Glacier National Park

Indigenous peoples

The K’tunaxa (Kootenai) and the Piikáni, one of the three Blackfeet tribes, have ties to this country reaching back well over a thousand years; the mountains are the Piikáni’s most sacred place. On January 23, 1870, in what the 2001 ethnographic overview calls the Massacre on the Marias, Col. E. M. Baker, under orders from General Sheridan, attacked a winter camp of friendly Piikáni and killed 173 or more, mostly women, children and elders. In 1883–1885, as promised rations were delayed or never delivered, 400 to 600 Piikáni died. [4]

In September 1895 three commissioners, George Bird Grinnell among them, met Blackfeet leaders to buy the mountain lands. The Piikáni asked $3 million and received $1.5 million over ten years, plus the right to hunt, fish and cut timber while the land stayed public. The strip became part of Glacier National Park in 1910, and the government came to treat those rights as lost or severely curtailed; many Blackfeet contend they never gave them up. [4]

Climate & environment

Glacier’s current ice is geologically young — formed about 7,000 years ago and at its largest around 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age. Since 1900, the U.S. Geological Survey reports, the park region’s mean annual temperature has risen 1.33 °C, 1.8 times the global mean increase, and rain rather than snow has been the dominant form of the century’s added precipitation. Of the roughly 150 glaciers estimated in 1850, 26 were still active in 2015; Grinnell Glacier lost about 45 percent of its area between 1966 and 2015, and models project that some studied glaciers will disappear between 2030 and 2080. The loss reaches beyond scenery: glaciers act as a bank of water that keeps streams cold and flowing in late summer, and without meltwater, USGS warns, rising stream temperatures could cause local extinctions of sensitive aquatic species and harm the threatened bull trout. [3] [2]