1894: Thanksgiving thoughts from Franz Boas
I think the following would be easy and delightful to translate into Chinuk Wawa; anybody care to try it, on their American Thanksgiving holiday?
Image credit: Walmart)
See the world around you! How was it made, who told the leaves to grow and drop in the fall? We don’t know. We only know that spring is beautiful, and so is winter when it snows. We are just happy about it, and we don’t want to make anybody sad; we want to thank somebody for the beautiful world because we enjoy it as we enjoy the presents our parents give us. We all feel like this.
— Franz Boas, letter to Marie Boas concerning how to talk with their daughter Helene about religion, Fort Rupert BC, November 27, 1894, in “The Ethnography of Franz Boas” edited by Ronald Rohner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), page 186
