“Fish house” part 3: it’s so definite
First I wrote about discovering a Heiltsuk word that probably showed how the Chinuk Wawa word — otherwise unknown to us — for “cannery” was fish house. Then I found backup for the… Continue reading
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Chinook snowman
Snowman: Chinook. Chinook snowman!
Kanamokst as a noun!
The word that was spelled kanamokst in the Kamloops area is known in every dialect of Chinuk Wawa. Dictionaries mostly define it in English as an adverb, “together”. This is what you’ll learn from the Grand Ronde… Continue reading
Definitions *in* Chinuk Wawa
Most wanted, to bring Chinook Jargon alive: definitions of the language…in the language. If we’re making the effort to revitalize an endangered idiom such as “Chinook”, we have to give new speakers a… Continue reading
Canneries, culture contact, and spreading Chinook literacy
The unique BC alphabet for Chinook Jargon, Chinuk pipa, found a secure place in Indigenous people’s hearts in its first few years. Not just southern interior people, and not limited either to lower mainland… Continue reading
More about the flood of 1894
I blogged the other day about the great Fraser River flood of 1894; how about some Indigenous people’s eyewitness notes, in Chinuk Wawa? From Kamloops Wawa #118b, July 1894, page 131: <More about the flood.>… Continue reading
Hyou dams!
Mirabile visu, a book review turns juicy! Commenting at length on Horatio Hale’s 1890 revision of his 1846 (Wilkes) U.S. Exploring Expedition report, a Robert Brown tosses in some great s#!+ in Chinook that you’ve never read… Continue reading
Wine tea, a redundancy born of anachronism
When Kamloops Wawa tells, on pages 21-22 of issue #118b (i.e. a whole ‘nother issue dated July 1894), the story of the wedding at Cana, we get an additional example of the old-fashioned talk that… Continue reading
The great Fraser River flood of 1894
The great Fraser River flood of 1894 impressed those affected sufficiently for it to get immediately labeled as “the big flood”. On the bright side, settlement was still pretty sparse so deaths were… Continue reading
Why would Frederic Remington use Chinuk Wawa?
The master of the “Western” genre in American painting, Frederic Remington (1861-1909), got most of his down-to-earth experience on the Plains: places like Nebraska and Montana. On a website like mine, you’ll expect… Continue reading