FW Howay 1943 “Origin of the Chinook Jargon on the Northwest Coast” (post-contact)
One of the very smartest pieces ever published about Chinuk Wawa’s history, was written by a BC judge.
Howay (image credit: ABC BookWorld)
“Origin of the Chinook Jargon on the North West Coast” by F.W. Howay (Oregon Historical Quarterly 44(1):27-55 (March 1943).
Frederic William Howay‘s sideline was as a devoted amateur historian of the Pacific Northwest, and he published incredible numbers of studies based on material that he diligently uncovered from libraries and booksellers all over the place. His partner in law and historical, including Jargon, studies was his longtime friend Robie L. Reid.
This 1943 article by Howay proceeds from a point noted by Reid in an earlier piece, that there are 2 main theories “and a tradition” about when Chinook Jargon came into being:
Theory 1 — that CW traces to the early contact days of the maritime fur trade.
Theory 2 — that CW was a “prehistoric inter-tribal language”.
A tradition — that CW was invented by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Howay is spot-on: this “has only to be mentioned to be laughed out of court”, says His Honour.
Having sagely rejected the linguistic urban legend, Howay gets right in to debunking Theory 2 as well. His lawyerly training in analyzing folks’ argumentation comes in handy. He’s sharp about noticing that most of the sources advancing the pre-contact CW hypothesis are imposing authorities (government-published reference works on Native people), which, however, supply exactly zero evidence for their claim. Howay finds, as do I, that regular long-distance travel for e.g. trading purposes was not a known major feature of pre-contact PNW coast life. He notes that it was instead conflict among tribes — I’d specify that this means those not directly tied together by marriage alliances, which I believe joined mostly geographically close groups — that was the rule.
Accomplished researcher of early historical documents that he is, Howay quotes from the diaries of Spanish priests Crespi & Pena, showing that in 1774 they could not effect any verbal communication with Haidas and Nuuchahnulths upon first contact, and only improvised hand signs were of any avail. Had there been any existing “prehistoric” pidgin, we can assume the newcomers would’ve picked up enough of it to communicate more than that, quite quickly. This point is one that I’ve made with regard to other early Euro-American visitors’ failure to communicate with a large range of Indigenous coastal nations. Howay notes, as I have done, that this language gap remained for at least a couple of decades, and it encompassed dealings with the Salish nations, Heiltsuks, Oregon coastal tribes, and plenty more. (Worth noting is that Howay dates the start of the PNW maritime fur trade to 1785.)
Howay takes the trouble to point out that early-contact quotations of “Nootka” people, such as Chief Callicum’s “Martínez pisce, Martínez capsil“, saying words that us modern speakers of CW recognize (“Martínez pishák, Martínez kapshwála” — ‘Martínez is bad, Martínez steals’), are examples of Nuuchahnulth speech. Whether a pidgin Nootka Jargon or straight Nuučaan’uɬ, as the case may be, these are no proof whatsoever of a pre-existing Chinook Jargon. One source who Howay is at pains to critique is EH Thomas, author of a very popular 1935 (and much reprinted) book that makes all sorts of fanciful and romantic claims about Chinuk Wawa.
It can never be overemphasized that the earliest recorded full sentence in CW is, as Howay specifies, the Chinook man in 1805 who said to one of Lewis & Clark’s party, “Clouch Musket, wake com ma-tax Musket” (ɬúsh mə́skit, wík kə́mtəks mə́skit, ‘nice gun, (I) don’t recognize the gun’). This is recognizably CW by virtue of being Nuuchahnulth & English words spoken outside of Nuuchahnulth & English territory by a person who knew neither of those languages.
Another feature of Aboriginal life that Howay is appropriately skeptical of, but which proponents of precontact CW have long relied on, is slavery. He finds scant evidence, in particular, that long-distance voyages were made for this purpose in the times before Euro-Americans’ arrival, and thus sees little to no reason to suppose a slave-trading lingo existed.
The conclusion of Howay’s careful examination of “Theory 2” is that Chinuk Wawa cannot be proved to be anything other than a post-contact language.
Bonus fact:
Robie L. Reid’s writing on Chinook Jargon is also well worth your time. I’ll try to write about it soon!
