History

The earliest written records that refer to the Ktunaxa are by people who were coming from the east and first encountered the Ktunaxa on the prairies, east of the Rocky Mountains. This has led many writers, one relying on the other, to suggest that the Ktunaxa in fact originated on the prairies. Some also refer to a supposed Ktunaxa legend that the Ktunaxa migrated around six hundred years ago from Lake Michigan, a thesis that does not agree with archaeological and linguistic evidence or with genuine Ktunaxa oral accounts.

There are Ktunaxa stories about lost populations of Ktunaxa people on the prairies, and such stories, told by elders in recent times, have been tape-recorded. The stories can be divided into two categories. One tells of a group encountered by Ktunaxa people when they were far out on the prairies to hunt buffalo, a group who, to the amazement of the Ktunaxa, were able to speak their language, or at least knew some Ktunaxa words. The other category of stories tells of an extinct band of Ktunaxa people who lived year-round on the prairies just to the east of the Rocky Mountains but were almost completely wiped out by an epidemic, with some survivors being absorbed by other tribes and others joining the Ktunaxa people in present-day Ktunaxa territory. These legendary plains Ktunaxa people evidently called themselves Ktunaxa rather than Ksanka; they have been referred to in some accounts as the Tonaxa, or Tunaxa, but this is a version of the name Ktunaxa and so possibly may just be a mishearing of it by ethnographers.

One interpretation of such stories maintains that the Ktunaxa people as a whole originated on the prairies, and it further claims that the Piegans (a Blackfoot group) are of plains Ktunaxa origin. The idea that the Piegans are of plains Ktunaxa origin at least suggests that some plains Ktunaxa people joined the Piegans. There is also information provided by the Montana Salish that one of their own groups was called Tunaxa and that there are people of this ancestry among them today.

Stories of the now-extinct plains Ktunaxa mention the town of Fort Macleod, Alberta, over 90 kilometres east of the British Columbia border. There are also reports of there having been a Ktunaxa band at Michel, British Columbia, in the Crowsnest Pass area, on the B.C.–Alberta border, as well as another centred around Fernie, B.C., on the Elk River, far up-stream from where the Elk River empties into the Kootenay in the territory of the Tobacco Plains Band.

Whatever the truth of these stories, any area of Alberta prairie that had earlier belonged to the Ktunaxa was claimed and occupied in the early historical period by the Blackfoot. Today, all the extant Ktunaxa bands have names based on the name of a place central to a much larger area; none of the now-extinct Ktunaxa communities was named for a place at the edge of their own traditional territory. The distances between Tobacco Plains, Fernie, Michel, and Fort Macleod are comparable to the distances between the places along the Kootenay River which mark the centres of the territories of the six extant bands.

Perhaps the first written mention of the Ktunaxa found to date is by Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company. In 1793 he travelled to the Pacific Ocean, evidently through Ktunaxa territory, and on a map he produced in 1801 is the name Cattanahowes, which, if we remove the “s,” looks like an approximation of Ktunaxa. In 1807 David Thompson, also representing the North West Company, founded Kootenae House, a trading post north of Lake Windermere in present-day Ktunaxa territory. Thompson had to brave the objections of Blackfoot people to establish trade with the Ktunaxa, since such trade would supply the Ktunaxa with rifles. His very use of the name Kootenae House for his trading post, rather than a name more like Kitunaha, suggests that Thompson arrived with a Blackfoot perspective on the supposed previous location of the Ktunaxa, rather than one acquired from the Ktunaxa themselves.

The establishment of Kootenae House by David Thompson began the fur trade in the region, on both sides of what would later become the U.S.-Canadian border. In 1881 fur-trading operations at Lake Windermere were moved to Fort Kootenay, near Jennings, Montana. A traveller who was at Fort Kootenay in 1854 claimed to have given some Ktunaxa a demonstration in the firing of a revolver, a weapon that they had apparently never seen before. This was at a time when, according to historical accounts, the Ktunaxa, along with Kalispels and other Montana Salish as well as Nez Perce people from farther south, were still making buffalo-hunting trips to the plains, where they sometimes wintered. For the southern neighbours of the Ktunaxa, such hunting expeditions sometimes kept them on the plains up to three years. Some of the historical accounts of trips to the prairies by these Rocky Mountain tribes mention the names, not only of traditional hunting grounds close to the Rockies, but also much more distant locations, even points as far east as Lake Superior.

Though the Ktunaxa were visited by a missionary in 1842, Jesuit missions among them were not built until 1845. In 1874 Oblates founded the St Eugene mission near Cranbrook, where the Sisters of Providence later staffed a school. In 1891, while ministering to the Montana Kootenai, Father Philip Canestrelli wrote a grammar of the Ktunaxa language in Latin, entitled Grammaticae Ksanka.

Wild Horse Creek in the Kootenay District was the focus of a gold rush in 1863, and tensions between land-hungry miners and settlers led in 1887, at the first sign of armed conflict between the two groups, to the establishment of Fort Steele by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. While peace was maintained, settlers continued to expropriate Ktunaxa lands. Reserves were established in 1888, but they were subsequently reduced in size.