Syilix

The Syilx, also called the Okanagan, are an Interior Salish people of the Northwest Plateau whose homeland covers the basin of Okanagan Lake and the Okanagan River, together with the Similkameen valley and the upper Nicola River. They speak Nsyilxcn, an Interior Salish language, and count the Sinixt, Shuswap and Nlaka'pamux among their close kin.

Syilx families followed a seasonal round, moving between fishing, hunting and root-and-berry gathering grounds, and wintered in villages of kekulis, round earth-covered pit houses, while summer camps used conical lodges of tule mats. Each village governed itself. The Spaxomin community of the Nicola Valley was linked by marriage and alliance to neighbouring Nlaka'pamux bands.

Europeans first reached the wider Interior Salish region in 1793, when Alexander Mackenzie entered Shuswap territory, and the fur trader Simon Fraser travelled the Fraser River in 1808.