Iskit/Secret Island/CJ considered as possible source for placenames

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm,

It's interesting to see just how "Chinook" is invoked as a possibility for
the source of many an indigenous-looking Northwest placename.  A few small
observations:

Many NW placenames and some proper names which look French or English to a
nonlinguist are actually CJ, but my sense is that these ones are rarely
suspected of having an origin other than in those European languages.

Many indigenous-looking placenames whose meaning or origin aren't
immediately apparent seem often to be first suspected of being CJ.
Predictably, knowledge of any of the numerous and fading indigenous
languages is very sparse, to the extent that it's quite a rare person who
knows even the name of a local tribe or its language, let alone whether
the language is (or was) related to any others in the region.

Most Chinook Jargon placenames on Northwest maps were bestowed by Whites,
I would guess, if I had to.  Most use a very limited subsection of the
lexicon of CJ.  Most are easy to quickly spot, identify, and interpret,
for that reason.  Furthermore (my brother the geographer might have more
to say on this matter), the CJ names we find in our maps seem to tend to
reflect Euro-American notions of geography, as well as of race.  Thus we
have plenty of places called <Ipsoot> /Ipsut/ "hidden", and numerous
physical features of our landscape labeled <Tatoosh> /tUtush/ "woman's
breast(s)"--the latter, I presume, being couched in Chinook-as-Indian-talk
in order to avoid giving offense to White audiences by using such a word
as "tits".  A small further excursus:  "Tit" appears only to be used in
Northwest geographical names which have already explicit reference to
Indians, e.g. "Squaw Tit Hill".

There are plenty more observations which could be made on this subject.
It would be good to present a paper on it at the next geographical names
board meeting in this region.

Best,
Dave



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