Pasakwa Huude and other names on Bannock Creek

Bannock Creek rises at the head of Arbon Valley and runs north past Arbon and Pauline, then on through the Fort Hall Reservation. In 2024 and 2025 the Sho-Ban News, which covers the reservation, printed the Bannock and Shoshone names for Bannock Creek, which is also the name of the reservation district on the creek's lower course. In 2022 it reported on an effort to replace a derogatory name on a creek that the paper placed in Bannock Creek, in Power County.

These reports are recent and still under copyright, so this post retells them in its own words and quotes only short phrases. The tribal names are given exactly as the paper printed them.

The valley itself was once known as Bannock Valley, and the family history of George Dennis Arbon says the area was named after the Bannock tribe. The valley's north end borders the reservation; the West Fork farms, bought by the government in the later 1930s, are now inside it (Pauline and West Fork).

Muddy Creek

On November 18, 2024, a group called Elders for Justice held a session for Shoshone-Bannock landowners at the Shoshone-Bannock Casino Hotel Events Center. One speaker was Louise E. Dixey, a rancher for 45 years and a former Bureau of Indian Affairs employee. She talked about range issues, how the reservation was created, the homelands its people had been removed from, and the place names of its districts. Lori Ann Edmo's report in the Sho-Ban News of November 21 gives each district's name in English, Bannock and Shoshone. The Ross District is "Under the Mountain", Lincoln Creek "the old schoolhouse", Gibson "Sagebrush Hill". And "Bannock Creek is referred to as Muddy Creek": Pasagway huude in Bannock, Saikwi hunnu in Shoshone. Dixey said she was presenting on her own time and was not speaking for the Tribes.

On January 31, 2025, Dixey spoke again, at a Winter Wellness Gathering held by the Waapi Kani Cedar House. This time the paper identified her as manager of the Tribes' Language and Culture Preservation Department. Among the reservation place names she gave, the paper printed the Bannock Creek District as Pasakwa Huude. The 2025 report does not say which language this name is in; it appears to be the Bannock name printed in 2024, spelled differently. Both spellings are given here as printed, and neither has been checked with the department.

The Muddy Creek of Dixey's talk is Bannock Creek itself, not the Muddy Creek near Crystal. On October 9, 1917, the American Falls Press reported that Manning Standley was still busy with his header, a grain harvester, on "upper Muddy creek, two miles southeast of Crystal."

Renaming a creek in the Bannock Creek district

On November 19, 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed Secretary's Order 3404. It declared a word used in many place names to be derogatory and set up a task force to choose new names for the 665 geographic features that carried it. By the paper's count, about 259 of those features lay within Shoshonean original territories. The Tribes asked their Cultural Committee and staff to take up the question, and Daniel Stone of the Fish & Wildlife Department narrowed the work down to 57 new names.

On Friday, April 8, 2022, the Language and Culture Preservation Department held a forum titled "Restoring Newe Place Names, Removing Derogatory Geographic Names." Nolan Brown, the department's researcher for original territories and history, handed out its list of proposed names, worked out with the lead language instructors Zelphia Towersap and Tony Moon Elk Shay and others in the department. Roselynn Yazzie's report of April 14 gives one example, a creek "located in Bannock Creek, located in Power County." Four names had been proposed for it: Donambi'na Baa', Newe Baa', Indian Creek and Tsaa Naivi Creek. Brown said the list was not final. He called the restoring of Native place names a path to wellness and a way of addressing systemic racism. Reclaiming the homelands "through our own place names," he said, could correct some of the skewed perceptions and stories that had grown up around the old names. Written comments were due on April 24, and the Board on Geographic Names was expected to decide in September.

On September 8, 2022, the Interior Department announced that the board had voted on new names for nearly 650 features, effective at once for federal use. The Sho-Ban News reports read for this post do not give the result. The federal Geographic Names Information System now lists a Power County stream that once carried the old name as Tonampi Naokwa̱i̱de. The point GNIS gives for its mouth lies about eight miles north-northwest of Pauline. It is probably the creek discussed at the forum, though no report read here says so. The name is not one of the four printed in 2022, although its first word resembles the first of them. The sources do not say when it was adopted or who proposed it.

