Fight for a future
BONNERS FERRY, Idaho – Thirty years ago, Amy Trice – a 34-year-old mom with six kids, the wife of a Bonners Ferry millworker – declared war on the United States of America. She did it for her people, the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho.
Some wars are declared to chase some notion of glory. How many have been declared out of greed – for oil, land, treasure, trade routes? There is a war today that’s been declared on terrorism. Others are fought invoking the name of a god.
For Trice?
“It was the sadness,” she said.
Her people were disappearing off the face of the Earth.
“There were only 67 of us left,” she said.
So on Sept. 20, 1974, a Friday morning, she declared war. Banners proclaiming “Kootenai Indian Country” in giant letters were unfurled across U.S. Highway 95 on either side of Bonners Ferry and tribal members on foot and horseback briefly blockaded the road, charging a 10-cent toll.
“I heard about it as soon as people started showing up for work that day,” said Bob Graham, who was the district forest ranger living in the Forest Service compound at the south end of Bonners Ferry. “I heard they had horses and barriers and were charging a fee.
“It was quite a surprise,” Graham said. “I don’t think anyone thought it would go to that extent.”
“Everyone thought it was just a joke,” Trice said. She and other tribal officials had been telling city and county officials for weeks that war was coming.
The Kootenais wanted to do it right: A week earlier, the tribe sent letters stating certain demands and outlining certain deadlines to officials with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to President Gerald Ford.
They were a small tribe, they wrote, that had never signed a treaty with the United States and thus didn’t have a reservation and hadn’t made any promises not to be hostile. The lack of a treaty also meant, the tribe noted, that pretty much all of extreme northern Idaho – some 1.6 million acres of mostly federal forest land – still belonged to them.
We’re willing to deal, the tribe wrote. It wanted land for a reservation and the financial and other benefits that come from being a federally recognized tribe.
A lot of people thought it was cute. A kind of “Mouse That Roared” moment where one little, two little, 67 little Kootenai Indians shook their fists at the U.S. government from the streets of Bonners Where?
But there was nothing cute, Trice said, about finding the body of an elderly tribal member frozen stiff inside a house that he was too poor to heat. There was nothing amusing, Trice said, about visiting a dying woman on a thin mattress on a floor and wondering what would happen to her four children.
Without land, without a budget, without any federal status as a sovereign people, there was no mechanism to help the Kootenais help one another. Children were taken away and sent to boarding schools or adopted out. Whole families were relocated.
There was nothing warm and fuzzy, Trice said, about a Bureau of Indian Affairs mainstreaming policy that packed up her family and sent it to Los Angeles because there was more “opportunity” there. Trice lasted two years in L.A.
Even decades later at the age of 64, the anger returns and Trice, in a house built on her father’s land several miles north of Bonners Ferry, drums her hand against the cushioned arm of an easy chair:
“This,” she said, “is my home.”
“This,” she said, “is my people’s home.”
So the letters threatening war went out.
Roots of war
The Idaho Kootenais, who historically numbered between 500 and 700, did not attend the signing of the Hellgate Treaty near present-day Missoula in 1855, but their lands were taken away as part of the deal anyway. Since they were not there, the tribe did not receive any reservation land.
The Army showed up one January and made a half-hearted effort to drive the Kootenais over to the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where other bands of the Kootenai people wound up. Outside of about seven families, the tribe refused to budge. The Army went away. There just weren’t enough Kootenais to trouble with.
A century after the Hellgate Treaty, tribal members were living on individual family allotments provided to Indians by the federal government in the wake of the Dawes Act of 1887 – pieces and bits of land ranging from 80 to 160 acres.
There were Kootenais so desperate for food – or for drink – that they would sell their few remaining acres to whites “for the price of a jug of wine,” Trice said.
The 67 tribal members left by 1974 lived in the sort of poverty associated with Third World countries. Diseases that were easily treatable elsewhere in America – even just three miles away in Bonners Ferry – still killed Kootenais.
Many of the remaining Kootenais clustered around the old Catholic mission several miles west of Bonners Ferry, a circle of dilapidated houses at the end of a bad dirt road.
Tribal elder Simon Francis, who had won a small settlement for the Kootenais from the federal government in 1962, asked Trice to run for tribal council and keep alive the fight to win a homeland for her people.
Trice said she ran into brick walls, dead ends and red tape not only with the federal government, but with the tribal leaders.
“The council at that time was really alcoholics, they didn’t do much at all,” she said. “But they were beaten down. When you are beaten, what are you going to do?”
Trice decided to step outside of the slow suffocation of “proper channels.” She called a meeting and told tribal members they were going to war.
She showed them a film about Frank’s Landing, where Indians near Chehalis, Wash., protesting for salmon fishing rights in 1965, were beaten by Washington state troopers and game wardens.
“This could get bloody,” she said. Some families left. Other Indians, who caught wind of the war, showed up.
By Sept. 13, 1974, the war letters went out. And then, Trice recalled, “I smudged and I prayed every morning and asked the good Lord and the Creator – who are one – to help me.”
Tenor of the times
In September 1974 the nation was aflame. President Nixon had resigned a month earlier. Bras and draft cards and ghettos were burning. There were Black Panthers and hippies and feminists and – more germane to the rural West – the American Indian Movement.
