Sentence of the day: Tying someone up = arresting them
I have pointed out that the colonizer custom of clapping cuffs on a culprit — arresting someone — is ‘tying’ them up, in many Indigenous languages, including Chinook Jargon.
Here’s a neat, and humorous, example of that.
Image credit: Prison Journalism Project
It’s some 1890’s advice to be sure and read your copies of the “Kamloops Wawa” Chinook newspaper:
Wiht pus
‘Also if’msaika mamuk-k’aw msaika pipa kopa iht boks, pus msaika
‘you tie up (arrest) your papers inside a box, and’mamuk-skukum-haws iaka, wik-kata msaika tolo
‘jail them, you can’t get any’ikta kopa ukuk pipa.
‘benefit from these papers.’
— “Kamloops Wawa” #136 (January 1896), page 12
Releasing someone from prison, as you might have guessed, can be mash yaka k’aw, ‘release their binds’.
