Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (Nəxʷsƛ̕ áy̕əm "strong people") is a federally recognized Native American nation in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The tribe is part of the larger Klallam culture, part of the Coast Salish peoples.

The traditional territory of the Klallam is the north and northeast portion of the Olympic Peninsula, in the U.S. state of Washington. They traditionally had several villages in this area. Since the 1930s part of the tribe has controlled a reservation located 4 miles west of Port Angeles at the mouth of the Elwha River.

In August 2003 the site of an ancient Klallam village, Tse-whit-zen, was discovered during a construction project on former tribal land in the city. The significance of the nearly intact village site, hundreds of human remains, and thousands of artifacts led to the state abandoning the construction project at that site. Based on radiocarbon dating, the village site appears to have been occupied for nearly 2700 years. The Lower Elwha Klallam lived there until the 1930s, when the federal government persuaded them to move outside the city to a reservation four miles west. The state has since returned 10 acres of land to the Tribe and leased it another 6 acres.

Klallam

Klallam (also Clallam, although the spelling with "K" is preferred in all four modern Klallam communities) refers to four related indigenous Native American/First Nations communities from the Pacific Northwest of North America. The Klallam culture is classified ethnographically and linguistically in the Coast Salish subgroup. Three Klallam bands live on the Olympic Peninsula in the far northwest corner (bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca) of Washington state, and one is based at Becher Bay on southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Name variants and usage

The indigenous Klallam language name for the tribe is nəxʷsƛ̕ay̕əm (meaning "strong people"). The word "Klallam" comes from the North Straits Salish language name for the Klallam people, [xʷstɬ̕æləm]. This has had a wide variety of English spellings including "Chalam", "Clalam", "Clallem", "Clallum", "Khalam", "Klalam", "Noodsdalum", "Nooselalum", "Noostlalum", "Tlalum", "Tlalam", "Wooselalim", "S'Klallam", "Ns'Klallam", "Klallam" and "Clallam". "Clallam" was used by the Washington Territory legislature in 1854 when it created Clallam County. The following year "S'klallam" was used in the Point No Point Treaty. In the following decades the simpler "Klallam" or "Clallam" predominated in the media and research literature. In 1981 "S'Klallam" was used when the United States Department of the Interior officially recognized the Lower Elwha, Jamestown, and Port Gamble (or Little Boston) tribes.