Making Wawa : The Genesis of Chinook Jargon [1 ed.] 9780774815284, 9780774815260

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Making Wawa Morphology

FIRST NATIONS LANGUAGES The First Nations languages of the world, many of which are renowned for the complexity and richness of their linguistic structure, embody the cumulative cultural knowledge of Aboriginal peoples. This vital linguistic heritage is currently under severe threat of extinction. This new series is dedicated to the linguistic study of these languages. Patricia A. Shaw, a member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and director of the First Nations Languages Program, is general editor of the series. The first four volumes in the series are The Lillooet Language: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax Jan van Eijk Musqueam Reference Grammar Wayne Suttles When I Was Small – I Wan Kwikws: A Grammatical Analysis of St’át’imc Oral Narratives Lisa Matthewson Witsuwit’en Grammar: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology Sharon Hargus

Making Wawa The Genesis of Chinook Jargon

George Lang

© UBC Press 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08m5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada with vegetable-based inks on FSC-certified ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lang, George, 1945Making Wawa : the genesis of Chinook Jargon / by George Lang. (First Nations languages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7748-1526-0 (bound); ISBN 978-0-7748-1527-7 (pbk.); ISBN 978-0-77481528-4 (ebook) 1. Chinook jargon–History. 2. Indians of North America–Northwest, Pacific–History. 3. Whites–Northwest, Pacific–Relations with Indians–History. 4. Chinook jargon– Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. I. Title. II. Series. PM846.L35 2008

497'.41

C2008-904332-4

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca

Konoway tiillciums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee i-lahie. Everyone was thrown together to make this strange new country. – Iona Campagnolo, former Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia (citing a line from Terry Glavin’s poem in Wawa, Rain Language)

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Contents

Acknowledgments / ix A Note on Orthography / xi Introduction / 1 1

The Nootka Jargon / 15

2

Pidgin Chinook / 43

3

Approximations at Astoria / 55

4

The Hothouse of Fort Vancouver / 85

5

Waves of Wawa / 123

Conclusion / 143 Appendix – Manuscript 195: A Partially Annotated Early Glossary of Chinook Jargon / 149 Chronology / 159 Notes / 163 References / 175 Index / 187

viii

Contents

Illustrations Map 1. Northwest Coast languages / 10 Map 2. Vancouver Island coast from Nootka Sound to the Strait of Juan de Fuca / 11 Map 3. From Grays Harbor through Shoalwater Bay to Baker’s Bay (including Qwatsamuts) / 12 Map 4. Language boundaries from Astoria to Portland / 13 Figure 3.1. The typescript of Manuscript 195 / 78 Figure 4.1. Dale Kinkade’s list of Lower Chehalis loan words into Wawa / 99

Acknowledgments

Over the years, I became indebted to a number of remarkable individuals: Peter Bakker, Ross Clark, Lee Falconer, Anthony Grant, Yvonne P. Hajda, Dell Hymes, Dave Robertson, and Henry B. Zenk. It goes without saying that neither they nor anyone else who provided me with material or advice directly or indirectly should be held to account for blunders and bloopers on my part. Henry deserves a special note. Without his generosity, which harks back to the disinterested scholarly traditions of the past, this book would not have whatever value it does. I am also grateful to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who, through their Cultural Education Coordinator, Tony A. Johnson, allowed me access to some unpublished material, in particular an early version of their dictionary. No small amount of this text coalesced during a stint as Gastprofessor and a subsequent sabbatical at the University of Innsbruck. It was spurred on by discussions with my friends and collaborators there, Friedrich Pöhl and Bernhard Tilg. Not to be neglected is the material support I received, first from the University of Alberta and then the University of Ottawa, in particular the research funding granted to me as Dean of Arts, without which I would not have been able to escape periodically my administrative routines and to pursue this vital thread of my intellectual life. Nor would the book have seen print without the patience and support of Jean Wilson at UBC Press. The anonymous readers did a fabulous job of helping me surmount my tics and occasional confusion, and quelling my unwarranted assaults on straw men. A book like this could probably never be published without the support of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

x

Acknowledgments

Finally, I should mention the forbearance of my wife, Nasrin Rahimieh, who had no idea what she was getting into over twenty years ago when she heard me call her favourite teddy tanas itsĥut ‘little bear’ – my first conscious coinage in Wawa.

A Note on Orthography

As we know from schooldays, spelling has always been associated with discipline and punishment, with imposing order. No order is ever neutral. Spelling is thus inherently prescriptive. Adopting an orthography is one way of saying: “This is how things should be.” Linguists think of their technical alphabets as descriptive. They seek a unified standard that can be consistently and knowledgeably applied to any given language, and ultimately to all languages. With regard to the languages of the Northwest Coast, there is a relatively firm consensus about how the International Phonetic Alphabet should be employed in an Americanist context. This is described at the head of each volume of the new Handbook of North American Indians (e.g., vol. 7, Northwest Coast, 1990, x). The trouble begins when we try to establish a simplified norm for nonspecialist readers, ideally one that does not contain “special” characters, or as few as possible. In North America, this means using the QWERTY keyboard. Wawa (also known as Chinook Jargon) offers its own set of problems. In the first place, much of the material is historical and needs to be quoted as is. Wawa is also pluri-dialectal. Alongside paston chinuk wawa, the anglicized varieties, there were and are Native varieties. 1 The Wawa spoken at the Grand Ronde reservation in Oregon has, for example, been formally adopted as a heritage language by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and provided with a phonologically rigorous orthography. An introduction can be found at http://www.grandronde.org/culture/#, Ntsayka Ikanum, “Our Story.” I was tempted to use “GR” as default throughout this book, but this orthography is tied to the project for which it was devised.

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A Note on Orthography

It is easily learned by those who are familiar with that dialect, but is not easily read by others. There is no perfect solution, none that will satisfy everyone. My own policy was to adopt as default the so-called French system begun by Father Modeste Demers in 1838 and systematized in 1864 by Father Louis Napoléon St. Onge (St. Onge 1892). It is worth noting that “French” here refers to the first language of the priests, since there is little evidence that they allowed French etymology or their own sense of literacy to affect their transcriptions. In fact, that they did not do so is one of its attractions. In the first place, this orthography is historically close to the early varieties of Wawa discussed here, almost coeval with them, although Father Demers’s collaborators, Father Francis Norbert Blanchet and the final editor, Father St. Onge, further developed the system throughout the nineteenth century, to the point that this orthography should best be baptized Demers/ Blanchet/St. Onge, hereinafter DBS (see Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge 1871; Lionnet 1853; Blanchet 1869). As important, this strand of the Wawa glossary lineage captures many of the nuances of Native varieties of Wawa, even that of Grand Ronde, all the while remaining more or less transparent to readers of English. There were only four special, non-QWERTY characters in DBS: an h with its right leg amputated; a K with its vertical shortened, used as the uppercase counterpart of another special character written ĸ; plus ï. In his own considerable corpus of later Wawa writings, St. Onge dropped ï, while adopting h with a cap (^) placed above it in place of DBS’s amputated h, and k with the same superimposed cap for both of DBS’s k-like characters. We have adapted St. Onge’s latter usages to the common “accented Latin” character set on most computers, writing, respectively, ĥ and ĸ for DBS/St. Onge’s hlike and k-like letters. Here, then, is DBS’s pronunciation guide, with the substitutions indicated above (cf. Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge 1871, 9-10): a has the Italian sounds as in bar, father, army. c, l, m, n, t, and w are sounded as in English (c occurs only in the ch combination mentioned below). e, as in pay. It is never mute. E.g., polakle ‘night’, is pronounced polaklay.

A Note on Orthography

xiii

h is aspirate, as in house. ĥ is guttural, and similar to the German ch in machen. i is always sounded as in finis. ï is equivalent to ee. E.g., lekaï ‘spotted’, is pronounced lay-kah-ee. k has its natural sound. ĸ has a guttural-explosive sound that practice alone can teach. o is sometimes long, e.g., kol ‘cold’; sometimes it is short, e.g., ĸol ‘hard’. s is always hard, like ss. E.g., ĸwas is pronounced kwass.2 u has the Italian sound, and is equivalent to oo in tool. E.g., tlush ‘good’ is pronounced tloosh. ch has the value of tsh. E.g., chits ‘grandmother’. The two special characters as well as the combinations mentioned above (tl in tlush and the tsh pronunciation of ch) are examples of this system’s potential to capture Indian and Native phonology. DBS is “under-differentiated.” 3 There is no distinction between velar and uvular sounds, so ĥ represents both velar and uvular fricatives (respectively, x and û in GR). It follows that the ĸ sound, described as “guttural-explosive” (in modern terminology, glottalized), covers both velar and uvular glottalized stops (› and ß in GR). Very rarely, St. Onge used a pp to represent glottalized p (Ù in GR). He recognized that there were other glottalized segments in Native varieties of Wawa, but decided he could omit them without serious consequence. I should add that I have often consulted the dictionary compiled by Jim Holton (2004), which is based on the English language lexicographical tradition, and which is accessible at http://rjholton.com/. Much other documentation as well as a list of glossaries available on the Web, including those of Blanchet (1869) and Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge (1871), and can be found at http://chinookjargon.home.att.net/. As usual, italicized text is used for words other than English, as in this citation from the journals of Lewis and Clark at the beginning of Chapter 1: clouch musket, wake com ma-tax musket. When appropriate, there is a transcription into DBS: tlush mosket, wek komtoks mosket. Where necessary, double quotes mark idiomatic translations (“that is a good musket, I do not understand this musket”). Single quotes contain a literal gloss (‘good musket,

xiv

A Note on Orthography

not know [this] musket’). Punctuation that is not part of these phrases falls outside of the cited material. For example, the first citation in Nootka in Chapter 1 (which is the present name of that language) is followed by a gloss: nuuaaÎu¿ ‘all along the mountains’. On occasion, a transcription of Wawa into GR has been inserted, for example, at the beginning of Chapter 1, ¿ush maskit, wik k¢mt¢ks maskit. On other occasions, GR has been used to emphasize Wawa’s relationship with Chinookan and other regional languages. One predicament that the GR orthography poses for readers and writers, and even for typesetters in our computer age, is that it cannot be easily transposed for e-mail and the Internet. This problem has been addressed by one of the orthographies recommended for use on the Chinuk Wawa Listserv (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/chinook.html). I cannot resist mentioning that there was a completely independent orthography developed near the end of the nineteenth century in the region of Kamloops, BC, by Father Jean-Marie Raphaël Le Jeune, one inspired by the syllabic systems devised by the Catholic Church for Indian languages in western and northern Canada but based, amazingly, on the Duployan business shorthand that Le Jeune had acquired in his youth in Paris, one related to the Gregg system. Examples can also be found at http://chinookjargon.home .att.net/. Kamloops Wawa falls outside of the scope of this book, but it should serve as reminder that Wawa orthographies are multiple, and that the difficulties raised in this note are, all things being equal, relatively minor.

Making Wawa

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Introduction

Several years before Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Tribe led his people on a last-ditch flight from the US Army across the Rockies near the Canadian border in 1877, he was known to frequent the homes of white people who had intruded into the Wallawa Valley in northeastern Oregon. Hoping to disarm tensions between the settlers and the non-conforming Nez Perce who refused to abandon their valley oasis, Joseph was ostentatiously friendly, “visiting some of the settlers’ homes, sitting in polite conversation in the Chinook Jargon with women, and playing genially with the children” (Josephy 1965, 453). That he chose to do so reflects personal values and a diplomatic strategy that will never be known with precision, but Chinook Jargon – hereinafter “Chinuk Wawa” or just “Wawa” – was his language of choice. By that time, several generations of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast had dealt with European newcomers. Initially, this interaction meant bartering, trading, and sometimes just giving. In fact, several of the oldest men and women in Chief Joseph’s 1877 band of refugees had welcomed the Lewis and Clark Expedition as it picked its way down the Rockies in a state of near starvation, desperate to arrive at the coast before the winter of 1806 set in. The Nez Perce had provided them with berries, dried fish, and breadcakes made from the onion-shaped roots of the hyacinthlike camas plant (Camassia quamash), habitually baked in a pit of hot rocks lined with wet grass. Europeans never acquired a taste for this staple of Native diet, flatulent in effect, but the common form among later speakers of Wawa was lakamas, with the French article la attached, one of many examples of the pervasive presence of French during the first decades of contact.

2

Introduction

Chief Joseph was not old enough to witness the encounter with Lewis and Clark, nor was he a particularly fluent speaker of Wawa. He had been born around 1840 far from the language’s heartland along the lower Columbia, and into a community that had voyageur French and, increasingly, missionary English alongside Nez Perce as main languages. The story of Chief Joseph opens this book not only because Wawa was the medium of his poignant effort to negotiate but also because, a decade later, during the denouement of Joseph’s War in the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, Wawa was used to lure him into the US Cavalry camp, where he was seized and taken hostage. What follows is an account of the origins of Wawa, a twobladed sword of reconciliation and betrayal that developed at the interface of “Indian” and white societies on the Northwest Coast during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. 1 Creole linguists tend to speak of the genesis of a language, as opposed to origins, but to use either term is inevitably to posit foundations, structures that persist over time and underlie some cohesive entity. Although Wawa in one form or another has been spoken for two centuries, it has been argued that it had no such underpinnings, that those who spoke it comprised a loose speech but not language community (Silverstein 1972, 623-24).2 This distinction is important, but not essential to what follows, since those two centuries of discourse constitute prima facie evidence that something was going on, something of interest to the study of human behaviour, particularly transcultural interaction, and to the history of Wawa. To state that Wawa was created – to some extent is still being made – is to shift the focus from formal analysis to the untidy and often confused lives of those who used it, to their agency and to their actions. Rarely does any collectivity set out self-consciously to invent a jargon or pidgin or any language; the artificial languages devised over the last few centuries are notable exceptions. Pidgins, in particular, arise “by accident” (Mufwene 1996, 87), the result of repeated attempts to communicate without a shared language. These collective efforts partake, moreover, of many dimensions. It follows that this book is not a work of linguistics per se, its argument falling instead between a number of academic disciplines: history, anthropology, demography, cultural studies, and literary theory. Indeed, the study of real-life events is inherently multidisciplinary, methodologies being procedural sets whose

Introduction

3

goal is to reduce complexity to manageable proportions, abstracting away factors defined as tangential to the explanations at hand. At the same time, however, those who embrace multidisciplinarity sometimes assume that they are above the law of the disciplines whose boundaries they transgress. The opposite is the case. There are not only epistemological but ethical reasons to conform to the etiquette and the procedural criteria of each realm the multidisciplinary scholar visits as a kind of guest. Multidisciplinarity is not a-disciplinarity, but rather what the word says: multi-. It exacts a higher degree of discipline than conformity to any single methodology. This account of the genesis of Wawa begins with the arrival of the Spanish explorer Juan Pérez at Nootka Sound and continues to the formal transfer of the Oregon Territory to the United States (1774-1846), although later events enter into the picture by virtue of the light they cast on the past. Although Wawa was spoken initially at the mouth of the Columbia, the contact at Nootka Sound deserves inclusion not only because of the striking number of words in Wawa from Nuuchahnulth, as Nootka is now called, but also because the maritime fur trade on the west coast of Vancouver Island in the last decades of the eighteenth century set parameters for contact among Aboriginal peoples and Europeans (Chapter 1, “The Nootka Jargon”). 3 The locus then shifts to the lower Columbia River and the surrounding region. The possibility that an antecedent pidgin of Lower Chinook influenced Wawa is broached in Chapter 2 (“Pidgin Chinook”). Thereafter, the saga of the birth of Wawa is set within the sequence of the cataclysmic transformation of indigenous societies that began with the arrival of the continental fur trade (Chapter 3, “Approximations at Astoria”). The region was at first slowly and then swiftly transformed as contacts intensified, notably through intermarriage and the institutionalization of the fur trade. The initial host culture at the mouth of the Columbia was consumed, and there arose “a special case of creolization” (Zenk 1984) in the newly established fur trade headquarters at what is now Vancouver, Washington (Chapter 4, “The Hothouse of Fort Vancouver”).4 Finally, by way of marking the end of the formative period of Wawa, Chapter 5 (“Waves of Wawa”) deals with the early stages of its dissemination along the Northwest Coast – which might as easily be qualified as the “Canadian Southwest,” although from a continental perspective that coast is decidedly to the northwest. From then on, the partially

4

Introduction

creolized pidgin that had been shared among a multi-ethnic and increasingly dispersed mobile population centred at Fort Vancouver was further transformed as speakers of diverse and mutually unintelligible Indian languages were confined to reservations, notably in Grand Ronde southwest of Portland, Oregon, but also on reserves around Kamloops, British Columbia. For a long time, Wawa remained an occasional and auxiliary tool for many of the settlers who flooded into the region. Its total number of speakers has been estimated to be as high as 100,000, its territory stretching “between San Francisco Bay and Sitka, between the Pacific shore and the top of the Rocky Mountains, and even beyond” (Grant 1945, 227). For a century, the semi-creolized core of the language coexisted with a swarm of makeshift varieties, white settlers finding a sense of regional belonging in it, Natives forging through Wawa an ethnic identity superseding former allegiances yet contrasting with settler values. At the end of this introduction are helpful maps and a table of languages mentioned in the text. In addition to a brief conclusion, there is, in appendix, a tentative transcription of what I call Manuscript 195, a previously unpublished glossary dating, I argue, from the 1820s. Myths about the birth of Wawa go back to the first Indian-European contacts. Shortly after his arrival on the lower Columbia in 1838, Father Demers concluded that “the Chinook Jargon was invented by the Hudson’s Bay Company traders, who were mostly French-Canadians” (Blanchet 1878, 7). This widely circulated fable has some truth to it. Wawa was indeed the result of contacts during the fur trade, although the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) did not assume effective control of the region until after its takeover of the North West Company in 1821, already well into our story. This takeover was in fact just one of the many shifts of political and economic power and authority during the early years of Wawa, whose homeland was disputed by Spain, Russia, Britain, and the United States, this, of course, leaving aside the claims of the prior inhabitants. After the War of 1812, it was agreed by treaty that the sole claimants to the lower Columbia River valley were to be Britain and the US. In 1846, this Anglo-American conflict was resolved in favour of the Americans, who occupied the land north of the Columbia up to the forty-ninth parallel, the HBC withdrawing to new regional headquarters in Victoria, BC.

Introduction

5

Notwithstanding this outcome, there are two significant Canadian dimensions to the history of Wawa, which constitute principal threads of this narrative. Whereas the peoples of the Northwest Coast had traditions of intercultural communication of their own, Europeans of the time had quite different ones, among themselves as well. In fact, during the crucial early decades of the nineteenth century, the transcultural dispositions of those engaged in the Canadian fur trade established the patterns of interaction from the European perspective. Montreal was the economic and social hub from which the transcontinental fur trade first spread, and through the agency of the canoe. It is perhaps hard to comprehend today, but the route up the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and over into Lake Winnipeg was the easiest way to the Pacific coast, at least until the mid-nineteenth century. From Lake Winnipeg, “the nerve centre of the continent’s canoe transportation system ... a man could travel by canoe to almost any part of North America, with never more than a day’s carry” (Campbell 1983, 1: 197). The cultural and linguistic practices of the Laurentian community were thus conveyed all the way to the Columbia basin. More importantly, the typically Laurentian custom of inter-ethnic marriage of French-speaking engagés to indigenous women, begun in the early years of the French colony and systematically pursued as the fur trade expanded across the continent, provided the crucible in which Wawa took shape. The first generation of fluent Wawa speakers was born in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century to the Native and, soon, Métis wives of the voyageurs who worked in and around the HBC headquarters of Fort Vancouver.5 Examining the relevant Catholic Church records, which begin in 1838, as well as commercial documents from the fur trade enables us to identify and follow the life histories of these women, who were instrumental in the birth of Wawa and who mothered its first cohorts of native or near-native speakers. Although my argument is confined to the early years of Wawa, the role women played in the genesis of pidgins and creoles deserves much more general attention than it has received. There is a second Canadian dimension to this story, although most of it falls outside the scope of this book. The foyer of creolization that arose around the HBC headquarters at Fort Vancouver survived for another decade or so after the HBC withdrawal, but the fluent speakers of Wawa who spent

6

Introduction

their childhood and adolescence in and around Fort Vancouver were scattered far and wide. Within the newly constituted Oregon Territory, Wawa played multiple roles. As American settlers took possession of the land, its Native variants retreated into enclaves, most lastingly to the Grand Ronde reservation southwest of Portland. North of the forty-ninth parallel, peoples as distant and diverse as the Songish, Kwakiutl, Bella Bella, Tsimshian, and Haida embraced it in more coherent communities. The history of the language north of the lower Columbia River valley, particularly in the Okanagan in central British Columbia, in the canneries of New Westminster, and along the fjords of the coast north to Alaska, deserves a complete study, of which Chapter 5 is at best a sketchy preamble. Pidgins perish as the ground shifts from under them. Most languages eventually die as well, a fate that has accelerated in this age of globalization. Yet there is no need to idealize Wawa to identify within it the germ of a culture eradicated before it could bear fruit. As the Harvard-trained philologist Horatio Hale (1846, 644) intuited, writing in 1841 about what he called this “very singular phenomenon” in philology: “Could the state of things which now exists there be suffered to remain for a century longer, the result might be the formation of a race and idiom whose affinities would be a puzzle to ethnographers.” Hale seems to have intuited in the “singularity” of Wawa how, had its ontogeny continued, affinities of idiom and fragments of speech would lose their distinctiveness and fuse, leaving behind a puzzle for ethnographers but a seemingly natural and transparent culture and language. Of such puzzles is the study of pidgins and creoles composed, indeed, it might be argued, as is life itself. The reigning metaphor in the title Making Wawa signals a belief about which readers in search of cold science alone should be forewarned. To speak about the making of a language is to step from the controlled environment of systematic linguistics onto an altogether different stage, since this turn of phrase, making, evokes connotations customarily applying to living agents and to the agony that life entails. This is why some linguists eschew the biological metaphor of language death by resorting to the circumlocution obsolescence. The science of linguistics as it currently stands presupposes that language works deep in the mind and is in no wise conscious, hence the need for induction and deduction about it. Similarly, formal

Introduction

7

definitions of culture suppose that it, too, is an invisible medium in which social beings, like fish in water, evolve, using their implicit knowledge of its rules to live out their lives, interpreting its signs and symbols without perceiving their underlying logic. The subjects of Making Wawa have been, however, depicted as agents whose activities were intelligible to themselves, and could be made so to others through discourse. A pidgin is, among other things, a set of interpretative routines that, while rooted in the languages and cultures of its practitioners, represents an effort to escape from the constraints of culture, at least for purposes at hand. This book is thus also about the limits of culture, an inquiry into what happens when culture and language falter and fail in “extreme” circumstances.

Table 1 Languages mentioned in the text Language

FAMILY, Subfamily

Notes

Lower Chinook (LC), Chinook proper

CHINOOKAN

Includes Clatsop on south shore of the mouth of the Columbia. Main source of Wawa.

Cathlamet

CHINOOKAN, Upper Chinook

Spoken on both shores upstream from Grays Bay to just beyond the Kalama River.

Chehalis, Upper and Lower

SALISHAN, Tsamosan

There was a dialect continuum from the Quinault through the Lower and Upper Chehalis and the Cowlitz, who occupied the river systems between the Columbia and the headwaters of Puget Sound.

Cree

ALGIC, Algonquian (CreeMontagnais)

The Plains and Woods dialects of Cree were most likely to be heard in Fort Vancouver.

Iroquois

IROQUOIAN, Northern Iroquoian

Many Iroquois worked in the fur trade and travelled to the West.

Michif, métif

ALGIC, Algonquian (being primarily of Cree derivation)

Mixed French-Cree contact language spoken on the Canadian Prairies from the 1820s onward.

MultnomahClackamas/WascoWishram

CHINOOKAN, Upper Chinook (Kiksht)

The former was spoken in the dense stretch of villages at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, eventually the site of Fort Vancouver; the latter up to The Dalles.

Language

FAMILY, Subfamily

Notes

Nez Perce

PLATEAU PENUTIAN, Shahaptian

A Nez Perce primer was published by Spaulding in 1838. Chief Joseph spoke Wawa but the language was rather removed from the heartland of early Wawa.

Nootka

WAKASHAN, Southern Wakashan

Now known as Nuuchahnulth. The source of “broken” Nootka, of Alexander Ross’s “Mixed Dialect,” and one major adjunct of Wawa.

Ojibwe

OJIBWAYAN, Northern Ojibwa

Spoken on territory through which the Laurentian fur trade passed.

Québécois (Canadian French)

INDO-EUROPEAN, Romance

The dialect of French that originated in the St. Lawrence Valley. Métis French is one dialect. Acadian and Missouri French were independent, although mutually intelligible with Québécois.

Tillamook

SALISHAN

Spoken just south of Clatsop territory. There was frequent trade and intermarriage with the Lower Chinook.

Source: Information about the Indian languages above is based on Goddard 1996 (17: 4-8).

10

Map 1. Northwest Coast languages

11

Map 2. Vancouver Island coast from Nootka Sound to the Strait of Juan de Fuca

12

Map 3. From Grays Harbor through Shoalwater Bay to Baker’s Bay (including Qwatsamuts)

13

Map 4. Language boundaries from Astoria to Portland

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1 The Nootka Jargon

During his stay among the Clatsop just south of the Columbia’s mouth in December 1805, Captain William Clark brought down a duck with a firearm more accurate than the flintlocks that had been known before on the coast. As the story goes, the weapon duly impressed one Clatsop, who was said to exclaim, Clouch musket, wake com ma-tax musket: “that is a good musket, I do not understand this musket” (tlush mosket, wek cumtuks mosket in the DBS orthography I am using throughout as default; ¿ush maskit, wik k¢mt¢ks maskit in the Grand Ronde orthography).1 With the exception of “musket,” the words in this sentence come from Nootka, spoken far north along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Yet this phrase is perfectly intelligible Wawa and is widely acknowledged to be one of the first recorded connected sentences in the language.2 As we shall see, there are many slips between events and their versions in print, but in this case there is little doubt that the “musket phrase” is authentic, since it can be found in the original journal and was likely transcribed that evening. We can also say with certainty that Clark or the editors of the published journals had some prior conception of how to write down the language spoken to Indians on the Pacific coast. The spelling of the phrase in question was close to what was already in the records from the time of Cook, whose 1778 Nootka vocabulary, or at least that attributed to him, inaugurated the study of Pacific Northwest languages. William Clark imagined that he was hearing Clatsop, a language closely related to Lower Chinook and just as difficult for Europeans, although he described what he heard as “resembling ours in pronunciation & more easy

16

The Nootka Jargon

to learn [than Lower Chinook].” The Clatsop he added, do “not accentuate the last syllable as most Indians, but rather the first” (Jackson 1962, 499). Clark’s error of mistaking a pidgin for a full language was not unusual. Pidgins have often been misconceived in this way. For example, European observers repeatedly mistook another American Indian pidgin, Mobilian Jargon, for one or another of the languages spoken in the southeastern area of what has become the United States (Dreschel 1997, 204-49). Thirty years after Clark and in the same locale, the Protestant missionaries Lee and Frost (1844, 343) still supposed that they were speaking “Clatsop dialect” when they used Wawa. That Clark’s Clatsop interlocutor’s Nootka-laden sentence was uttered before an American in the lower Columbia River valley in 1805 strongly suggests that simplified Nootka was used in inter-ethnic contact far from its home territory. From the datum itself, there is no way of proving this suggestion, although we do know that the total of about thirty words of Nootka origin were introduced into Wawa by Europeans. Proof lies in the phonological changes these words display. Europeans stripped away the glottal and lateral stops and affricatives that Indians in general throughout the Pacific Northwest recognized and retained in words borrowed from other Indian languages.3 That these features are largely missing from the Nootka component of Wawa indicates that Europeans were responsible for their transmission from Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island (also known as “Friendly Cove” and as “Yuquot,” from yuaat, the Nootka name for the summer residence of the Mowachath), across about 600 kilometres of open water and rugged coast to the lower Columbia, where Wawa itself was born. The Triangular Trade To be sure, it was not Europeans who first brought the Nootka and the Chinook into the same orbit. The Nootka were the privileged suppliers of the standard currency of exchange in the Northwest, Dentalium pretiosum shells, the word for which in Wawa was aiqua (Nootka ±iiùaa), which they harvested on a nearly industrial scale. Nootka-style hats with embossed images of whales and other marine life were familiar items along the lower Columbia (Wawa siaputl < iyapuùs ‘hat’). Alongside material culture, some elements of northern cultural life also made their way south: Nootka ceremonial

The Nootka Jargon

17

knowledge and doctoring ritual, as well as Kwakiutl winter rites from even farther north. In the reverse direction, the name and probably the figures of a Chinook twin heroes myth, Sikla, were adopted by the Nootka (Hymes 1980, 409-11). Surprisingly, direct contact between the Nootka and the Chinook was rare, the latter usually crossing to Puget Sound via internal waterways in order to barter for northern wares, against which they exchanged slaves. Although it makes sense that trade items or commodities like aiqua ‘dentalium’, siaputl ‘hat’, and chikomin ‘iron’ (Nootka ikimin) bore what could be thought of as Nootka trademarks by virtue of their names, the presence of Nootka etymons for many non-material referents – indeed, the three abstract terms in Clark’s Wawa (tlush ‘good’, wek ‘not’, cumtux ‘to know’) – cannot be explained by indigenous pre-contact trade relations, and point to a wider web of trade. In the late 1700s, the Pacific coast was drawn into the market frenzy launched by reports reaching London that the Cook expedition had sold its otter fur at Canton for a profit of 1,800 percent (Gibson 1997, 22). Over the next two decades, hundreds of British, American, and Spanish vessels harboured from Alaska down to what is now Oregon, radically transforming regional exchange and consumption patterns. Quickly, Yankee merchants dominated this trade. They originated in Boston, whence came the Wawa term for American, baston, usually contrasting with kinchauch ‘King George’, the population that became present-day English Canadians. After the fur trade out of Montreal reached the mouth of the Columbia, the spectrum of reference to Europeans expanded to include pasaïuks for (French) Canadiens, the traditional etymology of which is ‘blanket persons’. Fur from the sea otter, Lutris marina, was the pivotal sale item in a triple rollover of profits, first on the Vancouver coast, then in China, and then back again to Boston or London. Cheaply manufactured European goods such as chisels and files and copper and cloth, but also arms and alcohol, were exchanged for pelts, prized as both cloak and trim by the affluent Manchu upper class of northern China. Tea and china were hot commodities in London. Key to the success of this triangular market was control of Nootka Sound and the surrounding area, and crucial to that control in the early years was not only military or naval power but rather diplomacy and espionage, which require intelligence about the wishes and customs and, indispensably, the language of trading partners.4

18

The Nootka Jargon

Throughout this period and well into the nineteenth century, success at barter depended upon a semblance of knowledge of local languages, in this case the dialect of Nootka spoken at Yuquot, which came to be the default medium for transaction along the outer Vancouver Island coast. There is some evidence that this jargon survived well after the stocks of sea otter were depleted and the Nootka themselves were marginalized in the coastal trade. As late as 1818, Nootka Jargon was “so familiar to Europeans that it did not need comment” beyond simple allusion in documents of the time (Samarin 1988, 224). In the words of the Boston merchant William Sturgis, writing in the 1820s, “all intercourse with the natives was carried on in their own language, which compelled us to acquire a competent knowledge of it for managing trade, but not sufficient for a critical examination” (Gibson 1992, 116). We can also infer that Nootka Jargon may still have been used in 1825, when the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters at Fort Vancouver sent a clerk who spoke “the Chinook language” with an outfit north up the coast, but had him accompanied by “a Chinook who [spoke] the Nootka Tongue” (Rich 1941, 64). Since the clerk in question, Alexander McKenzie, had been in the Columbia district since 1814, he definitely had some knowledge of incipient Wawa, which, we can deduce by this account, would not have sufficed in the north (Coues 1897, 896). Although it is possible that “the Nootka Tongue” in this context meant Nootka proper and not Nootka Jargon, it is more plausible that a Chinook in the employ of the HBC used the trade jargon rather than any full version of Nootka. Thus, Wawa itself was unintelligible above Puget Sound, and Nootka proper was unintelligible farther south. The Nootka Word Lists At best, European control of Nootka was tenuous, a register we might call “broken Nootka.” It quickly became the basis of a conventionalized trade jargon in a process mediated in interesting and unusual ways in the wider history of trade jargons. Europeans had made systematic efforts to study Nootka, beginning with the vocabulary of 268 words contained in the journals of Captain Cook’s third voyage, 1776-80 (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 323-30). Compiled by the ship’s surgeon, William Anderson, during their stay at Nootka Sound in 1778, this glossary served as a template and often as a di-

The Nootka Jargon

19

rect source for later word lists (at least eleven in English and Spanish), some of which are still in manuscript form (Clark, forthcoming). There was also an explicit scientific goal behind the Anderson glossary, to offer “a sufficient specimen [that] may in some measure enable us to find out which of the neighbouring Nations these people bear the most affinity to.” Given the news of sensational profit to be made on the coast, subsequent traders “naturally familiarized themselves with [Anderson’s] dictionary before undertaking their ventures,” and tried out “their Nootkan equipment” on any Indians they met, “carrying Nootkan and English words to every Indian village” (Howay 1941, 240). In 1788, for example, John Meares (1790, 165) recorded that he tried to use “the language of King George’s [Nootka] Sound” at Shoalwater (now Willapa) Bay in present-day Washington State. It had sufficed as a medium of communication all the way south to the northwestern tip of present-day Washington. At Shoalwater Bay, however, the inhabitants “did not comprehend a word we uttered.” One can deduce that the use of Nootka Jargon did not spread past the Strait of Juan de Fuca until after 1788. Just four years later, however, the inhabitants of Grays Harbor, just north of Shoalwater Bay, recognized some Nootka words spoken by George Vancouver’s officers (Hymes 1980, 412), which Gray’s men had doubtless used a few months before when he named this inlet just north of the Columbia. The British and the Americans were not the only Europeans trading along the Pacific coast of North America, where the Spanish and Russians also had claims. The Russians had crossed the Bering Strait in 1744, and some form of “Sibero-Alaskan” trade jargon incorporating Eskimo, Tlingit, and Athapaskan words was used at one time or another as far south as Fort Ross in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco (Samarin 1988, 222-23). About thirty Russian words and fifteen others of possible Alutiiq origin have been attested in Pomo, spoken along the coast adjacent to Fort Ross. Conversely, Pomo hand-guessing-game terminology and other words have been found among the Den’ina in southern Alaska (Oswalt 1994, 101-5). This contact between Russian and the Indian and Eskimo languages of California and Alaska went on at roughly the same time that Nootka Jargon and then Wawa spread to Alaska and California. As for the Spanish, their ships had explored beyond what is now the Alaska/British Columbia border at latitude 54°40¢, a boundary reflecting a Russian and Spanish entente about respective

20

The Nootka Jargon

spheres of influence and dating back to Juan Pérez’s expedition in 1774. This boundary figured infamously in the 1844 electoral campaign slogan of James K. Polk (“Fifty-four forty or fight”), and it was in fact Polk who eventually presided over the annexation of Oregon Territory up to the fortyninth parallel. The First Potlatch In his diary, Juan Pérez records the first known contact between Nootkans and Europeans, a moment worth dwelling on, since it provides a paradigmatic picture of trade as initially conducted along the Northwest Coast: The Indians then came within speaking distance, and they started their trading by an exchange of furs for shells our men had brought from Monterey. [The sailors] got in return various sea otter skins and many sardines. The Indians differed in appearance from those at Santa Margarita [Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes], the pelts they wore not being placed against the body. There is copper in their land, for various strings of beads were seen ... that were made of animal teeth, and at their ends they had some eyeholes of beaten copper, which had certainly been grains extracted from the earth and later pounded, implying that they had some mines of this metal. These Indians are very docile, for they gave up their furs even before they were paid for them. (Beals 1989, 89)

Retrospectively, this willingness to “give up” items of trade “even before they were paid for” should be read as something completely different from “docility,” since trade among many Northwest Coast peoples was habitually initiated by the offering of gifts. These scare quotes are thus essential at this stage: this is a primary text touching on a deep-seated European trope concerning Northwest Indians, embodied in the English word potlatch – from Wawa potlatch ‘to give’. From the text, it is clear that this first potlatch, so to speak, was conducted entirely by gesture. Although the Nootka came “within speaking distance,” the Spanish relied strictly upon observation, hence the conclusion drawn about copper-mining techniques and the assumption that the Nootka did not appear to have “experienced or seen civilized people before” (Beals 1989, 89). There is no question, however, that both parties understood each other’s preferred

The Nootka Jargon

21

items of exchange, fur and preserved food for seashells – here not the common currency haykwa, Dentalium pretiosum, but abalone from the California coast, Haliotis cracherodii (Beals 1989, 244). William Anderson compiled almost three hundred words of Nootka, but David Samwell, the surgeon’s mate on the second ship in Cook’s party, the Discovery, collected a list of his own, one that overlaps with Anderson’s at some points but was, by all evidence, an independent effort. Samwell recorded more than fifty words, particularly two cited in the following passage, one oddly parallel to Juan Pérez’s of four years earlier: To this [Nootka] man Captn Cook offered a piece of bays but he did not seem at all desirous of it, nor would he for sometime accept of it, but kept repeating Tike’mily which with some motions he made, soon convinced us it was some tool made of Iron that he wantd; to the man who first visitd us, whose outward appearance I have mentiond, was given some Medals & beads, he took them very thankfully; he often repeat’d the word Macook; he threw into the Ship in return some dried herrings. (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 1394)

Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that the words for “iron” and “trade” were cited at the very beginning of the historical record of the Northwest Coast. Tike’mily (Nootka ikimin ‘iron’) eventually became aforementioned chikomin, its range extending to metal in general, minerals, and finally money. Samwell’s macook (Nootka maakuk ‘trade’) also entered Wawa as makuk. These two forms appear to have circulated among Cook’s party, since a German aboard the Discovery, Heinrich Zimmerman, transcribed and glossed them himself, giving makuk as kaufen and tschikimli as größer Nagel (Schumacher 1977, 64-65). Zimmerman also noted a third word, Tschibocks, which he thought meant gut. At first glance, the closest Nootka etymon is the aforementioned iyapuùs ‘hat’, a reading encouraged by the fact that one might imagine the manuscript scrawl for German Hut ‘hat’ confused for gut ‘good’. The most plausible Nootka etymon is, however, ‘iÙuuçs ‘copper’ (Clark, forthcoming). Samwell had transcribed it into English as cheepocs, remarking that the sailors with Cook baptized their harbour Cheepocs Sound (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 1104). Thus begins the written history of Wawa and our slow reconstruction of it.

