A wonderful Chinuk Wawa misunderstanding, on purpose, in an argument with a priest
I was re-reading a linguistics conference paper, and was reminded of some humor that involves Chinook Jargon.
Image credit: FreePik
“Three Okanagan Stories about Priests” were presented and analyzed by John Lyon in an ICSNL proceedings volume. (That’s the wonderful and venerable International Conference on Salish & Neighbouring Languages.)
An incredibly entertaining story was told by the elder, George Lezard (born about 1881) of BC’s Penticton Indian Reserve, in 1966 to researcher Randy Bouchard.
Mr. Lezard had gotten sick, and a priest came to his home, apparently to give the last rites. Instead, he got an earful from the patient. (Please click that link to go read the whole argument that they had!)
Anyway, this episode must have happened some time around 1900, I would guess, and one reason I say so is the quotation of a Chinook Jargon phrase in the narrative. Priests would’ve largely dealt with Syilx people via CJ back in those days, even if the “black robe” had learned some of the local Salish language.
So the following is probably (partially) translated from an originally Jargon conversation:
A number of points throughout the conversation are a fine combination of humor & Indigenous resistance to the colonizer’s religion. So I’m not surprised to see some humor in the quoted line above.
What’s funny about this bit, in my view, is that Mr. Lezard presents the well-known Chinuk Wawa phrase kápshwála łúchmən, ‘steal women, i.e. commit adultery’.
That same expression, translated into Salish languages, is what we see in the “Ten Commandments” in the various shorthand “Manuals” that were published in Kamloops about the same time this story took place.
But Lezard adds a twist to that phrase: the Syilx Salish preposition tl ‘from’, resulting in ‘steal from women’.
This is one of the ways Lezard argues with, and teases, the priest in the anecdote that he tells.
