Final Research Paper: The Origin of the

Sahaptian-Speaking Peoples

Chris Barts

December 6, 2014

A lot about the history of a people can be determined by the language

that people uses. How long they’ve lived in a given region can be deter-

mined by how well they know the plants and animals of the location, which

is reflected in how sophisticated their vocabulary on the subject is. Their

relationship to other groups can be determined by how similar their respec-

tive languages are; this in particular can be used to trace lineages going back

thousands of years or longer. For the people we’re studying, multiple lines

of evidence, both linguistic and non-linguistic, converge on one conclusion:

The Sahaptian-speaking peoples entered the Northern Plateau region from

what is now the Oregon coast in a slow process beginning approximately

4900 BCE and ending approximately 1000 CE.

In order to understand this, Sahaptin itself must be placed in a broader

linguistic context. In this case, it is well-settled that Sahaptian is a Penutian

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language, specifically in the Plateau Penutian sub-branch, and is therefore

related to languages in California and Oregon. This was established using

both binary and multilateral comparison; that is, by comparing both pairs of

languages and multiple languages, all the while looking for cognates, words

that are similar and mean similar things and weren’t borrowed from some

other language, in an attempt to build self-consistent theories about how

sounds changed in the various languages as they all diverged from some

common ancestor tongue. If such theories can be created in a plausible

fashion, that is strong evidence that the languages under consideration did

indeed diverge from a single ancestor and are, therefore, related to each other.

(DeLancey & Golla, 1997)

Such linguistic comparisons can also determine how closely related sibling

languages are to each other, and when speakers of those languages entered

a given region. For the languages we’re considering, the Plateau Penutian

tongues, cognates indicate the languages are divided into a Western and an

Eastern subgroup. The Western subgroup includes Lillooet, Thompson, and

Shuswap; the Eastern includes Kalispell, Coeur d’Alene, and Wenatchee-

Columbia, with Okanagon serving as a link between the two subgroups but

being more properly placed in the Eastern. The fact both these subgroups

properly belong to a single larger group, however, indicates that they all

diverged from a single common ancestor, a proto-Plateau Penutian, which

then split into Eastern and Western branches, which then split and re-split

until eventually creating the languages we know from post-contact history.

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(Elmendorf, 1965)

While this kind of analysis provides a sequence of events, it doesn’t pro-

vide a timeframe. This is inherently even more speculative than the sequenc-

ing, but it can be done with some degree of certainty using glottochronology.

This was done in this case, and it estimates that the initial proto-Plateau

Penutian split from its ancestor approximately between 4900–4000 BCE, then

remained a unified language until approximately 2500 BCE, at which point it

diverged into the Eastern and Western ancestral languages alluded to above.

Those languages began to split during increased migration in a generally

southern and eastern direction, and may have proceeded quite rapidly after

1000 BCE. The final dialect separation, of Kalispell from Okanagon and,

later, Shuswap from Thompson, probably happened after the beginning of

the Common Era, and dialect separation and spread into Western Montana,

involving the Spokane-Kalispell-Flathead dialect group, likely happened in

the last thousand years. This correlates with an important environmental

change: At around approximately 1000 BCE, a Medithermal climate came

to the region, which brought rain and forests to the southern and eastern

portions of the Northern Plateau; the people spread into the region along

with the newer, more welcoming climate. (Elmendorf, 1965)

That rather speculative chain of events isn’t the only reason we have to

believe that Sahaptian speakers spread into the region from the coast. In

fact, it isn’t even the only linguistic reason. People adapt their language to

the world they find themselves in, and create words to describe the things

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they value and rely on to survive. These words are then modified by a natural

process of linguistic change, which linguists can study and to some extent

reverse, creating lists of reconstructed words which are theorized to have

appeared in the ancestral language of the known languages they studied.

Reconstructing words related to plants and animals gives some insight into

where the speakers of the ancestral language lived. In this case, over 140 plant

and animal names have been reconstructed, and, of those, approximately two

dozen represent species found only on the coast, indicating a coastal origin

for the original ancestral language. This includes words for multiple kinds

of mollusc, even though only one kind is found in the interior, and, of the

fourteen words for berry species that can be reconstructed, four are found

only on the coast. (Kinkade, 1990)

There is also other evidence that the Sahaptin speakers did not enter this

region recently. The various peoples of the Northern Plateau have a broad

and deep knowledge of how to survive in this region. They know how to

construct fish weirs, which are large and complex structures finely adapted

to catching salmon moving upstream to their spawning grounds. They know

not only many plants which are good to eat, they know many plants which

are dangerous to eat, and can make fine distinctions between plants which

look very similar to the untrained eye, such as between the staple food x. aws

and the poisonous hati. They also have a rich stock of geographic terms,

including names for dozens of ephemeral features at the Celilo Falls fishery,

which can only be known through a long exposure to the region. They also

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know that certain foods must be prepared in special ways, such as the skulkul

root, which is so oily it must be baked underground to dry, whereas the very

similar lamus root can be dried just by stringing it up on a cord of Indian

hemp. They used the root of another plant, caluks, to anesthetize fish to

make them easier to catch (Hunn, 1990)

