Kamloops Wawa pictures, Part 6: Chapel at North Bend
Our latest vintage photo of Chinook Jargon-speaking country shows an important little village in British Columbia…
page [33]
It’s the “Roman Catholic chapel at North Bend, dedicated October 9, 1889.”
Kamloops Wawa #126 (March 1895), page 35
It looks like a number of people have set up tents next to it. A large tent might be the katishism haws ‘catechism house’ where Chinuk Pipa ‘Chinook writing’ literacy lessons took place.
North Bend is a Nɬeʔkepmxcín, a.k.a. Thompson Salish, settlement in the area where Kamloops Wawa‘s Father JMR Le Jeune did his first sustained missionary work, and refined his grasp of that Salish language and of Chinook Jargon.
It’s one of the few Catholic churches in the Kamloops Wawa circulation area that I haven’t yet visited in my 25 years of research. I haven’t determined whether it’s still standing; some have been destroyed by arson.
Here’s another historic structure in North Bend, BC, from the same era:
