Beware of Sasquatch & kook science & spiritual entrepreneurs!
Happy Halloween! I won’t tire you out with the story of how I found this item 🤩
(Other posts on my site that relate to Halloween.)
This was published in a magazine, “Many Smokes”, in its Fourth Quarter of 1968 issue. I haven’t found a copy of it accessible online, so instead here’s a link to another publication that reproduced it:
I read the caption as:
“14 Lemah Saghalie
Hy-kwa iktas
kuitan tupso
1897
Matah Kagmi”
That’s okay Chinook Jargon for “Fourteen hands high [like a horse] / wearing dentalia / (having) horse hair / 1897 / Matah Kagmi”.
That last line is supposed to be the Modoc tribal name for this supposed sasquatch.
Now, here are some problems.
This drawing only emerged 71 years after the supposed sighting by a supposed California Native man.
It looks as it were made intentionally to seem as if it were from the year 1897.
In 1897, no Indigenous people south of the Quileute Reservation (far northwest Washington state) are known to have been writing or reading in Chinook Jargon.
Using book spellings.
The supposed source of the 1897 tale, who attributed it to his supposed Indigenous grandfather, was the so-called Tawani Wakawa Shoush. Mr. Shoush, according to “Kook Science”, was also the publisher of the supposed secret diary of Richard Evelyn Byrd’s supposed secret UFO flight inside the supposed hollow Earth via a supposed hole in the North Pole. (He also claimed the Nazis explored there.)
And the publisher of Mr. Shoush’s 1968 tale & the above cartoon in “Many Smokes” was the so-called Sun Bear, a notorious spiritual entrepreneur known for “playing Indian” and selling access to his own supposed Native medicine powers and knowledge.
Put all of this together, and we come out today with a neat Jargon cartoon that we never knew about before 🙂
Bonus fact:
The Sts’ailes First Nation in British Columbia, the original source of the word “sasquatch”, has adopted this creature as its logo:
Image credit: Sts’ailes Nation
Sts’ailes (where lots of Chinook Jargon letters got written by Indigenous folks) has previously been called “Chehalis”, which is inaccurate. Chehalis is a Salish name from southwestern Washington State, not related to Sts’ailes. The reason for the confusion has to have been that folks were familiar with Chehalis (WA) first, and then went to BC and encountered this similar-sounding (to their colonial ears) name!
A similar thing happened, I hypothesize, with the nearby Sq’éwlets people in BC getting called “Scowlitz” back in the day. A Salish name, “Cowlitz”, was very well known in fur-trade days, and when non-Indigenous people later came up to the Fraser River, I think they transferred it onto the locality there called by a comparable name.
If you’d like to read part of a Sásq’ets story in the Halkomelem / Stó:lō language (and English) from elder Rosaleen George of Sts’ailes, click here.
You can also take certain stories told by elders in Chinook Jargon to be tales of Sasquatch, such as “Stingy Girl Taken Away by Mountain People” and “One Arm, One Leg”, at bcchinookjargon.ca. (It’s told in the Northern dialect there; originally it was gotten in Southern.)
I’ll leave you with one more image from Sts’ailes First Nation, where they take a lot of pride in Sásq’ets:
