1 2 3

View the Flathead Slideshow

          After a stint as an auto mechanic he enrolled in Salish Kootenai College’s carpentry program. While at the Pablo school, he took a Salish language course, one option to fulfill the required Native American Studies class. Carpentry became an afterthought and he stayed in school for seven years, getting degrees in bilingual education, Native American studies and elementary education.
          “The whole reason I got the degrees was to do this,” he says.
          Chaney Bell was a football player at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas studying to one day become a game warden.
          He says a friend there asked what he knew about his own people, the Salish and Pend d’Oreille. Very little, he had to admit.
          “Right then,” he says, “I dropped out of school and moved back home.”
           He enrolled at SKC where he took a required Native American Studies class on the Salish language. His teacher was Tachini Pete.
          It wasn’t long before Pete, Bell and fellow students Josh Brown and Melanie Sandoval began dreaming of a school, of saving the language.
          A year of research on other immersion schools, like the Piegan Institute in Browning, gave the group an outline, and the motivation. They opened their school in 2002, and enrollment has gone from six students the first year to 35 at present, their maximum capacity.
          Bell also traveled to New Zealand to observe the immersion programs of the Maori people native to that country.
          “It’s encouraging,” Bell says, “to see how proud Maori children are to be Maori, to say who they are and where they’re from.
          “We want our people to know who they are.”
          Bell’s stepdaughter attends Snqwiiqwo—despite the fact that he and his family live outside of Polson, nearly an hour from Arlee.
          “I get up every morning,” Bell says, then stops himself, laughing. “My wife gets up every morning and takes our daughter to Pablo to the bus.”
          The bus takes kids from Pablo, the seat of tribal government and home to around half of Snqwiiqwo students, on the 45-minute trip to Arlee and back each day.
          “I wouldn’t expect too many people to get up that early,” Bell says of their 6 a.m. awakening. “That’s how much it means to us.”
          Bell, the president of the Nkwsum board, is studying to get his teaching certificate and hopes to receive a grant after his graduation to immerse himself in the language for a year. By 2009, the year Nkwsum plans to open another immersion school in Pablo, Bell hopes he’ll be ready to teach. And if the Pablo school doesn’t happen? Bell says he’ll be packing up to move to Arlee to teach at Snqwiiqwo.
          It is not just the young adults, these saviors of Salish, whom the language means much to. For tribal elders, those who have held the language in trust all these years, it is hope realized.
          Pat Pierre, 77, an elder and language teacher at Snqwiiqwo, doesn’t call it Salish. He wants the children to speak “Indian.” He is teaching the three oldest students, ages 9, 10 and 11, a lesson in fractions. And he teaches all of it in Indian.
          Pierre remembers as a child his parents calling him in to explain that he must speak in English now, so he could go to school.
          “I don’t wanna speak English because I don’t wanna go to school,” Pierre recalls telling them.
          He did go to school, to Hot Springs and Camas Prairie schools on the Flathead Reservation in the 1930s.
          “We talked a lot of Indian at that school (Hot Springs),” he says, adding with some pride, that his football team “won a lot of games.”
          Pierre teaches full time, and is quick to emphasize the importance of the language immersion, and his commitment to it.
          “I want to teach everything I know to the little ones,” he says. “Seventy-seven years of knowledge, or wisdom if you want to call it that.
          “This is my work for the rest of my life; I’ll be here until I die.”
          Johnny Arlee looks Indian. That’s to say he looks traditional, like someone whose ties to the past are as tight as the red yarn wrapped skillfully around his long gray braided hair.
          Arlee, whose great-great grandfather the town of Arlee is named after, needed a translator when he started attending the Ursuline boarding school in St. Ignatius at age 10. Having been raised by his great-grandparents, Arlee spoke only Salish, what he calls “the language.”
          His father had been raised in the age of boarding schools and while Arlee says his father knew the language, he never spoke it in his home.
          “He was a clean cut, short hair, suit-and-tie man,” he says.
          His father’s generation left Arlee in a strange position. When he began to embrace his native culture as an adult, he bypassed many older than he to become a “tribal elder” because of his knowledge of the old ways.
          “We just lived it,” he says of his childhood and growing up under his great-grandparents’ tutelage.
          The rediscovery of his heritage, though, came from a most modern source.
          Arlee was a technical adviser and part-time actor in the 1972 film “Jeremiah Johnson.” He says that after the film’s premiere in Missoula four high school girls asked him if he could teach them traditional singing and drumming.

1 2 3

View the Flathead Slideshow