Cuitans and Native weather forecasters
One way to avoid providing translations of Chinuk Wawa when you quote it in your newspaper…
Image credit: Sticker Shoppe
Treat most of the words as if they’re English.
You might do that by using English spellings for words that came into Chinook Jargon, or by assuming local people use certain CJ words in their English.
If I tell you:
- cuitan = ‘horse’,
- Siwash = ‘Native person’,
- hiyu = ‘lots of’, and
- mimaluse = ‘dead’,
do you understand the rest of this passage about Indigenous weather forecasting?
An old Indian sage of the Okanogan country predicts a long cold winter, because the Great Spirit is angry with men for stealing his lightning and slaughtering and eating the cuitans he gave them.
…
The Warm Spring[s] Siwashes, says the Prineville Review, are making it tropical for the United States signal service this fall. We hear a number of them predicting upon the weather, most of them claiming that there will be hiyu snow, hiyu cold, hiyu mimaluse cuitan.
— from the St. Helens (OR) Oregon Mist of October 18, 1895, page 2, column 3
