Chinook

The Chinook are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest who speak Chinookan languages and have lived along the Columbia River, from its gorge to its mouth and the adjoining coast, for more than twelve thousand years.

In cedar-plank longhouses, they lived from salmon runs, elk hunting and river trade, and their societies were ranked into nobles, commoners and slaves. Elite families flattened the foreheads of their children as a mark of status, leading early European visitors to call them the Flathead Indians. Their villages made them middlemen between coastal and interior peoples, and the Chinook Jargon, partly based on their language, became the lingua franca of the Northwest fur trade.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition met the Lower Chinook at the mouth of the Columbia in 1805, after which maritime fur traders and repeated epidemics sharply reduced their numbers.