This week’s cover of the Inlander is completely in Salish.
We are celebrating the language and culture of the Interior Salish people in the Nov. 17 edition of the paper, and for the first time in the 29-year history of the Inlander, the cover won’t be in English.
Everything on the cover is either in Spokane Salish or Kalispel Salish, the languages of two local tribes in the Inland Northwest. This includes the masthead (which has said “Inlander” since the paper’s founding in 1993), the headline, and date.
This week, the masthead reads l̓ es qʷomšúlexʷ (Kalispel Salish for Inlander, or more literally “in the interior land”). The headline is hec yoyotwílšm nqélixʷcnm (Spokane Salish for the Salish Resurgence, or more literally “language getting stronger”). The date is also in Spokane Salish.
Local artist Emma Noyes created the cover in collaboration with Derek Harrison, the Inlander’s creative director. Noyes is of the Sinixt band of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and recently published a children’s book, Baby Speaks Salish.
Inside the issue, local teachers and speakers of the region’s various Salish languages talk about what the language means to them, and where they see it headed in the future. They include Marsha Wynecoop, language program manager with the Spokane Tribe of Indians; LaRae Wiley, executive director of the Salish School of Spokane; Barry Moses, co-founder of the Spokane Language House; Caj Matheson, director of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe Natural Resources Department; and JR Bluff, director of language for the Kalispel Tribe of Indians.
The idea to turn the cover over to the languages indigenous to the Inland Northwest came from the paper’s editor, Nicholas Deshais, who joined the paper this summer. But publisher and founder, Ted S. McGregor Jr. championed the idea.
“We have so much vibrant Native American culture all around us here in the Inland Northwest, and I don't believe we have appreciated it, or celebrated it enough. The Inlander has always made presenting that aspect of our local cultural fabric a priority. So to underline this even more, we decided this would be a cool approach to illustrate the remarkable story of how people are saving the region's original language, Salish, from extinction,” McGregor says.
Local readers can find the issue free at hundreds of Inlander newsstands across Eastern Washington and North Idaho. ♦
