Grant Helps Tribe Fight For Recognition

The Lemhi Shoshone, Sacajawea’s people, have received a $65,000 grant from the Administration for Native Americans to aid their fight for federal recognition as a tribe separate from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes at Fort Hall.

Except for about 25 families who hid in the hills, the Lemhi Shoshones were driven in 1907 from their reservation in the Lemhi Valley to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, 200 miles south. Now descendants of those families who escaped the forced march to Fort Hall want to return to Salmon.

Families that stayed behind lived first in one and then another village, finally ending up at the “Indian Camp,” a collection of shacks without running water or electricity on the edge of Salmon. One by one, the families gave in to economic pressure and moved to the Fort Hall reservation.

“We were the renegades. We lived in poverty so we could stay in the lands of our forefathers,” said Rod Ariwite, the last Lemhi to graduate from Salmon High School. “That grant was critical to us. If they didn’t think we had a claim, they wouldn’t have given it to us.”

If the Lemhi Shoshones are recog nized as a separate tribe, they could be eligible for financial aid from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for such things as housing and schools. But rather than becoming dependent on the government, Ariwite said his people want to make enough money of their own to buy land for a tribal community. They hope to create a Sacajawea interpretive center and possibly a resort.

Half the grant money will be used to pay for legal aid and historical research, Ariwite said. The rest will be used to fund a full-time coordinator for the tribe and an office in Salmon.

Sacajawea, who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition west from North Dakota, was a Lemhi Shoshone. She brought the explorers across the Continental Divide into the Lemhi Valley.