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Protecting Wild Nature on Native Lands
land and by maintaining and exercising the rights we kept in our treaty. This is our generational responsibility that we grow up with as Indian people. —Terry Tanner, Wildland Recreation Program, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes
Editor’s Note: Terry Tanner presented this case study, basing it on his work and that of David Rockwell, a 1999 paper compiled by Tom McDonald and Lester Bigcrane on behalf of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes through the University of Montana’s Distance Learning Program.
History: The First Tribal Wilderness The striking peaks found in the Mission Range of the Flathead Nation of western Montana crown a wilderness rare in the United States both in majesty and management. Just south of Flathead Lake, the range rises more than a mile above the farmlands and towns of the Mission Valley; the western front of the range provides one of the most spectacular valley landscapes in the Rocky Mountain region. But the range is more than a natural wonder. It is the first place in which an Indian nation has matched, and possibly exceeded, the U.S. Federal Government in dedicating lands to be managed as wilderness. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are composed of descendants of Salish (Flathead), Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai Indian tribes that traditionally occupied 8 million hectares (20 million acres) stretching from central Montana, across the Idaho Panhandle to eastern Washington, and north into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, Canada. The Hellgate Treaty of 1855 ceded the majority of those ancestral lands to the U.S. Government in return for