Sinixt

The Sinixt are an Interior Salish people of the upper Columbia River, whose villages lined the Arrow Lakes, the Slocan Valley and parts of Kootenay Lake in what is now southern British Columbia, reaching south as far as Kettle Falls in Washington.

Around 1780 they numbered some two thousand people in twenty or more villages. Semi-sedentary complex collectors, they wintered in semi-subterranean houses in sheltered valleys and summered along the river fishing salmon, and gathering camas roots and huckleberries. They built suspension bridges over the swift Columbia and, after acquiring horses, rode east to hunt bison on the Great Plains.

In 1830 and 1831 they wintered near the Hudson's Bay Company post of Fort Colvile, where they became prolific fur traders, and in 1837 Jesuit missionaries built St. Paul's Mission at Kettle Falls with Sinixt labor.