Go, Ghost, Go (1994)
For the more radical members of America’s indigenous community, the Chicago Government’s victory in the Second Civil War was cause for guarded celebration. While the relative distance of the fighting from most of the larger reservations had meant that the disruption to day-to-day life was minimal, it was generally supposed that some sort of renegotiation of the tenuous status of Native Americans would follow the cessation of hostilities.
As with most other minority groups, initial optimism fuelled by genuine action as various interest groups jostled for support in the first Chicago Congress (in the case of Native Americans, the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in favour of an Indian People’s Congress and the establishment of the Native American-heavy Sequoyah CSR within what had formerly been Oklahoma) gave way within the first decade of the CSA’s existence to a vague disappointment, as it became clear that the formation of a new national approach to indigenous issues was very low down on the new government’s list of priorities indeed.
In the absence of a national policy, the indigenous experience of American Syndicalism was dictated by the CSR in which each group resided, varying tremendously according to the value of their land, the extent to which they could wield political power as a unified bloc and the character of each CSR’s executive. Within the incredibly wide range of outcomes that these conditions could generate, the history of the Montana-based Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes within the CSA was broadly average – a good deal worse than the Osage people, who, allowed to maintain their pre-Civil War rights to the oil deposits beneath Sequoyah, absolutely dominated their CSR’s politics and would remain the wealthiest group per capita within the CSA well into the 1970s; but, then again, a good deal better than that of the Navajos, whose location on the border with the PSA marked them out as an immediate vector for infiltration by New Mexican Navajos (attempts to resettle them elsewhere at gunpoint resulted in a low-scale insurgency well into the 1950s, which was ultimately put down with a level of brutality exceeding that of SATPO in Northwest Montana at times).
Neither particularly rewarded or attacked by the State, the Salish-Kootenai people’s experience of the CSA would nevertheless be one of dramatic upheaval. This upheaval was driven, at least initially, by well-intentioned if wildly inaccurate theorising regarding the history of indigenous peoples in North America. First proposed by the anthropologists Orville S. Nungesser and Charlotte Fairbanks at Indiana Central College, the “Indian Substrate Theory” postulated that well into the seventeenth century, most North American indigenous peoples had belonged to one of a half-dozen or so more or less linguistically unified cultural complexes, and that their subsequent division into hundreds of much smaller bodies was a legacy of discord created by white settlers to make these cultural complexes easier to extirpate from their original lands. The Indian Substrate Theory happened to strike an ideological chord with the First Chicago Congress, and benefited accordingly; although largely exploded elsewhere within a few years of its first publication, it was taught as fact within the CSA’s anthropology departments well into the mid-1980s.
The Salish-Kootenai people’s first encounter with what the CSA saw as the logical consequences of the Indian Substrate Theory came in 1954, when the inhabitants of Flathead Reservation were given ninety days’ notice that, along with those of every other reservation in the former state of Montana, they were to be transported to Crow Reservation: there, it was hoped that, in time, the various indigenous peoples would recover the linguistic and cultural unity denied them by European settlement, eventually acceding to the CSA as a separate CSR on the same lines as Sequoyah. Even by the frayed logic of the Substrate Theory, this relocation was ludicrous: the Salish peoples, clearly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, were about as closely culturally related to the Crow peoples as the CSA officials mandating the relocation were to the Steppe Mongolians. Nevertheless, the move (driven far more by the pressing need for manpower to work the enormous coal deposits below Crow Reservation) went ahead, with only token resistance from the Salish-Kootenai.
If the CSA had been using the prospect of cultural unity between the Crow and the resettled peoples as anything more than a figleaf, it would have been bitterly disappointed by the simmering resentment which immediately developed: the Crow, entirely understandably, regarded everyone else as an interloper; everyone else, equally understandably, regarded the Crow as rent-seeking beneficiaries of their labour. Deprived of any real means to settle this dispute, and trapped by state fiat in a situation from where no escape was possible, many of the Salish-Kootenai turned to a tribal nationalism which had taken on an increasingly unpleasant edge by the early 90s, as a new generation which had known nothing but exile came of age.
Jim Balestier was typical of this generation of radicals: a mine foreman in his early thirties by 1994, his involvement with dissident Salish-Kootenai groups suspected of a string of arson attacks on Crow Property had attracted the attention of reservation authorities. Faced with, at best, permanent blacklisting from mine employment, and possible criminal proceedings, Balestier decided to take advantage of the collapse of authority in the Grangeland CSR to reclaim his birthright. Stealing a half dozen trucks, he and about fifty young men fled the reservation, buying their way through roadblocks with excess diesel; they had reached Polson, the former capital of Flathead Reservation (now virtually abandoned after the collapse of SATPO), before anyone in an official capacity had noticed what was happening.
It is likely that Balestier and his followers would have fallen prey to one of the many groups of looters still roaming the area as of the summer of 1994, had it not been for support from an unlikely source: the Klassenites, many of whom viewed indigenous Americans as essentially wayward Aryans, and whose relatively low numbers despite their outsize importance within the leadership of the Northwest Republic meant that more allies were always welcome, became enthusiastic proponents on the ruling council of the Northwest Republic for recognition of a separate Salish-Kootenai Republic within the wider Northwest Front. It was under their aegis that this Republic was established on 18 October 1994.
Balestier’s flight to Polson represents the first wave of what was to become a much larger migration of Salish-Kootenai peoples – it is estimated that, by early 1996, over five thousand people had returned to the area around Flathead Lake. For the time being, both the Klassenites and the Salish-Kootenai were content to maintain their mutually beneficial relationship. As the Northwest Republic embarked upon its first year of official existence in 1995, however, stranger forces even than this alliance would come to the fore.