Chehalis Erotic

The Chehalis are the Salish people of the Chehalis River, which drains a wide stretch of southwestern Washington before emptying into Grays Harbor on the Pacific. Their name comes from a Lower Chehalis word usually translated as sand. It first named a village near the mouth of the harbor. Settlers later gave it to the river, to a town and, until 1915, to a county. They are not the Sts'ailes of British Columbia, a separate Salish people who were long listed in English as the Chehalis band and so ended up with the same English name.

There have always been two Chehalis peoples. The Lower Chehalis lived on salt water around Grays Harbor and the north shore of Willapa Bay, living off clam beds, fish runs and waterfowl. The Upper Chehalis, sometimes called Kwaiailk, lived inland along the river and the streams that feed it. They built weirs to catch salmon, hunted elk and dug camas on the open prairies. Both spoke languages from the Tsamosan branch of the Salishan family. Lower Chehalis is close to Quinault, spoken on the coast to the north, and Upper Chehalis is close to Cowlitz, spoken to the south. Chinook Jargon, the regional trade language, let people trade across all of those language lines. Neither Chehalis language is still spoken at home, but linguists recorded Upper Chehalis carefully in the twentieth century, and that record is the basis for efforts to teach it again.

The turning point in their modern history came in 1855. Territorial governor Isaac Stevens called the peoples of the lower river and the coast to a treaty council and proposed moving them all onto one reservation in Quinault country. The Chehalis would not leave their river, and the council broke up with no treaty signed. They got a reservation anyway in 1864, where the Black River meets the Chehalis near Oakville, though much of that land was later opened to homesteaders. Their descendants make up the core of the federally recognized Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation. Other Lower Chehalis families are enrolled with the Shoalwater Bay and Quinault tribes.

Religious life here is layered. The older practice centered on personal spirit power, sought in youth and shown in winter dances. Later the Indian Shaker Church, a Christian movement founded among neighboring Salish in the early 1880s, gained followers here, alongside mainstream churches. In the 1920s the anthropologist Thelma Adamson wrote down stories of Bluejay, Moon and other beings of the mythic age from Upper Chehalis storytellers. Today the tribe runs the Lucky Eagle Casino and is a partner in the Great Wolf Lodge at Grand Mound, businesses built in the same valley their ancestors refused to leave.