Wenatchi Erotic

The Wenatchi are the river people of the Wenatchee valley in north-central Washington. They are an Interior Salish community whose name is now on a city, a lake, a river and a national forest, even though most of the people were forced off that ground more than a century ago. They are also known as P'squosa. Today they are one of the twelve bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and some descendants are enrolled with the Yakama.

Their country ran from the Cascade crest east to the Columbia. It followed the Wenatchee River down from Lake Wenatchee, through a tight canyon and out to the big river. The year moved with the food. Families spent winter in villages along the lower valley. In spring they dug bitterroot and other roots on the open slopes. Summer was fishing season, when chinook and sockeye ran upriver, and fall meant trips into the mountains for huckleberries and deer. The most important fishing place was where Icicle Creek meets the Wenatchee, near present-day Leavenworth. Neighboring peoples came there to fish and trade. Trails over the Cascade passes linked the Wenatchi to Salish peoples on the coast side.

They speak Nxaʔamxcín, usually called Columbia-Wenatchi in English. It is an Interior Salish language shared, with dialect differences, by the Chelan, Entiat and Columbia peoples. That set them apart from the Sahaptin-speaking Yakama and Kittitas to the south, though the groups married into each other. The name Wenatchi itself is generally traced to Sahaptin. Very few fluent speakers remain, and the Colville tribes run programs to keep the language going. Spiritual life centered on the guardian spirit. A young person went alone into the hills to seek a spirit power, which came with a song, and those songs were sung at winter dances. First-foods ceremonies still give thanks for roots and salmon before the harvest is eaten. Catholic missionaries worked the valley in the 1800s. Many families are Catholic now and still keep the older observances.

The turning point came in 1855. The Wenatchi were brought into the Yakama Treaty, which promised them a fishing reservation six miles square at the Icicle Creek fishery. The land was surveyed in the wrong place and never secured for them. In the 1890s the government extinguished the claim in a deal made with the Yakama, not the Wenatchi. With no land of their own, most Wenatchi families ended up on the Colville Reservation to the northeast. The dispute over the fishing rights promised in 1855 has since gone to federal court, and the Wenatchi remain a distinct band with a clear claim to the valley that carries their name.