More evidence of Chinuk Wawa as early as Lewis & Clark?
Ecola Creek (image credit: Trip Advisor)
Sometimes you revisit something you’ve read many times, and see it in a fresh way.
Many researchers have read this particular source, but I want to highlight one paragraph and re-discuss it:
— from George Gibbs, “Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language” (1863: Cramoisy Press, New York), page [20]
This refers to a place on the northwestern Oregon coast. The word is Lower Chinookan for ‘whale’, so it makes total sense for the location to be called that, right?
Nope. The above paragraph appears in a list of place names — and the thing is, this one isn’t formed like a normal toponym in the local area.
Those closest in location to it are noticeably Tillamook Salish, with common formal elements that you can easily spot in “Neahkahnie”, “Neahcoxie”, “Netarts“, and so on. There’s a Salish location prefix in those.
Those a little further afield, towards and on the Columbia River, have their own patterns. You have to distinguish the Lower Chehalis Salish ones that Gibbs lists — these typically start in “No-” or “Nos-” — from the Chinookan ones. This is the Lo Cheh version of the Salish location prefix.
The Chinookan toponyms tend to begin with “Ni-“, “Nai-” (that language’s location prefix), or “Wa-” or “Ka-“…but I’m not noticing any at all starting with the “E-” sound of the Chinookan male noun prefix.
So “Ekuli” / “Ecola” is looking unlike an actual Chinookan place name, in that way.
And if this (originally) Chinookan word isn’t a Chinookan place name, what it is it?
Well now, the strongest argument then seems to my mind to be: it’s one of the absolutely earliest Chinuk Wawa words recorded by history, having a date of 1805-1806.
Looks to me like a nonnative function for the word, outside Chinookan territory (it’s in Tillamook Salish land), used in communicating with the Johnny-Come-Lately American explorers. Gibbs himself comments that he’s not sure it’s a local Native name for the place.
This sounds mighty pidgin to me. Chinuk Wawa, to be specific.
There has been a recurring discussion among scholars through the last two centuries: did Lewis and Clark encounter and use Chinook Jargon? What survives of their group’s journals preserves scant direct evidence, a few words and certainly a suggestive phrase ~ tayi kamusak ‘chief beads; high-quality/valuable beads’.
For me, on balance it’s consistent with the idea that the Jargon already existed, albeit in an early form that underwent many changes in the next quarter-century. Lewis & Clark’s expedition is in fact the earliest explicit evidence of Chinuk Wawa in the historical record.
I think with today’s fresh look at “Ecola“, we identify one additional likely word of very early Jargon.
To be the devil’s advocate, there are numerous other theories that could explain this place name. Another option is the theory that was most widespread among the aboriginal people of the area. The first linguistically trained expert to encounter Chinook Wawa was Modeste Demers in 1838. His informants were French speaking men and non French speaking women, many of whom spoke traditional Chinook. They said that Chinook Wawa had arisen in the context of the Hudson Bay Company. If some of these women were 60 years old they would have been born in 1778 and would have been an eyewitness to European contact and would have known about Chinook Wawa if it had existed in any form. Since the Hudson Bay Company arrived in the mid-1820s and if we presume people made the distinction from the North West Company the language must have arisen sometime after that. I believe that many of the earliest documents indicate that most aboriginal people connected the language to the Hudson Bay Company.
This sounds more like the Hudson Bay Company encountered the language, found it useful and spread it beyond where it had been used before. Otherwise I’d expect a lot more English in it, perhaps also other more eastern languages (Cree, Ojibwe, Scottish Gaelic…?).
Well, there was no HBC in the area in 1805-1806 🙂 We have quite good indications of Chinuk Wawa’s existence before that company arrived.
This does not, however, rule out some interpretation of that qualifier, “in the context of the Hudson Bay Company”. For instance, I’m on board with a claim that the HBC played a crucial role in spreading the Jargon, and in supplying the locus of its creolization at Fort Vancouver and French Prairie-Tualatin Plains.
I definitely see Chinook Jargon as having existed from the visit of Lewis and Clark — seemingly in a rather variable, early-pidgin stage where the participating speakers were tossing in quite a lot of their mother-tongues, Nootka Jargon, whatever they happened to already know of other folks’ languages due to traditional village exogamy. (“Damned rascal, son of a bitch, nife, &c.” as I recall Aboriginal people saying per Lewis & Clark’s published report.)
By contrast, we have no clear documentation of even Nootka Jargon being understood just 20 or 25 years before this, when Lower Chehalis speakers were contacted by European traders. Things really do change rapidly when pidgins are involved…