Fourteen Thousand Years: The Kootenai and the Flathead Valley
Near Whitefish, Montana
The Kootenai people have lived in the mountains and valleys of this region for more than fourteen thousand years. The people who lived here longest were the Kootenai, whose territory spread across a large region of northwestern Montana, northern Idaho, and what is now southern British Columbia. They moved seasonally through this mountain landscape, fishing the lakes and rivers, hunting deer and elk, and gathering plants across a territory that followed the rhythms of the seasons through the mountains west of the Continental Divide.
The Kootenai shared this region with the Pend d'Oreille, also called the Kalispel, and the Bitterroot Salish, three peoples who knew these valleys and mountains for generations before European contact. The lake that would later carry the name Whitefish Lake was part of this territory, and the lake's fish were a significant food source for the people who lived along its shores. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes were assigned to the Flathead Reservation to the southeast under the Hellgate Treaty of eighteen fifty five, a negotiation that transferred most of their territory in exchange for annuities and promised protections that were not consistently honored.
The town of Whitefish grew on land that had been Kootenai and Pend d'Oreille country, a few miles from the reservation boundary. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes remain one of the largest tribal governments in Montana, with nearly eight thousand enrolled members and a reservation of more than one million two hundred thousand acres southeast of Whitefish.
