1878, SE Alaska: Chief Toy-a-att’s speech: Back-translation challenge
There are plenty of hints in today’s featured frontier-era newspaper article that Chinook Jargon was being used a lot in Southeast Alaska.
Such clues include the untranslated use of words such as tillicums, Ty-hee, and tum tum.
Image credit: UCSD Library Digital Collections
(Surely you know what those mean?)
I won’t reproduce here a speech by Chief Toy-a-att at Wrangell, Alaska, as translated into English. But I challenge you to follow the link below, and back-translate it into Chinook Jargon again.
(Extra credit: put it back into Lingít!)
Here’s what was said about the speech, which I think was characteristic of fairly early times in Pacific NW tribes’ contact with Americans:
Such, my readers, is Toy-a-att’s speech, verbatim, as near as I could report it. What do you think of it? Does it not speak volumes ? Does it not convince you that all the talk about the Indians of Alaska desiring missionaries sent among them is not an idle rumor ? This speech was made at his own request, before hundreds of people, and he desired that I should publish to the world what he said. I have endeavored to do so, and I trust that the public will receive it as an earnest appeal from an Indian who I believe is truly sincere in his efforts to do good.
Toy a-att spoke in the [Lingít (Tlingit)] Indian tongue, and his speech was repeated by Indian “Charley” in “Chinook.”
— from “Affairs in Alaska”, in the Port Townsend (Washington Territory) Puget Sound Weekly Argus of March 22, 1878, page 10, columns 1-3
This same speech is reproduced in an 1886 book.
