See what you think…

Thanks to John Enrico’s phenomenal “Haida Dictionary” (freely searchable here), I found this additional on-the-spot report from earliest times of Native-Newcomer contact on the Northwest Coast.

One of the very few times I’ve seen any Kwak’wala (“Kwakiutl”) word used in a Chinook Jargon environment!

If you grew up in Washington State when I did, you know “it’s the water”…

I’ve been having a look into Leonard Corwin Brant’s book…

I acquired a little book by Clarence Bagley, “The Acquisition and Pioneering of Old Oregon: In the Beginning / Pioneer Reminiscences” (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, undated].

Independent agreement that there was a sort of pidginized Haida in use during early days of contact with non-Indigenous people…

Calling all “back-translators” —

Pioneer-era boyhood friends communicated in Chinuk Wawa across ethnic lines…

Thanks again to researcher Jakob Svorkdal of the University of Victoria for sharing another neat document of Chinook Jargon use in frontier-era Victoria, BC.