Under the subdued gray light of the winter sun, Germaine White, enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), reminisced about the Jocko River slowly meandering in the shadow of the Mission Mountains in Northwestern Montana. Once, the river —nisisutetkʷ ntx̣ʷe in the Séliš-Ql̓ispé language — was laden with bull trout, and its plentiful tributaries provided abundant fresh cold water every spring.
“We live at the backbone of the world, where the water begins,” said White. “Scientists call it a ‘resource,’ but we call it the source.”
The Jocko River is fundamental to CSKT life, but over the last century the watershed became disconnected from its floodplain, leveled and channelized when agriculture moved onto the Flathead Indian Reservation. After a decade of negotiations, however, one of the most significant tribal settlements in U.S. history created the 2015 Confederated Salish and Kootenai-Montana Compact Water Rights Compact. Effective in 2021, the compact reauthorizes tribal water rights promised in the 1855 Hellgate Treaty, while also protecting existing water users through a joint state-tribal water management system. The combination of Indigenous-led restoration, shared management structures and targeted funding may help the tribe recover the rivers and the lifeways inextricably intertwined with them.
THE ABORIGINAL TERRITORY of the Selis, Ksanka and Qlispe tribes covered 22 million acres of western Montana and extended into Canada, Idaho and Wyoming. The three tribes coexisted in a rich landscape, amid over 980 miles of rivers and streams — a natural abundance that explains why Salish elder Mitch Smallsalmon famously called the tribes “wealthy from the water.”
But the tribes lost some of that wealth when the 1855 Hellgate Treaty was signed. And in 1887, the Dawes Act, determined to assimilate Indigenous people into settler society, opened parcels of the CSKT reservation to homesteaders. Even though the reservation comprised only about one-twentieth of the tribe’s original homeland, the act further divided the landscape, creating a patchwork of private and tribal lands. Many of the place names around the Mission Valley were lost, replaced by the settlers’ versions.
“Place names are so profoundly important; they’re the oldest words in our language,” said White. “They came from our creation stories and the making of this place. In recent times, the land has been altered so dramatically that it no longer resembles the place names.”
The legal term “prior appropriation,” colloquially known as “first in time, first in right,” underlies water rights in the West. Prior appropriation hinges on the idea that whoever first claims water and puts it to “beneficial use” holds first rights to it among subsequent users. During Westward expansion, settlers believed that water was an infinite resource, and water rights were given away freely and gluttonously consumed. But the commodification of water severed tribes from their lifeways.
“We look at the waterways — the veins of our Mother Earth — as a way of life,” Sadie Peone-Stops, CSKT member and director of the Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee, said. “Water gives all life. If people can understand that, they can understand what wealth means to the tribe.”
“Water gives all life. If people can understand that, they can understand what wealth means to the tribe.”
Throughout the 20th century, tribal reservation rights, including fishing and hunting rights, often overlapped with the prior appropriation rights given to white settlers on the reservation, resulting in a quagmire of conflicting rights. Stakeholders raced to the courthouse to have their water rights solidified before their rivals set precedent.
Eventually, the Montana Legislature recognized the need for a system to determine all outstanding water rights, and the Montana Water Court was born. This specialized part of the judicial branch is tasked with untangling the more than 219,000 water rights claimed in Montana prior to 1973. Through a unitary system and the adjudication process, the court works to determine water rights across every river basin in the state. It is also charged with reviewing and ruling on objections to negotiated compacts with the state’s tribes and federal agencies. Colorado and Idaho are the only other Western states with water courts.
About three decades ago, a series of cases filed on behalf of the CSKT by the federal government sparked the tribes’ fight for quantifiable water rights and eventually led to what is now the Water Compact. The CSKT-MT Compact quantified the tribes’ reserved and aboriginal water rights, recognizing existing tribal cultural and religious uses and protecting other existing water rights, regardless of their basis in state or federal law.
But by the time the compact was settled, over 100 years of industrialism had left their mark on watersheds in and around the reservation. Montana’s history of mining and milling poisoned rivers, while development fragmented watersheds and drained aquifers.
The compact’s final decree is still being determined by Montana’s Water Court, but it recognizes the tribes’ reserved and aboriginal water rights and their existing tribal cultural and religious uses. The compact also protects tribal instream flows, existing uses and historic deliveries to irrigators. The compact’s co-management plan uses both Western science and tribal knowledge to recover waterways and manage them more strategically.
THE COMPACT’S implementation phase is led in part by CSKT’s Division of Engineering and Water Resources, which expanded in 2020 to meet the compact’s needs. Over a dozen activities were outlined to reauthorize tribal water rights while fulfilling the reservation water uses provided by the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project (FIIP).
The FIIP was constructed in 1908 as part of the Dawes Act to help move water across the reservation for agriculture. The project has more than 1,000 miles of canals, irrigates nearly 130,000 acres and has 14 major reservoirs that feed its web of crisscrossing channels.
“The FIIP was ostensibly for the benefit of the Indian,” said Casey Ryan, a tribal member and manager of the tribe’s Natural Resource Department’s Division of Engineering and Water Resources. “There were so many changes that our tribe was trying to navigate … and despite all that, we were highly successful at incorporating agriculture.”
Still, the project warped the Mission Valley watersheds, and its antiquated infrastructure showed its inefficiencies as it aged. So federal legislation stemming from the compact prioritized rehabilitating FIIP’s infrastructure and repairing the damage it caused.
