Category Archive: Uncategorized

BC First Nations Chinuk Wawa: Who’s in charge of helping? It’s complicated

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Linguistically, “helping” is a real, real interesting thing.

McArthur’s “Oregon Geographic Names” (part 7 of 8)

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We’ve made a number of interesting discoveries as we’ve worked through the preceding six installments of this mini-series; now let’s see what awaits us in our next-to-last episode…

1795-1796: Bishop’s “Ruby” journals, and an amorphous NW Coast Jargon

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I recently wrote a little about how Captain Charles Bishop’s ship “Ruby” may have been the first to linger in the Pacific Northwest, and thus may have inspired Chinuk Wawa.

1888: A sermon by Myron Eells (part 6 of 6)

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Finishing up our deep look into Reverend Myron Eells’ quite fluent late-frontier Christian sermon addressed to a Native audience… 

Toward a deeper-rooted etymology of saplél

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It should be a Sahaptian-family word, shouldn’t it, judging by where it was first documented?

Native people’s voices in “Kamloops Wawa” (Part 1 )

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An argument between an Indigenous man and a priest in British Columbia…

19th c.: THE BRITISH COLONIST (Part 1: Chinook as a big-city language)

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1878: “Court of Assize: Before Mr. Justice Crease” is the headline…

Indigenizing the Katolik Styuil: Marriage and consent

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Chinuk Wawa research got me thinking about the expression of consent…

Serendipity: Why it’s so perfect to find “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in CW

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I won’t repeat the Chinook version of the US children’s rhyme, and song, “Mary Had a Little Lamb“, today.

1944: Rena V. Grant, “The Chinook Jargon, Past and Present” documents the early spread of CJ in BC

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The English professor who discovered a lost Walt Whitman poem also wrote some good scholarly articles on Chinook Jargon.