Kalispel elder shares tales of respect

SANDPOINT — It was the first thing you noticed, even before getting all the way into the room — the smell of wood smoke and tanned hides permeating the air. The earthy scents came from the ornate ceremonial regalia lining tables and walls on one side of the building.

An even larger impression was made by the two quiet individuals arranging the beaded and fringed clothing along the south wall. The man carried a big presence in a compact body, his granite-colored hair pulled back into a ponytail and his smooth features unruffled by the growing din around him as students filed into the gym. His wife worked nearby, radiating a calm and powerful beauty.

Francis and Wilma Cullooyah were on hand as elders of the Kalispel Tribe and when Francis stepped to the microphone, the students at Washington Elementary School fell quiet. Rows of heads cocked to one side as they realized this man was speaking in a tongue far removed from their own. Several sentences later, the speaker began again, this time in English.

“Good morning children,” the elder said, raising his arms slightly, as if in benediction. “Good morning brothers and sisters, all of you.”

The Cullooyahs came to the school as part of a project called “Kalispel Heritage in our Backyard.” Their presentation preceded visits to the fourth-grade classrooms of Sally Loveless and Ely Darling, in which students studying Idaho history were about to get an up-close, hands-on lesson about the region’s first inhabitants.

“As I get older, I find it’s a must that I do this,” Francis Cullooyah said, explaining that he was continuing an oral history that is older than the names of physical places, more ancient than the names of the tribes themselves. “You have to know that there were Kalispel people here before anyone else.

“Right down there, not far from your school,” he went on, turning to point over his shoulder in the direction of the Pend Oreille River, “there were tipis and longhouses on the beach.”

The Kalispel are barely mentioned in the fourth-grade history textbooks used by the Lake Pend Oreille School District, according to Ellen Weissman, M. Ed., the project coordinator who developed curriculum for the pilot program. Lack of knowledge on the subject is not surprising, she noted, since it wasn’t until 2004 that the state of Idaho actually recognized the Kalispel Tribe of Indians as an Idaho tribe.

Cullooyah spoke to the students about a three-day canoe trip he and a colleague took around the shores of Lake Pend Oreille in search of historical sites associated with the Kalispel.

“We found 89 different campsites of aboriginal Indian families,” he said. “Not only the Kalispel, but also the Coeur d’Alene, Spokane and Kootenai tribes, who also utilized this area.”

The area the elder referred to stretched from Camas Prairie, Mont., west along rivers to Pend Oreille and Priest lakes, north into Canada and westward again into the current state of Washington. Within that fertile belt, the tribes gathered camas root and bitterroot, harvested berries, fished the rivers and lakes and hunted for deer, elk and cougar.

“Our chiefs were the people who were in the know about where there was plentiful hunting and fishing and where there were berries to be picked,” said Cullooyah. “Our people moved from one place to another, because they didn’t want to over-hunt, they didn’t want to over-fish or over-pick.

“At a given time, all of the villages would come together and make sure that each family had the amount of food needed to last through the winter.”

Since the early 1900s, the formerly wide-ranging Kalispel people have been confined to a one-mile-wide, eight-mile-long strip of land near Usk on the Idaho/Washington border — what is now the Kalispel Indian Reservation.

“That is where we live today,” said the tribal elder. “That is where we are trying to hang on to our culture, our tradition and our language.”

Not many years ago, the Kalispel tongue was in danger of being forgotten, he added. Thanks to a resurgence of interest that led to ongoing native language classes, there are 12 fluent speakers in the tribe, all of whom work to share their knowledge with others.

Local fourth-grade students, too, will learn key words and phrases in Kalispel as part of the pilot program, Weissman said. Beyond that, their history curriculum will now cover how traditional sturgeon-nosed bark canoes were made, accompanied by classroom activities that include how to make traditional craft items such as stick games, necklaces and drum beaters.

This first phase of the “Kalispel Heritage in our Backyard” program was funded by a Teachers Incentive Grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, with matching funds provided by The Idaho Mythweaver through a grant from the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.

In order to get the program off the ground, both Weissman and Jane Fritz, award-winning author and volunteer director of The Idaho Mythweaver, have donated their time in hopes that the curriculum will be expanded into secondary and private schools through future grants.

Among the stories Cullooyah shared at the student assembly was the tale of a white man who made a difference in his life at a young age. The story began on his first day of school, when he arrived for first grade dressed in a checked, wool coat. Seated at the back of the one-room school, Francis, who spoke only Kalispel, couldn’t understand a word the teacher was saying.

“I decided it wasn’t for me, so I stood up, put on my coat and hat, grabbed my lunch bucket and walked out the door,” he said.

On his long hike back home, the boy heard a voice call out to him in his own tongue.

“Where are you going?” asked Adam White, the white storekeeper who ran a business on tribal land.

When the youngster explained what had happened, White struck up a deal with him. He pulled a candy bar out of his pocket and told Francis that, if he went back to the schoolhouse, he would not only walk back with him, but also give him the candy in the bargain.

“When we got there, he went up and talked to the teacher and then came back and sat down behind me,” the tribal elder said. “For my first 10 days of first grade, that man sat right there behind me — he was my interpreter.

“That man helped me and he lives on today in my life and my heart,” he continued. “That compassion, that sensitivity, is something I base my life on today.”

The message, Cullooyah told the gathered students as he wrapped up his remarks, is one of love and respect.

“It’s only the blessing of our Creator that puts us in this spot today,” he said, reminding them that they are lucky to live where they do.

“We keep in our hearts the teachings of our elders,” he told the kids. “Have respect for people — the person next to you, or the people you don’t even know. Keep that in your hearts and live a good life, where you respect and love one another.

“What you learn from me today, take that and teach someone else.”

To learn more about the Kalispel Tribe, its history and present-day endeavors, visit them on line at www.kalispeltribe.com.