Alaskan Haida bark-gathering song w/Chinook Jargon
A traditional Haida song for gathering the bark from young cedar trees uses Chinuk Wawa.
Image credit: Research Gate
It’s quoted from another source in the great ethnobotanist Nancy Turner’s book “Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge” as follows:
q’ahsgad-ɬaa, q’ahsgad-ɬaa (strike the ground)
háayaas-ɬ q’íiwii, háayaas-ɬ q’íiwii (fall hard)
John Enrico did his usual superb linguist work when he specified that the borrowed Chinook Jargon word háayaas means ‘hard/loud’ here.
That’s to say, that is a normal meaning of the word háyásh.
(Which is here pronounced with a Haida accent. There’s no “sh” sound in Haida.)
That word otherwise means ‘big’. I would be skeptical that it’s meant as ‘big’ in the above song, or ‘long’ as Newcombe guessed.
These lyrics back up our existing understanding that Haidas knew excellent Jargon in the years around the turn of the century (1900).
They composed and sang a large number of Chinuk Wawa songs, and due to the intertribal community at Victoria, BC in those years,
Haida musical influence spread far along the Northwest coast!
