When you look at the indigenous names of buildings 24 and 32 on campus, they are more than just names. They have a story to tell and a message to send. 

Both names are in Salish, which is the language spoken by the Spokane tTribe.

Pauline Flett, who passed away in 2020, was the one who named building 24 sn-w’ey’-mn. The name roughly translates to “a place of commerce”. Flett worked hard to document the language as well as teaching Salish. 

For building 32, the school president reached out to Sulustu (Barry Moses), the Program Manager for the N3 Pilot Program and Executive Director of Spokane Language House as well as an alumnus of SFCC, while the building was being built. The president told Moses that the building would be a place for the arts, creativity, connecting to nature, and honoring the Spokane tribe and the land.

“I suggested to her that I would come up with maybe 5 or 6 different possible names and then I would put their translations and I would put annunciations and maybe I would give a backstory to what each one of them means,” said Moses. “To my understanding, the reason the board chose the name sƛ̓x̣etkʷ is the closest thing to Spokane Falls that’s in our language.”

The name sƛ̓x̣etkʷ has a long history in Spokane that goes back before colonization. It translates to “fast water” or “white water rapids”. 

Before dams, the Spokane River used to be called sƛ̓x̣etkʷ by the natives because it was all fast moving water. The name eventually evolved to reference specifically the falls in current downtown Spokane. sƛ̓x̣etkʷ then became what the tribe called Spokane. 

“It’s important to have buildings that the names represent the different original lands of the people around, whether it’s Spokane names or CDA,” said Darlene Rickett, one of the advisors of SFCC’s Red Nations club. “We want the idea of acknowledgement to go beyond just saying it, but showing it in other ways and another way to show it is to have buildings that are representing names of the languages.”

Mark Ramos is the Indigenous Outreach & Support Manager at SFCC and has been chipping away at learning Salish. When you look at the art building’s name, you will notice symbols that are unrecognizable to English speakers.

“They are indicators on how the word is supposed to sound,” Ramos said.

When choosing the name, Moses cautioned the school board of the difficulty of the pronunciation and making a watered down version of the name along with the original pronunciation. But Moses believes that making the name more accessible to the general public will lead to conversation rather than barriers.

It may seem like just a name, but it goes deeper than that. 

When traveling to foreign countries that speak a different language, most people try to learn the basics of the language in order to properly communicate. 

“We as visitors have to conform ourselves to those places and we have to conform ourselves to the language of place. That has been almost totally erased from Spokane. Colonization is a deeply traumatic (and) painful thing. If we’re really honest about it, we can’t undo it. We can’t send everybody back. We can’t undo the city that was built here. We can’t undo the college that was built here. But we can go back and honor the language of place.”

There are people trying to preserve the Salish language and keep it alive. So even though the two Salish building names on the SFCC campus are simple ways of honoring the language, it is a step in the right direction of healing.

“My elders and my ancestors would say that the language itself is a spirit. By taking things and honoring the spirit that is indigenous to here is a way for all of us, regardless of race or backround, we all have the opportunity to honor and respect the spirit. It doesn’t erase the trauma of colonization. It doesn’t change the past, but in a way it feels to me like it helps to restore some dignity of the spirit of this place. We’re all here together now and that’s not going to change; we have to find a way to communicate, get along, and to move forward.” 

For any questions or comments on this story, please contact Alycia Love at sfcc.alycia.love@gmail.com.