Ktunaxa - History - Early History

Early History

Anthropological and ethnographic interest in the Ktunaxa began in the mid-19th century. What these European and North American scholars observed has to be viewed with a critical eye, since they did not have the theoretical sophistication we expect of anthropologists today, and they imputed a great deal of their own cultural values into what they were able to witness among the Ktunaxa. They remain, however, the most detailed descriptions of Ktunaxa lifestyles at a time when Aboriginal lifeways all over the world were dramatically changing in the face of a self-confident, commerce- and resource-driven European expansionism.

The earliest ethnographies detail Ktunaxa lifestyle around the turn of the 20th century. The Ktunaxa lifestyle, when first observed by Europeans, was full and rich. They observed a stable economic life and a rich social life with a detailed ritual calendar. Their economic life focused on fishing, using fish traps and hooks, and travelling on the waterways in the sturgeon-nosed canoe. There were also seasonal and sometimes ritual hunts for bear, deer, caribou, gophers, geese, and the many other fowl in Lower Kootenay country. As mentioned above, the Upper Kootenay often crossed the Rockies to participate in the bison hunt, but the Lower Kootenay did this only as an individual pursuit, and therefore it was not an important part of their economic life. citation required

Ktunaxa social life as observed by the anthropologists consists of vision quests, reverence of tobacco, a Sun Dance, and Grizzly Bear Dance, a midwinter festival, a Blue Jay Dance and other social and ceremonial activities.citation required There were different societies or lodges that people belonged to, such as The Crazy Dog Society, the Crazy Owl Society, and the Shamans’ Society. These groups took on certain responsibilities in Ktunaxa society, and membership in a lodge came with obligations in battle, hunting, and community service.

The Ktunaxa and their neighbors the Sinixt both used the sturgeon-nosed canoe. This water craft was first described in 1899 as being peculiarly shaped and having some resemblance to canoes that were used in the Amur region of Asia. Harry Holbert Turney-High, the first to write an extensive ethnography of the Ktunaxa, (focusing on the American bands), records a detailed description of the harvesting of the bark to make this canoe (67): “A tree growing rather high in the mountains is sought. Finding one of the desired size and quality, a man climbed it to the proper height and cut a ring around the bark with his elk-horn chisel or flint knife. In the meantime a helper cut out another ring at the base of the tree. This done, an incision was made down the length of the trunk connecting the two rings. This cut had to be as straight and accurate as possible. A stick of about two inches in diameter was used carefully to pry the bark from the tree. The bark was wrapped up so that it would not dry out on the way to camp. The inside, or tree-side of the bark sheet, became the outside of the canoe, while the outside surface became the inside of the boat. The bark was considered ready for immediate use. There was no scraping or seasoning, nor was it decorated in any way.”

The process that defines the entry of the Ktunaxa into the written record of the European immigrant society that was growing around them is the arrival of Christianity to their territory and their early relation to it. There is more information about this process than about any other sequence of events that the Ktunaxa were involved in at the turn of the 20th century.

The Ktunaxa had been exposed to Christianity as early as the 18th century, when a Lower Kootenay prophet from Flathead Lake in Idaho by the name of Shining Shirt spread news of the coming of the ‘Blackrobes’ (Cocolla 20). Ktunaxa people also encountered Christian Iroquois sent west by the Hudson's Bay Company. By the 1830s there was a blending of Native and Christian ceremonies among the Ktunaxa, which occurred without the presence of European missionaries or pressure, but rather through their contact with Christian Natives from other parts of Canada and the United States.

Father Pierre-Jean de Smet in 1845-6 was the first missionary to tour the region, with a view to establishing missions to minister to Native peoples and assessing the success and needs of those already established.citation required It had been a priority of the Jesuits to minister to these newly discovered non-Christians in the New World. This is a phenomenon that had been ongoing in Eastern North America for 200 years, but the Ktunaxa were not the objects of the church’s attentions until the mid-late 19th century. A Jesuit by the name of Philippo Canestrelli lived among the Ksanka people of Montana in the 1880s and 90s, and wrote a much celebrated grammar of their language, published in 1896. The first missionary to take up a permanent post in the Yaqan Nu’kiy territory, i.e. the Creston Band of Lower Kootenay, was Father Nicolas Coccola, who arrived in the Creston area in 1880. It is from his memoirs, corroborated by newspaper reports and Ktunaxa oral histories that the early 20th century history of the Ktunaxa is constructed.

In the first stages of Ktunaxa – European contact, mainly the result of a gold rush that began in earnest in 1863 with the discovery of gold in Wild Horse Creek, the Ktunaxa were little interested in European-driven economic activities. There was an attempt to recruit them to trap in support of the fur trade, but few Lower Kootenay found this worthwhile. The Lower Kootenay region is, as mentioned above, remarkably rich in fish, birds, and large game, and so the economic life of the Yaqan Nu’kiy was notably secure, and thus resistant to new unfamiliar economic activities.

Slowly though, the Yaqan Nu’kiy began participating in European-driven industries. They served as hunters and guides for the miners at the Bluebell silver-lead mine at Riondel. The richest gold mine ever discovered in the Kootenays was discovered by a Ktunaxa man named Pierre, and staked by him and Father Coccola in 1893.citation required