Locking down an Indigenous metaphor? The cow-cow boogie
I suggest we could add the translation ‘arrest someone’ to the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary entry for k’áw-k’aw.
That word is the productively reduplicated (distributive action) form of the root k’áw ‘to tie’.
The funnest illustration I could find (image credit: Youtube)
The 2012 dictionary defines k’áw-k’aw as ‘tied or tie up really well; all tied up; to tie a lot up’.
I’ll spare you folks some boring details, but the following example sentence is what got me realizing there’s a connection with Indigenous languages across our region —
k’áw-k’aw ya! k’áw-k’aw ya!
‘Tie ‘im up! Tie ‘im up!’
or
munk-k’áw-k’aw ya!
‘Tie ‘im up!’
so the crowd would yell at gatherings on Grand Ronde Reservation of yesteryear, when a drunk proved disruptive; he might be tied to a post for an indeterminate time, or be thrown tied-up into a dry well-hole.
Detaining a person by tying them up, in response to an infraction of community norms, sounds very much like “arresting” them.
Compare with a couple of other languages of the Pacific Northwest:
- Nez Perce (Sahaptian language family) wel̓étp̓ese ‘arrest, tie up‘
- Quinault (Salish language family) t̓ə́qləš ‘arrest’, literally ‘tie up‘
Hmmm…
