page_title: Nez Perce people
section_title: Name and history
hierarchical_section_title: Nez Perce people / Name and history
caption_attribution_description: Català: Infant nez percé, 1911 (1900?). Deutsch: Baby der Nez Percé, Edward Curtis, 1911. fixiertes indianisches Baby, 1910. English: Nez Perce baby, 1911. A traditional Nez Perce cradleboard (1911). Native American baby of the Nez Perce tribe, photographed by Edward S. Curtis, 1911. A child carrier, especially ones resembling those of Native Americans, is sometimes referred to as a Papoose. Español: Niño nez percé (1911). Français&#160;: Enfant Nez-Percé, 1911. Bébé dans un berceau. Porte-bébé amérindien (nez-percé). Português: Bebê Nez Percê, 1911. Türkçe: Nez Perce bebeği, 1911. 中文: 內茲佩爾塞人的嬰兒，攝於1911年.
context_page_description: The Nez Perce are an Indigenous people of the Plateau who have lived on the Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest region for at least 11,500 years.
  Members of the Sahaptin language group, the Niimíipuu were the dominant people of the Columbia Plateau for much of that time, especially after acquiring the horses that led them to breed the appaloosa horse in the 18th century.
  Prior to "first contact" with Western civilization the Nimiipuu were economically and culturally influential in trade and war, interacting with other indigenous nations in a vast network from the western shores of Oregon and Washington, the high plains of Montana, and the northern Great Basin in southern Idaho and northern Nevada.
  French explorers and trappers indiscriminately used and popularized the name "Nez Percé" for the Niimíipuu and nearby Chinook. The name translates as "pierced nose", but only the Chinook used that form of body modification.
  Today they are a federally recognized tribe, the Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, and govern their Indian reservation in Idaho through a central government headquartered in Lapwai, Idaho known as the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee.
context_section_description: Their name for themselves is Nimíipuu (pronounced [nimiːpuː]), meaning, "The People", in their language, part of the Sahaptin family.
  Nez Percé is an exonym given by French Canadian fur traders who visited the area regularly in the late 18th century, meaning literally "pierced nose". English-speaking traders and settlers adopted the name in turn. Since the late 20th century, the Nez Perce identify most often as Niimíipuu in Sahaptin. The Lakota/ Dakota named them the Watopala, or Canoe people, from Watopa. However, after Nez Perce became a more common name, they changed it to Watopahlute. This comes from pahlute, nasal passage and is simply a play on words. If translated literally, it would come out as either "Nasal Passage of the Canoe" (Watopa-pahlute) or "Nasal Passage of the Grass" (Wato-pahlute). The Assiniboine called them Pasú oȟnógA wįcaštA, the Arikara sinitčiškataríwiš. The tribe also uses the term "Nez Perce", as does the United States Government in its official dealings with them, and contemporary historians. Older historical ethnological works and documents use the French spelling of Nez Percé, with the diacritic. The original French pronunciation is [ne pɛʁse], with three syllables.
  The interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition mistakenly identified this people as the Nez Perce when the team encountered the tribe in 1805. Writing in 1889, anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who the U.S. government had sent to Idaho to allot the Nez Perce Reservation, explained the mistaken naming. She wrote,
  It is never easy to come at the name of an Indian or even of an Indian tribe. A tribe has always at least two names; one they call themselves by and one by which they are known to other tribes. All the tribes living west of the Rocky Mountains were called "Chupnit-pa-lu", which means people of the pierced noses; it also means emerging from the bushes or forest; the people from the woods. The tribes on the Columbia river used to pierce the nose and wear in it some ornament as you have seen some old fashioned white ladies wear in their ears. Lewis and Clark had with them an interpreter whose wife was a Shoshone or Snake woman and so it came about that when it was asked "What Indians are these?" the answer was "They are 'Chupnit-pa-lu'" and it was written down in the journal; spelled rather queerly, for white people's ears do not always catch Indian tones and of course the Indians could not spell any word.
  In his journals, William Clark referred to the people as the Chopunnish /ˈtʃoʊpənɪʃ/, a transliteration of a Sahaptin term. According to D.E. Walker in 1998, writing for the Smithsonian, this term is an adaptation of the term cú·pŉitpeľu (the Nez Perce people). The term is formed from cú·pŉit (piercing with a pointed object) and peľu (people). By contrast, the Nez Perce Language Dictionary has a different analysis than did Walker for the term cúpnitpelu. The prefix cú- means "in single file". This prefix, combined with the verb -piní, "to come out (e.g. of forest, bushes, ice)". Finally, with the suffix of -pelú, meaning "people or inhabitants of". Together, these three elements: cú- + -piní + pelú = cúpnitpelu, or "the People Walking Single File Out of the Forest". Nez Perce oral tradition indicates the name "Cuupn'itpel'uu" meant "we walked out of the woods or walked out of the mountains" and referred to the time before the Nez Perce had horses.
caption: Nez Perce baby in cradleboard, 1911
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