Nuxalc

The Nuxalk, who call themselves Nuxalkmc and were long known as the Bella Coola, are a Northwest Coast people centred on the Bella Coola River valley in British Columbia. Their language forms its own branch of the Salishan family, an enclave surrounded by Wakashan- and Athabascan-speaking neighbours.

Before contact their settlements numbered over a hundred; an estimate put their population in 1780 at about fourteen hundred. They lived in plank-house winter villages, fishing salmon and preserving lineage history in crests, songs and dances called smayusta, honouring the creator Alhkw'ntam and the war goddess Qamaits.

In 1793 the fur trader Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific through Nuxalk lands, completing the first European crossing of North America north of Mexico. During the nineteenth century the surviving village groups gathered in the Bella Coola Valley under Chief Pootlass, taking the collective name Nuxalkmc.