Spokane people
Native American people
The Spokane people ( spoh-KAN; Spokane: snxʷmeneʔ) are a Native American people indigenous to eastern Washington state, United States.
Spokane people are enrolled in the Spokane Tribe of Indians, a federally recognized tribe headquartered in Wellpinit, Washington (sčecuwe). The tribe governs the Spokane Indian Reservation, which includes about 237 square miles (610 km2) in eastern Washington between the Columbia and Spokane rivers.
The traditional language of the Spokane is Salish, an Interior Salishan language spoken from Washington to Montana. They speak the Spokane dialect.
Name
The name of the Spokane people in their language, Salish, is snxʷmeneʔ. The name snxʷmeneʔ means "steelhead."
The name Spokane is first recorded in 1807. According to George Gibbs, the name was used by the Coeur d'Alene for one specific band of the Spokane, later transferred to all allied bands.
A number of possible interpretations of the name have been proposed. Most frequently, the name has been translated as "Sun children", "Children of the Sun", or "Muddy people".
“Spokane people” enters the record as native American people. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spokane, people and Native can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Spokane people” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Spokane, people and Native provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q491709. The Library of Congress control number is sh85126844. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1807.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. 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 “Spokane people” 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.