This ecological knowledge is reflected in the vocabulary modern Sahap-

tin have for plants and animals they traditionally used. For example, they

have distinct words for jack Chinook and jack blueback salmon, which spawn

earlier than their kin even though they’re the same species, and they have

different words for large-scale and bridge-lip suckers. They also have two

different words for two different varieties of mule deer, yaamash for the

Rocky Mountain mule deer and tl’alk for the black-tailed deer of the Cascade

Mountains, in addition to words for white-tailed deer, mountain goat, and

pronghorn antelope; there are few places in the world where all these animals

occur in close proximity, and this region is one of them, providing evidence

they have a very long history in this region in specific. Similarly, they have

words for rattlesnake (waxpush), burrowing owl (papu), yellow-bellied mar-

mot (chikchıknu), Western gray squirrel (qanqan), and tick (ach’pl), all of

which are apparently quite old and all of which point to a long existence

in a semi-arid Plateau, as these species are much less common west of the

Cascades and north of the Canadian border. They even have a word for

the California condor (pachanahu), the historic range of which just touched

the Columbia Gorge on its northern edge. However, their words for bison,

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musmustsin or tsuulim, are loans from Cree and Flathead respectively, in-

dicating they had much less knowledge of animal life north or east of the

Inner Plateau region. This lack of knowledge indicates a long habitation in

a region without bison, as they are a staple food for groups in regions with

bison, and the fact bison were endemic to regions close by indicates that they

have lived a long time in the Northern Plateau in specific. (Hunn, 2000)

There’s even more evidence to gain from words Sahaptin lacks, as well

as words it has. For example, Sahaptin traditionally had no word for wa-

pato, a plant which is a staple food of Indians living west of the Cascades

on the Columbia, indicating they didn’t live in the region where it grew.

Additionally, yellow pond-lily, the plant known as wokas to the Klamath

of south-central Oregon, is in Sahaptin called kalamat, a corruption of the

word ‘Klamath’, indicating it wasn’t known to the Sahaptian-speakers ex-

cept through the Klamath peoples. Finally, the Sahaptin word for ‘maize’, a

staple crop of many Indian peoples outside the Northern Plateau region, is

sit’xws-waakul, which means “resembles hyacinth brodiaea”; hyacinth brodi-

aea is a favorite root food common in the Pacific Northwest. This is strong

evidence that Sahaptin speakers didn’t know about maize until recently, and,

indeed, maize is not native to this region. (Hunn, 2000)

There is still more linguistic evidence that Sahaptian speakers have been

here thousands of years. There is a mountain in the Rattlesnake Range, the

eastern prominence which is visible at least fifty miles in every direction,

which has no name in English but in Sahaptin is called Lalıık. ‘Lalıık ’ means

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“standing above the water”, which alludes to a time when the mountain

was an island due to a massive flood. This flood may have been one of the

late-Pleistocene Bretz floods, which periodically scoured the Columbia basin

between 13,000 and 18,000 years ago. Further evidence in favor of this is

the fact Gable Mountain, which sits opposite the White Bluffs on the beach

above a bend in the Columbia River, is in Sahaptin known as ‘nukshay ’,

which means “river otter”. This mountain would indeed have been seen as

swimming during a Bretz flood. (Hunn, 2000)

Finally, there is genetic evidence that a Coastal/Subarctic population

invaded the Columbia Plateau in prehistoric times. Specifically, certain

mtDNA haplotypes of haplogroups B, C, D, and X are observed to be shared

between Coastal and Columbia Plateau populations. Haplotype and hap-

logroup A distributions in specific among Northwest populations indicate

that Coastal/Subarctic populations intruded into the region before 1,500

years ago. (Malhi et al., 2004)

In conclusion, there is strong evidence from multiple sources that Sahaptian-

speaking peoples entered the Northern Plateau from the Oregon coast be-

ginning approximately 4900 BCE and spread slowly throughout the region,

developing new languages as they migrated west to east and ending up in

Montana approximately 1000 years ago. They have thus been in the region

for many thousands of years, learning the plant life, animal life, geography,

and all of the survival skills needed to live in this region, as evidenced by

both their strong ecological knowledge and their vast vocabulary which makes

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subtle distinctions between species and between smaller populations within

species. Conversely, their language lacks, or only has through loanwords,

terms for plants and animals not historically endemic to this region, indicat-

ing that they lived here in specific for the majority of their separate existence

as a cultural and linguistic group, as opposed to having had a larger range.

References

DeLancey, S., & Golla, V. (1997, January). The Penutian Hypothesis: Ret-

rospect and Prospect. International Journal of American Linguistics ,

63 (1), 171–202.

Elmendorf, W. W. (1965, Spring). Linguistic and Geographic Relations in

the Northern Plateau Area. Southwestern Journal Of Anthropology ,

21 (1), 63–78.

Hunn, E. S. (1990). Ecology. In Nch’i-Wana, “The Big River”: Mid-

Columbia Indians and Their Land (chap. 4). Seattle: University of

Washington Press.

Hunn, E. S. (2000). Review of Linguistic Information. In Kennewick Man

(chap. 4). Washington, D.C.: National Park Service Archaeology Pro-

gram.

Kinkade, M. D. (1990). Prehistory of Salishan Sanguages. In Papers for the

25th international conference on salish and neighboring languages (pp.

197–208). Vancouver: University of British Columbia.

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Malhi, R. S., Breece, K. E., Shook, B. A. S., Kaestle, F. A., Chatters, J. C.,

Hackenberger, S., et al. (2004). Patterns of mtDNA Diversity in North-

western North America. Human Biology , 76 (1), 33–54. Available from

http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hub.2004.0023

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