Echoes of Indigenous Voices

On a rain-blown July afternoon in 2019, a graduate assistant at the University of Montana cracked open a dented aluminum case misfiled in the music archives. Inside were twenty-three reel-to-reel tapes labeled in a neat hand: UHER 4000—Snowmelt Pass, Winter '74. When Jamison Two-Hawks threaded the first tape, he heard the trembling hum of a generator, wind screaming like a kettle, and a young woman naming the hour in Lakȟótiyapi before switching to English: "Mariah Spotted Elk, eight miles above the timberline. Quartzline skidders below us. Everyone's awake." Those recordings—made in the Bitterroot Range during a three-month blockade to halt clear-cutting on treaty-ceded slopes—unfurl an extraordinary chronicle of endurance and purpose. Families from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai, Bitterroot Salish elders, and Lakota students from Missoula caravanned to Snowmelt Pass in February 1974, hauling cedar snowshoes, canvas wall tents, and a sacred cottonwood pole lashed to a flatbed. What began as a ceremony to read aloud the unhonored promises of the 1855 Hellgate Treaty became a siege when a whiteout sealed the only switchback road. With a battery-powered ham radio (call sign W7HUM), a hand drill, a cast-iron Dutch oven, and coffee cans of rendered deer fat, they rationed flour, melted ice from blue-glazed drifts, argued by lantern light about tactics and prayer, and watched the green chains of Quartzline's mill devour the valley below. The tapes capture everything: the hiss of the stove, jokes about frozen mittens, the creak of a yew bow, the slow failing of a truck's carburetor, and the naming of the dead when a search party returned without Daniel Running Crane.

Two-Hawks follows the spooled voices across decades and terrain—from the basement of the Missoula courthouse to the pine-shadowed cemetery at Arlee; from a cardboard banker's box of Bureau of Indian Affairs memos sealed with brittle red tape to a photo negative in a Forest Service drawer stamped with an eagle and the word CONFIDENTIAL. The blockade's aftermath led to a bruising legal fight, Spotted Elk et al. v. United States, a case that drew log drivers in their lunch pails and grandmothers in ribbon skirts to Judge Lila Merriweather's courtroom. In testimony layered with maps, ledger drawings, a snow diary in pencil, and a contractor's fire plan, it became clear that more than a logging contract was at issue. A hidden memo outlined a plan to burn slash piles that would have leapt the line into a burial grove; a consultant's report had mistranslated a crucial clause about consent. Two-Hawks renders the hearing room with the taut intelligence of a legal thriller and the intimate patience of fieldwork. His reconstruction of the ridge-top camp—its hunger, its arguments over sovereignty and stewardship, its improvisations with baling wire—rivals the classics of survival narrative, yet the gravest stakes are philosophical: the idea of development, of nationhood itself, is placed under cross-examination. Echoes of Indigenous Voices braids the mechanical detail of chainsaw teeth and snowpack layers with the deep cadences of language and law, culminating in a rare injunction that still reverberates up the valley. The result is a living record that refuses to let a ruined winter, or the people who stood inside it, be tidied into the margins.