Ktunaxa

The Ktunaxa, also called Kutenai or Kootenay, are an Indigenous people of the northern Columbia Plateau whose bands live along the Kootenay River, split into Upper and Lower groups. Their Kutenai language is a language isolate.

One account of their origins holds that they began on the prairies and were pushed across the Rockies by the Blackfoot; each year parties crossed the mountains to hunt bison, and rivalry with the Blackfoot over hunting grounds often turned violent. Plateau villages lived on salmon, game and roots, travelling in distinctive sturgeon-nosed bark canoes.

In the eighteenth century a Lower Kootenay prophet, Shining Shirt, foretold the coming of black-robed missionaries, and by the 1830s Christian elements reached the Ktunaxa through Iroquois voyageurs. The North West Company built Kootanae House among them in 1807, but abandoned it in 1812 under hostility from the Peigan.