Talk:Coast Salish languages

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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)

Wow, that sentence is increasible offencive. OldManRivers 05:11, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
You're right, that was incredibly offensive. The Nuxalk, as a people, are of course experts on their language, so I'm not sure exactly why I would have written that. As Bill Poser said, however, the Nuxalk are not experts on all Coast Salish languages, much less languages in general. Being Nuxalk does not make you an expert on the Nuxalk language, nor does being a Nuxalk speaker make you an expert on the language any more than my speaking English makes me an expert on the English language. My point, if you read the whole thread, was that the Nuxalk should be respected as the experts on their culture, contrary to what was being said. - TheMightyQuill 08:24, 8 March 2007 (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

Image:Split-arrows.svg
  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 ==
Image:Splitsection.svg
 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 ==
Image:Splitsection.svg
 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 Britsh Columbia
Category:Indigenous peoples in the United States
Category:Native American culture
Category:Native American architecture [etc.]
Other "cultures" articles do not exist with that in the title; the format is the "xxx people" title structure, which is meant to include ethnology as well as history and culture etc; so again (from below I think), Coast Salish peoples would seem to be the logical way to go vs Coast Salish languages. BTW "Nation" in Canada is a very loaded word, even without the native context/issues ;-), and "we" have also used it in article titles to denote band governments aka colonialist-derived governmental structures (most Indian Bands also go by, say Tlaz'ten First Nation or Squamish Nation, which is why that convention has been used here, even though "nation" and "First Nation" are also used simultaneously or alternately, to mean the people/culture, and not the band governments. I'll find the recent talkpage discussions that best sums this up and try and come back with a link, unless OldManRivers or MightyQuill can come up with it (where we were going over this recently...).Skookum1 09:12, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Proposed:

Category:Coast Salish tribes (or some appropriate description).
Category:Coast Salish peoples, following the format "xxx people" which is used for Canadian and some American native-article pages; the language title would be "Coast Salish languages", although the category Category:Coast Salish already exists as a subcat of Category:Salishan languages which is of course in the languages cat hierarchy, not the ethno/"national" one(s); similarly the parent article is Salishan languages.Skookum1 09:12, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
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.
Gotta cut in right here- please stop using American terminology as if it sounded OK in Canada; it dopesn't ("tribes"); and Salish Sea is a noxious po-mo neologism that has no standing outside of a narrow group of writers and publishers/promoters of the term; it's the Georgia-Puget Basin or whatever; "Salish Sea" as a term, never mind its tawdry sound, also excludes the Laich-kwil-tach and Chemakum, who are on the Georgia Strait and Strait of Juan de Fuca, respectively (the Chemakum became extinct in the 1860s, thanks to the Suguamish...). And also bear in mind that "Salish" was originally the name of a specific Salishan people in Montana, and is an "alien" term to this region. Unless our friend OldManRivers (who's Skwxwu7mesh) can come up with a word in his language, that's identical to words in all the other languages, for the inland sea from Olympia to Campbell River, there's no "aboriginal name" for this expanse of coast, water and islands, even though that's the intent of the Salish Sea neologism. Please stop using it; it's ugly, and annoying.Skookum1 08:45, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

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)

It seems a bit pedantic IMHO. People read and know Coast Salish through academia, and otherwise. All this Languages of the Coast Salish, Cultures of the Coast Salish, Coast Salish Cultures etc. really lose sight of what is needed here. The article is definitely one sided and slanted to American history, so some added info to make it universal. We didn't cross the boarders, the boarders crossed us. Obviously there is no Coast Salish language, so I suggest Languages of the Coast Salish, and keep this page as the main article on everything else related Coast Salish, culture, history, peoples. Maybe even another page List of Coast Salish Nations. I will state this article is horribly Anglo-American POV, with a white "neutral" bias. It's really horrible. OldManRivers 05:07, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Please don't equate "Anglo-American" with "American"; it's like that "Euro-American" neologism which is, to me, highly derogatory as well as inaccurate. "Anglo-American" tends to refer to US-UK relations/culture but in this case the "king george" POV is notably missing, as on so many cross-border pages (see items in Category:Oregon Country, esp. their talkpages...). I tried to insert some north-of-the-border accuracy here, but I wasn't qualified enough to input what I felt was needed; and part of what I felt was needed was actual First Nations/Native American input/content, which has come along in the form of you (and certain others stateside). Wikispace is virgin territory; you can create and "colonize" what you want, "self-publish" in other words, without white guys (or gals) getting in the way with their degrees and ideologies etc. Note, in terms of the POV-ness of the American view, Go Dot's use of "tribes", which is (to me) an uncomfortable term and outmoded/out-of-date in BC (except as "tribal").
Developing individual articles could be facilitated by referring to a common article for common characteristics, rather than having duplicate boilerplate text.
But this common article applies beyond the Coast Salish/Interior Salish peoples; there's a commonality of experience spanning all peoples in the region; or rather there are two sets of experiences, post-1846, and the Americans - including Native Americans - tend to assume the same went on up here as down there (Yakima War, Cayuse War, Rogue River Wars etc). I ran into this same kind of thing during my involvement with the online Chinook Jargon revival (still underway, but without yours truly), where Native American interpretations of the language's history and lexicon were placed ahead of the First Nations/non-First Nations experience it north of the border; as if history was contiguous on either side of the border, instead of divided and disrupted. Every time I tried to put forward a differing view I was labelled either unqualified (not being an academic on the one hand, and not being native on the other - "you didn't acquire indigenous knowledge indigenously", as was hurled against me without knowing anything about my background or who I might ahve known or learned from) or racist (because I challenged their own racist and quasi-racist views....). Whatever, this is a friendly post not a critical one; bear in mind that people like Go Dot, despite what is to you their mistaken perspective, know what they know - right or wrong - because they're interested and want to know, and are sympathetic rather than parochial themselves; they're just working with the sources they have access to, which are invariably parochial (often literally, considering the Catholic Encyclopedia and the role of the Oblates and other missionaries in regional history).Skookum1 08:37, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

