This volume introduces the oral literature of Native American peoples in Puget Salish-speaking areas of western Washington. Seven stories told by Lushootseed elders are transcribed and translated into English, accompanied by information on narrative design and cultural background. Upper Skagit elder and cotranslator Vi Hilbert, a 1994 recipient of the NEH National Heritage Fellowship in Folk Arts, includes a cultural welcome and offers childhood reminiscences of the storytellers. Cotranslator Thomas M. Hess, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Victoria, parses the beginning lines of a text to show the grammatical structures; he also includes his recollections of working with the storytellers in the 1960s as a graduate student. Editor and cotranslator Crisca Bierwert, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, provides information on the processes of language translation and of rendering oral traditions into written form. Annotator T. C. S. Langen, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature and is a curriculum developer for the Tulalip tribe, provides analyses of Lushootseed poetics. The book includes information about purchasing audiotapes of the stories.

A celebration of western Washington Native language and culture, Lushootseed Dictionary is a completely reformatted and greatly revised and expanded update of Thom Hess's Dictionary of Puget Salish (1976). Editor Dawn Bates integrates the field notes of Vi Hilbert, Upper Skagit elder and native speaker of Lushootseed, with Hess's analyses, mining information gathered by Hilbert and Hess from Skagit, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, Swinomish, Puyallup, and other Native consultants over a period of thirty years. The dictionary includes numerous example sentences taken from Lushootseed's rich tradition of storytelling, made popular by Hilbert's book Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound and her public storytelling career. The introduction to the Lushootseed-English section catalogs Lushootseed word-building structures, and entries exemplify each prefix, suffix, and root. The English-Lushootseed section features encyclopedic entries on many culturally significant topics such as Native canoe classifications and animal names. Scientific classifications are included for botanical terms, and cultural information makes the volume interesting for the nonlinguist. An extensive introduction explains the structure of entries and provides clear definitions of grammatical terms. A detailed description of the sounds of Lushootseed will be invaluable for learners of the language. The traditional dictionary format is readable and economical, resulting in a volume of manageable size. Lushootseed Dictionary is intended for use by a diverse readership which includes Lushootseed speakers and their families, people of Lushootseed heritage unfamiliar with the language, linguists, folklorists, and thoseinterested in oral literature and the Native culture of Washington State.