Russians speaking Chinuk Wawa in Alaska
One of the persistent urban legends about Chinook Jargon has been that there are Russian words in it. Uh-uh.
However, I’ve found an example of Russians speaking this language, in southeast Alaska, in the frontier era!
Just a great photo taken by Scidmore in Japan (image credit: Wikipedia)
It’s in a newspaper piece signed by RUHAMAH, who has to have been the journalist Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, first woman on the National Geographic Society board and originator of the idea of planting Washington, DC with Japanese cherry trees.
Today’s article went on to be incorporated into Scidmore’s book “Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago“.
(I’ve written about her before.)
Getting to the point of Russian interest, since I’ve mentioned such things a few times lately: Scidmore visits “Kaigau” (Kaigani) in Alaskan Haida territory, where the only Whites besides a missionary family are Count Zuboff, who had been exiled by the tsar and decided to remain in Alaska after the handover to the USA. He’s married to “a charming Russian lady of Sitka”, perhaps a Creole?
The little Countess was unfeignedly glad to see a few fellow creatures, and in the dusk of that dreary, wet night welcomed us to her simple home, and showed us her treasures, from the big blue-eyed baby to a wonderfully painted dance blanket. When we expressed curiosity at the latter, the pretty Russian seized the great piece of fringed and painted deerskin, and wrapping it about her shoulders threw her head back with fine pose, and stood as an animated tableau in the dusk and fire- light of her Alaska chalet. “This was a cultus potlatch,” she said, with a dainty accent, as she explained the way it came into her possession, and we laughed not a little to learn that that dilettante word cultus means ‘worthless” in the Chinook jargon.
— from the St Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat of August 28, 1883, page 4, columns 5-6
