What do other people call you behind your back? Exonyms in Chinuk Wawa

Lately I’ve been doing a good deal of research deep into the Chinookan languages, but it’s leading me right back out to the names of foreign tribes!

Here I want to meditate on the talented photographer Edward S. Curtis’s 1911 book, “The North American Indian: Volume Eight/ The Nez Perces, Wallawalla, Cayuse, and Chinookan Tribes” (Norwood, MA: The Plimpton Press), and particularly on page 180 there.

Klamath tribe member, photographed by ES Curtis (image source: Fine Art America)

Three tribe names in the Kiksht Upper Chinookan language beg for comment. Here I’ll put them into Grand Ronde-style spellings:

1. ɬámaɬ ‘Klamath’:
   From a Chinookan noun for ‘their lake’. In the Klamath language it’s effectively the same idea: ʔews ‘the lake’. I reckon Klamath Lake is a gigantic landmark.
2. múwatʰa ‘Modoc’:
   The superb 2012 Grand Ronde CW dictionary reports múwatʰwas, which I have previously written about here. Both forms are outsiders’ confusion between Modocs and their neighbors, the totally distinct Pit River tribes of northern California. A Klamath-language word for ‘southerners’.
3. múlalish ‘Molala’:
   A word of unknown, non-Molala origin; the -ish ending is suggestive of Salish with its frequent suffix for ‘people’.

It strikes me that at least two of these three (#2 and #3) don’t follow Chinookan grammar, in that they lack the obligatory Chinookan number/gender prefixes. Thus they “sound foreign” in Chinookan.

And, finding these words in Columbia River tribal languages can be taken as suggestive that these names and the people labeled by them were known by Chinookans independently of, and before the time of, Chinook Jargon.

In that case, these words as Chinook Jargon vocabulary don’t necessarily trace to the reservation era. I personally had imagined that they came from the mid-1850s, when so many tribal nations were thrown together on the Grand Ronde Reservation. Instead these words may have been current well before that time.

Bonus fact:

You’ve got to figure, these words were also the names of actual enslaved people.

Various sources have indicated that traditionally a slave on the Pacific NW Coast would be just called by the name of their home tribe.

𛰅𛱁‌𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆‌𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙‌𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? Qu’en penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?

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