22

The Nootka Jargon

Those Who Dwell in Coming and Going Like Cook, William Anderson never survived to see the streets of London, and his personal journals were lost (Fisher and Bumstead 1982, 250). Yet his word list was pirated before its formal publication in 1788. It was thus in the hands of Alexander Walker, who produced his own Vocabulary of the Language at Nootka Sound during a voyage in 1785-86, checking every item in his glossary with the Cook list, noting similarities as well as differences. Walker himself probably collaborated with assistant surgeon John MacKay, who had been left alone at Nootka Sound over the winter of 1786 in order to “learn the local language and build up good will.” Several years later in India, Walker debriefed him, overcoming his personal dislike of the man for the sake of philology. Whether Walker’s work is his alone or partially MacKay’s, the glossary is impressive, looking to this day “very much like a word list that a modern linguist might gather in an initial field experience with an unfamiliar language” (Pethick 1980, 14, 91-103). This word list devotes ample attention to what we now call material culture, as its circumlocutory explanations reveal: “a leather dress adorned with deer’s hoofs & quills,” “a fishing spear with two prongs,” “the outer as opposed to the inner bark of the pine.” Sometimes Walker erred, as when he took scar for wound, as when he understood the particulars of an activity, “polishing with a shark’s skin,” but missed its sense as the ritual cleaning of a feast dish, or when he mistook ‘a penis with its foreskin drawn back’ for “urine”. Likewise, he thought Nootka mamuuk meant “weaving,” whereas it denotes work in general, as does its Wawa derivative mamuk, and the shortened form at Grand Ronde, múnk.5 John Meares had also read the accounts of Cook’s third voyage, although he left no list of his own and only a few direct citations of Nootka in his narrative, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (Meares 1790). He observed, for example, that the Nootka called a vessel he had constructed in 1788 Mamatlee, and that his own ship was called Tighee Mamatlee or “chief ship”. Tighee, from Nootka taayii ‘older son’ or ‘senior’, engendered Wawa tayi ‘chief’. The Nootka etymon for mamatlee remains uncertain and the word itself did not survive into later Wawa. It definitely belonged to Nootka Jargon, having been recorded as ¿ in the vocabulary of Chinook proper gathered circa 1811 by Alexander Ross, discussed in Chapter 2. As the source of mamatle, Clark

The Nootka Jargon

23

(forthcoming) proposes Nootka mama¿Îi ‘white man’ (which he glosses ‘dwell-moving-coming’: those who dwell in coming and going). The word also serves as further evidence that the authors of each travel narrative had read and perhaps carried with them earlier texts and glossaries. Mamatlee, for example, figures in the same spelling in next large Vocabulary of Nootka Sound, the three hundred or so items recorded by Robert Haswell in the logs of Robert Gray, whose Columbia was the first European ship to enter the mouth of the Columbia (Howay 1941, 102-7). Here, too, we find that there is a second hand at work behind the putative author-captain. Another avid student of Nootka was Joseph Ingraham, a first mate who had wintered with the American Robert Gray at Nootka Sound during 178889, two years after John MacKay from the Walker party, and was there again in 1792. Ingraham claimed that his extended stay that winter “enabled [him] to converse so well with the natives as to put beyond a doubt” that Cook was not the first European to enter the sound, but rather Juan Pérez (Beals 1989, 215). During those years, Ingraham and the other Americans had marked affection for the Spanish, who in return treated them with generosity and friendship. In any event, the recent memory of the Revolution certainly did not predispose Americans towards the British. As the tensions between the British and Spanish escalated towards war in the summer of 1789, Ingraham struck up a friendship with the captain of the Princesa, Esteban José Martínez, for whom he composed a memorandum of observations on the culture and language of the Nootka. Martínez, to whom is attributed a Nootka-Spanish list of 256 words, also availed himself of the services of a certain “Juan,” John Kendrick Jr., a Briton who had embraced Catholicism and entered Spanish service, bringing his reputed skills in interpreting Nootka, although we have no paper proof of his fluency (Cook 1973, 184). Clearly, Martínez was systematically gathering intelligence not only about the Nootka but also about the British and Americans. The memorandum that Ingraham passed on to the Spaniard containing the Nootka oral tradition about the arrival of Juan Pérez at Nootka Sound in 1774 was thus fraught with political implications. Transcription of oral history is one mode or genre in which Wawa has survived to this day, notably in Franz Boas’s transcription via Wawa of stories by the last surviving speaker of Chinook, “The First Ship Seen by the

24

The Nootka Jargon

Clatsop” (Boas 1894, 275-78). We might accordingly consider Ingraham’s account to mark the inception of this nascent ethnographic practice: About 40 months before Captn Cook’s arrival a Ship came into the sound and anchor’d within some rocks on the East side [of] the entrance where she Remain’d 4 Days and Departed. They said she was a larger ship than they had ever seen since; that she was copper’d and had a Copper Head, this I suppose to have been Gilt or painted yellow; that she had a great many guns and men; that the Officers wore Blue lac’d coats; and that most of the men wore Hankerchiefs about their heads. (Beals 1989, 216)

This is very indirect discourse indeed, devoid of what can be admitted in linguistics as data. Still, we can draw some conclusions about what Ingraham, who was certainly familiar with the two hundred or so words in his list, believed he could plausibly claim about his control of the Nootka language, since this account was supposed to reflect events transpiring fourteen years previously, in 1774. In the first place, there was the number system, about which Walker had written: “In computing, to avoid the use of their Numerals [which they had up to the number two hundred], they expressed all the ten in any number, by a clasping together of their hands, and then add the Units. Thus, if they want to express Sixty five, they clasp their hands six times, and say Soocha” (Fisher and Bumstead 1982, 90).6 In this passage, we must presume that Ingraham recognized the Nootka for copper (in the record since Samwell), for the colours yellow and blue, and for braided coats. Unless he was fabricating these details, Ingraham could identify sequence and order of events and, if what he says is not pure invention, a complex comparison of size across time (“larger than ever seen since”). To be sure, this passage and even those above do not provide any direct evidence of Nootka Jargon per se, but in combination with the Nootka glossaries, they do. Navigators collected and traders avidly purchased and pirated these glossaries in London and Boston, thus demonstrating the efforts of some individuals to learn and speak a form of Nootka. More to the point, the fact that key items in the later vocabulary of Wawa can also be found in documents from the primal moments of Indian and European contact on the Pacific coast constitutes proof of an unbroken chain of development stretching from Nootka Sound to the mouth

The Nootka Jargon

25

of the Columbia, despite the fact that the communities were not contiguous. Pursuit of ethnolinguistic information was, as we have seen, no monopoly of English speakers. The Spanish, in fact, had a longer philological tradition upon which to draw, one dating from their experience with Indian languages in Mexico and in Central and South America. For example, after the setback caused by Martínez’s ill-advised execution of Nootka Chief Callicum in 1789, Pedro Alberni and “a boy from Guadalajara who had learned some of the Nootka tongue” were able to translate enough of a speech by Chief Tlupa-na-nootl to impress the head of the next major Spanish expedition, Alejandro Malaspina, with the chief’s acumen, thereby enabling him to restore relatively peaceful relations (Cook 1973, 310). Alberni and his anonymous protégé’s translation should be recognized as a product of the systematic Spanish study of Nootka, of which there is record in the archives of the Museo Naval in Madrid. In 1792, even as their geopolitical claims to the Nootka trade faltered, Spain mounted a scientific expedition to the region under the command of José Mariano Moziño. In the words of one historian, this expedition “epitomized [Spain’s] participation in the intellectual enlightenment of the eighteenth century,” and preceded Lewis and Clark by fifteen years (Engstrand 1991, xxiv). Like the glossaries of Walker and Haswell, Moziño’s Brief Dictionary of the Terms that Could Be Learned of the Language of the Natives of Nootka was derived in part from the Cook list, since he had probably studied the Bocabulario de varias vozes que pronouncian los Indios en la Costa Septentrional de California, segun la obra de Cook. Spanish philologists, at least those attached to Mexico, were accustomed to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and they were inclined to use it for comparative purposes. In 1791, a year before Moziño’s expedition, Malaspina had been presented with a Spanish, Nahuatl, Nootka, and Hawaiian glossary. Ingraham himself had presented a Nootka word list to Martínez, which was integrated into the list the latter brought back to Mexico City, where it was thought to be of value “because that which appears in the work of Captain Cook is defective in pronunciation” (Engstrand 1991, 52). Moziño’s Brief Dictionary is the most systematic of the late eighteenthcentury word lists, and his observations on Nootka life are still cited by ethnographers.7 Organized in terms of the Great Chain of Being, it begins with the words for “God” and the distinctions between heaven and hell and spirit

26

The Nootka Jargon

and matter, proceeding to the parts of the body from hair down to the extremities, moving on to kinship terms, objects of the built environment, natural phenomena, numbers, adjectives, and pronouns (as he conceived them), and finally an alphabetical list of verbs. Generally speaking, word lists convey purely nominal and “propositional” as opposed to “integrative” or “expressive” grasp of languages.8 This is not surprising. The accumulation of a rudimentary vocabulary is a typical feature of adult second language learning and jargonization. In Moziño’s list, the vocabulary is organized in terms of his own cultural worldview. Mokquilla kakhsheetl quotluk As would be the case two decades later along the lower Columbia, the maritime explorers of the Vancouver Island coast lexicalized the complex polymorphemic structures of a North American Indian language with no understanding of their semantics – without analysis, as linguists would say. Pidginization proceeds initially through a process, usually called restructuring, in which unanalyzed lexical content of the target language is redistributed according to a prior and perhaps even nascent semantic system. Just as the ship linguists filled in a mental template extrapolated from their own semantic world, so the participants in pidginization acquire an inventory of necessary words and an implicit “worldview” before developing a “socially sanctioned grammar” complex enough to manipulate interlocutors, to refer to Mühlhäuser’s correlation between communicative functions and structures in jargons and pidgins (1986, 63). The mystery is where this grammar comes from. According to some, speakers of a stabilized pidgin, such as Wawa became in the first half of the nineteenth century, apply the rules of their own language and never learn a shared syntax. If, on the contrary, a pidgin does have a grammar of its own, however elementary, this grammar must result either from universal operations of simplification or from a process of mutual accommodation in which the jargonizers make approximate models of each other’s speech, trying them out over and over until some solution works.9 In this regard, it is useful to return to a passage by Alexander Walker, which, while betraying the prejudices of his times, shows some insight:

The Nootka Jargon

27

[Nootka] is nearly as deficient in pronouns, and entirely wants the Article. When any Person had occasion to speak of himself, he always used his proper name. For instance, Mokquilla, instead of saying, I own this, would say Mokquilla seeahy, it belongs to Mokquilla; and, in place of expressing himself in this way, I killed a Sea Otter, he would say, Mokquilla kakhsheetl quotluk, Mokquilla kill Sea Otter. The want of Personal pronouns is sometimes supplied by signs. We often observed these People at a loss for words to explain their sentiments, particularly in subjects, that were not immediately before their senses, or when they talked of past or future events. We may trace in those circumstances the speech and simplicity of Infants. A Savage is Man in a state of Infancy. These Americans speak in short sentences, and one word seems frequently to express a compleat proposition. They showed no desire to become acquainted with any more of our language, than the words, Copper and Iron, but they were prevented from acquiring even these, by a total inability of pronouncing the letter R; in place of which they already substituted L.10 (Fisher and Bumstead 1982, 90)

Walker was, despite first impression, a progressive “cultural relativist,” at least according to Fisher and Bumstead. He also perceived that Nootka is polysynthetic, that it has a high number of morphemes in a word, and hence tends towards structures in which “one word seems frequently to express a compleat proposition” – a description worth comparing with a contemporary linguist’s explanation of the language as a “polysynthetic verb-initial headmarking non-configurational reference-dominated genderless accusativetype suffixing language” (Jacobsen 1993, 235). Similarly, Walker’s comment about the paucity of pronouns forecast what linguists today consider a significant feature of Nootka, whose person markers are suffixed particles, hence usually inaudible to Europeans, who were chronically unable to distinguish the sounds Cook called “harsh and guttural” (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 1103), particularly voiceless fricative and ejective manners of articulation. Yet the intricacies of Nootka sentence structure eluded Walker, especially concepts that were not “immediately before [the] senses” and therefore could not be pointed to and readily lexicalized, such as tense or, much more important in Nootka, aspect. As Walker related, the Nootkans resorted to “signs” and gestures in order to convey relations for which they were “at a loss for words” – although there is no doubt that the Nootka were not at a

28

The Nootka Jargon

loss for words; it is rather that their own words were not understood by their interlocutors. Yet there is a lot of information contained in these two phrases of broken Nootka. In the first place, Mokquilla (Ìoina), the name of the most prominent chief among the Nootka at Yuquot during the maritime trade, should be considered as an item in the Nootka Jargon, just as the names of well-known leaders along the Columbia were early entries into Wawa. Walker’s seeahy (in Mokquilla seeahy) was probably Nootka siÿaa, the first person singular pronoun, one of two pronouns carried over into Nootka Jargon (Clark, forthcoming, 9). The morphology of Nootka is so complex as to remain the subject of controversy among linguists, and has been cited as an extreme example of a language in which there is no division of nouns and verbs but rather words that are suffixed and words that are not.11 What might have been the actual utterance underlying Walker’s Mokquilla kakhsheetl quotluk? We do know that in Nootka participants in events usually follow reference to events and that Walker either had not been presented with a complex statement or was modelling this phrase of his own invention on the conventions of the jargon, casting his phrase in the SVO (subject-verb-object) mould that English speakers take to be default (I hit the ball: He kills the sea otter). Nootka operates by more complex rules, some grasp of which can be seen in the following gloss for “Kwatyaat killed the wolf” (Nakayama 2001, 101): qa±saaÙañ qa±-sap die-MOMCAUS killed

-¢añ -TELIC

atyaat atyaat NAME NAME

€uui¿ €u-()i¿ it-doing.to doing.to.it

çayaiik çayai:k wolf wolf

One does not need to be a linguist to see that Nootka is vastly different from Walker’s pidgin Nootka.12 To reiterate, Walker’s phrase suggests that the Nootka catered to the ignorance of their interlocutors, simplifying their own language for them and themselves speaking broken or “foreigner” Nootka; they had learned to deal with the kind of babble Walker was recommending to his readers. Let us note in passing Walker’s kakhsheetl, which became kakshet ‘to strike or to whip’ in Wawa. Let us also retain for future reference the quotluk in Walker’s example (Ÿaañ ‘sea otter’), which never made it

The Nootka Jargon

29

into later Wawa but was attested by Alexander Ross circa 1812 (as quatluck). He attributed it to the “Mixed Dialect,” the core of nascent Columbian Wawa. José Mariano Moziño arrived on the Pacific coast with better philological training than Walker or Ingraham or anyone up to Horatio Hale in 1841, although harbouring prejudice of his own. “The extensiveness of this language can be estimated by the degree of civilization this tribe has attained, since I think the rule is generally true that the wiser the nation, the richer is the language they speak. Consequently, that of the Nootka is very poor, since it cannot have greater breadth than the idea the Nootkans have been able to form” (Engstrand 1991, 53). To anyone who has just tried to parse the Nootka sentence above, Moziño’s statement is utter nonsense. But he did realize that there is no substantive connection between the fact that in order to say “we go,” the Nahuatl use the word tlato, and the Nootkans, in order to say “go away,” use tlatlehu – here referring to ñat÷a, the etymon of Wawa tlatoa ‘to go’ but in Nootka ‘paddle away’. Moziño also recognized that despite having detected the negator he wrote as huic (Nootka wik, Wawa wik ‘not’), he had but scratched the surface. I have given all of [the verbs] the infinitive form although I understand that some are in the present perfect, others in the past, and others, finally, in the future. To the word auco I give the meaning “to eat,” when it really means no more than “he eats.” With this word I tried to begin to learn the pattern of its conjugation, but the only result of all my diligence was to observe the third person [singular and plural] of the present indicative tense, the three persons of the singular past perfect, and the second person of the imperative: “he eats,” auco; “they eat,” auca; “I ate,” aucmiz; “you ate,” auc; “he ate,” aucmitis; “you eat” [“eat it!”], aucce. On this occasion I observed that with some small variations they could be turned into negatives. Huic-mutz means “I did not eat”; huic-mutitz, “he did not eat.” When an interrogative is formed, [the verb] is combined with the words of the question to form a single expression; for example, A chitz-aco? A chichitl mic? “Whose is this?” “To whom does this belong?” (Engstrand 1991, 53)

The Spaniard had a marginally better understanding of Nootka syntax than Walker, or perhaps he was capable of eliciting fuller forms. For example, consider that ha€uk is the unmarked stem for ‘to eat’ and, while it normally

30

The Nootka Jargon

calls for a suffix, Moziño’s auc for “you ate” is plausible as unmarked ha€uk “if the indicative mode had already been established in a previous sentence” (Sapir and Swadesh 1939, 82). Auco “he eats” might well have been ‘he would [habitually] eat’, ha€uquu: [underlying: eat-COND.3]. Auca, “they eat” could have been ha€uk + -€a¿, the plural suffix ® hau€›aa¿ ® [haukaa], deleting the phonemes usually lost in Nootka Jargon), etc. In any event, it is unlikely that after eighteen years of contact with hispanophones and anglophones the Nootka were speaking spontaneously to these mama¿Îi – thosewho-dwell-in-coming-and-going – with the unmediated, complex patterns of their own speech. The Nootka Lingo A collection of words, the first step in elementary language learning and in pidginization, is in the first instance representational. The next stage of learning and speaking involves using words in utterances and for more complex purposes ranging from the utilitarian (trading for fur), the heuristic (gathering or transmitting information), and on through the integrative creation of social bonds, the expression of feelings, the metalinguistic clarification of what someone has said, and even, to an extent often dismissed for pidgins, the poetic function, in which language is used for its own sake, in play. Although these functions should not be thought of as composing some rigid interlocking system or stage of development, they do suggest both the demands made upon the language and, to some extent, the social roles the language was able to fulfill (Table 1.1).13 Wawa satisfied all of these functions at various times and places in its history. Broken Nootka never achieved such a range, but there is indication that during the heyday of the maritime fur trade, some of those higher functions were looming. Most early quotation of Nootka, Lower Chinook, and Wawa do not contain connected phrases that might reveal deeper structures or higher functions at play; instead they are word lists, a genre that corresponds to the flat “list-like” lexicons of the purely informative or cognitive level of jargons. Yet the expressivity of the broken Nootka and early Wawa implies that higher functions pervade even structurally less developed phases of pidgins, perhaps because speakers possess them from early childhood through the medium of their native tongues. Even a rudimentary jargon, pidgin, or incipient

The Nootka Jargon

31

creole can be raised beyond its apparent syntactical capacity by this often neglected psycholinguistic fact. Another related but largely hidden complexity underlying jargonization and pidginization is that they take place in a situation in which the parties are not only making guesses right or wrong about the meaning but, at least in this context, are engaged in barter and trade. At first, recognition of the value each party confers on coveted articles of trade takes place in ignorance of each other’s language, but repeatedly successful barter requires relatively accurate readings of each other’s culture, customs, and tastes, and hence some effort to obtain control of each other’s languages. A jargon begins with some form of interactive learning. Initially, incomprehension produces “foreigner talk,” the stilted, simplified registers that speakers slip into whenever they address persons who they know do not understand what they are saying. Foreigner talk is akin to baby talk: in neither do participants learn from each other (Holm 1988, 61). Table 1.1 Functional expansion of a pidgin-creole Functions

Communicative roles, structures

Propositional/ cognitive

The message itself, the information exchanged; simple sentences; no grammar beyond sentences, list-like lexicon

Directive/ integrative

Manipulation of others, creation of social bonds, language as index of group membership; systematic lexicon, forms that mark politeness, syntactic variants for request

Expressive

Expression of personal feelings; additions to lexical inventory, word formation, focalization, grammar beyond the sentence

Metalinguistic

Use of language to discuss language; emergence of lexical items for speaking about language, hyper-correction

Phatic

Keeping open channels of communication, creation of rituals; increase in stylistic variation at lexical and stylistic levels

Poetic

Focus on the message for its own sake, play with language; stylistic devices, productive word formation providing synonyms, stylistic syntactic transformation, conventions for metaphorical expansion

32

The Nootka Jargon

Our slowly accumulating vocabulary of Nootka-derived Wawa so far contains items that are nominally utilitarian (here cited in GR): ch•kh¢min ‘iron’ (which in Wawa came to stand in circumlocutions for ‘copper’ too once the Nootka Jargon reflex of ‘iÙuuçs fell out of use), h‹ykwa ‘shell currency’, siy‹pu¿ ‘hat’, ¿ush ‘good’, tay• ‘great’, wik ‘no or not’, k‹ksh¢t ‘to kill or beat’, k¢mt¢ks ‘to know’, ¿‹twa ‘to go’, m‹kuk ‘to trade’, m‹muk ‘to make or work’, p‹lach ‘to give or to potlatch’. Beyond the word lists running from Anderson to Moziño, there is glancing evidence of how Nootka Jargon might have been used in situ. Ross Clark has scoured the travelogues and determined a list of trade phrases that relate to the basic situations of trade and whose underlying Nootka forms can be reliably ascertained, such as Nootka Jargon achatla(k) ‘what is his name?’ – for which he posits these morphemes: aaq-ña-± who-named-2s/3s ‘you there, what is the name of that (third) person?’ (Clark, forthcoming, 8). As in the case of the hypothetical Chinook pidgin discussed in Chapter 2, there is the possibility that forms like these may have belonged to a regional lingua franca prior to the arrival of the Europeans. In any event, they were lexicalized lock, stock, and barrel by Europeans, thought of as complete utterances, their constituent parts not being identified as subject to combination and permutation in original sentences. Whatever the limitations of the Nootka Jargon, it was occasionally employed among the English and Spanish themselves, evidence that its bits and pieces had become entities that could be used outside their immediate context. For example, when his ship the Chatham was drawn ashore for caulking during the summer of 1793, Thomas Manby noted English and Spanish carpenters working together with the help of an interpreter: “When this [Interpreter] is not at hand curious scenes repeatedly ensue as our Conversation is generally carried on, by a few words, of all Languages – & signs – altho’ the ‘Nootka Lingo’ forms the greatest part – sometimes we understand each other – at other times not” (Cook 1973, 81-82). Exactly what constituted that “Nootka Lingo” will remain unknown. From the word lists, however, it can be deduced that the surgeons, botanists, and first mates who doubled as linguists on the British, American, and Spanish ships had enough broken Nootka for some communication with willing interlocutors. How widely this skill was shared, and what Manby’s English and Spanish carpenters might have actually uttered to each other as they worked on the Chatham is pure

The Nootka Jargon

33

speculation. Yet the documented fact that Europeans resorted to a jargon of different lexical origin than their own two languages is significant, pointing to what creolists once thought of as a necessary condition for pidginization, namely, having more than two languages in contact. Nootka Jargon appears to have been composed solely of Nootka, but some Nootkans did learn some English and Spanish. For example, in 1816, over two decades after the Spanish had more or less abandoned Nootka Sound, the French navigator Camille de Roquefeuil observed that the Nootka had “adopted many words of [Spanish]” (Roquefeuil 1823, 46). That said, the only Spanish word that survived into twentieth-century Nootka appears to be the name Santo (Sapir and Swadesh 1939, 307). Manby’s “Nootka Lingo” probably had elements of all three tongues intertwined, the result being an ad hoc playful hodgepodge shared by Europeans who spent any time at Nootka Sound. Notwithstanding the impression of conviviality conveyed by Manby’s account of banter between subjects of two antagonistic governments, encounters in the Nootka contact zone were inherently risky. It was a realm in which “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). However contumacious the conflict, all parties in a contact zone learn from each other and undergo a degree of “transculturation.” With conflict and coercion comes, however, the need for “higher” functions of discourse, those flowing from the persuasive roles of discourse: intimidation and threat, blandishment and flattery. One incident left a poignant mark on the record of our growing word list of Nootka-derived Jargon. During the 1789 clash between the Spanish and British at Nootka Sound, Spanish Captain Estéban José Martínez shot or ordered to be shot the Nootka Chief Callicum, who had been siding with the British Captain Meares against the Spanish. According to Frederick W. Howay (1941, 104), “Martínez, in his MS. diary, under date July 13, 1789, says that Callicum, whom he calls Keleken, insulted him by calling him a bad man and a thief: Martinez peshak, Martinez kapsualla. Like William Clark’s musket phrase, this insult is intelligible Wawa: pishak ‘bad’ or ‘worthless’ and capswala ‘to steal or hide’. For reasons similar to those adduced above, it is clear that Callicum’s insult was not a normal Nootka expression but rather a juxtaposition of simplified

34

The Nootka Jargon

forms of Ùiëak ‘bad’ and haptíiñ ‘hide’ by the Spanish captain and the unfortunate Nootka chief. But another filter has been inserted: Howay, editor of these pages, “Jargonized” these Nootka Jargon words. “Peeshack” and “cap sheetle” were the original spellings on the preceding page of Haswell’s word list that Howay (1941, 103-4) was commenting upon, but the editor’s spelling in his footnote reflects the mainstream anglophone settler version of Wawa. Martínez’s manuscript diary containing the phrase was not available to later British and American traders, although it doubtless was to Moziño, who had what became Wawa pishak in the compound pishec-as-yue “heavy weather” (a most useful word on the outer shores of Vancouver Island), and cap-xitl for haptíiñ.14 The presence of both reflexes in the Mexican manuscript describing Callicum’s execution and their retention in Jargon leave no doubt that by 1789 these prime bits of Nootka were used with vim and vigour between Indians and Europeans. Either Martínez could comprehend and remember this insult or, if he was making it up, had sufficient command of the idiom to invent a proper insult. If neither, then Callicum himself knew that he could get to Martínez in this way, although he doubtless did not foresee the outcome of his affront. A decade later, pe-shak was used on the south shore of the Columbia by a speaker of Tillamook, a Salishan language, which led one editor to suggest that “perhaps the Tillamocks were speaking Chinook trade jargon to Clark” (Moulton 1990, 6: 178). There is a second vignette suggesting how broken Nootka was used “directively” to manipulate others and hence was on the verge of becoming a stabilized jargon. After the death of Callicum, Nootkans shunned the Spanish, Maquinna, in particular, siding with either the British or the Americans. It thus fell to Francisco de Eliza, captain of the Concepción and first Spanish navigator to return to Nootka Sound after the death of Callicum, and Pedro Alberni, who commanded the newly built Spanish fortifications there, to reestablish relations. According to Moziño, Alberni recognized Maquinna’s susceptibility to flattery, and composed a song with the few words of the lingo he knew, one celebrating the presumed greatness of Callicum and the friendship Spain professed for the Nootka:

The Nootka Jargon

35

Macuina, Macuina, Macuina Asco Tais hua-cás España, España, España Hua-cás Macuina Nutka

Set to the tune of a popular Andalusian folk song that his men could easily learn to chant, this ditty translates as “Maquinna, Maquinna, Maquinna / Great prince and friend / Spain, Spain, Spain, / Friend of Maquinna and Nootka” (Engstrand 1991, 78). As mentioned above, tais entered Wawa as taï. Though not ultimately accepted into Wawa, asko for ‘great’ and hua-cas ‘friend’ were on the word lists Moziño inherited, the latter being the greeting Cook noticed in 1778 and from which the Wakashan language group is named.15 Pedro Alberni’s device of setting jargon to a previously known tune in order to imprint it in memory anticipated later practice. The melodies of hymns and popular songs were often borrowed for Wawa versions. Alberni’s use of broken Nootka in song was further motivated by the fact that the Nootka had sung and chanted in front of the Europeans. 16 Jargons and pidgins are not mere data preserved on a page, but sometimes zestfully improvised mediums of social exchange. Moziño goes on to relate that Alberni and Captain Eliza managed to ingratiate themselves with Maquinna, who, “noticing that Eliza’s table lacked the viands he had observed in the beginning, and learning from this the low state of his food supply, ordered his meschimes to take him fish everyday and to accept no payment for their gift” (Engstrand 1991, 79). Meschimes, used here for the first time in print, came from the Nootka stem -masim ‘commoner’, and eventually became Wawa mishtimish ‘slave’, although Nootka for slaves and captives is quu¿. This kind of distortion of a caste and rank system will be seen again below, since the fur traders at Astoria had similar misunderstandings of the Chinookan kinship and rank system. Tellingly, the Nootka used masim to refer to Spanish soldiers and sailors, commoners as it were, not slaves. The Spanish embraced this usage so thoroughly that that one Commandante applied it to his own men.17

36

The Nootka Jargon

Nootka Cosmopolitans We should by no means picture the Nootka as submissive bystanders in this process. As these anecdotes suggest, they significantly shaped the jargon itself, by “speaking down” to their European interlocutors, possibly resorting to devices already known to them through a regional lingua franca or to registers parallel to the many “special speech types” natural in Nootka, including baby talk. 18 Starting with Juan Pérez’s four-day stay at Nootka Sound, Nootkans grasped a number of things about the foreign navigators, their chiefs turning this knowledge to their own advantage. One of their first insights was the authority that writing bore for Europeans. Meares was thus at first “astonished” when Maquinna asked him to leave a letter for the next British ship, since “we had not the least idea that these people had the most imperfect notion of our possessing the faculty of communicating our thoughts to each other on paper,” a practice that the Nootka had observed during the sojourn of John MacKay, who had kept a diary (Meares 1790, 131). Until sea otter stocks in the immediate area were exhausted in the middle 1790s, Maquinna at Yuquot and Wickanninnish of Clayoquot farther south were powerful middlemen, and the Nootka became the first people of the Northwest Coast to undergo unexpected and inflated wealth due to the importation of European goods, a boom but then a bust by 1795 as the focus of the world market shifted away. This fate was to befall even more cruelly the Chinook of the lower Columbia two or three decades later. 19 For a brief moment in their history, the Nootka were “cosmopolitans” plunged into contact with the most powerful economies and cultures in the world, their own sudden wealth enhancing and perhaps exacerbating their customs of ceremony and ritual, particularly what came to be called the potlatch. And as the travelogues make clear, European traders were obliged to engage with Nootkan notions of the nature of trade and exchange as well as the strong personalities of their leaders, who in many cases bore slights long in their memory. Economics is traditionally defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources, but trade and exchange are in some sense trans-economic activities, the value of resources being mediated by language and culture (as is “scarcity” itself). In particular, the Nootka, who were skillful traders, “viewed barter as more than simply a commercial transaction. To them it was also a political and social event that should not be hurried” (Gibson

The Nootka Jargon

37

1992, 117). In other words, trade and exchange, makuk, involved what Europeans considered ceremonious preambles, reciprocated gifts, haggling over prices, and using the right words, all of which require mutual accommodation and transcultural learning of etiquette and discourse. There are signs of this gregarious delight in trading for trade’s sake scattered across the historical record. For example, Robert Gray’s mate, John Hoskins – this is around 1792 – found that the Nootka “don’t seem to covet usefull things but any thing that looks pleasing to the eye or what they call riches,” this despite his admission in the same paragraph that “they will not sell a single Skin but for Copper or Muskits or Powder and Shot.” “This Language,” Hoskins continued, “seems to be the general mind of all the tribes that Talk this Language” (Howay 1941, 485). “Language” here designates something broader than the dialect of Nootkan spoken at Yuquot – rather, a sphere of protocol well established up and down the coast and for which the Europeans believed the broken Nootka they knew was the lingua franca. There is a running debate among ethnohistorians between proponents of “cultural relativism” and those of “rationalism,” a debate that impinges on how trade with the Nootka and on what came to be known as the potlatch were perceived by the Europeans. Proponents of the latter tend to assume that the choices a people make will be the least coloured by “culturally defined goals” the more directly the sphere of activity involved relates to “their material well-being.” Applied to the Nootka in the late 1700s, a rationalist perspective would suppose that the Nootka definition of riches was only marginally shaped by questions of status, identity, and religious values. Since we do know that the Nootka at Yuquot exploited their privileged contact with the maritime traders and acquired considerable affluence thereby, it is safe to say that they sought and acquired goods useful not only to themselves but also to their other trading partners in the hinterland. Cook had noted the monopoly that the Nootka at Yuquot imposed on their contacts with Europeans. 20 Although the Nootka did not seem to Hoskins and others to prize “usefull” things, suppositions of future utility in subsequent trade unquestionably underlay their negotiated demands as economic actors. Unlike beauty, however, utility is found not only in the eye of the beholder. It must be measured in terms that surpass immediate consumption, in terms that may be purely non-material. As the late Bruce Trigger wrote in the preface

38

The Nootka Jargon

to his history of the Huron of Central Canada: “Individuals or groups can use rational means to pursue culturally defined goals that are themselves often far from rational.” Trigger’s example was telling, that of the “Jesuits’ risking of their own lives to rescue the souls of native people from eternal damnation,” an irrational exercise if ever there were one (Trigger 1987, xxi). Such self-sacrifice was surely not more irrational than the proclivity of the Nootka and other Northwest Coast peoples to exchange gifts in ways that made no sense in the eyes of the European traders. Øaiñ > P‹lach > Potlatch Given the importance of trade to the Nootka, it is no surprise that the most widely disseminated Wawa word of Nootka origin was potlatch ‘to give’. It was already in Cook/Anderson as pa’chatle and Moziño as pachitle, and is the source of English potlatch, an “invented omnibus word” that “no Indian used,” unless in conversation with whites (Cole and Chaikin 1990, 8). The presumed etymon is Ùaiñ, ‘give’, Ùa-, with the momentaneity marker we have seen above -iñ (< -íiñ). Note, again, that the stem Ùa- means merely ‘to exchange gifts’. In Nootka, as in many regional languages, “potlatch” as a concept for ceremonial exchange was not available until the word was coined in Wawa, the subsequent form being pa¿aa (Sapir and Swadesh 1939, 262). The alternative trajectory Ùaiñ > p‹lach > pa¿aa thus reflects the complex circularity of transcultural social construction, a Nootka etymon used in the late eighteenth century giving rise to a Wawa reflex that itself subsequently engenders a new Nootka word. A similar example is the Nootka doublet ñu¿ ‘good’ alternating with ñuuí, which derived from Wawa tlush, which was the source of the later item (Arima and Dewhirst 1990, 294). Unlike Anderson and Moziño, Meares (1790, 119-20) did not record any item based on Ùa-, but his men must certainly have heard one related form or another when, to their surprise, “after some time [the Nootka] changed the whole order of their traffic with us; and instead of common barter, according to the distinct value of the articles exchanged, the whole of our mercantile dealings was carried by making reciprocal presents.” Meares considered this to be some kind of market ploy, and there is every chance that it was a stratagem of sorts, although at the same time flowing from the regional predilection for what we might call “gifting.”

The Nootka Jargon

39

Hoskins’s allusion to the “uselessness” of trade items demanded by the Nootka thus stands near the head of a long tradition of reading Northwest Coast peoples as irrational trading partners and as passive subjects of a cultural tradition that held them captive. Two centuries later, for example, Gibson (1992, 214), whose work on Pacific Northwest history is essential reading and who has already been cited, glossed Hoskins’s passage in these terms: “Generally the [Nootka] preferred articles that could be readily counted and compared and were therefore suitable for potlatches, the gluttonous (and reciprocal) giveaways that proved the giver’s wealth, power, rank, and prestige. Thus, portable, storable, and uniform goods were desired.” Portable, storable, and uniform goods sounds exactly like what the European economy had discovered how to produce, and such goods were precisely what could be most efficiently brought aboard ship from the Atlantic around Cape Horn, so it is not obvious that it was Nootka preferences that prevailed. The tortuous history of the potlatch in colonial law and anthropological theory has been chronicled by Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin (1990), and remains a salient example of the cultural – indeed, legal – impact Wawa had on the settlers who took possession of the Northwest. The fact that the idea of the potlatch originated in Wawa was recognized in an 1889 argument in the British Columbia Supreme Court. In the same argument, it was affirmed in the eyes of the presiding judge that the meaning of potlatch (and that of “tamanawas,” to which we shall return in Chapter 3) was “indecidable.”21 Underlying this commonsensical observation is the fact that the domain of Nootka Jargon pa’chatle, to cite the Cook version, and then Wawa in all of its dialectal varieties, reflected transcultural compromise, the realities of a referential realm shared during the moments of face-to-face contact during which pidginization occurred. Both parties brought to the table their own presumptions about trade and exchange. As long as the word remained anchored in contact, there was an entity to which it referred, however different the cultural background of the parties in question. Ironically, it was only after pa’chatle/potlatch left the contact zone that it became “indecidable.” Potlatch migrated back into regional languages and was defined in Canadian jurisprudence, but it also entered anthropological theory. At roughly the same time the abovementioned legal case was being heard, Franz Boas was conducting his interviews with the “last of the Chinook,”

40

The Nootka Jargon

Charles Cultee, the results of which are the basis of our knowledge of Lower Chinook. Boas entitled one of these transcribed texts “The Potlatch,” and his choice reflects the general acceptance of the term by anthropologists of the time (Boas 1894, 266-69). Yet in Cultee’s Lower Chinook, the word itself was not used. This oddity has been explained by the historian Verne Ray (1938, 93), who observed: “Boas used the term ‘potlatch’ but it must be remembered that this is a Chinook Jargon word with little specific meaning in native speech and that Boas conversed with Charles Cultee, his informant, only in Chinook Jargon.” The Nootka etymons in Wawa will echo throughout the remainder of this book, but p‹lach in particular will serve as emblem of the ambiguities of exchange in the contact zone, a first nexus of Native and white Wawa that cannot be definitely unravelled. For example, although the distinction between noun and verb in Wawa is far from sharp, the settlers in the Oregon Territory thought that when used as a verb the word potlatch meant simply ‘to give’. Only as a noun did it refer to the “celebration” of gluttonous giveaways, especially when qualified by kaltash ‘worthless’ (GR kh¢lt¢s). Thus, in his 1863 Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon, George Gibbs glossed cultus potlatch as “a present or free gift,” although he knew that with cultus alongside, it meant a “bad” gift whose value was not to be recovered (Bracken 1997, 109-10). Suffice it to observe that Nootka Jargon bore within it a complex semantics of cultural exchange initiated by the reception, in Nootka Jargon, of Ùaiñ. Winnowing through these word lists, we are able to attest with some accuracy the first appearance in the European archive of Nootka words soon integrated into the working vocabulary of Wawa. In fact, the Haswell and the Moziño lists cover most of them. 22 Among those not mentioned above are Haswell, siahhao “far way” (saĥali); tenass “a child” (tanas); and waw waw “you said” (wawa). Moziño had mo-huec “deer” (mawich); na-na-nichi “to see” (nanich); cha-ac “water” (tsok, GR ts¢ç).23 Objects Named, Not Subjects of Naming There is one more Nootka etymon requiring attention before the focus shifts to the mouth of the Columbia, as the maritime fur traders themselves started doing around 1792. The Wawa word for woman is tluchmen (GR ¿uchm¢n)

The Nootka Jargon

41

from ¿uumaa, which Walker already had as klootshama or tootsma. The prominence of this item should come as no surprise. The first article of business at any port of call was satisfying the (hetero)sexual appetites of the all-male crew. Cook’s Journals spoke frankly about this necessity of maritime life, comparing Nootkan women unfavourably with the Polynesians the men had previously possessed, but also reporting the ravages of venereal disease that ensued, the Nootka having contracted syphilis from this visitation, the “venereal equivalent of Typhoid Mary.” 24 For the record, Europeans considered the Nootka to be relatively virtuous concerning their own wives and daughters, initially limiting the supply to female slaves, the aforementioned quu¿, whom they themselves used as concubines. As the rhythm of contact increased, however, a wider circle of sexual partners was integrated into the trade, serving the “same propitiatory purpose for the Indians as trinkets did for the Euroamericans” (Gibson 1992, 235). During the Nootka trade, the women exchanged for sexual purposes to Europeans were objects named, not speaking subjects with names, even though women were sometimes active bargainers of hard merchandise. Nootka ¿uumaa was thus the starting point of this ever-evolving sign, a regular feature of broken Nootka, then later a foundational term of Wawa. The different roles of women during the jargonization of Nootka and then during the stabilization of Wawa two decades later along the lower Columbia correspond, metaphorically at least, to the nature of the linguistic processes engaged. Temporary items of exchange at Yuquot and during the ephemeral trade relations that followed, subservient or subaltern women circulated like words in a jargon. They had reference of a kind, but the contact zone in question provided them no firm structure, no syntax as it were, in which to obtain prize, only an attributed price. Later, and on the lower Columbia River, after the destruction of Lower Chinook society, displaced women from other societies and Chinook women whose social roles had been redefined by the disintegration of the Chinook world around them began to find a place within an emerging, often chaotic structure. During the Nootka period of Wawa prehistory, there was no mediating structure. A woman was Nootkan and Nootkan alone. If she was to be exchanged, she was a Nootka slave. Below, it will be argued that many of the first fluent speakers of Wawa were Native women who found themselves traded out of or married from their

42

The Nootka Jargon

societies into situations and circumstances where their mother tongues were virtually of no use any more. The situation at Nootka Sound was so shortlived, not much more than a decade, that no similar situation arose there, but the role of Nootkan slave prostitutes foreshadowed what was to come. Languages die off when their moment of obsolescence arrives. Jargons are especially ephemeral, expiring as soon as the transcultural contact zone in which they survive disappears. They are not rooted in the minds of their users but rather in behavioural routines learned after adolescence. Nuuchahnulth, with a new name, is alive to this day, at least among six hundred or so elderly speakers. Had the Nootka Jargon of the late eighteenth century not left traces in Wawa, we would have even less proof that it existed as a jargon rather than merely as broken Nootka, as captured in the word lists and passing references in travelogues.

2 Pidgin Chinook

Using “Chinook” to mean the “artificial trade language” and not the “proper Chinook language” (Pilling 1893, 38) was a misunderstanding chronic throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed to this day. Even contemporary devotees of Wawa, who are perfectly aware of the difference, often write simply Chinuk or Chinook, dropping, respectively, Wawa or Jargon. This substitution is not entirely without justification. Having emerged alongside Lower Chinook proper, Wawa eventually replaced it, occupying its heartland and spreading far beyond its home base. Especially in the early years, the bulk of the Wawa lexicon was derived from “old Chinook.” During the first decade of the nineteenth century, what became Wawa was in fact “partly mutually intelligible with Lower Chinook” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 169). In other words, early Wawa was understood by some of its speakers to be a simplified form of Chinook proper. Accordingly, some have asserted that “Chinook Jargon” should be “characterized, if not named, as Pidgin Chinook” (Samarin 1988, 224). Others have argued that there may have been previously pidginized forms of Lower Chinook used in some settings, in trade and possibly with slaves, and that this language variety either set the parameters for Wawa or, most radically, was the early form of Wawa. Before turning to the socially chaotic and ultimately convulsive events that took place at the mouth of the Columbia from around 1805 onward, and that forged Wawa as it came to be known, it is well worth looking into the linguistic situation along the lower Columbia preceding contact.

44

Pidgin Chinook

The îsinõk The term “Chinook” has a long history of loose use. In Chehalis, a Salishan language spoken to the north and east of Lower Chinook (LC), ïsinõk designated the people scattered along the north shore of the mouth of the Columbia (Boas 1911, 563). It was thus an exonym, a denomination derived not from the language of those it names but by that of outsiders, just like “Indian,” in fact. Chinookan self-designations were “possessive constructions based on place-names or other terms with geographical reference” (Silverstein 1990, 533). So the fact that in 1792 Robert Gray’s first mate, John Boit, applied “Chinoak” to the village of Qwatsamuts (LC çac‹mc) suggests that the Chinook had adopted the Chehalis term for self-reference and conveyed it to him. Accordingly, it is possible to construe the very word “Chinook” as an early “loan word from the Chehalis” into Wawa (Ray 1938, 36). Thirteen years later, Lewis and Clark recorded that the inhabitants of Baker’s Bay as a whole called themselves “Chinnooks” (Thwaites 1904-05, 3: 226), which marks a further extension of its domain. In any event, whether by neighbouring peoples or by invading Europeans or even by that specialized corps of invaders known as ethnographers, applying “Chinook” “to a “group of villages or an area” was “arbitrary, since the Chinook themselves had no designation for political units larger than villages.” 1 To the Chinook, who were in essence defined into existence by outsiders as the referent for the trade complex they dominated, the homogenizing concepts of nation or indeed “tribe” were meaningless. Due to vagaries that we can only imagine, the village of Qwatsamuts was the focus of Lower Chinookan activity at the moment of contact, but there were many other summer and winter camps in the region, including those over the rise of land along Willapa or Shoalwater Bay; Verne Ray (1938, 41) lists twenty-four by name. On the opposite shore of the Columbia, the Clatsop (LC t¿‹¤p ‘those who have pounded salmon’) spoke a virtually identical language, although both peoples, usually lumped under the rubrics of Lower Chinook or the Chinook and Clatsop, remained independent of and sometimes hostile towards each other (Silverstein 1990, 534-45). Farther up the Columbia from Grays Bay were the Kathlamet, whose way of life was indistinguishable from the coastal Chinook, but whose language was about as distant from that spoken on the coast as Portuguese is from Spanish (Hymes

Pidgin Chinook

45

1981, 16). Related languages extended up the river past the junction with the Willamette River and onto the edge of the Plateau east of the Cascades: Multnomah and Kiksht, the latter a dialect cluster including Clackamas, Cascades, and Wasco-Wishram (Boyd 1996, 34-35). These Chinookan languages were important in the history of Wawa and in the ethnographic record of the region, since Upper Chinookan cultures survived longer than Lower. Initially, though, Europeans had the coastal Chinook in mind when they used the word, referring, as did almost everyone in the region and many beyond it, to those who controlled the bounty flowing from the mouth of the Columbia, a richness of habitat that “allowed for a greater production of economic goods than was necessary for local consumption” (Ray 1938, 99). The Chinook did not occupy this strategic location by accident. At a remote point in history, they had inserted themselves wedgelike into the population of Salishan speakers previously holding the territory. Split apart, the Salishans separated into the Chehalis to the north and Tillamook and Alseans to the south. By all evidence, the Chinookan invaders intermarried with the previous occupants, adopting many of their customs and traits, including the system of gender that Chinookan languages share with the Salish of the coast but not with other related members of the Penutian phylum to which they hypothetically belong. After a “Common Chinook” period at the mouth of the Columbia, some Chinookans gravitated upstream, encountering speakers of Sahaptian, from which the eastbound migrants borrowed extensively, having come into a different environment and needing new words for new things.2 A Common Areal Culture One striking fact about the cultures of the Pacific coast is their broad uniformity, which can be ascribed to the shared marine environment. This uniformity might seem hard to square with the incredible linguistic diversity of the region, a mosaic as intricate as anywhere in the New World. Around forty-five distinct Indian languages belonging to thirteen families were spoken. Franz Boas (1911, 7) speculated that the common areal culture of the Pacific coast was therefore the “outcome of a long development” that allowed for the slow diffusion of customs and techniques across the multiple

46

Pidgin Chinook

boundaries of mutual unintelligibility. Indeed, it is possible that this development goes back to the beginnings of human habitation of the hemisphere, since the Northwest Coast may have been the corridor through which entry to the New World was gained. 3 In any event, the conglomeration of languages and similarity of cultures along the Pacific coast are one of its distinctive features, and the obstacles to intelligibility over short distances have tended to promote the notion that one or several lingua francas preceded Wawa, perhaps, given the prestige of the Chinook, a pidginized form of their language. Another feature of indigenous Pacific coast cultures must be introduced into this picture. Like many other early visitors, Horatio Hale noted that “the Indians ... were quick in learning languages and some of them could speak five or six native idioms” (Pilling 1893, 38). One might assume that the brassage that produced this polyglottism was brought about by the fur trade and later invasion by settlers. The fur trade did intensify cross-cultural contact, but extensive multilingualism was indigenous. Throughout the region, neighbouring villages were not only politically autonomous but often of unlike language altogether, and marriage across language lines was commonplace (Sherzer 1976, 233). Among the Chinook, it was a reliable strategy for acquisition of wealth and prestige. Each village in the Greater Lower Columbia probably had its “native” language (or “father language,” to use Jean Jackson’s apt term), usually shared with at least some other villages. It was spoken by those who were born and brought up there and by the children of those (typically, males) who continued to live in the village as adults, as well as by out-marrying women. The in-marrying women, and probably many of their children, as well as slaves, spoke the languages and dialects of their birthplaces. With polygyny and slavery, it is possible that in some villages speakers of the “native” language were in the minority. (Hajda 1984, 14)4

In other words, the mixed households and habits of linguistic accommodation that exogamy promoted would have partially obviated the need for a lingua franca, since there was an available pool of “interpreters” with personal and family contacts across the region, intermediaries whose knowledge of the next language down the path could be patched into a chain of translation.

Pidgin Chinook

47

Such ad hoc chains of interpretation were common well into the nineteenth century. When James McMillan travelled along Puget Sound in 1824, he noted that as the party advanced, an increasing number of Indians needed to be brought in the loop before a given new language could be understood (McKelvie 1991, 28). There were other ways to bridge the gap among disparate languages along the Northwest Coast. The Salish who bordered on the Upper Chinookans at The Dalles had a sign language known as their own, perhaps derived from the Plains Sign Language around the time horses were introduced across the Rockies, with measurable effect upon Nez Perce, incidentally, who were brought to a peak of prosperity of their own around the same time. 5 In the late nineteenth century, Garrick Mallery (1881, 312) alleged that the Kalapuyans of the Willamette Valley had their own sign language until they abandoned it for Wawa in the early 1820s. This allegation has never been documented.6 To shift farther inland, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1991, 242) assumed that, before contact, Chinook Jargon was an “indispensable” agent at The Dalles for intertribal trading in skins, fur, fish, oil, roots, pemmican, feathers, robes, clothing, shells, slaves, and horses. But if pidginized Chinook was current at The Dalles, some other lingua franca was certainly necessary farther east, since we know that there was a sharp language boundary there. As late as 1843, the missionaries at Wascopam Mission still needed interpreters from Wawa into Kiksht and Sahaptin (Boyd 1996, 89). Lewis and Clark in 1805 and David Thompson in 1811 both noted the ensuing problems of communication at this place, the latter each time he crossed it.7 In 1813, Alexander Ross did, however, remark that expeditions onto the Plateau were accompanied by Chinook escort-interpreters (Quaife 1923, 288). There was unquestionably a diplomatic dimension to the presence of these escorts, who would have overseen European contacts with other Indians, about whom the Chinook were as leery as the Nootka had been about their own hinterland neighbours twenty-five years earlier. Yet Ross is explicit about the fact that whatever language the Chinook themselves spoke with Europeans, some other instrument was needed on the Plateau, presumably the aforementioned sign language derived from that used on the Plains. Some have imagined traces of this putative pre-contact pidgin Chinook in Lewis and Clark’s cha-pel-el “bread-cakes” and wap-pa-to, a comestible

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Pidgin Chinook

root whose consonance with “potato” helped impress it in their memory, although the botanical reference was to Sagittaria sagittifolia. Both were recorded above The Dalles, and both entered Wawa (as saplil and wapetu), or perhaps were already part of the trade jargon before Wawa proper was born.8 Roughly, then, the documents of the early historical period suggest that the area in which pidginized Chinook might have served as a lingua franca was restricted to the Chinookan heartland. Along the Nootkan coast, Europeans had been struck by the appeal bargaining held for Pacific coast peoples. Lower Chinook were especially notorious as “great higlers” (Gibson 1992, 122). This penchant for trade was doubtless one effect of the profusion of natural resources at the mouth of the Columbia. Trade also reflected the “materialistic” bent of their culture, wherein competitive display of wealth was concomitant with status. Ironically, the Chinook did not have practices easily construed as potlatch, whose classic forms, from the Western ethnographic perspective, were reached farther north, especially among the Kwakiutl. 9 Chinook feasting and gift giving peaked during the midwinter religious dance ceremonies, a rhythm more characteristic of the Plateau than of the north coast (Ray 1938, 367-68); these activities, associated with the guardian spirit dance and the pubescent spirit quest, did flaunt “the stuff of opulence – food, clothing, high-ranked spouses, slaves, canoes” (Silverstein 1990, 536). In no small part, this wealth and ascendancy in trade depended on the seasonal runs of anadromous fish such as salmon and smelt, which passed through the marine and intertidal sites over which the Chinook held sway. Upon this material base, they developed traffic in a variety of manufactured goods, the range of which provides some idea of the complexity and scope of the regional economy. Commodities obtained from as far north as Nootka Sound were numerous. The Makah at Cape Flattery on the tip of the Olympic peninsula occupied a strategic location from which to hunt whales, whose oil and blubber they traded both north and south. From The Dalles, the Chinook obtained pounded salmon packed according to riverine technologies that they themselves never acquired; grasses and fibres; pipes and European battleaxes that had already made their way across the continent; mountain skins and horn, which they converted into ornamented utensils; tobacco from as far south as California; and their most important commodity, slaves. The slave-and-salmon

Pidgin Chinook

49

cultural complex typical of the Chinook extended far beyond their realm and was of ancient practice, having been attested among the Fraser River Lillooet as early as AD 850 (Hayden 1992). Although the Chinook were reputed to be especially harsh masters and “possessed more slaves per capita than any surrounding people,” they sold most slaves they acquired, frequently taken from among the Kalapuya south along the Willamette River, into the Umpqua River valley and beyond into California; the Tillamook on the Oregon coast sometimes served as intermediaries. Apart from their intrinsic usefulness in terms of labour, slaves represented a “stable unit of value” and were sometimes acquired simply as part of a “good bargain” (Ray 1938, 51). At other times, slaves were procured through raids. When the market supply did not meet their needs, the Chinook themselves engaged in raids, never against neighbouring Lower Chinook villages but north among the Quinault, south into the Umpqua valley, and east up the Columbia. Rarely were adult males taken. Women and especially female children were the prime targets, since they were easier to bend to domestic purposes or to exchange in trade, the young girls in particular for prostitution to whites, when that market opened up (Donald 1997, 79, 154). The Lower Chinook shared with the Nootka and virtually all peoples of the Northwest a keen sense of social rank, one probably acquired from the north, the custom of hereditary social inequality fading away south of the Columbia and above The Dalles. Among the Chinook, it takes the paradigmatic form attributed to developed Northwest Coast cultures as a whole: a triptych of slaves, commoners, and nobles (Matson and Coupland 1995, 3034). There was some mobility beyond birthright, since the acquisition of wealth or its loss could elevate or lower free commoners, but at either end of the spectrum, hereditary status prevailed, and this status was marked by the practice of infant head flattening solely for the high-born, ensuring that slaves were noticeably “round-headed.” 10 A Slave Pidgin? The prominence of slavery among the Chinook has also fostered a second scenario for the pidginized forms of Chinook that might have preceded contact. This is how Dell Hymes conceived the process:

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Pidgin Chinook

A Chinook village was multilingual with respect to a caste-like system of masters and slaves; slaves were obtained from a great diversity of places, frequently as a unit of value and trade; slaves had to understand directions for work. These conditions would seem conducive to use of a reduced form of the dominant language, not only between master and slave, but also between slaves of different language backgrounds. Such communication among slaves would approximate Whinnom’s principle [of tertiary hybridization] as to the formation of a stable pidgin between speakers of different backgrounds using the same language as a target. (Hymes 1980, 417)11

The rampant multilingualism on the Northwest Coast and the fact that Chinook proper would have become the imposed target language for slaves inducted into the bottom rank of Chinook society does fit into the venerable creolist model of tertiary hybridization (Holm 1988). This model was intended to counter the supposition that creators of a pidgin belong to a homogeneous population, and that the pidgin they devise revolves around and remains an imperfect variety of a single language they are trying to speak, becoming a way station along the path towards the hegemony of the superstrate language of prestige and power, usually, though not here, that of the European colonizers. Pidginized slave Chinook would, according to this hypothesis, have been spoken by individuals from a variety of backgrounds, but the full repertory of Chinook proper would never have been revealed to them, given the “haughty attitude of Chinookans with regard to knowledge of their own language” (Hymes 1980, 414). Some of this “prestige” was transferred to Chinookantinged dialects of Wawa, which as late as the 1930s were considered the most elegant ones, residue of a hierarchy among the peoples of the region that was already moot a century earlier, as Chinook hegemony dissolved in the face of disease, changing trade patterns, and the ever-increasing flood of white settlers, but that left traces in contemporary Oregon dialects of Wawa.12 If, as Hymes suggests elsewhere, the Chinook nobles and commoners did withhold knowledge of the full gamut of their language from their slaves, then a second venerable model of creolistics would apply, Hugo Schuchardt’s metaphor that “it is not the foreigners who chip out single stones from a good, solid building in order to build themselves shabby huts,

Pidgin Chinook

51

but it is the proprietors themselves who hand them the pieces [einzelne Steine] for this purpose” (Schuchardt 1914, 69). According to this scheme, the heterogeneous pool of slaves owned by the Chinook may well have been the masons of Wawa, but the raw material was handed over to them by their masters, speaking a broken register akin to broken Nootka or to the downtalking most languages have for foreigners and children. Pushing pidginization back over the historiographic horizon, which is the effect of invoking the slave pidgin hypothesis in this setting, does not eliminate the historicity of this pidgin’s genesis: there would still be a sequence of circumstances such that at some point in time the Chinook acquired slaves in large number and began to speak down to them. Moreover, since slavery was prevalent in the Northwest, there would logically have been as many slave registers as foyers of slavery, and the Chinook slave dialect would have been only one among a multitude. Fur traders were not so much puzzled by a plethora of jargons as confounded by the tangled ethnolinguistic diversity of the region. They were no doubt pleased to discover any functional medium of inter-ethnic communication, although, as we have seen, simplified Chinook proper could not fill the role of lingua franca outside the narrow confines of the Chinookan sphere itself, over the limits of which the new economy quickly spilled. In addition, the kind of slavery practised on the Northwest Coast may have worked against pidginization of the sort that Hymes imagined. The Chinook did hold slaves in considerable numbers by Northwest standards, and may well have managed a transitory pool of slaves for trade, but the slaves who remained in the Lower Chinook heartland lived in their masters’ compounds. These abodes were far from capacious, and the relationship between master and slave, however brutal, was domestic and intimate, both belonging to that key institution of developed Northwest Coast culture, the household. High-ranking figures in a Chinook household could possess a half-dozen slaves or so, chiefs such as Concomly (Q‹nqÌli) as many as a dozen, while Concomly’s main rival, Cassino (ši‹snu), had sixteen.13 One count, taken during the 1820s by Hudson’s Bay Company clerks at the peak of Chinook prosperity, suggests no more than a one-to-three slave-to-master ratio (Merk 1968, 170). Later reports show a wider range (Hajda 1984, 191-95), but in no case were slaves ever close to a majority, an observation worth making

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Pidgin Chinook

by way of contrast with Caribbean plantation settings, where it was precisely the marginality of the Europeans that set the grounds for creole genesis.14 Gender and age should also enter into the picture of slavery among the Chinook. As David Thompson observed in 1811, most slaves were “youths when taken, [and] they appeared as well off as their masters, except their paddling the Canoes, and hauling the Seine Net, in which their masters took a share of the labor” – conditions that were common, incidentally, to the French-speaking voyageurs who had paddled Thompson across the prairies and down the Columbia.15 Slaves were introduced into Chinook society at an early age, and “presumably would learn the language of their masters with little or no accent” (Hajda 1984, 154). True, slaves were treated harshly. It was common to kill them on the flimsiest of pretexts. They were sometimes dispatched to accompany a departed son or daughter into the other world, tied to the sepulchre and left to starve to death. At other times, their bodies were denied burial and were thrown to the wilds or into coverless pits. Yet slaves surely had passive access to full registers of Chinook. Zenk (1984, 31) put it well: “If we regard slaves as household-group members ... the notion that a drastically different form of the primary household language was reserved for them alone becomes ... rather less plausible than it might at first glance appear.” That the majority of slaves the Chinook retained for themselves were not male raises more issues in terms of gender and status. Alexander Ross, for example, noticed that “a Chinook matron is constantly attended by two, three, or more slaves, who are on occasions obsequious to her will. In trade or barter the women are as actively employed as the men, and it is as common to see the wife, followed by a train of slaves, trading at the factory, as her husband” (Thwaites 1904, 7: 107). Europeans not only married Native women à la façon du pays but purchased slaves as concubines, and the higher echelons of Chinook society made the most they could by linking exchange of sex with that of other commodities. This particular market may not have been as active before the arrival of Europeans, but such complexity of gender and status relations disturbs the assumption that slaves and masters inhabited separate communicative monads and that a separate slave pidgin could have been reserved for the former.

Pidgin Chinook

53

The records of the early fur trade speak to the volume of intelligence gathered from Indians, although unfortunately not how this information was obtained. At the same time, there were increasing numbers of Indians from higher up the Columbia available as interpreters. Even before the arrival of the Astorians and the Nor’Westers, the lower Columbia was an integrated region in which communication across language barriers was a regular and absolutely normal practice. The preceding paragraphs are laden with conditionals and other markers precisely because the slave register hypothesis is speculation, reflection as upon a blank screen. There is in fact very good reason for this degree of irreality in the discussion of pidgin Chinook: not an iota of hard data exists – neither a single recorded utterance nor even plausible lines of reconstruction from documented Wawa back to it. In fact, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. The first word lists collected at the mouth of the Columbia show some grasp, however faulty, of the grammatical nuance of the full language, although these word lists also suggest that speakers of Lower Chinook may have been accommodating the foreigners, much as we have above supposed for the Nootka period. Many items of Wawa were manifestly derived from inflected forms of Chinook proper, as if, in the words of Anthony Grant (1996, 6), “they had been taken out of one utterance and generalized.” Rather than hypothesizing a stable and prior pidginized form of Chinook, it is more plausible to suppose that Wawa as we know it was “made” during the early period of contact between Indians and Europeans.

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3 Approximations at Astoria

Although there was no single designated linguist in their party, Lewis and Clark had been given the mission by Thomas Jefferson to gather information about the Indian languages spoken along their route to the Pacific. That task was daunting, communication itself being already difficult, given the number and variety of languages they were to encounter. Across the prairies, they frequently resorted to the kind of ad hoc interpretative chains mentioned above, not always an easy process. One North West Company trader recalled “watching Lewis and Clark struggle to record a Hidatsa vocabulary in which each word had to pass along a cumbersome translation chain stretching from a native speaker through Sacagawea, Charbonneau, Jusseaume, and on to members of the expedition. Heated arguments among the various translators were frequent, slowing the whole process and worrying many Indians” (Ronda 1984, 116). This arrangement worked across the prairies. From the Rockies westward, no easy link with Northwest languages could be found. Neither Toussaint Charbonneau nor his Shoshoni wife, Sacagawea, herself a prominent and eventually mythic figure in the expedition, knew anything about languages spoken beyond the Rockies (Ronda 1984, 189). Still, the impressive amount of information that Lewis and Clark gathered demonstrates that the modes of makeshift communication used along the Missouri were transferable to the lower Columbia. As well, Meriwether Lewis is known to have pieced together an extensive Chinookan vocabulary. Unfortunately, it was lost during a boating accident, not, ironically, on the Columbia but on the Potomac (Ronda 1984, 175). So the first surviving

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Approximations at Astoria

systematic lists of Chinookan are from two partners of second rank in the 1811 expedition to the mouth of the Columbia financed by John Jacob Astor. Alexander Ross and Gabriel Franchère had been hired away from the fur trade milieu of Montreal by the New York entrepreneur, and they were accustomed to, although far from fluent in, Indian languages. Each drew up Chinook word lists similar to those Anderson and others made of Nootka, Ross annexing a side list of “another lingo, or rather mixed dialect, spoken by the Chinook and the neighboring tribes; which is generally used in their intercourse with the whites” (Thwaites 1904, 7: 349). It is no accident that the key words in William Clark’s famous sentence, discussed in Chapter 1 (Clouch musket, wake com ma-tax musket) can be found in Ross’s list of this “lingo.” Largely Nootka in origin, the “Mixed Dialect” cited by Ross was the core of nascent Wawa.1 “The Crafty Chinookes” The Astorians’ grasp of Chinook was rudimentary but far from non-existent. In 1811, for example, Ross reported after a few months on the Columbia that the Astorians “had now begun to pick up a few words of the language, and were given to understand that the crafty Chinookes, like the cat in the fable, had fomented and nourished the misunderstanding between us and the distant tribes” (Thwaites 1904, 7: 95). It is hard to know exactly what Ross meant by “language” in this context. The two Astorian word lists contain much Lower Chinook, often in complexly inflected if incorrectly understood forms, but it is clear from the extent of the Mixed Dialect list that jargonizing was widespread, particularly the local use of what we can now identify as the Nootka Jargon. There was a consensus that Chinook was exceedingly difficult for Europeans, Ross himself allowing that “to speak the Chinook dialect [i.e., Lower Chinook], you must be a Chinook” (Thwaites 1904, 7: 115). This observation was repeated by Horatio Hale (1846, 562) three decades later: So extremely difficult is the pronunciation of many of the sounds and combinations of elements in this language, that foreigners seldom attempt to acquire it. Notwithstanding the close intercourse which has been maintained with this people by traders and settlers for more than thirty years [i.e., since 1811], only

Approximations at Astoria

57

one instance is known of a white man having learned to speak the language with fluency. This man was a Canadian, who went to the country in Mr. Astor’s first expedition, and has remained there ever since.

All the Chinookan languages presented a similar challenge, and to nonChinookan Indians as well. For example, two years later, in 1843, one of the Protestant missionaries at The Dalles wrote, “while the Walla-walla and Klikatak are spoken with facility by numbers of the [Upper] Chinooks, not one of the former tribes, to my knowledge, can speak the Chinook readily” (Boyd 1996, 34). It is worth pursuing the identity of the Canadian Astorian who learned “to speak the language [in this case Lower Chinook] with fluency.” This person could not have been either Alexander Ross or Gabriel Franchère. Both took leave from the lower Columbia shortly after their stay among the Chinook, Ross passing time in the Okanagan before returning to Manitoba when the Hudson’s Bay Company took over the trade, and Franchère leaving well before with Astorians who declined the offer to stay under North West Company control. Another candidate might have been the Astorian chief Duncan McDougall, who did marry a daughter of Concomly and who had much contact with the language. But McDougall left the Columbia in 1817, dying “a miserable death at Bas de la Rivière, Winipeg [sic]” according to Franchère in his notes to the 1854 Huntington translation of his (Franchère’s) text (Thwaites 1904, 6: 405). The most likely suspect was thus Michel Laframboise, who was in the Oregon Territory until annexation and who was often referred to as an interpreter. Unfortunately, he authored no glossary of his own, although he was literate and left a personal library of works in French and English that he had carried to or acquired in Oregon (Munnick 1972, A46). To be sure, literacy is no sine qua non for language learning; in these circumstances, it might even be a disadvantage. But Michel Laframboise had assimilated the cross-cultural affections of the Canadian fur traders, and would have had prior experience in makeshift communication. There is some indication of how he operated in Ross’s account of events during the restoration of Astoria to British rule in 1813. Laframboise, he wrote (Thwaites 1904, 7: 248), was “decked and painted in full Chinook costume”

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Approximations at Astoria

when he accompanied Duncan McDougall and John Halsey on a mission to sound out Chinook reactions to the change of command at the fort. As Laframboise’s get-up suggests, communication during early stages of contact is more performative than formal linguistic analysis might imply, deixis and gesture being of vital importance, as is the willingness to embrace another set of cultural norms.2 There are precious few other indications of Laframboise’s modus operandi as a language learner during the Astorian period, but it is safe to say that he was following in the path set centuries earlier by the French voyageur explorers of the continent, whose affinity or at least empathy for Aboriginal cultures was a crucial tool for their survival and, in many cases, assimilation into Indian societies. Although Gabriel Franchère was obviously not the Canadian fluent in Chinook to whom Hale alluded, he did possess some Chinook, perhaps more than his Quelques Mots de la langue Chinouque ou Tchinouke displays. He had travelled up to The Dalles with one of Concomly’s sons, by the Canadian’s estimation “an intelligent and communicative young man [to whom] I put several questions touching their religious belief” (Thwaites 1904, 6: 333). It was perhaps during this journey that Franchère learned the Chinook creation stories that figure in his narrative, although he misunderstood their gist. According to fellow trader Ross Cox, who included a short list of Chinook proper in his own Adventures on the Columbia River, “Mr. Franchère ... attained a more thorough knowledge of [Chinook] than any one in the Company’s service” and “from [Franchère’s] knowledge of the Chinook language Mr. [John George] McTavish made him handsome offers to join the North West Company [in 1813].”3 Franchère was also an interpreter to the Chinook of events around the change of flags at Astoria, recording that “the Indian chiefs had been gathered to witness the ceremony, and I explained to them in their language what it was all about” (Coues 1897, 771). It is less than likely that at that point in time any European could convey in Lower Chinook the diplomatic nuance of the restoration of Astoria, events themselves already perplexing to many of the Europeans but probably bizarre to the Chinook, who expected Americans remaining loyal to Astor to be enslaved immediately by the British, per their own customs. Cox thought that Concomly quickly enough guessed that “power had somehow shifted at the fort” and had decided to “realign his own trade and diplomatic alliances”

Approximations at Astoria

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(Ronda 1990, 277-301). It is unlikely that Concomly would have been aware of the fact that the principals on both sides were Montrealers and Scots to boot, who, despite their formal allegiance to the rival fur companies, shared a culture and a lingering resentment towards the institutions for which they worked.4 Yet the narrative record, while fascinating, does not shed much direct light on the nexus between Chinook proper, Ross’s Mixed Dialect, and early Wawa. There remain only the lists themselves, whose words must be weighed as best as can now be done against their Chinook, Nootka Jargon, and Wawa counterparts. Editorial Considerations There are historiographical reasons to approach Ross’s Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon and Columbia River with caution. Its publication in 1849, almost forty years after the events, was no doubt in part motivated by the annexation of the Oregon Territory and the swelling sentiment of US Manifest Destiny, as had been Washington Irving’s 1836 Astoria, commissioned to promote the reputation of John Jacob Astor and to wave the flag of US possession of the Oregon Territory. 5 Thus, for the usual but also for the exceptional reasons of the times, Ross’s manuscript of his Adventures underwent editorial emendation, although these changes cannot be tracked because the manuscripts have gone missing. 6 The Fur Hunters of the Far West, the companion volume, does, however, differ considerably from the manuscript: “[Its] style was extensively revised by the 1855 editor to make it conform to accepted rhetorical practices current in mid-nineteenth century England, and many manuscript passages were expunged, sometimes for prolixity, sometimes for earthiness of expression, and sometimes to avoid giving offense to persons or institutions” (Spaulding 1956, xxi). The nature of these changes can be seen at a glance by comparing Spaulding’s Introduction, the pro-settler orientation of which is plain, with the reprint of the 1855 original edited by Quaife (1924). As for Franchère’s Relation d’un voyage à la côte du Nord-ouest de l’Amérique Septentrionale, it was published in French only a few years after his return east, although its translation into English dates from the post-annexation period (Huntington 1854). At that time, its translator-editor omitted the Chinook vocabulary, one imagines because it

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was thought to be superfluous, which for immediate purposes it doubtless was, since Lower Chinookans were virtually extinct by then. Notwithstanding these and other unknown factors, it is clear that both Franchère’s and Ross’s lists as such were compiled during the years of the Astorian and then North West Company settlements on the lower Columbia. In the first place, internal evidence implies that the items collected belong to the same set of data. There is considerable inconsistency in transcription, backhanded proof of authenticity, since this means that no later professional hand intervened to regularize the spelling, delete sloppy repetition, or catch egregious scribal or typographical errors.7 There is also no sign that the lists were revised against recent publications, in particular Horatio Hale’s Vocabulary, which saw print in 1846 just as Ross’s Adventures was being prepared. 8 Finally, in neither Ross nor Franchère is there any Wawa derived from French, which was widespread by the late 1820s, surfacing in the lexicographical archive compiled by Fathers Modeste Demers and Francis Norbert Blanchet from 1838 onward. Instead, there are items eventually replaced by French-derived vocabulary, such as Ross’s “broken Chinook” and/or early Wawa kits-tan “ax” which was soon subsumed by lahash (< la hache). Franchère, but Ross too, spoke French, and both were immersed in what was the working, if not the managerial, language of the trade. Either would have recognized any fragments of French in speech around them. For these several reasons, the two lists reliably document how the Astorians perceived their linguistic environment. This last point is worth making, given that these lists stand in contrast with the numerous later glossaries and dictionaries, most of which were simply repackaged or plagiarized from previous works. This has been amply demonstrated in Samuel Johnson’s “Chinook Jargon: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Variation in an American Indian Pidgin” (1978), a work that was innovative in both its subject matter and methodology, an example of early use of cybertechnology in the humanities. It also goes without saying that these glossaries, often appended to travelogues and commercialized guides, reflect the habits and prejudices of native speakers of English and French, fur traders, missionaries, and settlers who, despite the sympathy they may have professed for Indians around them, approached Wawa from an angle very much their own. Similarly, the Wawa cited in many mid-nineteenth-century publications was

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standardized according to the norms of the glossary tradition, their content reflecting the tastes of their prospective readership and the ideological bias of the times. Although much can be gleaned from the archive and the data derived therefrom, this history of the genesis of Wawa must deal with the mediated status of its raw material. A Skeleton Key to Chinook To understand how the meat of Chinook was boiled down to the sinews of Wawa and how much Ross and Franchère understood of the language, one must first have some grasp of Chinook’s own flesh and bones. Unfortunately, there is no single grammar and or dictionary of the language. Much of the linguistic material revolves around theoretical debates interesting in their own right but tangential to the problem before us.9 What follows immediately below is not a scientific description of Chinook proper or even a practical guide to the language, but rather a sketch against which to set the approximations of Chinook inscribed into Astorian and other records from the early nineteenth century. Between Chinook proper and Nootka there is a gulf at least as wide as, if not greater than, that between any two European languages. Yet they are roughly comparable from the European perspective, consisting of lengthy, “sentencelong words” composed of elements whose order is prescribed but complicated by an elaborate protocol of phonological rules. Michael Silverstein’s two landmark pieces on Chinook Jargon turn on virtuoso displays of deep syntactic structures rather than the superficial features of interest here, but he opens his argument with a useful example drawn from the material Franz Boas collected. Silverstein (1972, 387) asks his readers to note the sentence taka then

a--ñ-ñ-u-ñ he-carried-it-to-it

ku to

ñ-ç water

ç-ña that

ñ-›asks child.

ADV

VERB

PREP

NOUN

DEM

NOUN

Silverstein continues: The inflected stem of the verb is u-ñ ‘carry’, consisting of root √-ñ and ‘distad’ prefix -u, which alternates with ‘proximad’ -t. Proximad and distad are

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defined in relation to the hic et nunc of the speech situation, along with temporal or spatial axes ... The initial morph of the verb, a-, is the narrative past tense marker. The other morphemes of the verb are of interest here. In order, they are  (3rd person singular masculine transitive subject), -ñ- (3rd person singular neuter transitive object), -ñ- (3rd person neuter indirect object), and -l- ‘to’ (postposition of indirect object). The glosses of the pronominals make it clear that they are subcategorized for person, number, and gender. Now both of the nouns, ‘water’ and ‘child’, show morphemes prefixed to stems which look exactly like the object pronouns. These are number-gender markers and agree grammatically with the pronominals in the verb. The demonstrative ç-ña also agrees with the noun it modified in number and gender, the -ña being the word-final form of -ñ-. Note that the first -ñ- of the verb, direct object pronominal, cross-references the last noun phrase of the sentence, ç-ña- ñ-›asks, while the second pronominal -ñ- and its postposition -l- cross-reference the prepositional phrase ku ñ-ç. Hence there is cross-referencing of both elements of the prepositional phrase.10

This analysis of a simple sentence should suffice to demonstrate that Chinook proper offered a considerable challenge to the Europeans, a task even more onerous because many sounds, especially the consonants, were alien to speakers of English or French. For example, imagine trying to catch in the flow of things the morpheme -ç ‘water’, the presumed etymon of Wawa tsok ‘water’ (GR ts¢qw). In the first place, -ç (which rarely stands alone without a gender and another marker) is embedded in a string the orthographic representation of which is, for non-linguists, some sign of the effort required. All three phonemes of this stem have only rough equivalents in English or French. Europeans attempting to make some sense of -ç did have the advantage of a similar word in Nootka Jargon recorded by Anderson as chauk “water”, Moziño as cha-a “agua”, and Gray as chauch “fresh water”. Ross must have heard this Nootka-derived doublet on occasion, yet was targeting Chinook proper when he gave ill-chu “water”, since he took the (LC gender and number marker) ñ- to be part of the word. Moreover, he had no entry in the Mixed Dialect for “water” – although it certainly belonged to the set of Nootka words conveyed to the Columbia. Despite these difficulties, many of the items in the Franchère and Ross lists are recognizable Lower Chinook, although both had as little knowledge

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of its grammar as Anderson or Walker or Moziño did of Nootka’s. For example, Ross’s kits-tan ‘ax’ could not have been part of a full statement in Chinook, since it lacks the masculine gender marker i-, a nicety that George Gibbs or, more likely, his informant Alexander Caulfield Anderson, caught and included in the later Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language, where Gibbs has ekuts’tan for hatchet.11 Put into familiar terms, this would be like writing down a French or German noun without bothering with the gender- and number-marking articles, not the worst sin an amateur can commit, but grossly insufficient for someone who might want to master those languages. It is possible that Ross knew that kits-tan was only a stem. But there is no distinction in his list between items showing remnants of gender and/or possessive markers, for example: eanux “little” < LC stem -nukstû ‘smallness’ ekass-cass “boy” < LC -›ak ‘boy’ chlikc-ax “hair” < LC -q ‘hair’ and those that do not: cill-cill “buttons” < LC stem - ¢l¢l ‘star’ moluck “elk” < LC -mulak ‘elk’ mamah “father” < LC -mama, ‘father’ The last item, although in Ross, likely did not survive into Wawa because of the conflict with English mama and French maman. Field Work Despite his loose grasp of Chinook proper, Ross appears to have gathered information during face-to-face inquiry. Many of his words reflect possessive forms that he does not gloss. Henry Zenk thinks this consistent with Ross’s habits later, when he was stationed in the interior of British Columbia and set about recording the language of the Okanagan in his notebooks, and it seems plausible when one compares some of Ross’s items with the reconstructed Lower Chinook (after Zenk and Johnson 2007, 27):12

64

emeck-kats-ach “back” eats-wane “belly” thlam-eck-took “head” etsuck-out “eyes” ots-ats-ach “teeth” ecskaun “chest, wood” useun [sic] “kettle”

Approximations at Astoria

i-[m¢]-x ‘thy back’ i-[]-wan ‘my belly’ ñ¢-[m]-iqtq ‘thy head’ [i]-[¢]-çt ‘my eye’ [u]-[]-ax ‘my tooth’ i-íkan ‘plank’ (stem -íkan ‘wood’) u-íkan ‘bucket’ (stem -íkan ‘wood’)

It is easy to imagine Ross pointing to his informant’s belly and receiving the reply “my belly,” transcribing “belly,” then touching his own head and hearing “thy head” but glossing what he heard as just “head.” This level of misunderstanding is less fundamental, however, than the mixture of marked and unmarked forms in Ross’s list, of which his confusion between i-íkan ‘plank’ and u-íkan ‘bucket’ (both from the same stem for ‘wood’ but of different gender) is typical. Some of these marked forms entered Wawa, surviving into the dialects of settlers too: ina ‘beaver’, inpu ‘louse’, ikanum ‘myth’, olipitsike ‘fire’. There were two “great classes” of stems in Chinook, to use Boas’s expression: those that do not need affixes and those that occur only with prefixes. Into the first category fall many temporal and modal adverbs, exhortative utterances, conjunctions, and interjections that stand alone or at least stand out in Chinook, that were noted by Ross and Franchère, and that also entered Wawa almost directly (the LC forms can be found in Boas 1911, 633-36, the Wawa here in GR). LC kaltas ‘in vain’ / GR kh¢lt¢s LC ñunas ‘I don’t know’ / GR ï¿unas LC wixt ‘again’ / GR w¢ût LC kw‹n¢m ‘always’ / GR kw‹n¢m LC ‹yaq ‘quickly’ / GR ‹yaq LC niûwa ‘please, just try to’ / GR n•ûwa LC an‹ ‘surprise or displeasure’ / GR an‹ LC ‹lta ‘now’ / GR ‹lta

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For slightly different reasons, numerals and colours were easily recognized as independent items by the Europeans. Franchère cited most of the Chinook numerals, words that passed over into Wawa as close to verbatim as the different phonologies allowed: icht (one) makust (two) thloun (three) lakut (four) itallilum (ten) ekoun-icht (eleven) makust thlatl (twenty) Ross spelled them otherwise, and went to four decimal digits: eattathlelum (ten) eattathlelum equin ight (eleven) muxt-thlalth (twenty) lakat-thlalth (forty) e-tha-ca-munack (one hundred) thlune e-tha-ca-munack (three hundred) hi-oh (thousand) hi-oh hi-oh hi-oh hi-oh hi-oh (five thousand)13 Spectra rarely coincide across languages, but Wawa borrowed its own rainbow more or less en bloc from Chinook proper, where colours were used without pronominal prefixes and were conspicuous vocabulary items. Disentangling the broken Chinook spoken by the Astorians from the particles of nascent Wawa they also recorded is not an easy task. It is helpful to borrow a distinction proposed by the French creolist Robert Chaudenson, that between first-degree approximations and second-degree approximations of approximations. Adult language learners invariably produce imperfect approximations of the material presented to them. The term is imprecise, but almost every piece of data about the early history of Wawa and of its ambient languages consists

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of such approximations: the imperfect Nootka of the maritime fur trade word lists, the transcriptions and transmogrifications of what had been Nootka Jargon by Lewis and Clark and in Alexander Ross’s “Mixed Dialect,” and Ross’s and Franchère’s glossaries of Chinook proper. By the standards of our day, even the systematic glossaries of Fathers Demers and Blanchet in 1838 and the Harvard-trained philologist Horatio Hale in 1841 are approximations, since only with the work of Franz Boas does the study of Pacific coast languages begin to conform to contemporary academic norms. Such imprecision comes with the territory of pidgins, which are, even after their lexicon and grammar stabilize, makeshift, contingent, and dependent on interlocutors’ experience with cross-cultural communication. In the history of a pidgin, there comes a moment when these approximations are subjected to a second degree of approximation, when, in other words, they have circulated long enough to become the autonomous object of approximation themselves. Detached from the original target language, they acquire a life of their own and are diffused without further reference to their origin. This “meta-approximation” has been described by Robert Chaudenson, a proponent of the so-called superstratist school: “One accordingly understands that the phenomenon [of creolization of French creoles] is essentially that of a transition to a second degree of approximation of French, approximation squared as it were, which seems to me to be the true moment and site of creolization: the autonomy of this approximate system vis-à-vis French” (Chaudenson 1992, 121). To be sure, the transition Chaudenson had in mind was one in which a European superstrate was targeted by diverse indigenous and/or imported populations, the result of which was a creole marked by lexical borrowing from that superstrate, whereas Chinook proper can be conceived of as a superstrate only in the special context of the early years of European presence in the Northwest. Still, something akin to this second degree of approximation of Chinook defines the point when Wawa acquired its own inner logic. Similarly, during the Nootka period when, at most, a trade jargon developed, the maritime traders’ word lists provided a target that was detached from Nootka itself, even to some extent from native speakers of it, who knew how little their interlocutors knew – hence the great fortune in our having the Ross and Franchère word lists, which contain approximations of both Chinook and nascent forms of Wawa.

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Broken Chinook itself belongs in the first category, first approximations of a full language. Early Wawa already shows signs of being approximations of approximations – in other words, attempts at reproducing vocables that were free-floating and widely circulating faulty imitations of the full language. About half the words that Ross and Franchère thought they caught in Chinook did not survive into Wawa, and so should be thought of as broken Chinook, the slots they occupied in the semantic world of Wawa eventually occupied by words from Nootka, French, English, or even other Chinook competitors, among them: echa-latsa “rise up” emets-kill “mouth” etisspol-etick “arms” nachamats “shame” oak-cutsa “ears” optètè “sleep” each-e-chimley “understand” Other items did enter Wawa, but because they were not fully functional in Lower Chinook, they must have had independent lives in the early 1810s, in the sense that native speakers of Chinook proper would not normally have used them. As observed above, Ross’s moluck “elk”, which became Wawa mulak, could not have been used in a grammatical Chinook utterance, although it appears in a phrase of Franchère’s putative Chinook, nix, quatiasse moulak thlousk “No, give me some meat.”14 Ecock-a-mans “chief” was approximate Chinook (LC i-ûak¢mana), but elsewhere Ross had Nootkaderived tye-yea for “chief” (Wawa tayi). A similar example, cited from Zenk above, is Ross’s etsuck-out “eyes” – a misunderstanding of i-¢-çt ‘my eye’. The Chinook singular stem for eye was i-çt, but the plural had to take a dual form, s-çct, the plural/dual for “eyes” meaning, logically enough, “face” (although it is always possible to imagine a grotesque collection of non-dual eyes). There is no evidence that Ross’s etsuck-out circulated beyond his own list, but his sheaaugh-ouest (from s-çct), carried over into Wawa, was in Gibbs as se-áh-host.15 This and other approximations of Chinook by the two Astorians were in turn approximated by later speakers and can even be found in Edward Harper Thomas’s 1935 Chinook: A History and Dictionary:

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eats-im-oughts, “heart” (EHT et’-shum ‘heart’); emeeats “nose” (EHT e-meets’ ‘nose’); emets-aughtick “breasts” (EHT e-mi’h ‘breast’).16 Speech Acts As defined by Thomason (1997, 3), a contact language is “a language ... that comprises linguistic material which cannot be traced back primarily to a single source.” One touchstone for such heterogeneity should be the fusing of items from two different languages with no indication on the part of the speaker that different languages are involved. In Ross’s early Wawa/broken Chinook, kaltash wa-wa presented such a case: kaltash was the Chinook adverb kaltas ‘in vain, only’; wa-wa, of course, was from Nootka. One suspects that it may already have been assimilated into ordinary Chinook speech, or at least could be understood in the context of ordinary speech. This was certainly the situation of Ross’s nica oh-low “I’m hungry”. As Zenk and Johnson observe (2007, 27-28), the phrase is rather bare when measured against the Chinookan equivalents that have been documented, but would be “perfectly intelligible” as a Wawa predicate adjective construction. The jury thus remains out on whether this is “good” or “broken” Chinookan, though both lexemes were from Chinook. Other phrases as well would have been intelligible to Chinookan speakers, perhaps only after effort or as a register – Chinookans were used to hearing from outsiders, particularly whites. Here are some other examples: queentschech pasheshiooks? “How many whites?” potlatch nain maika? “Will you give it to me?” ikta mika makoumak? “What do you want to eat?” thlounasse otile? “Perhaps some fruit?” queentshich higua? “How many dentalia?” queentshich enna? “How many beaver?” Sentences like these could have been uttered by native Chinookan speakers, although the strong or independent pronouns (maika, mika – Wawa but also potentially LC) suggest that these simple phrases belonged to a subset spoken to and with foreigners, one that was “structurally shallow and discretely linear” (Silverstein 1972, 614). In any case, they are intelligible Wawa.

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If there are rules set deep in the mind that determine how to construct meaning syntactically, the way Wawa speakers composed the above phrases during the period of its pidginization might reflect them. Recently, Zvjezdana Vrzic has argued that the “universal” tendency towards the SVO (subject-verb-object) word order in pidgins results from the loss of inflectional morphology in the languages in contact. Her data are drawn from Kamloops Wawa, the study of which has just begun. Vrzic’s Wawa and the ways it was spoken around the turn of the century in central British Columbia should not be confused with the early Columbian dialect, yet her argument does relate to how phrases may have been shaped during the early days of contact at Astoria. The loss of inflectional morphology from Chinook would, to follow her line of thought, have activated the default SVO. The numerous languages present along the Columbia River during the period of genesis, including French and English, would then have had little role in the formation of Wawa grammar.17 This not being, strictly speaking, a work of formal linguistics, this technical issue can be left as is. The process of approximating approximations lasted over two decades, during which time broken Chinook and incipient Wawa were intermingled, some Europeans targeting Chinook, however imprecisely, but using, maybe unknowingly, the Mixed Dialect too. Speakers of Lower Chinook had something of an edge, since their language was in some sense the target (what might in other situations be called the superstrate). Speakers of other Amerindian languages also had a leg up, although the collective target, Wawa, was increasingly influenced by French and then English phonology. There was, in other words, a multidimensional continuum of dialects approximating Lower Chinook (LC) and then approximating, almost randomly, each other. As the collective ability to produce inflected, properly cross-referenced LC became less and less frequent among the speech community, the processes of pidginization kicked in. What had been approximations reached a second degree, the approximation of prior approximation. Mutual accommodation was the order of the day. There is thus not much to be said with any authority about the syntax of early Wawa. If there was grammar embedded in the few phrases that Ross and Franchère delivered to us, it could have been derived either from the native speech of its users – Lower Chinook, Chinookan, other Amerindian

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languages, English, French – or from universal grammar. Historical sociolinguistics is at best an imprecise science. Nonetheless, it seems safe to argue that when a jargon begins to acquire directive functions (“getting things achieved, manipulation of others”), it must needs fill in its lexicon and structures. Neither Franchère nor Ross understood the vocative or imperative moods underlying many items they collected. Still, it does not take much imagination to see how representational modes (“this blanket costs two beavers”) easily spill over to directive ones (“you better buy or I get up and go”). The fine line between stabilization and expansion of a jargon is crossed when integrative functions are engaged and language is used to “create social bonds” and as “an index of group membership.” The difficulty lies in determining the borders of group membership. Since active and self-aggrandizing trade was a primary goal of both Chinook and Europeans (as Ross said, “the Chinooks were up to all the shifts of bargaining”), it makes sense to consider the site of their transactions as composing ipso facto membership in a group of some kind or other, a community of practice, although when the trade was over, that little bubble of identity dissolved as each party returned to his or her established community. We can, I would argue, speak of the emergence of a pidgin culture. A Pidgin Culture In the first instance, pidginization is a linguistic process, but cultural categories too are “reduced” as they are translated into a new language. A telling example is Franchère’s gloss of ekannum (LC ikánum ‘story’ or ‘myth’) for “The Good Spirit of the Waters,” quite a digest of whatever story he had been told. He also glossed etalapass (from LC i-ï‹lapas ‘coyote’) for “God, or the Supreme Being”. Many Chinookan tales turn about this incarnation of the Trickster, who is synonymous with craftiness, as in the GR idiom k‹kwa ïalaÙas ‘like a coyote’ (“to become devious”). Ross committed an analogous blooper in assigning etaminua to “prophet, priest”, whereas the entity in question was i-ïamanaí ‘guardian spirit’, the vision figure that young males and some females sought during their rites of passage into adulthood, which remained a central figure of their socio-psychological lives. In the gap between these categories can be grasped the displacement of semantic worlds between Chinook itself and the jargon that was emerging, although Ross thought he was recording Chinook.

