Talk:Coast Salish

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[edit] Is this a language or culture page?

Some content here is more apt for discussions of "people"/tribe articles, not for a linguistic grouping. To me this is properly a linguistic-group page and need not have the stuff about slavery, salmon etc. which properly belong on an ethnography-content page (see Wikipedia:Wikiproject Indigenous peoples of North America and consult tables and accompanying discussions.Skookum1 07:41, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Wow, you put a lot of work in here. Thanks. -- TheMightyQuill 09:24, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pay attention to classification

I've just removed Nuxalk from the list of Coast Salish languages. Nuxalk is Salishan, and it is spoken on the coast, but it is not Coast Salish. It is considered to be an outlier, not belonging to any of the major divisions of the Salishan languages. The linguistic classification is often not inferrable from either the name of a language or its geographical position. Please be careful and consult the linguistic classification (e.g. in the Salishan languages article) so as to be accurate and consistent.Bill 16:49, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I've just removed the Tillamoook link for the same reason: it isn't Coast Salish. It is the other language considered an outlier.Bill 16:52, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Both of these were listed on Salishan languages which is why they wound up here; other than Nuxalk, which in BC accounts is always Coast Salish; apparently linguistics differs, but I've never heard this before (about Nuxalk anyway).Skookum1 20:25, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Nuxalk is listed in Salishan languages, but not as a member of the Coast Salish subgroup. The odd-man-out status of Nuxalk is quite standard in linguistics. You'll find it listed separately from Coast Salish in all of the linguistic classifications I can think of, including the one in the Ethnologue. A widely held speculation is that the Nuxalk represent a group that either split off from the Interior Salish and moved out to the Coast or that got cut off when Athabaskans moved south. If you've seen Nuxalk included in Coast Salish, I bet it is in classifications that don't distinguish language from culture, or that simply assume that you can use geography naivley and that "on the coast" implies "Coast Salish". Bill 21:27, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Pfffft. Bill, what are YOUR sources for this "outlier" thing? The Coast Salish designation for Bella Coola goes back to Barbeau and Boas and is in use by the Nuxalk people themselves, as in the following exerpt from their webpage:LANGUAGE: The Nuxalk language is part of the Coast Salish dialect. (http://www.nuxalk.org/html/history.htm) Somewhere in my messy house I also have a Nat'l Museum of Canada (or Provincial Museum) booklet on the Coast Salish as a language group and Bella Coola is definitely listed on it; and it also shows up on all maps of the NW Sprachbund and regional language maps as in the Coast Salish group (as it also does on the Salishan languages Wiki page). I'm sure I could find you a HUNDRED further references for this, it's so commonplace; I'm surprised by Ethnologue's breakdown (which doesn't even bother to dissect Hulquminum, Hunquminum and Halqemeylem from Halkomelem) but, in my experience with nature cultural matters, it behooves one to go with what the people themselves say rather than what absentee anthro-linguists opine about an issue; and in this case I'd say the Nuxalk have done more study into the history of their language than YOU have (or Ethnologue has, either one). It's also worth noting that their culture, at least in terms of material style and other traits, does NOT resemble the other Coast Salish peoples, but is more distinctly "Northwest Coast" in the same culture-category as their Wakashan neighbours, the Haida, the Tsimshian and Haida; only the more northerly of the Gulf of Georgia Salish affected upcoast style - the Squamish and Sechelt in particular, and they were consciously imitating the style of the Euclataws and Haida raiders who harried their people from the north; whereas the Musqueam and others farther south had a more fluid, less stylized, almost more naturalistic artistic style and a different mode of social organization (hence, partly, the bitter differences that existed between the Squamish and Musqueam for many years, including their ongoing territorial claims-crossover).

