Sammamish (tribe)
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| About 101 (1854). | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Sammamish Valley lake and river, King County, Washington | |
| Languages | |
| Southern Lushootseed | |
| Religion | |
| Mostly Indigenous, some Roman Catholic | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Duwamish, Snoqualmie; ancestral Xacuabš "the People of the Large Lake" (before mid-1850s). Coast Salish |
The Sammamish (/səˈmæmɪʃ/; indigenously, [t͡saˈpaːbʃ]) people were a Coast Salish Native American tribe in the Sammamish River Valley in central King County, Washington. Their name is variously translated as ssts'p-abc ("meander dwellers", a group residing around Bothwell),s-tah-PAHBSH ("willow people") or as Samena ("hunter people"), which was corrupted into Sammamish. According to Hitchman, it does not mean “hunter people”, the name is derived from samma, meaning “the sound of the blue crane” and mish, meaning “river.” The name may have originated with the Snoqualmie—some tribal members once lived along the lake near the bottom of Inglewood Hill—but this has not been verified. They were also known to early European-American settlers as "Squak", "Simump", and "Squowh.",Squak is a corruption of sqwa'ux, meaning Issaqha Creek, which was a village site on Sammamish Lake. They were closely related to the Duwamish, and have often been considered a Duwamish sub-group as part of the Xacuabš ("People of the Large Lake") who lived near Lake Washington. Like the Duwamish, the Sammamish originally spoke a southern dialect of Lushootseed.
The largest Sammamish village was tlah-WAH-dees at the mouth of the Sammamish River, which at the time was between present-day Kenmore and Bothell, east of its present location at the southwest corner of Kenmore. The mouth of the river moved to the west after 1916, when Lake Washington was lowered nine feet by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. A second Sammamish village with at least one longhouse was located near what is now Issaquah. When Europeans from the Hudson's Bay Company arrived in the area in 1832, the Sammamish had several permanent and seasonal settlements along the length of the river, and numbered as many as 200.
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