1905, BC: Bridge River paper salmon

Naika wawa mirsi kopa Alex Code, for a splendid little discovery.

Image credit: @IndigenousXCa Archived

“Alik” sent over this tiny but powerful sample of southern interior British Columbia’s dialect of Chinook Jargon:

Siwash says to Prospector, nanich bridge, hiyu salmon, mamook paper. Sure enough the Government’s big iron structure across Fraser river is festooned in dried salmon.

— from the Lillooet (BC) Prospector of August 17, 1905, page 1, column 3

• Siwash
  = sáwásh
  = ‘Native person’.
• Nanich bridge, hiyu salmon, mamook paper
  = nánich brích*, háyú sámən, mamuk-pípa [Ø]
  = ‘Look at the bridge, there’s lots of salmon, (they’re) “papering” it.’

Alex commented that it was nice to see confirmation of brích* (my inferred pronunciation) as a Chinuk Wawa word in the northern dialect. We also see it in the Kamloops Wawa newspaper of the 1890s.

I’m tremendously excited about the mamuk-pípa [Ø] part.

In a Native-written Chinuk Wawa letter from the same region and time, I’ve seen an expression pípa-sàmən that I wasn’t entirely sure of. I guessed that it was an expression for flat, dried salmon as being ‘paper-salmon’, and today’s news clipping appears to confirm that!

We have a northern-dialect expression here, ‘to make-paper’ your salmon in the traditional style. The fact that the ‘dried salmon is like a sheet of paper’ metaphor shows up in both verb and noun forms implies that it was a well-known idiom in the area.

Bonus fact:

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been given a tour of traditional Ucwalmicw wind-drying racks during a summer salmon run, at Bridge River — which is where today’s anecdote seems to have taken place!

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?