There's certainly no way they could be Interior Salish; their own legends do not speak of an in-migration to the area, and like the Gulf of Georgia Salish their creation myths tend to have them in situ "when the land was revealed/created". The Wakashan languages on the outer coast however, from what I remember in Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (AMNH publication) that the ancestors of the Queen Charlotte Strait Kwakiutl were an offshoot of a West Coast of Vancouver Island group in the Quatsino Sound area, who migrated around Cape Scott. That account makes no mention of prior Salishan inhabitants of the region, although it's a certainty that the Comox territories in the northern Georgia Strait and Johnstone Strait/Discovery Islands were overrun by the Euclataws (Laich-kwil-tach or Southern Kwakiutl) in living memory, around the same time as Contact in fact (1780s, or 1700s anyway). The implication is that there were/may have been Salishan peoples farther north than Queen Charlotte Strait, in other words havingt a geographic/ancestral connection to the Bella Coola, whose deep fjord location (and more warlike nature than the southern Salishan, perhaps) protected them from being absorbed or pushed aside by the so-called Northern Kwakiutl (Oweekyala/Heiltsuk, Haisla etc); inland from there is Athabaskan peoples, especially in the remote past (by apocryphal stories, the fierceness and bloody-mindedness of the Chilcotin may be what drove the so-called Nicola Athabaskans from their former home, apparently somewhere up the Fraser Canyon or west of the Fraser, to the place of their demise around Nicola Lake; likewise, in the remoter past, the southward migration of the Navajo/Dineh is supposed to have started from within the ranks of their northern kindred; somewhere in BC's Interior Plateau most likely.

All that's by the way; the point is that while geographically they may be an outlier to the academics you've studied, but BC-based anthropologists, linguists and culture historians - and the native peoples themselves - consider Nuxalk to be Coast Salish by language group. Period. I'd think that the Nuxalk are the most bona fide reference here, and I'll go by their word (and put Nuxalk back on the page where it belongs). As for Tillimook, I'll refer to that to a Chinook Jargon colleague at Grand Ronde whose an Oregon languages specialist and see what he has to say about it....Skookum1 01:08, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


PS Bill - I'm anything but naive concerning BC geography, and would never make such a silly assumption as you've suggested I've done. Or is it the Nuxalk people who've made that assumption? Why don't you ask THEM (government_at_nuxalk.org)Skookum1 01:38, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