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Much as the maritime fur traders collapsed the Nootka taxonomy of caste and class, converting ‘commoner’ into ‘slave’, so LC slave, i-láitix, became GR i-l‹ithix (for which there was a feminine form, u-láitix ‘female slave’). In Chinook society, non-slaves were divided into the commoner (i-û•yal) and noble, the highest rank of which was “chief” (i-kánax), the operative distinction being between those who were bought and sold as opposed to those who could buy and sell others (Silverstein 1990, 541). There is no reflection in Ross or in Wawa early or late of this nuance, although the dynamic of Chinook culture was driven by the struggle of those who were not slaves to accumulate wealth, often in the coinage of slaves, while the bulk of fur traders, not highly ranked within their own society, dealt with lesser powers than chiefs when it came to acquiring their wives. Unaware of the nuances of Chinookan morphology, Ross generalized forms, giving, for example, “grandfather” for eock-acka instead of ‘his mother’s father’ (i-á-gaga), “grandmother” for eye-kecka instead of ‘his father’s mother’ (u-y‹-›e›e). “Daughter” oquè-cha and “son” etsicha appeared to be declined forms of the stem for ‘child’ (-xá), the feminine first person possessive and the masculine third person possessive, respectively. The Chinook kinship system was predicated on criteria usually missing from Ross’s terminology and from Wawa itself: gender not only of the relative in question but of the speaker and the connecting relative, vital status (living or dead) and nature of relationship, blood or affinal, and relative age of the relatives (Ray 1938, 78-80). As perusal of Table 3.1 shows, much nuance of the Chinook kinship system was lost to the first cohort of traders who arrived at the mouth of the Columbia in 1811, at least in terms of their glosses present in Ross’s text (there are more precise glosses for some terms in Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge 1871). Such minutiae were as important as any other with which the fur traders had to grapple. They were acutely aware of the need to marry correctly into Indian society, this having been a reliable modus operandi of the fur trade, especially the branch of it springing out of Laurentian society after the arrival of Jacques Cartier. Their behaviour in this regard was different from that of the maritime traders, for whom the ephemeral sexual relief of shipbound sailors was the impetus. Nor were the Astorians and those who followed in their path oblivious to the advantages of familial alliance as

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practised by the Chinook and other Northwest Coast peoples, since social promotion and acquisition of wealth was contingent upon marital contract, as indeed it was in the European societies whence they came. Yet the skeleton key of the Chinook kinship systems contained in Ross’s and Franchère’s broken Chinook offers a glimpse of the emerging but ambiguous rules of the contact zone in which Wawa became the vehicle. This zone was relatively impoverished, semantically speaking, another gauge of which Table 3.1 Some early Wawa kinship terms recorded by Alexander Ross

Ross

Gloss

LC etymon when known

eock-acka

grandfather

i-‹-gaga

‘his mother’s father’

eye-kecka

grandmother

u-y‹-›e›e

‘his father’s mother’

etsicha

son

i-a-x‹

masc. 3rd per. possessive by woman

oquè-cha

daughter

u-a-x‹

fem. 1st per. possessive

okuste

daughter-in-law

u-t¢

‘mutual relation between wife and husband’s parents’

oquack-ekull

wife

u--kikal

‘my female spouse’

tlick-chall

husband

i-m¢-kikal

‘your male spouse’

ek-keck

brother-in-law

-‹q [stem]

‘my wife’s brother’ [male speaking]

ack

nephew

aq

vocative: ‘sister’s son’

ats

sister

a

‘younger sister’

a-u

brother

aw

vocative: ‘younger brother’

cap-whoo

relations

k‹pûo

‘elder relations either gender’

t-colal [stem]

‘relatives in general’ per Boas

col-el-achum man Source: Thwaites 1904.

Notes

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is the paucity of zoological and botanical reference in Wawa as opposed to that still to be found in Chinook two or three generations later, and also immanent in the botanical taxonomies of early explorers in Spanish and English. Very little nuance from either side made it into early Wawa. Only as a pidgin creolizes does the scope of its taxonomies of the natural world broaden. Such relative semantic complexity might also be a useful criterion with which to judge its development, just as speech functions beyond representation point towards a language that has been conventionalized. The Mixed Dialect No small amount of linguistic chaos reigned during the Astorian period, this too contributing to occasional contradictions in Ross’s lists. For example, his putative Lower Chinook capshewalla “steal” goes back to the insult that Martínez accused Callicum of declaiming in 1789; chick-amen “iron” was one of the first Nootka words written down in both English and German. Carelessly, Ross put both na-wetca “it is true” in the main list and nawetkaha idem in the Mixed Dialect. Derived from a genuine Chinook adverb, it became Wawa nawítka ‘certainly, yes’, and in the 1810s probably coexisted in both sets, if there were in fact two sets. Ross and Franchère both thought that potlatch meant “a present”, so it may already have entered LC proper as a loan from Nootka Jargon, although note that there is no sign in either transcription of LC morphology. Ross’s phlun-ass “perhaps” was a legitimate reflex of the Chinook adverb that Boas glossed as “I don’t know” (LC ñunas), as was polackly “night” (although there is a another scribal typo for the same polackley in Ross’s Mixed Dialect as “might”). Similarly, Ross gave te-keigh for “affection” in the main list, and again tekeigh in the Mixed Dialect for “I love you” (LC stem -tqiû ‘to like’). Table 3.2 shows Ross’s Mixed Dialect, the principal “seed” of Wawa in which Nootka Jargon was embedded (from Thwaites 1904, 7: 349). Of the twenty-eight items that Ross cites, well over half are from Nootka, here referred back to their entry into the European record, although neither Ross nor his editors availed themselves of the word lists from the Nootka period. In other words, Ross’s Mixed Dialect was not as “mixed” as his main list, the word possibly reflecting a vague sense that he was dealing with a special set. Yet the Mixed Dialect clearly stood apart in his mind, first pragmatically

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Table 3.2 Alexander Ross’s “Mixed Dialect” Item

Gloss

Notes1, 2

Hias tye-yea Miss-che-iss Tlutchè-men Tunass Tlòsh Pishack Wake Mackouk Chippots Ta-an-ass Poll-alley Quatluck Na-wetkaha Thla-choea Wa-wa Ick-etta Polackley Chicko Thlat-away Winnippiè Come-a-tax Hi-ass Snass Shippo Is-co-com Meth-lite Tekeigh Omintick

Great chief Slave Woman Child Good Bad No Trade Canoe Very little Balls Sea-otter It’s true How are you? To speak What Might [sic] Come here Go away By-and-bye Understand Big or large Rain Ship Good spirit Come in I love you Game

N Meares, 1790, Tighee Mamatlee “chief ship” N Moziño, 1792, meschimes N Walker, 1785, klootshama or tootsma N Gray, 1792, tenass; Wawa tan‹s N Walker, 1785, klookh; Clark, 1805, clouch N Clark, 1805, Pe Shack; GR p•shak N Cook, 1778, wik; Moziño, 1792, huic N Cook, 1778, macook; Moziño, 1792, ma-cu-co N Cook, sha’pats N Cf. tunass above. GR t¢n‹s LC põlali ‘powder, gunpowder’ or French poudrerie N Cook, quot’luk; Walker, 1785, quotluck LC n‹w-itka ‘indeed!’ LC ñ‹ûawa ‘welcome’ N Gray, 1792, waw waw LC •-kta ‘thing, something, what’ LC -põlakli ‘dark, night’ N No previous citation: uaa ‘come here’ N Gray, 1792, clotuwah; Moziño, 1792, tlatlehua N Gray, 1792, winnapee “stay”: wi.napi ‘remaining’ N Gray, 1792, commatax N Walker, 1785, haeeeo “ten” Salish English. Ross had N ma-ma-tle as LC “ship”. LC i-skukm ‘powerful creature’ LC mi-¿ayt ‘sit down’ LC -tqiû ‘to like’ LC *u-mintk, from the stem –tk ‘to throw down’

Notes: 1 N = Nootka; LC = Lower Chinook. 2 Sources: Meares, 1790: Meares 1790; Moziño, 1792: Engstrand and Wilson 1991; Walker, 1785: Fisher and Bumstead 1982; Gray, 1792: Howay 1941; Clark, 1805: Moulton 1990; Cook, 1778: Beaglehole 1969.

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as “generally used in ... intercourse with the whites,” and second as easier to learn, “the pronunciation more agreeable to the ear than the other” – most of the “difficult” consonants having already been removed from the Nootka etymons as they passed through Nootka Jargon. All this confusion may well have resulted from the likelihood that the Chinook themselves shifted between the Mixed Dialect and simplified forms of Chinook but produced proper Chinook when it was elicited, as it was on occasion for Ross. Doubtless, many words in the Mixed Dialect and later Wawa of Nootka origin were borrowed into Chinook as it was spoken in the 1810s, our old friends makouke “to make” and nannitch “to look” among them. Within a short time, traffic went in the other direction. A large proportion of Wawa comes from Chinook proper and got there because the boundary between it and the Mixed Dialect was permeable. Ross took kaltash wa-wa “idle talk” to be Chinook. To this day it is good Wawa. The presence of so many Nootka loans alongside fragments of broken Chinook in Ross’s lists suggests that the corpus we know as Nootka-derived was a kind of cue to apply the rudimentary grammatical routines of the Nootka Jargon itself, even for Indians who had control of Chinookan, or for that matter a Salishan language. Moreover, the persistent presence of the Nootka loans in all the documents that survive from the first decade of institutionalized European presence on the lower Columbia points to a wider issue in the history of Wawa, one that presaged its use later as an inter-ethnic contact language among Indians. It is usually supposed that the prestige of a language promotes its use. Usually an amorphous jargon, which the Nootka Lingo clearly was at that stage, is bereft of social power. Why, then, did the Nootka words come to occupy such a prominent place in Early Wawa – indeed, occupy key positions at the very core of the developing language? Two explanations leap to mind. In the first, the European speakers of the languages indisputably found the Nootka etymons easier to reproduce; in the words of Ross himself, “it is much more easily learned, and the pronunciation more agreeable to the ear” (Thwaites 1904, 7: 328). The Nootka Jargon had, after all, been conveyed to the lower Columbia by speakers of English for the most part, and its sharply reduced phonological features made it easy to grasp, at least for Europeans. On the other side of the system, Indians, at first mostly the Chinook themselves

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but soon thereafter speakers of a variety of languages, were, all things considered, comfortable with the sounds, and so must have had some other motivation. It is logical to conclude that association of the Mixed Dialect with the accelerating trade in European articles and then the centres of power that Europeans began to cast around their trading colonies exerted considerable attraction. Lower Chinook in either its full form or even the reduced forms that may have been current before the arrival of the continental fur traders was undoubtedly associated with the power of the “Tsinuk” themselves. Many might have found it advantageous to use a language that was not “Chinook.” In fact, the often-reported arrogance of the Chinook regarding their own language and mores would have tended to encourage them to borrow this alien lingo themselves, when they conversed with outsiders, as observed at the beginning of this chapter. By the same token, or rather by way of reference to the flipside of that coin, those who were not part of the Chinook inner circle preferred to use a medium that was on the surface at least nonChinook, a middle ground upon which all were to some degree equal. Manuscript 195 Given its relatively rapid publication, Gabriel Franchère’s Quelques Mots de la langue Chinouque ou Tchinouke stands at the head of the archive of Wawa itemized in James Constantine Pilling’s 1893 Bibliography of the Chinookan Languages (Including the Chinook Jargon). The inclusion of Wawa in this summa is something of an anomaly among the nine similar compilations of late-nineteenth-century ethnolinguistics sponsored by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution (Salishan, Wakashan, Athapaskan, and Algonquinian among them). The bureau’s director, John Wesley Powell, had a distinct preference for “uncontaminated” artifacts and resisted collecting “articles of the acculturated arts” – a category into which Chinook Jargon would readily fit if languages were subject to such criteria, totally indigenous and pure on the one hand, acculturated and “mixed” on the other. 18 But Chinook proper and Wawa were not only often confused but intermixed, at least in the early years. Material on them naturally fell into the same volume. Prior to the arrival of Fathers Demers and Blanchet in 1838, which began the French thread of dictionaries, and the appearance in 1846 of Horatio Hale’s report of the US Expedition to the Oregon Territory, there are only twenty-five

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items containing vocabulary or sentences in Chinookan languages, at least as known to Pilling and his bibliographers in 1893. All of them were sketchier than Ross, although there are ninety Wawa words in Samuel Parker’s Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains, and fifty more, many the same, in Daniel Lee and Joseph Frost’s Ten Years in Oregon.19 Hence the importance of a recently discovered glossary, one that ranks in extent with Ross and Franchère: the “Vocabulary of the Language Used between the Whites and Indians on the Columbia River” attributed to the schoolmaster John Ball and hereinafter referred to as “Manuscript 195” (see the Appendix). Although the Ross and Franchère lists contain items that decidedly were early Wawa, there is also much broken Chinook. Manuscript 195 is, by its own account, a glossary of Wawa itself. Yet the history of this manuscript is vexatious. Only a typewritten transcription is left, of unknown author and date, of a manuscript that ended up in the family papers of John Ball and has gone missing, perhaps through neglect, perhaps through theft (Figure 3.1).20 Ball, who served as schoolmaster at Fort Vancouver in 1831-32, was not an insightful observer of the social scene around him, as his published remarks suggest: There was in use a mongrel language between the Indians and the traders, called the Chenook; but unlike theirs [the Chinook], which is said by a man well acquainted with that and other Indians languages, to be the most copious of any. But this [jargon] comprised hardly three hundred words, and probably not half of these theirs, but composed in part of words of other tribes, English and French. Things new to the Indians were called by their accustomed names [i.e., customary in English and French]. (Ball 1925, 96)

The attitude conveyed in this passage is consonant with the duncing of languages other than English that Ball inflicted upon Ranald MacDonald and his classmates circa 1832. The list, moreover, does not fit with the description of the above passage, since there is in fact almost no English or French in it. The most reasonable hypothesis is that Manuscript 195 was not his own work but was circulating in handwritten form among Europeans at Fort Vancouver in the early 1830s, although how widely cannot be known, let alone the actual author.

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Figure 3.1. The typescript of Manuscript 195 †

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†

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… Figure 3.1. The typescript of Manuscript 195

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Another reason for thinking so is that the spelling of Manuscript 195 – “orthography” is too grand a word – differs at every point from Ross, Franchère, Demers/Lionnet, Gibbs, and Hale, although its Lower Chinook– derived items belong to the same set as the first two, as a comparison of the numerals shows.21 An independent inventory without connection to those preceding or following, it cleaves closely to the broken Chinook present in Ross and Franchère, except for the sample of connected phrases tellingly included in the list of “English & French words adopted into the language,” which are in fact recognizable Wawa. The Appendix is a partially annotated transcription of the typescript. There are many transmogrified familiar forms in this list: cokchuttle “to strike, to injure” newitcak “true” oahluckcalah “birds of all kinds” (here with residue of the LC feminine prefix) paddle “full” (Ross had pattle) piltum “fool” There are also fresh arrivals into the archive: calaqlty “bark”22 chalack “fence” cleminchood “not true” (GR ï¿¢mnxw¢t ‘to lie’) coopooops “a small kind of hyquaka [dentalium]” (GR kupkup) skae “fresh, new” (GR chxi ‘immediately’ < LC xi) Some anomalies stick in the mind: chisne “bold” ooharee “file” soloossoloos “mat made of rushes” tice “ship” tapahote “shame”

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Finally, in the connected phrases, there is evidence that the grammar in Manuscript 195 was no longer related to Chinook. There are in the first place concatenated compounds whose manner is Wawa-like: cockshul stick “to cut wood” tathlelum poo pullalley “charges of powder” muckmuck-water “to drink” tenas sun “early in the morning” The full phrases supplied are also decidedly not LC. By the time of Manuscript 195, commands were unmarked in Wawa, taking only a pronoun: micah claluah namich mowitch “will you go and hunt deer” marmook-pire “make the fire” Similarly, there are questions presumably signalled by intonation or context: hyo salmon tumater ultah “is there plenty of salmon at the falls[?]” ech mowitch echta micah potlatch “what will you give for a deer[?]” Also telling is the fact that these early speakers of Wawa had learned to resort to serial verbs, a regular feature of pidgins and creoles, such as: clatwayt nanich kaywahum “to hunt the horses” micah claluah namich mowitch [see above] One key internal trait places Manuscript 195 on the far side of the divide between early tentative and later more consolidated Wawa. Like the Ross and Franchère lists but unlike those of Blanchet and Hale, it contains virtually no words of French origin. Even its side list of “English & French words adopted into the language” are of English or Nootka origin. There is no French, although there are two items that would have been perceived as Indian: toottooche “milk”, purportedly from Ojibwe, and metalap “leggings” from the Cree.23 It is conceivable that whoever compiled Manuscript 195 thought that the French element in Jargon was so obvious that it could be excluded from the

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list without loss. But this does not make sense. The reverse practice would be expected. In the late twentieth century, J.V. Powell even argued that the reason French terms persisted in Wawa when there were alternatives from English is that “French words seemed more appropriate in a ‘foreign’ language. Such logic would explain why the francophone priest, Father Le Jeune, included numerous words of English origin in his Jargon lexicon [1892] while the anglophone compilers included French forms” (Powell 1991, 137). Now there are English-derived items in Ball’s side list, among the earliest to enter Jargon (sun, moon, fire, water, salmon, stick, tomorrow). The omission of French loans was thus not intentional, but rather reflected the word pool at hand, which, given the continual presence of Englishspeakers on the Pacific coast from 1778 onward, had a limited but deeply rooted layer of English loans. One of the problems in categorizing Wawa is indeed its “chaotic diversity” (Zenk 1996, 173). Parsing of the Astorian word lists, including Manuscript 195, nonetheless exposes certain patterns. The co-presence of Europeanized Nootka and broken Chinook suggests that nascent Wawa was perceived by its indigenous speakers as a set of routines not far removed from the Nootka Jargon, which they had learned to use with whites, although some Chinook had been subsumed into the Mixed Dialect. European speakers perceived no distinction between Nootka Jargon and broken Chinook, although they were sometimes aware, to return to Ross’s words at the beginning of this chapter, that “another lingo ... [was] generally used in their intercourse with the whites,” namely, the Mixed Dialect, which had been brought to the mouth of the Columbia by the maritime fur trade. Johnson defines the “Middle Chinook [Jargon]” period as that standing between the word lists of Ross and Franchère, “who thought they were recording Native American Indian languages,” and the next phase of lexicography, beginning with Fathers Demers and Blanchet, who knew full well that Wawa was a pidgin but also recognized that it was the best instrument of proselytization. Whereas this criterion is accurate from a historiographical point of view, the radical changes that occurred along the Lower Columbia and that came to a head in the late 1820s reflect what can only be understood, from the perspective of indigenous people, as cataclysmic.

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4 The Hothouse of Fort Vancouver

The race to Astoria just prior to the War of 1812 was one episode among others in the rivalry between a colonial power, Great Britain, and its henceforth self-determining former colony, the United States. The genesis of Chinuk Wawa took place largely in a buffer zone between the two, who had agreed in 1818 to joint occupation of the territory stretching north of the Columba River up to the forty-ninth parallel. During the same period, a second rivalry came to a head, and its outcome was also crucial for the future of Wawa: the competition between the North West Company (NWC) and the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which had begun well over a century earlier and was to some extent the prolongation in a different guise of the old French and British struggle for control of North America. After the fall of New France, the fur trade had passed entirely into British hands, and for another half-century the North West Company, based in Montreal, warred, sometimes literally, with the Company of Agents trading out of Hudson’s Bay. By 1821, after years of exhausting competition and increasing NWC mismanagement, the HBC prevailed. The merger of the two companies, in effect a takeover, gave the latter complete control of the northern fur trade, including its farthest reaches on the Pacific coast, which the HBC called its Columbia district.1 The ensuing rationalization of the northern fur trade, overseen by the new governor, George Simpson, set the stage for the transformation of Wawa from a loose and improvised trade jargon into an expanded pidgin that soon acquired fluent speakers in number. Increasingly structured social conditions produced, in this case at least, a more structured pidgin, not only

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because contact among languages became more regular and intense but also because the functions that this pidgin was expected to fill grew. The most significant measure Simpson imposed, at least as far as Wawa goes, was the establishment of a new headquarters for HBC operations and the abandonment of Astoria. This act of consolidation was based on geopolitical calculations. The NWC had always worked the territory south of the Columbia, and the HBC continued to do so for as long as it could; indeed, it deliberately tried to exhaust resources there with “scouring” expeditions, the purpose of which was to forestall for as long as possible the intrusion and implantation of rival US traders based in St. Louis. Anticipating their eventual exclusion from what became Oregon, Idaho, and Utah, Simpson chose to place Columbia District headquarters at Fort Vancouver, on the north side of the Columbia roughly across from present-day Portland, in what it was hoped would remain British territory.2 On richer soil than Astoria, Fort Vancouver also offered ample pasture and farmlands and was closer to the areas of trade opening up farther inland. Twenty years of trade had depleted resources at the mouth of the river. The consequences of this decision for the future of Wawa were monumental, although it is not as important as one might first think that Wawa, as the contact language of the fur trade, was thereby detached from the direct influence of its initial matrix, Lower Chinook, and moved to an environment where the Multnomah dialect of Chinookan was spoken. Indeed, Lower Chinook society had suffered severely during the previous two generations not only from the effects of venereal disease and the epidemics that plagued indigenous societies across the continent but also, a factor often overlooked, from Chinook reaction to the birth and the rejection of offspring from white fathers.3 Although disease ensuing from contact with the European population took root almost immediately, the malaria epidemic known in Wawa as col sik ‘cold sick’ should be attributed to the concentration of contact and exchange at Fort Vancouver. Col sik broke out in 1829, decimating the Indian population and affecting Europeans as well.4 A prominent victim of this epidemic was Concomly himself, whose death symbolized the “end of Indian social dominance on the Greater Lower Columbia” (Hajda 1984, 46). There was accordingly an ever smaller and moribund community of fluent LC speakers, and an ever larger number of Europeans and Indians from outside that community for

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whom Wawa itself was the lingua franca. Nonetheless, the dominating presence of LC etymons in Wawa is backhanded proof of how conventionalized Wawa had become within the first two decades of contact, before the transfer of the trade to Fort Vancouver. Once Fort Vancouver was settled, economic activity intensified and diversified. There had always been a hierarchy within the trade, one that for the most part reflected ethnic differences between the Scottish upper-echelon clerks or administrators and the French-speaking Canadiens, including Métis voyageurs, who provided labour.5 Under the stark and inhospitable conditions during the years at Astoria, a rough degree of frontier equality prevailed. With the reorganization of the trade under the HBC, social distinctions became more sharply defined. Developments were much accelerated after coalition [of the NWC and the HBC in 1821] ... The rule of a unified company-government provided what might be described as a hothouse atmosphere in which social distinctions seemed to grow and flourish. Pressed to economize and to increase the efficiency of company operations, and wielding strong monopoly powers, the new governor [Simpson] and his associates were able, for a time, to sort and simplify the fur trade population into classes of people distinguished by their race on one hand and their membership in kin-friendship networks on the other, directing them along different career paths. (Brown 1980, 217)

The hothouse metaphor is apt, not only sociologically but also linguistically. The economy of the Columbia district was still based on the fur trade but evolved swiftly as agricultural and soon quasi-industrial specialization became necessary. Some measure of this technological transformation can be seen in the profile of French in Wawa. French was spoken to some extent or another by virtually all participants in the trade, but during the first decade of contact, names for trade items remained Lower Chinook or Nootka, such as the terms in Manuscript 195 for “iron and most tools & utensils” checkameen (which goes back to Cook’s Nootka tikemily from 1778), “file” ooharee, “needle and awl” kapwaw, “bason [sic] or bowl or mug” oscum. The last two, of LC origin, had been recorded by Ross: ke-pa-watt “needle” and useum “kettle”.

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Although the Wawa word for ‘metal, iron, money’ remained chikomin, the concept was soon enough unpacked and expanded into a new taxonomy of implements brought by the fur trade and bearing French designations. With this lexico-semantic “blooming,” to extend Brown’s metaphor, came other sorts of complexification. Ironically, stratification within fur trade society was in some sense a continuation of the pre-existing hierarchy within Chinook and other Northwest societies. Although the indigenous social order itself was quickly destroyed, its lower echelons were reserved different fates from its former nobility, the former tending to scatter along the emerging linguistic continuum, clumping disproportionately at the lower end of the spectrum where Wawa was the main vehicle of community life, especially the domestic households resulting from marriage à la façon du pays between the engagés or voyageurs in the employ of the HBC and indigenous women, initially those extracted from Lower Chinook society but later women from throughout the region, some from as far away as the Canadian Prairies or what is now the northern British Columbia coast. A Mobile Sprachbund Tightly woven into the fabric of Northwest Coast history, Wawa was also enmeshed in a web of cultural and linguistic practices. These, stretching back across the continent, were in some sense the terminus of centuries-long discourse/intercourse along the network of inland seas, lakes, and rivers across which the pelt was conveyed, the far reach of which was the Pacific coast. Although the French in Wawa is an adstrate of little structural consequence, the culture of the voyageurs was a vital factor during its foundation, since it was the children of voyageurs and Native women who first spoke Wawa with ease. The term voyageur initially designated canoeists in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes trade circa 1650-1700 who shared in the profits of the fur companies. After 1700, when the trade was restructured and labourers were simply hired, the contractual term became engagés. Voyageur nevertheless survived as an honorific and passed into general use (Lovell and Lai 1994, 340). Here it is used as shorthand for the subaltern French speakers in the trade who ended up in Wawa territory. The personnel lists of the Astorians

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and the “Nor’Westers” who replaced them at the mouth of the Columbia show that the majority of Europeans present were French speakers. Their superiors, the company officers, were anglophone Scots, some of whom also spoke Gaelic, as we can see from Alexander Henry’s list of the personnel at Fort George in the summer of 1814 (Coues 1897, 868-87). Very few of the francophone voyageurs held administrative posts, one exception being the aforementioned Michel Laframboise, who eventually led the scouting expeditions that the HBC sent south into California during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Yet even Laframboise expressed bitterness about his treatment by the HBC to Charles Wilkes, head of the 1841 United States expedition preparing the annexation of Oregon, for which Horatio Hale was the official philologist (Moore 1974, 106). Although their knowledge of and relationship to indigenous cultures were indispensable to the success of the British fur trade, these French speakers constituted a separate social caste. To some extent, Toussaint Charbonneau, whom Lewis and Clark encountered in 1804 among the Sioux and who accompanied them to the Pacific, was a paragon of these voyageur-interpreters. Born in Boucherville, Quebec, “Chabono” actually belonged at that point to the Missouri instead of the Laurentian French community, but he was one among the many Canadiens in the Lewis and Clark expedition (Chalout 2003). His reputation as a master of the languages up the Missouri valley was doubtless exaggerated, but there is no doubt that he was, like many a voyageur, a master of cross-cultural communication. In other words, the voyageur’s tool of communication was a behavioural model rather than a body of given linguistic codes learned lock, stock, and barrel. These interpretative skills are best explained not by the genius of any single voyageur but rather by their acquisition of the linguistic accommodations that indigenous peoples themselves made, as on the Northwest Coast. To no small degree, this knowledge was born out of familial bonds with women. It is possible to pinpoint the emergence of this cross-cultural interpretative network, a kind of fluid and mobile Sprachbund, “a speech area of shared understandings as to what to talk about and how to say it,” to quote Dell Hymes (1980, 409). The first coureur de bois, as the predecessors of voyageurs are called, was a boy by the name of Étienne Brûlé whom the explorer Champlain sent among the Algonquin in 1610 to learn their language. A

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number of other apprentices followed, although they soon began to slip out of the control of French authorities and to side more and more with the Indians whose tongues they had learned and with whom many intermarried. Another example is Nicolas Marsolet, whom the Jesuit missionaries in Quebec City were initially delighted to have as a truchement, an interpreter (Hanzeli 1969, 47). Yet this same Marsolet became so protective of the Algonquin that he refused to reveal details about their tongue, conceding only after his pay was threatened (Trigger 1987, 405). By the 1680s, there were more than eight hundred unattached men living in the woods between Ottawa and Michilimakinac, Michigan (Eccles 1983, 110). Observers have noted the absence of a pidgin associated with the fur trade and attributed this absence to the fact that métissage produced a bilingual population of cultural intermediaries, buffers that short-circuited the process of pidginization that was to be expected in contact between French and Indians. Such a hypothesis, one of continental scope, is not amenable to easy proof. But voyageur habits, born within a permanent floating contact zone, did set some parameters. The emergence of Wawa cannot be understood without reference to these antecedents in Canadian history. In this light, the phenomenon of Wawa in the lower Columbia basin and beyond raises a larger question for contact linguists: Why were there not scores of other loci of pidginization across North America? To be sure, there were some, among them the Basque-Algonquinian pidgin that sprang from the first white-Native encounters in the New World along the Newfoundland and Maritime coasts (Bakker 1989), the Delaware Jargon spoken in the 1600s between the Lenape and Swedes, Dutch, and English along the middle Atlantic coast (Thomason 1980), and Mobilian Jargon, akin in many ways to Wawa, which extended from Mississippi across to east Texas, where it was alive almost to this day (Dreschel 1997). Alongside these pidgins were the Native lingua francas predating or surviving contact with Europeans. In the 1600s and 1700s, Huron, at least simplified forms of it, served this function in the Ottawa Valley and along the shores of Lake Huron. Farther northeast, there was Ojibwe; across the Prairies, Cree. Fluency in one or another Indian tongue was doubtless a help in acquiring another one, but mastery of any of these languages was rare among non-Native speakers. Plotted on a map of North America, these contact pidgins fall along the fringes of the broad area

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of North America that the voyageurs plied, circumscribing their domain and tracing the outline of their presence. At the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota and in isolates on the Canadian Prairies, there subsists a fascinating relic of this centuries-long encounter, one whose genesis was more or less contemporary with that of Wawa. This language, Michif, has been called the nec plus ultra of contact languages (Papen 1987), and is a striking case of “language intertwining” (Bakker and Muysken 1995, 45). Cree, more precisely its prairie dialect, rules its verbal system, while noun phrases in Michif are in a dialect of the Laurentian French once widely spoken in Western Canada. Michif was initially shared by speakers “perfectly bilingual in both source languages, otherwise they could not have produced without errors its Cree and French components” (Bakker 1997, 340), but “many speakers do not [presently] speak Cree or French, almost all [being] bilingual in English and [Michif]” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 232). The most plausible scenario for the genesis of Michif, which we owe to Peter Bakker (1997, 277-80), is that it arose in the 1820s through the relexification of Cree by Métis buffalo hunters interacting with counterpart Ojibwe, Assiniboine, and Cree who spoke Plains Cree. Speakers habitually inserted French into their Cree sentences, much as we might imagine Chinookans slipping Nootkan Wawa vocabulary into the slots of their native grammar, except that the grammar of Cree prevailed and the next generation received Michif intact, whereas the grammar of Chinook left only residual traces in Wawa. And like Michif, Wawa was and still is an insider’s language, spoken by multilinguals who recognize and reward each other’s capacities but who have other languages at hand. “French” here should be taken linguistically, not ethnically, since no mean component of the transcontinental fur trade were Iroquois. They were “steel trappers” from peoples now confined to the Kahnawaké, Kanesataké, and Akwesasne reserves and reservations in present-day Quebec and New York State. They had worked in the Ohio Valley and then beyond the Great Lakes on the Prairies and on contract with the North West Company since 1800, intermarrying with “Cree and Métis, but later with whites” (Dickason 1992, 203-4). Their common language was French, their religion Catholic for generations, and their family histories can be read between the lines of the

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Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, where they often bore the surname “Iroquois,” in part because men “with tin ears, like David Thompson and Alex[ander] Henry gave up trying to spell Iroquois names and referred to Pierre Iroquois, Joseph Iroquois, Thomas Iroquois, or Charles Iroquois” (Jackson 2007, 20), but also in part because it was frequent throughout the region to identify individuals with an ethnic handle. Their names also regularly appear in the business records of the fur trade: Dehodionwasse, Hatchiorauquasha, Kanota, Konitogen, Hayaiguarelita, Miaquin, Sasnirie, Sowenge, Tennnotiessen, Thaarackton, Karotohaw Ostiserio, Tevanitgaon – here cited by Jackson (2007, 25) from the HBC records of the 1824 Snake River Brigade. This transcontinental wave of displaced Algonquinians raises a sometimes neglected issue in the history of Wawa. In the first place, the Iroquois “remembered the destruction of the ancient Longhouse heritage. The fur trade [in the East had] ended the dream of Indians, scattering natives like the ashes of the destroyed council fire. The Iroquois knew the fate of Indian America long before other nations” (Jackson 2007, 29). The Iroquois were, however, active collaborators in the transformation that produced Wawa and that eventually destroyed most Indian cultures on the Northwest Coast. Significantly, the role of the Iroquois as displaced, transfigured agents of the new economy was due to a technological innovation, the invention of the steel trap. This invention altered the ways in which beaver and other furbearing prey were harvested, a novelty to which the Iroquois, thousands of miles from their homelands, were amenable, and at which they were adept. In fact, the Iroquois and other Indians from the east were crucial to the extension of the fur trade because Plains Indians, whose lives and cultures had been transformed by the arrival of horses only a century earlier, declined to stoop to such menial activities: “Indian hunters usually sniped at unwary beavers, or tore the roofs off dens and clubbed the animals. But on the Western plains, few proud horsemen were willing to dismount and dig out bankside dens” (Jackson 2007, 18-19). These displaced Iroquois eventually became agents of a second cultural or spiritual innovation in the local order of things, since they had converted to Catholicism and were among the first to seek a formal Catholic presence in the West. Distrusted by British traders and exploited by the Americans, they were nonetheless crucial in the development

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of the separate Native cultures that sought terms of truce after the invasion of American settlers, finding homes in Métis settlements on Indian reservations established in the United States from 1856 onward. Except for the unusual case of Michif, French never creolized in northern North America. Métis French closely resembles Laurentian French, although there are some phonological shifts and both English and Cree additions to the vocabulary. Nor should Métis French be mistaken for voyageur French per se, which is, for our immediate purposes in the passages that follow, a loose construct intended to account for the varieties of French that arrived in the lower Columbia starting in 1811, and for the lexico-semantic world thereby brought to Wawa. Speakers of many French dialects were present on the Pacific coast. In the first place, there was Québécois, which was, incidentally, consolidated as a social dialect during the seventeenth century, well before the French now standard in France. 6 Québécois was the basis of the French spoken in the West. There was admixture from the Acadian and Missouri strata, in the latter case because of the presence of French speakers from the American colonies based in St. Louis, among them Charbonneau.7 The Voyageur Contribution Although French was familiar to all the Astorians, Wawa did not contain significant French vocabulary until the second decade of contact under the new conditions prevailing at Fort Vancouver, an increasingly stratified but also more secure and comfortable zone of contact. Almost half the recorded French etymons in Wawa relate to tools and items of trade, material wellbeing, even fashion from the Laurentian world that the voyageurs had left behind – new objects that arrived with new names: lahash ‘ax’ lakaset ‘box’ lakle ‘key’ laklu ‘nail’ lakom ‘pitch, glue’ lalim ‘file’ lametsin ‘European medical knowledge’ lapuel or lapoen ‘skillet’

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lapushet ‘fork’ lashalu ‘plow’ lashen ‘chain’ lashes ‘chair’ lasiet ‘plate’ laswa ‘silk’ latap or latam ‘table’ lekwin ‘saw’ (égoïne) lematto ‘hammer’ lesiso ‘scissors’ limulaï ‘mill’ These French-derived items begin to enter the record with works by Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge (1871), Lionnet (1853), Hale (1846), and Gibbs (1863b), although these publication dates do not reflect the time of their entry into usage. We possess a fairly accurate idea of the diet on the Northwest Coast at the time of contact (Ruby and Brown 1976, 12-16), and so can measure by way of contrast the nature of the foodstuffs introduced to Wawa culture: lakalet ‘flat cakes’ lakles, glees ‘grease, fat, oil’ lam ‘rum’ or ‘alcohol of any kind’ lapiskwi ‘biscuit’ lasap ‘eggs’ lawen ‘oats’ lepa ‘bread’ lepoa ‘peas’ lepul ‘chicken, hen’ lesoïo ‘onion’ lesook ‘sugar’ (there was also shuka) lolsh ‘barley’ The indigenous diet depended upon sophisticated gathering techniques and had a correspondingly rich vocabulary, but lalasin ‘root’ came to designate

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most comestible roots in Wawa, with the notable exception of lakalot ‘carrot’ (French), and lakamas ‘camas root’, whose origin is Nez Perce but which was transmitted through French. The single voyageur contribution to the vocabulary of seafood was lukulchee ‘clams’ (les coquilles), the rest of the marine menu being drawn primarily from Chinook. One striking area of compatibility between voyageur and Indian cultures can been seen in the fact that the word for a shared meal, lakamin ‘stew’ or ‘shared meal’ (la commune), passed, like potlatch, through Wawa into a number of Indian languages, as did the notion of a table, latam, which might make Francophiles rejoice for the continuity of their culinary culture (Powell 1991, 141). Chinook proper provided the common word for tobacco, kïnuhl, but the voyageurs used lahb for the bearberries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) that replaced tobacco in times of shortage, as did as its Cree-derived synonym, kinikinik. All were smoked in lapip. In HBC posts west of the Rocky Mountains, “horrid dried salmon” was the staple of diet, replacing the pemmican of the plains, so it is not surprising that lepukan (le boucan ‘dried red meat’) never took root, but it was a recorded object of desire. Although horses were present in the inland Northwest at the moment of contact, almost all equestrian equipment and equine taxonomy derives from French. Voyageurs moved across the Prairies on their way to the coast, and horses were essential in the transcontinental trade once long-distance portages had been established, such as the haul from Fort Edmonton over to Assiniboia on the Athabaska River, which led into present-day Jasper National Park and the easiest inclines over the continental divide. Hence the striking French domination of equestrian nomenclature: lasel ‘saddle’, laplit ‘bridle’, lisiplo ‘spurs’ (les éperons). Like numerals, colours in Wawa are from Chinook, but colours as applied to horses are from French: blue, cream, gray, mottled, roan. Local fauna generally retained Chinook names in Wawa: kamuks ‘dog’, seam ‘grizzly bear’, ĸolĸol ‘mouse’ (although souli [souris]) was also used), but the imported menagerie included lelu ‘wolf’, lemoto ‘sheep’, letig ‘lynx’ (there was also puspus aïas ‘big cat’ “tiger”), and shawash kosho ‘Indian pig,’ i.e., ‘seal’ (although the Chinook-derived GR úlxayu survived). Two additional contributions are lemus ‘flies’ and melakwa ‘mosquitoes’ (maragouins), which were surely coupled with blasphemous expressions that no one, unfortunately,

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recorded. To this day, GR Wawa uses drét ‘really, truly’ (< droit ‘straight’) in insulting idioms like dr“t kh‹muksh “you dirty dog!”, dr“t tï¿imnxw¢ “what a liar!”, and dr“t p‹laks “you prick!”, so we can safely presume that Victorian prudery rather than the absence of blasphemy and obscenity prevented such items from entering the archive. Father Demers and others did unabashedly cite idioms with shit, although it is not clear when they entered the record: shit inpu ‘shit bug’ “nit” or “egg of louse or any insect”; shit hows “water closet”; shit lametsin “asperient”. This might well be an instance of the common phenomenon that other cultures’ obscenities are relatively harmless, since merde is nowhere in the French archive. Sometimes the French was derived from Algonquin or Cree, such as apichama ‘saddle blanket’, papus ‘papouse’, sikayou ‘bobtailed horse’; at other times, even further afield: badash ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘homosexual’ (Middle French bardache, Arabic bardaj ‘slave’).8 Other domains show different factors at play and offer less easy explanation. French, as opposed to Chinookan, denotes bodily extremities: lalak ‘tongue’ lapush ‘mouth’ latet ‘head’ lekok ‘penis’ leku ‘neck’ lemaï ‘hand’ lepie ‘foot’ letaï ‘teeth’ The word lekok shows up only later in Kamloops Wawa (Powell 1991), but goes back to Rabelais. English did lay its heavy hand on ‘testicles’ with ston, but the compound with French-derived mash (‘to leave or expel’ < marcher) in mash ston ‘castrate’ certainly points to expressive word formation, one presumes in the period when mash became an auxiliary verb, forming compounds with Nootka and Chinook words like GR mash ts¢qw ‘urinate, to void water’ (although Wawa also has pis, from pisse), mash m¢km¢k ‘defecate, to void food’, and mash pípil ‘menstruate, to void blood’. Similar inventions from French etymons in

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Wawa proliferated across the Northwest. Mel or med < merde was, despite its absence from the glossaries, not only good Wawa but it entered regional languages through its intermediary, for example, in Quileute, where melst‹.daq was formed from the suffix -st‹.daq, ‘one who does things habitually’, and Wawa for, well, merde, giving “liar” or “B.S.-er” (Powell 1991, 139). This last observation notwithstanding, Wawa terminology for inner or lower body parts or effluvia therefrom is generally derived from Chinook or Indian languages, aĸ, ‘feces’, ĸaïaĸ ‘guts or entrails’, itluil ‘meat, flesh, body, verenda’, ĸwatin ‘stomach’, totush ‘breasts, milk’, oputs ‘tail, rear’ (cf. GR õphuch ¿ûap ‘ass hole’). As with Chinook proper, free-standing French expressions like interjections and imperatives were most likely to stick: appa ‘well then’ (Eh bien!), ata ‘wait!’ (< attends!), mashie ‘merci’, peme ‘shut’ (< fermez), piupiu ‘pew!’ (which coexisted with LC hum), and shante ‘sing!’ Although many Catholic expressions entered Wawa and are found in later lists, only a few had currency before the arrival of the priests in 1838: leïom or leïop ‘devil’, lakloa ‘cross’, liplet ‘priest’, and lisai ‘saint’. The good Fathers in fact relied upon Chinook-based Wawa to forge neologisms for “heaven” saħali elehi (cf. GR saû¢li ili€i ‘high land’ from LC sax¢li ‘up’) and “God” Saħali-Taï ‘sky chief’ (LC sax¢li plus Nootka-derived tayi). Finally, for conjunctions, alongside spos or ‘if’ (supposedly from English suppose), there is pi ‘and’ (< French puis).9 Many French etymons of Wawa were bound into idiomatic phrases by the time they were recorded by Hale in 1841 (kakshatl naika lepie “my leg is broken”, haias klosh okok mula “very good is that mill”), but the “list-like” attributes of the French component are manifest, and most items were technologically or culturally new. This is not hard to comprehend. Canadiens were the purveyors of these fur trade techniques and customs because they “travelled, hunted, ate, and in short lived with [Indians] on terms of familiarity” (Hale 1846, 636). Co-present with the incipient pidgin and marking the milieux in which it arose, French did not, however, participate significantly in its restructuring. Although crude in terms of present-day methodologies, the statistical comparison of the word origins of three major glossaries of Wawa made by Chamberlain in 1912 confirms the temporary predominance of French at the

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time of Hale and Gibbs, and then its relative decline in the second half of the century (Table 4.1). The numbers in Table 4.1 are approximate, having been derived from glossaries collected according to their own rules and to accidents of geography, and of course the data and their interpretation go back more than a century. There has been, however, some contemporary parsing of the archive by Zenk (1996) and by Dale Kinkade and his collaborators (Kinkade, Powell, and Seaburg, forthcoming; see Figure 4.1). The latter argue that there were perhaps as many as forty-nine loan words from Lower Chehalis, thirtyfour for sure.10 Lower Chehalis was spoken on the northern shores of Willapa Bay and on up the coast past Grays Harbor. It was not only in direct contact with Lower Chinook, but would have been, as early discussion has shown, first in contact with the Nootka Jargon. Its importance as the third largest Indian language adstrate to Wawa is therefore easy to understand. As many have observed, Wawa’s vocabulary changes drastically from locale to locale, but “it is possible that every language used on the Pacific Slope from northern California to the Arctic Circle coloured the jargon” (Sproat 1987, 94). Moreover, mere number count of words from such and such a source-language is not necessarily significant. Etymologies are fascinating but the actual meaning of words depends upon their contemporary context of semantic reference. Table 4.1 The evolution of the Chinook Jargon lexicon Origin

1841

1863

1894

Nootka

18 (7%)

24 (5%)

23 (2%)

111 (44%)

221 (45%)

198 (18%)

French

34 (13%)

94 (19%)

158 (14%)

English

41 (16%)

67 (13%)

570 (52%)

Other

48 (19%)

79 (16%)

138 (12%)

Chinook

Note: Numbers and percentages of total items are shown. In all cases, they are derived from the available glossaries consulted.

