1915: Collison, “In the Wake of the War Canoe”
between pages 160 & 161
“In the Wake of the War Canoe: A Stirring Record of Forty Years’ Successful Labour, Peril & Adventure Amongst the Savage Indian Tribes of the Pacific Coast, and the Piratical Head-hunting Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C.” by William Henry Collison (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1915).
Crammed with truly excellent photos, this firsthand memoir of later frontier, and post-frontier, times (circa 1873-1915) by a British missionary has the power to open eyes.
I’m a scholar of pidgin and creole languages in general, so I’m really curious whether someone in the know could take a look at the things Collison says and quotes in the “Tsimshian” & Haida languages. Will these turn out to be pidginized versions of both? Here’s a preliminary list of the data to be checked on:
- Page 124 both.
- Note his description on pages 125-126 of the difficulties he had in learning the tribal languages, and the evidence we see in the laughter greeting his reading back of his pupils’ names.
- He gives some grammatical description on those pages as well.
- 174 Haida bible quotation.
- 201 Tsimshian.
- 203 Haida.
- 215 Haida.
- 231 Tsimshian.
- 240, 242 Tsimshian.
cover
Moving on to Chinuk Wawa-related material — pages 86-87 evaluates North Coast Indians’ acculturation, both religious and linguistic (they’ve largely moved beyond using CW) :
Pages 126ff: the author repeats some less than accurate folklore about Chinook Jargon:
On page 131, Chinuk Wawa is used by a Haida man working for Collison, to threaten a White storekeeper:
In this section of the book, it’s interesting to see Collison arguing for a milder White attitude toward the Indigenous “potlatch“, which he says has become quite acculturated by the time of writing. Still, he calls it a “harmful” tradition! On a similar note, Collison is overall a better than average observer of Native people’s customs, but still insists on trying to replace them with Euro-American ones.
Page 151 tells us the origin of (at least local) terms for ‘Saturday’ & ‘Sunday’ in Tsimshian, perhaps partly from Chinuk Wawa’s word for ‘Sunday / week’:
Page 154 notes a Tsimshian captain & crew who, pretty typically for their people, know no CJ:
On page 160, a shipwrecked “Hudsons Bay Company factor”, Mr. Williams (?), reaches a village of Tlingits who luckily do turn out to know Jargon:
On page 164, “hootchino” is mentioned; it’s a Tongass Tlingit place name that’s the ancestor of the modern slang “hooch” for ‘liquor’. (Collison goes on to describe their town as having distilling equipment outside every single house.) Sometimes folks have claimed it to be a Chinuk Wawa word; we have scant direct evidence for that, although it was certainly used in a CW environment.
On page 165, Collison preaches in Jargon in a Tongass Tlingit town, as he doesn’t speak Tlingit. He repeats the hoary old anecdote of the missionary who had terrible results preaching through a Chinuk Wawa interpreter, an incident that I can tell you was due to the dude’s flowery literary English, which is extremely hard to translate into CW:
On page 173, a Haida man’s description of the “fighting fire-ship” (a steam-powered naval vessel) suggests speech in or influenced by Chinuk Wawa:
Similarly, pages 305-306 report the phrasing “white man’s fire canoe” for a steamboat:
Thank you for citing so many excerpts of the original 1915 edition. I have never seen it, but some years ago I bought a recently published reedition of this book, done by a Mr Lillard of Victoria, BC. It was obvious that his editing work was geared towards the missionary history of the area, omitting a lot of things I would have liked to see mentioned about the native people that Collison interacted with. Among other things, I did not see any words in native languages, although Collison became fluent in Haida and Nisqa’a as well as CW.
I am able to read the “Tsimshian” words (some of which are Nisqa’a) and will provide transcriptions and notes.
Hi, sorry to keep you waiting. Here are some notes:
Collison: an Anglican missionary, he worked first among the Tsimshians who then gathered at Fort Simpson (an important Hudson’s Bay post and at the time an indispensable port of entry for visitors to the area), then was sent to Haida Gwaii and later to Kincolith (“Ginqolx”) on the Lower Naas to work among the Nisqa’a converts there. He and his wife promised that they would never leave them, and indeed they both ended their lives there. Their children spoke Nisqa’a before they spoke English. Collison was also instrumental in rescuing the last survivors of the “Tsetsaut” people, Dene speakers who had been the victims in a series of local wars. Boas also travelled to Fort Simpson, then to Kincolith in order to research the Tsetsaut language, but not finding enough consultantts, he mostly researched the Nisqa’a language, with consultants who knew CJ.
p. 86 The language of the Nisqa’a people (“Naasqa” in some older documents) of the Upper Nass River, is closely related to “Tsimshean”, spoken on the Lower Skeena River. The Reverend J.B. McCullagh, an Anglican missionary, spent 40 years among the Nisga’a, learned trades in order to transmit skills to his parishioners, ran a bilingual school, and produced a bilingual newsletter as well as some religious translations (printed with special characters on a press imported from England). Unfortunately a lot of his work, including a grammar of the language, was lost in a fire. McCullagh also supported the Nisqa’a in their early attempts to secure their traditional territory, something which took close to a century to achieve, by peaceful means.
p. 126 (approximately) It must be around here that Collison describes his early attempts at teaching school, and the hilarious results of his trying to read his approximations of the children’s names. I can’t find my (edited) copy at the moment!
p. 151 Sunday, Christmas : Many words which occur in English with “on”, like “on Sunday”, were translated or adapted into Tsimshianic languages with the double prefix ha-n’ii-(Nisqa’a) or ha-li- (Tsimshian) (ha- sthg for, n’ii- or li- ‘on’), followed by the number of the day in the week or the activity engaged in on that day. Before becoming christianized by missionaries, the people dealing with non-native traders were used to seeing them wearing their best clothes on Sunday, hence Tsimshian “hali-kanootk” (haliqanuutk) ‘day of dressing well’. Once christianized, they learned to “observe the Lord’s day” by resting, hence Tsimshian “hali-squait-ka-sha” (ha-li-sgwaytk-a sa, with sgwaytk ‘to rest’, -a ‘connective’, sa ‘day’) ; similarly Nisqa’a han’iisgwaay’tkw “Sunday’ – no word for ‘day’ here). As for Christmas, the Tsimshian added an adjective for “great”, hence “Welaixim kanootk” (W’ii-leeks-im qanuutk) (final -im is a linking suffix).
Unfortunately the other pages you mention are not reproduced here.
hayu masi for sharing this deep knowledge, Marie-Lucie. It’s very helpful for understanding what was happening in the linguistic landscape!
Dave