“Camas stick” revisited!
Columbia Plateau “camas stick” (image credit: Oregon History Project)
Dedicated to the memory of Pauline Pascal Flett (1926-2020), whose love of and work for her Spokane Salish language put me on the path to being a professional linguist.
I’ve previously suggested, and am now going to claim more strongly, that “camas stick” is a previously unrecognized Chinuk Wawa phrase.
Even the great early CW dictionary maker George Gibbs — albeit elsewhere than his famous 1863 dictionary — supplies us with evidence for this claim, with his < kamass stick > / < kamas stick >.
Here’s what I consider to be plenty more evidence that this phrase needs to be added to our dictionaries of the Jargon…
Among the Chinookans:
From H.C. Yarrow, “A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians“, 1881, page 179
From southwest Oregon’s Takelma people:
from Edward Sapir, “Takelma Texts“, 1909, page 261
From southeast Washington’s Cayuse tribe:
from Matilda Sager, “A Survivor’s Recollections of the Whitman Massacre“, 1920 [1847 data], page 13
from Frederick W. Coville, “The Sage Plains of Oregon“, (National Geographic Magazine, December 1896), page 401
From southwest Oregon too, Rogue River country:
from Percy T. Booth, “Valley of the Rogues“, 1970, page 58
Also from southwest Oregon, Klamaths again:
from Frederick W. Coville, “Notes on the Plants Used by the Klamath Indians of Oregon“, 1897, page 93
From northwest Oregon, Willamette Valley:
from “Burial Customs in Oregon: Letter from a Gentleman Who Traveled through That Region at an Early Date“, 1882 [1832 data], page 331
from “Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States“, 1894, page 235
From coastal Washington Territory, the Nisqually Salish people:
from A.B. Rabbeson, “Pioneer Reminiscences: A Legend of the Aborigines“, 1886, page 1, column 2
[Editing to add another example, found the day after publication: William Fraser Tolmie’s 1837 list of Klickitat Sahaptian tree names, courtesy of Jack Nisbet (personal communication): “Vine maple…Kliketats make their Kamass sticks of the branches”.]
Briefly putting all of that together, kamas-stik is looking like a commonly used phrase of frontier-era Chinuk Wawa for what I know in local English as a “digger”.