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Figure 4.1. Dale Kinkade’s list of Lower Chehalis loan words into Wawa

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That said, the obvious “directionality in change of proportions” of the source languages in Table 4.1 does tells a “tale of sequential ascendency for different segments of the international trading community” (Silverstein 1972, 617). By 1841, English was the ascendant language of prestige, the target of the upwardly mobile, although it should not be forgotten that French was not banished from the scene, even among the HBC elite. Chief Factor John McLoughlin’s mother was a French speaker who had him baptized as JeanBaptiste, and he regularly gave Sunday services in French (Rich 1941, xxx, cxviii). The distant Red River society through which HBC personnel passed and where they often sank roots was bilingual. To take an example of no small consequence within the household of John McLoughlin, the investigations around the murder of his son John in 1842 show that French was accepted in legal proceeding within fur trade society as late as that date, and in a rather distant setting, Sitka in Alaska (Rich 1941, 2: 168). As Charles Wilkes noted during his stay with McLoughlin in 1841, “Canadian French is generally spoken to the servants [i.e., HBC employees]: even those who come out from England after a while adopt it” (Moore 1974, 67). The French adjunct to Wawa thus stands as one piece of evidence about the nomad multi-ethnic culture that the voyageurs conveyed across the continent. As for French itself, it survived and even flourished for a few generations in the self-consciously Catholic society founded on French Prairie by former voyageurs. Already, in the mid-1840s, according to Palmer (1847, 180), few of its inhabitants spoke “the English language fluently; they mostly talk French and Chinook jargon.” French remained a family language of historical memory on the Grand Ronde reservation into the twentieth century (Zenk 1984, 16), and Wawa is still the heritage language of the reservation, its fluent speakers well within historical memory. This Factitious Language Among the various observations that Horatio Hale recorded in his report subsequent to the 1841 expedition studying US annexation of the Oregon Territory was the claim that some young children at the HBC headquarters at Fort Vancouver were using Wawa virtually as a native language. Often cited, the passage in question played no small part in debates about the nature of pidgins and creoles in the second half of the nineteenth century.11 As for Hale,

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he was fascinated by the heterogeneity he glimpsed at Fort Vancouver, and his words are worth quoting at length: The place at which the Jargon is mostly in use is at Fort Vancouver. At this establishment five languages are spoken by about five hundred persons, – namely, the English, the Canadian French, the Tshinuk, the Cree or Knisteneau, and the Hawaiian. The three former are already accounted for; the Cree is the language spoken in the families of many officers and men belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, who have married half-breed wives at the posts east of the Rocky Mountains. The Hawaiian is in use among about a hundred natives of the Sandwich Islands who are employed as laborers about the fort. Besides these five, there are many others, – the Tsihailish, Walawala, Kalapuya, Naskwale, &c., – which are daily heard from natives who visit the fort for the purpose of trading. Among all these individuals, there are very few who understand more than two languages, and many who speak only their own. The general communication is, therefore, maintained chiefly by means of the Jargon, which may be said to be the prevailing idiom. There are Canadians and half-breeds married to Chinook women, who can only converse with their wives in this speech, – and it is the fact, strange as it may seem, that many young children are growing up to whom this factitious language is really the mother-tongue, and who speak it with more readiness and perfection than any other. (Hale 1846, 644)

If his description is accurate, in Fort Vancouver Wawa underwent what Henry Zenk called “a special case of creolization” (1984), although Zenk applied the term to the Grand Ronde reservation southwest of Portland. What Hale’s account encourages us to believe is that during the 1820s and 1830s, the makeshift pidgin first spoken at Astoria, itself derived in part from the Mixed Dialect that Ross recorded there in the early 1810s, took on a new life. Not only was it used in numerous circumstances and by speakers of multiple languages, both Indian and European, but in certain milieux it was learned by children to whom it was the most natural vehicle of thought. The accuracy of Hale’s observation has been contested on various grounds, most pointedly by Michael Silverstein (1972, 380), who, as mentioned above, doubted that there was a sufficiently “stable linguistic community [to lead] to creolization.” This objection reflected mainstream creolist thought of the

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1970s, which held creolization to be a thorough restructuring of the “debris” typical of pidgins by a community that then welded itself around the new language. The roots of this conflation of language and community go back to Herder and beyond, and should by no means be discounted out of hand, although the fluidity of personnel in an ever-evolving contact zone like that along the lower Columbia in the first part of the nineteenth century does not mean that a self-conscious community of sorts did not exist. Fur trade society was composed of “mobile multilingual colonies,” to cite, somewhat out of context, Samarin’s words (1988, 229). Silverstein’s argument also followed, however, from analysis according to which Wawa had no grammatical centre that held, that it was not “amenable to a unified grammatical description.” 12 Whereas, Silverstein argued, there may well have been a Chinook Jargon speech community, there was “no Chinook Jargon language community” (1972, 623-24, emphasis added). Given his position, he had to challenge Hale’s claim that children were using Wawa as their primary language, and suggest that Hale, like many early observers of the scene, was unlikely to have known the difference between Lower Chinook, especially as spoken by the very young, and Wawa.13 But there is every reason to believe that Hale knew the difference between Lower Chinook and Wawa. He published a lexicon of 257 Wawa words broken down into their Nootka, English, “Tshinuk,” French, onomatopoeic, and “doubtful” origins, as well as a collection of over fifty connected phrases.14 He also published a short but distinctive glossary of Lower Chinook. There is a second, crucial reason why only some – in fact, very few – of the children whom Hale overheard on the streets of Fort Vancouver could have been speaking “baby Chinook.” The regional practice of exogamy combined with that of multilingualism in mixed households might well have created conditions in which Chinookan mothers spoke complex forms of their languages with the infant members of their households – hardly a bold assertion, since mothers do tend to speak their own mother tongue with their children in the early years, albeit in forms recognizable as baby talk (IDS, or infant-directed speech). We do in fact know the names of a number of Lower Chinookan wives who were living in and around Fort Vancouver in the late 1830s, as well as the names of their partners and offspring. Most mothers of the children at Fort Vancouver were not native or even casual

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speakers of Chinook proper by the early 1830s; far from it. In the Catholic Church Records, slave women often bore proper names designating their purported tribes of origin, and there are many women in them surnamed “Chinook” (Ray 1938, 53-54). Yet the same practice, borrowed by the priests from indigenous practice to designate otherwise anonymous women, shows that many Native women among the five hundred or so residents of Fort Vancouver and its outlying dependencies had accompanied their husbands from farther afield. As time passed, ever more came from outside the Chinook homeland, and an increasing number of children had mothers of indigenous tongues other than Chinook. In any event, by the late 1830s, the population of native speakers of Chinook had been devastated, having fallen from an estimated twenty thousand at the turn of the century to a mere handful, two hundred at best. In this context, it is interesting to recall that, according to Henry Perkins, a missionary at The Dalles, “while the Walla-walla and Klikatak are spoken with facility by numbers of the [Upper] Chinooks, not one of the former tribes, to my knowledge, can speak the Chinook readily.” Robert Boyd (1996, 34), who had just cited the last passage, goes on to raise the following question: “This statement – certainly true, as it is echoed by contemporary native informants – has interesting, and to this writer’s knowledge, unexplored social implications. Did it apply as well to non-Chinookan wives ... of Chinookan men? If so, did the husbands and wives communicate via the wife’s language, or perhaps via a simplified speech form such as Chinook Jargon? Did the reluctance to learn the Chinookan languages promote the spread of Chinook Jargon?” There were many factors that led to the rise of Wawa and the decline and eventual demise of the Chinookan languages, particularly Lower Chinook, but, at least as Boyd has conceived it, Wawa was the default language used between ethnically diverse Native spouses in lieu of Chinook itself. According to the missionary Henry Perkins, Wawa came “to be spoken between the French and American settlers upon the Willamette” (Boyd 1996, 234). Because Wawa was used in lieu of either group’s learning the other’s language, we can safely presume that it played an important role in domestic life both at Fort Vancouver and in French Prairie, the meadowland south of present-day Portland that became the destination of many French speakers as they retired from the HBC.

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Belated Church Records Inter-ethnic marriage had always been a strategy of indigenous Northwest cultures, and this strategy was shared especially, although not exclusively, by voyageurs in the fur trade. As Laurentian society imposed its own norms on the social space of the colony, these marriages à la façon du pays were retrospectively regularized in front of priests, sometimes as long as twenty years after the fact, affording considerable insight into social interactions during those obscure years of fur trade history. Beginning with Juan Pérez’s 1774 expedition, the diaries, logs, and other documents focus, not surprisingly, on the lives of high-ranking Europeans who entered this contact zone, plus anecdotal information on the Nootka and Chinook nobles who were their privileged interlocutors: Maquinna, Callicum, Concomly, and others. As traffic on the lower Columbia increased, the documentary record filled in, thanks in part to business records kept by the fur companies. As one might expect, the life histories of subalterns, simple employees or engagés on the European side, as well as ordinary Indians and slaves on the other, remain obscure from view in these commercial records but not necessarily in Church records. Fathers Demers and Blanchet can thus be thought of as agents of the tracking of the population under HBC control, the assignment, to echo Brown’s words, into “classes of people distinguished by their race ... and their membership in kin-friendship networks.” “Tracking” bears a double sense here, that intended by Brown, in which the colony structured itself around race and kin-friendship networks, but also tracking in the documentary sense that significant moments in the lives of those who were beginning to speak Wawa can be charted by the records kept by these priests. It is not surprising that the trajectories seen in the Church records accord with what we have been told about the inter-ethnic and gender relations in the fur trade. Here, for example, is Theodore Stern’s description (1993, 100) of social relations obtaining at Fort Nez Perce at the period when he opens his study, 1818: The Nor’Westers embodied a higher degree of social and ethnic complexity. Operating out of Montreal, the agents and officers – the latter including the “wintering partners” in the field – were predominantly Highland Scots, some of them Loyalists who had withdrawn from New York, linked often by horizontal

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ties of kinship, reinforced by long friendly association. Beneath them, a legacy from the French fur traders who had preceded them, were the Canadien (French-Canadian) voyageurs. These intrepid and hardy canoemen were the descendants of those bold coureurs du bois, the free traders fighting the licensing monopolies of New France, who had taken Indian wives and through them and their relatives had learned the skills of the wilderness. Supplementing them were diverse Indians, including Iroquois, and Hawaiians. By virtue of their background, servants did not move into the ranks of officers, although a literate Frenchman from the provinces of French Canada might be taken on as clerk, and thus aspire to advancement with the ranks of higher officers. All of these persons might take “country” wives from among the local Indians, although the officers were likely to seek out the métisse daughters of such unions.

Although conditions at Fort Vancouver in the 1820s were already somewhat different from those at Fort Nez Perce in 1818 – this by deliberate design of George Simpson – this description applies well to the HBC headquarters during the next decade, and can be read between the lines of the Church records. What follows is a synoptic account of the cohort of wives and mothers, and their consorts and husbands and offspring, that Hale would have observed in 1841. This sketch is derived from the data recorded in the Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest from 1838 onward by Fathers Demers and Blanchet, but which has been made accessible to modern readers by the work of Harriet Duncan Munnick (1972, 1974), whose own commentary and indices provide an additional trove of information. This collective profile conforms to what we know about the ethnolinguistics of indigenous societies and the ways in which multilingual contact itself generally proceeds. It is, to be sure, patently subject to amendment but offers a repository of information about the social relations obtaining at Fort Vancouver when Hale made his claims about mothers and fathers of the young children growing up “to whom this factitious language [was] really the mother-tongue.” At Fort Vancouver, marriage was exogamous and family life necessarily multilingual, although due to the widespread movement of persons within, and increasingly of wholly intact communities into, the region, the situation had become complex. It is reasonable to suppose that mothers on the Lower Columbia spoke to their children in the language in which they were themselves most

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fluent, at least for a while. After this experience of a “cradle language,” each and every child would have lived out differing unfolding alternatives, depending on his or her situation in the networks of inter-ethnic, kinship, and friendship connections, and also languages. Many children of these marriages had contact with a number of Indian languages, perhaps Chinookan more than others at first, but, to repeat Hale’s list, also Cree, Iroquois, and then, increasingly, a range of languages from across the region, and English and French. Let us also remember that “native language” within regional indigenous societies often meant “father’s” not “mother’s” tongue, since family units were patrilocal, out-marrying women carrying their languages with them into the new community, which continued to define itself in terms of “patriarchal” languages already in place. In other words, children in these communities would have acquired both their mother’s tongue and that of the community into which their mothers had married. Intermarriage across ethnic groups had been a consistent feature of Northwest cultures, but the forms and degree of ethnic mixing stirred up by the fur trade altered the terms of kinship according to which Northwest peoples lived (as discussed above, the Chinook kinship system was radically simplified when transposed into Wawa). Native-voyageur families that began to function within these abbreviated norms occupied a zone of considerable ethnological turbulence. Not surprisingly, the traces of their compromises are sometimes difficult to read. The women whose children began speaking Wawa systematically at Fort Vancouver had matured during a period of breathtaking social change. For the most part, they were low in status within the ambient society, frequently former slaves freed upon the death of their owners and bartered to European or Métis men. For many, their marriage bespoke an improvement in situation, since they gained greater access to the goods around which their society revolved and that had been denied them within the old hierarchy. At the same time, the economic value and to some extent the very survival of the Europeans and the voyageurs was enhanced by their relationship with Native women, although these latter also had reasons of their own for promoting integration of the diverse societies in contact and conflict. In the words of Sylvia Van Kirk (1980, 76), referring to the wider sphere of the Canadian fur trade, “women within the tribes had a vested interest in promoting cordial relations with the whites. If the traders were driven from the country, the

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Indian women would lose the source of European goods which revolutionized their lives.” Chinook women who were not slaves sometimes found themselves in a classic cross-cultural double bind, since Europeans, including the nominally Catholic voyageurs, and the Iroquois loathed the custom of head flattening and insisted that their children not bear this mark of noble status, one that was denied slaves: “As a result the mothers [often] murdered their babies rather than have them suffer the ignominy of growing up to look like slaves” (Van Kirk 1980, 88). Much more common, and more indicative of the sauve qui peut within disintegrating Chinookan societies, “was the [custom] of female slaves having children by their owners of whatever rank, with the children not undergoing headflattening” (Hajda 1984, 180). By the 1820s – roughly the time that Wawa caught on – European preferences had prevailed, and even the children of the Chinook elite began to resemble slaves, although as late as 1876 an elderly Chinook by the name of Matote or Light House Charley was noted to have a flattened skull (Ruby and Brown 1976, 243), as did Boas’s informant of the late 1880s, Charles Cultee. Fluency in Chinook proper died out with this cosmetic practice. Here, then, are some female figures whose trajectories can be discerned in the Catholic Church Records, beginning with the generation born at the turn of the century or shortly thereafter. These women were in their teens or twenties during the 1820s and 1830s. Their children belonged roughly to the cohort that Horatio Hale described, although not all were born or raised at Fort Vancouver, the focus of the trade during those years, though not its sole site. There is only occasional direct evidence of the languages they spoke, so it is rather the ethnolinguistic heterogeneity of their family lives that can be positively concluded from these accounts. It should be remembered that in the first instance the Catholic Church Records are in French. Native Wives Among the earliest Native wives were daughters of the most prominent Chinookans at the mouth of the Columbia. Marguerite Kil-a-ko-tah Clatsop (ca. 1800-73), eldest daughter of Chief Coboway, was first married to William Matthews of the North West Company, then to James McMillan, later the leader of the HBC expedition to Puget Sound and the founder of Fort Langley,

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near the mouth of the Fraser (Hussey 1957, 63). Kil-a-ko-tah’s nickname meant ‘little songbird’ in Clatsop, and entered Wawa as kêlakêla ‘bird’. Although we do not know the date of her union with William Matthews, she was married young, probably in the late 1810s, and her presence in the community at Fort George was a token of the unity between the fur traders and the Lower Chinook, as was that of Car-cum-cum, who was kept at Fort George under the protection of Chief Factor Archibald MacDonald a decade and a half later, even as the trade was shifting to Fort Vancouver, in 1824. The Wawa Kil-a-ko-tah spoke was no doubt heavily coloured by her native Clatsop. We might presume that Ellen, daughter from the first marriage with William Matthews, was raised with English in mind, or so her name suggests. Choice of children’s names is no clear indication of language use, but her second daughter, by James McMillan, was named Victoire, and Kil-a-kotah’s third husband was Louis Labonté, a Quebecker who had been previously involved with the American Fur Company and who had signed on as carpenter with Hunt’s overland division of the Astor expedition. Louis Labonté stayed in the West, and retired with Kil-a-ko-tah to French Prairie in 1830 (Munnick 1972, A-43). In the passages that follow, parenthetical references are to Munnick unless otherwise noted. Names can be further referenced in her indices. Two other daughters of Coboway were married à la façon du pays into the fur trade. Hélène Celiast Clatsop (ca. 1804-91) had a son, François (ca. 1826, baptized at age fifteen), by Basile Poirier, a baker at Fort Vancouver who had come from Montreal, although Hélène had left Basile previously when “it was learned that he had a wife living in Canada” (1972, 66, A-67). She moved into the household of her sister, the youngest of the three Coboway daughters in the record, Yi-a-must Clatsop (1815-40), herself married formally to Joseph Gervais and baptized Marguerite in 1839 at Willamette, where she died a year later (1972, A-15). The complex language relations within this extended family can be seen by the fact that after Basile Poirier’s death, Hélène married the American Soloman Smith, himself involved with Jason Lee’s Methodist mission established on Clatsop territory. As for Marguerite Yi-a-must, after her death at the age of twenty-five, her son with Joseph Gervais, Édouard (b. 1836), was raised by her husband’s next wife, Marie Angélique Chinook. Édouard

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eventually married Nancy Nehalim, whose name reflects her Tillamook origins, and lived on the coast until his death in 1912. Édouard, we can reasonably suppose, had French, some English, the Clatsop of his mother as a cradle language, contact with his wife’s Salishan, but also Wawa as it was known to his generation, especially those living on the coast until the end of the nineteenth century, where many Chinookans took refuge as the settlers took control of the land. Another example of a high-born Indian woman married into the fur trade should be mentioned, Jane Tchinouk-Quinault (ca. 1810–ca. 1855). Her children were identified as Wawa speakers by James Swan (1857), who lived on Shoalwater Bay in the 1850s, although their descent into socioeconomic marginality is confirmed by this very observation. She was known as a daughter of both Chinook and Quinault nobles. She married James Johnson, a Scots sailor who moved with his family from Fort Vancouver to Baker’s Bay in the late 1840s instead of following the HBC to its new headquarters in Victoria. Jane had both Lower Chinook and Quinault, but spoke Wawa with her husband and in public life, probably the reason her two sons spoke it, as Swan stated. Louise Moatwas (ca. 1800-?) belongs in the same category, although she was from farther upriver. Daughter of Chief Uhlahnee of Celilo Falls, Louise married the same Basile Poirier mentioned earlier, Father Demers perhaps being unapprised of Basile’s wife in Canada or looking the other way on the grounds that Basile recognized his children with Hélène Celiast (1972, 21). Although the date of her death is not recorded, she ended her years on Shoalwater Bay, an “old blind woman living in a hut” behind the home of her in-laws, the Haguet, the patriarch of whom was from France itself, not Quebec. French was the language of both husbands (the second of whom was Isaac Lebelle), but she too was in Fort Vancouver in the early 1840s; she had probably never learned English but spoke Wawa, which was widely spoken at Shoalwater Bay from the 1850s onward, as her principal medium of communication (1972, A-57). These daughters of the Chinookan nobility were the exceptions rather than the rule among Native wives of this generation, although each finished her life in a radically different and usually diminished world compared with that in which they were born. As a rule, these women were prepubescent during

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the brief Astorian period, at which time betrothal of high-status women remained rare, there being little in the record to suggest that socially significant marital contracts were then being signed between the leaders of each group, the Chinookans and the intrusive European trade community. With some exceptions during the 1810s, sexual contact between the two groups was mediated by the protocols of commodity exchange that had defined the Nootka period and that had continued during the sojourn of Lewis and Clark. In their journals, the latter were relatively discreet about such contact, although they refer to many of their men having “Louis Veneri,” lues venerea, syphilis, and also observed that “some women (who were “often the principal village merchants and frequently owned trade canoes”) struck more or less permanent arrangements with various ship captains, even going so far as to have names like ‘J. Bowmon’ tattooed on their arms.”15 For the most part, intermarriage between the two groups did not entail lasting reciprocal bonds until the early 1820s, when country marriages as conceived within fur trade society were increasingly contracted. Before then, marriage was diplomatic in intention and in consequence, such as that of Duncan McDougall, a pivotal figure in the negotiations that led to sale of Astoria to the Nor’Westers in 1813, with a daughter of Concomly, which may have weighed in the decision of his counterpart, John George McTavish, not to take military action against Astoria (Ronda 1990, 289). The advantages of marital alliance were apparent to all echelons of the fur trade. A telling example of how self-consciously this tactic was wielded by the HBC can be found in a letter from Chief Factor George Simpson to John McLoughlin as late as 1825, when the former proposed that the company defray any expenses entailed if John Work, then involved in scouring the Snake River district, “took to wife the daughter of a chief of the Cayuse Indians” (Rich 1941, lvii). As a rule, however, women exchanged on a permanent basis were lower-caste. The Chinook nobility itself was disintegrating, its means increasingly constrained. Well into the late nineteenth century, it was understood that “slaves were characteristically named after the group or locality of their nativity.” 16 Many of the surnames in the Catholic Church Records attest to this pattern. As mentioned, there are dozens of women “Chinook” by surname in the Records, although one, Lisette Chinook (ca. 1810-51), stands out in this regard,

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in no small part because her known movements correspond to what we know about the wives of voyageurs in the Canadian West. Lisette was the wife of Joseph Despart and eventually settled with him in French Prairie in the early 1830s after travelling with her husband on John Work’s 1830 brigade to Snake River country, where her skills as a helpmate were typical of country wives on the Canadian Prairies. Their first child, Joseph, was born in 1827, and three more daughters were born in French Prairie between 1833 and 1838 (Marie Anne, Rose, and Marguerite). There is no direct evidence that Lisette spoke Wawa, and the legitimization of her marriage in front of Father Blanchet in 1839 as well as the names of her children reflect the French Catholic orientation of her domestic life. We must presume that Lisette was “Chinook” by place of birth – in other words, that she had nothing to lose by embracing the emerging norms of fur trade society, as she did. Some dialect or other of Chinookan was her native tongue, but her life was lived out in French, which became the language of her household in her late adolescence. For her and others like her, Wawa was probably an auxiliary tongue, useful in community life whenever French or Chinook itself was not sufficient. Among the generation born in the two first decades of the nineteenth century, most Native wives were not from the Chinook heartland. It is the ethnolinguistic mix that is striking. Among them, there is Nancy of The Dalles (ca. 1800-50). Her first husband was a “Frenchman” killed by the Blackfoot in a massacre of which she was one of two survivors. Her second husband was an American named Goodrich, a member of Peter Skene Ogden’s brigade to the Great Salt Lake. Nancy was at Fort Vancouver in 1839, where she was married to Jean Baptiste Dobin. Her name suggests that she was a native speaker of Upper Chinookan, but she was also said to “know Blackfoot ways.” An indication of the mobility of this population can be found in the fact that Nancy participated in the French Canadian parties to the California Gold Rush, where her husband, Jean Baptiste, died. She returned to French Prairie and to her extended family, including her daughter by Goodrich, Susanne, who married Pierre Pepin dit Lachance, and ended up on the Grand Ronde reservation. The Lachance family was French speaking, but still had Wawa in the twentieth century (Zenk 1984, 274). It is reasonable to believe that Nancy spoke Wawa alongside French and was indeed one of its earliest speakers.

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One of the oldest of this cohort, Marguerite Marie Michina (ca. 17981868), was a Coeur d’Alene woman who married the Métis canoeman Canoté Humpherville and raised eight children, several of whom were baptized at Fort Colville in 1839. After his death in 1841, she retired to French Prairie, where she probably continued speaking French. Another woman from upriver was Susanne Okanogan (ca. 1800–after 1848). Her husband, Jacques Lafantaisie, had come to Astoria on the Tonquin in 1811, and was characterized by George Simpson in 1828 as an “interpreter not sufficiently resolute with Indians” (1972, A-44). Their son, Charles, was born in 1819 and baptized when he was twenty. Yet another Native wife from outside the Chinook homeland was Julia Flathead (ca. 1800-86), Spokane “by nation” in the records, but also of Iroquois heritage and stepdaughter of François Rivet (Jackson 2007, 49). “Flathead” was clearly a misnomer, referring to the mistaken ethnic nomenclature of the time, since her head was decidedly not flattened, the practice being restricted to the mouth of the Columbia. Julia was the companion of HBC trader Peter Skene Ogden, the bulk of whose activities in fact lay well above the lower Columbia. From the Catholic Church Records we know that she was at Fort Colville in 1839, and ultimately retired to Oregon City with Ogden. After Ogden’s death in 1854, she lived with the family of her own daughter Julia and the trader Archibald McKinlay in Lac La Hache, BC. The mother, Julia Flathead, certainly knew English better than Wawa or French, but would have had ample occasion to speak Wawa in the British Columbia of those days. Josephte Kanhopitsa (ca. 1802) first bore a child with an Astorian, John Clarke, who abandoned her, and several other children with Jean-Baptiste Boucher, a Métis who had been with Simon Fraser on the voyage down the Fraser river to the Georgian Gulf, and who had the Cree name of Waccan (Campbell 1983, 2: 280). She then married Joachim Hubert, by whom she had eight children between 1826 and 1844. She was at Fort Colville in 1838, where she certainly had occasion to use her native Salishan again. Another similar profile: Louise Cowichan (ca. 1809-75), Clallam by nation, married Paschal Caillé, who had come from Montreal in 1820. A first son, François, was born in 1833, Henriette in 1836, Rose in 1838. Louise

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was residing at Fort Vancouver in 1838, where the marriage was legitimized, and her children were nine, six, and four, respectively, when Hale arrived. Lisette Shuswap (Souchewabe) (ca. 1807-41) was from yet farther afield, although her homeland was directly in the path of “the Lifeline of the Oregon Country,” the Fraser-Columbia Brigade of which Gibson (1997) has written. First wife of Joseph Délard, mother of Catherine, Pierre, Augustin, Basile, Marie Anne, and Antoine, Louise had, we should presume, Shuswap as her mother tongue. Her husband, Joseph, a steersman, had came early to the Northwest, and presumably spoke Wawa well. In the 1820s, he was noted by George Simpson as “an active hand with horses” (1972, A-19), where his terminology for such duties would have contributed to the aforementioned prominence of French equestrian terminology in Wawa. In 1832, the couple retired to French Prairie, where they were one of the original petitioners for a Catholic mission, although Lisette died before 1841. Joseph married again, this time a woman of Clatsop origin, Catherine, and had two more children, Rose and Joseph, who were orphaned in 1850. According to Munnick (1972, A-77), the life of Thérèse Spokane (ca. 1810) “was one of tragedy, though perhaps not more so than that of many other native women, were we to know their story so well. Her first husband, Louis Lavallé, died at an unrecorded time, leaving two small sons, Martial and Pierre. Her second husband, Pierre Grenier, was drowned at The Dalles in a brigade tragedy [in 1830], leaving an infant daughter, Marie Anne, born in 1828. Her third husband was the noted steersman, Joseph Cournoillé, who patented his claim at French Prairie. He left children Victoire, Joseph and Louis. What become of Thérèse after the death of her last husband is not known.” Thérèse was only one among many of the “Spokane wives” who were married into the trade both because of their reputed beauty and because there was a shortage of available women on the lower Columbia.17 To pursue examples of women from upriver who entered into the Fort Vancouver community, consider Marguerite Kwéhéssest Pend d’Oreille (ca. 1806-51), who married Joseph Pin, an HBC boatman who was in the Snake River country in 1824 and at Fort Langley in 1829. One daughter, born in 1839, was a ward of Chief Factor John McLoughlin and lived in his house for some time. Their son, Joseph, was described by another HBC trader in these terms: “His father was French, his mother Indian. He learned to speak

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both languages, but he is not now and never has been able to pronounce the English language in a proper manner, and in giving his name his pronunciation of it is so imperfect that it is more often spelled incorrectly than correctly.” The implication that Joseph (b. 1836) spoke “Indian” should not be interpreted to mean that he spoke his mother’s Salishan, a culture in which he had never been raised, but rather Wawa (1972, 40). The Sasté or Shasta (of the Hokan language group) were frequently slaves of the lower Columbia tribes. It is not clear whether Félicite Sasseté (1802) and the other Sasseté in the records were manumitted slaves or wives conveyed to the lower Columbia by the California brigades. But she married François Piette dit Faignant at Cowlitz in April 1839, when she was alleged to be thirty-two (1972, 37-37). Her husband, François, who was born around 1800 in Vaudreuil, Quebec, was an early HBC employee from 1818. Later, after the arrival of the priests in 1838, he was repeatedly a witness or godfather to many legitimized marriages and baptisms. Their child, Mathilde, was born in 1837 (1972, 59). We should hesitate to extrapolate from these several cases, but these and others recorded in the same pages point towards a systematic embrace of French Catholic society by a number of women from ethnolinguistic origins other than but not exclusive of Chinookan, a phenomenon that conforms to the express missionary goal of seeking out the dispossessed. This trend could also be interpreted in light of cross-cultural confusion reigning on the lower Columbia due to the social dislocations brought about by invasion of the European fur traders and the attendant anomy. From 1838 on, the Catholic Church attracted a large number of converts, many of whom had already been married à la façon du pays to French engagés. They found refuge of a sort in one nascent social structure, and more likely than not had Wawa as the default medium within that structure, this being, moreover, the express strategy of Fathers Demers and Blanchet, who from the beginning understood that Wawa was their most effective instrument, itself a key piece of evidence about which language worked and which did not in that milieu. The case of Thérèse Makaïna (ca. 1815-?) speaks to the ethnolinguistic turbulence of the times, and the activism of some women converted to Catholicism in gathering those otherwise bereft of identity along the lower Columbia.

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Thérèse had seven children by Joseph Plouf, HBC blacksmith at Fort Vancouver, who died in 1849. Her father was Owyhee (Hawaiian) and her mother tongue was Chehalis. In 1842, she was a witness to a collective baptism of children from various backgrounds, including Chehalis, Chinook, and Owyhee. In terms of labour, the Hawaiians were vital in the early years but had no focal point around which to gather. One of the first to enter the record is a man by the name of Coxe, hired by David Thompson for his ascent of the Columbia in late July 1811, who “spoke some English, and was anxious to acquire our language” (1972, A-61). When the HBC withdrew to Victoria, the Kanakas or Owyhees had “no other place to go except to the tribes of their wives” (1972, A-61). Unlike the voyageur wives of Indian origin, who had married into a patriarchal lineage that offered a new identity, the Owyhee themselves and their Indian wives (for there are no recorded instances of Owyhee women on the Columbia) were perhaps the most marginalized of the population. To conclude this sketch, which only suggests the prolixity of cultural contact in the nascent society that had Wawa as its prime means of communication, let us mention a number of elite wives of the fur trade. Emélie Finlay (ca. 1796–before 1848) had as mother a certain Josephte Cree, and as father François Finlay, son of Jacques (“Jacco”) Finlay (1972, A-26). She was born in Western Canada and had five children by Pierre Bercier, who had been the guide of David Thompson’s descent down the Columbia in 1811. Pierre set himself up as boatman at Spokane House in 1812, travelled to the Snake River country with Odgen in 1824, but died in 1830. Emélie then married Simon Plamondon in 1830, a boatman for the HBC and farmer for a while at the Company Farm at Cowlitz. Five children issued from this second alliance for Emélie, after whose death Simon married a niece of Father François Blanchet. Hélène McDonald (1811-63) was the daughter of a Pend-d’Oreille woman and Finn McDonald, who spoke “pure Gaelic” alongside English and French and “various tribal dialects, frequently mixing all together in moments of excitement.” She married William Kitson and was with him at Fort Nisqually during Father Demers’s mission in 1839, where “Kitsen” was, according to Father Blanchet, “very useful as an interpreter, [understanding] Nesqualy, Chinoook jargon and Flathead” (Blanchet 1878, 96). Like her father and her

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husband, she was a multilingual who tended towards English but certainly knew Wawa through Kitson. Upon the latter’s death in 1841, she moved to Montana as the wife of HBC trader Richard Grant. This collective portrait only scratches the surface of the Catholic Church Records and omits evidence that might be culled from the counterpart Protestant documents or other sources. It is sufficient to show that by the 1830s, Lower Chinook was no longer in any way an effective vehicle for communication in fur trade society as it had evolved, and that “baby Chinook” was a rarity by then, although this is a relatively minor point measured against the rich multilingual and multicultural texture of this disparate but nonetheless interconnected community. These Native wives mark the many interstices in which a lingua franca was necessary, and it was from the families they raised, initially at the centre but soon enough on the margins of Oregon society, that the first generation of Wawa speakers emerged. A Cohort of Near-Native Speakers Notwithstanding the role that French played as working language in fur trade society, English was also a target for speakers who had Wawa, as Wawa was for speakers of English, both in the period of its genesis and then through the century, as the huge number of Wawa handbooks and word lists published from the 1850s onward demonstrated. The interaction of the Chinook elite with the factors and clerks of the fur trade is a matter of historical record, so it is not surprising that many already had some English, such as the son of Concomly, with whom Gabriel Franchère travelled beyond The Dalles in 1812, and from whom the latter is thought to have learned his limited Lower Chinook. In this context, it is worth recalling Jennifer Brown’s observation earlier that Simpson and the company were able to “sort and simplify” the fur trade population by race and kin-friendship networks. Language was closely aligned with “race,” although it is worth remembering that there were perceptible distinctions and hence tracking of the sort she describes not only among English, Scottish, and what must be called English Canadians but also among the French speakers. Race and kin-friendship were perhaps the initial “operators” of selection, so to speak. But as the society evolved and itself split off into a southern US population and a northern British Columbian one, more formal procedures came into force.

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For example, the progeny of the English-speaking Columbian factors, traders, and clerks, on the one hand, were on occasion sent back to board either in the Red River settlement or in Montreal, which is what John McLoughlin arranged for his son John (who went on to study medicine, unsuccessfully, in Paris). Another example, one showing how kin-friendship apparently prevailed over race, is the trajectory of one of the most famous of the Scottish-Chinook Métis, Ranald MacDonald, born in 1824, grandson of Concomly and subsequently famous as one of the first Western travellers to Japan before 1854. His father was Archibald MacDonald, his mother Raven or “Princess Sunday,” who died in childbirth. Ranald was then placed in the care of his aforementioned aunt Car-cum-cum in an Indian lodge at Fort George.18 Later he attended the school that the “Yankee schoolmaster” John Ball (the putative author of Manuscript 195) opened at Fort Vancouver in 1832 “for two dozen half-breed Indian children of the HBC employees. These children ranged in age from six to sixteen years and talked the Cree, Nez Percé, Chinook, Klickitat and other Indian languages.”19 Ranald MacDonald’s memories speak to the language training that Ball and the HBC were bringing to the children of the factors and clerks: “I attended the school to learn my ABC and English. The big boys had a medal put over their necks, if caught speaking French or Chinook, and when school was out had to remain and learn a task” (Lewis and Murakami 1990, 25). “Chinook” here meant Wawa. As an infant, Ranald was taken into the care of his mother’s sister, but after two years he moved to British Columbia with his father, Archibald MacDonald, and stepmother, Jane Klyne MacDonald, who was half- or quarter-Cree. Although he regularly visited with Chinook relatives during his first decade, after which he was sent to Red River, Lower Chinook was doubtless alien to him by the time he returned to school at Fort Vancouver at the age of nine, and the mixed population of the school would have had no special command of full Lower Chinook, but only Wawa as a lingua franca. In any event, Ball’s schoolmaster discipline was intended to impose English on his wards, as one of the first Protestant missionaries in the area observed: the Fort Vancouver school taught “the common branches of the English language, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, and geography” (Parker 1840, 168). From the arrival of Fathers Demers and Blanchet onward, French became the medium of the Catholic mission (Roth

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1994, 161), and was that of the Boys’ School in French Prairie that Father Jean-Baptiste Bolduc ran from 1844 to 1849 with “28 boarders, all children of Canadians or Americans, except only one that is of pure native blood.” 20 Implied in Ranald MacDonald’s memory of education in and around Fort Vancouver is that use of both French and Wawa by students from six to sixteen was punishable. It is logical to deduce that not only integrative functions (creating social bonds and group membership) but also expressive ones (“personal feelings towards the message or interlocutors”) were active in French and in Wawa among a cohort of anglophones born around 1820 with roots in Native cultures throughout the Northwest and across onto the Canadian Prairies. Fostering English literacy is one thing; totally expunging the appeal or even pragmatic attraction of Wawa is another. Wawa was, in other words, already cross-tribal but pro-Native within the wider Fort Vancouver community – a role that Zenk was to confirm in his studies of Grand Ronde reservation families three generations later. Most of the English-speaking sons of HBC traders continued to live in the Northwest, including the globe-trotting Ranald MacDonald, who returned to die in Montana. Others followed the HBC in its retreat out of the Oregon Territory in 1846. One stratum of the multilayered network of Wawa speakers at mid-century can be represented by this cohort, who had possessed the language near-natively in youth, and who were nostalgically attached to it although they were also committed to the increasingly entrenched values of settler society. There is nothing in the record indicating how long Ranald MacDonald continued speaking Wawa, but there is striking proof that one of his cousins, another grandchild of Concomly, remained fluent until the end of the century. Born in 1824, William C. McKay was the son of Thomas McKay and another of Concomly’s daughters, Timmee. Thomas McKay, who was part Ojibwa, had arrived with the Astorians in his teens in the company of his father, Alexander, who perished in the Tonquin at Vancouver Island in 1811. Alexander’s widow, Margaret Wadine McKay, subsequently remarried none other than John McLoughlin. William McKay therefore “counted none other than the ‘father’ of white Oregon as a step-grand-father” (Zenk 1999, 41), a pivotal position to say the least. His father, much like Ranald MacDonald’s, had initially intended to send his child to study abroad, in Scotland, but was

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persuaded by the Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman to have him educated as a doctor in the eastern United States. He returned to the Northwest at the age of nineteen in 1843. William McKay was a legendary figure in Oregon and Washington (and was denied the vote in the 1870 elections because he was considered by a US district court to be either a British subject or a member of the Indian community). His importance in this context is due, however, to the fact that at the age of sixty-eight he gave a short oration in Wawa at the 1892 centenary celebration of Captain Robert Gray’s entrance into the mouth of the Columbia. The Oregonian reported: “Dr W.C. McKay, of Pendleton, was ... introduced, and made a pleasing address. He spoke briefly, and in the Chinook language, with which many in the audience were sufficiently familiar to follow him” (Zenk 1999, 43). Zenk has edited this text and explained its significance as both a historical and linguistic document. If there had not been a community of Wawa speakers, it would have been difficult for William McKay to compose this address more than a half-century after having learned the language (near-natively, it should be insisted). Even more significant is the fact that there were many in the audience “sufficiently familiar” with it to follow him. The composite portrait of the generation of women born after 1800 and before the HBC withdrew to Victoria shows that they usually had as mother tongue one or another of the languages of the lower Columbia, frequently Chinook proper or its Clatsop dialect, but on occasion more distant languages such as Clallam, Snoqualmie, Cayuse, Spokane, Shasta, and so on. These mothers usually encountered French only after adolescence, but their male children were in contact with and probably fluent in the language of their fathers, sometimes English, usually French, sometimes both. The progeny of these mixed families, even those reaching adulthood from 1840 onward, did retain some control of Indian languages, but never to the extent their mothers had, to no small degree because the circle of interlocutors was radically altered within that generation. Native life was thereafter thoroughly mixed, ethnically speaking. Much worked against the full retention of Indian languages by the second generation within voyageur families. The embrace of Catholicism and its cultural apparatus signals a massive shift away from the traditions these languages would have sustained, and that would have helped sustain them. Yet even where Native lifestyles and Native-Native marriage continued, those

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traditions were soon obliterated. One indication of this is Franz Boas’s delight at finding an informant like Charles Cultee, and his dismay that the Clatsop had forgotten their myths and could not provide any “connected text” (Boas 1894, 5). The severe epidemics of the 1830s had played no small part in the demise of Lower Chinook, but intermarriage produced a shift away from it among those who did survive and maintain a Native lifestyle, to the profit of Salishan Tillamook on the south bank and Salishan Chehalis on the north. Recall that Cultee spoke Wawa with Boas, having little or no English, his own Chinook proper having fallen into disuse after marriage with a Chehalis woman. Zenk (1984, 8) observes that within the Grand Ronde reservation community, Wawa became the emblem and vehicle of Native cultural traditions, and speaking it became an “act of identity” per Le Page. “Native” here is capitalized because this identity was a synthetic construction among those who could or would no longer identify with tribal ethnicity. This was doubtless the case on the Grand Ronde reservation, and Jacobs reiterated the point (1936a, vii). Yet a more primal logic operated within voyageur families in the 1830s. Given the linguistic discontinuities in their community and within those families themselves, Wawa was an essential instrument of exchange. The native orientation of Wawa phonology was rooted in the speech habits of those who were its primary users. Within the wider circles of fur trade society around Fort Vancouver, these included not only women such as those above but also voyageurs themselves and other agents of the fur trade. Spoken as a contact pidgin by a heterogeneous and scattered population, Wawa was most thoroughly embraced and transformed by the small community who had urgent need for it: Indian and métisse women who had entered fur trade society too late to learn French or English, whose own children did not acquire their mothers’ mother tongues, and whose speech habits were phonologically Native. Although many were Chinookan speakers, a large number of Salishan and even some Wakashan and Hokan speakers were part of the mix. With some exceptions, there is considerable convergence among these languages, at least in terms of phonological traits central to Wawa. There is, in other words, no need to postulate some continuity between Wawa and Chinook proper (or even a putative pidginized Chinook) to explain the many Native phonological features in the former.

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In the early 1810s, no one could have foreseen that the incipient Nootkaflavoured Wawa that Astorians and Nor’Westers began using with Chinook speakers around them would become the common language of a thriving trade centre a hundred miles upstream, and that an assortment of Native women in particular would find it essential in their lives. Likewise unimaginable during the early days were the entwined lives of the Native and voyageur families in Fort Vancouver and then French Prairie beginning in the 1820s, some of whose history is documented above. Not unimaginable but simply non-existent is the society that might have taken root in that “state of things,” to quote again Horatio Hale (1846, 644), who did imagine the resulting “formation of a race and idiom whose affinities would be a puzzle to ethnographers.”

