Lushootseed dictionary

by Dawn Bates, linguist

A celebration of western Washington Native language and culture, Lushootseed Dictionary is a completely reformatted and greatly revised and expanded update of Thom Hess's Dictionary of Puget Salish (1976). Editor Dawn Bates integrates the field notes of Vi Hilbert, Upper Skagit elder and native speaker of Lushootseed, with Hess's analyses, mining information gathered by Hilbert and Hess from Skagit, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, Swinomish, Puyallup, and other Native consultants over a period of thirty years. The dictionary includes numerous example sentences taken from Lushootseed's rich tradition of storytelling, made popular by Hilbert's book Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound and her public storytelling career. The introduction to the Lushootseed-English section catalogs Lushootseed word-building structures, and entries exemplify each prefix, suffix, and root. The English-Lushootseed section features encyclopedic entries on many culturally significant topics such as Native cano