[There should be a map loading below. If not: Direct link to map]

As usual, the clue was in the title: Salt Water People, in its 1984 1st edition, includes a list of place names as an appendix with a free-flowing structure. I remember being confused by discrepancies where others seemed to have transposed names for different locations, and others which didn’t seem to be documented place. Then it thwacked me like a paddle:

🛶 🛶 🛶 🛶
CANOES!
🛶 🛶 🛶 🛶

How might PENÁĆ have recalled place names from his childhood? Perhaps, I thought, by re-living a series of mental canoe journeys across waters he knew intimately, narrating these journeys onto a recording, and having that transcribed in his waning years.

Indeed, that hypothesis led to this map. If Dave’s Version was really Dave’s Vision, my thinking went, I should probably map these names in order, tracing the route he describes. Doing so helped to fill in some of the stranger references (e.g., “next point north”).

There remained ambiguous points throughout the text, however, owing partly to Dave’s usage of 1930s-era toponyms (e.g., Coal Point on Orcas Island, generally called Point Doughty — save for in this random photo from 1933). Would someone working on the 1990 edition have been able to discern which point was once Coal Point in 10 seconds?

With modern geomatics and GIS tools, such as Felt, it is amazingly simple to compile and share this kind of previously inaccessible information. At the same time, the ease of access to a wide base of historical sources via search engines and academic institutions means that it’s easier than ever to approximate what Dave might have been picturing.

In Salt Water People, PENÁĆ contextualizes the list of SENĆOŦEN place names succinctly:

“We gave names to all of the places that we knew. Every bay, every stream, every village, every island, every mountain, every lake had a name in our language.”

(p.15-16, 1st ed.)

Feature-centric naming is common in Coast Salish cultures, as opposed to a colonial framework of locational specificity for titled subdivision. Participating in a seasonal round of resource cultivation and gathering meant moving to the right places at the right times and employing mass labour efforts to make the most of a permaculture economy.

To random white dudes out of place, temporarily vacant villages home to people off fishing en masse looked abandoned, and that was a heady cocktail with terra nullius on the brain. Indeed, a Saanich seasonal village opposite Tsawwassen on Boundary Bay was vacant when Captain Vancouver visited it in June 1792; had he come by a month later, it would have been abuzz with the summer fishery.

Instead, he and his European pals wouldn’t make contact with the South Island’s Indigenous peoples for decades. In 1789, historic accounts make note of a devastating first smallpox epidemic among the Songhees (Saanich peoples’ southern neighbours), nominally “pre-contact”. Pathogenic colonialism came first; then, secondhand violence: devastating raids from newly gun-equipped north-gulf rivals from the 1790s unsettled the traditional economic and political power balance enormously.

In the spirit of CTA79, Factso is excited to present this map. As a better way to interpret the place names in the vein of Dave’s description, I have generalized the areas as categorized shapes based on their order and secondary research. For ease of understanding, I have colour-coded the map, extrapolating from Dave’s specific words.

In certain cases, multiple instances of the same name exist at one “place”, referencing multiple features as a set. The legend allows viewers to show labels by category. Each shape and label includes a link to its S1-1984 transcript, in addition to the text provided and the sequence of the name in order.

