Jargon in Sechelt

[Mike Cleven]

I've just started reading Lester Peterson's "The Story of the Sechelt
Nation", which appears to be a fairly accurate (and elder-endorsed) account
of Sechelt language, toponymy, and culture history.  No doubt the
Salishanists among us would be able to correct the chosen spellings of the
Sechelt language words given, and may wish to dispute the Sechelt's own
assertion that their language is unrelated to any other (which is strange,
since my Squamish acquaintances maintain that their own language is "almost
the same").  Maybe once I'm done reading it I'll type in all the Sechelt
lexicon given and hope for someone out there to give the proper technical
orthography; whether or not this will match with the Sechelt's own
preferred orthography is anyone's guess.

Anyway, I'm not even through the fourth chapter yet and I've already come
across three or four terms of Jargon origin, or perhaps which came to the
Jargon from Sechelt.  At least one is a Sechelt-Jargon compound.

They are:


Klaya-klaya-klye - "always smiling"; seems to be from the Jargon "klee" -
smile, glad, happy.  Name of a tribal heroine.

Moose-moose-shah-lah-klahsh - "sea cow", or "cow from the waters"; not a
manatee, but some kind of sea serpent covered in fur, with forelimbs.
Lives in a cave on Narrows Arm; only comes out at night.

Kwuhn-ayss - "white whale".  Sechelt myth has several tales featuring white
whales, speculated by Peterson to be sperms but given the antiquity of the
people even, perhaps, belugas.  There are several placenames relating to
the Kwuhn-ayss, and some lakes in the heads of various Sechelt-area inlets
are said to hold, or to have once held, white whales who strayed in there
from the sea.  There is one location on Sechelt Arm where a white whale is
supposedly still visible, deep below the shoreline.

Kuhl-ah-khan - "fort".  Sechelts had numerous fortified encampments,
consisting of a palisade surrounded by a dry moat.  At Skwah-lahwt on
Thormanby Island, "existence of such a structure is remember to the present
day".

Peterson also mentions the Jargon, and gives a source for a certain word I
hadn't noticed before - "shelikum" for a mirror as an English borrowing
(from "she like 'um").

The book is full of interesting ethnography, even if he does reach a bit
and pull stuff in from Heyerdahl and other dubious interpreters of
Northwest mythography.  He goes so far as to posit "Shoo-lee-uh" as being
derived from the Egyptian "shu" (god of the sky) and "ra/la" (god of the
sun), and also suggest that "paht-ahm-oss" ("water running over the edge of
a vessel") may be comparable to the Greek "potamos" ("river").  Despite
such embarrassing anomalies, he describes numerous interesting
legends/myths, including references to prehistoric horses that fled the
rising waters, and of the coming of the ice giants and a time when there
was only darkness and rain/snow.........