Current Projects

Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Tribal Legacy Project

The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Tribal Legacy Project is part of the National Park Service’s effort to build on the themes and goals of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial commemoration with a focus on native people along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Hundreds of taped presentations and interviews with tribal elders and educators provide an important American legacy. The intention is to develop educational resources that will help teachers nationwide integrate Native American culture and history across the curriculum. These resources will serve grades two through high school as well as educational programs of state and national parks, museums and cultural centers.

While the Lewis and Clark commemoration will open the door to this project, the themes will not be bound by the subject of Lewis and Clark. The project will provide a unique opportunity for American Indians to educate other Americans about American Indians, and promote respect for native cultures and languages, the environment, and the future. The project will be organized by regions, from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia.

The unique and extensive video interviews and presentations recorded in conjunction with the Bicentennial will serve as the base from which this legacy will be created. Drawing on these and other important primary resources, a digital collection will be made accessible to teachers for classroom use, along with supplements to guide effective application.

Glacier Ethnohistory Project

Glacier National Park, in commemoration of its centennial in 2010, has launched a book project to acknowledge the rich, diverse, and long-standing record of Native American associations with the lands now included in the Park. The book, The Seasons of Glacier: Tribal Perspectives, is being researched and edited by RLP director, Sally Thompson. The intention is to dispel the notion that this area was an empty wilderness before Europeans arrived, and that ongoing relationships of these tribes with this place have been shaped by this rich history.

Working with tribes of the region, the book will focus on the long-term view of changing seasons from the perspectives of the native peoples whose homelands include these lands; the Kootenai, Blackfeet, Bloods, Pend d’Oreille, and Salish. This knowledge will be put into context of major episodes of climate change since the Late Pleistocene.

Readers will be engaged in thinking about the activities that brought people into these mountains, such as food and other resource gathering and processing, and camping along age-old trails. Particular topics will include (1) the moon cycles for each tribe, with stories of food gathering and other activities that are dictated by the turning seasons; (2) methods for reckoning time; and (3) planning for the next season based on observations of nature.

Jesuit Research Project

An EPSCoR research fellowship for Sally Thompson made possible the acquisition of an entire collection of rare 19th century documents from the Rocky Mountain Missions and the opportunity to have them translated from their original French. Italian and Latin. This collection provides a unique glimpse into the details of life in the northern Rockies before the creation of the Mullan Road and the discovery of gold in the region. Later documents give firsthand glimpses into changes brought about by the arrival of miners and settlers and their impacts on the native peoples and the environment.

This project is currently on hold.

Heritage Trails of Montana

Since the end of the last Ice Age, travelers through this Montana landscape have established trails along river courses and upland ridge-tops, and have crossed creeks and mountains by following routes dictated by the natural elements of this place. After hundreds of generations of native peoples had walked these trails, 19th century explorers, trappers and traders, miners, and early settlers followed these same pathways into the country, and created new ones to gain access to previously unexploited resources. Many of these heritage trails are essentially the same that we travel today, such as portions of the routes of the Corps of Discovery, the Mullan Road and the Bozeman Trail.

In 2001, with funding from Montana Committee for the Humanities (now Humanities Montana), RLP staff created a narrated slide show taking viewers back to the decades of the 19th century, through the eyes of mapmakers, artists and travelers. The presentation serves to widen the circle of Montanans with an understanding of heritage trails -- why they formed, how they served, and how they have fared – and the role of the landscape in shaping them.

RLP hopes to update and expand the content of this program and link it to the National Historic Trails network.

Crown of the Continent Communiqués:
A Conversation with Indigenous and Western Scientists

This research initiative, Crown of the Continent Communiqués, is designed to expand and deepen the knowledge base on major regional and national themes of climate change and watersheds that originate in the contiguous mountains of Glacier and Waterton Parks and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, collectively known as the Crown of the Continent. From the peaks of this region, rivers flow from a triple divide to the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson’s Bay. The glaciers that feed the rivers of these North American watersheds are disappearing and everything fed by these waters is experiencing the ramifications. How do humans and other life forms adapt to such drastic climatic changes? Scientists and educators at The University of Montana and partner organizations (Glacier National Park, Waterton National Park, and Biomimicry Institute), recognize the importance of developing mechanisms for integrating and disseminating knowledge from a myriad of sources to enhance our capacity to understand these complex watersheds and the systems they feed. Working with Montana NSF-EPSCoR at the University of Montana, we are proposing that NSF support a pilot workshop focused on the homeland of the Kainai of southern Alberta, to serve as a model for a series of dialogues with tribal communities whose homelands include the Crown of the Continent.