Squamish

The Squamish, historically recorded as Sko-ko-mish, are a Coast Salish people whose homeland is the network of fjords and rivers around Howe Sound and Burrard Inlet in southwestern British Columbia; archaeological traces place their plank-house villages there for more than a thousand years. They travelled in red-cedar canoes, relied on salmon, herring and shellfish, and settled rank through the potlatch held in their longhouses.

Smallpox swept the coast in the 1770s, killing at least a third of its Indigenous population before any European was seen, and the first recorded contact followed in 1791 and 1792 with the Spanish expedition of José María Narváez and George Vancouver's British ships.