My sources are listed in the references. In addition to the Ethnologue, which is the most authoritative general source, both Czaykowska-Higgins and Kinkade (1998) at pp. 3-4 and Kroeber (1999) at pp. 4-6 treat Nuxalk and Tillamook as distinct subgroups of Salishan, not part of Coast Salish. Czaykowska-Higgins is a faculty member at the University of Victoria who specializes in Salishan languages. The late Dale Kinkade, of the University of British Columbia, was arguably the leading specialist in Salishan languages. Paul Kroeber is a well known specialist in Salishan languages. In short, the most current and authoritative sources support the position that Nuxalk and Tillamook do not belong in Coast Salish. Incidentally, although Salishan is not my area of expertise, I am a BC-based linguist myself, with a great deal of field experience in BC as well as knowledge of the literature. I'm afraid that your idea of what us BC-based linguists think is out of date.
I'm writing this while having breakfast on my way to work so have no time to compile references at the moment; sounds like anything I have is discreditable based on sheer age, anything else will be online and so discreditable by you (as with www.nuxalk.org); my main objection here is that official linguistics demarcations of what belongs where should not be the sole defining arbiter of language articles in the Wikiproject:Indigenous peoples of North America, and any article should reflect popular opinion/feeling - esp. home-turf opinion - as well as what the people in the ivory towers have decided on behalf of teh rest of us. Linguists aren't priests, and as much as they pretend to the same infallibility, they're not in charge or truth, nor the prosecution of heresies. In Chinookology I've seen the linguists make one peremptory or presumptive judgement after another, and also ignore whole bodies of literature and research that are inconvenient to their pet dialect/definition, or the theories that they want to espouse, or the cultural biases they have affected. And not just in Chinook studies; in academia in general I've found an exclusionist attitude and a lot of at-a-distance pompousness; usually used to disguise actual lack of information; and when in doubt, cite an "authority", which is someone with a bit more alphabet soup after their name than the next guy.
Part of the problem here is the long-standing blend between culture, language, identity and nation in BC society, and some political unities on the map are were defined along linguistic lines by the federal government, not by the peoples themselves (hence that problem with Somena, and the Southern Kwakiutl vs Kwakwaka'wakw distinction/history. And the fudging of the term "Coast Salish" both in journalism and academia; the existence of this vagueness should at least be discussed here, and then you can proceed with the hardcore linguistics definitions. But here's an observation: the many language pages I've looked at in the Indigenous project are often/mostly very dry, purely technical linguistics pages, with little in the way of public/lay content. More "human content" in such articles is needed, partly for you linguistics guys to prove you're actually human and not just a bunch of IPA-spitting, syntax-analyzing academics who don't talk to anyone else and don't care if anyone else doesn't understand, or doesn't agree. You guys can come up with definitions and impose them within academia all you want; but to sell them to the public (or the group being studied/described, as with the Nuxalk), you're going to have to learn ordinary English and ordinary descriptive writing, and also not presume academic materials are the only things that are important in language or anything else.Skookum1 14:39, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
In contrast to the current and authoritative sources that I cite, you provide no references. In any case, Barbeau and Boas are over half a century out of date, and neither had much expertise in linguistic classification. (Regrettably, it is now even rarer for anthropologists to have much knowledge of linguistics than it was in their day, though are notable exceptions, such as Jay Powell and the late Wayne Suttles.) As for your claim that what the Nuxalk say is somehow authoritative, that's crazy. That's like saying that because you and I are human beings we are experts on medicine. Linguistic classification is a specialized, technical activity that has only been carried out in anything resembling a scientific fashion within the past two centuries. Even now, most people have no idea how to do it. Your claim that the Nuxalk are the authorities requires not only that they be experts in this arcane field but that they be knowledgable about not only their own language (and, regrettably, only a small minority of the Nuxalk have any command of the language) but the other Salishan languages. They don't. Or do you think that because they are indigenous people they somehow acquire knowledge by some mystical process? The odds are that in stating that their language is a Coast Salish language they are either simply repeating what they have been told or are making the false but understandable inference that because they are on the coast and their language is Salishan, it must be Coast Salish. I would be most interested to see if anyone in the community has put forward linguistic arguments regarding the position of the language within the Salishan family.
As for the history of the Nuxalk, I think that you place too much reliance on mythology, but this is not the place to go into this. My purpose in mentioning the proposals about the Nuxalk was merely to illustrate the fact that current scholarship regards the position of Nuxalk as something requiring an explanation.Bill 09:07, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
First of all, you guys both need to calm down and be a little nicer. While I tend to side with Billposer on the language classification, since he seems to have good sources (and a good knowledge of linguistics), we should keep in mind that this article deals with other elements of culture besides language. The Nuxalk may not, sadly, be experts on their language but they are the authority on Nuxalk culture, and can decide who their cultural relatives are. Perhaps we should split the page? Also, while the language classification system may seem very rigid in the eyes of a linguist, it is a scholarly construction, not some naturally occuring division of language. -- TheMightyQuill 13:37, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
it is a scholarly construction...and therefore not the only truth; any academic "construction" is a theoretical construction meant to express an ideal reality and should NOT be taken as being reality (while it's true that anthropologists need to study linguistics, linguistics people need to study philosophy, especially epistemology. A little humility would help too, but most linguists I've met/dealth with have that in rather short supply.Skookum1 14:24, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


The page needs splitting anyway, as language and culture and nation articles should be separate and also "Coast Salish" is NOT a culture-group except by default/definition as being in the same language group (and as a culture-group, the Nuxalk are NOT part of it, but more in a Kulturbund (q.v. Sprachbund with their non-Salishan coastal neighbours; and if I could show you some pictures of Upriver Sto:lo vs. Squamish vs southern Puget Sound artwork you'd pick up that the idea of a "Coast Salish culture" is a non-starter, unless the defining component of culture is language (which to some schools of thought it is).

