The Valley

The Mission Valley of western Montana, between the Mission Mountains and the Flathead Range.

I am from Sonielmn. The Salish name for this valley — Sniɬmn — means the place where you surround something. I did not grow up here the way most people grow up in a place. I grew up here through stories, told to me by someone who has lived along this creek his whole life. The stories made the ground specific. Specific enough to be home.

This is one community with three histories: the Salish and their neighbors who were here first and are still here; the Catholic missionaries who arrived in the 1840s and built the church at the center of the oldest name; and the homesteaders who came after 1910 and plowed the land the federal irrigation project made arable. Three histories, one place. The tension is real and unresolved. I write from inside it.

• Snyelmn
  The word, the valley, the people who are here.
• The Church at Snyelmn
  The mission, the painter, the pilgrim, and the word.
• Restoration
  What carries life across time, and what happens when it breaks.
• Repentance as Return
  The daily turn toward what is real.