Stkamish
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Stkamish were a historical Coast Salish people of the White River watershed in present-day Washington. Their name was recorded in nineteenth-century sources as Sté-kah-mish, St-kah-mish, and St-Ka-mish. The Stkamish were among the Southern Lushootseed-speaking peoples later associated with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.
Name and territory
Ethnologist George Gibbs recorded the name as "Sté-kah-mish" in his survey of Indigenous names west of the Cascade Range between 1853 and 1856, identifying them with the White River. In another 1854 list, Gibbs used the spelling "St-Ka-mish" and placed them on the main White River.
Anthropologist Barbara Lane noted that the ending -mish or -amish appears in several local Coast Salish names and interpreted it as meaning "people of". She suggested that the name Stkamish may have referred to people connected with the Stuck River, a watercourse in the White River system. Lane distinguished the Stkamish from the neighboring Smulkamish of another part of the White River and the Skopamish of the Green River.
The Stkamish were part of the Southern Lushootseed-speaking communities whose territories extended along the White and Green rivers and into the foothills of the Cascade Range.
Treaty period
The Stkamish were named in the preamble of the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, where the spelling "St-kah-mish" appears among the tribes and bands represented at the treaty council.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stkamish” 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.