INTRODUCTION Indigenous language use within Coast Salish communities has declined severely since colonization, following the arrival of Non-Indigenous people’s. Although the cultural Coast Salish languages are rarely heard to the general public, they still play a great role in the cultural heritage, ethnography, and stories of the great Coast Salish today. This essay will focus on the key role language plays within Coast Salish communities. Collaborating the use of language in cultural and traditional use, land mapping, and efforts taken to help revitalize this sleeping language. The main point this essay will refer to is the strong role language plays in a deep cultural community like the Coast Salish, and why it is so important to preserve…show more content… Languages are being spoken less, and are ultimately becoming extinct dead languages. Since the arrival of non Natives, the use of Indigenous Coast Salish languages is not seen as needed. The issues of colonization, assimilation, and residential schools has affected the languages greatly, pushing them into the state of endangerment and in reaction, the necessity for measures of preservation and revitalization. This essay will focus on the present state of language and its connection to the Coast Salish rather than dwell on the unfortunate past events and forceful suppression the Coast Salish people’s had to endure. However, it is important to note that residential schools and laws that were forced to be abided by the Coast Salish played a huge role in the status of these languages…show more content… They seek harmony with the land, and a mutual respect is given. What is remarkable in many ways like naming ceremonies of the Coast Salish is their “inalienable identification of language with the land” (Shaw, 40). It is shown through “people’s identity, their sense of who they are and where they came from, who their ancestors were and how the continuity of their lives and their ways of being in the world - are linked most elementally though their ancestral languages and their ancestral lands”. (Shaw, 46). In Galloway’s book on the Nooksack, he includes an important fact on the Coast Salish referring to place names and how these “give a fascinating insight into another culture or an earlier phase of our own culture” (4). The “place names help people connect to their ancestry and history” (class
