Title: Northwest Coast Indian | History, Art, Region, Facts, Religion, & Culture | Britannica
Headings: Northwest Coast Indian
Northwest Coast Indian
people
Top Questions
Which Native American peoples lived in the Pacific Northwest?
Where did the Northwest Coast Indian people live?
What was the social structure of Northwest Coast Indian society?
How did the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast get their food?
What kind of homes did the Northwest Coast Indians live in?
Traditional culture patterns
Linguistic and territorial organization

Content: Traditional culture patterns: Subsistence, settlement patterns, and housing
Salmon
Learn more about the Pacific salmon, which provided sustenance for the Northwest Coast Indians. What kind of homes did the Northwest Coast Indians live in? The dwellings of the Northwest Coast Indians were rectilinear structures that were built of timber or planks and, except for those in northwestern California, were usually quite large, as the members of a corporate “house” typically lived together in one building. In the houses of the Wakashan province, huge cedar posts with side beams and ridgepoles constituted a permanent framework to which were attached wall planks and roof planks that could be taken down, loaded onto canoes, and transported from one site to another. Read more below: Traditional culture patterns: Subsistence, settlement patterns, and housing
Longhouse
Learn how longhouses, the dwellings of the Northeast Indians, were different from the homes of the Northwest Coast Indians. The Northwest Coast was the most sharply delimited culture area of native North America. It covered a long narrow arc of Pacific coast and offshore islands from Yakutat Bay, in the northeastern Gulf of Alaska, south to Cape Mendocino, in present-day California.