Rejected posting to CHINOOK at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU

[Liland Brajant ROS']

>>From: David Robertson <drobert at tincan.tincan.org>
>>
>>LaXiyEm, kanawi-Laksta,
>>
>>I don't know a thing that'd be useful in answering Mike's question
>>about this, but a tiny anecdote:  My Salish teacher, if I recall
>>right, at least once mentioned to us about some indigenous people
>>who somehow got the idea to use thorns to inoculate against this
>>dreaded plague -- and it worked in many cases.
>>
>>How many of realize that smallpox was as bad or far worse for
>>American natives than the black plague ever was for Europeans?
>>
>>Respectfully,
>>Dave

Very true, and at least in some cases it was deliberately spread mong
the tribal people by the US Government or its agents, as it's sug in
the Buffy Ste.-Marie song:

     Hear how the bargain was made for the West,
     With her shivering children at zero degrees:
     "Blankets for your land", so the treaties attest,
     Oh, well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed,
     And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
     From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day,
     And the tribes were wiped out, and history books censored--
     A hundred years of your chiefs have felt it's better that way...

(I'm quoting from distant memory, probably didn't get it quite right)

Of course a lot of the worst of the epidemics my ancestors brought here
had run their course long before Uncle Sam was anywhere near the action,
and were entirely unintentional in their genesis, but still there were
cases where what she sings was just the plain truth.

                  +++++changing the subject+++++

Being of Sedro-Woolley extraction, I first learnt the word Siwash in the
context of the poem "Bug". The relevant (first) stanza:

                               Bug

     On the banks of the mighty Skagit,
          in the haunts of the Siwash and slug,
     Some time in the early 'eighties
          rose a brisk little town called "Bug!"

I think at first I thought it was a tribal name.  I certainly didn't
know for many years about its (potentially disparaging) etymology.  In
my experience it is not a common English term, and when it does occur
the referent is more often a mythical provincial (in the sense of
slightly backwards, not BC-govt-funded) college, "Old Siwash" or "Siwash
State", than any sort of First Nations.

Leland



--
Liland Brajant Ros' * UEA-D, Seatlo Usono * FD Baptismo, AA, US-lit-ro
      204 N 39th St / Seattle WA 98103 Usono | tel 206-633-2434
    lilandbr at scn.org / lilandbr at hotmail.com / lbrnpusa at hotmail.com
        webpage "La Lilandejo" - http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/