Author Archive

1909: A Jargon invitation…to Native people?

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Straight out, this is some wacky (and in some ways wack) Chinuk Wawa that reader Alex Code sent my way…

1888: Political/religious/gender joke

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My home state of Washington was among the first to legalize voting by women…

1915: Campus Day at the high school; another new Chinook hymn?

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News coverage of a day of beautifying the still new high school campus in one of Washington state’s “Tri-Cities” involves two obscure expressions.

Métis people’s tracks in the BC Christmas landscape

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The research I’ve been doing into the Métis linguistic presence in British Columbia leads to a timely discovery…

1878: Christmas at Neah Bay, and a clue to Jack’s 1881 CW letter

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Well within the frontier period (some of Washington’s biggest cities hadn’t yet been founded!), Chinook Jargon was already being suppressed in some places…

1899 Xmas: Have you read the posters?

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Another Chinook Jargon artifact from Kittitas County that I’d like to find…

1909: A hilarious Jargon song for Christmas

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A nice local report of post-frontier Native celebration of Christmas in Umatilla County, northeastern Oregon.

1891: Poor old Angeline, getting tooted on?

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Not do diminish the importance of this substantial human-interest piece about a major Native figure, but I suspect we have a rare Chinuk Wawa ‘fart’ sighting here…

SO MANY Métis words in interior PNW languages (Part 1: Dakelh)

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In this mini-series, I’m not going to list all the Chinuk Wawa, and later English, loans found in each language. I’ll do that in separate articles. The idea here is to demonstrate to… Continue reading

1868: A newfound quote + 3 Indigenous speakers of BC Métis French

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I’ve written a number of times about the Métis French that was BC’s lingua franca until Chinook Jargon — another Métis language — took over…