1854, southwest Oregon: Che(e)nook and Nipissing
Many thanks to David Gene Lewis PhD for his phenomenal research, presented over the years on his website, The Quartux Journal.
That’s where I first noticed what I take as a Chinuk Wawa name on an Umpqua or K’alapuya chief from western Oregon, in the middle of what gets called the frontier era.
In the published, official text of:
(source)
…the Treaty between the United States and the Umpqua and Calapooia Indians (1855), it’s the names of one Native leader that attracted my attention —
(source)
I don’t know which ethnic group “Absaquil” hails from, unfortunately. But “Cheenook” seems highly likely to be a spelling of Chinúk.
Why would a respected Indigenous man have that name? This is a valid and interesting question.
1.
Let’s recall that “Chinook” is universally acknowledged, from early sources onwards, to be a (Lower) Chehalis word — it doesn’t come from the language of the ethnic group we know as (Lower) Chinook(an)s. In fact my research suggests that “Chinook” in Lower Chehalis means approximately “at the neighbors’ place”. The Lower Chehalis and Lower Chinook people lived in very close proximity, in some cases within the same village, such as the traditional village known as…Chinook.
This is to lay the groundwork for observing that the man called “Cheenook” wasn’t necessarily known as such due to having any (Lower) Chinook(an) ancestry. Only newcomers called the (Lower) Chinook(an)s (and the Lower Chehalis!) Chinooks.
My impression from reading the ethnographic record is that a person could be known by a parent’s village name — so “Cheenook” could mean that this southwest Oregon chief had family at Chinook village. (Of whatever ethnicity.)
How likely is it that a leader of the K’alapuya, let alone of the more southerly Umpqua tribes, had such ancestry? I don’t know.
Slaves, too, were called simply by their place of origin, but I doubt that a chief would have been an ex-slave, nor reminded of it daily.
2.
I’m bound to point out another, and more unpleasant, facet of our discussion. Pretty early in the “contact era”, the word Chinook diffused into the languages of numerous inland tribes as a word for a new phenomenon: sexually transmitted infections (STI’s). In languages from Umatilla Sahaptin to Colville-Okanagan Salish, we find this as the only meaning of the word. This would seem to reflect the introduction of new STI’s with the fur trade that initially centered in (Lower) Chinook(an) territory around the mouth of the Columbia River.
A possibility that arises from our awareness of this is — perhaps K’alapuyan or “Umpqua” (Athabaskan? other?) partook of the folk understanding that these diseases were emanating from Chinook land. Therefore, it’s not beyond imagination that this chief was known as someone who had (or had had) an STI.
3.
A third possibility is perhaps the most straightforward, but the least convincing. Maybe this chief was known for speaking Chinuk Wawa, which is also called Chinuk.
The reason that that wouldn’t really be interesting information about him is, well, plenty of people spoke that language by 1855. And we’ve found that chiefs were particularly likely to know it, in connection with their duties to deal with outsiders to their tribe. So it seems a flimsy explanation if we suggest that Absaquil was famous as “the Chinook Jargon guy”.
Maybe other people have researched this man, and can say more based on that. Today I’ve just presented the first analysis of this question from a linguist’s point of view.
Bonus fact:
David Lewis’s Quartux Journal article on the Umpqua & Calapooia treaty also notes that some of the same chiefs signed the Molala treaty. Could some of them be Molala leaders? I don’t know.
A really interesting little point in the Umpqua & Calapooia treaty is that one signer’s name is recorded in varying ways: “Na-pe-sa, or Louis” as well as the quasi-French-looking “Louis la Pe Cinque“. Could these both be variants of “Nipissing“? That’s a northern Ontario (Canada) Ojibwe tribe, which had a historic involvement in the overland fur trade. David Lewis has written another article suggesting this identification for the man we’re talking about, who was “an adopted chief of the Upper Umpquas”.
This same man must be the Grand Ronde community Métis named Louis Nipissing (1818-1888). This was the pre-Fort Vancouver (!), Oregon-born son of Louis “Tom-a-Pierre” [Thomas Pierre?] Nipissing (b. 1800, Slave Lake, NW Territories) and “Lip-a-sent of the Chinook” (b. 1800, Chinook village!). This name of his mother’s may very well be a typical (/n~l/) Lower Chinookan pronunciation of Nipissing. Also note that our b. 1818 Louis Nipissing’s kids were known as Larose Nipissing/Nepisank and Joseph Nipucing-nipissing, further pronunciation & spelling variants on the same tribe name.
All of these bonus facts perhaps may influence us to put more weight onto #1 above. Possibly the leader known as Cheenook was indeed of some “foreign” tribal background, and perhaps he too had something to do with the fur trade, which had been a notable player in the Umpqua-K’alapuya area since the 1820s.
