Coast Salish Quotes

Reservations should not have been a permeant home. Like trailers, like campgrounds, like prisons or hospitals, they felt temporary, like some place you go between places. I realized I wasn't sure what permanence looked like, because we weren't meant to survive. My family, my tribe, my ancestors, we were something temporary to the settlers. Something that would eventually go away. Whether by disease or alcohol or poverty, our genocide was inevitable to them. I looked at the smoke pluming from the metal chimneys of the small reservation houses along the highway. But here we were, existing in our impermanent homes.

The eventual religious affiliation of Indian tribes depended not only on the success of missionaries in making first contact but on the compatibility of their social patterns with the types of Christianity from which they were able to choose. The Oblates were delighted with the response of the tractable Déné of the far northwest. Anglicans had greater success with the Tudukh, whom they found 'more lively and affectionate' although 'more superstitious' than the Déné. In British Columbia the Roman Catholics were able to plant missions among the interior Salish, who liked their ceremonies and readily accepted their disciplined approach to community life. From the warlike Kwakiutls, Haidas and Tsimshians of the coast they met only rebuffs, but it was among these tribes that the more emotional Methodists were able to establish themselves.

How is it I have never dated / someone who is also Coast Salish / or at least Indigenous / instead it's Disney's Pocahontas / her animated dad with his hands up / these white men are dangerous / and I come running

Slapping someone in real life is not like slapping someone in the movies. There is no victory or empowerment or dramatic romantic tension in it. A slap in real life just leaves your fingers burning and the lingering truth that something is irreversibly wrong.

The salmon is a symbol of prosperity and determination to the Coast Salish tribes, the band of tribes in the Pacific Northwest of which the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is a part. She defies nature, swimming upstream to provide for the people of the land. Yet she must sacrifice herself to give that abundance to others. Her determination comes at a deep personal cost.