• Age: 17
• Grade: 12

Wayne Suttles has devoted much of his professional life to research on the cultures of the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, especially the Coast Salish of the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound Basin. Born and raised in this region, he has been guided by a life-long love of its natural environment and wish to know how its Native peoples lived in it, understood it and felt it. In 1946 he began ethnographic field work with the Straits peoples and in 1951 presented in his Ph.D. dissertation one of the fullest accounts that we have of the fishing, hunting and gathering foundation of a Northwest Coast Indian culture. He is probably best known for his contribution to the “ecological” approach to the Northwest Coast. In essays included in this volume, he was the first to challenge the received wisdom that Northwest Coast Indians lived in perpetual Eden-like abundance and that their lavish potlatches were merely the expression of cultural values gone wild, and he was the first to suggest that cultural differences within the Northwest Coast may be related to environmental differences. These essays have had a lasting impact on the study of the Northwest Coast, provoking argument and suggesting problems for research and hypotheses to test in both social anthropology and archeology. Other essays deal with Native knowledge, belief and art, with Native responses to the European invasion, and with the prehistory of Northwestern North America. All are updated with references to more recent works and the author’s own reconsideration of some matters.

Wayne Suttles
Wayne Suttles (1918–2005) was an American anthropologist and linguist. He was the leading authority on the ethnology and linguistics of the Coast Salish people of British Columbia and Washington State. He was Professor of Anthropology at Portland State University. Coast Salish Essays is a collection of his key contributions to an ethnographic understanding of the Native peoples of the Northwest coast.

Wayne Suttles' profile page

"A major contribution to the study of the indians of the the Northwest Coast."
— Pacific News Quarterly

Coast Salish Essays

This volume is a substantial collection of sixteen anthropological, archaeological and linguistic papers on the Northwest Coast Aboriginal cultures. The four sections cover a large variety of topics on the historic social systems, religious beliefs, art, survival through the European invasion and prehistoric inferences. The book dispels many inaccurate generalizations of the culture by developing a sophisticated understanding of Coast Salish economy, ecology, social structure, language and beliefs, and placing these categories within the wider framework of comparison with other Northwest Coast cultures. This is a comprehensive introduction for a study of the Northwest Coast Aboriginal understanding. Includes appendices.

Suttles, a former teacher at the University of British Columbia, presently works as a full time writer and editor.

Caution: The author frequently uses “Indians”.