ABSTRACT. Determiners in Coast Salish languages distinguish gender and most grammars describe this as a natural gender system: feminine determiners are used on female humans and animals while masculine determiners are used as the default. However, my fieldwork on the Island dialect of Halkomelem shows that feminine gender "leaks" on to hundreds of inanimate objects. The use of feminine gender forms a complex semantic network selecting objects on the basis of their size, shape, and function. Unlike gender/class systems in the more familiar languages of Europe and Africa, where the gender of a noun is selected once and for all and then lexicalized, the selection of gender in Halkomelem is subject to variation based on the cognitive setting and the pragmatics of the context. The study of texts shows that some of the factors involved are the sex of the speaker, the sex of the possessor of the noun, and the individuation of the noun. In sum, the Halkomelem gender system is used by speakers to express their viewpoint on a situation.