WA: Ford family history
It’s not in the title of The Family History of Raymond & Corinne Blakeslee {do you realize that that’s a link to click?}, but the pioneer Ford family of southwest Washington is documented in a homemade treasure.
These were immigrants of 1846 to what’s now Washington, quite early Settlers.
There’s quite a lot of quotation from Silas Heck (Upper Chehalis tribe), and several people’s valuable memories of frontier times.
A new meaning of skookum house (skúkum-háws) shows up. Across all dialects of Chinook Jargon this is an established metaphorical phrase for a ‘jail’. Page 16 of the typewritten family history has a paragraph starting this way:
“All that winter my father, Koolah, helped ‘Mister Poot’ [Ford] with his stock,” continued Silas Heck, “and he did the chores and also stood guard right at the ‘skookum house,’ or fort, as the Indians called the two log houses; for ‘Mister Poot’ had placed wooden blocks a foot thick over the windows.
So that’s a more literal meaning of the Chinook Jargon phrase: a ‘strong building’.
Other items of interest are:
- The discussion of Saturday being called ‘distribution day for rations’ in Upper Chehalis Salish, as it historically has been termed in Chinuk Wawa also. (Page 15.)
- Description of the Chinook Jargon interpreting that went on for the Treaty of Medicine Creek. (Pages 9 and onwards.)
- A tribal member recalling that Governor Isaac I. Stevens pleaded with the Indigenous people at the treaty grounds, claiming there were so many White people back east that they would have to eat each other if they couldn’t get hold of some land here in Washington. (Page 19.)
- Bits of Upper Chehalis that the tribal people used with the Ford family, including giving their children nicknames like ‘Sunny’. (Pages 9-10 for example.) Some of these words may be new discoveries, such as ‘resting place’ and ‘immune’.
- As we have seen before, any distinction between Kanaka (Pacific Islander) and African-American was blurry among Settlers; page 8 tells of “Peter Austinger, a native of Central America”, whom locals called, forgive me, “Nigger Pete” due to his complexion. Mr. Austinger hated being called this.
- Page 10 — the Ford child known as Sunny or Kolum witnessed a medicine man making Tamahnawus (t’əmánəwas) to cure people, and supposedly learned how to do it himself.
- An example of the Settler tendency to spell Indigenous [á] as if it were the English-language diphthong [ái] (which we see in the famous word Siwash) is the personal name “Clilike (Clilac)” on page 16.
- Page 17 — Chinook Jargon “mamook pooh” meaning ‘shoot him’ (an owl).
Go read it, it’s a marvelous resource that the family has shared online!
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?
Hey! Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon!
And join free Zoom sessions…currently Monday @ 7PM (West Coast)!
Contact me for the Zoom link.
