At the extended family level, the oldest, most experienced man served, by consensus, as its leader. When more than one family was involved, a respected person of demonstrated ability would be chosen to lead. More specifically, leadership always derived from the recognition by members of the community that a generous person had a skill set, demonstrated by success, that qualified him to lead in a particular endeavor. Leadership could be for a single activity only, like harvesting waterfowl or for guiding a group from one place to another over recognized trails. Since all skills were understood to ultimately result from spiritual power, there was also recognition of spiritual authority in the informal leadership.

With the introduction of the horse and attendant increase in bison hunting on the western Plains by the Upper Kutenai, leadership in the organization of bison hunting expeditions became even more important, particularly since it required organizing large, multi-ethnic hunting parties that also had to function as war parties. Bison hunting and raiding led to counting coup, the warrior society known as the “Crazy Dogs,” and an ability to amass wealth that then could be distributed, resulting in elevated prestige and a further concentration of power for some individuals. Village chiefs, who were still first among equals, developed in historic times as a more general-purpose leader. They were generous individuals who had the attribute of great spiritual power for accumulating “wealth” in hunting, gambling, and warfare. They coordinated day-to-day activities, used their influence to maintain order, and met with a council of respected men to make decisions for the band. They had a “camp crier” who announced their decisions. They also appointed special purpose leaders who were analogous to those of the older pattern.

Day-to-day social control was managed through normal face-to-face community methods like gossip and shaming. Older people admonished others to behave well, and intervened to diffuse conflict. The Crazy Dogs functioned as a police unit while on the bison hunt, maintaining order within the moving group.

Interpersonal conflict was handled by individuals directly, and by families. Older people often functioned as a buffer between contending individuals and families, interceding in conflicts in order to calm emotional intensity. At the intergroup level, Kutenai identity functioned to exclude all outsiders (defined as non-Kutenai), a pattern which persisted into the 1970s. Predominantly hostile relations existed between the Kutenai and Blackfoot, and also the neighboring Salish. Relatively friendly relations obtained between the Kutenai and Plains Cree. With the introduction of the horse, hostility between the Kutenai and Blackfoot intensified due to more frequent and deeper incursions into the Plains by the Kutenai for bison hunting, and consequent raiding and horse-stealing. The fur trade again intensified these hostilities. Interestingly, relations between the Kutenai and their Plateau neighbors such as the Salish warmed, at least seasonally, due to mutual benefit from cooperation on bison hunting expeditions. As actual open hostilities such as raiding diminished, hostility was channeled into intergroup gambling competition. The “stick game,” also known as the “bone” and “hand” game in English, became a major vehicle through which old hostilities and alignments became expressed.

Kutenai cosmology is deeply spiritual, with everything in nature (the world itself) seen as having both spiritual and natural aspects. In the Kutenai view, long ago before humans the world was occupied by spirits who looked and lived like humans, but were the essences of the entire natural world: the plants, animals, rocks, etc. All had abilities (their “power”) which, by a pre-ordained charter, one day would be offered to humans in visions when humans took their rightful place in the world. Coyote was the trickster/transformer character in Kutenai myths (the stories about this pre-human time). Interestingly, Coyote was seen as a gambler by the Kutenai, an activity for which they were notorious. Old Lady Owl was the bogey man, carrying away naughty children to her nest which had sharp awls sticking through it, preventing their escape. Also in that time there was a Water Monster, who was killed, resulting in a great flood; it was never a threat to humans. In the Kutenai version of this Plateau mythical theme, the spirits decided to challenge the humans to gambling contests in order to force them to earn the privilege of replacing them on the Earth.

