Let’s get right into our 3rd installment of the mini-series on Franz Boas’s 1892 article in Science, “The Chinook Jargon“.

Are you familiar with the North American tradition of “Chautauqua”?

Let’s be clear: George Gibbs’s highly influential 1863 dictionary of Fort Vancouver-area early-creolized Chinuk Wawa doesn’t so much present us with didactic dialogues as fluent phrases…

Harold Morton Kramer (1873-1930) published a novel, “The Chrysalis“, in 1909 (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.).

Continuing to examine John Box Hoskins’s 2nd NW coast journal, I ask you: Is there much communication here that can’t be explained as the use of a lot of gestures and a few… Continue reading →

A recommendation to you:

nayka wáwa drét háyú mási kʰapa David Gene Lewis, PhD.

Franz Boas 1892 observed, with charming vagueness, that the word mamuk (‘do, make’) “has acquired an obscene meaning,”*…

There’s plenty of really substantial material in the 1886 memoir of Myron Eells, an acute on-the-spot observer of Puget Sound Native life, who sometimes writes of himself as “I” and sometimes in the… Continue reading →

The magazine article is titled “Old Seattle, and His Tribe” (Overland Monthly IV(4):297-302, April 1870).