Evidence on the Adequacy of First Nations Consultation - BC Hydro ...

The first trading post in Ktunaxa territory was established close by the Columbia River by David
Thompson in 1807 near present day Windermere, B.C. and called Upper Kootenay House. 26 This
appears to have been both for its nearness to Howse Pass and for what he perceived as good trade
possibilities. Subsequently, regional posts for trading with the Ktunaxa and other Indian nations were
established at Fort Colvile, Thompson’s River [Kamloops], Spokane and Flathead along with
numerous smaller outposts.
It appears that the location of these trading posts had important impacts on the activities of the
various tribal groups. For the Upper Ktunaxa, the posts at Kootenae House, Spokane and Flathead
drew their attention southwards. For the Lower Kootenay, Sinixt and Okanagans, Fort Colvile was a
powerful attractant. While most of the neighbouring Shuswap looked westward to Thompson’s Fort,
we shall see that some were deliberately attracted by the Hudson Bay Company towards Jasper’s
House, east of the Rockies which brought them into the traditional northern range of the Ktunaxa.
Catholic missionaries like Fathers Blanchet and De Smets, called by the Indians “black robes”, began
to proselytize in the area in the 1830s and 1840s and established a number of missions. They were at
first received with an almost messianic fervour by the Plateau Indians, but this fervour appears to
have subsided markedly in the later 1800s. According to Larry Cebula 27 , the Indians slowly realized
that the white man’s Christianity was not conferring the spiritual power they initially thought it
would, especially regarding immunity to the horrifying and deadly diseases that continued to plague
them.
The character of the area began to change even more dramatically with the settling of the border with
the United States through the signing in 1846 of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, one result of which was
to sever Ktunaxa territory roughly in half. The impact on the western neighbours of the Lower
Ktunaxa, the Salish speaking Sinixt, was even more dramatic in that new border restrictions and
aggressive settlers caused them to eventually abandon the Canadian portion of their traditional
seasonal round and remove southward into the U.S. to settle on the newly created multi-tribal
Colville Reservation. This new reality also occasioned the 1855 Lame Bull Treaty, in which the
American based Blackfeet were reduced to a Montana reservation and peaceful access to the
dwindling buffalo herds was made available to the American Ktunaxa and other tribes in the U.S. 28
The latter half of the 19 th Century saw the decline of the fur trade and the arrival of first a trickle and
then a flood of settlers into the Kootenays, primarily miners and farmers. Largely in response to the
sudden influx of thousands of American gold prospectors, the Crown Colony of British Columbia
was created in 1858, and was eventually combined in 1862 with its counterpart on Vancouver Island.
The colonial government saw as its prime concern the attraction of new settlers who professed loyalty
to the British Crown, and not the protection of Indians in their traditional lands, an orientation
strongly reinforced by the Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works, Joseph Trutch. Under his
26 This post was closed after a few years and subsequently replaced by the Hudson’s Bay Company with a small post to
the south in the Tobacco Plains area known as Kootenae House. The initial clerk in charge was Edouard Berland, who
was succeeded on his untimely death by Michael Phillipps who in turn subsequently became the first Indian Agent for the
Kootenay District. The post was closed for economic reasons in 1871
27 Cebula, Larry, Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 2003
28 Traditional hostilities between the Blackfeet and other tribes continued in Canada throughout the 1860s but their
intensity mirrored the vanishing buffalo herds until both had virtually disappeared by 1880.
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