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5 Waves of Wawa

Contemporary linguists customarily disparage the data of nineteenth-century scholars who collected most of the early Wawa on record, yet some of these pioneers were not rank amateurs measured by their times. 1 Fathers Demers and Blanchet both had classical seminary educations in Quebec, as did the majority of the priests who followed them. 2 Horatio Hale and George Gibbs were schooled at Harvard, where Hale was known as a precocious Indian ethnologist, among the best of his generation. Even in his later career as a lawyer in Ontario, he showed empathy with and insight into First Nations cultures. Nor did either of these early lexicographers work in an utter void. Both had knowledge, however approximate, of the ethnolinguistic mosaic of the Northwest Coast as it appeared in Archaeologia Americana in 1836 and the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1841. The first contained the Honorable Albert Gallatin’s “Synopsis of Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America,” a subsequent version of which glossed Hale’s own “Indians of Northwest America.” The second was Dr. John Scouler’s “Observations on the Indigenous Tribes of the N.W. Coast of America.” Scouler had first visited the Columbia in 1825, and while his knowledge now seems primitive, his vocabularies and descriptions did sketch out still recognizable patterns. Two decades earlier, Albert Gallatin had been a key figure in John Jacob Astor’s diplomatic ploy to persuade the American government to recover Astoria and the American outpost there militarily, if necessary, a hardly surprising connection between politics and linguistics (Ronda 1990, 309). George Gibbs came somewhat later onto the scene.

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Trained as a lawyer and best known as a geologist, he was actively involved with the US scientific expeditions to the Northwest Coast. His Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language (published at the same time as his Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 1863) was derived in no small part from a glossary of Lower Chinook established by the experienced Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) clerk Alexander Caulfield Anderson, himself the author of a later handbook of Wawa (1858).3 During two decades of use at the interface of several cultures mostly on the lower Columbia, Wawa expanded its functional range. When, circa 1812, full phrases of Wawa began to appear, their purport was already directive or heuristic (“use of language for obtaining information”): queentschech pasheshiooks “how many whites?”; ikta mika makoumak “what do you want to eat?”; or thlounasse otile “perhaps some fruits?” It is not, however, until the late 1830s that phrases show up in the archive that can be readily understood as integrative, expressive, phatic, or even poetic (per Table 1.1), although we should also bear in mind that some of these items, those found in the missionary diaries and travel narratives, have been and edited and packaged, often for deprecative or satirical ends. Take, for example, the phrases that the Protestant missionary Daniel Lee attributed to his canoeists: “Now-it-kah mah-sach-e chuk – The water was very bad. Weke quos en-si-kah – We were not afraid. Hi-as en-si-kah tum-tune – Our hearts were large. We are men!” (Lee and Frost 1844, 204). Bravado, or even bravado satirized, is certainly indicative of higher language use. Equally illustrative is the lament that Lee attributed to a Kalapuya father at the sight of his dying daughter, this during the epidemics of the 1830s: “A father’s love appeared in his tears, and he caressed his ‘little one,’ endearingly exclaiming, ni-kah ten-as! ni-kah ten-as! ‘My little one! my little one!’” (133). Still again, a phrase from Lee that, for him, was humorous: “A missionary ... reproved an old Indian for being caught in the same filthy practice [of eating head lice], upon which the old man, very honestly, answered, in his own speech, ‘Cultus, cultus shicks, cahqua salmon claska – Nothing, nothing, friend; they are all the same as salmon’” (229). Among the narratives that have appended Wawa vocabularies were not only Lee and Frost 1844 but also Parker 1840, Palmer 1847, and Winthrop 1863. Leaving aside the limitations of the discursive tradition they exemplify – those of the pioneer adventure travelogue – the conventions they share regarding

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their use of Wawa compose a loose and quasi-literary tradition of its own. It is even possible that this topos (what we might call “Indians speaking Wawa”) was inspired by the mock-heroic passages in Lee and Frost, like those quoted above, in which Native guides are portrayed as boasting of their courage, but only once safe and sound on shore. Incidentally, the settler A.J. Splawn met Loolowcan, the Callam who became the butt of Winthrop’s gibes, and recorded in his own memoirs that Loolowcan’s version of the events described in Canoe and Saddle is quite different from Winthrop’s: “I [Loolowcan] have often thought of that man [Winthrop] and regret I did not kill him. He was me-satch-ee” (masache ‘mean’; Splawn 1917, 129-30). The practice of inserting Wawa into travelogues for satiric purpose was to die out quickly enough, although even Franz Boas’s interest in the language stemmed from a snippet of song he came across in a “third-class novel” (Boas 1888, 220). In the meantime, though, inclusion of a Wawa glossary was a token of authenticity that was, in addition, of potential practical use to many readers, the summa of this exercise being Farrow’s Mountain Scouting: A Hand-Book for Officers and Soldiers on the Frontiers (1881), in which the Wawa vocabulary figures in the appendix alongside swimming and rowing instructions! Given the literary conventions and inter-ethnic stereotypes at play, we should certainly not draw any direct conclusions about Wawa itself, although its presence in these texts does show that it was used throughout the lower Columbia and its tributaries by mid-century. The utterances above come from what could be called Middle Wawa, dating from the period after the founding of Fort Vancouver upriver from the Lower Chinook homeland in 1824. Such expanding functions mark the continuing expansion of this pidgin. Of further interest is the possibility of stylistic variation, evidence of hyper-correction and even of the poetic function, defined simply but sufficiently in this context as “play with language.” There were forms to mark politeness as well as “syntactic variants for request.” Personal feelings were readily expressed. By the 1830s, the unification of Wawa (or, to put it another way, the separating out of Wawa from Lower Chinook) was complete. This was assuredly the case among Wawa’s speakers, but also, importantly, in the minds of the lexicographers Demers and Blanchet, and of Hale and Gibbs, all of whom distinguished the pidgin from its principal source. Hale did so explicitly by

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drawing up a separate list of Tsinuk, and Gibbs by publishing the aforementioned Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language. Henceforth, the “scientific” literature ceased to confuse the two. Although the moniker “Chinook” continued in use, it was known by almost all to refer to Wawa, not to Lower Chinook. In addition to its increasingly robust discursive functions, its lexicon became more “systematic,” the inventory amenable to invention, the formation of new words being based on the norms of Wawa itself. Compounds drawn from across language boundaries were common. For example, the following are compound words founds in Father Demers’s list (circa 1838): chikomin-lop “chain” ‘iron-rope’ [noun + noun] kuli tsok “rapids” ‘run-water’ [verb + noun] memelust tsok “pond” ‘dead-water’ [adj + noun] tanas-sun “morning” ‘little-sun’ [adj + noun] Sahali-Taï-pepa “Bible” ‘High-Chief-paper’ [adj + noun + noun] tutush klis “butter” ‘milk-grease’ [noun + noun] tlush elehi “prairie” ‘good-land’ [adj + noun] tlush stik “cedar” ‘good-wood’ [adj + noun] chako ĸal “to become hard” ‘[be]come hard’ [intr + adj] chako saliks “to get mad” ‘[be]come mad’ [intr + adj] chako tanas “to be born” ‘[be]come child’ [intr + noun] chako tlaĥ “to get loose” ‘[be]come loose’ [intr + adj] capswala tlatoa “to run away” ‘steal-run’ [trans + noun] capswala musom “adultery” ‘steal-sleep’ [trans + noun] mamuk ipĥuï “to close” ‘make + shut’ [aux verb + adj] mamuk hihi “to gamble, play, mock” ‘make + laughter’ [aux + noun] mamuk kikwile “to lower down” ‘make lower’ [aux + adj] mamuk mitlaït kopa elehi “to bury” ‘make-reside-in-earth’ [aux + verb + prep + noun] mamuk tlemintlemin “to grind or mash” ‘make mash-mash’ [aux + noun] nanich kopa musom “to dream” ‘see-in-sleep’ [trans + prep + noun] To be sure, the grammatical functions attributed here are simple, and the distinction between transitive, intransitive, and auxiliary verbs rather crude,

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as they doubtless were in actual use during the 1830s. The point is, however, that these expressions were becoming idiomatic. They were learned as conventionalized units. Copious similar examples can be found in the corpus drawn from the 1830s and 1840s, all of which point to the autonomy of Wawa, the fact that its speakers were no longer approximating approximations of Lower Chinook but instead communicating with the conviction that the conventions in place were solid and shared. There was, in other words, a stable grammar, if only at the surface of the language. What followed this expansion of discursive functions, once the HBC period of Wawa history drew to a close south of the forty-ninth parallel, was a rapid expansion of its geographical realm, mostly north into what was becoming Canada, and as far as what eventually became Alaska. Fur trade society had comprised many “mobile multilingual colonies,” to quote Samarin’s words again (1988, 229), so Wawa, emerging from the fairly stable contact zones first at Astoria and then Fort Vancouver, had always been used on the road, carried as far south as California, for example, during the scouring expeditions into then Mexican territory. This is how the Siskiyou mountains were named, from the Cree and then Wawa word for a bobtailed horse, at least according to Gibbs (1863a). Similarly, when the HBC sent James McMillan north to Puget Sound in 1824, Wawa was used not only among the party members but also with the Coast Salish into whose territory the company entered. Once Fort Vancouver became the headquarters and natural focus of trade, which it remained for about two decades, Wawa was the natural medium of exchange for all who fell within its swoop, at levels below, of course, the administration itself. It is not easy to track with precision what Anthony Grant (1996) has described as the “wave-like” expansion of Wawa. In 1971, Terrence Kaufman, one of the first creolists to write on Wawa, proposed a chart of its spread across the Northwest, one based on the publication dates and places of the various glossaries as well as regional biographical narratives (1971, 276). As he states (1971, 276), the arrival and establishment of Wawa was “probably considerably earlier” than what is shown here. Table 5.1 offers my notes next to his proposed sequence. Given that glossaries such as those of Anderson (1858), Stuart (1865), and Tate (1889) were commercial products, often reprints of earlier works or at best

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slight revisions, their value as primary documents is questionable. Yet some settlers did arrive with glossaries in hand. In other words, these lists might have had an effect reminiscent of Cook’s 1778 glossary of Nootka, which shaped the expectations of later traders along the coast. In this case, of course, the expected pidgin would have been the anglicized version described, one might even say prescribed, therein. Such glossaries should also serve to remind us that pidgins are cases of late second-language acquisition, and that literates need special help with them. There are unmistakable lines of descent among the nineteenth-century glossaries that codified Jargon (first raised by Kaufman but explored at length by Johnson [1978, 12-15]). Such a family tree of dictionaries signals the existence of a parallel, static literate culture running alongside multiple and fluctuating varieties of pidgin or pidgin-creole speech. Beginning with Demers’s word list in 1838, the selection of Wawa items in the glossaries remains relatively unchanged, passing more or less intact from one dictionary to the next with only minor changes. Table 5.1 The spread of Chinook Jargon Locale

Date and source

Notes based on this text

Mouth of Columbia

1834, Lee and Frost

Broken Chinook, Franchère, Ross, ca. 1812

Fort Vancouver

1838, Parker

Manuscript 195, late 1820s

Willamette Valley

1847, Palmer

French Prairie, mid-1830s onward

Oregon generally

1850, Lionnet

Grand Ronde, 1856

Western Washington

1855, Gibbs

Fort Langley, 1828; Demers and Blanchet, 1838

Fraser River, BC

1858, Anderson

Splawn, 1860

British Columbia

1870

Founding of Victoria Hudson’s Bay Company, 1846

Source: Kaufman 1971, 276.

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Johnson established a number of rules to explain various phonological shifts displayed in the glossaries, such as the kinds of simplification that substituted Wawa /p/ for English /b/, /p/, and /f/, and Wawa /k/ for Chinook proper /k/, /kw/, /q/, and /qw/, as well as alternative rules showing how a Tlingit speaker would deal with Wawa /l/ or /m/, transposing them to /n/ and /w/, respectively (Johnson 1978, 3). And a few of the surviving texts in Wawa do provide some notion of how its dialects were pronounced, such as the song by a native Nootka speaker of Wawa that Boas transcribed in the 1890s (Thomason 1983, 837). Thomason was also able to demonstrate that speakers of both Amerindian languages and English and French targeted autonomous Wawa norms of pronunciation, in part by referring to some of the above travelogues, particularly those by Palmer, Winthrop, and Swan, and by decoding their idiosyncratic application of English orthography. Thus, because of the numerous filters, not to mention obstacles, standing between Wawa utterances and the written record of them, the glossaries should not be thought of as corresponding directly to the dialect current wherever they happened to be published. They should rather be seen as providing secondary evidence that Wawa in forms whose details we cannot now discern was spoken at those times and in those places. Moreover, lexicographers habitually “refrain from including new coinages and other neologisms and borrowings until they become established and generalized in popular usage” (Powell 1991, 135), a practice intrinsically at odds with the fluidity of pidgins. Native speakers of Wawa specialized in trapping during the early days, and later logging, fishing, and cannery labour. The argot for these occupations was often in Wawa, and beyond the notice of white lexicographers.4 Kaufman’s schema above (Table 5.1) can be broken down into the following domains: the Chinook heartland (Astoria and Fort Vancouver, with extensions south along the Willamette River to French Prairie and, eventually, Grand Ronde, where it is to this day the heritage language of the reservation); an eastern, inland versant up the Columbia plateau and adjacent areas along the tributaries of the Columbia and the Fraser, Thompson, and Okanagan Rivers (most notably the variant now known as Kamloops Wawa, which had its own orthography and an active readership); and the mountainous coast from the Puget Sound area and the British Columbia coast up to Alaska. This is merely a framework that others will fill in or correct, since

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research into the northern history and dialects spoken in Canada and Alaska is only just beginning to approach a critical mass. 5 It should be remembered, moreover, that Wawa was characterized by what Zenk (1996) called “chaotic diversity.” Such variety is not simply the result of the lack of standardization. Languages do not need external literate standards to be regular, coherent, and predictable. In fact, this is precisely what makes the scientific study of language possible: a language is regular. A pidgin like Wawa – more precisely, Wawa as a pidgin – is instead inherently diverse, since its speakers were usually approximating routines that they had learned as adult speakers. One might add that to some extent the diversity of Wawa comes with the territory on which it was spoken, the result of the original manifold complexity of the Northwest Coast Indian languages. Students of Wawa Fort Vancouver survived as the hub of the HBC fur trade and as the crucible of Wawa as a near-native “special-case” of creolization for no more than a decade and a half. Ironically, Hale’s visit there in 1841, the occasion during which Wawa was described in some detail for the first time, was part of Charles Wilkes’s United States Exploring Expedition to the Northwest, which was preparing the annexation of the Oregon Territory, including the lands north of the Columbia and south of the forty-ninth parallel. Already in the 1830s, Protestants in the United States felt the call to bring their faith and their “civilizing” missions to the Northwest. Economic depressions in the United States in 1837 and 1841 further encouraged others to seek out a new life in the West. The collapse of the international fur trade in 1841 also weakened the power of the traders based at Fort Vancouver. That year, the first group of self-defining emigrants embarked along what became the Oregon Trail, and there were 1,000 emigrants a mere two years later. Although not all of them arrived at Fort Vancouver, the effect was massive. The first Federal Census of 1850 listed over 13,000 persons in the immediate region, although only 3,175 had been born there.6 The HBC strategy against American fur traders working out of St. Louis was generally successful, yet one inadvertent repercussion was the growth of a population of disaffected former American trappers who gravitated to and settled along the Willamette Valley, where they were joined by HBC engagés

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whose contracts had expired. Simultaneously, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries came on the scene. Lee and Frost’s Ten Years in Oregon (1844), the history of the Methodist Episcopal Mission at Willamette, founded in 1834, is the earliest consistent source of full phrases in Wawa, and is cited by Kaufman (1971, 276) as the first hard evidence of its use, although, as he states, the actual date of use was “considerably earlier.” Lee and Frost must always be read against their own proselytizing agenda, although much can be glimpsed through their narrative about the status of Wawa and its accessibility to the missionaries who began arriving in the late 1830s. From the beginning, Daniel Lee recognized Wawa as the most convenient medium for discourse with Natives. Four years after his arrival, he continued to conduct Sabbath services “in the ‘jargon,’ through an interpreter” (Lee and Frost 1844, 153; emphasis added). He had not mastered it himself. After Frost disembarked from the Lausanne in 1840, he “secluded himself from his family to live with [the Clatsop] and master the jargon, boasting that he could learn it ten times faster than the Clatsops could master English” (Ruby and Brown 1976, 211). Despite this bravado, Frost was soon to forgo preaching in Wawa, and he abandoned his mission altogether within three years, rationalizing his failure with the observation that “their language [Wawa] is so defective, that thereby it is impossible to acquaint them with the true nature of law” (Lee and Frost 1844, 313). This statement reflects Frost’s personal setback more than it speaks of the capacities of Wawa. This is the same time that Father Demers compiled his glossary and translated the catechism and various hymns into Wawa and into versions widely accepted by Indians and disseminated throughout the Northwest. Similarly, in 1838, John McLoughlin reported that a Sunday school had been opened in Fort Vancouver by a volunteer, Dr. Tolmie, “for the instruction of the Natives, which they attended in great numbers. The weekly lectures were delivered in the Native language [Wawa], & conveyed some idea of the Divine Attributes” (Rich 1941, 239). Indeed, McLoughlin praises the success of Dr. Tolmie precisely because he had some control of Wawa, contrasting his work with the failure of the Reverend Mr. Beaver, who never learned it and who accordingly lacked that “general acquaintance, and benevolent intercourse, with the lower classes, which, without degrading, so greatly extends the power & efficiency of the Clergy” (Rich 1941, 239). Tolmie was, incidentally, the

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source of the earliest published comparative glossary of Pacific coast languages (Scouler 1841, 229). That McLoughlin had reasons of his own for disparaging the Reverend Mr. Beaver – aspersions the latter cast upon the former’s “half-breed” wife – does not alter the facts underlying Tolmie’s successful, strategic use of Wawa. Fifty years later in Victoria, Dr. Tolmie was to meet another advocate of Wawa, the ethnographer Franz Boas, who used it in his fieldwork with Charles Cultee to collect the last large corpus of Lower Chinook (Rohner 1969, 29). As we might expect from authors who admit their failure at learning Wawa, the few dozen utterances that can be extracted from Lee and Frost do not betray a sense of the autonomous Native-oriented Wawa pronunciation found among some other writers, although there is every reason to believe that such a target was present because Father Demers and others, learning Wawa in the same years, caught it. That said, much can be gleaned from Ten Years in Oregon about the discursive environment in which Wawa was spoken. In the first place, it is apparent that Wawa was reserved not only for Native-white, but also Native-Native contact, as Frost’s canoe trip above The Dalles shows. Significantly, Wawa was already a language of work among ethnically mixed labourers and guides (Lee and Frost 1844, 201-6). The first wave of Protestant missionaries were largely unsuccessful at learning Wawa, as indeed they were in their missions more generally (Charles Wilkes in Moore 1974, 113-14). It fell to the francophone Catholic missionaries who arrived in 1838 to exploit this lingua franca more effectively during the next generation or two. Like many, Father Blanchet (1847, 93) felt that no orthography could capture Wawa adequately: “one cannot [write out] the pronunciation: you absolutely must hear it spoken” – a remark echoed throughout the century. His colleague, Father Demers, nonetheless set about devising a writing system for hymn and prayer translations, one that did convey some of its Native-oriented phonology: in general, according to Thomason (1983, 828), the transcriptions in his work “agree very closely with later transcriptions of CJ elicited from Indians by linguists.” The comparative early success of the Catholics in the Northwest was due, among other things, to their skill at mastering the Indian dialects of Wawa and their ready embrace of it in rite and song. Not only were such texts as the Lord’s Prayer and simple canticles cast into Wawa, but the so-called Catholic Ladder,

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or sahale stick (‘stick from above’), which visually represented the rudiments of Catholic theology, was given commentary in Wawa. The myth that the HBC “invented” Wawa has been attributed to Father Demers (Pilling 1893, 5), so it is ironic that he was the instrument of the first “direct human interference” into its development (Mühlhäuser 1986, 88). Blanchet’s sketches (1878, 79, 84) of the period indicate that French was an integral part of Catholic proselytization, as was English for the Protestants (Parker 1840, 255) – that is, that Wawa was a language to which conditions on the ground obliged them to resort. The Catholic Fathers accordingly tended to divide their endeavours into two spheres, the first specializing in French and increasingly English, the second in Wawa (O’Hara 1925, 23). The constituency of Wawa speakers, however, comprised not only Natives but also the wives and children involved in the fur trade, as we have seen in Chapter 4. At the arrival of Fathers Blanchet and Demers in 1838, the orbit of Natives for whom Wawa was a viable instrument stretched from Fort Vancouver and the Willamette Valley up to the falls at Champoeg, and then east as far as the “Cascade Indians ... and some of the Klikatats” (Blanchet 1878, 58). Northward, it ran along the old trade route that the HBC had begun using in 1824, when James McMillan was dispatched to Puget Sound via the Cowlitz River. At that time, he noted that “progress was made carefully and cautiously. Indian interpreters had to be recruited as different tongues were encountered. The process of gaining information became more difficult as the party advanced. Several Indians would be utilized as intermediary interpreters before a language could be understood” (McKelvie 1991, 28). Three years later, the HBC established Fort Langley, British Columbia. Accounts of that enterprise (Maclachlan 1998) do not mention Wawa per se and only once record a Wawa word (17 June 1830), but Wawa was no doubt known to most or all of the party that arrived there in 1827. The party included several Native women from the Columbia District, who would have communicated with their husbands and others in Wawa, and two Native traders who had visited Fort George (Astoria). There is no evidence that any jargon based on a local Aboriginal language developed near the site of Fort Langley, as it might have without the arrival of Wawa (Suttles in Maclachlan 1998, 164). There is some irony in the fact that no small part of Wawa at that time, the mid-1820s, consisted of Nootka words that had previously .

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made the trip south. When Wawa was brought north, it was already a complex beast. Virtually every Amerindian language in the area assimilated concepts and words from Wawa, the various reflexes of potlatch foremost among them. That Wawa was in contact with the plethora of languages spoken from Puget Sound to Alaska is the starting point for research that will unfold over the years. In any event, fifteen years later, in 1839, Father Demers observed that the Cowlitz, whose language was Salishan, spoke Wawa and made the following appeal to him: tlahowiam nesaika waik ekita nesaika ‘pity us, nothing is ours’ (Blanchet 1878, 59). During his sojourn at Fort Nisqually at the southern end of Puget Sound in April-May 1839, canticles were sung and catechism taught in both Wawa and French, but some Natives, whose language was Coast Salish, had Wawa alone as an auxiliary tongue (Blanchet 1878, 96). The creolization of Wawa on the Grand Ronde reservation from 1854 onward was a later phase of the dissemination of Wawa around and then away from Fort Vancouver, first to the immediately surrounding territory and then south up the Willamette River, where the first farms independent of the HBC were established, and quickly thereafter to the network of HBC trading posts: Fort Walla Walla to the east and Fort Colville farther up the Columbia, Fort Okanogan at the junction of the Columbia and Okanogan Rivers, and eventually Fort Langley on the Fraser River, this last founded in 1827. Almost all early speakers of Wawa touched at Fort Vancouver before scattering across the region or, more typically, were based there for certain periods. A noteworthy example of one such Wawa speaker was Thomas Indian, who accompanied Father Demers and later Father J.-B.Z. Bolduc on their missions north from Fort Vancouver. Thomas, a former slave “of unknown [tribal] origin” whom Demers had purchased for ten blankets to become an interpreter, was said to translate religious instructions into Wawa “far into the night” (Munnick 1972, A-38). And of course Father Demers himself was the most prominent of these migratory speakers of Wawa. In the early 1840s, he made repeated expeditions north to Forts Colville and Langley, and in 1846 he was named Bishop of Vancouver Island, withdrawing with the HBC to Victoria (O’Hara 1925, 99) and carrying the habit of Wawa with him. Thomas Indian and Father Demers are paradigmatic of two different sorts of Wawa learners. Another, perhaps less successful mode in the multidimensional

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spectrum of Wawa acquisition is suggested by a brief note in Samuel Parker’s Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains: “[I] encamped with Capt. Wyeth [near The Dalles], and obtained from him a short vocabulary of the Chenook language, to enable me to do common business with the Indians residing along on the lower part of this river” (Parker 1840, 137). Wyeth was an American trader whose enterprise in Snake River country was thwarted by the HBC, and who later settled in the lower Columbia. In addition to confirming that Wawa was still more or less confined below The Dalles at that time, Parker’s remark reveals an aspect of Wawa rarely documented among pidgin-creoles: there was much spontaneous exchange of information about it among settlers themselves, an exchange that helped shape white knowledge of Wawa and that was commercialized shortly thereafter in the numerous guidebooks sold throughout the region. The Collapse of the Heartland Within a matter of years, Wawa was swamped by the invasion of settlers along the Oregon Trail. Fort Vancouver was disaffected, and the Willamette Valley was fully settled by incoming Americans, as opposed to those who had been connected to the fur trade. Wawa fell into disuse within its original heartland. It retreated into the reservations into which Natives were shunted starting in 1852. Although it continued to be spoken by some residents of French Prairie and thereafter on the Grand Ronde and related reservations, those who had control of Wawa and who remained off the reservations were forced to seek some accommodation with the emerging economic order. Most of the remaining Chinook and Clatsop and the voyageur families turned to the coast and entered the fishery. Although remnants of the Chinook population did survive – three hundred when the Tansey Point treaty was signed in 1852 (Ruby and Brown 1976, 226) – their social structure was thoroughly shaken and had dissolved by the mid-1850s, according to Solomon Smith (husband of Hélène Clatsop Celiast). Another wave of smallpox reappeared in 1854, and the new economics of the state of Oregon and territory of Washington reserved little place for Natives. A growing oyster trade in Willapa Bay attracted some survivors. James G. Swan’s well-known The Northwest Coast (1857) documents the regular use of Wawa along Shoalwater Bay from the mid-1850s onward. There, in what had been Chehalis

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territory, or at least its rim, Wawa became the bridge not only between Natives and whites, but also for those Wawa speakers who had not become bilingual in Chehalis, which was dominant among the Native population and destined to replace Chinook proper within a generation (Boas’s informant Charles Cultee was married into that community and spoke Chehalis with greater ease than Lower Chinook). Yet it is apparent from the negotiations with US Superintendent of Indians Isaac I. Stevens and his agent, William H. Tappan, that Wawa, in 1855, played only an intermediary role in the regional linguistic makeup. For example, in early January of that year, a group of Chinook refused to talk with Tappan: “Instead of using the Wawa to communicate with him, they conversed among themselves in their own tongue” (Ruby and Brown 1976, 234). Stevens was a proponent of one big reservation extending from Grays Harbor north to Cape Flattery at the northwestern tip of Washington State, and so gathered a representative council of Chinook, Chehalis, Quinaults, Satsops, and Cowlitz. “To the Indians, who had drawn into a large circle, the governor made his customary warming-up speech, which was translated by Colonel B.F. Shaw into the Chinook Jargon, from which Indians of each tribe translated it into the language of their people, who in turn discussed it – in all a lengthy process of great concern to Stevens but not to the Indians” (Ruby and Brown 1976, 235). A year later, in early April 1856, a delegation of Natives from the interior, many of whom were embroiled in the Yakima campaign, visited the Chinook and other coastal Natives to incite them into taking up arms against the settlers and their army. Wawa, in Swan’s words (1971, 126), “never used except when Indians and whites are conversing, or by two distant tribes, who do not understand each other,” was the common tongue in these unsuccessful tractations. This intertribal diplomatic Wawa was doubtless different in lexicon, pronunciation, and perhaps even structure from that spoken in the fishing village of Chinook on the north shore at the mouth of the Columbia, where, two decades later, the demographics of Horatio Hale’s Fort Vancouver persisted, as an American traveller described in the 1860s: “When the hundred FrenchCanadians, half-bloods, and inter-married descendants of all finished processing their daily catches at that place they frolicked at day’s end, punctuating the air with sounds of a patois, a French and Indian jargon interlarded with some

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Scottish and a little English” (Angelo 1866, 15). This Wawa spoken by those drawn from Fort Vancouver into the coastal fishing trade was in turn different from that which had spread through Puget Sound and on up the British Columbia coast beginning in the 1830s. The most prominent of the reservations in which the survivors of three generations of contact were confined was of course Grand Ronde, from which Henry Zenk derived the data for his “Chinook Jargon and Native Cultural Persistence in the Grand Ronde Indian Community, 1856-1907: A Special Case of Creolization” (1984), to this day the most complete and informative study of a particular group of Wawa speakers, their history, and their language. The expansion of Wawa eastward beyond The Dalles and up the Columbia and Snake Rivers can be traced with some accuracy, although it was neither continuous nor always successful. In the late 1830s, Wawa was the vernacular in use between Natives and missionary communities at The Dalles, as described by Lee and Frost (1844). Yet in 1841, when the Congregationalist missionary Asa Bowen Smith set himself up higher on the Columbia Plateau at Kamiah along the Clearwater River, precisely because that was “where the pure Nez Perces is spoken” (Drury 1958, 103), he encountered what he felt were insurmountable obstacles to communication: Wawa, like English, was inadequate, and Nez Perce remained impenetrable, at least for some time. Eventually the author of the first Nez Perce grammar, Smith was a proponent of evangelization in it despite its confounding difficulty, given that there was in his mind no choice: “After witnessing what has been accomplished towards instructing the [Nez Perce] people in the English language for three years, I must say it appears folly in the extreme” (Drury 1958, 106). That Wawa was not an option at that point in time and at that place is also plain from the efforts of his fellow Protestant missionary Henry Harmon Spaulding (whose command of Nez Perce Smith repeatedly criticized) to struggle with and eventually print grammars and religious material in Nez Perce. In any event, among the complaints that some Nez Perce held against the missionaries at Lapwai, just above Lewiston on the Clearwater River, was that the Spauldings had not let them learn English, “the only language God understood” (Drury 1958, 326). Accounts of the troubles among the Nez Perce during the 1840s regularly mention interpreters whose knowledge, usually through marriage, was of Nez Perce itself or, alternatively, if they

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were Native, of English, that is, not Wawa (Josephy 1965, 226, 246, 254). This recourse to interpreters with knowledge of Amerindian languages reflects the limitations of Wawa as late as mid-century on the Columbia Plateau, both in the sense that not all Natives spoke it and that all whites were far from conversant with it. Throughout the Northwest, in fact, whites found Wawa “an awkward but necessary means of communication. English and native languages proved more effective where precision was needed. Then the natives, some of whom were slaves or ex-slaves, were called upon to interpret” (Ruby and Brown 1993, 64). At least among the Salishan speakers of the Plateau, there was also the previously mentioned early local sign language, one replaced by another imported from the Northern Plains and learned particularly through the Crow (Teit 1930, 135, 261, 373). Above The Dalles, it was signing, rather than Wawa, that facilitated trade (Stern 1993, 26). Wawa was late in coming to the Plateau, and among the Salishan there it never replaced French as fallback medium of communication in the trading posts, or English with the Protestant missionaries. There is nonetheless something revealing about Chief Joseph’s use of Wawa en famille with settlers in the Wallowa Valley and his desire thereby to exchange more than mere information – the episode with which this book began. Joseph understood that Wawa was potentially integrative, expressing and indeed knotting social bonds of a sort at odds both with English and with the Nez Perce that no settlers ever picked up. There were, in any event, no more than five thousand Nez Perce speakers in the 1840s, and far fewer in the 1870s. For Joseph, Wawa was an alternative to the inexorable clash of language and people in which he was enmeshed. The politeness he strove to convey through its use was nevertheless futile, as we saw. Farther west and closer to the Chinook heartland, Wawa was a ready instrument by the 1850s. One of the most famous phrases in Wawa is the death plea of Chief Qualchan. First quoted in B.F. Manring’s Conquest of the Coeur d’Alenes, Spokanes and Palouses, it was reproduced in Powers’s History of Oregon Literature and reprised in Thomas 1935 (47). Although Qualchan’s plea has become the stuff of legend, it too suggests that Wawa was the natural vehicle for spontaneous exchange between Natives and whites. At the same time, if we are to believe other accounts of this, Wawa was not always

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the first choice for Native-Native discourse. According to another anecdote from A.J. Splawn, Qualchan’s younger brother Lo-kout was present at the execution of the former and briefly had a noose about his own neck. Lo-kout was cut free, however: “A voice in his native tongue said, ‘Jump on your horse and flee or you are a dead man ...’ He [Lo-kout] looked up to see a half-breed Colville Indian cutting him loose” (Splawn 1917, 119; emphasis added). Splawn’s widow, Margaret C. Splawn, who edited the book, testified to the authenticity of this anecdote: “This speech Mr. Splawn and I heard. I took it down. It was at this time that Lo-kout gave Mr. Splawn the information about the deaths of Qual-chan and Ow-hi” (1917, 468). In the Yakima and related wars that followed over the next three years, Wawa continued to be spoken between the sides, in part because members of the various militia involved (Olney’s “Forty Thieves,” Ford’s “Walla Walla Mounted Militia,” or Cornoyer’s Métis “Volunteers”) were Wawa speakers, many conscripted from French Prairie (Munnick 1972, A1-6). By the 1860s, the valleys of eastern Oregon and Washington were sufficiently subdued for systematic settlement to begin, and Wawa was frequently used between these settlers and the Native population that remained. One settler who did use Wawa frequently was in fact Splawn. In his memoirs, which are woven into the history of the Yakima’s defeat, he recalls having first learned it at the age of fifteen in order to communicate with the daughter of a Klickitat elder, a “red Princess” who had enchanted him (Splawn 1917, 141). Although raised in the Willamette Valley in the early 1850s, Splawn did not, by his own account, learn Wawa until he crossed the Cascades in 1860, which speaks to the limited extent to which it was spoken even in its heartland. Shortly thereafter, Splawn left for the Fraser River valley in central British Columbia, where Wawa was commonplace, or so one should gather from the names of those at a “squaw dance” in the winter of 1861-62: Skookum Dan, Cultus Liz, Tenas George, Klat-a-wa Kate, Mam-ma-loose Jim, and Hi-a Jane (175). The Fraser River Gold Rush of the late 1850s had attracted a large population of transient fortune seekers, plus others like Splawn who were simply drawn into events. More than one of the first Chinook Jargon dictionaries targeted this market. Once Wawa was launched, it took an array of disparate forms, each of which in turn represented the particular conditions prevailing in each contact zone, hence its ambiguity as seen from the paradigms of linguistics, even

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creolistics. In some ways, Wawa is not definable as a “pidgin-creole,” the hybrid term invented to explain the many anomalies within the world’s gamut of contact languages. Even in the “special” creolized varieties found on Grand Ronde, the syntactic forms associated with full creolization are rare in Wawa. This autonomous target of norms that jelled during the period of contact around Fort Vancouver remained elastic, as speakers of different backgrounds bent their ears to each other and, twisting their tongues, substituted artificial distinctions for phonemic contrasts that they did not possess. Nor can Wawa be said to possess the sort of complex semantics found in “natural” languages, the idioms that mark the conventionalization of a pidgin being far from amenable to deep analysis. There is nonetheless every evidence that speakers in the east and the north as well as in the heartland identified with Wawa, and with other speakers through it. Moreover – this is the telling factor – somehow the centre of this amorphous body of speech conventions held across a vast territory in conditions of continuous disruptive contact and conflict and over at least four generations. Perhaps one reason this centre has held is that Wawa became a diaspora language. Technically defined as one spoken in a zone of migration, a diaspora language inevitably comes bearing a culture haunted by a sense of lost and distant roots. Having assumed its present shape during the first decades of the nineteenth century on the lower Columbia, Wawa lost its homeland as the region became radically transformed. It became by and large an obsolete language in which disparate and scattered communities now seek traces of their past. This kind of hypothesis is not amenable to cut-and-dried scientific proof. Yet it is clear that present-day advocates of Wawa identify with more than the language itself. Be they actively involved in language preservation, like those at Grand Ronde, or simply individually motivated devotees, they find in Wawa the symbol of a yearned-for regional history broader and better than the way things turned out. In other words, as Wawa spread in waves across the Northwest, it became a mega-sign signifying desire for a community beyond those to which its speakers are currently bound. One indication of this nostalgic yearning can be found in the value attributed to the Nootkan and Chinookan elements of Wawa, from which do indeed emanate a haunting sense of now alien but compelling societies. An

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emblem of this nostalgia, Wawa has come for some to serve as the notional “national” language of a unified and ecologically correct Cascadia. Writing in this setting as a Canadian, I am inclined to add that Wawa reverberates far beyond the putative boundaries of Cascadia, since it can also be read as the symbol of an ideal but unattained Canadian synthesis. Based largely on Indian, Native, and Métis foundations, this imaginary “Canadian Wawa” would have roughly the same proportion of English and French as these two languages have speakers in Canada today. It would be a language known to and shared by all. That Canadian Wawa belongs in the realm of fantasy, but there is still a Cascadian Wawa, and people who speak it.

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Conclusion

Pidgins and creoles are not formed in a void. Contact languages are not brewed according to some abstract recipe calculating the deep structures of the languages in contact; instead, they evolve within a matrix of concrete conditions at many levels.1 To be sure, some factors prevail over others. Throughout this book, it has been argued that the cultures and customs of the Northwest peoples and the modi operandi of Canadian fur trade society were the fundamental givens of the genesis of Wawa. There were, however, two factors that need to be especially underscored: the demographic collapse of the Northwest Indian societies and the often neglected role women played in the making of Wawa. “Genocide” is not only a loaded word but one that fails to capture the gravity of the events that rolled across the Americas from the fifteenth century onward. What actually happened was even more devastating than the premeditated extermination of the population could have been. The presumed superiority of European technology has often been exaggerated. The balance often swung the other way, at least initially. The imminent starvation of the Lewis and Clark party as they crossed the Rockies in 1805 compared with the bounty possessed by the Nez Perce is but one anecdote among countless confirming that invasion and settlement would have turned out very differently had Indians, upon whom Europeans were usually dependent in the beginning, consistently resisted rather than abided the latter. Unfortunately, Amerindian societies were never in a position to resist as fully as they might have if the debilitating effects of epidemics had not been visited upon them. The explorers, adventurers, and finally settlers could never have perpetrated as complete a destruction as did “disease-related population

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loss” (Mann 2006, 453). This is not to say that there were not many cases when Europeans knowingly chose to spread disease, the 1763 distribution of smallpox-contaminated blankets during the British conquest of French Canada being one widely cited example.2 Recently, historians have understood that the New World epidemics resulting from Old World viruses and bacteria took place well before Europeans had been able to expand their tenuous footholds. The germs in question leapt ahead of human incursions from Europe. Such a perspective reflects the epidemiological fact that the isolation of the New World from the germ pools of Eurasia, as well as the relative absence from the Americas of certain domesticable animals, pigs in particular, exposed Indians from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego to the devastating contagions that raged from the fifteenth century onward (Mann 2006, 98-106). The Pacific Northwest conforms to this pattern, since epidemics of smallpox and syphilis – the latter has often been thought to be one of the rare New World contributions to the international germ pool (but see Mann 2006, 35153) – broke out well before prolonged contact. Smallpox had been brought to the coast by Spanish ships, and the Lower Chinook experienced it by 1778, just as the Nootka trade began (Gibson 1992, 273-74). Lewis and Clark encountered the disastrous effects of smallpox all across the Prairies, and learned that it had already decimated the Clatsop four or five years prior to their arrival. These bouts are but a few of the many that swept the entire continent in the 1770s and 1780s. In other words, well before the Astorians and their successors established themselves at the mouth of the Columbia, the societies in question had been severely weakened. The devastation continued unabated. In 1824, Hudson’s Bay Company documents put the total Native population between the coast and The Dalles at 2,760. This figure was perhaps low, but within a decade the population became drastically smaller, after the epidemic beginning in 1830. Three-quarters of the natives in the vicinity of Fort Vancouver perished around October 1830 (Rich 1941, 88). The Cascades tribes, according to Blanchet in September 1843, were composed mostly of young people, “all the elders having been cut down by the fevers [in the early 1830s]” (Munnick 1972, A-13). The overall decline in populations was radical. Boyd (1990, 1999) suggests a 90 percent decrease in the total population during the first decades of contact.

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The early histories of most pidgins and creoles are grisly. Language contact of the sort that creates them is inherently wrenching, convulsive. 3 The Atlantic creoles, in particular, were born out of the brutality of the African slave trade and Caribbean plantation economies. In the case of Wawa, it is critical to understand the cataclysmic demographic conditions that attended its genesis and development, since they, as much as any other factors, shaped it. During the first years of contact, Chinook society remained sufficiently intact for Lower Chinook to be targeted by the traders as what in other circumstances might be called a superstrate, the language of prestige and power that a weaker population, here the Europeans, attempts to learn. This had certainly been the case with Nootka and the Nootka Jargon, since the maritime fur traders had no choice but to try to communicate in the language of the middlemen who monopolized the trade. But the transmission of the Nootka Jargon down the coast and its apparent embrace by the Chinook among others signals an important regional shift, one that opened the way to Wawa, providing at the same time its core vocabulary. The fact remains that the Astorians did continue to try to speak some approximation of Lower Chinook, as Ross’s word list shows. In any event, the virtual extinction of LC speakers by the 1830s and the removal of HBC headquarters from Lower Chinook territory reinforced the role of Wawa as principal contact language whenever English or French were not possible. Wawa was, then, one product among others of the epidemics that raged along the Northwest Coast until the Indian populations were finally expelled from their traditional lands and replaced as the dominant population by English-speaking settlers from the United States. Others have written and still others will write about the subsequent history of Wawa as an intertribal medium of communication among the Natives incarcerated on the reservations and reserves. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that this contact language was born out of not just contact but also demographic collapse. There is a second demographic dimension to the story of Wawa that needs to be repeated. This is the extent of women’s role in its genesis. The implied standard model for language contact predicates two males engaged in trade and striving to communicate across a language barrier. To be sure, this was often the case, and the various instances where Wawa or its predecessor, the Nootka Jargon, arose would seem to confirm this presumption.

