A discovery: “Boston name” + more Métis horse naming influence
Really truly and for sure, I recommend Geo. Gibbs’s 1877 “Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon” as a phenomenal, fun ethnographic read.
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“Stick shoes” loan-translated into Lushootseed, twice
In memory of the late Thom Hess.
1945: Skqee Mus letter from Nooksack country
On page xv of Robert Emmett Hawley’s book “Skqee Mus, or Pioneer Days on the Nooksack” (Bellingham, WA, 1945) is the following letter to the reader.
T’əmánəwas boards among Lower Chehalis + Chinooks
Like a number of other highly important cultural terms that Geo. Gibbs reports in his 1877 ethnography, I take it that the phrase “tamahno-ūs boards” was definitely Chinuk Wawa.
Alaska/BC Canadians/”French half-breeds” talking Chinook Jargon
Missionary S. Hall Young remembered plenty about his conversations with Canadian French speakers from originally fur-trade families in the area of Fort Stikine (Wrangell), Alaska, in the 1880s.
1914: LBDB’s “Chinook-English Songs”, part 2 of 15 “Nika Wake Shunta Ole Sante”
Being a longtime partisan of Chinook Jargon, it pains me to confess that the Chinooking of today’s song made it much worse than the touching original!
My attempt at a Siletz etymology for t’ísáy ‘stick game’
A word that I first learned from the wonderful 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa is t’isay ‘the many-stick gambling game; the bundle of sticks used in playing the many-stick game’.
Cayuse language implications for Chinuk Wawa?
The Molala (or “Molalla”, “Molale”, “Pole Alley” etc.) language too, maybe.
1858: Confirmed BC Métis French in the Cariboo
A remembered secondhand recollection of the Cariboo gold rush, from a man who became a Settler, confirms the presence of BC Métis French by a different name.
Lewis + Clark were real chiefs, Settlers are “but tilikum”
A fine little master class in the traditional distinction between táyí & tílixam…