With Skookum1 gone now, it leaves me here to check on things. My suggestion is Coast Salish become the cultural page for all nations of the Coast Salish group. On the top page For details of the Coast Salish languages, see Coast Salish languages. e on the top page. The media, as well as books, and many other sources refer to the Coast Salish as a cultural group because the Coast Salish do have many similarities. So my suggestions stands: Coast Salish for cultrual page. Coast Salish languages for language group. OldManRivers 03:00, 30 April 2007 (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)

[edit] Re History section

Just noticed its expansion. Seems pretty clear that a completely separate chronicle/timeline for BC is necessary, and this section should be titled clearly that it's a U.S. events timeline; the only common timeline would be up until 1846. I almost added the "globalize" template here because of the increasing USAcentricity of this page; there should be a "CanCon.v.US" template or something, like the globalize tag but dealing with non-US North American issues, as various cross-border articles like this have problematic content/contexts (e.g. Oregon boundary dispute). I'd imagine the same applies with Mexico. Also, just checking before making the edit as it could be, like the Nuxalk/Bella Coola, that the Nehalem/Tillamook aren't Coast Salish even though they're on the coast, but they're definitely Salish and they're in Oregon, which isn't mentioned in the intro.Skookum1 19:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Oleman House <=> Old Man House

Noticed this. Actually, although I accept the Suquamish translation and usage, the real sense of oleman house in Chinook Jargon means "old building", even "run-down room" - oleman did not just mean "old man", it mean anything old and/or worn-out.Skookum1 21:20, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anglo-American Bias

There exists no historical information prior to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in the 1820s, and none that was very systematically gathered until the 1860s, but for casual observations logged by members of the Vancouver expedition of 1792, published 1798. Summer camps were seen, but probably not winter villages. Names of natives or native leaders were not recorded. John Work of the HBC made the earliest identification of tribes (1824).


If anyone was wondering, the Indigenous people of this land are not dead. We never just disappeared, or conquered and simply vanish. And along with that parochialism and patriarchism, we have our own histories. No history prior to this date? That's a big load of crap. Our histories are some of the oldest around. Do your people have histories that have existed for thousands of years? Do your people have histories talking about animals that are extinct? Yeah, we've existed from time immemorial. But to our people, the "other" people of this land, we have our mythology, and superstitions. Except the Bible isn't regarded as "mythological legends". People still hold these histories dear, and people do believe in this histories. But with the bible, they are regarded as "Biblical origin stories." Yeah, I understand. Wikiepdia has it's "neutral" bias, which is another way of saying, "Oh yes, the only experts are the white professors who have "neutral bias", but this is a far stretch for it. grrrrr, I'm just so pissed off about this ignorance. OldManRivers 05:26, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Do your people have histories that have existed for thousands of years?
Um, yes, actually. It's not like we don't. It's also worth reminding you, friendly-wise, that Europeans were subjected to the atrocities and cultural genocide of the Conversion, which ended in Northern Europe only half-a-dozen centuries before the same was perpetrated here. The Irish in particular have preserved a lot of their ancient oral tradition, and also the Scandinavians and certain others - especially, of course, the Greeks (well, it was preserved for them, actually, as they were being too devout to want to do so themselves, for the most part). "Pagan" traditions (that's a derisive term to start with, as is also "heathen") are also considered "mythology" and "superstition"; and it's not like a lot of British Columbians buy the evangelical line, or even the Catholic one, about "Biblical origin stories"; this place on the whole of the continent has been, until recently, the least affective of the various Christan prejudices and conceits, and a lot of us here consider Christianity, especially in its organized-religion form, to be "superstition" and "mythology" despite its claims to historical validity (Islam makes the same claim as to historical validity; Shinto and Taoism and Hinduism dno't bother, but they're not "organized", i.e. institutionalized religions with a tax/tithe base to protect....er, "souls to save", like pennies one presumes).
Do your people have histories talking about animals that are extinct?
Once again, um, yes, we do. Please don't dismiss European/British "mythological" traditions if you aren't familiar with them; whether it's dragons, trolls (giant humans), the kraken (which might exist, granted), the Norwegian Sea Serpent or, in fact, something as simple as the European lion (which even used to be present in England and Scandinavia....), yes, we do have histories that talk about animals that are extinct and/or extraordinarly marvellous. We've also accreted such animals from other peoples' "mythologies", e.g. the roc, which is part of folklore in the West since the popularizaton of the Thousand and One Nights. Tell ya what, you drop your animosity towards my people's traditions and I'll be glad to share some of them with you, or point you in the right direction for resources to find out how misguided your sentiments really are. For starters, the Elder Edda and the Book of the Dun Cow (Taigne Bo Culaigne in Erse - "tain boe coolie" it's pronounced - if there's an article on it) should get you started...Just because the white people who disenfranchised you all wore white collars and went to church doesn't mean we're all like that, or were always like that either....Skookum1 08:54, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Stand corrected. OldManRivers 21:36, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

