“Nose-in-the-Soup”, a Grand Round Chinuk Wawa name?
File under ‘Chinook Jargon names’.
(There are lots.)
I wasn’t previously aware of Chief Nose-in-the-Soup.
His name looks like it could be:
- A mocking English nickname — I hope not.
- A representation of something natively Chinookan.
- Or of something natively łəw̓ál̓məš (Lower Chehalis Salish); it resembles a couple of place names in that language.
- Perhaps translating a Chinookan name, a Chinuk Wawa phrase that I’ll guess as nús kʰapa (la)súp ‘nose in the soup’.
For my readers here, the interesting possibility is this last one. I’ll elaborate in brief.
As a word for ‘soup’ the variant súp is definitely known in other regions’ Jargon, if not at Sháwash Iliʔi [Grand Ronde reservation community], where it means ‘soap’.
At GR, lasúp is typical as one of the synonyms for ‘soup’ or ‘stew’. If the name that this leader was known by was nús kʰapa lasúp, I can bring myself to suppose local English … and French Prairie’s French … speakers thought of him as ‘Nose in the Soup’ as opposed to ‘Nose in Soup’.
— The Portland Sunday Oregonian, May 13, 1906, page 11, column 4
Do any of you have further information about Chief Nose-in-the-Soup, or his daughter Mrs. Louisa Feliz-O’Chena, that might clarify this question?
This “O’Chena” reminds me of the prominent GR family name, Wacheno, if that’s a helpful lead…
Very odd. “FelizO’chena” sounds like it could be for someone from the Wacheno family of Grand Ronde. They were one of the Clackamas families on the reservation, and “Chinook” was often used historically for any and all Chinookans including the Clackamas. According to June Olson’s book (Living in the Great Circle, 2011:464-65), John Wacheno (of the same generation as Jacobs’s Clackamas informant, Victoria Howard; she had been married to one of his brothers, Dan Wacheno) had a son named Felix Wacheno, who died in 1906. Felix Wacheno’s wife was named Louise (aka Louise Wallace aka Washtali). So that much seems to sort of match. Then “nose in the soup” would have to be John Wacheno, for whom Jacobs recorded two Clackamas names: tsə́nwaɬ (Tsinwahlth), šnúngiya (Shnoongiya). A “mocking nickname” (related to one of those Clackamas names, or another?) would not be out of character for Whites writing during that time.
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Henry, hayu masi, I think you’ve identified the person and the probable tenor of the name. I’d suppose it’s more likely English than Chinuk Wawa, then. Quite a thing.
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And it now occurs to me that “Nose in the Soup” could have been meant as an allusion to John Wacheno’s alcoholism, which was well known both within and without the Indian community. ?Something like: “Down in the Sauce.”
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I’m not finding “soup” as American English slang for “alcohol” yet, but there’s the fairly old expression “in the soup” meaning “in trouble”, dating back at least to 1888. Maybe it amounts to a different way of referring to the same situation for a reservation Indian?
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A small related point of interest is that in the Oregon City area there was, from about the 1880s and lasting several decades, a “Wacheno Lodge” chapter of the nationwide fraternal organization named the Improved Order of Red Men or IORM.
There are lots of mentions of that, and a little bit of information about John and Foster Wacheno’s family, when you search Historic Oregon Newspapers for “Wacheno”, “Wachino”, “Wachine”, etc.
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