The Mission Field and “Chinhook” (Part 4 of 6)
The pot calls the kettle black: Protestant missionary William Henry Lomas (1839-1889) criticizes the Catholic missionary for preaching in Chinuk Wawa.
ímage credit: My Heritage
PART 4
At a village of the Lyackson First Nation, a Salish tribe of southeast Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in The Mission Field, Volume 12 #452, page 438, dated June 12, 1867, Mr. Lomas notices the great linguistic variety in the area and the differential effects of exposure to Euro-American culture:
I counted 120 canoes drawn up on the beach, and I think there are at least 1,100 Indians here, belonging to fourteen different tribes; but, although their languages seem very much alike, a great many of them cannot understand each other, and speak in Chinook. The tribes from the towns appear very much inferior to those from the country districts, while the latter as a rule abstain from strong drink…At night I had a long talk with the chiefs, and I was pleased to find that I could understand a good deal that they said, although I could not answer them correctly in their own tongue; when I explained to them the reason I was learning their language they seemed all pleased, and were very anxious that I should visit all their homes…The Cowichen chiefs said that my being there kept many of their tribes from drink, as they would be very much ashamed to see me afterwards if they had ‘Chaco‘d Piltons.’
This Chinook Jargon expression chaku-pʰíltən is typically taken as ‘go crazy’ in southern-dialect CJ, but the way it’s used here is strongly reminiscent of what we see in the old Kamloops Wawa newspaper, where chako piltin usually conveys ‘to lapse into sinning’.
It’s noteworthy that around SE Vancouver Island and the BC lower mainland, there existed a separate common CW word that only meant ‘crazy’: skáti, from British English ‘scatty/scotty’.
That word was so much in use that it’s become part of the modern tribal languages.
And in southern interior BC, the Jargon klisi (from English ‘crazy’) was the word dedicated to ‘insane/foolish’.
So piltin was free to develop into a word for ‘exhibiting bad behaviour’.
However, the Englishing by Lomas, treating Pilton as a noun in the plural number, also indicates that he wrongly took this word for its well-known etymological source in the name of one particular man!
Here’s a little more from the same writer, who had just arrived in 1864:
Volume 12 #453, June 13, 1867, page 439… “Language” …
I have had an Indian boy living with me for some months, but still I do not make the progress I could wish in the [Hul’q’umi’num Salish] language, as almost every word undergoes a variety of changes according to the place it occupies in the sentence; and besides this, Indians living close together do not give exactly the same changes in the words, which is very confusing, especially as all wish to instruct me in their tongue.
The religious instruction that they have received from the Romish [Catholic] Missionary must necessarily be very superficial, as the priest who has been here many years does not speak their language, but preaches to them in Chinook, so I feel sure that when once we have acquired their own tongue we shall have great influence over them.
The actual fact is, none of the European/American missionaries in the area where Lomas was working are known to have ever acquired a working knowledge of the Indigenous tribal languages.
So Chinuk Wawa it was, when they wanted to effect any meaningful communication with the local people!
The most success these Christian workers had with the Native languages was actually when they used CW to get fluent speakers to translate prayers and hymns.
(Which the missionaries seem only rarely to have understood any of!)
