1910, BC: Memorial To Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada, From the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia
Much as with the Stevens Treaties in the US, back-translation into Northern Chinook Jargon awaits this important BC document.
And, as with those treaties, the point is that it was Chinook Jargon in which this statement of understanding was largely worked out.
These Indigenous leaders’ wishes and experiences were also conveyed to the Whites on their team (James A. Teit, J.M.R. Le Jeune, certain Indian Agents and lawyers) via tribal languages like Nɬeʔkepmxcín (“Couteau”) and Secwepemctsín (“Shuswap”) — but frankly none of those Settlers had a deeply fluent understanding of those forms of speech.
Some tribal chiefs had a degree of understanding of English by 1910, and older ones knew some Métis/Canadian French from fur-trade times. It would be a fairly wild claim to say that they knew English or French legal terminology or proper forms of address to use in a formal document to the Prime Minister.
(For instance, “memorial” is a legal term:
- (law) A statement of facts set out in the form of a petition to a person in authority, a court or tribunal, a government, etc. [from 17th c.] )
The most useful BC intercultural language in 1910 remained Chinuk Wawa.
Sir Wilfred (image source: British Columbia, An Untold History)
Sir Wilfred (the proper spelling) Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada at the time, was traveling through Kamloops on August 25, 1910, and was handed this important political message from the Indigenous leaders of that area:
I myself am not going to start into back-translating this Memorial right now. But when that happens, I guarantee its Chinook Jargon will demonstrate great differences of understanding between Indigenous and Euro-Canadian people.
I am not saying that the two parties totally failed to grasp each other’s points of view.
I am saying we can legally establish that the two sides were talking past each other to a significant degree.
My experience of a large number of languages, as a professional linguist, is that there’s no such thing as a perfect translation — and the greater the cultural dissimilarities, the less likely a translation is to be a perfect tool.
By the way, there exist numerous other written Memorials from tribal leaders of BC to the Canadian government…
