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Indians 201: A very short overview of the Kalispel Indians [1]
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Date: 2023-12-26
The aboriginal homeland of the Kalispel (“Camas People”) was in the camas-rich area around Calispell Lake and the Pend Oreille River in what is now eastern Washington. Their homeland was heavily forested and mountainous with interspersed meadows. Their lifestyle prior to the coming of the horse was centered on the river. Their traditional territory followed the rivers into what is now northern Idaho and western Montana.
With regard to language, the Kalispel language is a part of the larger Salish language family and is most closely related to Cheweleh, Spokan, Pend d’Oreille, and Flathead.
Prior to the coming of the horse, the people would spend the winter in camps along the Pend Oreille River. When the snow disappeared in the Spring, the families would separate and move to areas where they had the rights to fish and hunt. In June, the camas would be ripe and the families would come back together at the camas fields. Following the camas harvest in July, the people would once again focus their attention on hunting, fishing, and the gathering of other wild plant foods. When the snows began, the bands would reassemble at their winter camps along the river where the snowfall was lighter and the temperatures somewhat milder.
Camas
Camas is a lily-like plant whose bulb can be fire-baked to make a sweet and nutritious staple. In some places in the Northwest, camas was so common that non-Indian travelers would mistake the plant’s blue flowers for distant lakes. In her book on the Nez Perce, Do Them No Harm!: Lewis and Clark Among the Nez Perce, Zoa Swayne describes camas this way:
“Fresh camas meat was white and the juice milky. Roasted, the meat was brown and the juice sweet and syrupy.”
Camas is very high in protein: 5.4 ounces of protein per pound of roots. In comparison, steelhead trout (Salmo gairdneri) has 3.4 ounces of protein per pound.
Shown above are camas bulbs from a photograph displayed in the Willamette Heritage Center in Salem, Oregon.
The camas was often dug up using digging sticks made from elk antlers. In his book Montana: Native Plants and Early Peoples, Jeff Hart reports:
“To remove camas bulbs from the heavy meadow turf, women preferred using elk antler digging sticks. However, they sometimes used fire-hardened wooden sticks made from hawthorn, serviceberry, and other woody materials, with horn, antler, or wooden transverse handles.”
In digging the camas, the digging stick would be stabbed into the ground six to eight inches away from the plant, then worked back and forth to loosen the soil. A woman could dig up about a bushel of roots in a day from a site that was about half an acre in size.
Writing about the Kalispel in their book Archaeology in Washington, Ruth Kirk and Richard Daugherty report:
“Young women seeking guardian spirits hoped to gain ability to find roots, dig them, or roast and prepare them for storage. Skill in roasting roots was more valued than skill in digging them.”
Unlike other plants gathered in the Plateau area, camas has to be roasted because their sugar is indigestible until converted to fructose. Ruth Kirk and Richard Daugherty report:
“Slow cooking in earth ovens solves the problem, and with the high sugar content camas stored well.”
At the camas digging camps, the camas was usually cooked in earth ovens before eating it or storing it. Since the same camps were used each season, the pit ovens used for roasting the camas were also reused.
The oven (a roasting pit dug into the ground) was preheated by building a fire in it and placing small rocks (about 5” in diameter) in with the wood. In addition to the small rocks, some pits had large flat stones on the bottom which were also heated by the fire. When the rocks were hot, they were covered with wet vegetation such as slough grass, alder branches, willow, and/or skunk cabbage leaves. Then the camas bulbs were placed on top of the vegetation. Sometimes Douglas onions (Allium douglasii) were placed in with the camas. The camas was then covered with bark and earth and a fire was built on top of the oven. Cooking usually took between 12 and 70 hours, depending on the number of camas bulbs in the oven.
Fishing, Hunting, Gathering
Fishing was an important economic activity, and the fish were harvested with fish traps, weirs, and spearing platforms. While most of these were individually owned, there were also large weir sites which were tribally owned. The fish harvested from the tribal weirs would be communally distributed. It has been estimated that about two-thirds of the fish harvested by the Kalispel came from weirs.
