Sealth was born about 1786. His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish and his mother, Scholitza, was Duwamish. As a young boy in 1792, he witnessed the arrival of the first Europeans to his area: British Captain George Vancouver entered Puget Sound and traded with the Suquamish. In his short biography of Seattle in the Encyclopedia of … Continued
Sealth was born about 1786. His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish and his mother, Scholitza, was Duwamish. As a young boy in 1792, he witnessed the arrival of the first Europeans: British Captain George Vancouver entered Puget Sound and traded with the Suquamish. Among the Salish-speaking tribes of the Northwest Coast, children often seek spiritual helpers … Continued
The Columbia Plateau refers to the area between the Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Western Montana. The Sanpoil are an Interior Salish-speaking tribe whose homeland was on the north bank of the Columbia River from its confluence with the Spokane River to the Sanpoil Valley. Vision Quest … Continued
In 1881, the Squaxin of the Puget Sound area in Washington would have described John Slocum has having a bit of an inclination toward alcohol and a well-known fondness for gambling. One day he became ill and died. Upon dying, he went to heaven where he was met by angels who told him that because … Continued
Both spoken language and sign language are capable of communicating a great deal of information, but they have a limited physical range. American Indian hunting parties, for example, often needed to communicate across long distances to coordinate their hunts, and this communication needed to be quiet so as not to alert the game to the … Continued
In 1527, The Spanish soldier Pánfilio de Narváez, with a reputation for brutality and a strong desire to find gold and wealth, began his ill-fated invasion of Florida. Failing to find the mythical gold and militarily defeated by the Indians, the surviving Spanish built five boats with the intention of sailing from the panhandle of … Continued
Death Valley, located in California, is the hottest, driest, and lowest place in the United States. It is an area of sand dunes and wilderness. Non-Indian tourism into this desolate region actually began in 1926 and in 1933 President Herbert Hoover created the Death Valley National Monument by Presidential Executive Order. While some saw this … Continued
For many people in the academic world, one of the major foundations of Native American literature was laid with the publication of The Surrounded in 1936. This novel, written by D’Arcy McNickle, was not the first novel written by an Indian nor was it particularly successful at the time. The book came out in the … Continued
By 1776, some of the British colonists in North America had become somewhat irritated with the Monarchy and particularly with its limitations on the expansion of the colonies. Colonial displeasure with the British King was expressed in a document known as the Declaration of Independence in which they express the following charge against the King: … Continued
There are more than 6,000 languages in the world and only about 100 of these developed their own writing system. For most of these writing systems, we know relatively little about the individuals who actually created the writing system. The exception to this is the development of the Cherokee writing system in the nineteenth century … Continued
