Needle-hearted Coeur d’Alenes, a Native metaphor?
A sort of speculative piece for you today…
(Image credit: TodayIFoundOut.com)
tsiĥ-tomtom ‘shrewd’ is in Father St Onge’s Chinuk Wawa dictionary manuscript of 1892. That’s literally ‘sharp-heart’. In modern Grand Ronde tribal spelling it would be tsíx-tə́mtəm, although it’s not in their dictionary. This phrase got me thinking.
It brings to mind the north Idaho tribal name “Coeur d’Alene“, famously said to come from French “heart of an awl” and connoting that Salish group’s acuity in bargaining. Hmm.
A question I hadn’t considered before — exactly who called the tribe that? This is not the native Coeur d’Alene name for themselves…in their Salish language it’s snchitsu’umsh. And most of their neighbors know them by that name. Which has nothing to do with hearts; it means ‘the ones who were discovered’.
- Could CdA (as we sometimes say locally, when we’re abbreviating what’s locally pronounced “Korda Lane”) be a translation from a Native metaphor?
- Or did French-Canadians in the fur trade use such expressions?
- Both could be the case, of course.
I have not found such an expression elsewhere in Chinuk Wawa, having searched the usual pile of reference materials. That’s a little surprising because the Jargon famously has a lot of idioms involving kinds of ‘heart’. I realize they’re not cross-indexed under tə́mtəm in your Grand Ronde dictionary so maybe you haven’t quite grasped the range of its uses, so here are some for you:
- sáx̣ali-tə́mtəm literally ‘high-heart’ ‘feeling good, in good humor; awake’ (Kamloops usage: ‘arrogant’)
- sík-tə́mtəm literally ‘hurting-heart’ ‘sorry, sad’
- ɬúsh-tə́mtəm literally ‘good-heart’ ‘be glad, in good humor, happy’
- iht tomtom literally ‘one heart’ (Kamloops) ‘in agreement; resolved’
- mokst tomtom literally ‘two hearts’ (Kamloops) ‘dubious, doubt’
- ayu tomtom literally ‘many hearts’ (Kamloops) ‘confused’
- iktas tomtom literally ‘belongings-heart’ (Kamloops) ‘materialistic’
There are plenty more. Not just in the Jargon, but in the Native languages.
I suspect a lot of the Native “heart” metaphors escaped documentation in the various languages. For example, just three or so of these are to be found under ‘think ( /heart)’ in the Upper Chehalis Salish dictionary:
- ‘good-hearted’
- ‘brave person’ (literally ‘big/grown-up heart’)
- ‘bad character’ (‘bad heart’)
But the languages that we have anything like actual usage data from confirm that ‘heart’ metaphors were common. Look in Boas’s [Lower Chinookan language] “Chinook Texts” book, searching for ‘heart’, and you see quite a variety of these expressions (I’m just giving literal translations to keep this simple):
- ‘not good Bluejay his heart’ (page 12)
- ‘tired gets my heart’ (page 12)
- ‘my heart lonesome it got’ (page 22)
- ‘dry became his heart’ (page 71)
- ‘liberal his heart’ (page 267)
Could coeur d’alène have been a set expression beforehand in French? I’m not the expert but I put in some effort searching Google with the language settings changed to French, and I come away with the impression that the phrase first shows up in reference to the tribe. Maybe one of my francophone readers can contribute some wisdom.
Well, I haven’t definitively proven anything with this exercise, but my contribution today is a hypothesis that “Coeur d’Alene” is more a Native metaphor than a French one.
I looked up “cœur” in the TLFI, looking for phrases beginning with “cœur de …”. There are many such phrases (the entry itself is huge), some of them followed by names of animals or hard substances (like “cœur de pierre” ‘heart of stone’), but absolutely NONE comparing a heart to a tool. “Une alène” is not just any needle (certainly not that of a syringe), it is a thick, strong shoemaker’s or saddler’s tool, straight or curved, with a specially shaped, thickened working end, used to pierce holes in leather. So “cœur d’alène” may have been invented in the fur trade context, perhaps with a semantic convergence of French and indigenous metaphors.
I’m with you, “awl” seems awfully specific. The metaphor seems most plausible to me (regardless of its source language) as connoting the fur-trade milieu, which I imagine was the locus where awls were most salient. To be “awl-hearted” could be either to be a “sharp” bargainer (which the Chinuk Wawa idiom suggests) or to have one’s “heart set on” awls (which would parallel other expressions like chikmin tomtom [moneygrubbing] and iktas tomtom [materialistic]).
I had forgotten the word “awl’ but if I had remembered it I might not have described the tool in order to make the meaning of “alène” crystal clear.
The French structure could only mean “(having a) heart like an awl” (very hard, sharp and unbendable). In your examples you used “awl-hearted” which would translate the French, but not “money-hearted” which would suggest ‘having a heart made of money’. ‘Having one’s heart set on awls’ could be “awl-loving’, the latter morphologically possible in English, but not as semantically plausible as “money-loving” and “material things-loving”, beside not being compatible with the French structure and its meaning.
I had forgotten the word “awl’ but if I had remembered it I might not have described the tool in order to make the meaning of “alène” crystal clear.
The French structure could only mean “(having a) heart like an awl” (very hard, sharp and unbendable). In your examples you used “awl-hearted” which would translate the French, but not “money-hearted” which would suggest ‘having a heart made of money’. ‘Having one’s heart set on awls’ could be “awl-loving’, the latter morphologically possible in English, but not as semantically plausible as “money-loving” and “material things-loving”, besides not being compatible with the French structure and its meaning.
Apart from the possible use of awls in dealing with animal skins, they would also have been indispensable for making and repairing objects made of thick leather like saddles, belts (for people and horses) and shoes, among other things.
Whoa! Or wow! When did the Boas Lower Chinook texts become searchable? Does it search Chnook too, or just the recognizable English?
Can you type in that crazy Chinook alphabet??
Best call it Boasian. I’m sure some cool code dude could easily work it out now but the challenge of entering all that code and then searching texts in non-qwerty was way too daunting in my time, back when foreign fonts were all jerry-rigged. Putting together just a short glossary even as recently as the 90s was a typographical nightmare. Hence my delight at this new e-version.
🙂 I’m fortunate enough to have been provided an electronic Boasian keyboard, and have used it on a big pile of data…but it’s still a pain in the tuchys to juggle all those symbols!
I would be very interested in getting an electronic Basin keyboard, as he used pretty much the same characters in all his transcriptions.
With at least one exception: for “Tsimshian” he uses “L” for the lateral Fricative, but for other languages he uses it for the lateral Affricate, as I discovered to my surprise and disgust!
Sorry, I meant “Boasian” of course, but the computer changed it to “Basin” before I noticed.
Confoundedly complicated as the Transcription Key in Mithun, The Languages of Native North America, pp. xiii-xv demonstrates. There Boas is set alongside AAA, Sapir et al, the Handbook standard of 1996 and IPA. Is that “keyboard” you have Dave, a piece of software loadable into Mac?
That’s what I need too, a piece of software loadable into a Mac.
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