![]() ![]() The Coast Salish peoples alone include more than fifty nations and bands, such as the Squamish, the Swinomish, the Tulalip, the Duwamish, and the Lummi Nation, each with their own language or dialect, political system, and economy. One of these linguistic groupings is Salishan, which branches into Interior Salish (Columbia Plateau) and Coast Salish. We know of at least two dozen distinct linguistic divisions that encompassed hundreds of different nations, bands, and tribal affiliations. It had already been one of the most densely populated parts of the continent before European-Americans set foot there. The part about the Pacific Northwest being unoccupied was complete nonsense, of course. By midcentury, close to half a million Americans had migrated to the region via the Oregon Trail, and trade and industry there were booming. government as “the most valuable of all the unoccupied parts of the earth.” 3 It was the perfect spot for a new Eden, for the manifestation of American destiny. In the early 1830s, it was presented to the U.S. Owing to its strategic location and incredible resources, the Pacific Northwest, as we know it now, became extremely desirable to American expansionists. But after months of charting high plains and lowlands, it was the land just west of the Rockies that began to excite American imaginations. Known as Louisiana, its purchase arguably marked the onset of a serious and more substantial consideration of the West for potential expansion of the American empire. In 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition set out to map the United States’ newly acquired land west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains. He concluded that such knowledge was crucial for Americans, too, “if the future of the fisheries is not to be seriously endangered.” 1 Today, salmon are at five percent of the abundance recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest is perhaps irreparably damaged. In other parts of the world, like northern Europe and Japan, it had long been “evident to every one how important it is to carry on the fisheries in accordance with certain well-defined rules based on a thorough knowledge of the nature and mode of life of the fish,” as Baird phrased it. Commissioner for Fisheries Spencer Fullerton Baird in 1878, “that wherever the white man plants his foot and the so-called civilization of a country is begun, inhabitants of the air, land, and the water, begin to disappear.” Particularly salmon at the heart of the thriving Pacific Northwest fishing industry were subject to this “fatal influence.” Baird’s warnings regarding overfishing and habitat destruction were among the earliest written accounts to caution against overexploiting the region’s resources. “It may safely be said,” wrote naturalist and U.S.
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