Thanksgiving has complicated local history

Though American tradition teaches the first Thanksgiving in 1621 was a happy and thankful event to celebrate the bonding of early Pilgrims and the Wampangoag Indians, nearly 400 years later, Americans in Lake County are undecided on whether cultural cohesion between the white man and Indian Nations lives up to everything early turkey eaters might have expected.

During the early half of the 19th century the Bitteroot Salish, Upper Pend d’Oreille and the Kootenai Tribes covered all of western Montana and extended into parts of Idaho, British Columbia and Wyoming.

Each of the three Tribes had its own culture, language and way of life. Each government developed through generations of observation, experimentation and spiritual interaction with the natural world, according to an essay at www.cskt.org.

Each created a body of knowledge about the environment closely tied to its seasons, location and biology. This way of life was suffused with rich oral history and a spiritual tradition in which people respected the animals, plants and other elements of the natural environment. 

Tribal governments were run by their Elders who taught Tribal children their ways of life. 

What some say was at first a good relationship between the white man and about 600 different Indian Tribes through various trading networks, soon declined after the white man developed a reputation for cheating and lying to Indians to take advantage of their goods, according to a www.indians.org essay, an American Indian Heritage Foundation website.

The white man’s poor reputation grew worse as the white man did not understand or Indian Tribes’ respect of animals and environment, the website said.

As the white man colonized countryside and moved into the vast “wilderness” across the country, he went to war with the Indians, believing that Indians needed to be removed.

The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. The law authorized the president to negotiate with southern Indian tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their ancestral homelands. 

A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy.

In 1848, The United States organized Oregon Territory, exerting jurisdiction over Tribal aboriginal lands west of the continental divide, an Office of Indian Education timeline said.

But instead of trying to remove northern pacific Indian Tribes, the United States government signed the Hellgate Treaty with tribal leaders in 1855, which officially recognized Indian Tribes as their own nations, but forced the Indians to “cede” their homelands, agreeing instead to occupy designated lands set aside by the United States government. 

Tribal governments lost ownership of more than half a million acres of land.

The next intrusion of the United State government arrived in 1887 when

Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, authored the Dawes Act which aimed to break up reservations by granting land allotment to individual Indians.

Legislatures saw the political move as a way to move from all-out war against the Indians to a sort of government-forced conversion from Indians seeing themselves as Tribal members to seeing themselves as individual Americans, according to the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, a www.ourdocuments.gov essay read.

The government hoped that individual Indians would stop looking to their Tribal government for leadership of their welfare.

“It would then no longer be necessary for government to oversee Indian welfare in the paternalistic way it had been obligated to do, or provide meager annuities that seemed to keep the Indian in a subservient and poverty-stricken position,” the essay said.

The Act enabled the President to break up reservation land, which was held in common by the members of a tribe into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals.

Anyone on the Indian “roll” received a portion of land. On the Flathead reservation, there were 2,390 Tribal members eligible.

Though Dawes Act proponents claim the act was intended to protect Indian rights, their outcome in many instances were disastrous, the website reads.

Section five of the Dawes Act reads that “..if in the opinion of the President it shall be for the best interests of said tribe, it shall be lawful for the Secretary of the Interior to negotiate with such Indian tribe for the purchase and release by said tribe, and considered it “just and equitable between the United States and said tribe of Indians…”

Section 5 of the Dawes Act reads that “…all lands adapted to agriculture, with or without irrigation so sold or released to the United States by any Indian tribe shall be held by the United States for the sale purpose of securing homes to actual settlers and shall be disposed of by the United States to actual and bona fide settlers…”

Relations further declined in 1901.

“A small delegation of representatives of the U.S. Government, led by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Hoyt, met with tribal leaders on the reservation to discuss an offer to buy part of the northern end of the reservation.,” an Office of Indian Education timeline said. 

Tribal leaders refused to sell. 

 “I will not sell a foot (of land),” said Chief Charlo, the timeline said. 

Kootenai Chief Isaac agreed. 

“My body is full of your people’s lies. You told me I was poor and needed money, but I am not poor. What is valuable to a person is land, the earth, water, trees…and all these belong to us…We haven’t any more land than we need, so you had better buy from somebody else,” Kootenai Chief Isaac said.

In 1904 the United States Congress passed the Flathead Allotment Act, setting the course for more than a 60-percent loss of reservation land. 

Each ‘counted and enrolled’ Indian family was given an allotment and the rest was open to homesteading. the timeline said.

Of the 1,245,000 acres available, 245,000 acres were secured by Indian allotments.

Lake County faces the American Thanksgiving holiday each year with a contingent of people who want to focus on the common American version of Thanksgiving now commonly recreated, while others prefer to focus on their Creator and be thankful they are alive, respect their culture, their land, their animals and their way of life. 

Email Michelle Lovato at mlovato@leaderadvertiser.com.