Southern Coast Salish

expand_more Description

The Southern Coast Salish comprise a number of Lushootseed and Tuwaduq (Twana) speaking peoples whose pre-reservation homeland extended along the shores and inland river basins of Puget Sound and the Hood Canal of Washington state. Their traditional economy relied on fishing, gathering, and hunting. Society was organized according to family, household and village, with class distinctions of upper, freeman and slave; chiefdoms likely arose in late pre-reservation times as a means of resistance. Following the signing of an 1855 treaty with the United States, Southern Coast Salish peoples ceded much of their land to white settlers, but the government largely reneged on its promises of adequate access to traditional resources, farmland, and services on the reservations. In addition, introduced diseases, Christian missions, continued settler incursions, and global economic pressures served to drive the cultures of many groups underground or to extinction.

Identifier

Region

• North America

Subregion

• Northwest Coast and California

Subsistence Type

• hunter-gatherers

Samples

• EA
• SCCS

Countries

• United States