CHINOOK JARGON AS A BC ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE: The following is an argument I wrote up as a grad student, a few years back. It’s keenly relevant now, eh?
“The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia” by the engineer/surveyor Walter Moberly (London: H. Blacklock & Co., 1885.) This is the sort of old Northwest book that’s not quite crammed full of the stuff… Continue reading →
Around the turn of the century, as they used to call 1900, a lot of Indigenous people were recorded as talking a mixture of pidgin English and Chinook Jargon. Here’s an Okanagan… Continue reading →
At evening we walked up to Geary’s ranch, which he ” runs ” as a kind of hotel for the few travellers who pass this way. Conspicuous on the wall of the only… Continue reading →
( * In honor of chup henli Zenk.) 🙂 When your grandfather isn’t your chúp, what do you call him? I’m not thinking here of the affectionate variants that you can find in… Continue reading →
On my family’s vacation to the central Oregon coast this last week, we visited a number of Chinuk Wawa-named places: I know I’m leaving some out! There are lots of them in that… Continue reading →
Yesterday I shared a Secwepemc girl’s tree-bark (!) postcard congratulating Queen Victoria on her 60th anniversary on the British throne. Today (in shorthand French): how that message was received. Də d… Continue reading →
[Serendipity! Updated 7/20/2016 when I discovered a clearer copy of her letter, with a French translation backing it up, in the next issue of Kamloops Wawa.] From an Indigenous girl in 1897: … Continue reading →
This verbal portrait comes courtesy of The Prospector newspaper (Lillooet, BC), volume 7, number 7, February 9, 1905, page 3, second column, under the headline “Current Comment” (my comments follow below the image): One of the… Continue reading →
File under Chinuk Wawa names: A previous post of mine made a sideways mention of botanical luminary David Douglas’s presumable Chinuk Wawa name. He was said to be called “Grass Man”, I suppose… Continue reading →
There are things I find in my work with old documents that would be disturbing if taken out of context. Some Chinook Jargon dictionaries have swastikas on their covers. (“It’s an ‘Indian’ symbol!”… Continue reading →