The words spoken to Lewis and Clark are all words from Nootka Jargon so they could have been speaking Nootka Jargon. The high status aristocrats of native nations usually spoke eloquently in their own language and typically used interpreters. There are references to the Chinook people being proud of their language. It was undignified to stumble through another language and I suspect some would find CJ/CW jarring. George Lang sees Fort Vancouver as the ‘hot house’ for Chinook Jargon because it was removed from the social network of the Lower Chinookan people where it could have its own identity. The first documentation of what we recognize as CJ was the schoolteacher at Fort Vancouver c.1832 and the missionary Harper c.1834 who notes it being spoken as a first language by the children. I think a good hypothesis is that it was developed by schoolchildren who attended the school and who had mostly French speaking fathers and mostly Chinook speaking mothers. This might also explain why there is no Hawaiian words despite 30% of the population being Hawaiian. They were under the protection of a representative of the King of Hawaii and they insisted on living outside the Fort in their own homes so no Hawaiian children attended the school. It seems that Chinook Jargon spread from Fort Vancouver and not from Fort George/Astoria. FW Howay is brilliant but he moved to BC as a child when Modeste Demers died. Modeste Demers was the first trained linguist to study Chinook Jargon in 1838 and his aboriginal informants told him that CJ came from the milieu of Fort Vancouver, the hub of the Hudson’s Bay Company and that it was spread through its network of trading forts. It seems to me that this is still a valid hypothesis which could be falsified by evidence of CJ versus ‘broken Chinook’ at Fort George or someone writing about the existence of a language before 1828.
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I don’t see Father Demers as a trained linguist; he was a scholarly polyglot, good at speaking and learning languages, but uneducated in analyzing how languages develop and operate in real time. (Such training didn’t exist yet.)
A short response to your very thoughtful note — looks like we agree that Chinuk Wawa is a post-Contact language!
Longer response — I’m impressed with your suggestion. Sure, we can think of the lingo spoken on the lower Columbia from Contact onward for some time as an evolving Nootka Jargon. I guess we linguists would contribute the thought that it quickly became “unmoored”, let’s call it, from Nootka, and by Astorian times (1811+), it was pretty clearly Chinook-oriented. In that sense, it was “a” Chinook Jargon already, quite early. All of this is sort of like those who argue over whether modern English “is” Anglo-Saxon or “is” a mishmash of several languages; really both are true.
Another contribution I can make — Chinook Jargon wasn’t known by any name, as far as research has shown, until the Fort Vancouver era (1825+). For that reason alone, folks may have had only a foggy notion of its earlier existence. Note that this argument could be invoked in favour of a pre-Contact CJ, but it’s counteracted by the nonexistence of any positive evidence whatsoever.
I’m jotting a number of thoughts as they occur to me, and the next one is that Chinook Jargon was indeed strongly associated with Fort Vancouver, which was this language’s metropolis. CJ was not spoken very far away from Ft Van as late as the 1840s, and I’d say we have to acknowledge that Settlers, who began pouring in around that time, played a huge role in propagating CJ use. (At least until they became the predominant demographic group a generation later, at which point, things tipped in favour of English.)
“Broken Chinook”, as it’s been described, was nevertheless a distinct pidgin language from others including Nootka Jargon. And creoles, at least those that don’t develop extremely rapidly, develop from pidgins.
And the pre-Fort Vancouver lingo was definitely an early form of Chinook Jargon.
And Chinook Jargon certainly had a definite grammatical structure before its creolization by Fort Vancouver kids, from all evidence regarding phrase structure, documented sentences, etc.
(From the scraps we have of Nootka Jargon, it too had a grammar, and I strongly suspect that that grammar was heavily English-influenced. Chinook Jargon quickly came to have a much more Native-influenced grammar, once NJ “unmoored” itself from Nootka and was identified with the Chinook area.)
I’d like to know more about the circumstances around the Hawai’ians living separately from the “creole” community. It’s intriguing to think that there’s so clearcut an explanation for the lack of Hawai’ian words in Jargon. “Kanakas” did marry PNW Native women, as did the Canadians et al., and would’ve likewise had to speak Jargon with their wives, so we’d suppose that they were among the “creole” households.
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