Nlakapamuk

The Nlakapamuk, known to outsiders as the Thompson people or the Couteau, or Knife, Indians, are an Interior Salish people of southern British Columbia, whose country runs through the Fraser Canyon, the Thompson Canyon and the Nicola Country. They speak the Thompson language; the Nlakapamuk of the Nicola Valley call themselves the Scw'exmx and speak their own dialect.

Like other Interior Salish peoples, they followed a seasonal round of salmon fishing, hunting and berry gathering, wintering in pit houses in autonomous villages and passing the summers in tule-mat lodges.

The Scw'exmx joined with the Spaxomin, a branch of the Syilx, to form the Nicola alliance, named after the fur-trade-era chief Nicola. The explorer Simon Fraser travelled through their Fraser Canyon homeland in 1808, and Anglican and Catholic missionaries arrived among them in the nineteenth century.