Cowlitz Erotic

The Cowlitz take their name from a river, and the river is what holds a two-part story together. It rises on the glaciers of Mount Rainier and runs south through southwestern Washington to meet the Columbia at Longview and Kelso. Two peoples lived along it, and outsiders called both of them Cowlitz. Downstream were the Lower Cowlitz, or Cowlitz proper, who spoke a Salishan language closely related to Chehalis and Quinault. Upstream, in the high country between Rainier and Mount Adams, lived the Taitnapam, or Upper Cowlitz. They spoke a dialect of Sahaptin and looked east across the Cascades to Klickitat and Yakama relatives. Their languages came from unrelated families, but the two peoples shared one valley and generations of marriage and trade.

Lower Cowlitz life followed the salmon runs. Elk, camas and berries filled out the year, families wintered in villages of cedar plank houses, and canoes worked the river. The Taitnapam moved more with the seasons, climbing to mountain meadows for huckleberries and crossing the passes to trade. In the 1830s epidemics tore through the lower Columbia country and hit both peoples hard. Then the river became a thoroughfare. The Hudson's Bay Company ran a farm on Cowlitz Prairie, a Catholic mission opened there in 1838, and the valley became part of the overland route between the Columbia and Puget Sound. Many Cowlitz women married French-Canadian company men, and the Catholic and Métis threads from that era still run through many families.

The defining modern fact is land, or the lack of it. At the 1855 Chehalis River treaty council, Cowlitz leaders refused to sign an agreement that gave them no reservation of their own and would have moved them to the coast. That refusal left them landless for about 160 years. Some families took allotments on the Quinault Reservation, others enrolled with the Chehalis, and many Taitnapam became part of the Yakama Nation. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe kept pressing its case. It won federal acknowledgment in 2000, and in 2015 land near La Center was finally taken into trust as its reservation.

In the old religion, young people went out alone to seek spirit power, and that belief did not simply disappear once Catholicism arrived. Upriver, Taitnapam religious life drew on the same Plateau world as the Yakama and Klickitat. Cowlitz Salish lost its last fluent speakers in the twentieth century. A dictionary built from work with those last speakers gives today's learners a solid place to start.