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The Sinkaietk are the Okanagan people of the lower Okanogan River, the dry valley that runs south from the Canadian border to meet the Columbia in north-central Washington. Sinkaietk is the name anthropologists settled on, most lastingly in the 1938 ethnography edited by Leslie Spier. On the reservation today, people are more likely to say Okanogan, or Syilx for the whole nation. Their northern relatives live farther up the same valley in British Columbia, and what separates them is politics, not culture. The 1846 Oregon Treaty ran a border through one people, and the two countries never agreed on a spelling: Okanogan to the south, Okanagan to the north.

Their language, Nsyilxcən, belongs to the Interior branch of the Salishan family. Linguists often call it Colville-Okanagan because the neighboring Sanpoil, Colville and Lakes peoples speak dialects of the same language. The Methow and Moses-Columbia peoples to the south speak a closely related Salish language. The Sahaptin languages farther south, such as Yakama, come from a different family altogether. Few fluent elders remain, and the language now lives on through classes and immersion programs on both sides of the border.

Life followed the seasons. Salmon runs on the Okanogan and Columbia shaped the year. Digging bitterroot in spring, picking berries in summer and hunting deer in autumn filled in the rest. People spent the winter in partly underground pit houses or in lodges covered with mats. Young people went alone into the hills to seek a guardian spirit, and the power they gained might not show itself until years later, at the winter dances. Syilx tradition tells of four food chiefs, Black Bear, Chinook Salmon, Bitterroot and Saskatoon Berry, who agreed to give themselves up so that people could live. That story still shapes how many Syilx talk about their duties to land and water.

Outsiders came early. Fur traders built Fort Okanogan at the river's mouth in 1811. Jesuit missionaries followed, and Catholicism took hold alongside older beliefs. In 1872 much of the land east of the river became part of the Colville Reservation, whose western edge is the Okanogan River itself. Sinkaietk descendants are counted today among the twelve bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Dams built in the twentieth century cut off the Columbia's upper salmon runs, and the tribes have spent the decades since working to bring fish back to the Okanogan.