Proof of the racialization of “Klootchman”
Here’s the start of a local-color story in a Washington Territory newspaper:
This delate klootchman would be literally a ‘real woman’ in straight-ahead Chinuk Wawa. Maybe we’re being told that this young man’s mom was female?
I doubt that. However, as a loanword into regional English, the second word became synonymous with the S-word for ‘Native woman’.
Notice that the first word is italicized, as if to show us that it’s being used in Chinook Jargon, in contrast to the PNW English 2nd word. Klootchman was already so Anglicized that English speakers pluralized it as klootchmen!
Add this to our already ample proof that Settler culture put its own special cultural twist on CJ words that it borrowed.
The above is from (the even more thoroughly racialized) “Indian Dwarf” in the Seattle (WA) Daily Intelligencer of September 21, 1878, page 3, column 2.
