Starting about five thousand years ago, Salish ancestors on the Fraser River built round winter homes into the earth that were called c7ístkten, kekuli, or pithouses. Salish pithouse builders spread their salmon-fishing culture up the Fraser River into the interior, where they encountered nomadic hunter-gatherers who left behind distinct, lightweight stone microblade tools befitting their mobile culture. For about a thousand years, the sedentary Salish coexisted and intermingled with these nomadic hunters. Then the two merged, creating the Interior Salish and giving rise to a distinct subfamily of languages. Coyote’s name—Sek’lep in Secwepemctsín—likely dates to this era and has cognates in all Interior Salish languages:
N’kyap in Ucwalmícwts (St’at’imc language)
Sn’kyap in Nlaka’pamuxcín (Thompson language)
Snk’lip in Nsyilxcn (Okanagan language)
Snclé in both Qlispe and Sélis (Kalispel and Montana Salish, respectively)
Coyote Stories relate ancient memories of geological, climatic, ecological, and cultural transformation. This antiquity was acted out in the telling. When our downriver neighbors the Nlaka’pamux performed their cycle of Coyote Stories, the trickster not only spoke in a high-pitched tone like a coyote, he also spoke Secwepemctsín, the language considered most akin to the ancient tongue of the trickster and the people of his day. I mostly use Secwepemctsín, the language I learned from my kyé7e and that she, in turn, spoke with her mother, Alice Noiscat. Because that’s the way our trickster ancestor and his descendants spoke.
As the root morpheme cwep, meaning “spread out,” from our endonym Secwépemc suggests, my ancestors spread north across the rivers and plateaus, fishing the Fraser and its tributaries like Canoe Creek, where my great-grandmother once lived, our tongues slowly transforming to fit these new geographies. In the winter, our ancestors built pithouse villages into and out of our tmícw, our living earth which is also animate, at places like Copper Johnny Meadow. In our oral histories, Coyote often sculpted himself and others into and from the land. Because the words for “human being” and “earth” share the same root, when we name people or place in our language, we are sculpting ourselves, our nations, our villages, our rezzes and their names into and from the land—like Coyote and the pithouse builders.
And like the trickster, speaking our language can also be an act of play. Aert Kuipers worked with May Dixon, an elder from Tsq’escen (Canim Lake), and other fluent speakers to codify a Secwepemctsín curriculum in the seventies. May and her friends decided to give Aert’s people, the Dutch, a Secwépemc name: Sxetsxts’icén̓ (Wooden Feet), a joking reference to their clogs. Kyé7e always laughs when she says that one.