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The absence of female voices from the documents as we have them is surely not an accident. It is related to a bias built into European society and from which there was little or no escape in the eighteenth and nineteenth (and, some might well argue, until well into the twenty-first) centuries. At the same time, a form of puritanism has induced many linguists, even those who are inclined to close study of the historical context of pidgin and creole genesis, to neglect the fact that sexual “exchange” is an essential element in any cross-cultural “trade.” This was patently the case and can be seen in the documents dealing with the Nootka trade from Cook’s Journals onward. During the Nootka phase, women were still “objects named” rather than “subjects of naming.” This is consonant with the inchoate and eventually undeveloped state at which Nootka Jargon remained, in part because the triangular maritime trade and, more specifically, that in maritime mammal pelts shifted quickly away from Yuquot. There was no lasting settlement, no enduring focus of trade, and accordingly no stable community and the care for offspring that such implies. This last factor marks the qualitative difference between the maritime trade and exploratory missions to Vancouver Island on the one hand and the permanent occupation of land that began at Astoria in 1811. From that point on, there were repeated regular contacts between the Lower Chinook and paston, kinchauch, and pasaïuks. The last group, consisting largely of French-speaking voyageurs, brought to the Northwest Coast their centuriesold practice of intermarriage with Indian women and métisses. Within a year or two of their arrival at the mouth of the Columbia, the Astorians, both French and Scottish, were forming strategic marital alliances with the Chinook. Some of their progeny were named in the preceding chapters, but most were totally anonymous. The word lists from that period reflect the male-dominated trade economy and can be readily broken down into categories essential for barter, exchange, and sale. The indirect evidence is clear, however. Most publicly acknowledged interpreters of Indian languages were married to Indian or later to Native women, and it is their children, more precisely the children of these men and their wives, who composed the first cohort of Wawa speakers beginning around 1820. We can be sure that, insofar as possible, these Native wives practised the multilingualism found in the region long before

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contact. Their children would have heard in the cradle one of the Amerindian languages of the region or from beyond. We know that Iroquois, Ojibwe, and Cree were present. While it was undoubtedly the case that speakers of any given language would seek out and establish connections with others who share it, the scope of each language in the Northwest, with the exception of English and for several decades French, was limited, especially in a society in constant flux. It was under these conditions that Wawa arose. To be sure, there are no data, in the strict sense, of language use in these domestic settings. Given the fluidity and mobility of many of the families involved, “household” is also something of a misnomer. If, however, we take Horatio Hale at his word, by 1841 children in the streets of Fort Vancouver were casually speaking what he knew to be Wawa, a language that he described in some detail and that was, by that point in time, distinct from even “broken” Lower Chinook, there being already precious few speakers of the latter language left in Fort Vancouver or the region. The parents of almost all those children belonged to the cohort born from the early 1810s onward from marriages à la façon du pays. The American population of the Oregon Territory increased during the 1830s, although not as radically as it did once the Oregon Trail was opened. The total population was increasingly diverse, many living on the periphery of fur trade society or, like the missionaries, deliberately seeking to transform it. The fact remains that during the two decades or so in which the HBC controlled commerce in the region, the peculiar customs of the Canadian fur trade provided a milieu in which Wawa could become nearly native to many speakers. Until a decade ago, there was little recognition of the role gender played in the Canadian fur trade or, to put it less abstractly, of the crucial economic contribution and wider social and cultural impact of women. 4 The fur trade was a man’s thing. Be it of the daring Scottish explorers who are touted in Canadian history books, or the hardworking voyageurs who carried the loads, it was through the lens of men’s activity that its story had been told. In Making Wawa, there is a substantial dose of what Pollard (1990) called “Whig history” – history from the top down. Yet my goal has been to show that a contact language is “made” from the ground up, and that the whole raft of interdisciplinary, interstitial specializations in the academic marketplace are necessary tools for its study.

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Above and beyond these academic considerations, it turns out that a personal genealogical quest has led many people back to Wawa and will have interested them in this book. Some of this material has been on the World Wide Web for several years in more rudimentary form. Almost all the resulting e-mail queries came from women seeking more information about their ancestors, especially those of Native background. This factor alone should alert us to the importance that Wawa not only had but could continue to have in the minds of those living in Cascadia.

Appendix – Manuscript 195: A Partially Annotated Early Glossary of Chinook Jargon

As discussed in Chapter 3, this transcription is based on a typescript, made by someone unfamiliar with Wawa, of a now missing handwritten glossary, so errors are many. This text is nonetheless an important missing link that demonstrates that Wawa had jelled in its present form by the end of the 1820s at the latest. I am grateful to Henry Zenk for discovering and passing on the material, and to Dave Robertson for many corrections and suggestions. Neither should be blamed for my mistakes. The items have been alphabetized and are followed immediately by the gloss given in the original. Underlined letters refer to odd spellings in the typescript that have been left in place. My aim has been to link as many items as possible with DBS (Demers/Blanchet/St. Onge, here including Lionnet 1853), and then to correlate them with Franchère 1820 (circa 1812) Ross = Thwaites 1904 (circa 1812) Hale 1846 GR (Grand Ronde usage in Zenk and Johnson 2003) Given this sequence, we can readily see that Manuscript 195, even in the present imperfect form, connects in almost every case with the list cited by Hale about fifteen years later, while offering, in many cases, a shortened

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form of items found in Franchère and Ross. The survival of the vast majority of them can be confirmed in recognizable forms in Grand Ronde usage. aa, yes. DBS ah. Ross aa. Hale a. GR aha. adse, sister. DBS ats. Ross ats. Hale ats younger sister. GR ats. ancutty, time past. DBS ankate. Ross ankatè. Hale anlkati. GR anqati, long ago. ayack iscum water, make haste to get water. DBS aïak. Ross i-ake. See isoum below. GR ayáq. ayhack, to make haste. Idem. cahlack, fence. DBS kalal. GR q’alaû. cahluckcalah, birds of all kinds (just above cahluckcalah in the typescript is an indecipherable form for “birds”). DBS klakla. Ross cal-a-cal-ama goose. Hale kalákalá. GR kalakala. cahmooks, dog. DBS kamuks. Franchère kamoux. Ross camux. Hale kámuks. GR khamuksh. cahquah, like. DBS kakwa. Hale kákwa. GR kakwa or khakwa. calaqlty, bark. DBS kalakwat, cedar bark. Kalakáti or bark skirts were soon replaced with cloth ones. See Ray 1938 (138) for a description, Hajda 1984 (137) for their geographical range. Only the oldest women still wore them among the surviving Chinook on Shoalwater Bay at mid-nineteenth century (Swan 1857, 112, 154-55). cach, where. DBS kaĥ. Franchère kakhpah emoreya “Where do you go”. Hale kah. GR qha. or qhaû. capho, brother (see ow). DBS kahpo. Ross cap-whoo relations. GR kapxu older sibling. capswallaw, to steal. DBS kapshwala. Moziño cap-xitl. Ross capshewalla. Hale kapshuála. GR kapshwala. catah, why. DBS kata. Ross cat-ta. Hale kata. GR qhata. checkameen, iron and most tools and utensils. DBS chikomin. Ross chickamen. Hale tshikamen. GR chikhamin. chilchil, buttons. DBS tsiltsil. Ross cill-cill. Hale tiltil, tshiltschil. GR chilchil star, button. chisne, bold. ?

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chuck, water (potential etymons in both Nootka a’ak ‘river, creek, flowing stream’ and LC stem -qw). DBS tsok. Ross ill-chu water. Hale tsok. GR ts¢qw. clachman, out of doors. DBS klaĥane. GR ¿aûani. clack, to cut or let loose. DBS tlkop. GR ¿q’up to cut or ¿aû to come out. clackhowym, how do you do? DBS klahawioum. Ross tcha choea. Hale klahaweam. GR ¿aûayam. clalo, blue. See clayhim. claskstuk, who. DBS klaksta okuk / ok. Ross klaksta. GR ¿aksta uk? “Who is it?” clatahway, to go (Nootka ñatwa ‘to paddle steadily’). DBS tlatoa. Hale klatawa. GR ¿atwa, to go, walk. clatwah nanich kaywahtum, to hunt the horses. DBS tlatoa nanich see, kéwtan horse. Ross kiutan. GR ¿atwa nanich khiyut¢n “go see horses.” clayhim, black. See clalo. DBS tlihil black. Ross othlal-ough blue cloth. Hale kláïl black. GR ¿i€il black. cleminchood, not true (typescript error emended by unknown hand from “bleminchood”). DBS tleminwhit. Ross ettlè-mena chute falsehood. Hale kleminekwit. GR ï¿¢minxw¢t to lie or deceive. climenclimen, broken up or soft. DBS tlimintlimin. Hale klimenklimen. GR ï¿imin. cloon, three. DBS klun. Franchère thloun. Ross klune. Hale klon, klun. GR ¿un. comb ilahee, to harrow (similar handwritten correction as for cleminchood above). ‘comb’ + ‘earth’. See ilachee below. coolcool, mole. DBS houlhoul rat. GR xulxul mouse. cloonas, to not know. Franchère thlounasse otile “Perhaps some fruit?” Ross thlun-ass. GR ï¿unas. clootchamun, woman or women. DBS tluchmen. Ross tlutchè-men. Hale klutshmun. GR ¿uchm¢n. close, good (“blose” in the typescript; see cleminchood above). DBS tlush. Ross tlosh. GR ¿ush. cluxcah, them. DBS tlaskla. Hale klaska. GR ¿aska. cockshul stick, to cut wood. DBS kakshet stik. GR kashat stik. See next item.

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cokchuttle, to strike, to injure (cf. Walker’s Nootka Jargon Mokquilla kakhsheetl quotluk “Maquinna kill otter”). DBS kakshet. Hale kakcal to strike, hurt, kill destroy. klon nusaika kashatl we killed three. coopcoops, a small kind of hyquaka. GR kupkup. cow, to tie. DBS ĸao. Hale kao. GR ›aw. culeytum, balls and arrow. DBS kalaïten arrow. Ross caleitan. Hale kalaitan arrow, shot, bullet. GR kalayt¢n, kaláyt¢n-stik. cultus, common, nothing. DBS kaltas. Ross kaltash wa-wa idle talk. GR kh¢lt¢s. cumpton, brests [sic]. ? cumshaick, when, how many. DBS kansiĥ. Franchère Kantchik euskoya? “When will you return?” Ross Queentschech pasheshiooks? “How many whites?” Hale kantshiask musaika? “How many were there of you?” GR qhanchi. cumtux, to understand. DBS komtoks. Ross come-a-tax. Hale kumataks. GR k¢mt¢ks. cunahoohtak, everything. DBS kanewekaĥ. GR khanawi-ikta. cunahway, the whole. DBS kanawe. Hale kanawee. GR khanawi. echtah mamock, what are you doing? DBS ikta mamuk. Hale ikata / ikta mámuk. GR ikta mamuk. ech mowitch echtah micah potlatch, what will you give for a deer? DBS iĥt mowich ikta maïka mawich. GR ixt mawich ikta mayka palach. echt, one. DBS iĥt. Ross ight. Hale ikt, iht. GR ixt. echtah, what. DBS ekita. Franchère Ikta mika makoumak? “What do you want to eat?” Ross Ick-etta mika mackouk? “What are you going to trade?” Hale ikta goods, property. GR ikta what. echtah-micah jacko, what do you want? DBS ekita maïka (see iacke). elita, slave. DBS elaïtiĥ, elaik. See mischemis. enahpoo, flea. DBS inapu. Ross inapoo. GR inapu flea. enak, beaver. DBS ina. Ross enna. Hale ina. GR ina. enamocks, otter. DBS inamuks. Ross ennamuux. Hale nanámuks. enapty, on the other side. DBS inataï. Hale inatay. GR inatay. eselot, corn. DBS isalĥ. GR isalx. fehlan, fathom. DBS itlan fathom, yard. halo, none. DBS helo. Hale helu win no wind. GR hilu.

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hayhay, to laugh (typescript reads “haylay”). DBS hihi. Hale hehe. GR hihi. hias, large. DBS aïas. Ross hi-ass. Hale haias. GR hayash. homats, hand. Cf. DBS lemaï. Hale liman. GR lima. huloyoman, another’s. DBS holoïma. Hale haloima. GR ûlúyma or hulúyma, strange, different, mysterious. hum, stink. DBS ham. GR h¢m smelly, to stink. hyo salmon tumwater ultah, is there plenty of salmon at the falls? GR hayú sam¢n t¢mwata alta. See hyyo, ulkay. hyquak, a shell used as money (Dentalium pretiosum, the pre-contact currency). Ross queentshich higua? “How many dentalia?” GR haykwa. hyyo, plenty. DBS ayo. Hale hi-oh, haiu. GR hayú. iacke, to come. See ayack and echtah-micah jacko. ilachee, land. DBS elehi. Franchère illekai. Ross e-lè-he. Hale ilehi. GR ili€i. iscum nicah caywahtum, bring my horse. DBS iskom naïka kiutan. Ross eskam take it. Hale iskam. GR isk¢m nayka khiyut¢n. issik, paddle. DBS issik. Hale isik. GR isik. kapwaw, needle and awl. DBS kipuet. Ross ke-pa-watt. Hale kiapot. GR ›ipwat. kaywahtum, horse. DBS kuitan. Ross keutan. Hale kíutan. GR khiyut¢n. kegualy, inside. DBS kikwile. Hale kikwili. GR kikw¢li down, under, low. kinoos, tobacco. DBS kaïnuĥ. Franchère kaienoulk. Hale kainutl. GR ›aynu¿. lacket, four (typescript has “sacket”). DBS laket. Franchère lakut. Ross lakat. Hale laket or lakt. GR lakit. lazy, lazy. DBS lese. Hale lesi. GR lisi. liplip, to boil or cook (typescript has “siplip”). DBS leplep. Hale liplip (“by onomatopoeia”). GR líphlip. lollo, to carry (typescript has “sollo”). Hale lolo. GR lulu. loloosloloos, mat made of rushes (typescript has “soloossoloos”). DBS ĸliskwis. GR ¿iskwis mat. maeclight, in, at, on, down. DBS mitlaït. Franchère mitlaight o kok “sit down there”. Ross meth-lite sit down, come in. Hale mitlait. GR mit¿ayt. mahmook, to make or do. DBS mamuk. mahsetchy, bad. DBS masache. Ross mass-atsy. Hale masátsi. GR mashachi. marmoock-pire, make the fire. DBS mamuk païa.

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marmoock pire stick, get firewood. DBS mamuk païa stik. mahkook, to purchase (typsescript has “mahmook”). Ross mackouk. Hale mákuk. GR makuk. marthany, the shore. DBS matline. Hale mátlini to or near the river. GR ma¿xw¢li or máhw¢li inland. maeame, below. DBS maïmi. Hale maimi downstream. GR may€mi downriver. mawxt, two. DBS mokst. Hale makst. GR makwst. mememoss, dead. DBD memlust. Hale memelust. GR mim¢lust. metlap, leggings (Cree mitâs ‘trousers’ [singular animate noun] via French). GR mitas leggings. micah, you. DBS maïka. Hale mayka. GR mayka. micah claluah namich mowitch, will you go and hunt deer. DBS maïka tlatoa nanich mowich. GR mayka ¿atwa nanich mawich. midquar, to stand up. DBS mithwi. Hale mitkoi. GR mitxwit. mischemis, slave (from Nootka masim ‘commoner’). DBS michtimich. Hale mistshimus. GR michtsimas. See elita. misikeah, you or them. DBS msaïka. Hale musaika. GR msayka (pl.). moolak, elk. DBS mulak. GR mulak. moon, moon. DBS mun. Hale mun. GR mun. moosmoos, buffalo, bull cow. DBS musmus stable. Hale musmus. moosum, to sleep. DBS musum. Hale mosum, musam. GR musum. mowitch, deer. DBS mowich. Ross wow-wich small deer. GR mawich deer. muckmuck, to eat. DBS mokamok. GR m¢km¢k. muckmuck-water, to drink. DBS mokamok. GR m¢km¢k wata. nanitch, to see. DBS nanich. Ross nananitch (but not in Mixed Dialect). GR nanich. nesikah, we or us. DBS nsaïka. GR nsayka. newitcak, true. DBS nawitka, nawitika. Ross na-wetca. Hale nawitika. GR nawitka. nicah, me or I. DBS naïka. GR nayka. nequas, let me see it. DBS niĥwa. GR nixwá. ocok-sun, today. DBS okuk son. Hale okok-sun. GR ukuk-san. oculah, hazelnuts. DBS tokola. GR taq¢wla.

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olilee, berries of all kinds. DBS olile. Franchère thlounasse otile “Perhaps some fruit?” Ross o’lèlè strawberries. Hale olele. GR ulali. olo, hungry. DBS olo. Franchère olo. Ross nica oh-low “I am hungry”. Hale olo. GR ulu. olpskay, fire (doublet at pire). DBS olipitsike. Ross uliptskè. Hale olapitski. GR ulapitski. ooock, that. DBS okuk. Ross ock-ock these. Hale ókok. GR uk, ukuk. ocharlee, file. DBS lalim, from French. Hale lalim. oosqualah, sinews. Cf. DBS ĸaïaĥ. GR q’ayaû guts. opats, tail. DBS oputs. Hale opotsch stern of a vessel. GR uphuch ass, genitals. orchut, trail. DBS oïĥot. Hale wikat. GR uyxat. oscum, basen [sic] or bowl or mug. DBS oskan. Ross useun kettle. Hale kitl. GR uskan cup, dipper, can. ow, brother. DBS hao younger brother. Ross a-u brother. Hale au brother, younger. GR aw. paddle, full. DBS patl. Ross pattle. GR pha¿. pahsisooks, white men. DBS pasaïuks French. Franchère papische aiyouks. Ross pa-she-shi-ooks. Hale pasaioks (“Français?”). GR phasayuks. pawsissa, blanket. DBS pasisee. Franchère passiche cloth, passischqua cover. Ross pa-chichè-till-cup (surely a white one: till-cup; see tecope). Hale pasese. GR passisi. pilpil, blood, red. DBS pelpel. Ross pill-pill. Hale pélpel, pilpil. GR pil red. piltum, fool. DBS pilten. Hale pílton. GR pilt¢n. pire, fire (doublet at olpskay). DBS païa. Hale paya. GR phaya. pishaik, very bad. DBS pishak. Ross pishack. Hale pishak or peshak. GR phishak. pispis, cat. DBS puspus. Ross piss-piss. GR Ùus. poe, a charge of powder. DBS po. Hale po to shoot, noise of a gun (“by onomatopoeia”). potlatch, to give. DBS potlatch. Ross patlatch. GR palach or pa¿ach. pulalley, powder. DBS polale. Ross poll-alley balls. Hale polali, pulali. GR pulali. pullachly, night. DBS polakle. Ross polackly. Hale polakle or pulakli. GR pulakhli. qualap, raccoon. DBS kwalas wild rat. GR q’al¢s.

156

Appendix

quansum, always. DBS kwanisson. Hale kwanisum. GR kwans¢m. quas, to fear. DBS ĸwas. Ross quass. Hale kwas. GR ›was. quiets, nine. DBS ĸwaïts. Ross quie-est. Hale kwaiíst. GR ›wayts. quinum, five. DBS kwanom. Ross quinum. Hale kwunum. GR qwin¢m. quopit, to finish or to stop. DBS kopet. Hale kwapet. GR kh¢pit. sachlee, above. DBS saĥali. Ross sáhali, sákali. Hale sáhali. GR saûali. sahcahlooks, pantaloons. DBS sakaluks. Hale sakaluks. GR si›aluks. sahpolel, wheat, flour, or bread. DBS sapelil. Hale sapelil. GR saplel. sallex, to be angry. DBS saliks. Franchère chalaks. Hale sáleks. GR saliks. seahoust, eyes. DBS siaĥost. Ross sheaugh-ouest. Hale siáhos. GR siyaxus face, eyes. seahpotes, hat. siyapu¿, or shapu. DBS siapult. Ross ohe-a-pool hat (probably “she-a-pool”) and cheapool. Hale siápot. seetcoom, half. DBS sitkum. Hale sitkum. GR sitkum. seiyah, far away. DBS saïa. Ross sciah. Hale saia. GR saya. shoocomb, strong. DBS shukum strong, skokum “spider, insect which the jugglers pretend to find in the body of a patient”. Ross is-co-com “Good spirit” (in the Mixed Dialect although from Lower Chinook). Hale skókom, skukúm. GR skukum strong and skukúm dangerous. siam, bear. DBS shaïm. Hale saíam brown bear. GR shayam grizzly bear. sinemauxt, seven. DBS senemokst. Franchère sinebakust. Ross sinamuxt. Hale sunumakst, sinimakst, sanamakst. GR sinamakwst. six, friend (LC voc. ik friend!). DBS siks. Hale siks. GR siks. skae, fresh, new. Hale ishi now, immediately. GR chxi. skakqual, gule (gun). Franchère sakquallal. Ross suck-wall-allè. Hale sukwalal. GR saqwala. snass, rain. DBS snas. Ross snass (Mixed Dialect although from Lower Chehalis). Hale snas. GR snas. stocktekeen, eight. DBS stotkin, sotĥin. Franchère stoutekane. Ross istoughttekin. Hale stohtkin, stuhkin. GR stuxkin. sun, sun. DBS san. See ocok-sun. GR san. tachleelum, ten. DBS tatlelom. Franchère itallilum. Ross eattathlelum. Hale tatlelam. GR ta¿lam. tackakmoonack, one hundred. DBS takamunak. Ross e-tha-ca-munack. Hale takamonak, takamanak. GR tak’umunaq.

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tahmoolche, barrel. DBS tamolich. Hale tamólitsh cask, barrel. GR ïamulch. takey, to be fond. DBS tike, tiĸeĥ. Franchère Ste kech “I love you”. Ross tekeigh. Hale tukeh. GR tiki or thq’i. tapahote, shame (Robertson [personal communication, 2007] genially suggests French t’as pas honte). Cf. DBS shem. Ross nachamats shame. GR shím. tarpa, woolf. DBS talapos. The trickster hero of many regional tales, hence Franchère etalapass “God, or the Supreme Being”. GR ïalaÙas, coyote. tathlelum poo pullalley, ten charges of powder (typescript has “the charges of powder”). See tachleelum, poe, and pulalley. tanky, yesterday. DBS tanlke. Ross tanilkey. Hale taanliki. GR ta€an¿khi, tan¿ki. tecope, white. DBS tkop. Ross till-cup. Hale tekup. GR th›up. teyhawe, feet (per handwritten emendation). DBS teïawit. GR thiya€wit or thiyáw¢t. tekeek, fish hook. DBS tekek, akik. GR ikhik. tenas, small. DBS tanas. Ross ta-na-ass. Hale tánas. GR t¢n¢s. tenas sun, early in the morning. DBS tanas san. tice, chip. ? till, tired. DBS til, tel. Hale tul, til. GR thil. tiluchum, man or people (handwritten correction from “fliluchum”). DBS telikom. Franchère tilikum men. Ross tilloch-cum Indians. Hale tilikum. GR tilixam. tipso, hair, grass, leaves. DBS tipso. Hale iákso, yakso hair. GR tipsu grass, yáksu hair. tomollow, tomorrow. DBS temala. Hale tumala, wáki. GR tamala. toottooche, milk. DBS totush. Hale titush. GR tutúsh klís, tutush nipple. tuchan, six. DBS taĥom. Ross tuchum. Hale takam, taham. GR taûam. tumtum, heart. DBS tomtom. GR t¢mt¢m. ulkay, soon. DBS alke. Ross alké by-and-by, and alkè just now. Hale álke. GR a¿qi later, in the future. ultah / ultax, now. DBS alta. Hale álta. GR alta. wack, to throw. DBS waĥ. GR waû to spill. wahwah, to talk. DBS wawa. Hale wawa. GR wawa. wake, no. DBS wek. Hale wek, wik. GR wik. wake ultah halo, no, none now. DBS wek alta helo. GR wik alta hilu.

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wappahtoo, potato. DBS wapetu. Ross wapatoe. GR wapthu. water, water. Hale wata. GR wata. winapae, in a little. Ross winnippiè. Hale winapi. yahwah, there. DBS yakwa. Hale iáwa. GR yawá. yuchcah, his or his. DBS ïaka. Hale iáhka, yákha. GR yáûka.

Appendix

Chronology

1774. Juan Pérez expedition to Nootka Sound. 1775. First visitation of epidemic smallpox across the Northwest Coast, with a conservative estimate of 30 percent mortality (Boyd 1990). 1778. Captain Cook at Nootka Sound. The first glossary of Nootka is collected, probably by ship’s surgeon William Anderson. 1786. John MacKay, a member of Alexander Walker’s expedition, is left alone at Nootka Sound over the winter “to learn the local language.” 1788. John Meares records that he tried to use “the language of [Nootka Sound]” at Shoalwater (now Willapa) Bay in present-day Washington state. 1788-89. Robert Ingraham, a first mate with the American Robert Gray, claims that his extended stay at Nootka Sound that winter “enabled [him] to converse so well with the natives as to put beyond a doubt” that Cook was not the first European to enter the sound, but rather Juan Pérez. 1789. Esteban José Martínez’s ill-advised execution of Nootka Chief Callicum. 1792. Spanish scientific expedition to the region under the command of José Mariano Moziño, preceding Lewis and Clark by fifteen years. George Vancouver’s officers report that inhabitants of Grays Harbor, just north of Shoalwater Bay, recognize some Nootka words. John Boit (with Robert Gray’s expedition) apply “Chinoak” to the village of Qwatsamuts (çac‹mc). 1801. Second wave of smallpox along the lower Columbia. 1805. William Clark reaches the future site of Astoria. The journals of Clark and Meriwether Lewis record the first complete sentence in Wawa: Clouch musket, wake com ma-tax musket.

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Chronology

1811. Establishment of Astoria by the Pacific Fur Company. Alexander Ross reports after a few months on the Columbia that the Astorians have begun to pick up a few words of the language. 1812. The War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States begins in June. 1813. Sale of Astoria to the British North West Company, and then transfer to British rule. Astoria is renamed Fort George. Alexander Ross remarks that expeditions onto the Plateau are accompanied by Chinook escortinterpreters. 1818. Anglo-American Convention allows joint occupation and settlement of the Oregon Country, the territory west of the Rocky Mountains from lat. 42° N to lat. 54°40¢ N. 1821. The “coalition” or merger of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and the North West Company takes place, in effect a takeover of the latter by the former. 1824. John McLoughlin is appointed Chief Factor of the HBC at Fort Vancouver. James McMillan travels along Puget Sound, unable to communicate without interpretative chains. HBC estimates the total Indian population between the coast and The Dalles at 2,760. 1824-25. The “mortality” of 1824-25, possibly measles, causes a 10-20 percent drop in the Indian population. 1825. On 19 March, George Simpson formally opens Fort Vancouver for business. 1829. Etienne Lucier settles his family on “French Prairie” near Champoeg in the Willamette Valley. 1830. First epidemic of col sik, a “fever and ague” later determined to be malaria. Three-quarters of the Indian population in the vicinity of Fort Vancouver perish. Concomly (q‹nqÌli) dies, symbolizing the end of Indian social dominance on the Greater Lower Columbia. 1836. Washington Irving’s Astoria is published. 1838. Fathers Demers and Blanchet arrive at Fort Vancouver and begin collecting their word list and retroactively formalizing the marriages of fur trade couples. 1841. Horatio Hale arrives at Fort Vancouver as part of the United States Exploring Expedition preparing annexation. He describes children there as

Chronology

161

“growing up [and] to whom this factitious language is really the mothertongue, and who speak it with more readiness and perfection than any other.” 1843. Fort Victoria is founded in anticipation of the HBC withdrawal from south of the forty-ninth parallel. 1846. The Treaty of Oregon sets the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel. 1848. Oregon Territory is made a United States territory. 1849. HBC Pacific Headquarters are moved to Fort Victoria.

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Notes

A Note on Orthography 1 Paston wawa is understood to mean “the English language,” so paston chinuk wawa refers to the variety of Wawa spoken by mainstream Americans. I have never seen the expression, but we could coin the expression kinchauch wawa, making it mean ‘King George’ or Canadian English, leaving kinchauch chinuk wawa to mean Wawa the way Canadians speak it. 2 The discrepancy between the ĸ in ĸwas and the k in kwass is one example of editorial inconsistencies in these nineteenth-century works. I have tried to iron them out as much as possible. 3 My thanks to Henry Zenk, who not only reminded me how appropriate it would be to choose the Demers, Blanchet, St. Onge (DBS) system but also articulated to me its features and the contrasts it bears to the Grand Ronde system. See Zenk (forthcoming) for more information on DBS. Introduction 1 There is no simple solution to replacing the widely disapproved exonym “Indian,” which still stands in the title of many linguistic and anthropological texts, such as the Handbook of North American Indians. For one thing, usage in Canada and the United States is different, “First Nations” having acquired some legitimacy north of the forty-ninth parallel, “First Peoples” or “Native Americans” making their way south of it. “Aboriginal” has some currency in Canada but is widely disliked in the United States. For reasons that will become clear, I am reserving “Native” for post-tribal identities, although this term implies that the tribe was a living concept in pre-contact indigenous societies. It was not; it was and remains very much a European construct. In other words, “Native” contrasts with “white,” an ethnonym used both by those who referred to themselves with it and by those who defined themselves or were defined by others as not belonging to this set. I shall follow the practice set forth by Charles C. Mann in his 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (xi), which is to conform to the widely

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Notes to pages 2-15

accepted self-definition of most New World peoples, Indians, offering apologies in advance. Silverstein’s analysis of Chinook proper argued that its ergative structure offered sufficient suppleness for Chinookan speakers to produce intelligible phrases in Wawa, just as the accusative syntax of English enabled English speakers to do the same (1972, 388-92). In other words, speakers of Wawa used the grammar they possessed natively. No autonomous grammatical core of Wawa would accordingly exist. On its own terms, Silverstein’s demonstration was persuasive, but, as Thomason (1983, 832) observed, “the difficulty with [Silverstein’s] claim here is that he bases it on a theory of syntax so powerful that virtually any construction in a pidgin could be explained as a simplification of any language’s syntactic deep structure.” Nuuchahnulth comes from nuuaaÎu¿ ‘all along the mountains’. The name was adopted by Tribal Council decree in 1978. There was no previous indigenous term for the collectivity as a whole. I usually retain “Nootka” to avoid anachronism, an exonym that goes back to Captain Cook’s misunderstanding of nuutxaa ‘circling about’. The dialect of Nootka most frequently encountered during the maritime fur trade out of Nootka Sound was that now known as Mowachath (muwa‘at±), which belongs to the northern dialect group, itself a member of the southern branch of Wakashan languages (Stoneham 1999, 4-5). Zenk’s need to qualify Wawa as a “special case” reflected the disciplinary norms of creole linguists in the 1980s, when there was still contentious debate about the distinction between creoles and other classes of contact language. Today, it is accepted that contact languages assume a range of forms and types. As Mühlhäuser (1999, 122) has written: “The class labels that linguists have employed (language, dialect, patois, pidgin, creole, vernacular, lingua franca, etc.) are descriptive categories reflecting an artificial cultural selection of perceived similarities and dissimilarities. Whilst the descriptive categories are often arranged on a monodimensional continuum (e.g. pre-pidgin – pidgin – expanded pidgin) reality is multidimensional.” Both Mufwene (2001) and Ansaldo and colleagues (2007) offer what one might call “post-creolist” perspectives to those interested in pursuing this thread. My understanding is that, for the moment, pidgins and creoles should be put in a tentative grouping, that of extreme contact languages. The term Métis has complex connotations and differing legal implications. Within Canadian society, the Métis have status of a sort among the First Nations. In the United States, such status is not recognized, although Northwest Coast histories do not hesitate to invoke the term (e.g., Jackson 2007).

Chapter 1: The Nootka Jargon 1 As explained in the prefatory “A Note on Orthography,” the system adopted by the Confederated Tribes of the Community of Grand Ronde (Oregon) will occasionally be supplied to remind readers that there is a dialect of Wawa with an orthography

Notes to pages 15-26

2

3

4

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7

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distinct from the English-oriented spelling established in the lexicological tradition. The latter goes back to word lists collected during the fur trade, and then conveyed roughly from the 1850s onward through numerous commercialized and often pirated word lists. Johnson 1978 is the prime reference on these glossary histories and genealogies. The phrase can be found in the Moulton edition of the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1990, 6: 121), and also in the Thwaites edition (1905, 3: 276). For discussion of the possible impact of Biddle in the editorial process, see Jackson 1962, 497-97; Hajda 1984, 38; Zenk 1984, 28-29. As Ross Clark (forthcoming) observes, the Nootka laterals (ñ, ó, ¿) were lost in Nootka Jargon, and the pharyngeals (, ±) and glottals (€, h) sharply reduced. For example, Wawa tlush came from Nootka ñu¿ ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’. Europeans tend to replace the “impossible” sound of ñ (the initial lateral in the Nootka) with the kl in kloush or with tl in the French Wawa glossary tradition. The same sound is represented by ¿ in GR Wawa: ¿ush. Similarly, the equally “impossible” terminal Nootka ¿ was often rendered in Wawa by a ch or sh. Hence, Clark’s clouch, the cloush in Gray’s 1792 Nootka word list, and the sh in GR ¿ush. An economic historian’s analysis of the trade can be found in Gibson 1992, 299310, where there is a register of British, American, other trading and hunting vessels on the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841. A similar list of Spanish vessels and others can be found in Cook 1973, 550-51. Other examples in Fisher and Bumstead 1982, 250, and in the appendix of same. The orthography of Nootka has been regularized according to the system used by Nakayama (2001). Etymologies in this chapter are drawn from Clark, forthcoming; Carlson, Thomas, and Charlie 1982; Arima and Dewhirst 1990, 410; and Sapir and Swadesh 1939. It turns out that either Ingraham misinterpreted the numeral system or Nootka traditions had already become confused, because it was not forty but forty-four months after Pérez when Cook entered Nootka Sound (Beals 1989, 251). The List of Words in the captivity narrative by John R. Jewitt did appear later (Smith 1974, original 1815), although by that time the Nootka component of Wawa was already in place. The evidence is that Jewitt spoke not Nootka itself but Nootka Jargon (Clark, forthcoming). “Propositional” versus “integrative” and “expressive” in Mühlhäuser’s sense (1986, 81-87). See Table 1.1. The two sides of this debate as it relates to Wawa can be found in Silverstein 1972 and Thomason 1983. Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 262) described “mutual accommodation” during pidginization as the process during which speakers make “guesses” about what their interlocutors would understand. “‘Right’ guesses [would be] incorporated into the grammar of the developing contact language.” However tentative they may been, these “guesses” are informed ones, being based

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16 17 18

19 20

21

Notes to pages 27-39

upon what each interlocutor knows about the other(s), about the other’s need to know, about what all parties involved want to do. Walker’s manuscript was not published until 1982, and was thoroughly rewritten after he became governor of St. Helena, which explains his allusions to a text published decades after his stay at Nootka Sound: von Humboldt’s 1811 Political Essays (Fisher and Bumstead 1982, 90-91). For more on von Humboldt, there is Pratt’s chapter on the “Reinvention of America” (1992, 111-43). Nakayama (2001) demonstrates the complexity of Nootka morphosyntax. See also Jacobsen 1993 and 1979, and Sherzer 1976, 70, 76. See Stoneham 1999, 113, for the phonological features of statements attributed to Kwatyaat, a Nootka cultural hero, whose represented speech assumes special forms. Nakayama (2001, 148) allows that Nootka would likely be considered VSO “in Greenbergian terms,” although he prefers to avoid the claim. Table revised from Mühlhäuser (1986, 81-87), who derived these categories from Halliday (1974) and Jakobson (1987). Mühlhäuser has slightly altered his position about contact languages (1999). Like Ùaiñ, the source of “potlatch,” haptíiñ is another Nootka item with momentaneity marked by -íiñ. Moziño had cap-xitl, so it was definitely in Nootka Jargon. But, as Clark (forthcoming) observes, there is no perfect match for haptíiñ in Wawa, since the last two syllables in kapshwala cannot be easily explained. “Was I to name them as a Nation I would call them Wak’ashians, from the Wak’ash which they frequently made use of but rather more with the women than the men; it seems to express applause, approbation and friendship” (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 323). What Cook heard was waakaaí ‘bravo!’ Nootka €asco means ‘small fish in plenty’. As Haswell wrote into the Cook journals: “We continued to be entertained with their songs” (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 1396). Discussion and details in Arima and Dewhirst 1990, 400; Engstrand 1991, 55; Samarin 1988, 228. Stoneham (1999, 111-25) gives examples of this phenomenon of phoneme changes to convey “extralinguistic information,” such as the “voices” of mythological figures, and the language spoken to children. There is, however, no obvious trace of Nootka baby talk in Nootka Jargon (Kess and Kess 1986). On the general impact of the rise and fall of the maritime trade at Yuquot, see Gibson 1992, 251-52, 269-72, as well as Arima and Dewhirst 1990, 407. “Strangers were not allowed to come along side the Ships nor to have any trade or intercourse with us: our first friends, or those who lived in the Sound seemed determined to ingross us [e]ntirely to themselves” (Beaglehole 1969, 3: 299). “Begbie’s judgment confirms that the meaning and the reference of ‘Potlatch’ and ‘Tamanawas’ are undecidable ... Says Begbie, ‘From all I know of the gathering, I think it would be very hard to explain’ because ‘different people appear

Notes to pages 40-48

167

to have different notions as to what the word means.’ The reason it is difficult to identify this particular kind of ‘gathering’ is that the meaning of the word ‘Potlach’ does not give its hearer sufficient information to distinguish the ‘Potlach’ from the other kinds of gatherings that occur on the northwest coast” (Bracken 1997, 93-94). 22 See Clark, forthcoming, for a summary of Nootka loans into Wawa. 23 There is a converging Lower Chinook source for tsok. Per Zenk (1996, 182). Nootka ca€ak means ‘river, creek, flowing stream’. Discussed more fully in Chapter 2. 24 The expression comes from Boyd (1999, 64). In the following pages, he provides documentation concerning prostitution as practised at Yuquot. Chapter 2: Pidgin Chinook 1 Ray 1938, 35. Further on the point of the relevance of “tribe” along the lower Columbia, see Hajda 1984, 7-15; also Hajda 1984, 64-65, for other references to contact in the Columbia estuary. 2 See Silverstein 1974, S98-S99, for the areal and dialectical history of the Chinookan languages. The Penutian phylum is scattered widely in the Northwest, from the Tsimshian in the far north, south to California and east into the Plateau (Sherzer 1976; Silverstein 1990). 3 For an overview of the prehistory of the Northwest Coast, see Matson and Coupland 1995, and the summary of the coastal route theory of Indian migration in Mann 2006, 171-72. 4 In her appendix, Hajda (1984, 327-29) lists thirty “inter-ethnic” Indian marriages as found in the historical record. 5 Teit 1930, 126. “For some two decades [before contact] the tribes of the Nez Perce District had been shaped by the acquisition of an equestrian life, with an opening to the fascinating and perilous life on the Plains. Their larger, multi-tribal society had become reordered, with an emphasis on equestrian wealth” (Stern 1993, 207). 6 Indeed, it is clear from one report by an early explorer of the Willamette Valley based in Astoria that communication so far from the Chinook homeland was difficult. “There is,” he wrote, “something bad in agitation among the natives, [but] having no person with [me] who used the language, [I] cannot ascertain the truth” (Coues 1897, 752). This does not jibe with the idea that pidginized Chinook worked beyond the areas the Chinook themselves occupied. 7 “A Chief of the Countries below offered to accompany me; he understood the Language of the People below.” In her note to this entry for 7 July 1811, Belyea (1994, 269) also comments on this language boundary. 8 Moulton 1990, 5: 380, 6: 17. Ross thought both were Chinook, having chap-allell and wapatoe in his main list (Thwaites 1904, 347-48). Saplil was once attributed to French la farine, and wapetu, by no lesser authority than the Oxford Eng-

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Notes to pages 48-58

lish Dictionary, to Cree wapatowa ‘white mushroom’. Zenk (1996) demonstrates the error of these pseudo-derivations. Ray (1938, 93) notes the absence of “wealth songs” among the Chinook. See also Hajda’s discussion (1984, 25-31) of the potlatch in the wider context of regional trade and exchange. Commoners were allowed whatever slaves they could afford (Ray 1938, 51), and this permeability between commoner and noble suggests that these three classes were in fact two, slave and non-slave (Suttles and Jonaitis 1990, 87). Hajda (1984, 178, 151-53) discusses the function and symbolism of flattened heads within the wider region: “In theory, slaves came from areas where headflattening was not practiced, while wives came from areas where it was.” There are critiques of Hymes in Samarin 1986 and Donald 1997, 230-31. Thomason (1983, 862) so claims, summarizing Jacobs 1932, although Zenk reminds us (personal communication) that not all the “elegant” speakers of CJ in western Oregon or the lower Columbia, per Jacobs, were necessarily Chinookans. Munnick (1972, A-14), probably echoing Ray (1938, 51). The Chinook names for Concomly and Cassino are from Silverstein 1990, 541. The information on slaves has been summarized by Hajda (1984, 191-95). Lewis and Clark estimated that there were only 1,100 Lower Chinook in 1806, although Ray (1938, 38) thought this low. Glover 1962, 363. Thompson’s Narrative was an “adaptation of his professional journals ‘for the general reader’” (Belyea 1994, xvi).

Chapter 3: Approximations at Astoria 1 Ross’s list was omitted from the 1849 original (reprinted in Quaife 1923, 110), but is in the appendix of Thwaites. Franchère’s French original is in Franchère 1820, 204-5. An English translation is found in Hoyt C. Franchère 1967, 122-24. Hajda (1984, 41) discusses the reliability of these sources, as well as the journals of Ross Cox (1831) and Alexander Henry (Coues 1897). 2 Horatio Hale describes the gesticulation that still accompanied Wawa some thirty years later: “We frequently had occasion to observe the sudden change produced when a party of natives, who had been conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner, with whom it was necessary to speak in [Wawa]. The countenances which before had been grave, stolid, and inexpressive, were instantly lighted up with animation; the low monotonous tone became lively and modulated; every feature was active; the head, the arms, and the whole body in motion, and every look and gesture became imbued with meaning. One who knew merely the subject of the discourse might often have comprehended, from this source alone, the general purport of the conversation” (1846, 643). 3 Quotes in Cox 1831, 255. Cox’s own list (1831, 255) contains the numerals 1 to 12 plus 20, seven words, and three phrases. The same phrases are also in Franchère,

Notes to pages 59-63

169

which suggests that a common manuscript was circulating among the Astorians. 4 These factors, crucial for understanding the transition at Astoria and its aftermath, are notably absent from the standard early-twentieth-century American version of events by Hiram Martin Chittenden (1986, 229-37), who saw only treachery and betrayal on the part of those who shifted their allegiance to the North West Company. 5 The critique published by Edgeley W. Todd (1964) is a useful filter through which to read Astoria. Ross himself was in retirement in the Red River settlement in present-day Manitoba, and had a somewhat broader view of Destiny, writing that “to the spirit of enterprise developed in the service of commercial speculation, civilized nations owe not only wealth and territorial acquisition, but also their acquaintance with the earth and its productions” (Thwaites 1904, 6: 34). 6 As one editor reminds us, “[Ross] was more than sixty years of age when completing [his two] books, which, from their context evidently were based upon some journal of memoranda then at hand. There has been and probably always will be a question as to how closely he followed any such original memoranda and how much he drew from memory” Elliot (n.d., 367). 7 Three cases in the print are Ross’s ul-chey for “moon”, whereas Wawa GR úlche means “moose”; his wow-wich “small deer” with a w, whereas Wawa “deer” is mawich; and his, or at least the book’s, ohe-a-pool “hat” (which was cheapool in the body of text), perhaps an erroneous transliteration of an oh for s. Franchère had ocoutlamaine and Gibbs ok-tla-min’ for Chinook ‘moon’. Wawa rapidly had mun, from English, collected by Hale in 1841. There was a Wawa variant from Chinook proper, u¿an ‘moon’ (Grant 1996; Johnson 1978). 8 Compare, for example, Hale’s nawitka “surely”, tukéh “like, love”, and tilikum “people” with the corresponding items in Ross, na-wetca, te-keigh, tiloch-cum. 9 The sum of information on Lower Chinook must be ferreted out from Boas (1888, 1904, 1911) as well as Swanton (1900), and from work in the twentieth century on the related Chinookan languages by Dell Hymes (1955) and Silverstein (1972, 1974). 10 Linguist shorthand has been expanded and the typography slightly altered. 11 Zenk (personal communication) observes that kiítan is the normal word for ‘axe’ in Kalapuyan and Molala, and that Jacobs also has Sahaptin éiû¢n with the same meaning, so this may be an example of Wawa having conveyed a word into LC. Gibbs’s Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language (to be distinguished from his Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon of the same year, 1863b) shows that the word had become fully integrated into LC with its gender marker. Alexander Caulfield Anderson was a Hudson’s Bay Company agent who went on to publish his own list of Jargon after he withdrew to Victoria in 1846. Pilling (1893, 2) refers to Anderson’s folio manuscript of two hundred Chinook terms conveyed to Gibbs and incorporated into the Alphabetical Vocabulary.

