Chinook Jargon sighting: “The War on Illahee” book (and a linguistic urban legend)
Naika wawa masi kopa Tiyaha (I say thanks to T.) for pointing this recently published book out to me1
In one of our Chinook Jargon Zoom sessions the other day, Tiyaha infored us about:
“The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest”, by Marc James Carpener (Yale University Press, 2025).
From the publisher’s blurb:
Illahee (a term for “homeland” in Chinook) was turned into the states of Oregon and Washington through the violence of invading soldiers, settlers, and serial killers.
That explains to you why I’m blogging about the book.
A comment: íliʔi (in Southern Dialect spelling) / ilahi (Northern) doesn’t only mean a “homeland”, but that’s a very good translation of the word.
I often find myself having to teach people that this word, which can also have the more generic senses of “a place; land; dirt”, had the inherent connotation of “Native people’s land”.
Thus, the numerous Northern Dialect letters from Indigenous people that make contrasts such as Lillooet ilahi vs. Lillooet town: the Lillooet, BC Indian Reserve vs. the Settler town of Lillooet.
It’s good to observe, however, that not once in my entire career have I found anyone speaking Chinuk Wawa and using íliʔi / ilahi as meaning, all by itself, “homeland”, in the now-understood sense of that term.
My sense as a decent speaker of the language is that you have to specify a bit — for example saying nsayka íliʔi / nesaika ilahi — if you’re intent on your hearer or reader picking up your intended meaning of an ancestral country.
And for that matter, if you’re referring to someone’s ancestral, age-old, immemorial homeland, the most normal and frequent thing would be to call it their ánqati íliʔi / ankati ilahi: their “age-old land”.
I say all of this to counteract one of the linguistic urban legends about Chinook Jargon, that supposedly people of the past called the Pacific Northwest “Illahee”, with a capital I, as a proper noun.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nobody did that.
There was no concept, until about 1900, of a “Pacific Northwest”.
Plus, when you spend a lot of time researching stuff related to that concept, you find that even now, people in different North American regions near the North Pacific coast have strongly diverging opinions about what the PNW even includes.
(Or whether their place is included in “Cascadia”.)
I finish by commenting that it appears the “we called it Illahee” legend originated in the minds of academic scholars: some really smart people who did not happen to speak or understand Chinook Jargon.
