The first sight Zalmai “Zeke” Zahir would see most mornings growing up in Seattle and on the Muckleshoot reservation was the white-capped grooves of Mount Rainier. A linguist, Zahir recently published the first comprehensive paper exploring the many Native American names for the mountain and how it got those names.
In reviewing historical records, interviews, dictionaries, news articles, sound recordings and field notes, some of which dated back to the 1800s, Zahir found 20 different names for Mount Rainier, 18 of which were Salishan in origin. Zahir said he didn’t write the paper to argue for the use of one name over the other but rather to “give a plethora of names they can choose from” and illustrate the mountain’s significance to those who live around it.
People have talked about changing the name of Mount Rainier for decades. The mountain got its English name in the late 1700s when British explorer George Vancouver named the mountain Rainier as a tribute to Peter Rainier, an admiral in the Royal Navy who had never stepped foot in the Pacific Northwest and fought against American forces during the Revolutionary War. There have also been efforts to change the mountain’s name to “Mt. Tahoma” or something similar to match the city of Tacoma’s name.
A number of different Native languages are spoken around Mount Rainier, including Lushootseed, Klallam and Twana to the north and west; Upper Chehalis and Cowlitz to the southwest; and Ichishkíin to the east and south, according to Zahir’s article. The Lushootseed groups mentioned include Skagit, Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Puyallup and Nisqually people. Ichishkíin includes Yakima, Klickitat, Warm Springs and Umatilla people.
The names for Mount Rainier Zahir found in his research include taqʷuʔman, təqʷuʔmaʔ, təqʷuʔməʔ, təqʷuʔbəd, təqubəd, təqʷubəʔ, təqubət, xʷaq’ʷ , t(xʷ)xʷaq’ʷ, tax̌uma, taquʔmən, taquʔma, tax̌uʔma, təx̌uʔma, təquʔmən’, nšʔaʔk’ʷiyqł, dəxʷwak’ʷ, taqʷuʔmaʔ, nəxʷwək’ʷ and ya lamətay. (Editor’s note: The News Tribune’s publishing system cannot reproduce all of the Native characters. The above graphic shows the spellings as written by area tribes.)
Many of the Indigenous names for Mount Rainier were associated with definitions like, “don’t forget the water,” “bring the water with us,” “to dip water,” “breast,” “plenty of food or nourishment,” “snow-capped mountain,” “fountain,” “she the mountain,” “(sky) wiper” and “white mountain,” Zahir wrote in the article.
Zahir said those meanings could be because of the unique abundance of water that flows from Mount Rainier’s glaciers and drainage basins into the surrounding landscape. Other words “have become part of the metaphorical meaning of the names given to this mountain and express an element of the Indigenous cosmology,” he wrote.
“The Klickitat (a dialect of Ichishkíin) translation for the name for Mount Rainier tax̌uma is ‘woman’s breast’, ‘woman’s breast that feeds’. This is because the Earth is the mother, and she feeds the land with the milky waters that flow from tax̌uma, the mountain that is her breast,” Zahir wrote. “This mountain provides water to drink and white rivers that overflow and make the grasses grow. This is why tax̌uma also applies to other mountains, because these mountains have flowing waters that provide sustenance for the land and all living things, as well.”
‘Now we have the opportunity to learn’
Amber Hayward is program director for the Puyallup Tribe’s language program. She’s worked for the Tribe for about 25 years, starting in the historic-preservation department. Zahir is a Lushootseed language consultant for the Tribe and was contracted by the Puyallup Tribe to write the analysis to answer longstanding community questions about, “What is the original Native name for Mt. Rainier and what does it mean?” the tribe said in a press release.
Hayward said historically non-Native linguists and anthropologists documented tribal languages like English, which is heavy on nouns rather than verbs. Zahir has worked on new methods to revitalize the Lushootseed language with a focus on speaking, she said.
“It works, because we started with no speakers, and now we’re up to over 200 speakers in our community over the past 10 years,” Hayward said. “It’s super important, because it’s our ancestral language, and that links us back to the eyes of our ancestors. And so if we don’t have those pieces, we don’t have pieces of our identity. And then the more you get into your ancestral language, you get insights that you would never get from English.”
Connie McCloud, who has worked for the Puyallup Tribe for nearly 50 years and oversees the language, culture and historic preservation division, said Zahir’s paper is significant because “everything about our history, who we are, where we come from, lies in our language.”
“We are now looking at the revival of our language. I am not a first language speaker. I would not have heard our language spoke by my parents or either sets of my grandparents, because my grandparents would have been punished for speaking their language, particularly if they had gone to the boarding schools,” she said. “There was a very clear attempt to have all evidence of our culture removed from us. That included language. They removed children from their homes. Our long houses were destroyed, and all evidence of our culture was destroyed.”
McCloud grew up in Yelm “on the yellow prairie, waking up every day with our sacred mountain over us.” She said her grandmother was Nisqually and her grandfather was an enrolled Puyallup Tribal member. Her father is an enrolled Puyallup member and her mother is from the Chehalis Tribe.
Today there are not only children but adults who are learning their language, McCloud said. When Indigenous people had their identity taken from them by the U.S. government and Christian missionaries through boarding schools and the destruction of Native cultures and communities, McCloud said, it resulted in a lot of historical trauma that caused secondary problems like alcoholism, drug use, family division, abuse within families and contributed to a feeling of not belonging or feeling “less than human.”
“Our children can see and hear and speak and be taught our language in our schools, on their computers, on their phones,” she said. “Our children will never grow up and say, ‘I’ve never heard our language, I don’t know our songs, I don’t know our history,’ because it’s more available to not only our children but many of our adults [who] didn’t have that opportunity growing up. And now we have the opportunity to learn. And we have a sense of identity — this is who we are, where we come from — and within that is pride.”
McCloud said she refers to Mount Rainier as “the sacred mountain” because “it’s where our water comes from, and our water is sacred.”
“It is a life giver, both not only physically, but spiritually. It feeds the land. It feeds our streams, our rivers, out to the Salish Sea. Everything is connected, and we have a primary responsibility to take care of our water because within our waters is the quality of life, and we all want to live a quality, healthy life,” she said. “We want water that’s drinkable. We want to eat clams and shrimp that’s gathered from our waters that are not polluted. The idea of protecting our water goes beyond just the water, it’s everything that the water feeds.”
Hayward said she uses multiple names for Mount Rainier, like taqʷuʔma and təqʷuʔbəd, because in Lushootseed “there’s multiple ways to say things [and] there could be multiple meanings.”
When issuing news releases on behalf of the Puyallup Tribe about the mountain, Hayward said she’ll often list two or three names for the mountain on purpose to “try to get that environment to where it’s not one” name.
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