Is Yahooskin a part-Chinuk Wawa tribal name? Or, maybe from *wax̣puš-kni?
Is the tribe name “Yahooskin”, as in “The Yahooskin Tribe of Snake Indians“, from a language other than their own Northern Paiute, at least in part?
Image credit: Yahooskin (Northern Paiute) Language, on Facebook
This is the claim of the Northern Paiute lesson book “Numu Yadua“, page 24:
yuhuskɨn ‘Snake River people (Yahooskin¹º)’
10 yuhu means ‘grease’ or ‘tallow.’ skɨn is from English ‘skin.’ A story of first contact accounts for
their combination. The Yahooskin Band applied tallow from deer bone marrow to their skin to ward off
insects. A white settler probably asked what it was called and then gave them the name.
Chinuk Wawa?
As usual, when we see someone claiming that a word in a Pacific Northwest tribal language is “from English” (or “from French”), it’s more probable that “from Chinook Jargon” is the true story.
But I have some doubts about the idea of “Yahooskin” being a blending of a Northern Paiute word with a CJ one.
We just don’t find other phrases built on such a pattern, anywhere in the Northwest.
Nor do we find Chinuk Wawa’s skin ever used in reference to the physical bodies of a human ethnic group.
The only demonym know of from actual CW that uses this word is British Columbia’s Skin Tyee Band, and that one comes from a known historical individual who was the ‘Fur Chief’. (And that’s the meaning of Skin Tyee.)
And Northern Paiute speakers aren’t historically known to have had very much to do with the Jargon, which is a language strongly associated with the (Indigenous) Northwest Coast and Plateau culture areas.
In this case, we’re talking about folks from the Klamath Reservation area of southwest Oregon. They had more connection with people of the “Great Basin” culture area to the east and southeast of there. Most of their exposure to the Jargon would seem to have happened in connection with Klamath speakers, some of whom could also talk Jargon.
So how about another possible source…
Sahaptin?
Tim Thornes in the respected journal IJAL explicitly says “it is clear that the term ‘Yahooskin’ is not a native [Northern Paiute] term (likely originating from the Sahaptin (Ichishkiin) language)”. He offers no specific ideas about a Sahaptin etymology. Still, this strikes me as one genuine possibility, since there was a historical presence of Sahaptin speakers, often called Klickitats, in the area.
I find no word for Paiutes in the Yakima Sahaptin dictionary, but the Umatilla Sahaptin dictionary has the word wax̣púš[-]pal for ‘Bannock; Shoshone; [Northern] Paiute’ — This is clearly the widely used exonym meaning ‘snake people’. Many languages of the greater Pacific Northwest use their own word for ‘(rattle)snake’ to refer to these ethnic groups. Again, note that the Yahooskins call themselves “The Yahooskin Tribe of Snake Indians” in English.
One problem in making a connection with wax̣púš[-]pal is that that apparent /h/ sound in “Yahooskin” is, as in Salish, also pretty infrequent in Sahaptin. If there’s any Sahaptin involved in the etymology of “Yahooskin”, perhaps it’s as a borrowing into a language that has more /h/’s. Such as Northern Paiute!
Non-Sahaptin speakers might have been familiar with the word wax̣púš[-]pal, and realized that wax̣puš is ‘rattlesnake’. At least one oldish Chinook Jargon dictionary has this wahpoos as a CJ borrowing from Sahaptin. Please read on for another etymological idea:
Klamath?
Fowler & Liljeblad, on page 464 of Volume 11 “Great Basin” of the Handbook of North American Indians, say likewise that “Yahooskin” is not a Northern Paiute-language word, but that it’s presumably Klamath. They note that it was originally found only in US government treaty documents, and then in Indian Affairs papers — but not documented in actual use by witnesses on the scene.
Wikipedia has a pretty well-researched article that suggests “Yahooskin” is a name originating in the unrelated Klamath language that would mean ‘people of far off down below’. The suggested Klamath source form, however, is pretty different-sounding from “Yahooskin”, so we still have to figure out what’s happened here.
Barker’s dictionary of Klamath speaks (page 544) of a demonym suffix:
almost any place name can be used as a “tribal name” when it occurs with [the suffix] kni … ‘from, people or person from’
I would add that, in an apparent coincidence, the unrelated Sahaptin language also has a suffix -kni, which is the ‘Ablative’ case, as in Ímatalam[-]kni ‘from Umatilla’. Rude’s Umatilla dictionary points out this similarity of suffixes as well. So presumably ‘(the people) from Snake country’ might be something like *wax̣puš-kni in Sahaptin, Klamath, or both.
We might wonder if folks who primarily spoke a language other than Klamath or Sahaptin — again perhaps the Northern Paiutes themselves — had a variant pronunciation of this, like –kɨn?
So, speculation is all I can offer here. My best guess for the time being might be that “Yahooskin” is Northern Paiute speakers’ foreigner pronunciation of *wax̣puš-kni.
I’ll have to invite those who know more about Northern Paiute, especially its phonology, to weigh in at this point!
