Day 11

7/17/18

              We got to go to the Kalispel Tribal Fish Hatchery today, and guess what we saw there. We saw some fish. I liked how Jason, the Fish Program Manager, talked about how the fish that weren’t wild, were spawned there, then moved as they got older and bigger, and used for research experiments, such as trying to test out fish ladders. The fun part about that place was when Omar, Damaris, Jessica, and I decided to have a challenge, which included putting our hands into super cold water that had a lot of small fishes in it. Jessica quit first, then Omar also took his hands out, so the adults quit first, because Omar still likes to act all professional like an adult, which kind of bothers me a little bit, but he doesn’t know. I think. Anyways, it was about 6 minutes when we had to move to the next spot, so Damaris I were still competing. Jessica told us to take our hands out of the water because it was time to move on, but I pretended that I couldn’t hear, so I eventually won, because I guess I cheated.

              Later, we went to a building where we met JR, who introduced us to the teachers there that are teaching a class of about 30 kids the Salish language. Although I have no interest in being a teacher as I don’t think I would ever be able to do it, it was pretty interesting when they mentioned that only 4 out of 15 elders on the Kalispel Reservation spoke the language fluently, which has about 300 enrolled members. I could tell that they had a lot of passion for their mission of keeping their culture alive by bringing back the Salish language. I also learned how to say the phrases, “blackbear,” “fish,” and “I am hungry,” along with the sign language for them. I would try typing the words in Salish but I might spell it wrong. Everybody else learned the Salish phrase for “I am full” but I totally blanked it out because I won’t ever need to say it. This is because I am always hungry.