Some broad ideas about “wapsina”

In a Chinook Jargon invitation, we once saw a mysterious word “wapsina“…

It seemed to mean ‘(young) woman’.

Image credit: Alamy

I couldn’t come up with an etymology at the time, six years ago.

Now I’ve spotted a word in the Indigenous language local to that ad, Umatilla Sahaptin:

wápšaš ‘hair braid’.

That’s fairly similar in sound to “wapsina”.

I see that there’s a Dual number suffix -ina in Umatilla; could that help account for the ending of “wapsina” — ‘2 braids’? Braids often come in pairs.

And it seems plausible that local English- and Chinook-speaking White folks might have heard a word for ‘braids’ from Umatillas, and understood it.

One possible weakness of my case here is that this stem for ‘braids’ is used in reference to both females and males, in Umatilla.

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?