Alaxwa from Yakima
Spotlighting the intercultural nature of traditional gaming and of Chinuk Wawa:
My reader Alex Code pointed me to an Indigenous slahál song sung by Tom “Mackenzie” Willie in 1991 and transcribed by the gifted William Wasden Jr in 2023.
Image credit: Patrick Amos (Nuu-chah-nulth) “West Coast Bone Game)”, found at Cascadia Department of Bioregion
This is coming to us from the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of coastal British Columbia, so I say Gilakas’la for the privilege of hearing it.
The song is presented at the marvelous FirstVoices.com with a title of Alaxwa from Yakima, a “Chinook Lahal song”.
Alaxwa is the ‘bone game’ in Kwak’wala language; David Grubbs’s fine little 1977 dictionary points out a connection to áleh ‘search for’.
(There’s so much known about Kwak’wala — I wish for a much more comprehensive dictionary & reference grammar.)
You may know this as ‘stick game’, ‘hand game’, lahal, slahal, lehel, etc.
One type of Indigenous gambling game is slahal, which involves singing taunting songs to distract your opponents. Traditionally you’d gamble against folks from other tribes when there were gatherings that featured some leisure time.
So, you picked up songs from a range of Native cultures. In this case, Kwakwaka’wakw people picked up a “Yakima” song from interior Washington state.
In my way of understanding, the most effective way to heckle opposing players who didn’t know your Indigenous language was to switch into Chinook Jargon. Lots of people knew Jargon, so you could use it to mess with their concentration. 😊
Here, I’m only going to show the part of the lyrics that involves Chinuk Wawa, but rest assured, whichever language a slahal song is in, it makes similar playful insults…
yey ha-a-la
[Kwak’wala:] ga̱n dzixs-dey galda (‘how many sticks you lose’)yey ha-a-la
[Chinook Jargon:] wiki sa-ya-a helu (‘like you always do’)yey ha-a-la
[Chinook Jargon:] gwan sum ka-agwa (‘losing all the time’)
In our current Northern Dialect CJ spelling, this is weik-saiyaa heilo (“they (the sticks) are almost gone”) and kwanisum kakwa (“it’s always like this!”).
