1915: Campus Day at the high school; another new Chinook hymn?
News coverage of a day of beautifying the still new high school campus in one of Washington state’s “Tri-Cities” involves two obscure expressions.
One of them I can explain!
CAMPUS DAY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL
•••
With rakes, shovels, picks and other hand-made the cametaointriiiniiiiidmaneta [sic] blistering machines the youngsters made the campus look like somebody was at home.
•••
In the evening a program was given in three parts. The first part consisted of songs and jokes, the second part, selections by Thorpe’s orchestra and solos, duets and quartets, by the various Seniors. In the third part the Seniors, in Indian costumes, made a treaty with M. M. Moulton for the work done during the day. The farewell song “Alkiniski Klatawa Nanich Kopiclos Ailehe” (Bye and Bye We’ll Reach the Promised Land), sung in the original Chinook language completed the program.
— from the Kennewick (WA) Courier-Reporter of April 15, 1915, page 1, column 3
That was surely intended as something more like Alki Nisika Klatawa Nanich Kopi Clos Ailehe, in modern Grand Ronde spelling áɬqi nsayka ɬátwa nánich kʰapa ɬúsh ílihi, ‘some day we’ll visit/go see in the good place’.
The unique spellings in the 1915 report suggest someone’s personal take on Chinuk Wawa, as they’re not all found in published reference works of the time.
Neither is the English title, as provided! I’m not recognizing the hymn, and I don’t see it in the places I know to check, such as Myron Eells’s “Hymns in the Chinook Language”.
So this may be new discovery for us — a translation into Jargon that we hadn’t known of.
