The Literary Fly Fisher

I’m sure the lake must have a name in the language of the Kootenai (Ktunaxa/Ksanka), upon whose historic territory it rests. The lake is just beyond the edge of a huge valley, through which the Big Blackfoot River runs. No doubt, it has names in other Indigenous languages too, as the path laid by the Blackfoot River was well travelled by Native Americans of several nations. In English, however, the lake is named for a long-passed miner, Charles Cooper.

I have no idea when the lake was given Cooper’s  name, though the area, still sparsely populated, was first settled permanently by whites around the same time that the Kootenai and others were being restricted to their shrinking reservations. In fact, the nearest town, Ovando, was named for a local settler who left his work at the Flathead Indian Reservation, after being spooked by the so-called “Nez Perce War” of 1877 (Margaret Ronan, Girl from the Gulches; The Story of Mary Ronan, 2003, 177),  Incidentally, this was a war that the New York Times said was “on our part [the whites], … in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime” (“A Lesson from the Nez Perces,” Oct. 15, 1877).

I would like to know the name that the Kootenai gave to the lake. I will ask a speaker of the language about it someday, though I suspect the name is forgotten. As it is, I simply think of the lake as “home,” for my sisters and I share a cabin there.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2015 at 2:46 PM and is filed under The Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.