Not Chinook Jargon, but a widely known Native word

The other day, I shared a menu from what now sounds like a bizarre event, a dinner for the Oregon Indian War Veterans, in Washington DC.

(See “1901: “Hyas Muckamuck” Menu”)

Klamath ipos harvesters (image credit: Herald and News)

That menu included a couple of mystery words. I’d love to figure out the word “kinapoo”!

Another obscurity, < epaws >, shows up in the menu’s “Tenas Tipso Ictas” section, i.e. ‘Little Plant Things’.

It’s alongside of “kamas pe kouse”, which we already recognize because they’re the same as the modern English words, ‘camas’ and ‘couse’ (biscuitroot).

So that’s a clue that “epaws” is a root food.

Since the menu makes a couple of allusions to ethnic Klamath / Modoc territory, where some significant “Indian wars” took place, I turned to the dictionaries of those people’s Klamath language for clues.

In Albert Gatschet’s “Dictionary of the Klamath Language” (US Gov’t Printing Office, 1890), it wasn’t hard to locate a Klamath word < kä‘sh > which he points out was also commonly known by an apparently non-Klamath name, < ípo / ípχa > as well as ‘(wild) potato’, which he sometimes pluralizes as < ipos >. This root food, says Gatschet, is a species of Calochortus in the taxonomy of Western science.

In M.A.R. Barker’s “Klamath Dictionary“, published by the University of California Press in 1963 (and freely downloadable), I found it interesting that the same Klamath word (written as ġe•s), is consistently translated as ipos, with a final “s”. For example, Barker refers to “ipos roots”, whereas Gatschet says “ipo-roots”. Ipos is again presented as non-Klamath, as if it’s a word of local English. This plant root, identified now as Carum oregonum, is said to be similar to the one known in Klamath as yan (Calochortus macrocarpus Dougl.).

I was curious to learn the source of this apparently widely known but “foreign” word. Not a lot of work has been done on it. It seems ípo(s) plausibly traces back to

(A) yampa(h), a Shoshoni/Shoshone (Idaho-Wyoming-Nevada-Utah) word that’s solidly established in western US English for a native root food, often called “wild carrot”, or

(B) a relative of that word. Shoshone or “Snake”, a Uto-Aztecan language which at one time was a lingua franca on parts of the Oregon Trail & for the fur trade in that area, is closely related to the Oregon language Paiute, historically spoken in territories very near to the Klamath and Modoc people.

The Klamath word yan that I mentioned above also gets me thinking about a possible Uto-Aztecan connection. (A borrowing.) Know any Uto-Aztecan scholars to ask?

I wouldn’t be surprised to also some day stumble on confirmation that ípo(s) was used in local Chinuk Wawa, in southwestern Oregon.

If the meaning of it, in that spelling < epaws >, was obvious to the Oregon Indian War vets, then those Settler colonizers had probably learned it in their years spent in contact with Klamaths, Modocs, and other Indigenous folks —

— Years in which the big majority of the communication is known to have happened in Chinook Jargon.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?