When a history book includes a foreword written by the subject’s descendants, it signals that the author’s standard of accuracy goes beyond mere approval-seeking. It also serves as a poignant reminder that, although history is often contextualized as a series of sanitized dates, places, and names trapped in a distant era, what occurred in the past has ramifications today. The foreword written by Bitterroot Salish (Sèliš) descendants Myrna Adams Dumontier and Greg Dumontier in Sally Thompson’s “Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World: Chief Charlo and Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains” reminds readers of those ramifications and more. A Missoula-based anthropologist and author, Thompson documents when the Jesuits, or “black robes” missionaries, arrived in what is now western Montana nearly 200 years ago, and how that encounter forever altered the lives of the Salish tribe. This tragic period remains a part of the fabric that continues to shape members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes like the Dumontiers.
Thompson’s latest work, published in 2024, is a dual biography of one of the most famous Jesuits, Belgium born Pierre-Jean De Smet, and Chief Charlo of the Bitterroot Salish, whose life underwent dramatic changes during the decades of the mid-to-late 19th century when the United States government forcibly removed Indians from their homelands and moved tribal nations onto reservations. It is worth highlighting that Thompson’s deeply researched account merited approval from tribal members, particularly since Thompson is not Salish and because this devastating period for the Salish has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. Thompson’s intention was two-fold: to provide a little-known historical narrative of the West that didn’t center upon the typical tales of war, and instead brings forth the history of a tribe that did not fight against Euro-Americans and even welcomed settlers and explorers like the Lewis and Clark expedition. Secondly, Thompson, who’s spent her long career working with Native American tribes across the West, has a personal stake in the project. She writes, “My desire to bring to light the distinctions between the Indigenous and Euro-American worlds is driven by despair with our present global climate crisis and my recognition of our great need for wise guidance.” Incorporated into this account is an examination of the fundamental differences in the ways the Bitterroot Salish — like all Native American tribes — and Euro-American settlers related to land and nature.
Chief Charlo, as he was known by whites, was born in 1830 and spent the winters in the tribe’s village in th Bitterroot Valley as the “Place of Wide Cottonwoods,” which present-day Stevensville now occupies. Young Charlo spent time in the winter village, moving north in the spring to dig for roots and fish for bull trout in the Missoula Valley, and then traveling eastward across the Continental Divide to hunt on the buffalo plains. However, this way of life, shaped by the spiritual and cultural teachings of a kinship with the land, would be forever altered for Chief Charlo and his people by the introduction of the Black Robes and white settlers. De Smet, who emigrated to America from Belgium as a young man, was a “geographically curious” missionary who at the age of forty, became the leading Jesuit who established Catholic missions across the northern Rocky Mountains. De Smet’s vision for the tribes west of St. Louis was shaped by the Jesuit order to convert Indians to Catholicism and the prevailing American opinion that tribal people were a barbaric impediment to progress. In the 1840s when De Smet arrived in the region, he and his fellow black robes were welcomed by the generous Salish who hoped the priests would bring spiritual power and safety to their people. By the end of Chief Charlo’s life in 1910, he and his tribe lamented this arrival after they’d been forced to live on a reservation, betrayed by U.S. treaties, and subjected to brutal assimilation.
Thompson’s extensive and accessible bicultural history is accompanied by new records and artwork, including illustrations and photographs, that immerse the reader in this dynamic and transformative era. She manages to keep the saga moving, focusing on the divergent philosophies of the Jesuits and white settlers, as well as the Salish, while recreating a more sensitive and respectful account of a people whose survival was continuously under threat from white incursion. While the story is a gripping account of the collision of the traditional and collective values of the Salish against the values of individualism and material wealth, Thompson also claims the book is not “a call to go back to the old ways that Native Americans lived before Pilgrims arrived on these shores. The rest of us cannot simply adopt Indian ways of being, and even if we could, there is no ‘back’ to go to. Instead, this is a call to reconsider attitudes and beliefs about the nature of the living world and our relationship to it.” Thompson’s critical work representing the lives of the Salish, whose world was upended by Father De Smet, serves as both a record of this traumatic period in American history and a reminder that the tribe continues to live by Coyote’s teachings.