Main entrance, Kamloops residential school

Said to be a 1930’s photo by George Meeres, this shot of the Kamloops residential school entrance surprised me.

Here’s the entire image:

It’s at the British Columbia Regional Digitized History website.

(Thanks to Darrin Brager for making me aware of that site!)

Here’s a zoom-in:

We’re told this about the photo:

View of a wooden entranceway straddling a road. A sign hanging from the top of the entrance says “Kla How Ya Tillicum.” This salutation means “Welcome Friends” in the Chinook Jargon (also known as Chinuk Wawa). Industrial schools (also called boarding schools) were the precursor to residential schools, instituted with the objective of systematically and forcibly assimilated Indigenous children, as a form of cultural genocide. The building is now the site of the Secwepemc Museum.

Kamloops has a strong historical connection with Chinook Jargon, because Father JMR Le Jeune published the CJ “Kamloops Wawa” newspaper there, and shared the knowledge of “Chinook Writing”, Chinuk Pipa, with Native people who then taught and wrote to each other in that unique BC alphabet.

But I’m kind of astonished to see a Jargon salutation on a public-facing sign there. By the 1930s, the great majority of people in the vicinity were speaking English rather than Chinuk Wawa.

So this “Kla How Ya Tillicum” greeting, in the English alphabet, seems more like a Settler-colonizer-oriented piece of colorful local nostalgia, and less like a user-friendly acknowledgment of Indigenous families’ claim to the place.

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?