Plateau Indian

Language

The peoples of the Plateau belong mainly to four linguistic families: Salishan, Sahaptin, Kutenai, and Modoc and Klamath. The majority of Plateau groups speak Salishan and Sahaptin languages.

The tribes that speak Salishan languages may be conveniently divided into Northern Plateau and Interior Salish; there are also Coast Salish among the Northwest Coast Indians. The Northern Plateau Salish include the Shuswap, Lillooet, and Ntlakapamux (Thompson) tribes. The Interior Salish live mostly in the Upper Columbia area and include the Okanagan, Sinkaietk, Lake, Wenatchee, Sanpoil, Nespelim, Spokan, Kalispel, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alene, and Flathead peoples. Some early works incorrectly denote all Salishan groups as “Flathead.”

Speakers of Sahaptin languages may be subdivided into three main groups: the Nez Percé, the Cayuse and Molala, and the Central Sahaptin, comprising the Yakama (Yakima), Walla Walla, Tenino, Umatilla, and others (see also Sahaptin).

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The Kutenai and the Modoc and Klamath language families include the Kutenai and the Modoc and Klamath peoples.

Trade and interaction

Its geographic location in the midst of four other culture areas—the Northwest Coast, the Plains, the Great Basin, and California—made the Plateau a crossroads of cultures. An expansive trade network enabled the exchange of goods, ideas, and even people, as slavery was common in the region. The Northwest Coast cultures contributed innovations such as mat-covered houses and pit houses, the carving of animal motifs in wood and bone, and cremation and scaffold burials. Part of this diffusion undoubtedly occurred through trade-based interactions, while other ideas arrived with the Wishram, a Chinook group that migrated from the coast into the Cascade Mountains.

During the 18th century, influences from the south and east grew in importance. The Great Basin’s Shoshone had acquired horses by this time and furnished their closest neighbours on the Plains and the Plateau with the new animals. The Plateau tribes placed such a high value on horses that European and Euro-American traders testified that the Nez Percé, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Flathead had more horses than the tribes of the northern Plains from the early 19th century onward.

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the peoples of the Middle Columbia area adopted several kinds of material culture from the Plains. Sahaptin women, for example, made and wore Plains-inspired beaded dresses, men began to wear feathered headdresses and other war regalia, and tepees became popular. Similar innovations occurred on the eastern periphery of the Plateau, especially among the Flathead and the Kutenai. The northwestern Salishan peoples, however, rejected these changes in favour of maintaining Plateau traditions. The military ethos common among the Plains peoples was not found uniformly among residents of the Plateau. The Ntlakapamux, Shuswap, Sahaptin, and Klamath did make occasional war raids, dressed in elk hide or wooden slat armour and armed with bows and clubs. Other groups chose to avoid conflict, however; the Flathead in particular were well regarded by visitors for their courtesy, hospitality, honesty, and courage.

Settlement patterns and housing

Traditionally, the Plateau peoples resided in permanent villages during the winter, with the remainder of the year divided between those villages and a variety of semipermanent camps conveniently situated for hunting and gathering. As soon as horses were adopted, some groups became more nomadic, using mobile camps as they traversed the Rocky Mountains in order to hunt buffalo on the Plains.

A village was home to between a few hundred and a thousand people, although the community could house more than that during major events. Villages were generally located on waterways, often at rapids or narrows where fish were abundant during the winter season. Communities owned the fishing sites and surrounding area in common. Each village also had an upland for hunting; in contradistinction to the fishing localities, upland territories were mostly open for people from other villages as well.

Village houses were of two main types, the semisubterranean pit house and the mat-covered surface house. Pit houses were usually circular and typically had a pit 3–6 feet (1–2 metres) deep and a diameter of 25–40 feet (7.5–12 metres), with an interior space of approximately 500–1,260 square feet (45–115 square metres). The roof was usually conical and was supported by a framework of wooden posts, beams, and stringers—long saplings that had been stripped of bark and were used to bridge the area between the beams or from the beams to the ground. The smoke hole in the top was also the entrance to the house; the interior was reached by climbing onto the roof, through the smoke hole, and down a ladder or notched log.

Pit houses were common throughout the Plateau region at one time, but they were eventually supplanted in the southern Plateau by the mat-covered surface house. These homes used a conical or A-frame design that was formed by leaning together stringers or timbers and covering them with mats made of tule, a type of reed. As the availability of Euro-American goods increased, Plateau peoples often covered surface houses with canvas instead of reed mats, which were time-consuming to produce.

Conical houses had one hearth in the centre of the floor and generally sheltered one nuclear or three-generation family. These tepeelike, lightly-built structures were used in summer when families were engaged in nomadic foraging activities; they averaged perhaps 15 to 30 feet (4.5 to 9 metres) in diameter, with an interior space of approximately 175–700 square feet (16–65 square metres). In contrast, A-frame houses were used as communal winter residences, so they were very large, heavily built, and thoroughly insulated. Early visitors to the Plateau report houses as much as 150 feet (45 metres) long. More typical were houses between 25 and 60 feet (7.5 and 18 metres) long and perhaps 12 to 15 feet (3.5 to 4.5 metres) wide, for an interior of approximately 300–900 square feet (28–85 square metres). Hearths were placed at intervals down the central aisle and were usually shared by two nuclear families, one on each side of the aisle.

Housing at foraging camps could take a variety of forms, ranging from small conical mat lodges to simple windbreaks. Groups that traveled to the Plains to hunt bison typically used the tepee during those expeditions; as they became increasingly nomadic, many of these groups adopted the tepee as a full-time dwelling.