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Wayne P. Suttles (1918-2005) was an ethnographer of the Northwest Coast people, especially the Coast Salish, from the mid-1940s and began linguistic work in the mid-1950s. Suttles was an editor of the Handbook of North American Indians, and testified as an expert witness in several legal cases relating to Native rights in both Washington State and British Columbia. His 2004 grammar of the Musqueam language was an important addition to Salish studies.

Wayne Suttles (1918-2005) was a leading authority on the ethnology and linguistics of the Coast Salish people. He grew up on a dairy farm in Bothell, Washington before attending the University of Washington and majoring in anthropology. While attending UW, Suttles met and married fellow anthropology major, Shirley Smith, later known as essayist and children’s author Lesley Conger.

In 1941 Suttles was recruited into the U.S. Navy’s Japanese language program and served as a Naval Japanese Language Officer in Okinawa. He did field research for the National Research Council and kept field notes on Okinawan culture and language, which he later used in further research with Canadian-Okinawan immigrants.

Suttles returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1946 and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington, where he was a student of Erna Gunther, Melville Jacobs, Viola Garfield, and Verne Ray. His field research with residents of the Swinomish and Lummi reservations and Saanich and Songhees reserves informed his dissertation “The Economic Life of the Coast Salish of Haro and Rosario Straits.” Like his Boasian predecessors, Suttles focused on both ethnography and linguistics to understand historical culture, but endeavored to understand how contemporary Salish culture evolved and continues to change. He insisted that Salish worldviews must be placed in the forefront and that Western-imposed categories often misrepresented Indigenous culture.

Suttles held teaching positions at the University of British Columbia (1952-1963), University of Nevada-Reno (1963-1966) and Portland State University (1966-1985), and continued to research Salish languages and culture, producing papers on Northwest Coast natural resources, potlatch practices, and art. In 1971 he took on the project of editing the Handbook of North American Indians on the Northwest Coast , which was published in 1990. Another major project was Suttles’s work with Musqueam and Katzie speakers of the Halkomelem (Halq'emeylem) language, culminating in Musqueam Reference Grammar in 2004. His extensive research and knowledge of the Pacific Northwest regional history was also used to assist Indigenous communities in asserting land use claims and fishing rights, of which Sparrow v. The Queen et al, was a landmark case in British Columbia.

Sources: Obituary by Aldona Jonaitis in American Anthropologist , Seattle Times obituary, Shirley Suttles obituary