Factso Notes: Thoughts from A3-2024

1. I have made what may be a first connection between #132 TOLES (TOL,LOS in 2nd ed. p.39) and an assigned physical feature-location. Dave calls it “Three Tree Island;” Montler appends a (?) to TOLES táləs, #1943, because he probably tried to find Three Tree Island but couldn’t, because there’s no island by that name in WA.
   • Burien, WA is the next town south of Seattle on Puget Sound. As it happens, a spit of land juts westward into the sound there, dividing the physical geography of Seattle’s tangled ridges from Burien’s slope from airport to water at a big cliff face.
   • In 1903, that spit was first developed, and given the name Three Tree Point. Selling waterfront living to rich people, the developers chose to remove the namesake trees: three immense old-growth firs, towering over the water — and, I aver, providing a long-distance visual reference point for northern Canoe Culture peoples.
   • My first clue was a search listing for Burien’s “Three Tree Point Indian Trail,” which weaves among the houses there; then, I found this local history article, which describes the removal of the trees in the early 1900s.
   • In sequence, Dave sandwiched TOLES (from TOL, “way out, off-shore”) between #131 ŚÁNES (Turn Point, Stuart Island) and #133 ṈENÁNET (Henry Island), before rattling off a list of San Juan Island spots.
   • Here’s my conjecture: On a mental canoe trip westward, he turns southward at Stuart Island and thinks about what’s out that way, “way out, off-shore”, before the next landmark appears, Henry Island.
   • Neither the 1st nor 2nd editions make this clear, but #145 STOLȻEȽ (listed as the term for Friday Harbour, “place way out”, again from TOL) looks to be a generalizable term for the island, based on the size and positioning of its labels on A2-1990. I suspect there’s something to the shared etymology, given their physical alignment. However, I don’t think that it’s reasonable to infer that #132 refers to San Juan Island.
   • With the highly directional basis of place names — for instance, there is no specific name for the Inlet’s waters, but there are specific names for “inbound” and “outbound” that refer only to the Inlet.
   • It is conceivable that Three Tree Point is somewhere hidden on the San Juans, but repeated searches identified nothing by that name. Another clue may exist in -OLȻEȽ, a root which occurs in reference to “hit (in)side of the body/break a rib” #1141, #1144 and “appendix (organ)” #517. If San Juan Island is the “side of the body”, what’s the rest of the body?
   • I believe it is far more likely that the spit in Burien is the spot, as it would be in a “strait” (har-har) line south from San Juan Island to the Sound, another cultural nexus, from a place way out — to a place way out off-shore. Perhaps the previously noted physiological referencing of some names (S2-1995) is related; the cluster of “chest” and “neck” terms near the mouth of the Satellite Channel, then San Juan as the side.
2. Some of the names mapped above did not make it into the 2nd edition, either in the maps provided (A2-1990) or the indices (see PDF linked from S1-1984): #4, W̱ȾIXES Observatory Hill, for instance.
3. Others have been re-interpreted visually (not all listed):
   • #2 X̱EOLX̱ELE₭ is given as “drifting along” for Elk Lake in the 2nd edition. However, the 1st edition appends “referring to a small island that would appear to be moving around”. This little tidbit turns out to have its own whole mind-blowing story, but for now I’ve added a label to the main island at the neck between the two lobes of the lake (Elk, northward, and Beaver, southward to the creek).
   • #155 KELJIEUEȽ “spit on the center east side of James Island” led me to label the outlet of a forested creek which seems to have fed a larger sandbar prior to its sediments being influenced by the gold course there. A2-1990, based on a clipped description, labels the easternmost point.
   • #110 SMEMIEḰ is an outlier worth explaining: “Lummi Island (center facing east)”
     • In the 2nd edition, the nearby Barnes and Clark Islands are labeled MEMIEḰ. They are not given a name in this edition.
       • Drawing from S1-1984, Montler #1854 calls all of Lummi Island SMEMIEḰ.
       • While not listed in the indices, A2-1990 labels Lummi Island W̱LEMMI, which gives more of a “from where the Lummi come/where to find the Lummi” sense with W̱.
     • Names beginning with S, while often translated as “place of”, may be glossed “you can see {name} from there” based on my research of other names and reading in Montler’s dictionary. W̱ is more about “where from”, or “where to find”.
       • Trying to take Dave’s visual description literally, I imagined standing in the “center” of Lummi Island and facing east.
       • That would put me in the wetland at the rough midpoint of the 8-shaped island, facing the mainland. Dominant in my sightline from that perspective would be the mountain on the southern half of Lummi Island.
       • My inference: SMEMIEḰ, which goes undefined in S1-1984, means “you can see” MEMIEḰ (from there). If I were facing east, I’d mostly see that ridge, from which one could likely see MEMIEḰ on a clear day.
       • Since MEMIEḰ is west of W̱LEMMI, not east, SMEMIEḰ as given (centre facing east) can’t refer to Lummi Island.
     • Then, if I were to ascend that mountain I could see from the centre facing east, I would be able to spin around, look west, and boom. SMEMIEḰ: the mount from which one can see MEMIEḰ, near the centre of W̱LEMMI.
4. Factso does not claim these interpretations are exact, but offers them as an educational resource that may help break down the visual and conceptual barriers between ways Western culture relates to places and Indigenous contextual experience. The above inferences have not been reviewed with Indigenous knowledge keepers but are the product of careful comparative research.