But I re-assert the point about the Nuxalk being Coast Salish as a language; or at least, if credentialism produces a body of literature (which no one else reads) that says it isn't in their definition of Coast Salish, then taxonomical strictness must apply; but it is important that the article say that only linguists make this distinction and Nuxalk speakers themselves do not; and other than the confusion evident in the text overleaf (I took out the "tribe" references last night) there's never been a confusion in the stuff I read between the Coast Salish language group and a supposed Coast Salish culture group (local newspaper reporters, apparently fresh out of their B.A. or out of somewhere else in Canada, will often describe a First Nations person as "Coast Salish" - and often First Nations people do themselves, but that's because they either don't want to be specific, or spend a half hour teaching people about which language/people they're from all the differentiation and so on.

Linguistics rearranges its deck chairs all the time, and you can always find one linguist who says Haida is Na-Dene and another one who says it isn't; and there's hosts of them that point at what someone else has written and state that's their case for authority. I've got Bella Coola Texts (BC Provincial Museum) and its introduction says simply "Salishan" but points for the nearest relatives to the coastal group to the southeast; it makes no mention of the Interior Salish group; I'll quote this here later and also dig out what other texts I have here. As you can see in the history file at Coast Salish there's some confusion still among people that THAT is a culture, whereas it's only a language group; and as the discussion at Talk:Somena "hints", there's a lot of subtlety between what is a "nation" and what is a "culture" (they're in the Hulquminum language area but there are/were no political/cultural cohesion implied).

The Nuxalk may not, sadly, be experts on their language but they are the authority on Nuxalk culture

You know, between you and me, I sure wouldn't say that in the bar at Bella Coola, or in the presence of a native politico in BC. Cultural parochialismisn't very welcome nowadays, and sorry Quill I know you mean well but that's what that is. Academia of course is inherently parochial, and full now of rote-learning, and you always get somebody from the other side of the continent making pronouncements on places they've never been and people they've never met. It's one of the reasons I didn't bother finishing a degree; it clearly meant very little than skill at rote-learning and the ability to agree with your professors.Skookum1 14:17, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

---The indentation seems to be messed up so I'm starting down here. This is Bill.

The very fact that linguists change their minds is counterevidence to User:Skookum1's idea that its all about memorization and authority. That is so far from from my 32 years of experience in linguistics that I really don't know what to make of it. If S had an unpleasant experience at university, I'm sorry, but that really is not typical of what the field is like. In any case, the idea that Nuxalk is an outlier and not part of Coast Salish is not that recent. If you'll consult Thompson (1979) (in the references to the Salish article), you'll see that he considered Nuxalk (under the name Bella Coola) to be a sister of the entire remainder of the family.

I don't think that you should think of my use of more recent sources as some sort of trumping by trickery. There are good reasons why more recent classifications are usually better. One is that we have better data. Many of the languages are better documented than they were fifty or twenty or even ten years ago, and that can make a difference in the classification. Another is that early classifications tend to be done rather casually, while at a later point someone may have gotten around to doing the considerable amount of work necessary to do it properly, including at least partial reconstruction of the proto-language and study of the changes needed to derive each of the daughter languages from it. Boas, for instance, had available neither very much data nor a reconstruction and so could not carry out a proper classification. It wasn't his fault and it doesn't mean he was stupid or ignorant - he just wasn't in a position to do more than an initial, rather subjective, classification. As a result of the large increase in documentation beginning in the 1960s and the comparative work done by people like Larry Thompson and Dale Kinkade, we're in a much better position now to work out the classification.

Let me turn now to the question of what kind of object a classification is. Since it is constructed by people, who may lack essential data and may make mistakes, it is certainly a contingent truth, subject to revision. However, I object to the idea that a classification is simply something in the mind of the linguist. A linguistic classification is a proposal about the actual history of the speech community. The claim that Nuxalk is a Coast Salish language does not mean that Nuxalk and the other languages are similar to each other by criteria that one may legitimately vary, so that there can be more than one truth to the matter. Rather, it implies that at some time in the past there was a single speech community, speaking a single language that we call proto-Coast Salish, that later divided into two or more speech communities, one of which is ancestral to the current Nuxalk speech community, and that the languages ancestral to the other Salishan languages are not descendants of proto-Coast Salish. That is a specific historical hypothesis that must be either true or false.

