Chinook/Salish Style Knives

The Mobile Museum is excited to add two of these three Lower Columbia River Chinook/Salish First Nation style replica knives created by Steve Alley 2018 to the mobile Museum educational displays and tours.

The middle one with the maple handle is probably the most accurate example with classic Tsagiglalal, “She Who Watches” motif carving still looks out across the Columbia River from the basalt cliff where she was painted by Chinookan People somewhere between the years 1700 and 1840. The other two knives have yew wood handles and traditional agate blades.

This spectacular pictograph was created using mineral pigments pulverized from rock.

Chinookan peoples include several groups of indigenous First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest in the United States who speak the Chinookan languages. In the early 19th century, the Chinookan-speaking peoples resided along the Lower and Middle Columbia River from the river’s gorge downstream to the river’s mouth, and along adjacent portions of the coasts, from Tillamook Bay of present-day Oregon in the south, north to Willapa Bay in southwest Washington. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark Expedition encountered the Chinook tribe on the lower Columbia. The name ″Chinook″ came from a Chehalis word Tsinúk for the inhabitants of and a particular village site on Baker Bay.