Say you land on Dec. 25, 1882:
"At eleven o'clock at night on Christmas Eve, the doors of the church were closed, except for the sanctuary door through which the students from both schools entered. At the first peal of the bell, firecrackers and gunshots resounded simultaneously from all parts of the camp; then the voices of the chiefs could be heard.
So wrote Brother Etienne De Rouge, in French. It was translated for "A Pretty Village" by Elizabeth Hubble from the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at the University of Montana.
To do what editor Bob Bigart has done, reducing thousands of photographs, letters, manuscripts, newspaper articles, diaries and journals - not all of them in English - into a compelling read was a massive undertaking.
The result: A two-volume set published in January by Salish Kootenai College Press and distributed by the prestigious University of Nebraska Press.
Here are accounts of religious ceremonies, speeches and sociological observations, public hangings and floggings, horse racing and the works of the well-regarded tribal agent, Peter Ronan.
"A Pretty Village" and its companion volume, "Zealous in All Virtues," involved dozens of other translations from Italian and Latin writings from 1880 to 1894.
The subtitles of both are "Documents of Worship and Culture Change, St. Ignatius Mission, Montana" - and a red flag shoots up. Documents? Worship and culture change? No leisurely summer reading, this.
Still, these are page turners, whether or not you turn one at a time. Bigart has arranged them chronologically, so you always know where you're headed. The initial entry of "A Pretty Village" is a pedestrian one from the St. Ignatius Mission House Diary on Jan. 1, 1880, noting the Thursday was a feast day of the Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The final account, written at the end of 1889, is a 4 1/2-page extract from Father Pietro Bandini's "State of Montana" letter. Bandini wrote to a fellow priest in Latin.
"No one will disagree with me," Bandini's treatise begins, "if I call Montana the cradle of our Missions. That is because from this land grew the first sparks of the flame that spread throughout all the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, making these Indians the town criers of the Holy Word."
"A Pretty Village" and "Zealous in All Virtues" address a niche that needed scratching in western history. The railroads were arriving and the buffalo vanishing from the Montana plains.
The St. Ignatius Mission had been moved from Lake Pend d'Oreille in present-day Idaho to its current location in 1854. Separate boarding schools for girls and, later, boys were established at the site.
By the 1880s, Bigart writes in his introduction, "the mission was both an agent of change - teaching new skills to help the tribes survive in the post-buffalo economy - and an anchor to Christian religious power prized by the Salish people for fifty years."
There were disagreements between the priests and tribal leaders over how the tribe should adapt to the changing times, Bigart notes.
Tribal members spent most of the time scattered in small camps.
"Church festivals became major tribal gatherings that helped strengthen the community," he writes. "At the same time, the nineteenth-century European ideology that permeated the St. Ignatius schools worked to supplant Salish and Kootenai culture and undermine tribal languages."
He makes it clear what's missing here. Nearly everything in both books comes from written - i.e., non-Indian - sources.
"When the oral traditions now being recorded and edited by the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee in St. Ignatius and the Kootenai Culture Committee in Elmo become available to researchers in the future," Bigart says, "they will provide new perspectives to complement the written documents."
Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
"A Pretty Village: Documents of Worship and Culture Change, St. Ignatius Mission, Montana, 1880-1889," edited by Robert J. Bigart. Latin translation by James M. Scott, French translation by Elizabeth A. Hubble, University of Nebraska Press, 352 pages, $19.95
"Zealous in All Virtues: Documents of Worship and Culture Change, St. Ignatius Mission, Montana, 1890-1894," edited by Robert J. Bigart, Latin translation by James M. Scott, University of Nebraska Press, 324 pages, $19.95
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