In the winter of 1973 was the siege at Wounded Knee. There was the killing of FBI agents, the arrest of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, and the mysterious and violent deaths of many Indians. A few days before the Kootenais began their three-day war, federal Judge George Boldt awarded Indians in Western Washington rights to half the returning salmon.
Indians were getting radical. Graham, the former district forest ranger, said the specter of AIM leaders coming to Bonners Ferry was a frightening one.
But Trice laughs.
“They were already here. They came the night before,” she said. She still calls them the South Dakota boys and says they were her bodyguards.
Even though Trice never intended a shooting war, she went into it thinking that there were good odds she wouldn’t make it out alive.
Not everyone was ignoring the Kootenais, or treating the prospect of war as a joke. On the night of Sept. 19, a convoy of 34 cruisers carrying more than a third of Idaho’s state troopers – some 70 or more – prowled into town and set up a command post in the hospital.
“It’s still funny to me that the police station was right across the street from our office,” Trice said.
FBI agents and the swarm of state troopers assembled on one side of First Street to assist Sheriff Cliff Ketner and his four deputies even as the South Dakota boys hung out with Trice and other tribal members.
One more group was on the way: Twenty well-armed and highly trained Forest Service agents drifted into Bonners Ferry in ones and twos and filtered into the woods and Forest Service buildings, ready to fight off any takeover attempt.
“Nobody knew they were there,” said Graham, the former forest ranger. He remembers daily conference calls to Washington, D.C., with intense discussions of whether deadly force would be used.
FBI intelligence had local police worried that AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks might be heading to Bonners Ferry. This could lead to hostage taking or other actions that would raise the profile of the war in the national media, police feared.
Graham was one of four civic leaders – county extension agent Ben Studor, Mayor Harold Simms and county Commissioner Walt Worley were the others – who walked across the street every few hours to negotiate with Trice, tribal spokesman Doug Wheaton and others. The FBI agents told Graham he was the most likely candidate to be taken hostage.
But the FBI intelligence may have been faulty, even inflammatory.
“I was on the phone with Dennis Banks every half-hour,” Trice said. “AIM was a big help to me, but I said I didn’t want him or Russell Means to come. I didn’t want this to end up a Wounded Knee or Frank’s Landing.”
At one point, to ease the tension, the AIM members and others in tribal headquarters gathered around a drum and began singing. Across the street, it sounded ominous and was answered with the banging of hammers. Plywood went up on the lower windows of the Sheriff’s Office.
The Kootenais at the highway blockades that first day were outnumbered 5-to-1 by newspaper and television reporters. The tribal members tried to be clear that the federal government’s Indian policies were the enemy, Trice said, not any of their neighbors.
Defining the enemy as a faraway bureaucracy may have helped. Tension between whites and Kootenais was tight, but the war ended without a shot being fired. As far as anyone knows, that is. There was the mysterious – and uninvestigated – death of tribal member Joseph Chiqui, Trice said. He “went missing around the time of the war. His body was found buried up to his waist in Kootenai River mud about a month later,” she said.
There were rumors, Trice said, of people bragging, “We got one.”
“It got nasty,” current tribal Councilwoman Velma Bahe said. “Some of the bars had a reward for killing an Indian.”
The rewards were printed up like hunting licenses. The fee was $1.75 to shoot a buck, $2 for a doe, Trice said.
The Kootenais answered with a document of their own. They sold “war bonds,” designed by artist Emily “Rainbow” Touraine.
War, what is it good for?
The toll blockades on Highway 95 were removed in a matter of hours after the start of the war. Tribal members continued to hold up banners and asked for donations of a dime for three days. Trice said the tribe raised about $4,000.
An Israeli working as a cook on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea heard about the war and scraped up a few dollars to mail to Trice, along with a letter that said, “My tribe has been at war for thousands of years. I hope yours doesn’t go that long.”
The war, as a public spectacle, ended after three days. The Kootenais had made their point. The Idaho congressional delegation came to visit. The state troopers went home. By October, President Ford signed a bill awarding 12.5 acres of land around the old mission site to the tribe as the beginnings of a reservation.
The Kootenais now have more than 130 enrolled members. They received federal grants to build houses, and repaid them. They have a casino and plow the profits into a fund to purchase ancestral lands and allotment lands that had slipped away in bad times.
There is a clinic, a school and a budget that seems to bank hope as well as greenbacks.
Bahe, the tribal councilwoman, remembers she was away trying to get into college when the war broke out. She called tribal leaders at the time to see if they could help her out with $50.
“The tribe only had $80,” Bahe said. “I am glad war was declared. Just for the opportunity now that we can give our kids and our grandkids.”
Graham, the former forester, notes, “They now have a staff of specialists they never had before in the area of resource management. They have biologists and fisheries people, and that’s a major plus.”
The Kootenais have the expertise to pull off projects that benefit the entire community, Graham said, noting the tribe’s strengths in forest management and that it is a world leader in research into declining sturgeon fisheries.
More than that, the Kootenais have a home.
“Oh yes. We have houses. We have a highway. We have a community building. We got our own doctor now,” Trice said.
From the armchair in the house on her father’s land she can look out the window and see the mountain-stabbed horizon where her people have lived for thousands of years.