William “Willie” McCluskey (1862-1939) was a Swinomish Reservation (La Conner, Washington) man who wrote a number of fine Chinook Jargon letters in the post-frontier era.

Typically unsympathetic Settler newspaper coverage of Native defendants in the colonial courts…

From one of the great Canadian magazines, an impressively well reported account of the colonialist prohibition on potlatching.

Here as usual I’ll refer to the mixed Cree-French language Michif for Métis French word forms.

Times change…It’s incredible how many times we’ve found that the songs folks felt like translating into Chinook Jargon were racist minstrel tunes!

READER CHALLENGE: read on to see if you have ideas about some French source words! I’ve written that certain entire families, and types, of languages are fairly impervious to external influence.

James R. Anderson, a noted botanical authority in British Columbia, was the son of fur-trade era Chinook Jargon authority Alexander Caulfield Anderson.

One of the few published mentions of the pidgin Haida of the early Northwest Coast maritime fur trade…

(Image credit: “Career of a Scotch Boy“) Active contributor LeAnn Riding got me thinking about BC Métis people, when she posted on our old CHINOOK listserv (remember listservs?) — “A while ago I… Continue reading →

In a 2000 discussion on our old CHINOOK listserv, founder of modern Chinuk Wawa studies, Dr. Henry Zenk, shared a historical quotation from the Grand Ronde, Oregon, area: