Salish School of Spokane to begin construction on new Spokane River campus, unveils new name after language pioneer

May 21-When Salish School of Spokane Founder LaRae Wiley set out to learn the endangered indigenous language of her ancestors, she didn't go at it alone.

It would be easy to feel that way, trying to learn the language with only a few fluent Salish speakers left alive, most of them elders. Still, she knew she had to preserve the language while she had the chance.

In 2005, one such elder opened her home to Wiley and her husband Chris Parkin, co-founder of the school, for two years of immersion of Colville-Okanogan Salish. The couple moved in with Sarah "Sʔamtícaʔ" (Sam-teet-sa) Peterson in her home in British Columbia, becoming fluent themselves and going on to found the school to rear a new generation of fluent Salish speakers.

Sʔamtícaʔ not only taught the pair, but helped write curriculum for the school, recorded audio and was there for Wiley through the daunting task until she died in 2021.

"Her timeless effort and encouragement has made it possible for everything that we do at Salish School of Spokane," Wiley said. "We listen to her recordings, her voice, every single day. We get to sing with her every single day. She just had a wonderful sense of humor, just an amazing work ethic."

On Thursday, five years to the day since she died, Wiley, some of the school's pupils and family of Sʔamtícaʔ broke ground on the future campus of the Salish school along the Spokane River.

As they did so, with a traditional root digging stick called a picha, Wiley announced the name of the school and cultural center building: "Sʔamtícaʔ Iʔ snmamáyaʔtns," (Sam-teet-sa Ees-sem-ah-mai-eh-tens) or "Sʔamtícaʔ's School" in English, in honor of their "grand teacher," Wiley said.

"We just can't say enough about Sʔamtícaʔ. She was our teacher and mentor, and our guide for how to be a good human being, and she was a true organic genius," Parkin said at the ceremony. "She did not have an easy life, but she had such strength of character, such beautiful values."

Such values included an untenable kindness, said her granddaughter Shannon Terbasket, 31, who shed tears describing what her matriarch meant to her. The family traveled from Canada to attend the celebration.

"It doesn't cost anything to be nice," she said. "You never know what anyone's going through, so just be nice."

Construction will start on the new Sʔamtícaʔ Iʔ snmamáyaʔtns in the coming weeks, founders said, having raised $15 million of the $17.5 million needed for the project from a combination of government grants, individual donors and partnerships.

The two buildings, school and cultural community center, will be ready to enroll students by fall of 2027, Parkin said.

The private, nonprofit immersion school teaches around 50 kids from preschool to eighth grade entirely in Colville-Okanagan Salish, currently at their school off Maple Street. It also enrolls 70 adults in an immersion program. The new building will have more capacity that will double the number of pupils served and expand to teach up to 12th grade, said board President Randall Schleuffer, a Coeur d'Alene tribal member.

"After construction, we will replant the campus with our traditional food and medicine plants. We'll have outdoor facilities for drying meat, tanning hides, and weaving tule," Schleuffer said. "Our kids will be able to step out the back door and into a 30-acre protected forest that surrounds this property. That forest will be filled with the sounds of drums and songs, and this will be our biggest classroom."

The land itself, a lush 3.4 acre swath along the Spokane River at 2720 W. Elliott Drive, was donated to the school as a reparations gift from Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington.

The reason Salish, and many other Indigenous languages, is endangered is largely because of a forced erasure from Indigenous boarding schools. Indigenous children were taken from their homes by the thousands to be abused in the schools, stripped of cultural identifiers like use of their language.

The federal government operated over 400 of these schools, as did religious groups. The Catholic Church operated the most of any religious group, according to a 2022 report from the United States Department of the Interior.

Boarding schools were prevalent in the U.S. and Canada from the 1800s to the 1970s, and survivors were often too traumatized to retain their languages, much less teach them to future generations.

That was the case in Saʔmtícaʔ's family. A boarding school survivor herself; it was too painful to teach Salish to her own children, said her oldest son Wayne "Hondo" Terbasket, 71.

"Even our uncle, they were told not to speak Indian to us, they were told by residential schools not to do it," he said. "We lost that, but it's slowly coming back with our younger kids."

"It's my loss," Wayne Terbasket said of not knowing Salish, though he knows his mother is beaming seeing her legacy come to fruition in an almost unbelievable way.

"My heart is full. It's really good to be here. I couldn't be more proud," Shannon Terbasket said tearfully. "I'm sure she's here right now, and just so happy. So happy to see her hard work paid off, and for the language to survive and keep going on for the next seven generations."

Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.

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This story was originally published May 22, 2026 at 8:11 AM.