Preservation as Perpetuation

Abstract

I am a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Nation, in northwestern Montana. We are one of the tribes that have assumed the State Historic Preservation Office authority for our Reservation, under the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act. The theme of this session, Native Spaces-Public Places, is at the center of the issue of preservation and is at the heart of the challenge to First Nations to protect and perpetuate their cultural survival. As you know, the First Nations of this continent did not have a written history in book form, as did the non-Indian peoples who came here. Our history is written within our unique and specific cultural landscapes. These places hold the memories of our ancestors, speak to us in the present, and are crucial to our survival, as Indian people, into the future. Large portions of our cultural landscapes are located in aboriginal territory, that is, land ceded to the U.S. government under treaties or executive orders. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes ceded 22 million acres to the government; it retained 1.2 million acres, which is the present Flathead Reservation. Thus cultural sites, intrinsic to our people and cared for by our people for millennia, were no longer considered ours but belonged to the federal government. Our sites lay within national park and national forest boundaries, under Army Corps of Engineers dams and reservoirs, and in other federal landholdings. When it comes to the protection and management of these cultural sites and landscapes, the federal agencies and the tribes often disagree. The National Historic Preservation Act is one of the main federal laws used when a federal undertaking may affect a cultural site eligible to the National Register of Historic Places. Criterion "D" of the National Register Significance Criteria recognizes a site as eligible based on scientific information value, usually in the field of archaeology. We always say "D" stands for "digging." This is the crux of the issue for the CSKT. In our culture's view, deliberately disrupting the natural cycle of life and its decay is not acceptable. Since the inception of [End Page 18] cultural resource management laws, Criterion D has been the primary focus of public land managers when dealing with tribal heritage sites. On the Flathead Reservation avoidance is the emphasized mode of management for cultural resources. In aboriginal territory if our cultural site impedes the implementation of a federal undertaking, this resource is often considered expendable by the federal agency. The site will be dug to determine eligibility under Criterion D and dug again to "scientifically" mitigate its destruction. The digging policy of the archaeologists in our Aboriginal Territory pursuant to NHPA Section 106 has caused much cultural anguish for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The NHPA 1992 amendments gave the tribes the opportunity to incorporate tribal values into the process followed in complying with the law. It has been a tremendous challenge for those of us at the CSKT Preservation Department to take this law, which was developed outside our cultural construct, and critically study and analyze it through our culture's lenses. The cultural anguish has motivated us to create a culturally compatible Section 106 process that meets the law's requirements of evaluation and eligibility and has eased our cultural and personal anxiety. In the field of ethnography, for too long we have watched the extraction of our traditional knowledge from our elders - knowledge used not to benefit our people but to launch a professional career or create a "professional expert" on our tribal lifeways. These careers have been built on the shoulders of our elders, the true Ph.D.s of our culture. We at the CSKT Preservation Department are infusing our values, our Cultural Truths, into the process of complying with the law in an effort to evaluate and preserve our landscape and, more...