Once humans claimed the Earth, the spirits, as chartered, moved into the background and offered their skills (powers) to humans through the vision quest, which was usually undertaken some time before puberty while children were understood to be “ritually pure.” Both boys and girls received power this way. Success in life depended upon power granted by these helping/tutelary spirits in the vision quest. Power and the spirit granting it remained with one until death. Kutenai spirituality included belief in a set of sun-related spirits most probably connected to the Sun Dance complex borrowed from the Plains. One spirit, Sweat Lodge, was available to all who took part in the sweat lodge ceremony, regardless of their success on the vision quest. Sweat lodge was a metaphor for the world, both spiritually and physically. It was seen as being composed of three parts: the earth (rocks) surrounded by the water (poured on the rocks), covered by the dome of the sky (the hemisphere of the sweat lodge roof). Participating in the Sweat Lodge ceremony was thus a communion with the spiritual aspect of the world (of nature) and power granted from that communion was considered very efficacious.

After Father Pierre Jean de Smet’s first mission to the Flathead (which had limited effect on the Kutenai) ended in 1850, another was established by the Jesuits in 1854 among the Pend d’Oreille and Kutenai at St. Ignatius. The priests sought to make fundamental changes to native culture. After 1855, agents of the reservation system also were involved in this effort. Particular targets for eradication by the end of the 1880s were gambling and native religion. The forced destruction of medicine bundles (actually fakes) and gambling equipment demanded by the Jesuit priests in 1897 drove both religion and gambling underground. While gambling was again openly practiced by the 1970s, Kutenai religion remains shrouded in secrecy. In fact, the Kutenai maintain a “doctrine of secrecy” concerning their religious beliefs and practices. We do know that while the Kutenai were nominally Christian in the 1970s, they also retained their native beliefs and practiced ceremonies designed to commune with, and make use of, spirits and their power.

Kutenai spiritual practitioners included both healing shamans and shaman/priests. Healing shamans were specialized, in that they usually had power to treat one class of illness only. Shaman/priests had power to conduct ceremonies, but they might also engage in healing during those ceremonies.

Kutenai ceremonies include Spirit Dances, the Sweat Lodge Ceremony, the Conjuring or Blanket Ceremony (similar to the Algonquian Shaking Tent), the Jump Dance, and the Sun Dance. Conjuring, or “Putting Up the Blanket,” is a spirit-calling ceremony wherein shaman/priests, working as a team, call in spirits in order for participants to be granted help from them. It featured a “bound shaman” element. Another ceremony of particular interest and enduring value to the Kutenai is, the Stick Game. This game is widely distributed in western North America. It is a “team” gambling game based on guessing the location of bone playing pieces concealed in the hands of opponents. Large wagers are made, and opposing multi-ethnic teams are often traditional enemies, so it is expressive of alliances and conflicts. Spiritual power bestowed on individuals is used in the game, which may last a whole night at pow wows. People attended any and all of these Kutenai ceremonies in order to commune with their helping spirits, and to acquire benefits such as healing from them through the shamans who have the appropriate power to host the ceremony.

Ancestors of the Kutenai left rock art depicting their visionary experiences. They also adorned utilitarian objects with graphic art, such as shields and lodge covers. Women did geometric bead work on garments such as dresses and moccasins. Men carved stone pipes in which they used strong tobacco in ceremonial contexts.

Illness had two causes: natural and spiritual. Natural disease was treated by an herbalist while spiritual illness required a healing shaman. In the latter case, the disease was usually attributed to an intrusion in the body by a spiritual object sent by a sorcerer. Treatment involved locating the object, sucking or blowing it out, and either sending it back to the sorcerer or neutralizing it in juniper smoke.

It is difficult to know what the aboriginal Kutenai belief was concerning the soul and afterlife. One belief by contemporary Kutenai holds that the soul, as the human spiritual counterpart, departs the body at death and moves in a westerly direction. This westward journey is thought to continue until the end of time (the end of the world), when all souls complete their journey and, entering the world from the east, reunite with the living. Another version has the soul of a deceased person hover near the village, awaiting the birth of a child for it to occupy so as to live another life span.

The culture summary was written by Bill B. Brunton in June, 2017. Leon G. Doyon updated the population figures in September, 2017.

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