New study finds 20 different Native names for Mount Rainier. Here’s how to say them

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.

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 taxuma 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 taxuma, 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 taxuma also applies to other mountains, because these mountains have flowing waters that provide sustenance for the land and all living things, as well.”

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. ”

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.”

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.