With regard to hunting, mule deer and whitetail deer were the most important game animals. While deer were hunted throughout the year, most were harvested in the winter. During the winter, hunters using snowshoes would hunt deer with bows and arrows. In the deep snow, the hunters would often have more mobility than the deer.
In addition to deer, caribou were hunted in some areas. Mountain sheep and goats were also found in some areas and mountain sheep robes were highly valued.
Some of the tribes had animals which they did not like. For the Kalispel, one of these animals was the wolverine. In his chapter on the Kalispel in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 12: Plateau, Sylvester Lahren reports
“The Kalispel deliberately tried to exterminate this animal because it would destroy their deadfalls and eat the bait or captured animal”
While camas was the most important plant food, the Kalispel also gathered Indian potato, cattail roots, wild garlic, wild celery, wild carrot, Easter lily, and bitterroot. A wide variety of berries were also harvested. Berry harvesting was generally regarded as the exclusive domain of the women.
The Horse
The horse was brought to the Americans by the Spanish colonists in New Mexico. Following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the horse began to spread northward and was introduced to the Plateau tribes by the Shoshone between 1710 and 1740. The arrival of the horse brought dramatic changes to Kalispel culture.
First of all, the horse enabled the Kalispel to leave their homelands in eastern Washington and travel across the Rocky Mountains to hunt buffalo on the Great Plains. With the horse, some families would leave for the Plains in mid-July, hunt for three or four weeks, and then return home. This brought them into contact with the Blackfoot who resented their intrusion into Blackfoot hunting grounds.
Using the horse and hunting buffalo on the Plains, a number of Plains cultural elements were acquired in the Plateau. These Plains cultural elements included the use of the tipi and the travois, the custom of war honors dances, beaded dresses, feather warbonnets, and the idea of electing chiefs because of their skill as warriors. Warfare became more common: prior to the acquisition of the horse warfare had been almost nonexistent among the Plateau tribes.
Sylvester Lahren reports:
“Warfare was almost nonexistent prior to the arrival of the horse.”
Housing
During the summer, the people lived in conical mat lodges: similar in shape to the Plains tipi but covered with tule mats rather than buffalo hide. In the winter, the people would use an elongated house which ranged from 20 to 60 feet in length. The floor of the winter house would be excavated about a foot which would provide some additional warmth. The winter house would be covered with woven tule mats. The winter house would usually be home to 3 to 12 families.
Canoes
As a river people, water transport was important. The Kalispel made and used several different kinds of canoes, including both dugouts (that is, made from a single log that had been hollowed out) and bark canoes (a frame covered with bark).
A special exhibit in the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC) in Spokane entitled Awakenings: Canoes and Calling the Salmon Home included the unusual sturgeon-nose canoe used by the Kalispel Indians.
The long projections at the bow and stern of the canoe provides increased buoyancy and improves steering.
With regard to the unusual shape of the sturgeon-nose canoes, John Jennings, in his book Bark Canoes: The Art and Obsession of Tappan Adney, observes:
“They are, however, strikingly similar to the bark canoes of the Amur River of Asia, which forms the eastern boundary between China and Russia and flows into the Sea of Okhotsk.”
Shown above is a 1905 Kalispel sturgeon nose canoe made from cedar, pitch, birch, and pine.
Shown above is a photo from about 1910 of Kalispel Indians fishing on the Pend O’reille River.
Government
As with other Plateau Indian tribes, the Kalispel were not a single political or social unit. The tribe was composed of independent villages or bands which were united by a common culture, including a common language (Salish). There was no overall “chief” or group of “chiefs.” Each village had its own leaders and leadership was not hereditary but was based on leadership skills. Leaders exerted power through their ability to persuade. The council of adults who made decisions included women.
More tribal profiles
Indians 101: A Very Brief Overview of California's Achumawi Indians
Indians 101: A Brief Overview of the Assiniboine Indians
Indians 201: A very short overview of Washington's Chehalis Indians
Indians 201: A short overview of the Coeur d'Alene Indians
Indians 101: A very short overview of the Havasupai Indians
Indians 201: A very short overview of the Lenni Lenape Indians
Indians 101: A Very Short Overview of the Ottawa Indians
Indians 101: A very short overview of the Wichita Indians
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