Coast Salish peoples
group of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast
The Coast Salish peoples are a group of ethnically and linguistically related Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, living in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon. They speak the Coast Salish languages and Tsamosan languages.
The Coast Salish are a large, loose grouping of many nations with numerous distinct cultures and languages. Territory claimed by Coast Salish peoples span from the northern limit of the Salish Sea on the inside of Vancouver Island and covers most of southern Vancouver Island, all of the Lower Mainland and most of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula (except for territories of the Chemakum people). Their traditional territories coincide with modern major metropolitan areas, namely Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle. The Tillamook or Nehalem around Tillamook, Oregon are the southernmost of the Coast Salish peoples.
Coast Salish cultures differ considerably from those of their northern neighbors. They have a patrilineal and matrilineal kinship system, with inheritance and descent passed through the male and female line. According to a 2012 estimate, the population of Coast Salish numbers at least 56,590 people, made of 28,406 Status Indians registered to Coast Salish bands in British Columbia, and 28,284 enrolled members of federally recognized tribes of Coast Salish in Washington State.
Terminology
The term "Coast Salish" is used to refer to the speakers of fourteen contiguous Salishan languages on the western coast of North America.
The public source identifies “Coast Salish peoples” as group of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Coast, Salish and peoples.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1755154. The Library of Congress control number is sh85027429. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coast Salish peoples” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.