Methow Erotic

The Methow are a people named for a river, and the name still fits. The Methow River gathers snowmelt off the eastern slope of the North Cascades and runs south through a long, narrow valley until it meets the Columbia at present-day Pateros, Washington. That valley, from the fishing grounds near where the two rivers meet up toward the high country, was Methow land. Families spent the winter in villages along the lower river and the Columbia. In the warm months they moved upstream to spear and net salmon, hunt deer in the foothills, and dig roots and pick berries. Their neighbors would have recognized that calendar, because the whole Plateau moved to the same rhythm.

Their speech belongs to the Interior Salish branch of the Salishan family. It is closely related to Okanagan to the north and to the Columbia-Moses speech of the Chelan, Entiat, Wenatchi and Sinkiuse to the south. Those borders were easy to cross. Marriage, trade and shared fishing sites tied the Methow to all of these peoples, and once horses reached the region in the eighteenth century those ties reached farther still.

Religious life rested on personal spirit power. Young people went alone into the hills to fast and wait for a guardian spirit, and the songs from those encounters were sung in public at winter dances. Those gatherings still take place on the Colville Reservation. First-foods ceremonies honored the season's first salmon and roots before anyone ate freely. Catholic missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century, and for many families the church and the winter dance have never been an either-or choice.

The decisive break came in the 1880s. An 1879 executive order folded the Methow Valley into the short-lived Columbia Reservation, set aside for Chief Moses and the Sinkiuse. Within a few years that reservation was dissolved under the Moses Agreement, and the valley was opened to miners and homesteaders. Most Methow moved east to the Colville Reservation, while a few families took individual allotments and stayed near their old ground.

Today the Methow are one of the twelve tribes that make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. They are enrolled as Colville members and have no separate federal recognition. Methow identity lives on in family lines, in knowledge of the valley itself, and in the river. Its spring Chinook salmon now climb the fish ladders of the Columbia's dams and are on the federal endangered species list, a hard measure of how much has changed since the valley was theirs.