Emic views of Chinuk Wawa
George Bundy Wasson, Jr. (image credit: The World)
“Growing Up Indian: An Emic Perspective” by Coquille Tribe elder George Bundy Wasson, Jr. is a PhD dissertation that he wrote at the University of Oregon, 2001.
Wasson’s unconventional “insider view” dissertation has lots to recommend it, and of course I’m not going to do it full justice here because my focus is limited to language history. Read the whole thing at the link above.
I’m here mainly to point you to his discussions of Chinuk Wawa, on page 57 (in passing) and pages 80-96 in more depth. From the latter section, I want to highlight a couple of ideas that are new contributions by Wasson.
On pages 93-94, he quotes his father’s “personal unpublished papers on Oregon Indians’ land claims” (1916-1947) for the notion that the name of the Molalla Indians is actually Jargon (compare my recent post):
There was no such language as the Molalla language, there were no Molel Indians. Molallas in the Chinook language means ‘berries’ — Huckle berries or Sabbath berries. … [Some writers use “Olallie” as a generic term for berries.] … These Indians were known as Molallas or Huckle Berry Indians by the tribe of Indians who spoke the Chinook Jargon language. These same bands of Indians were known among their own people, the Klamath, as Chuck-Sum-Kanay, or Sabbath Berry bands, the people who lived where the Sabbath Berries grew.
[Wasson Jr. goes on:] It seems that in 1856, when General Joel Palmer rounded up Indians in the Willamette Valley, the “Huckle Berry” band of Klamaths were camping in the valley picking berries, nad were taken away with the Calapooias to Grand Ronde, where they were just called “Mollalas,” (or Huckle Berries) as usual.
And on page 95, Wasson credits the inspiration of his half-Aleut aunt for the idea that Chinuk Wawa’s word for ‘fence’ is originally Russian:
As I scanned the word list I noticed a word definition of, “a fence; a corral; enclosure.” To my surprise, I saw the Jargon word was Kul-lagh’ (Long 1909:33). It sounded so very familiar, but, not as an English or French word. By reversing ‘k’ to ‘g’ it became startlingly clear that the origin must have been the Russian word gulag, which means camp, prison, or enclosure (see also “corral,” Long 1909:10; “fence,” Long 1909:13).
That would be nice. The lack of Russian, Hawaiian or Spanish words in Chinook Wawa is interesting in itself. But I think this work does have a Chinook or Chehalis origin?
Oh, that’s embarrassing. GULag is an acronym no older than the Soviet camps themselves. The very first footnote of the English Wikipedia article is:
To be honest, though, I’m still getting used to having the world’s knowledge at my fingertips myself.
I am kinda puzzled – I mean the Molalla Indians didn’t call themselves Molallas – I forget at the moment what their own word was for themselves, but I have seen it – and they did seem to have a good trading network with the Klamaths. But they were a distinct people and language. In fact I have heard there is a group at Grand Ronde working on all extant Molalla materials right now – which is pretty neat! Also the Smithsonian has online 6 recordings JP Harrington’s assistant Jack Marr made of a Molalla speaker I think in 1941 (or around that time). I think it was one of the Yelkes family from Grand Ronde.
Also, peaking in GR’s Chinuk Wawa dictionary, for fence they have q’ǝlax which Zenk traced back to Lower Chehalis word for fence.
There are no known Russian words in Chinuk Wawa, if you ask linguists. There are one or two of Spanish origin, although they’re likely to have come via Mississippi Valley/Métis French, such as Grand Ronde’s kabréys for something like a lariat, from New World Spanish cabestro. The only Hawaiian-origin items ever said to be Chinuk Wawa are really the place names “Hawai’i” and “Oahu”, and the Polynesian word Kanaka, whose /k/ sounds suggest the possibility of a source not in Hawaiian but in the broader South Seas Pidgin that Emanuel Drechsel recently published a book about.
Centuries ago, Proto-Salish already had *q̓əlx̣, *q̓lax̣ ‘fence, enclosure’, I imagine referring at least to technologies of “funneling” prey like deer into a place where they’re more easily killed. There’s strong evidence that this word in Chinuk Wawa came from Lower Chehalis Salish.
Some excellent work on the Molalla language has been getting done in recent years. Nick Pharris’ linguistics dissertation comes to mind.
Henry Zenk and Bruce Rigsby’s “Handbook of North American Indians” article on the ethnic group indicates that “Molallas” is “said to be Clackamas (Chinookan) origin”. You know me, I find it interesting that the Clackamas word, which is muláliš, sure looks Salish in structure, i.e. a root shaped like mul (there are a number such all the way back to Proto-Salish), a “stem extender” -ál, and a “lexical suffix” -iš meaning ‘people’. Speculative, but it can be argued that the word looks more Salish than Chinookan.
My understanding of “emic” is that it one of its meanings can be “people’s understandings as participants in a culture, rather than outside observers”…
Adding: there seem to be a couple of Spanish words in British Columbia’s Chinuk Wawa usage, due to the presence of “packers” — people who hired out to transport your goods for you — of Mexican origin. We find mulo and/or mula for ‘mule’, and manta for a saddle blanket.