Newspaper editors used to libel each other freely in the USA.

Today’s clipping is Chinook Jargon from the Grand Ronde area, in frontier times, so it’s un-translated by the newspaper editor.

This installment is admittedly from the “Chinook Paper” but not directly in Chinook Jargon — read on to see the humor in it, and for a little lesson in Jargon.

Is this Chinuk Wawa’s ísik ‘paddle’, loaned into the language of the central Washington Coast? 

Take a look at the names of “the first of them to write” Chinook Writing at Kamloops — do they all seem Métis to you?

The other day, I showed the English word “or” showing up in the Northern Dialect of Chinook Jargon.

Sometimes we find a new, important document of Chinook Jargon inside an item that we already knew of!

Song #6 from Myron Eells’s little book, “Hymns in the Chinook Jargon Language“, 2nd (expanded!) edition (Portland, OR: David Steel, 1889):

A bit north of Walla Walla, withing frontier times, a local Settler newspaper undermined its own message by complaining in a language Indigenous people understood.

This one is Chinuk Wawa in the news in a roundabout way!