Nice proof of “kinnikinnick” in Chinook Jargon: kilikinik
I know I’m not alone in having doubted the presence of some “Indian” (sorry) words in Chinuk Wawa that we know originated from far-away Eastern Algonquian languages, and that we know could only have been brought here by non-Indigenous people.
“Non-Indigenous” here meaning not the local Indigenous folks. I reckon some fur-trade workers who were Iroquois, Abenaki, Nipissing, Métis and so forth knew these words before coming to the Pacific Northwest.
A German ad for “Kilikinik”! (image source: Silesian Digital Library)
There are a number of such words that had been known for so long in North American English that they had already become stereotypical of Indigenous people to Anglophones: “papoose” is one…and we’ve now proven it to be widely used in Chinook Jargon.
Another is “kinnikinnick” (or choose your alternate spelling), a word I grew up hearing in PNW English as [kə′nιkənιk]. I was amazed to meet a lifelong PNW’er who had never heard the word!
That’s also a word used in the Jargon, according to no less a source than the splendid 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary.
Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s handwritten Chinuk Wawa dictionary that I’m working with has this entry for it:
- kilikinik
- ‘arbutus [i.e. Arctostaphylos uva-ursi]‘
- ‘tobacco [i.e. the pipe-smoking mixture that customarily included that plant’s leaves]‘
This makes me happy.
Because of that “L” in it.
Mutations from “N” to “L” sounds typify Pacific Northwest Indigenous languages, including Chinookan and the Sahaptian languages spoken where St Onge worked in the mid-to-later 1800s.
This word was in common enough use in our region that it got re-Indigenized.
Bonus fact:
There is, I would say, a possibility of specific Sahaptin-language influence in turning kinikinik into kilikinik.
In Noel Rude’s lovely “Umatilla Dictionary” of that Sahaptin variety, one of the words for kinnikinnick is ilík.
See any resemblance there?
However, we do find (and this is mentioned in the 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary) kilikinik in an item having earlier sources, the 1871 Demers – Blanchet – St Onge dictionary that uses data all the way back to 1838, from the Fort Vancouver area.
