James Charles Stuart Strange (1753-1840), godson of Bonnie Prince Charlie, led a fur-trading expedition from India to Vancouver Island in the early era of contact between the Indigenous people there and non-Indigenous newcomers.
Today we have another early report from the still-new Kamloops Industrial School, saying everyone is still quite idealistic about the place’s prospects.
An Alaska Native leader is remembered for his love of Chinuk Wawa…
Jan van Eijk’s fine 2013 “Lillooet-English Dictionary“, page 14, has the word pḷạ́nsmən meaning ‘Frenchman’.
…A reminder that I’m also featuring non-Jargon humor from Kamloops Wawa, the “Chinook newspaper”!
In Part 1 of this mini-series on James Cook’s first-contact narrative, I showed what he expressed in the narrative of his 1778 visit in Nuuchahnulth country at what’s now known as Nootka Sound,… Continue reading →
By definition, a first-contact report won’t contain a pidgin language, such as the so-called Nootka Jargon, nor Chinook Jargon, which we’ve been finding didn’t yet exist…
This mini-series gives you some nice chunks of material to practice reading.
There’s a metaphor in Chinuk Wawa that we only seem to know from the Northern Dialect…but evidence suggests it may be older, from the Southern Dialect.
A decade ago in this space, I wrote “Cayuse French, It’s a Thing“. I gave examples from books.
