Montana's First Peoples: Twelve Nations, Seven Reservations

Montana has twelve federally recognized tribal nations. They occupy seven reservations that collectively cover roughly one-tenth of the state's total land area, more than nine million acres across the high plains and the mountain valleys and the river corridors that frame the state's geography.

The nations are the Blackfeet, the Crow, the Assiniboine, the Gros Ventre, the Salish, the Kootenai, the Pend d'Oreilles, the Northern Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Rocky Boy's Chippewa Cree, the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux, and the Little Shell Chippewa Cree, who received federal recognition in twenty nineteen after more than one hundred years of petition. Each nation has a distinct history, a distinct territory, a distinct relationship with the federal government, and a distinct trajectory through the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reduced Indigenous land holdings across the West. They are not interchangeable, and their histories are not the same story told with different names.

Montana's Indian Education for All law, passed in nineteen ninety-nine, requires public schools to include the history and culture of Montana's tribal nations in their curricula across every grade and every subject. It is the most comprehensive state-level Indigenous education mandate in the United States; no other state has enacted a comparable requirement. Whether the law's implementation has matched its ambition varies by school district and by teacher. The requirement exists, statewide, as a matter of state statute.

The reservations that bracket this stretch of the Northern Rockies, the Blackfeet Reservation to the east of Glacier and the Flathead Reservation to the south, are not museum exhibits. They are functioning governments with economies, language programs, legal systems, and communities that predate the state of Montana by centuries and will outlast any particular political arrangement by which the state currently defines itself.