Cda Tribe Visits The Past

The sound of chanting and drums drifted Monday among the graves of long-dead Coeur d’Alene Indians.

As they have for 60 years, Coeur d’Alene tribal members gathered at the Cataldo Mission to celebrate the Catholic Feast of the Assumption and to honor their ancestors.

“We laugh and dance and pray,” said tribal cultural resources director Dixie Saxon. “It’s a time of renewal, not only for my faith, but for who I am.”

More than 1,000 people, many of them tourists, lined up for the tribe’s traditional free feast of corn, melon and frybread. Tribal member Cliff SiJohn said Indian hunters killed three elk and five deer for feast meat.

Tribal members danced in buckskin, beadwork and feathers as visitors watched or took pictures. Tribal musicians beat a large drum and sang. Many of the Coeur d’Alenes arrived Friday and Saturday, camping below the mission in tents, trucks and tepees.

According to tribal lore, Chief Circling Raven predicted about 1760 that a gray-haired man in a black robe would come to the tribe carrying crossed sticks. That man, the chief said, would change the tribe forever.

When black-robed Father PierreJean DeSmet arrived in 1842 carrying a crucifix, the tribe quickly converted to Catholicism.

Missionary Father Nicolas Point and the Coeur d’Alenes built a small church and village on the banks of the St. Joe River, near present-day St. Maries. After several floods, they moved to the Cataldo site. The Coeur d’Alenes completed the mission, now the oldest building in Idaho, in 1853.

“All of us are direct descendents of the people who built this mission,” said tribal chairman Ernie Stensgar.

“I’ve been coming here since I was an infant.”

When the federal government set the boundaries for the Coeur d’Alene reservation in 1876, it did not include the mission.

The Indians built a new mission at DeSmet, 50 miles south of Coeur d’Alene. Left behind were the roughly 300 Indians buried over the years at the Cataldo Mission cemetery.

The annual pilgrimages to the mission began in 1934.

“It’s a reminder of who these people were and what they meant to us,” said Lawrence Aripa, tribal council vice chairman. “It’s an honor we feel they deserve.”

The camp-outs, with gambling stick games going late into the night, began about 20 years ago.

“It just comes alive in you. Even after I go home, for a couple days I can feel the people,” said Julie Walking-On-Arm.

“What you are seeing here is the same thing that happened in old people looking at faces, people sitting on the grass, sharing food,” said SiJohn.

“Our clothes are different, but nothing changes.”