History
The Ktunaxa people today live in southeastern British Columbia, Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. In Montana they are known as Ksanka. Ktunaxa is the term that these tribes call themselves, which is pronounced Ta-na-ha, with a barely perceptible ‘k’ sound at the beginning of the word. Traditionally these people have been known as Kootenay or Kootenai, which is an anglicisation of the Blackfoot word used to refer to the Ktunaxa, so in some of their tribal organizations and activities, the Ktunaxa refer to themselves as Kootenay, or in Montana, Kootenai.
There is a cultural distinction between Upper Kootenay, those bands based around Invermere and Windermere, British Columbia, and Lower Kootenay, those based around Creston, Grasmere, and Cranbrook, British Columbia, Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and the Ksanka of Elmo, Montana. This history focuses on the Creston Band of the Lower Kootenay, who call themselves the Yaqan Nu’kiy Ktunaxa, or the marsh or water people of the Ktunaxa, also situates this group in the broader context of all the Ktunaxa tribes.
Read more about this topic: Kutenai People
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“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)