One of the very few times I’ve seen any Kwak’wala (“Kwakiutl”) word used in a Chinook Jargon environment!

If you grew up in Washington State when I did, you know “it’s the water”…

I’ve been having a look into Leonard Corwin Brant’s book…

I acquired a little book by Clarence Bagley, “The Acquisition and Pioneering of Old Oregon: In the Beginning / Pioneer Reminiscences” (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, undated].

Independent agreement that there was a sort of pidginized Haida in use during early days of contact with non-Indigenous people…

Calling all “back-translators” —

Pioneer-era boyhood friends communicated in Chinuk Wawa across ethnic lines…

Thanks again to researcher Jakob Svorkdal of the University of Victoria for sharing another neat document of Chinook Jargon use in frontier-era Victoria, BC.

Seems like it was always in the post-frontier era, after Jargon declined from daily use, that Settlers started naming things in it.

You can express irony in a pidgin language!