As Chinook Jargon scholarship steadily advances, we become ever more aware of what it implies that the major “Washington Territory” treaties with Native tribes having been worked out via that Indigenous-oriented language.

Naika wawa mirsi kopa okok Alex “Alik” Code kopa okok tanas pipa.

This is an oddity, with genuine Chinuk Wawa from Native people, far from home, who chose to play up to White people’s stereotypes.

Jargon as written German-style, in the Fraktur alphabet even!

Mockery of the northwesternmost Natives to speak Chinuk Wawa is still evidence of how they spoke it!

This “our Indians” thing sounds real, real patronizing…

A casual comment makes an oldtimer’s interview plenty interesting to us…

Maybe you can help decipher this!

I’ve previously written about origins of Chinook Jargon’s ísik-stík (‘paddle-wood’) as the name of a tree species…

From George Gibbs’s phenomenal 1877 ethnographic and historical tour de force, “Tribes of Western Washington and Northwest Oregon”…