lasted understanding religious convincing history destruction

BEFORE COLUMBUS
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. But in fact the Koyukon homeland is not a wilderness, nor has it been
for millennia. This apparently untrodden forest and tundra country is thoroughly
known by a people whose entire lives and cultural ancestry are inextricably
associated with it. The lakes, hills, river bends, sloughs, and creeks
are named and imbued with personal or cultural meanings. Indeed, to the
Koyukon these lands are no more a wilderness than are farmlands to a farmer
or streets to a city dweller. 7
Nelson's point is affectingly well illustrated in a story told by environmental
author Barry Lopez about "a native woman [of this region], alone and
melancholy in a hospital room, [who] told another interviewer she would
sometimes raise her hands before her eyes to stare at them: 'Right in my
hand, I could see the shorelines, beaches, lakes, mountains, and hills I had
been to. I could see the seals, birds, and game. . .' " 8
From the panhandle of Alaska south through the upper northwest and
on down to the California border lived so many different cultural communities,
densely settled and thickly populated, that we have no hope of
ever recovering anything close to a complete record of their vibrant pasts.
The Makah, the Strait, the Quileute, the Nitinat, the Nooksack, the Chemakum,
the Halkomelem, the Squamish, the Quinault, the Pentlatch, the
Sechelt, the Twana, and the Luchootseet are a baker's dozen of linguistically
and culturally separate peoples whose communities were confined to
the relatively small area that today is bounded by Vancouver to the north
and Seattle to the south, a distance of less than 150 miles. Overall, however,
the native peoples of the northwest coast made their homes along
more than 2000 miles of coastline. Compared with other regions, archaeological
research has been minimal in the northwest. As a result, while
traditional estimates of the population prior to European contact rarely
exceed a third of a million people, many more than that probably lived
along this strip of land that is more extensive than the coastline of Peruan
area that supported about 6,500,000 people in a much harsher environment
during pre-Columbian times. Indeed, one recent study has put the
population of British Columbia alone at over 1,000,000 prior to Western
contact. 9 In addition to the coastal settlements, moreover, even as late as
the nineteenth century, after many years of wholesale devastation, more
than 100 tribes representing fifteen different language groups lived on in
British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho-including the Chelan,
the Yakima, the Palouse, the Walla Walla, the Nez Perce, the Umatilla,
the Cayuse, the Flathead, the Coeur D'Alene, the Kalispel, the Colville,
the Kootenay, the Sanpoil, the Wenatchee, the Methow, the
Okanagan, the Ntlakyapamuk, the Nicola, the Lillooct, the Shuswap, and
more.
Similarly, from the northern California border down to today's Golden
Gate Bridge in the west and Yosemite National Park in the east, an area
barely 250 miles by 200 miles, there lived the Tolowa, the Yurok, the