Growing up on Bannock Creek

The January 2025 gathering also heard from a panel of tribal elders. Daisy Hood said she grew up in Bannock Creek and now lives in Fort Hall. She had lived in California and Oklahoma too, but, as the paper put it, "her heart's always been in Bannock Creek." She remembered her grandmother making baskets out of willow, and a time when there was no electricity and water and wood had to be hauled.

The district today

Other reports describe the district along the creek. At the 2024 landowners' session, Dave Bollinger, manager of the Fort Hall Irrigation Project, named Bannock Creek as one of the project's three minor units and dated them to 1948. Long before that, the federal decree of 1907 had divided the creek's water between the Tribes and the upstream settlers. That story is told in United States v. Daniels. By March 21, 2024, the old main building of the Bannock Creek Community Center had been cleared to make way for a steel building of about 4,000 square feet, with $1 million set aside for it. For the November 2024 election, the Tribes' notice said that Bannock Creek residents living in Power County could vote at the Pocatello Airport. Those it described as "Arbon Valley residents" could vote at the Arbon Valley Bible Church.

The story as reported

Sho-Ban News, November 21, 2024. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

FORT HALL — Shoshone-Bannock landowners gathered on November 18, 2024, for an Elders for Justice program about grazing on the reservation's range units and water from the Fort Hall Irrigation Project. The Shoshone-Bannock Casino Hotel's events center was the venue.

Louise E. Dixey led the range portion. Speaking as a private person rather than for the Tribes, she said, she gave the talk on her own time. Her background included 45 years of ranching, a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and paralegal work for the Tribes' attorney.

Her talk opened on the past: how the reservation came to be, which homelands the people had been forced to leave, what land was ceded, and what each district is called in the native languages. For Bannock Creek she gave three names: Muddy Creek, Pasagway huude (Bannock) and Saikwi hunnu (Shoshone). She gave names for the Ross, Lincoln Creek, Gibson and Fort Hall districts as well; Gibson, for one, is Sagebrush Hill.

According to her figures, 97 percent of the reservation's 546,000 acres is trust land belonging to the Tribes or to individual allottees, and the Tribes count 6,187 enrolled members. The Tribes took over the range program in 2018. Under the program are 14 range units totaling 320,292 acres, pieced together from roughly 1,544 tracts, some tribal and some fractionated allotments. With a map, she went over Unit 3, about 126,000 acres, where grazing fees were $8.50 per animal unit month for tribal members and $29.50 for others.

Next came Dave Bollinger, who manages the irrigation project; its water, taken from the Blackfoot and Snake rivers and other sources, goes to farms both on the reservation and on ceded lands. Building the system took from 1894 to 1954. Two large units, Fort Hall (1907) and Michaud (1954), make up most of it, and the three minor ones, all from 1948, are named for Lincoln Creek, Ross Fork Creek and Bannock Creek. The Bureau of Indian Affairs owns the works, which include 2,172 structures, two pumping plants and more than 300 miles of canals, laterals and drains; landowners and lessees pay for their upkeep. He also read from a solicitor's opinion of 1936, which found that Indians who own land on the reservation owe no operation and maintenance assessments for their water.

Questions also went to Cecil Breland, a Bureau of Indian Affairs retiree. Michelle Pak, with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, gave an overview of the Conservation Reserve Program: in exchange for annual payments, landowners sign ten-year contracts to keep environmentally sensitive ground out of farming.

Russell Haskett, who lives at Bannock Creek, told the meeting that cattle were grazing CRP land there, and he wanted to know who monitors such ground and whether the agency keeps track of fencing. Complaints of violations, Pak replied, are followed up. A Ross Fork resident told Bollinger of water being blocked from a canal, and another asked whether Indian water users could form their own group; Bollinger said they could, once they wrote bylaws.

The organizers expect to hold a further workshop, Elders for Justice members said.

On this site: Pauline and West Fork, the 1907 Bannock Creek decree, and the links to the Tribes' own history on Start here.