User:Tristy Goetz/sandbox

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Kiksht is a dialect of a larger family of Upper Chinook languages historically spoken in the US Pacific Northwest. The other languages that once belonged to the Upper Chinook family besides Kiksht have become extinct, due to this Kiksht is sometimes referred to as Columbia Chinook, Wasco-Wishram, and Upper Chinook.

Inside the Warm Springs Reservation we can find the Wascoe, Warm Springs and the Paiute tribes. All three have their own separate language which is Kiksht for the Wascoe, Sahaptin for the Warm Springs and Shoshonean for the Paiutes. The Wascoe band acquired most of their food from fishing and trading with the Warm Springs which did a lot of game hunting and scavenging. Having two separate languages did not stop these two tribes from trading heavily. Contact with the Paiute band was very little until their members were forced to leave the Yakama Reservation and move into the the Warm Springs Reservation in 1879. In 1990 Kiksht had 69 speakers, of whom 7 were monolingual: five Wasco and two Wishram. In 2001, there were five remaining speakers of Wasco. The last fluent speaker of the Wasco-Wishram dialect, Madeline Brunoe Mclnturff, died on 11 July 2006. The last fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012. Thompson had been honored for her work by the Oregon Legislature in 2007.

Though there are no longer any fluent speakers from birth, Kiksht continues to be studied and spoken in several areas. Two new speakers of Kiksht headed a revival movement teaching Kiksht at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in 2006. Similarly the Northwest Indian Language Institute of the University of Oregon formed a partnership to teach Kiksht and Numu languages in the Warm Springs school district. Audio and video files of Kiksht are also preserved and available within the Endangered Languages Archive.