As for the rest of your argument, I'm in complete sympathy, and I'd venture that the oral traditions as interpreted by one of the Delgamuukw decisions, i.e. that such oral traditions are as factual and legitimate as the English countryside traditions (many inherited from pagan times) that underlay Common Law, that First Nations oral law/literature/constitutionality eventually has to be incorporated into Canadian Common Law in the same way English countryside traditions formed the body of English law. What I'm getting at is that your people's "oral accounts" if you'd care to share them publicly here are citable not by pointing at an academic paper (and I think most people with alphabet soup after their name are the least trustworthy of all sources, especially when they field their own opinions/interpretations as if they were fact) but by simply citing your own people's publications, even if they're only on file at your own offices/libraries. They're legitimate sources, so use them.

One comment about the maze of garbage overleaf - parts of it are from the Catholic Encyclopedia, with all its biases and bad ethnology, but it still gets cited (see Talk:Wakash Indians as if it were reliable; same as the ethnologists and linguists who are decades out of date. So if your people have more recent publications based on your own materials, without academic filtering, by all means use them. It's one of my contentions that Wikipedia provides an outlet for information and views that academia and media either ignore or are incapable of honestly or adequately presenting, i.e. without their own blinkers on.....

More thoughts later; I need some food.Skookum1 08:09, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Of course, oldmanrivers, you are correct. Firstly, that sort of slanted text should be removed/rewritten, but that won't solve the problem. The issue is much larger that Coast Salish. As you stated, Wikipedia has an in-built bias towards the written word. Some academics, who Skookum seems to have written off entirely, are intelligent enough to value oral histories at least equally to written histories, but wikipedia's guidelines don't reflect this increasing openness to "alternate" sources. I'm not going to revert edits made to this page which reference oral histories, but others will, and in arbitration, they would probably win, even if they are posting the kind of crap you quoted above. I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Relying on the few oral histories which have been recorded and published (a practice not without its own critics) is hardly enough to get an NPOV article. - TheMightyQuill 08:39, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I knew that when I did this post, but, there wasn't anything anywhere else so I had to post something. OldManRivers 21:36, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, some of the oral tradition is in print, whether recently or historically/ethnographically; I'm thinking of Lillooet Stories which can be found ref'd on the St'at'imc pages, or even Barbeau's amazing compendium of the stories that go with each totem pole/house front in his Totem Poles (which I also used to own); such written/oral materials do exist in publication; those can be cited. I'm unsure about any unpublished ones, i.e. things in the Skwxwu7mesh library or internal curriculum/files not accessible/checkable by the general public. Annie York's writings on Nlaka'pamux ethnobotany come to mind, also, and there's lots more. BTW OldManRivers, if you haven't read Chiwid from Transmontanus Books, make sure you do; eyewitness account of Chiwid's/Lillie Skinner's strange and somehow inspiring life, and chock-full of observations of life in the Chilcotin before pavement came....Skookum1 21:54, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Change of name for this article

As this article currently reads, it doesn't make much sense. Clearly a major part of it is on the subject "Coast Salish Languages," however, it also covers the culture and history of the Coast Salish peoples. It's probably not a bad idea to have such an article, as long as it continues to be clear that the Coast Salish comprise many First Nations. However, the content doesn't match its current title. I propose that we move the content to a new article entitled "Coast Salish" and create a redirect for "Coast Salish languages." This would be the reverse of what we have now, but it seems to fit better with the current content of the article. Comments? Sunray 03:14, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

This has been suggested before on a few occasions. No one voiced any opposition, but just some other idea's. I say, let's do it. It is very unclear for what the title suggests. I agree with the proposed move. OldManRivers 04:34, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
See here. OldManRivers 04:36, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
O.K., so basic agreement. I like your suggestion for the names of the two articles and will proceed with that. Sunray 18:47, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
I've made the move to two articles. They will need further adjustments, but see what you think, so far. Sunray 19:55, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the move. I've added the, well I don't know what to call it, at the top to make things a little easier to understand. If this is to complicated it might have to go to a disambig page, but I think this will be fine. I'll see how I can work it out so they become a bit more clearer on the different and do some adjustments. Thanks again for the move. OldManRivers 20:48, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Excellent work, guys. That split was long overdue. - TheMightyQuill 21:57, 18 June 2007 (UTC)