Hitswithastick lives, teaches traditional Bitterroot Salish ways

“The Art of Primitive Survival: Native American Tools and Techniques,” a movie made by Buck and Rose Hitswithastick of Arlee with support from the Montana Council of the Arts, debuted at the Johnny Arlee/Vic Charlo Theater on the Salish Kootenai College campus on April 25. The movie stresses keeping tradition, self sufficiency, living with nature, and Native arts and tradition.

It’s appropriate that this theater screened the premier since its namesake, Johnny Arlee, “and those other old timers, they’ll tell you how they used to do it,” Buck says. “Now just for fun, go try and do it.”

He also mentioned Eneas Vanderburg, Dwight Billedeaux, Ron Theriault, Mike Dolson, and other family, friends and acquaintances. Theriault was his first history teacher and Dolson taught Indian Studies.

“A lot of real learning came from Dwight Billedeaux,” Buck added.

Buck’s a storyteller, and a good one. After the film, during a question-and-answer session, he recalled how going hunting with his granddad when he was a third grader kindled his interest in traditional ways.

“I’d just gotten a huntin’ knife; I called it my ‘Rambo’ knife,” he said.

After their travels on the backroads, Buck’s granddad shot a deer. He went up to slit the deer’s throat to bleed it out and asked Buck to turn over his Rambo knife.

When his grandad pushed it into the deer’s neck, “it was like pushing on rubber with your thumb,” Buck said.

His granddad cautioned him to never hand him a dull knife again. Looking around, he spied some rocks in the field, and selected a sharp one. His grandfather hit it with another rock to chip it off and make an edge sharp enough to complete the job.

Everything we need is already here

“That really got me interested in using what nature provides,” Buck said. “Everything we need is already here.”

Then young Buck continued his education by making a bow and arrows and shot four or five gophers. His granddad was amazed he’d been able to shoot them with his bow, and his grandmother admonished him to ”get them out of here.”

So he skinned the little critters, because people don’t eat gophers.

“I must have scraped the hides,” Buck said, “because I would put them over my face to gross my grandmother out. And then … (because) my greasy little kid hands and my greasy little kid face were always on the little hides, I invented leather.”

There were a few switchbacks on the road to becoming an artist, a Native traditionalist, and the adjunct professor at Salish Kootenai College that he is today.

“Sometimes teenagers are pulled the wrong way,” Buck explained.

To stop “drinking and drugging” he would go out and camp by himself in the mountains and make art and tools, returning to town to play in a heavy metal band, War Cry. He also taught Salish in the Dixon schools.

Buck added, “It takes the rough support of your family, the elders checking on you, and the Fish and Game when you’re camping out in the woods.”

For instance, he spent a lot of time at the Agnes Vanderburg Camp near Arlee, which was seven miles up a gravel road from his family. After a big snowstorm, he heard a motor in the distance, and the next day heard it again. After spending two days pushing snow out of the way, Eneas Vanderburg broke through the snow and drove into camp to get the snowed-in young man and give him a ride home.

Buck has come a long way from gopher hides. Now he brain tans and smokes deer and elk hides and makes clothing and moccasins. Blankets and many other items come from bear and buffalo hides; he also uses bear hide with the fur side out for a quiver.

But the principles are the same. If you shoot an animal, you eat it and use all the parts of the animal you can.

Buck makes knives from elk and buffalo bones, hide scrapers from buffalo ribs, spearheads, smaller knives and axes from stones, and many other traditional tools and weapons.

He marks his wood during the year, then gathers it as the sap quits running in the fall. Dogbane, which looks like a dry tube at the edge of a patch of cattails in the fall, breaks down into strong fiber, which Buck forms into string – a technique he demonstrates in the movie.

His advice is to “gather your materials in the fall, do a lot of work in the winter, and the messy stuff in the spring.”

Sticks lashed together with rawhide makes a backpack to carry his lightweight kit, including a rawhide parfleche filled with knives, his sandpaper rock, assorted small stones, maybe buffalo sinew, buckskin thongs, and dogbane string. Buck also packs his grease-filled shell in a cone of rawhide. Hides, tanned and not, go on top. It's much lighter than the backpack he used to lug when he first began going into the mountains to camp “with pots and pans hanging on it” and all sorts of extra stuff.

Use everything is a credo of Buck’s. Save the little bits and pieces from scraping the back of a hide and boil it with some water for glue. Save small pieces of wolf fur or bear hide to put on weapons.

“You make a spear point,” he said. “When it breaks, it becomes a knife; that breaks and it becomes a paring knife; then an awl, then a needle that breaks and it goes back to dirt.”

“Archaeologists don’t always find everything because many things were used until they were back to dirt,” Buck said.

He hopes the traditional ways of the Bitterroot Salish that he knows and practices will reach and influence more people due to modern technology. “Powwow stuff, animal stuff, just everyday stuff is interesting to people,” Buck said.

For more information, head to YouTube and search for Buck Hitswithastick. His media-savvy wife Rose, who shot the movie, also has Buck on TikTok.

It’s all part of his effort to convey the following advice: Live with nature and develop a natural respect for the land, and learn how to become a human being.