Found: an etymology for Grand Ronde’s ‘jail’
I’m very intrigued that in the southern creole CW-speaking community of Grand Ronde, Oregon — and only there — we find skúkum-háws as just one of several expressions for ‘jail’.
(Image credit: Wikipedia)
They also have noun-phrase synonyms for it unique to their community, púlakʰli-háws (literally ‘dark/night-house’) and kʰéphaws (spelled with no dash in it), phonetically [kʰε(·)p.hʌυs].
That last expression’s etymology hasn’t been clearly identified; the 2012 GR dictionary speculates that it’s from English “keep-house”.
I’ve had no luck tracking down any evidence that “keep-house” was ever a noun phrase for a ‘prison’ in any variety of English.
And I’m skeptical that “keep”, although it is known as an English noun for ‘jail’, was in circulation within the Chinuk Wawa of Grand Ronde during the childhoods of the elders who later worked with Henry Zenk to document their language.
CW as a strong rule only takes in words from its environment that are in frequent use, and my impression is that “keep” hasn’t been among the most common expressions for this concept in English.
Instead, the present meditation on the synonyms for ‘prison’ is opening my eyes to a different etymology.
We saw that Grand Ronde folks referred to the púlakʰli-háws.
Now, let’s consider this — are folks held in jails only at night, which is one of the possible understandings of púlakʰli?
Not to my knowledge.
So púlakʰli-háws more likely meant the ‘dark-house’ to the people of sháwásh-íliʔi.
I mentally link this to the widely expressed dread among Indigenous people of the frontier era that, once they signed treaties, they’d be sent off to the púlakʰli-íliʔi ‘dark land’.
And now my mind realizes that the Grand Ronde CW synonym for ‘dark’ is kʰíyəp, a word unique to that community.
Which sounds quite a lot like kʰép!
So I propose that kʰéphaws is really a compound kʰép-haws, which is really kʰíyəp-haws, one of a couple ways that GR folks said ‘dark-house’.
As a native speaker of British English, the first definition of ‘stronghouse’ for me is ‘prison’ or ‘jail/gaol’ dating from the 17th century. ‘skukum-haws’ looks very similar.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The comparison is compelling! The time frame may be a difficulty. And I’m not sure — has American English, which has been dominant in the Oregon Country since the 1830s, ever used the term ‘stronghouse’ much?
LikeLike
Dave, it’s entirely possible that you are right about this, though I don’t think it’s possible to prove (well, not mathematically, anyway). Both of those expressions for ‘jail’ that you cite from our dictionary are from Jacobs’s field notebooks 33-34 (1928), documenting some of his very first sessions with John B Hudson, who subsequently dictated Santiam Kalapuya texts to him (published in Kalapuya Texts, 1945). I think it’s pretty clear that he was using Jargon as a warm-up for the main course, which of course was Hudson’s Kalapuya. See our dictionary, p. 387, for a description of the phonetic alphabet that Jacobs was using in 1928 (“in some respects narrower” than the one he used to transcribe most of his published texts in w Oregon languages). This material consists of 30 pages of Jargon words and sentences plus the little text (two pages) “Rabbit races Mud-turtle” (reproduced in our dictionary: 387-88). One of those two words for ‘jail’ follows the other in the ms:
mɑ skɑ ᴘα kɛ́ˑphɑus jail [Greek alpha in ᴘα – hard to see here]
[po] ᴘólɑklι hɑus jail [brackets = crossed out]
It’s pretty obvious that Jacobs was still feeling his way towards a grasp of Hudson’s phonetics. The first line has to be for “mash kʰapa [kʰe:p] haws”: Jacobs didn’t register the word boundaries. Possibly Hudson gave “pulakʰli haws,” immediately following, by way of clarification. The etymology note in the dictionary was just me taking it for granted that [kʰɛ:p] must be for English “keep.” But as you point out, that is a pretty odd expression (though maybe not impossible for local rural English around 19th c Grand Ronde?).
The Grand Ronde Res community jail during the late 19th c was an old army blockhouse that had originally been built as part of Fort Yamhill, which for 10 years oversaw the reservation from Fort Hill to the east. After the fort was decommissioned the blockhouse was moved to Grand Ronde Agency (about 7 miles to the west) where it served as the community jail. I imagine it was indeed pretty dark in there. BTW, the blockhouse still survives: in 1911 it was moved to the town of Dayton, OR, where it today sits in the city park. It is the only surviving building from the historic Grand Ronde Agency.
LikeLike