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The Nez Perce's name for themselves was Nee-me-poo, which means simply "the People." This is perhaps the most common self-designation of aboriginal peoples the world over.
Nez Perce couple (c. 1900)
University of Washington Digital Collections
The Nez Perce territory at the time of Lewis and Clark was approximately 17,000,000 acres (69,000 km²). It covered parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, in an area surrounding the Snake River and the Clearwater River. The Nez Perce, like many western Native AmericanNative Americans (also Indians Aboriginal Peoples American Indians First Nations Alaskan Natives or Indigenous Peoples of America are the indigenous inhabitants of Americas prior to the European colonization, and their modern descendants. This term compri tribes, were migratory and would travel with the seasons, according to where the most abundant food was to be found at a given time of year. They were known go as far east as the Great PlainsThe Great Plains or High Plains are the elevated plains which lie east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States of America and Canada, covering the states of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and No, hunting buffalo and fishing for salmonThis article is about the fish. For the color, see salmon (color). Salmon is the common name for several species of fish of the Salmonidae family. Several other fishes in the family are called trout. Salmon live in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. They relied heavily on quamashQuamash is a native American term for the bulb which was gathered and used as a food source by native tribes in the Pacific Northwest. The bulbs were harvested and pit-roasted or boiled by women of the Nez Perce, Cree, and Blackfoot tribes. It also helped or camasCamassia is a genus of the Liliaceae (Lily family). Common names Camas Wild hyacinth Indian hyacinth Quamash Species Camassia angusta Prairie Camas Camassia cusickii Cusick's Camas (occurs in Eastern Oregon) Camassia howellii Howell's Camas Camassia leich gathered in the region between the Salmon and Clearwater River drainages as a food source.
Probably the best known leader of the Nez Perce was Chief JosephChief Joseph ( 1840 September 21, 1904) was a Nez Perce Chief, humanitarian, and peacemaker, best known for his principled resistance to the U. government's attempts to force the Nez Perce onto a reservation. Chief Joseph was born in the Wallowa Valley of, who led his people in their struggle to retain their identity in the face of American encroachments on their land.
The Nez Perce language is a branch of the Sahaptian (spelled -ian) family, which also includes several dialects of Sahaptin (spelled -in). Together, these languages are grouped into the larger Penutian family, which also includes languages such as Cayuse, Klamath, and Chinookan. The organization of this linguistic family can be compared to often more familiar examples such as the Indo-European or Romance families, though presumably Penutian is in no way historically related to Indo-European languages.
The grammar of Nez Perce has been described in the dissertations of Noel Rude (University of Oregon, 1985) and Harold David Crook (UCLA, 1999), in a grammar by Haruo Aoki (University of California Press, 1975) and a dictionary by Haruo Aoki (University of California Press, 1999).
What follows is a brief non-technical overview of Nez Perce grammar.
In Nez Perce, the subject of a sentence and the object can each be marked with a morpheme called a case-marker. This tells whether the word in question is the subject or the object. (This strategy of differentiating subject from object is found in most languages; consider English 'I', a subject only, versus 'me', an object.) Nez Perce employs a strategy called three-way case-marking; this means that a transitive subject, transitive object, and intransitive subject are all marked differently.
Because Nez Perce subjects and objects carry morphemes revealing their function in the sentence, the word order can be quite free. For example, in English one says "I saw him" but not "I him saw," "him I saw," "him saw I," "saw I him," or "saw him I"; in Nez Perce, one may say the equivalent of any of these. The word order tells what is new information (focus) versus old information (topic), but it does not tell which noun is subject and which is object, unlike in English.
A Nez Perce verb can have the meaning of an entire sentence in English. (This manner of providing a great deal of information in one word is called 'polysynthesis'.) Verbal morphemes provide information about the person and number of the subject and object, as well as tense and aspect (whether or not an action has been completed, e.g.). In fact, so much information is provided by the verb that nouns can often be left out of sentences. The example "I saw him" would probably be translated as one word, a verb, whose morphemes would be the equivalent of I-him-see-past.
The phonology of Nez Perce includes a phenomenon known as vowel harmony, as well as a complex stress system described by Crook (1999).
Nez Perce is a highly endangered language. While sources differ on the exact number of fluent speakers, it is almost definitely under 100. The Nez Perce tribe is endeavoring to reintroduce the language into native usage through a revitalization program, though at present the future of the Nez Perce language is far from assured.
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