What’s in a tribe name?

I recently received an email from a reader who was dying to know what tribe Syawa and Hector were from.  Because I thought other readers might be wondering the same thing, I thought I’d share my answer here.

I was deliberately vague about their tribal affiliation for three main reasons:
1. Katie could not possibly know or understand which Nation they came from and so she could not possibly explain it to us.
2. I did not want to take the liberty of describing in detail a group whose descendants might be offended by my representations of their culture;
3. All of the Nations in the Pacific Northwest were significantly altered by the time Lewis and Clark came through, and by the time American settlers were pouring in, many of the Nations Lewis and Clark met were gone, blended, or mere shadows of their former selves.

In other words, the tribe Syawa and Hector belong to has long-since disappeared into the dark folds of unrecorded history.

That being said, I will admit I based their lifestyle on one of the many Nations who spoke a language of the Salish language group. To say they were “Salish” is as meaningless as saying someone was Algonquin or Sioux–those are arbitrary terms applied to many different groups of people who lived within a particular territory. They did not think of themselves as a unified nation the way Iroquois people thought of themselves as Iroquois, regardless of whether they were Seneca, Mohawk, or Onandaga. But people who spoke Salishan languages generally recognized an ancestral connection and interacted comfortably with one another even though they were not, technically speaking, of one tribe.

So, to answer your question more simply, I would say Syawa and Hector were members of some long-gone tribe that spoke a Salish dialect.

Now that I’ve answered that, I wonder how many readers could tell me what tribe their people belonged to in 1747?  I’m pretty sure some of my ancestors had a very close tie to some county in Ireland, but those tribal affiliations, like Syawa and Hector’s, have faded from modern memory.  I guess tribes, like everything else, come and go.

Now would you like to know why I chose to write about such an obscure group of people so far from Pennsylvania?

I think I’ll save that answer for my next post . . .