Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart Thomas Biolsi (bio) Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 ROBERT J. BIGART is librarian emeritus at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation. Providing for the People is not a typical scholarly history. This is a detailed narrative of the gradual changes in the reservation economy of the Salish and Kootenai and the result of what the author describes as over fifty years of research. The narrative is focused largely on how Salish and Kootenai adapted—very effectively, it quickly becomes obvious—to changing circumstances, and description is tightly linked to the archival sources. The book is copiously documented and draws on the author's long career locating documents of many kinds. The main lesson of the narrative is abundantly clear: The Salish and Kootenai peoples made a gradual transition from dependence on hunting, fishing, and foraging to primary dependence upon cattle and farming by 1910 (although foraging continued to play a role in subsistence into the twentieth century). Another lesson is that this transition was made without any need for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to "civilize" or otherwise induce the Salish and Kootenai to farm; they made the transition on their own, with some very modest assistance from the agency in the form of seeds and farm implements (paid for with Indian labor). Furthermore, the Salish and Kootenai never became heavily dependent upon BIA rations. The picture Bigart carefully paints makes the reader wonder why on earth the transition to agriculture and "self-support" (as the BIA anxiously and judgmentally called it) was supposedly so vexed on other reservations—or even if the fraught histories of poverty and supposed resistance to agriculture on other reservations was more the outcome of the BIA failures than the "buffalo culture," much less the "indolence" of Native people. The last buffalo hunt took place in 1881, and at that point adaptations were already apparent on the reservation. Both horses and cattle were grazed on the open range (with an annual roundup); numbers varied by individual, of which 105 owned cattle. Most livestock were owned by mixedbloods and white men married into the tribes, but sixty-seven fullbloods owned at least some. The impact of family ownership of even a few cattle for cash sale [End Page 181] and for subsistence was, of course, significant. A good deal of small-scale farming was also taking place by 1881, including subsistence gardens, but also wheat and oats acreages (two to ten acres in the case of wheat). Notably, this was prior to the allotment of the reservation; there was no need to impose "private property" to induce what the BIA called "industry." Chiefs had an important role in allocating farmsteads and in adjudicating disputes over land (apparently there was little need for a Court of Indian Offenses). Even though economic productivity varied by family—a few families owned large herds or farms and also opened reservation businesses—one must consider that surviving traditional customs of pooling and sharing spread basic resources and even cash more widely than might be the case among non-Indians. The tribes also continued to forage both on and off the reservation (including deer, elk, trout, bitterroot, and berries); access to the original homelands beyond reservation boundaries was guaranteed by the terms of the Hellgate Treaty of 1855. Families that continued to rely on this source of subsistence combined it with livestock and farming, leaving for trips when crops or cattle did not need intensive attention. Gradually, the role of foraging in subsistence declined (but never disappeared), while cattle raising, farming, and (fairly limited) wage work became more prominent. The BIA agent reported in 1910 that "practically every family on the reservation is engaged in the cattle business to a certain extent, and the herds vary from two or three cows to as high as a thousand head of cattle" (144). It was the imposition of new laws in the twentieth century that put this Indigenous economic adaptation at risk. Most importantly...