Worldwide the oceans rose rapidly from 15,000 to 3,000 years ago. Saltwater today cover 12,000 years or more of Northwest Native American history, leaving a few scraps 300′ below the ocean’s surface. One wonders how this contributed to the diverse distributions of languages. Think of the Cascadia Floristic Region with fence posts (red dots), north to south, with a space separating the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River. Above the northern post are Salish, Nootkan, Tlingit (Athabascan), Haida, and Aleut languages. Washington State’s western edge (between 2 posts) has the Makah (Wakashan), Quileute (related to Chimakum), Chehalis (Salishan),
Quinault (also Salish)), Shoalwater’s (Chinook) and Willapa Bay’s Athabaskan. Oregon south to Fort Ross (San Francisco) has many more languages; Fort Humboldt (Humboldt County) where Ulysses S. Grant quit the Army in the 1854 had 6 mutually exclusive language families within walking distance of each other. This was before most were forced onto the Yurok Reservation, the Yuroks also using an Athabaskan language and being among the few to still live on their historic land. Forcing differing language groups into a single reservation (Oregon, for example, has but 4 reservations west of the Cascades) led to many languages (and peoples’) demise. Along Willapa Bay in SW Washington the Shoalwater Bay Reservation’s 334 acres hosts but 84 members. The Willapa peoples may have been forced (before the pioneers) by rising waters into the upper reaches of the Chehalis and Willapa Rivers, then back into a small enclave. In visiting Willapa Bay where this writer once was a high school teacher (Pacific County’ has 12 museums, South Bend’s Manager having worked for this writer in another life in 3 different states) the language study finds an amazing diversity in a small group of people. Is there new information (research, collections, DNA) that tells the story of the Willapa peoples? Like plants, a peoples’ extinction does not necessarily occur because of their being killed. If a species is denied habitat in which to live or the ability to reproduce and/or raise its young, they will disappear just as their languages have disappeared. (Think of the Northwest’s alpine plants moving upwards as the climate warms; at some time, they will have no where upwards to go.)
https://www.rwjf.org/en/grants/grantee-stories/2016/2016-winner-shoalwater-tribe-wa.html
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_North_American_Indian_Volume_9_The_S.html?id=mmPi-wuMt6sC
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01604-y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willapa_people
https://pchs.mystagingwebsite.com/pchs-paccomuseums/
Over the past period of 15,000 (to 30,000) years where homo sapiens populated the western Pacific Rim the ocean levels have dramatically:
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