I am entirely in agreement with the proposition that it would make sense for the language and culture articles to be separated, as they are in many other cases. It is quite possible for the linguistic and cultural classifications to differ. Indeed, the Pacific Northwest is well known as a culture area whose languages are genetically quite diverse.

Finally, on the question of whether the Nuxalk are the authorities on the classification of their language, while as you say, it is politically correct to maintain that they are, I must nonetheless maintain that they aren't. To begin with, that is exactly the kind of argument from authority that all of us, I hope, object to. The only proper authority is evidence and argument. Secondly, it is not the case that the classification of Nuxalk is a fact entirely about Nuxalk, so even if one holds the view, in my opinion false, that native people are the ultimate authority in all matters concerning them, the classification of their language would not be a matter falling within that authority. The reason is that the classification of Nuxalk is a fact about the relationship of Nuxalk to OTHER languages. Even if the Nuxalk are the authorities about Nuxalk, they are not the authorities about Chehalis or Flathead or Okanagan or any of the other languages, nor are they the authorities about the procedures for determining a linguistic classification. In any case, as I have suggested previously, I am not at all sure that the Nuxalk even claim to hold a view on the classification of their language in the technical sense used in linguistics, so it isn't clear that there is really a conflict here.

There are two larger points here. One is that it is understandable that native people want to assert ultimate authority about themselves. They have often been misrepresented, and it seems to go to their identity. However, an understandable motivation for claiming this authority does not change the fact that authentic knowledge cannot be obtained by political authority or revelation but only by evidence and argument. Many First Nations politicians understand this perfectly well, though they may not want to say so publicly. I now quite a few, some quite well, and have discussed this issue with them. They know that if you want to know how to say something or what traditional cultural values are, you ask the elders, but that it is linguists rather than the elders who can tell you how relative clauses are formed or what the acoustic properties are that differentiate one speech sound from another.

The second point is that people seem to object to the fact that linguistics is a technical subject requiring a lot of study. For some reason, people have the idea that knowledge about language is, or ought to be, immediately accessible to them and that they can have useful opinions about it without significant study, whereas they would not make the same claims about a subject like chemistry. When a linguist says that you need to understand this, that, and the other thing in order to debate a topic knowledgably, or uses technical terminology, this is treated as arrogance, when in fact it is just like any other scientific subject. If you don't know what an isogloss is or what a common retention is or how to reconstruct the phonology of a proto-language, you can't talk meaningfully about classification any more than someone who doesn't know what bond energy and molecular orbitals are can talk meaningfully about chemical reactions. Bill 23:29, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible split of page?

There's a lot of issues you've raised I'd like to discuss, but the salient material here is what to do with the Coast Salish article page overleaf so I'll try not to engage on side-topics (any more than I usually do. I've started a new section heading for ease of editing (but will be responding to text in the previous section).

Part of this spins off my own edit of the page to make it a language-group page only, at least in theory as some culture/ethnographic stuff is still in place (like the salmon and artwork sentence-paragraphs). In the course of your replies concerning the official linguistics delineation, and your own comment that we shouldn't mix the Coast Salish language group with Coast Salish as a cultural identity/grouping, it seems that this points us in the direction of saying that "Coast Salish" has two meanings; one in linguistics, which used to include Nuxalk and Nehalem/Tillamook but has since been revised, and another meaning where the context is cultural/ethnographic. Except that the Nuxalk are not similar so much to any nearby Salish people, other than those also taken up with the Kulturbund of the Northwest Coast "totem pole civilization"; the Comox, Squamish and Sechelt share in this, but not to the same degree as the Nuxalk; while the Straits Salish, Puget Sound and Sto:lo are/were not. So what to do? I think - because people without linguistics training - are going to come by looking for Bella Coola/Nuxalk in Coast Salish that it should be mentioned that this grouping was due to an older, now out-of-date definition. A similar comment should maybe be added to the Salishan languages page (partly to avoid changes and re-interpretations such as the one I made...).

