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?
In 1896, BC Indigenous people and others still remembered traditional underground “pithouses”, which in Chinook Jargon were known as kíkwəli-háws.
Here’s a totally fascinating political satire from Territorial days here in Washington.
Here’s a funny, maybe true, story from British Columbia’s frontier era that’s focused on lakamín, a cultural trait and a word that are important to Chinook Jargon.
A little more evidence of Northern Paiute speakers in Chinook Jargon-speaking environments.
“The Indians Friendly” was one of several stacked-up breathless headlines from the start of a gold fever.
Just a few words, but fun!
With that settled, the next question may be whether this comes from casual French, as I suspect, meaning it dates to Fort Astoria/Fort Vancouver days, but not earlier.
The Portland (OR) Sunday Oregonian of August 20, 1899, page 19, columns 1-2 carries a very interesting, but flawed, source of information about Chinook Jargon.
“Navigating by a Dead-Reckoning” is the headline on a territorial-era newspaper piece about the steamship North Pacific leaving Victoria, BC on its way to Puget Sound…
Enough readers of this post-frontier era Alaskan newspaper understood Chinook to make it worth publishing the following joke.
