Canucks and kanakas

[Mike Cleven]

At 06:45 PM 2/13/99 -0800, David Robertson wrote:
>Howdy,
>
>Just got E. Drechsel's & H. Makuakane's paper on Hawai'ian loanwords in
>CJ.
>
>Footnote 2 mentions the possible connection of "Kanaka" with "Canuck"
>(originally 'an epithet for a dark-skinned French-Canadian of part-Indian
>descent on the frontier').  Later the term, as the papers notes, became
>general for all Canadians.

This is an interesting possibility, but methinks it unlikely.  The answer
will have to do with the period of origin of the term "Canuck", which I
have a gut feeling is long before any connection between the Pacific Coast
and French Canada.  It _is_ true that "Canuck" once meant only French
Canadians, and was imported into New England in that guise; I had not heard
before that it was associated with Metis/halfbreed identity, which I
suppose is a possibility.  But Quebeckers used the term "Canuck"
self-referentially until its adaption to the whole of the Canadian
population, and they were not known for associating themselves with any
native Indian inheritance; unless the use of "Canuck" sprang up in the
French Ontarian community (which _is_ heavily part-native and usually not
afraid to say so) and was transferred to Quebeckers from there.

But again the date of provenance is an issue.  CJisms might have travelled
with the voyageurs back out of BC/WA/OR, but there was no real contact
between Canada and the Pacific Coast until well after the founding of the
Mainland Colony in 1858; really there were no "cultural transmissions" out
of BC into the rest of Canada until after the opening of the railway
(1885-6); and really most CJisms in the outside world didn't leave the NW
until the days of the Klondike, unless they "left" via sailors' lingo (if
at all).

So if "Canuck" turns out to be pre-1850 it's very unlikely that this is a
CJism from "Kanaka"; if it's older than the advent of the Hawaiians on the
Coast (1787), then it's quite impossible.......it raises the interesting
issue of French-Hawaiian interaction at the fur company posts,
however.....but no, there were no Pasiooks klootchman in the region, nor
Kanaka klootchman, for the mixing of the Metis and Kanaka inheritance.......

BTW I've got the 101 Hawaiian words that are borrowings from English or
other colonialist languages; it's on an HTML page but I could copy-paste it
here as text if anyone wants to see it......


>May I note that many people in the Spokane, Washington area at least, use
>the term "Doukhobor" [du*k at bor] in a similar way.  No time to define the
>term now, so I'll apologize, rrun, and point you to the encyclopedia.

Well, in the parts of BC adjacent to Spokane, it _is_ almost true that
"Doukhobor" would suffice for a generalized description of the kind of
Canadian who would be clogging the parking lots at Spokane's malls.  Not
all of the population of the West Kootenay is Doukhobor, but it's
close........I think "cheesehead" has a similar origin; most of the Fraser
Valley-ites hitting Whatcom County are dairy farmers, and either Mennonite
or Dutch Reformed (or as in Van der Zalm's case, hard-core Dutch
Catholic.....)......

Mike C.