Bitterroot Salish Erotic

The Salish call themselves Séliš. Everyone else called them Flathead, a name pinned on them by outsiders and carried into the 1855 treaty that still bears it, though they never flattened anyone's head. Their country is the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, a long corridor between the Sapphire Mountains and the Bitterroot Range, and from there the seasonal round ran east over the divide onto the plains for bison, and out to camas grounds and mountain fisheries the rest of the year. That position made them a hinge people: Plateau in language, kinship and root gathering, Plains in horses, tipis and warfare. Horses reached them early in the eighteenth century and stretched everything, the hunts, the range, and the reach of Blackfeet raiders who had guns from the fur trade well before the Salish did. Their language, Montana Salish, belongs to the Interior branch of Salishan and sits so close to Kalispel and Pend d'Oreille that speakers treat the three as dialects of one thing. It has no relation at all to Ktunaxa, spoken by the neighbors they now share a government with. Fluent speakers are few, and the immersion school at Arlee and the culture committee at St. Ignatius have spent decades holding the line, including a place names project that has recorded well over a thousand named sites across western Montana, a great many of them marking something Coyote did there. Those stories get told in winter, not in summer.

Catholicism came to them by invitation, which is rare enough to say plainly. Between 1831 and 1839 the Salish sent four delegations east to St. Louis asking for Jesuit priests, prompted in part by Iroquois Catholics who had married in and settled among them, and Pierre-Jean De Smet founded St. Mary's Mission in the Bitterroot in 1841. The faith took and held, layered over older practice rather than replacing it. What came after was not invited. The Hellgate Treaty was pushed through with interpretation so poor that a priest in the room judged that not a tenth of it had been understood, and it left the valley's future deliberately unsettled. Chief Victor would not sign the Bitterroot away. His son Charlo refused as well, and found his name on the 1872 agreement anyway, forged, a grievance he pressed for the rest of his life. In 1891 the last families were marched north to the Jocko. Today they are one of three peoples in the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, on a reservation that allotment broke into a checkerboard and left them a minority in their own home. They have been buying it back for decades. Each spring the bitterroot comes up, and the first roots are still blessed before anyone eats.