Čáw Pawá Láakni: They Are Not Forgotten
A phenomenal cultural document that recently joined my research library is the book “Čáw Pawá Láakni: They Are Not Forgotten / Sahaptian Place Names Atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla” by Eugene S. Hunn et al. (Pendleton, OR: Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, 2015).
Image credit: Tamástslikt Cultural Institute
It’s part of a recent trend for Indigenous nations to publicly show their traditional land knowledge, as also seen in the books “Stó:lō Coast Salish Historical Atlas” and “Nooksack Place Names“.
Here I will only show one place name that I found in it, because this one is in Chinuk Wawa:
kàkšit kiyútin, as it’s written on page 186 of the book. This means ‘broken horse’, as in being broke-down and no longer useful. It’s said to come from
an incident where a white horse belonging to a Wallowa Band Nez Perce broke its leg and had to be shot…This does not mean that Chinooks named the place but simply implies that the widespread use of this trade jargon resulted in the naming of this place.
The locale is the Imnaha River at the Upper Snake River, in the far northeast corner of present-day Oregon.
I appreciate the detailed phonetic spelling used for this toponym in the book. It’s useful to know that first word carried secondary stress (exactly as we expect for a modifying word such as this in Jargon). It’s also nice to learn that the second word was, in local pronunciation, stressed on its second syllable. Compare the standardized Grand Ronde version, which would be kàkshət kʰíyútən (where the second word can have the stress either on its first or second syllable).
I also value the backstory that’s provided. For us it’s good to learn that kákshət ‘broken’ has a history of usage in reference to living beings, as ‘hopelessly damaged’. (And, for instance, not as a parallel to English ‘broken (i.e. tamed) horse’.) This in fact parallels what I was told the other day by a descendant of Koxit/Coxit George, Chief of the Moses band in north-central Washington, that that Chinook name of his stemmed from an occurrence when he got thrown from, and permanently injured by, a horse he had been proud of.
