Coeur d'Alene people
Traditional Territory
A territory of 3.5 million acres in present-day northern Idaho, eastern Washington and western Montana, including villages along the Coeur d'Alene, St. Joe, Clark Fork, and Spokane rivers, and sites on the shores of Lake Coeur d'Alene, Lake Pend Oreille, and Hayden Lake.
Overview
The Coeur d'Alene Tribe are a Native American tribe and one of five federally recognized tribes in the state of Idaho. They have sovereign control of their Coeur d'Alene Reservation, which includes a significant portion of Lake Coeur d'Alene and its submerged lands. Their native language is Snchitsu'umshtsn, an Interior Salishan language, and they are one of the Salish language peoples of the inland plateau and Pacific Northwest.
Historical Notes
First encountered Europeans in 1793. Historically occupied 3.5 million acres in present-day northern Idaho, eastern Washington and western Montana. Lands were reduced to 600,000 acres in 1873 and further reduced to 345,000 acres near Plummer.
Language and Culture
The Coeur d'Alene people speak a language belonging to the Salishan language family, with historical presence recorded across Idaho, documented from 1793 to present. Language family affiliation is one of the primary means by which historians and anthropologists identify historical connections between Indigenous peoples across time and geography.
Federal Recognition
The Coeur d'Alene people hold federal recognition from the United States government, administered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Federally recognized tribes have a government-to-government relationship with the United States and are eligible for services and protections under federal Indian law. There are currently 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States.
Indigenous peoples had inhabited North America for at least 15,000 years before European contact, developing complex societies across every region of the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered on the city of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, reached its peak around 1100 AD with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 — larger than contemporary London. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Iroquois Confederacy, formed between roughly 1450 and 1600, united five nations under a constitution that influenced later American democratic thinking. Across the eastern woodlands, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest, hundreds of distinct nations maintained sophisticated trade networks, agricultural systems, and governance structures. European contact beginning in the late 15th century introduced epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, influenza — which devastated Indigenous populations by an estimated 50 to 90 percent within a century.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Source: Wikipedia.
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