“She was a Salish woman who married Kootenai men.” That’s how Tony Incashola, director of her tribe’s culture committee, described Agnes Kenmille at the time of her death in 2009. Except for a brief stint at a boarding school in Idaho, Kenmille lived most of her ninety-three years within a few miles of Arlee, Montana, where she is buried. Her world was comprised of the Flathead, Mission, and Jocko valleys of far western Montana between the Clark Fork River and Glacier National Park. Kenmille’s influence, however, extended well beyond her reservation’s boundaries. Asshe was a master craftsperson and skilled tanner, her materials and artwork spread far and wide–Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Ali owned gauntlets and moccasins from Agnes. Countless craftspeople from around the country sought her brain-tanned buckskin for beadwork, powwow dresses, and reenactment clothing. At home, she was respected and beloved as an elder fluent in Bitterroot Salish (Flathead in the ethnographic record), Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles languages and traditions. Throughout her career as a tanner, Agnes gave back to her community and to visitors of all backgrounds by teaching brain tanning to anyone who would do the work.
Agnes Kenmille’s life, as it is presented in this short text, will hopefully serve as an inspiration to young Indian people on the Flathead reservation. Kenmille was born in March of 1916 into Chief Charlo’s band of Bitterroot Salish. By age twelve she was orphaned, and then at age fourteen she was placed into an arranged marriage with a twenty-nine-year-old Kootenai man. She spoke no Kootenai at that time, and her husband spoke no Salish, so they communicated through Indian sign language. By age fifteen she had given birth to her first child, and a year later her husband died of tuberculosis. As a young wife and a young widow through the crushing poverty of Indian Country in the Great Depression, Agnes maintained a positive outlook on life. At times she only had flour mixed with water heated on a wood stove to make a thin gravy, but she was thankful for that meal and how good the gravy tasted. At other times she subsisted entirely on biscuits and bacon. Although she regretted not having any vegetables, she was thankful for the food she did have. Her resilience throughout the 1920s and 1930s comes across strongly in the text.
Kenmille’s first mother-in-law was a hide tanner who taught Agnes to brain tan in the Kootenai tradition, a skill that would provide her a livelihood for the next seventy-eight years. In her early twenties, Agnes married another Kootenai man and had two children with him, but when pregnant with her third child, her husband was killed in the construction of a local dam. In spite of this, she went right along tanning hides. Eventually she would be tanning 300 hides per year and selling not only the brain-tanned deer skins, but also beaded vests, moccasins, dresses, and gauntlets. Later, she instructed countless students on brain tanning at the tribal college in Pablo.
Agnes Oshanee Kenmille: Salish Indian Elder and Master Craftswoman is interesting because it’s not possible to determine who put it together. No editor is listed, and yet the book is made up of a series of short vignettes on Kenmille’s life, presumably most of them were published previously in magazines or newspapers. There is an introduction by her granddaughter, which provides some context on Agnes but not for the book. One of the more revealing essays is a short interview with Agnes Kenmille about her past. In addition to some short newspaper articles on Kenmille, there is also an obituary from The Missoulian. The book ends with a series of beautiful color photographs of her craftwork–mostly beaded dresses and vests. It would have been nice if an editor had provided more context for the essays and the interior Salish world in which Kenmille lived, and yet the text works as a glimpse into the life of a resilient and positive elder with a good Indian sense of humor.
This text is in line with other publications from the Salish Kootenai College that cover the lives of notable tribal members. This book has the potential to inspire young Indian people with its example of a self-made woman who achieved great success within her community by remaining faithful to the traditional values of kindness, humility, hard work, and good humor. Scholars of Native North America will appreciate a book that does not focus on macro-level Indian-White relations, but instead gives a sincere account of a tribal member’s life throughout the twentieth century.
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[Review length: 764 words * Review posted on May 6, 2025]