Discoveries in Cayuse ‘n’ cussin’ ‘n’ Chinookin’

Bear with me, and send the kids to another room.

Some of the journals of fur trader Samuel Black (1780?-1841) are published in a little-known small book titled “faithful to their Tribe & friends“, edited by Dennis Baird.

Image credit: Tenor

Black was Chief Factor at Fort Nez Percés from about 1825 to 1830, in the area of modern Walla Walla, Washington state. Previously he had spent years all over northern North America with the North West Company and the XY Company, working with Indigenous people.

So he was well equipped, and motivated, to note down vocabularies of the Native languages used around his post. In this case, we have many pages of his Sahaptin, Nez Perce, and Cayuse-language lexicon.

That last language is particularly exciting to find some words of, because Cayuse went out of use soon after, due to intermarriage with the Lower Nez Perce.

And, Black’s material was apparently not known to linguistic anthropologist Bruce Rigsby, whose 1969 paper “The Waiilatpuan Problem: More on Cayuse-Molala Relatability” is the closest thing I know of to a Cayuse dictionary. (Neither do e.g. Nicholas Pharris & Sarah Thomason reference Black in their 2005 paper that has some relation to Cayuse.)

So I’m happy to make a small contribution to Cayuse-language studies today.

In Black’s vocabularies, each entry of which is keyed to an English translation, there’s a section where he’s discussing bodily functions: “To F__t” [fart], “To Piss”, “To S__t” [shit], and…”____”!

Now, what the heck is that last one going to refer to? I really wanted to find out, because it’s mighty rare to find even self-censored documentation of naughty stuff in old Pacific NW papers.

The Indigenous words corresponding to this mysterious “____” are:

• Willa Walla [Walla Walla Sahaptin] — Pattasha or Papta
• Nez Perces [Nez Perce] — Shakeisha [or] shakish
• Cayouse [Cayuse] — Squintenichlin, squinten Ita

We know so little about Cayuse that it might be impossible to figure anything out from that material. But there’s a good deal of excellent modern data available on the other two languages. Following a hunch, I went looking for words for sex, and I found:

• Sahaptin — Beavert & Hargus’s wonderful Yakama dictionary has:
  • pápawinp– ‘get together, live together, marry, mate, have sex’
  • pách’aa- ‘have sex’
  • páts’x– ‘have sex with, have sexual intercourse with’
  • páku- ‘have sex with, procreate’ (compare with pákuk in Noel Rude’s fine Umatilla dictionary)
• Nez Perce — caʔqí•qawtaca ‘sexual intercourse, have’ (based on a variant of the word for ‘vagina’, says dictionary author Haruo Aoki)

These are mighty good matches for Samuel Black’s forms! So I’m convinced that he was noting down words for sex, for his own uses if not for anyone else to know. (I mean, he left the English meaning blank!)

Discovering this (and the Cayuse word for intercourse) backs up a point I’ve made any number of times in my research: that the people of the frontier past did indeed cuss.

I doubt Mr Black left a blank space while thinking of any polite synonym for “fuck”; why censor “coitus” or “intercourse”, for example?

We also know folks had naughty words in Chinuk Wawa. Those words never, or rarely, got published during that era.

• I find “squitch” just twice in print in those times, and quite late in fact, 1883-1884.
• JK Gill’s 1909 edition may have been the first time CW words for ‘penis’ were published; neither of them is the usual one that we now know, by the way, and I think they’re Chinookan, rather than Jargon.
• Explicit words for ‘having sex’ never made it into print until the top-notch 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary came out.

But when we track down people’s private papers from those times, we find that they most definitely were using lots of words of this nature.

• Royal Bensell was, in 1864 Oregon.
• John Noble was, circa 1850 in Oregon. He’s about as blunt, or even coarser, than Samuel Black was, with Chinook Jargon words including those for “c__t”, “f__k”, “asking a woman” i.e. propositioning her, and “a man’s thing”. He even has extra synonyms, new discoveries to us, for the male and female sex organs (deriving from the Clackamas Chinookan language), and warnings (for men anyway) not to address a woman as shíksh. (Which in modern times is just ‘friend’.)
• “Shit” was an English loan into the Jargon, scarcely ever documented in print by those who grew up speaking English — but freely recorded by speakers of French, Italian, etc.
• By 1874, the verb for ‘sleep’ was widely used for ‘sex’; at least in the Northern Dialect, this led to músum being replaced by a borrowing of the English word sleep.
• Franz Boas in 1892 may have been the first to say out loud that the word for ‘to do’ “has acquired an obscene connotation”.
• We know a word for cussin’ in Jargon, “hyou dams” = “many swears”!

So I’ll reemphasize my point that Chinook Jargon went hand-in-hand with cussin’ in many situations.

Don’t forget, some of the first non-local words Lewis & Clark heard from Lower Chinooks were “damned rascal, sun of a bitch &c.” That was in the winter of 1805-1806, when the Corps of Discovery were the first to document the Jargon existing.

What the h___ do you think?
Pi ′qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?