Spokane Erotic

The Spokane take their name from the river, and the river took its shape from a set of falls in the middle of what is now Washington's second largest city. Before the mills and the streetlights, those falls were a fishery: a place where chinook stacked up in the narrows every summer and where families from up and down the Plateau came to trade, argue, marry and eat. Say the name the way they do, with the last syllable flat: spo-KAN. The tribe was historically three bands, Upper, Middle and Lower, spread along the Spokane and the Little Spokane, each with its own fishing stations and its own claim on the surrounding camas and bitterroot grounds. Their language, Npoqínišcn, belongs to the Southern Interior branch of Salishan and sits so close to Kalispel and Montana Salish that the three function as dialects of one tongue. Coeur d'Alene is the near neighbor, respected but not quite understood. Fluent first speakers now number in the handfuls, and immersion classrooms are doing the slow work of making more.

Horses reached the Plateau early in the eighteenth century and gave some Spokane families a second life hunting bison east of the Rockies. The fur trade arrived in 1810 with Spokane House at the confluence of the two rivers, the first sustained non-Native settlement in the state. Then came the missionaries, Presbyterians at Tshimakain in 1838 and Jesuits working the upper river, which is why Spokane households today can be Protestant or Catholic along lines drawn nearly two centuries ago, usually without much heat. Spokane Garry, sent north as a boy to a mission school on the Red River and returned as a literate teacher, spent his adult life trying to broker a settlement that never held. In 1858 Colonel George Wright ended the Plateau wars by rounding up roughly eight hundred Spokane horses and shooting them, an act of economic destruction the tribe still names by its location on the river. The reservation followed in 1881, west of the water near Wellpinit. Grand Coulee Dam went up without fish ladders and ended the salmon runs outright by 1942; compensation took until 2019. An open pit uranium mine ran on reservation land from 1955 to 1981 and left a Superfund site the tribe has spent decades forcing someone to clean up. The Spokane are still here, a few thousand enrolled, still on the river, still keeping count of what the river is owed.