And it's not political correctness I've been concerned with so much as "cultural correctness", which includes heeding what the elders say, or at least bringing up their point of view on something even if it disagrees with professional academics; I've run head-on into culture conflicts of this kind and that's why I was sensitive and reacted the way I did; because I knew how sensitive the material is, and how touchy First Nations ethnographers are about how they are presented. A similar problem, BTW, has come up with someone's recent expansion of Sahaptin people, which again is a language group now being treated as if it were a tribe, which it's not (at least not in terms of the article's new text, which is from the Catholic Encyclopedia and therefore - to me - highly suspect). Same problem with Cowichan people (see Somena and Talk:Somena).

Lastly (for now, as I've got real-world stuff to do), I think it's a truism that "Coast Salish" has become an ethnic identifier for some First Nations people, say when quoted in print; easier to say that than try to get the media to accurately spell/name your own people's name; and also because many are mixed-First Nation, e.g. part Sneneymux, part Sto:lo, part Lummi or Songhees or whatever. So whether I or anybody else likes it or not, "Coast Salish" does have meaning outside the usage preferred/mandated by professional linguistics; exactly how to define the "other" page/meaning remains for us to work out, perhaps. More comments on specific issues you raised later maybeSkookum1 22:09, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Style notes

Links within headings are avoided to facilitate allowing the use of links to headings. (Links to headings containing links can be problematic.)

The article is apparently originally the Queen's Canadian English; spellings corrections in accordance would be welcome. --GoDot 00:22, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Split

It has been suggested that this page be split into multiple pages accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss)

Initially posting here on Talk to first guage interest, leaving the article less interrupted.
Could split into language and culture: Languages of the Coast Salish and Cultures of the Coast Salish, for example, per naming conventions.

Alternative: leave the article primary structure largely as is, at least until it becomes large. In this way a better resolution may become apparent as the article is improved over time.

A proposal:

== Language group: Peoples speaking a Coast Salish language ==
It has been suggested that this section be split into a new page entitled Languages of the Coast Salish. (Discuss)
North to south
=== Vancouver Island ===
[...]
== Culture group or ethnography ==
It has been suggested that this section be split into a new page entitled [[Ethnography of the Coast Salish or Cultures of the Coast Salish]]. (Discuss)
The staple of their diet was typcially salmon, supplemented with [...]

Structure
Language:

Languages of the Coast Salish
Have article Interior Salish
Category:Indigenous languages of the North American Northwest Coast

Culture:

Ethnography of the Coast Salish or Cultures of the Coast Salish (more lyrical)
Category:First Nations in British Columbia
Category:Indigenous peoples in the United States
Category:Native American culture
Category:Native American architecture [etc.]

Proposed:

Category:Coast Salish tribes (or some appropriate description).
This will require resolution. So far, many tribes around the Salish Sea share historical similarities such as in social structure, architecture and technologies, hunting and gathering, initiative and response to White contact, (and experience with their public health). Developing individual articles could be facilitated by referring to a common article for common characteristics, rather than having duplicate boilerplate text.

As you all prob'ly know, one of the most prominent distinctions and defining characteristics of a people is shared language, particularly a living, spoken language. With respect to smaller populations, a living language is one characteristic of a vital culture or ethnicity (that is, a living language has a vital ethnicity {or ethnicities}, though a vital ethnicity may not necessarily have an associated language).

--GoDot 00:22, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confirmation of Place Name as Coast Salish

Could someone familiar with Coast Salish confirm that the reference to the name of Mount Arrowsmith from the reference source given with the BC Government as "The Indian name is Kulth-ka-choolth, meaning "jagged face"" is correct and is correctly referred to as Coast Salish? Thanks KenWalker | Talk 05:31, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

There is no "Coast Salish" language - a common misperception because of the misuses of "Salish" by press and curriculum books over the years: it's a group of languages. Around there it's almost definitely Hunquminum, which is the Island/Straits dialect of Halkemeylem; but it could possibly be Pentlatch or Comox. All three are Coast Salish languages; it's a question of which one.Skookum1 20:40, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
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