A passing remark by known BC Chinuk Wawa speaker and researcher, George Mercer Dawson, helps us understand the geographic limits of CW.

I thought this would be among the briefest of notes I publish on my site.

I shared this on the old CHINOOK listserv 14 years ago, and it deserves wider visibility.

An elder pioneer was interviewed by the Depression-era Federal Writers Project in the 1930s…

Untranslated Chinuk Wawa in a Seattle paper early in the post-frontier period…

So far, in previous posts I’ve tallied these 7 echoes of Métis French calumet ‘pipe (for smoking tobacco)’ in the Pacific Northwest:

Early days in Salish linguistics: you had your “Salt Water” Selish, your “Horse” Selish (Nisqually), your “Kwillehiut” Selish (the unrelated Quileutes!), your Yakama Snohomish Selish (the unrelated Sahaptians!), and such.

Lee & Frost’s “Clatsop” brief vocabulary list in “Ten Years in Oregon” (1844) is indeed Chinookan, but it’s Lower Chinookan as spoken with the White missionaries.

Perfetly typical for a bustling big city after frontier times, this Seattle newspaper needed to explain Chinuk Wawa words to its readers.

A prolific genre was enriched by a talented painter.