170

Notes to pages 63-77

12 Zenk and Johnson 2007 is the state of the art when it comes to deciphering the Chinookan roots of Wawa, and should be the starting point for anyone interested in pursuing the topic. 13 Ross’s hi-oh (“thousand”, Wawa ayo ‘many’) was originally Nootka ‘ten’. Ross’s e-tha-ca-munack “one hundred” was the LC ordinal, which bore the pronominal and possessive prefixes i-ñ (Boas 1911, 637). See Wawa ta›‹munaq ‘one hundred’ immediately above. 14 Zenk and Johnson (2007, 29) read this as a possible full Chinookan utterance, the “e” at the end of quatiasse being the gender marker for moulak, the sentence parsing as: nikít q-i-tû i-mulak ‘no someone-it-(DIR)-give MASC/SG-elk’. 15 Zenk (1996, 188) derived GR siy‹ûw¢s ‘face’ from -íi‹ûus ‘DUAL-his-eyes’, the s ~ í alternation being common. 16 Eats-im-oughts, “heart” (LC stem -mxt); emeeats “nose” (LC stem -katû); emets-aughtick “breasts” (LC i-ta-to ‘her [female] breast’). 17 “Since the predominant SVO word order and the lack of overt VM [verb movement] in CJ cannot be explained by the properties of its source languages, [these facts] provide evidence for the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in the process of creolization. In particular, [these facts lend] support for two recent proposals made in syntactic theory – a return to the ‘universal base hypothesis’ of basic word order and a correlation between overt morphological marking in language and the existence of strong (abstract) features of functional categories” (Vrzic 1996, 467; her 2000 dissertation elaborates). 18 See Cole 1995, 91-92, in particular on this point, and throughout for a detailed history of the development of museological ethnological traditions for Northwest Coast cultures. 19 Johnson (1978) has covered this early material in detail too. Several typical sentences of Lee and Frost (1844, 133) were cited in the Introduction. The Parker vocabulary (1840, 396-99) is discussed in Pilling 1893, 58-59. To clarify, Ross was published in 1849 but, as the last chapter has demonstrated, dates from at least three decades earlier. 20 Henry Zenk (personal communication) first encountered this typescript in the John Ball papers at the Oregon Historical Society Library in Portland, and wrote to the Grand Rapids Public Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Ball papers are housed, in quest of the manuscript, labelled “Mss. 195.” He was told that the original document had disappeared. Recovering the original might enable us to track down its scribe or author. In its absence, we must also deal with the many errors perpetrated by whoever typed out the manuscript, someone clearly not conversant with the lexicons available to this day, typing out “heat” as opposed to “heart” for tomtom.

Notes to pages 81-87

171

21 These differences can be readily checked in Johnson’s “Master File” (1978, 239460), or in the originals, although Johnson did not have Manuscript 195 or its typescript in his database. 22 Kalakáti skirts were soon enough replaced with cloth ones. See Ray 1938, 138, for a description, Hajda 1984, 137, for the geographical range. Only the oldest women still wore them among the surviving Chinook on Shoalwater Bay at midcentury (Swan 1857, 112, 154-55, per Silverstein 1990, 540). 23 Probably from the plural mitsâk ‘trousers’, the Cree singular mitâs eventually providing Wawa mitás ‘leggings’ (Waugh 1998, 90). Chapter 4: The Hothouse of Fort Vancouver 1 For the economic factors and business strategy behind this restructuring of the trade, see Rich 1941, xxiv-xxix, and Hussey 1957, 1-42. The website for the US National Historical Site at Fort Vancouver is http://www.nps.gov/fova/index.htm. 2 A succinct summary of the deliberations behind this decision can be found in W. Kaye Lamb’s Introduction to The Letters of John McLoughlin (Rich 1941, xvxxix). Kenneth A. Spaulding (1956, xix), in his Introduction to Alexander Ross’s Fur Traders of the Far West, imputed “dim reluctance” to the North West Company, which purportedly fathomed the changes around them as “an attack on the traditional and feudal society that they revered ... [T]he old system of interdependence was doomed ... These men were menaced not only by a condition particular to one section of the fur trade but also by an idea.” There is a grain of truth in this analysis, but it was less an idea than economic, military, and diplomatic facts that transformed the Oregon Territory. On this point, the documents show that for at least another decade, the policies of the HBC, shared even by those below the level of management, were based on the belief that the British might be able to retain the land north of the Columbia, preserving there the customs and government that did, after all, evolve into the current society north of the forty-ninth parallel. 3 See Pollard 1990, 1-63, for the background. For a discussion of the purported origin of syphilis in North America, see Mann 2006, 351-53. 4 Boyd (1975) showed that the “fever and ague” of 1830 was malaria, and he treats the topic at length in The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence (1999, 84-114). One finds in the Journal of HBC trader John Work (Lewis and Phillips 1923, 72) that his expedition to the Snake River country was sorely afflicted by the same fevers in August of the following year, but the epidemic was also present and became endemic in the Sacramento Valley, with which there was much interchange (Hurtado 1988, 53). 5 In this regard, it is enlightening to read French histories of the fur trade, which, while allowing the full place to the careers of the largely Scots leadership, also make room for the voyageurs and Métis. Compare, for example, Campbell’s two

172

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15 16

17

Notes to pages 93-113

volumes (1983) with Rumilly’s two (1980), which cover the same ground from a French Montreal point of view. See Mougeon and Benlak 1994 for the rise of Québécois, and Bakker 1997, 251, for a summary of the differences between that dialect of French and Métis French. It is useful to bear in mind that Parisian French too is a dialect of French. Missouri French became an isolate, disconnected from both Louisiana French and Québébois, but at this point in time French speakers in the Missouri fur trade were in contact with both. See Papen 1984, 115-16. Gibbs 1863b, vi; Avis 1967, 47; McDermott 1941, 22. Franz Boas (1932, 211) attributed the latter to convergence with the Chinook conjunction pe ‘contrary to fact’. GR ¿ush spus ‘good + suppose’ forms a kind of optative, as in GR ¿ush spus n‹yka ¿‹twa ‘may I go’. Cf. GR ¿ush-kh‹kwa ‘never mind, let it go’. Table 4.1 is from Chamberlain 1912, and is repeated in Silverstein 1972, 617. The vocabularies involved are Hale 1846, Gibbs 1863b, and Le Jeune 1898. I am grateful to Jay Powell for advance notice of Kinkade, Powell, and Seaburg (forthcoming), and for graciously providing the image of Dale Kinkade’s notes on Lower Chehalis loan words (Figure 4.1). See, for example, James Cresswell Clough’s “On the Existence of Mixed Languages” (1876, xiv), where Hale’s passage is quoted. This principle also reflects Silverstein’s later thought. See, for example, his recent judgment (1996, 130) that “the phrasal structure of Chinook Jargon utterances is thus completely linear, that is, there are no significant discontinuities in grammatical units such as abound in all the relevant primary languages.” Silverstein’s doubt was reflected by Roth (1994, 162-64), but the latter’s analysis of the situation is marred by egregious misunderstandings of persons present and their locations. For example, in the quote at the bottom of his page 162, he takes Rich’s quotation of Tolmie to be the words of Reverend Beaver, and on the next page does not indicate that the scene has shifted far north to Sitka, Alaska. Hale 1846, 636. Below, we shall return to what the archaeological and social record of Fort Vancouver reveals about the society living there in the late 1830s and early 1840s (for which see Hussey 1957). For this paragraph, see Gibson 1992, 239; Thwaites 1904-05, 3: 240. The quote is from Ronda 1990, 227, summarizing Thwaites 1904, 7: 239. “Both men and women were subject to such designation, but sex identifying suffixes were used. Naming according to this pattern was not invariable practice; owners followed their own desires” (Ray 1938, 53). Ross wrote that “no females in the land were so fair to look upon as the nymphs of Spokane. No damsels could dance so gracefully as they; none were so attractive” (Spaulding 1956, 96.). Quoted by Jackson (2007, 48), who also recounts

Notes to pages 117-44

173

Ross Cox’s observation that, in 1815, none of the “Columbian half-breeds had attained a sufficiently mature age [for marriage].” 18 Lewis and Murakami 1990, 23-24. Hajda (1984, 335) remarks that Car-cum-cum may have been a daughter of Concomly. 19 Hussey 1957, 80. Ball had come to Fort Vancouver with the American Wyeth with the intention of farming a plot in the Willamette Valley, but found favour with McLoughlin, who engaged him as master of the first school in the Northwest. 20 Munnick 1972, A-9. It cannot go unremarked that Roth’s description of the “speech-economy consisting of coexisting and slightly overlapping codes – English and French” (161) presumes that those who did learn to speak French learned it largely to speak to servants. He is echoing remarks by Charles Wilkes (cited elsewhere here) but ignoring the fact that large numbers of native speakers of French were present, including English-dominant members of the HBC elite, such as McLoughlin, whose mother was French and who gave sermons in it. Chapter 5: Waves of Wawa 1 See Kinkade 1990 for the history of linguistics concerning the Northwest Coast. 2 Of Demers it has been written: “Without being a littérateur in the full sense of the word, Mgr. Demers had tastes and aptitudes which would justify calling him an intellectual” (Morice 1915, 288). 3 Pilling 1893 provides bio-bibliographical references. 4 As Powell (1990, 141) related, speaking of the later period of Wawa but with relevance to middle of the nineteenth century: “Terms for farming and farm implements and technology are also seldom found in the [Wawa] dictionaries. It was very common for native workers to be engaged in temporary or seasonal employment on farms through Jargon country. The annual haps hokometl (hops harvest) drew native workers to the Tacoma area every fall for long workdays followed by campfire socializing in [Wawa] long into the night.” 5 One thinks of the recent work of Zvjezdana Vrzic (2000). Dave Robertson is also preparing a PhD dissertation on Kamloops Wawa at the University of Victoria. 6 Much demographic information is available at http://www.oregonvos.net/~clenzen /firstsettlers.html#_ . These figures are drawn from Bowen 1978, 13. Conclusion 1 Mufwene (2001) argues this point persuasively. It is the “ecology” of each contact situation that produces the particular outcome in question, the totality of factors at play. I admit that there is something tautological in such a statement, but I do hold that the complexity of contact and the mutually interactive nature of cultural contacts – something on the lines of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (1986) – requires discussion of the sort I have brought to bear in this study. 2 http://johntracey.blogspot.com/2005/12/smallpox-joseph-banks-and-james-cook.html.

174

Notes to pages 145-47

3 See, for example, the first three chapters of Lang 2000. 4 A generation ago, with the advent of several revisionist works, among them Van Kirk 1980 and Brown 1980, this myopic vision was altered, at least among professional Canadian historians.

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Index

Notes: CCR stands for Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest; Ft.V., for Fort Vancouver; LC, for Lower Chinook; NW, for Northwest Coast Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon and Columbia River (Ross), 59, 60 Alberni, Pedro, 25, 34-35 Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language (Gibbs), 63, 124, 126 Anderson, Alexander Caulfield, 63, 124, 127 Anderson, William, 18-19, 21, 22 approximation in language learning, 65-68 Archaeologia Americana, 123 Astor, John Jacob, 56, 57, 59. See also Astoria; Ross, Alexander Astoria, 57, 58-59, 86, 146, 160 Astoria (Irving), 59 Bakker, Peter, 91 Ball, John, 77-82, 117, 149-58 Basque-Algonquinian, 90 Bella Bella language, 10(m) Bella Coola language, 10(m) Bercier, Pierre, 115 Bibliography of the Chinookan Languages (Including the Chinook Jargon) (Pilling), 76

Blanchet, Francis Norbert, Father: on devastation of Native population by disease, 144; education and experience, 123; families at Ft.V. (in CCR), 104-7; glossary, xiii, 66, 128(t), 160; on nature and use of Wawa, 83, 114, 125, 133; orthography, xii; on Wawa pronunciation, 132 Boas, Franz: beginning of interest in Wawa, 125; on broadly uniform NW cultures, 45-46; interview with “last of the Chinook,” 39-40, 120, 132; transcription of account of Spanish ship in Nootka Sound, 23-24; work on Chinook language, 61 Boit, John, 44, 159 Bolduc, Jean-Baptiste, Father, 118 Boucher, Jean-Baptiste, 112 Boyd, Robert, 103, 144 Brief Dictionary (Moziño), 25-26 Britain and British: Astoria returned to British rule (1813), 57, 58-59; involvement in Oregon fur trade, 17; occupation of Oregon Territory (1818-46), 4, 85; triangular trade, 17; use of Nootka Jargon, 32-33

188

broken Chinook: first approximation of LC, 67; intermingling with incipient Wawa, 65-68, 68-70, 83; kinship terms (broken Chinook/Wawa), 71-72; in lists by Ross, 65, 67, 68, 72, 75, 77, 81; Mixed Dialect and Wawa-Nootka words borrowed into Chinook, 75. See also Wawa (Chinook Jargon); Wawa and Chinook influence broken Nootka: based on Nootka proper, 9(t); functional stages reached, 30-35; word lists prepared by Europeans, 18-20, 21, 22-23, 25-26. See also Nootka Jargon Brown, Jennifer S.H., 87, 88, 104, 116 Brûle, Étienne, 89-90 Bumstead, J.M., 27 Caillé, Paschal, 112 Callicum, Chief, 25, 33-34, 159 Canoe and Saddle (Splawn), 125 capswala (to steal or hide), 33-34 Cascades language, 45 Cassino (Chinook chief), 51 Cathlamet language, 8(t), 13(m), 44-45 Catholic Church: Catholic expressions in Wawa, 97; converts (from 1838 on), 114; French also used in mission, 133; impact of conversions on Native traditions and languages, 119-20; Iroquois as Catholics, 91-92; missionaries’ skill at mastering Indian dialects, 132-33; Native women’s embrace of, 114 Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest: families at Ft.V., 104-7; family histories of Iroquois, 92; names of former slaves, 103, 110-11; profiles and ethnolinguistic mix of Native wives and their children, 10716, 119, 133

Index

Celiast, Hélène, 108, 109 Chaikin, Ira, 39 Charbonneau, Toussaint, 55, 89 Chaudenson, Robert, 65-66 Chehalis, Upper and Lower, 8(t), 13(m), 44, 135-36 Chemakum language, 10(m) Chinook: Chinookan languages, 44-45; “loan word” from Chehalis, 44; mistaken term meaning “artificial trade language,” 43. See also broken Chinook; Lower Chinook culture; Lower Chinook language; Pidgin Chinook; Wawa and Chinook influence Chinook: A History and Dictionary (Thomas), 67-68 Chinook, Lisette, 110-11 Chinook Jargon. See Wawa (Chinook Jargon) Chinook Jargon: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Variation in an American Indian Pidgin (Johnson), 60 Chinook Jargon and Native Cultural Persistence in the Grand Ronde Indian Community, 1856-1907 (Zenk), 137 Chinookans, 10(m) Chinuk Wawa Listserv, xiv chronology of Northwest coast (17741849), 159-61 Clackamas/Wasco-Wishram language, 8(t), 13(m), 45 Clark, Ross, 22-23, 32 Clark, William, 15-16, 56, 159. See also Lewis and Clark Expedition Clarke, John, 112 Clatskanie language, 10(m) Clatsop language, 15-16, 44 Coast Salish languages, 10(m) Cole, Douglas, 39 Columbia River, Lower: Astor expedition, 56; British-US joint occupation

Index

(1818-46), 4, 85; European transmission of Nootka to, 16, 24-25, 145; fur trade, impact of, 17; linguistic situation pre-contact, 44-45, 53; location where Wawa first spoken, 3; North West Company (NWC) activity, 60. See also Fort Vancouver Concomly (Chinook chief), 51, 58-59, 86 contact languages, 8(t), 68, 90-91. See also Nootka Jargon; pidgin languages; entries beginning with Wawa Cook, James, Captain: fur trading on Pacific coast, 17, 23, 37, 41; glossary of Nootka, 15, 18, 25, 39, 128 Cornoillé, Joseph, 113 coureurs de bois, 89-90. See also Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC); voyageurs Cowichan, Louise, 112-13 Cox, Ross, 58-59 Cree, Josephte, 115 Cree language, 8(t), 90, 91 creolization: definition, 102; French creolized only in Michif, 91, 93; functions in expansion of pidgincreole, 30, 31(t); slave pidgin hypothesis (tertiary hybridization), 49-53; of Wawa at Ft.V., 100-101, 120-21, 130; of Wawa on the Grand Ronde reservation, 134 Cultee, Charles, 39-40, 107, 120, 132, 136 Délard, Joseph, 113 Delaware Jargon, 90 Demers, Modeste, Father: ability in Wawa, 131, 132, 134; compound words in Wawa, 126; education and experience, 123; on expansion of Wawa, 134; families at Ft.V. (in CCR), 104-7; French and Catholic derivations in Wawa, 94, 96, 97;

189

glossary, xiii, 66, 128, 131, 160; myth re. HBC’s inventing Wawa, 133; on nature and use of Wawa, 83, 114, 125; writing system for Wawa, xii, 132 Dentalium shells, 16 Despart, Joseph, 111 Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon (Gibbs), 40 directive/integrative function, 30, 31(t) disease, impact on Native population, 86, 120, 135-36, 143-44, 159-60 Eliza, Francisco de, 34-35 English language: ascendant by 1841, 100; language of education at Ft.V., 117-18; target for Wawa speakers, 116-17. See also Wawa and English influence epidemics, impact on Native population, 86, 120, 135-36, 143-44, 159-60 Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains (Parker), 134-35 expressive function of language, 30, 31(t) Faignant, François Piette dit, 114 Farrow, Edward S., 125 Finlay, Emélie, 115 Finlay, François, 115 Fisher, Robin, 27 Flathead, Julia, 112 Fort George, 133, 160. See also Astoria Fort Langley, 133, 134 Fort Okanogan, 134 Fort Vancouver: children fluent in Wawa, 5-6, 100-101, 146-47; children punished if caught speaking Wawa or French, 117-18; classification of people by race and kin-friendship networks, 104, 116-17; collapse of

190

fur trade in 1841, 130; “creolization” of Wawa, 100-101, 120-21, 130; decline of Chinook, 102-3; demographics (1860s), 136-37; devastation of Native population by disease, 144; English as language of education, 117-18; founding (1824), 125; French language of Catholic mission, 117-18; HBC headquarters for district, 86; languages spoken at, 101; marriage and families in (from CCR), 104-7; profiles and languages of Native wives and their children (from CCR), 107-16, 119, 133; spread of Wawa at, 5-6, 100-101, 103, 130, 134, 146-47; stratification in fur trade society, 87, 88; Sunday school (in Wawa), 131; use of French (1820s on), 87-88; Wawa as lingua franca, 86-87, 117-18, 120-21, 127. See also Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Fort Victoria, 161 Fort Walla Walla, 134 Franchère, Gabriel: ability to speak Chinook, 57, 58; approximations on Chinook word lists, 66-68; book included in bibliography of Chinook languages, 76; broken Chinook in lists, 67, 72-73, 77, 83; Chinook numerals, 65; Chinook/Wawa word lists, 56, 59-63, 64-65, 66-68, 70; class of Chinook words not needing affixes, 64; contradictions in lists, 73; nuance lost in broken Chinook, 70, 72; terms in pidgin culture, 70 Fraser River Gold Rush, 139 French language: Boys’ School at French Prairie, 118; common language among Iroquois, 91; creolized only in Michif, 91, 93; French dialects on Pacific coast, 93; at French

Index

Prairie settlement, 103, 108, 111, 112, 113; loan words to Wawa (from 1820s on), 60, 82-83, 93-96, 97-98, 100; Métis French, 93; treatment of French speakers by HBC, 89, 117-18; use at Ft.V. (from 1820s on), 87-88; used in fur trade society, 100. See also Wawa and French influence French Prairie: Boys’ School, 118; destination for French speakers after leaving HBC, 103, 108, 111, 112, 113; settlement (1829), 160 “French” system of Wawa orthography, xii-xiii Frost, Joseph, 16, 77, 124-25, 131, 137 fur trade: collapse in 1841, 130; “elite” wives of the fur trade, 115-16; importance of Montreal hub, 5; invention of steel trap, 92; knowledge of local languages necessary, 18-19; market frenzy in late 1700s, 17; social stratification in Northwest, 87-88; transformation of indigenous societies and, 3; triangular trade, Vancouver coast–China–Boston/London, 17 The Fur Hunters of the Far West (Ross), 59 Gallatin, Albert, 123 Gervais, Édouard, 108-9 Gervais, Joseph, 108 Gibbs, George: Alphabetical Vocabulary of the Chinook Language, 63, 124, 126; education and experience, 123-24; French-derived words in Wawa, 97; gender markers in Chinook, 63; separation of Wawa from LC, 126; on word “potlatch,” 40 Gibson, James R., 39, 113 Grand Ronde reservation: creolization of Wawa, 134; expansion of Wawa,

Index

191

128(t), 129, 137; Wawa as heritage language, 100, 120, 129, xi Grant, Anthony, 53, 127 Grant, Richard, 116 Gray, Robert, 23, 44 Grays Harbor, 12(m), 19 Grenier, Pierre, 113

Huron language, 90 Hymes, Dell, 49-50, 89

Hale, Horatio: children fluent in Wawa at Ft.V., 100-101, 146-47, 160-61; “creolization” of Wawa at Ft.V., 100-101, 105; difficulty of Chinook language, 56-57; education and experience, 123; French-derived words in Wawa, 97; glossaries as approximations, 66; on indigenous multilingualism, 46; lexicon of origins of Wawa words, 102; philologist on US Expedition re. Oregon annexation (1841), 89; separation of Wawa from LC, 125-26; on “singularity” of Wawa, 6, 121 Haswell, Robert, 23, 40 Hawaiians at Fort Vancouver, 101, 115 Holton, Jim, xiii Hoskins, John, 37, 39 Howay, Frederick W., 33-34 Hubert, Joachim, 112 Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC): classification of people by race and kinfriendship networks, 104, 116-17; headquarters of Columbia District at Ft.V., 86; influence on Wawa, 4, 147; strategy against US fur traders from St. Louis, 86, 130-31; takeover of North West Company, 4, 85, 160; treatment of French speakers, 89; use of Nootka Jargon, 18; withdrawal to BC from Oregon, 4, 161. See also Fort Vancouver; voyageurs Humpherville, Canoté, 112

Jackson, John C., 92 Jacobs, Melville, 120 jargons: Delaware Jargon, 90; ephemeral nature, 42; functional stages, 30-32, 70; interactive learning, 31; medium of social exchange, 35; Mobilian Jargon, 16, 90; origins of, 2-3. See also Nootka Jargon; pidgin languages; Wawa (Chinook Jargon) Jefferson, Thomas, 55 Johnson, James, 109 Johnson, Samuel, 60, 83, 127, 128 Joseph, Chief, 1-2, 138 Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains (Parker), 77 Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 123

Indian, Thomas, 134-35 Ingraham, Joseph, 23-24, 159 Iroquois, 8(t), 91-93 Irving, Washington, 59

Kamloops Wawa, 69, 96, 129 Kanhopitsa, Josephte, 112 Kaufman, Terrence, 127, 128(t), 129-30, 131 Kendrick, John Jr., 23 Kiksht, 45 Kil-a-ko-tah, Marguerite, 107-8 Kinkade, Dale, 98, 99(f) kits-tan (ax), 60, 63 Kitson, William, 115-16 Kwakiutl, 10(m), 48 Kwalhioqua language, 10(m) Labonté, Louis, 108 Lafantaisie, Jacques, 112

192

Laframboise, Michel, 57-58, 89 language learning, functional stages, 30-32 Lavallé, Louis, 113 Le Jeune, Jean-Marie Raphaël, 83, xiv Lee, Daniel, 16, 77, 124-25, 131, 137 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 47 Lewis, Meriwether. See Lewis and Clark Expedition Lewis and Clark Expedition: assistance from Nez Perce Tribe, 1; Chinook vocabulary (lost), 55; on devastation of Native population by disease, 144; examples of pre-contact pidgin Chinook, 47-48; on language boundary at The Dalles, 47; language situation along Lower Columbia, 44; mandate to gather information about Indian languages, 55; on syphilis among men, 110; use of ad hoc chains of interpreters, 55 Lionnet, Père, 97 Lower Chehalis language, 12(m), 98, 99(f) Lower Chinook culture: demographic collapse and genesis of Wawa, 143-44; disease and social disintegration, 86, 120, 135-36; head-flattening custom, 49, 107; as invaders at mouth of Columbia, 45; marriage as way to gain prestige and wealth, 46; nuances of culture not captured by Wawa, 70-73; slave-owning practices, 48-49, 51-53; social rank important, 49; trade practices, 48-49; use of Nootka Jargon and Wawa, 75-76 Lower Chinook language: brief sketch of the language, 61-63; broken Chinook as first approximation of, 67; classes of stems, 64; decline (number of speakers) by late 1830s, 86,

Index

103, 116; difficulty for Europeans, 56-57, 62; language boundary, 13(m); linguistic situation pre-contact, 44-45; main source of Wawa, 43, 53, 66-67, 75, 87; numerals and colours, 65, 95; replaced by Wawa, 43; superstrate in early contact years, 145; system of gender and kinship, 45, 71-73; word lists, 55-56, 59-63, 66-68; word “potlatch” not used, 40. See also broken Chinook; Lower Chinook culture; Wawa (Chinook Jargon); Wawa and Chinook influence MacDonald, Archibald, 117 MacDonald, Jane Klyne, 117 MacDonald, Ranald, 77, 117-18 MacKay, John, 22 Makah language, 10(m), 48 Makaïna, Thérèse, 114-15 makuk (trade [Nootka maakuk]), 21 malaria, 86, 160 Malaspina, Alejandro, 25 Mallery, Garrick, 47 mamatlee (ship), 22-23 Manby, Thomas, 32-33 Manning, B.F., 138 Manuscript 195 (Chinook Jargon), 77-82, 149-58, 170n20 Maquinna (Nootka chief), 34-35, 36 marriage: à la façon du pays (NativeEuropean marriages), 52, 88, 104-5; advantages of marital alliances, 110; “elite” wives of the fur trade, 11516; Laurentian custom of interethnic marriage, 5, 88, 104-5, 146; marriage and families in Ft.V. (from CCR), 104-7; most Native wives not Chinook, 111-14; profiles and languages of Native wives and their children (from CCR), 107-16, 119,

Index

133; role in multilingualism of indigenous peoples, 46-47; Wawa as default language in Native-European marriages, 88, 101, 102-3 Marsolet, Nicolas, 90 Martínez, Esteban José, 23, 25, 33-34, 159 Matthews, William, 107-8 McDonald, Hélène, 115-16 McDougall, Duncan, 57, 110 McKay, Margaret Wadine, 118 McKay, Thomas, 118 McKay, William C., 118-19 McKenzie, Alexander, 18 McKinlay, Archibald, 112 McLoughlin, John: ability to speak French, 100; on advantages of marital alliances, 110; marriage and halfNative step-grandson, 118, 132; son sent to Montreal for education, 117; Sunday school (in Wawa) at Ft.V., 131; wards of, 113 McMillan, James, 47, 107-8, 127, 133, 160 Meares, John, 19, 22, 36, 38 measles, 160 meschimes (commoners), 35 metalinguistic function, 30, 31(t) Methodist Episcopal Mission, 131 Métis: dialect of Laurentian French, 9(t), 93; genesis of Michif and, 91; inter-ethnic marriages, 5, 105, 106, 146; lack of pidgin language in fur trade and, 90; place in hierarchy at Ft.V., 87; spread of Wawa and, 120 Michif, contact language, 8(t), 91 Michina, Marguerite Marie, 112 mishtimish (slaves), 35 Mixed Dialect: approximation of Nootka Jargon, 66; Cook’s contribution, 74(t); use of Nootka and Chinook,

193

56, 73-76; word lists of Ross and Franchère, 56, 59-60, 66, 73-75, 83 Moatwas, Louise, 109 Mobilian Jargon, 16, 90 Montreal and the fur trade, 5 morphemes in Nootka, 27, 28 Mountain Scouting: A Hand-Book for Officers and Soldiers on the Frontiers (Farrow), 125 Moziño, José Mariano: scientific expedition to Northwest coast, 25, 159; song in broken Nootka post-Callicum execution, 34-35; understanding of Nootka syntax, 29-30; word lists of Nootka terms, 25-26, 40 Mühlhäuser, Peter, 26 Multnomah language, 8(t), 13(m), 45 Munnick, Harriet Duncan, 105, 108-9, 112-14 Nez Perce language, 9(t), 47, 137 Nootka: “cosmopolitan” due to trade, 36-37; first potlatch with Europeans, 20-21; language simplified for Europeans, 28-30, 36; perspective on trade vs. European, 37-39; trading activities, 16-17, 36-37 Nootka Jargon: based on Nootka, 9(t), 18-20, 33; broken Nootka, 9(t), 30-31, 33-35; medium for communication on outer Vancouver Island coast, 18; Nootka lingo, 30-35; number system, 24; origin of “potlatch” as used in Wawa, 38-40; passage of time, 24; prominent in early Wawa, 75-76; simplified language used by Nootka for Europeans, 28-30, 36; Spanish command of, 25-26; transmission down Pacific coast, 16, 24-25, 145; unknown south of Puget Sound (pre1788), 18, 19; use by English and

194

Spanish in their communication, 32-33; use in Mixed Dialect, 56, 73-76; use in situ, 32; word lists prepared by Europeans, 15, 18-20, 21, 22-23, 25-26, 128. See also Nootka language; pidgin languages Nootka language: complexity of, 27-30; European transmission to Lower Columbia River, 16, 24-25, 145; evolution of word “woman” into Wawa, 41-42; map of boundary, 10(m); morphemes and morphology, 27, 28; number system, 24; prominent place in early Wawa, 9(t), 75; simplified version for inter-ethnic contact pre-Europeans, 16; source of broken Nootka, 9(t), 18. See also Nootka Jargon; Wawa and Nootka influence Nootka Sound, 3, 17, 33-34 North West Company (NWC), 4, 60, 85, 160 Northwest Coast: ad hoc chains of interpreters, 46-47, 55; cultures broadly uniform, 45-46; decimation of Native population by disease, 86, 120, 135-36, 143-44; diet, tools, fauna, horses as shown in French-derived Wawa, 93-96; extensive multilingualism, 46-47; importance of social rank, 49; language boundaries, 10(m); linguistic diversity, 10(m), 11(m), 45-49; pidgin Chinook as precontact language, 47-48; Protestant missionaries, 130-31; sign languages, 47; Vancouver Island (west coast) languages, 11(m). See also Fort Vancouver; Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC); Lower Chinook; Nootka The Northwest Coast (Swan), 135 Nuuchahnulth (formerly Nootka), 3, 42, 164n3. See also Nootka language

Index

Ogden, Peter Skene, 112 Ojibwe language, 9(t) Okanogan, Susanne, 112 Oowekeeno, 10(m) Oregon Territory: annexation, 3, 20, 59, 130, 161; emigrants from East, 130, 135, 147; settlers’ understanding of word “potlatch,” 40; US expedition to explore annexation, 89, 130. See also Columbia River, Lower Oregon Trail, 130, 135 Palmer, Joel, 124, 129 Parker, Samuel, 77, 124, 134-35 Pend d’Oreille, Marguerite Kwéhéssest, 113 Pérez, Juan, 3, 20, 23-24 Perkins, Henry, 103 phatic function of language, 30, 31(t) Pidgin Chinook: argument that it is really Chinook Jargon, 43; pidginization, 69; possible influence on Wawa, 3; pre-contact language, 47-48; slave pidgin hypothesis (tertiary hybridization), 49-53. See also Wawa (Chinook Jargon) pidgin languages: argument that Chinook Jargon is really Pidgin Chinook, 43; contact pidgins, 90-91; definition, 7; functional stages of pidginization, 30-32, 70; grammar of, 26-28; imprecision (approximations), 66-68; interactive learning, 31; lifespan of, 6; line between stabilization and expansion, 70; medium of social exchange, 35; Michif, 8(t), 91; mistaken for a full language, 16; origins of, 2-3; pidgin culture, 70-73; process of pidginization, 26-27; tendency toward SVO word order, 69, 170n17. See also Pidgin Chinook

Index

Pilling, James Constantine, 76 Pin, Joseph, 113 pishak (bad or worthless), 33-34 Plamondon, Simon, 115 Plouf, Joseph, 115 poetic function of language, 30, 31(t) Poirier, Basile, 108, 109 Polk, James K., 20 Pollard, Juliet Thelma, 147 Pomo language, 19 potlatch: Chinook Jargon word only, 40; in colonial law and anthropological theory, 39-40; first potlatch between Spanish and Nootkans, 20-21; idea of potlatch originated in Wawa, 38, 39; misunderstandings in contact zone, 40 Powell, John Wesley, 76 Powell, J.V., 83 pronouns in Nootka, 27 propositional/cognitive function, 30, 31(t) Protestant missionaries, 130-31, 132, 137 Puget Sound and Wawa, 18, 128(t), 129, 133-34, 137 Qualchan, Chief, 138 Québécois French, 9(t), 93 Quelques Mots de la langue Chinouque ou Tchinouke (Franchère), 58, 76 Quileute language, 10(m) quotluk (sea otter), 28 Qwatsamuts, 12(m), 44 Ray, Verne, 40, 44 Relation d’un voyage à la côte du Nord-ouest de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Franchère), 59-60 Robertson, Dave, 149 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Roquefeuil, Camille de, 33

195

Ross, Alexander: ability to speak Chinook, 57; approximations on Chinook word lists, 66-68; broken Chinook in lists, 65, 67, 68, 71-73, 75, 77, 81, 83; Chinook/Wawa word lists, 56, 59-63, 64-65, 66-68, 145; class of Chinook words not needing affixes, 64; contradictions in lists, 73; on difficulty of Chinook language, 56; on interpreters used in NW, 47; kinship terms (broken Chinook/Wawa), 71-72; Mixed Dialect word lists, 56, 59-60, 66, 73-75, 83; mixture of marked and unmarked forms in Chinook word lists, 63-64; nuance lost in broken Chinook, 70-72; numerals and colours in Chinook, 65; pidginization of cultural events, 70; on quotluk (sea otter), 29; slavery among the Chinook, gender and status, 52; vocabulary of Chinook proper, 22 Russian traders and trade jargon, 19 Sacagawea, 55 Sahaptian language, 45 Salish languages, 10(m), 45, 47, 138 Samarin, William J., 102, 127 Samwell, David, 21 Sasseté, Félicite, 114 Sasté (Shasta), 114 Schuchardt, Hugo, 50-51 Scouler, John, 123 Shuswap, Lisette, 113 sign languages, 47, 138 Silverstein, Michael, 2, 61-62, 101-2, 164n2 Simpson, George: on advantages of marital alliances, 110; classification of fur trade population, 87, 105, 116; governor of HBC’s Columbia district, 85; HBC headquarters at Ft.V., 86

196

slavery: gender and age of slaves, 52; slave-owning practices of Chinook, 48-49, 51-53; slave pidgin hypothesis, 49-50; slaves named after group or locality of birth, 103, 110-11 smallpox, 135, 144, 159. See also epidemics Smith, Asa Bowen, 137 Smith, Soloman, 108, 135 Spanish involvement in Northwest coast: command of Nootka Jargon, 25-26; explorations along Pacific coast, 19-20, 25; first known contact between Nootkans and Europeans, 20, 23-24; first potlatch with Nootkans, 20-21; origins of Wawa and, 3 Spaulding, Henry Harmon, 137 Spaulding, Kenneth A., 59 Splawn, A.J., 125, 139 Splawn, Margaret C., 139 Spokane, Thérèse, 113 St. Onge, Louis Napoléon, Father, xii Stern, Theodore, 104-5 Stevens, Isaac I., 136 Stuart, Granville, 127 Sturgis, William, 18 Swan, James, 109, 129, 135, 136 Tappan, William H., 136 Tate, Charles Montgomery, 127 Tchinouk-Quinault, Jane, 109 Ten Years in Oregon (Lee and Frost), 77, 131 The Dalles: expansion of Wawa east of, 137; location of language boundary, 47-48, 57, 103, 132, 135 Thomas, Edward Harper, 67-68, 138 Thomason, Sarah Grey, 68, 129, 132 Thompson, David, 47, 52, 115 Tillamook, 9(t), 10(m), 45 tluchmen (woman), 41-42

Index

Tolmie, Dr., 131-32 trade: knowledge of local languages necessary, 18; Nootka with other indigenous peoples, 16-17; triangular trade, Vancouver coast–China–Boston/ London, 17. See also fur trade; Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Trigger, Bruce, 37-38 United States: involvement in fur trade in Oregon, 17; occupation with Britain of Oregon Territory (1818-46), 4, 85; triangular trade, China–Vancouver coast–London/Boston, 17. See also Oregon Territory Upper Chinook, 45, 47 US expedition to the Oregon Territory, 89, 130 Van Kirk, Sylvia, 106-7 venereal disease, 41, 86, 144 Vocabulary (Hale), 60 Vocabulary of the Language at Nootka Sound (Walker), 22 “Vocabulary of the Language Used between the White and Indians on the Columbia River” (Ball), 77-82 Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (Meares), 22 voyageurs: ability at cross-cultural communication, 89-90; description, 88-89; influence on Wawa words derived from French, 93-96; intermarriage with Indian women, 5, 88, 104-5, 146; use of French, 89, 100; voyageur culture important to Wawa, 88. See also Fort Vancouver; Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Vrzic, Zvjezdana, 69

Index

Walker, Alexander, 22, 24, 26-29 Wasco-Wishram. See Clackamas/ Wasco-Wishram language Wawa (Chinook Jargon): “chaotic diversity,” 83, 130; compound words, 82, 126-27; decline (mid-1850s) with influx of settlers, 135; demographic collapse of Natives and, 143-45; diaspora language, 140; disparate forms of, 139-40; ethnolinguistic mix of Native wives (from CCR), 107-16, 119, 133; expansion geographically, 127-30, 133-34, 137-39; first sentence in language, 15-16, 56, 159; functional stages reached, 30-32, 124-26; glossary (“Manuscript 195”), 77-82, 149-58; glottal/lateral stops and affricatives missing, 16; grammar stable (from 1830s on), 82, 126-27; historical overview, 1-7; “independent” words (early 1800s), 67; intertribal Wawa, 136-37, 145; lexicon mainly derived from Chinook, 43, 53, 66-67, 75, 87; limitations, 138; lines of descent in glossaries, 24-25, 128; lingua franca with decline of LC, 43, 86-87, 117-18, 120-21, 127, 133, 135, 145; “Middle Chinook [Jargon]” period, 83; Natives’ preference for own language, 136, 138-39; nuance missing from early Wawa, 71-73; number of speakers, 4; orthography, xi-xiv, 15, 164n1; phonological shifts, 128; pronunciation guide, xii-xiii; second degree of approximation of Chinook, 66-68; students (sometimes speakers) of Wawa, 130-35; syntax of early Wawa difficult to discern, 69-70; unification of Wawa (separation from LC), 125-27; women’s role in

197

genesis and spread, 5, 107-16, 120-21, 133, 145-47; word origins, statistical comparison of, 97-100 Wawa and Chinook influence: Catholic expressions, 97; class of words not needing affixes, 64; considered most “elegant,” 50; intermingling of broken Chinook and incipient Wawa, 65-68, 68-70, 83; kinship terms, 71-73; kinship terms (broken Chinook/ Wawa), 71-72; lexicon derived largely from Chinook, 43, 53, 66-67, 75, 87; names of fauna, 95; numerals and colours, 65, 95; from pre-contact pidgin Chinook, 47-48; statistical comparison of word origins, 98(t); unification of Wawa (separation from LC), 125-27; Wawa second degree of approximation of Chinook, 66-68; word lists of Ross and Franchère, 56, 59-63, 64-65, 66-68, 145 Wawa and English influence: English as target for Wawa speakers, 116-17; English ascendant by 1841, 100; English loan words, 83, 96-97; English as language of education at Ft.V., 117-18; statistical comparison of word origins, 98, 100 Wawa and French influence: animals, 95-96; body terms, 96-97; foodstuffs, 94-95; French loan words, 60, 82-83, 93-96, 97-98, 100; horses and their equipment, 95; idiomatic phrases, 97; statistical comparison of word origins, 98, 100; tools and items of trade, 93-94 Wawa and Mixed Dialect, word lists of Ross and Franchère, 56, 59-60, 66, 73-75, 83 Wawa and Nootka influence: etymology of tluchmen (woman), 41-42; first

198

recorded sentence in Wawa, 15-16, 56, 159; in Mixed Dialect, 73-76; Nootka-derived words, 16, 21, 22-23, 28, 29, 32-35, 40, 87-88; Nootka prominent in early Wawa, 9(t), 75, 83, 133; origin of potlatch, 38-40; statistical comparison of word origins, 98(t) Wawa at Fort Vancouver: children fluent in Wawa, 5-6, 100-101, 146-47; children punished if caught speaking Wawa or French, 117-18; “creolization” at Ft.V., 100-101, 120-21, 130; demographics of fort (1860s), 136-37; French loan words (from 1820s on), 93-96, 97-98, 100; lingua franca with decline of LC, 86-87, 117-18, 120-21, 127; profiles and languages of Native wives and their children (from CCR), 107-16, 119, 133; spread of Wawa, 5-6, 100-01, 103, 130, 134, 146-47; Sunday school (in Wawa), 131; Wawa spoken by children, 102-3, 106 Whitman, Marcus, 119 Wilkes, Charles, 89, 100, 130 Willamette Valley: expansion of Wawa, 128(t), 129, 133, 134; linguistic situation pre-contact, 45; Protestant Mission, 131; settlement by Americans, 130, 135; sign language, 47; Wawa spoken by French and American settlers, 103

Index

Winthrop, Theodore, 124, 129 women, indigenous: ethnolinguistic mix of Native wives and their children, 107-16, 119, 133, 146-47; etymology of term in Wawa (tluchmen), 41-42; exogamous marriages and learning of Wawa, 41-42, 46-47, 102-3, 105-6; objects named, rather than subjects of naming, 42, 146; role in genesis and spread of Wawa, 5, 107-16, 120-21, 133, 145-47 Yakima campaign, 136, 139 Yi-a-must, Marguerite, 108 Yuquot, Vancouver Island, 16, 18, 28, 36, 37, 41, 146 Zenk, Henry B., 98; book on Chinook Jargon and Grand Ronde community, 137; “chaotic diversity” of Wawa, 83, 130; discovery of Manuscript 195, 149, 170n20; on Ross’ word lists, 63; on slave pidgin hypothesis, 52; on speech in Wawa by W.C. McKay, 119; on use of Wawa at Ft.V., 118; on use of Wawa on Grand Ronde reservation, 120; Wawa as “special case of creolization,” 100-101, 164n4; work used to determine origin of loan words into Wawa, 98 Zimmerman, Heinrich, 21