When the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes first established the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee (SPCC) in 1974-75, the small staff asked culturally knowledgeable elders to come in and teach what they knew. The elders responded by generously sharing their songs and stories — almost all in the Salish language, many of them handed down through tribal tradition from time immemorial. The staff recorded the elders on simple cassette tape machines. And from that humble beginning, the SPCC developed one of the world’s finest and most extensive archives of tribal oral history and culture.
The SPCC is working on a series of books that will include many excerpts from those recorded oral histories. Now, readers will have access not only to transcripts of the recordings, but also to the recordings themselves: the voices of tribal elders. It is their voices that we honor, respect, and put forward as the authorities on Salish-Pend d’Oreille language and culture. We hope this website will serve as a powerful way in which the elders can directly teach our language, our history, and our culture. Additional files will be made available as staff time allows for all SPCC books and projects.
Click on an icon below to access the audio files
Additional Audio
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Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee All Rights reserved
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Phone: 406 745 4572
Fax: 406 745 4573
Address: PO Box 550
81 Blind Barnaby
St.Ignatius Mt 59865
About Us
This website has been developed in order to allow public access to our media resources. Explicit use of all media apply as per our copyright agreement. We provide access to all content in order to encourage the development of knowledge for our history our language and our culture.