The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes: The Hell Gate Treaty and Its Aftermath

In July of eighteen fifty-five, at a location in the Bitterroot Valley that is now near Missoula, representatives of the United States government sat down with leaders of the Salish, the Pend d'Oreilles, and the Kootenai peoples and negotiated the Hell Gate Treaty. The treaty established the Flathead Reservation as the permanent homeland for these three confederated nations, a reserved territory centered on the Mission Valley, the Flathead Lake basin, and the surrounding mountains and river systems.

What the treaty promised and what followed were two different things. The Flathead Reservation, as established in eighteen fifty-five, encompassed approximately one and a quarter million acres from a territory the three peoples had occupied across an area perhaps twenty times larger. The reduction was significant. What happened afterward made it more so.

The McLaughlin Agreement of nineteen oh four opened what the federal government characterized as surplus reservation lands to outside homesteaders, without adequate tribal consent, under the allotment policies that the General Allotment Act of eighteen eighty-seven had enabled across the United States. Non-Indian homesteaders moved onto reservation lands that the Salish, Pend d'Oreilles, and Kootenai had not agreed to sell. Then, in nineteen oh eight, Congress carved the National Bison Range out of the reservation without tribal consent, taking another section of land for a federal wildlife refuge that the tribes would not manage for more than a century.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have responded to this history not through resignation but through sustained legal and political action. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes negotiated the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project water compact, won federal recognition of their rights to the Flathead River system, and achieved the return of the National Bison Range to tribal management, enacted by Congress in December of twenty twenty and fully completed in twenty twenty-two. Their tribal government is regarded by federal and state officials as among the most sophisticated in the United States.

The People's Center in Pablo, on the reservation, is the primary cultural institution where visitors can engage with Salish and Kootenai history, art, and contemporary life on the community's own terms.