The notion of “beneficial use” of water was so powerful in the 20th century that any water left in FIIP’s irrigation canals was regarded as “waste.” The Jocko River, the second-largest river on the reservation, was drastically disfigured — confined to a channel as straight as a bowling lane and severed from its natural meanders, floodplain and side channels, which once supported a flourishing ecosystem. According to Ryan, as early as the 1930s, water surveys showed that FIIP was a deficit irrigation project, meaning that in most years, the water supply was insufficient to meet potential crop needs.
“There are over 34 creeks that come out onto the valley floor, and of those, most die in the canal that runs along the base of the Mission Mountains,” said Ryan. “We even have staff that can remember when the Jocko would run dry during the irrigation season.”
Restoration on the Jocko started even before the compact was signed, thanks to funds the CSKT won in a pivotal case in the 1980s known as the ARCO lawsuit. Mining and milling on the Upper Clark Fork River Basin had left the river — formerly the tribes’ hunting and fishing grounds — so polluted that it became one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites.
The $187 million ARCO settlement was used by the tribes and state to finance cleanup efforts. But the lawsuit also demonstrated the weight of the rights outlined in the CSKT’s treaty, as well as the tribes’ prowess in wielding the law to enforce environmental reclamation. The tribes —determined to save the bull trout, a culturally significant fish — concentrated on restoring the South Fork of the Jocko because it had the same hydrological profile as the Clark Fork.
The bull trout was listed on the Endangered Species Act in 1998, and the Jocko is its final stronghold, home to its last remaining migratory population. According to White, the bull trout had been a vital tribal food source when reserves were low and game was scarce. The fish sustained the people in time of need, enabling the CSKT to avoid the starvation that plagued other tribes during long harsh winters.
“We always had that incredible gift of the water, and with it, the gift of the bull trout,” said White, who managed the education and information pieces for the Jocko River Restoration Project.
“We always had that incredible gift of the water, and with it, the gift of the bull trout.”
The Restoration Project worked to stem further damage by purchasing private land and removing houses from the floodplain while creating an interdisciplinary team to conduct environmental restoration. Today, the CSKT owns over 70% of its reservation, wielding tribal sovereignty to protect lands — including the first tribally designated wilderness area in the nation. The tribe also made the South Fork a primitive area available only to tribal members to preserve its cultural and recreational value. But funding from the ARCO case eventually ran out, leaving the lower reach of the Jocko still channelized and trapped against the Bison Range.
“When we got the Water Compact, the last block clicked into place,” said White.
The compact’s implementation phase has picked up where the Jocko River Restoration Project left off — with “adaptive management” underpinning the effort. By reconnecting the river to its floodplain and allowing water to slow, spread and seep back into the land, tribal crews are monitoring and evaluating how the river heals. Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge has also been integrated into its recovery. In low-lying areas, tribal crews have created natural filtration zones using cattails and other wetland plants — living buffers that capture agricultural runoff before it reaches the river.
The project’s overall goal is to find ways to align agriculture needs with ecological practices. More efficient water delivery can reduce losses and still leave water for instream flows — and, according to Ryan, has already resulted in more bull trout returning to their native streams. Healthier rivers, in turn, support soil, recharge groundwater and stabilize the broader watershed that farming requires.
“One of the beautiful things about the compact is it recognizes that water is a unitary resource, and that it needs to be managed as such,” said Ryan. “FIIP’s rehabilitation has been good for fish and farmers.”
Sadie Peone-Stops, a CSKT member and director of the Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee, at the Flathead River. Liz Dempsey/High Country News
THE COMPACT’S foundational measures — including the rehabilitation of FIIP’s infrastructure, restoration of environmental damage and improved water management — are essential, but cultural preservation is equally important.
“The restoration’s importance cannot be overstated,” said Peone-Stops. “It’s going to bring back life, and with plant and animal life, it could bring life back to the culture in new ways.”
The CSKT’s Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee, guided by the wisdom of a board of tribal elders, has been at the heart of the tribes’ efforts for 50 years, helping to guide the ground-floor application of every project. Besides restoring the landscape, the compact is bringing jobs and reconnecting members to tribal lifeways. According to Peone-Stops, this helps the tribe re-establish its belief that every natural resource is a cultural resource.
“It’s going to bring back life, and with plant and animal life, it could bring life back to the culture in new ways.”
“The Water Compact is helping us to continue our mission: to preserve, protect and perpetuate the Selis and Qlispe culture, language and history,” said Peone-Stops. “It’s not a one-and-done thing. It will help us continue to serve our membership into the future.”
In 2021, the CSKT also established the Lower Flathead River as a cultural waterway through its “Cultural Waterway Ordinance,” which mirrors the provisions in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act that protects a river’s free-flowing nature from development. According to Peone-Stops, the tribe also plans to preserve and protect other waterways in the future.
“When I think about this compact, it’s not about control or greediness. It’s so that the water — and everything connected to it — is protected,” said Peone-Stops. “We adapt with what we have to, but our tribal practices, caring for the land in the way we know how, has always been the same.”
Liz Dempsey contributed reporting to this story. Dempsey is a descendant of the Salish and Lakota Sioux. She currently works for Char-Koosta, the tribal newspaper located on the Flathead Indian Reservation.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
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This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The wealth of rivers.”
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