Spokane (tribe)

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Spokane flag

The Spokane (or Spokan) are a Native American people in the northeastern portion of the U.S. state of Washington. The Spokane Indian Reservation is located in eastern Washington, almost entirely in extreme southern Stevens County, but includes two very small parcels of land (totaling 1.52 acres) and part of the Spokane River in northeastern Lincoln County. The city of Spokane, Washington takes its name, which literally means "children of the sun" from them. Their language belongs to the Interior branch of the Salishan family. According to Lewis and Clark, in the early 19th century they lived in the vicinity of the Spokane River and numbered around 600. In 1990 there were over 2,000 Spokane in the United States. The 2000 census reported the resident population of the reservation at 2,004 persons, living on a land area of 615.168 km² (237.518 sq mi).

1 History
2 Notable members
3 Bibliography
4 Footnotes
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] History

The territory the Spokanes live on consists of 154,000 acres (623 km²), but now they have only ten percent of that territory, the rest is held by the government; the Spokane tribe once sprawled out over three million acres (12,000 km²) of land. The Spokane’s ancestors were the Spokan and the language of the Spokane people is classified as Salish. For thousands of years the Spokanes lived near the Spokane river, living by fishing, hunting and gathering.^{[citation needed]}

The Spokane people began to be changed by the outside world starting in the 13th century.^{[citation needed]} The Spokanes constructed permanent villages for the winter by the river for fishing and huts in the mountains for gathering. Other Indian people began to influence the Spokanes introducing them to plank houses and horses. The first white men to contact them Spokane were explorers and fur traders. A trading post known as Spokane House was constructed near the confluence of Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers around 1810. Samuel Johnson, the first missionary to visit the Spokane, arrived in 1836.^[1]

As with other tribes, the Spokanes suffered from introduced diseases (including smallpox, syphilis, influenza) and land-grabbing brought by white settlers and exacerbated by lack of legal controls to prevent injustice. By the 1860s homesteaders were driving into the west pushing off the original inhabitants, such as the Spokanes. Some consequences of the movement of the white men were the destruction of the burial grounds and ancient villages, the suppression of original Indian languages and cultures. The Spokane Indians, among many other Indians, were given English names. The Spokanes made a number of agreements with the federal governments in the late 1800’s. In 1877 the Lower Spokane relocated to the Spokane reservation which was declared a reservation in 1881. In 1887 the Upper and Middle Spokane agreed to move to the Colville Flathead Reservation.

[edit] Notable members

Chief Lot and Chief Garry were well-known nineteenth-century tribal leaders.
Charlene Teters, artist and anti-mascot activist
The author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie is of Spokane (and Coeur d'Alene) ancestry.

[edit] Bibliography

Ruby, R. H., and J. A. Brown (1970). "The Spokan Indians, Children of the Sun".
Wynecoop, D. C. (1969). "Children of the Sun: A History of the Spokane Indians".
Spokane Reservation, Washington United States Census Bureau