BC 1st Nations attitudes to CJ: Kutenai

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm.

Lhush pus ma hay nanIch ukuk ya chaku khapa / Please consider the
following which comes from

Boas, Franz.  "Kutenai Tales" ...

p. 352	American (=Boston) 	pO'stIn
p. 355	bluejay			qoqu'ske:
p. 356	Canadian 		kIndzOrdz (King George)
p. 357	Chinaman		knu'q!Lam [native Kutenai]
p. 358	cook, to [generic?]	-keik-
p. 360	Englishman		soya'pe [from Nez Perce/Salish]
p. 363	Frenchman		nu:L?a'qana [native Kutenai]
p. 365	hammer			po'po
p. 371	Skukum Chuck, below	aa`kauma`kso:k [?perhaps folk-
		Finlay Creek		etymologized into Kutenai?]
* There is no generic word for "Whiteman" here.
* There is no generic word for "Indian" here.

First note:  These are all of the words I found in the English-Kutenai
vocabulary of the book which show much resemblance to CJ items.   I have
included additional, dissimilar words for a reason.

Second note:  Only "American" and "Canadian" are clearly loans from CJ.
They did not apparently displace "Englishman", a term common to languages
of this region of the Interior, originating reputedly in Nez Perce.
"Frenchman" and "Chinaman" are described by native Kutenai terms.
"Whiteman" and "Indian" seem absent, perhaps indicating a late, or
limited, acculturation to nonnative concepts -- though "Englishman" could
in fact mean "Whiteman", as the cognate term does in e.g. Salish.

Third note:  Of verbs, only "cook" looks possibly influenced by
(nonstandard) ChInuk Wawa; the resemblance cannot be shown by me to be
other than chance.

Fourth note:  "Hammer" uses the same onomatopoeic form that CJ uses for
"gunshot; beating; blowing" but in a rather different sense, and this form
is common in numerous NW languages already.  Correspondence with ChInuk
Wawa is not the best thesis here.  Similarly "bluejay" is a form shared
among many unrelated languages of the region, apparently predating CJ.

Fifth note:  "Skukum Chuck" contains the very frequent prefix aa-, and
might represent an interpretation of the CJ name as a sequence of Kutenai
morphemes.  The Kutenai in this case may have parsed the word as having
the Salish prefix s-.  They had extensive contact with the Salish;
surrounded as they were by that ethnic group, presumably the Kutenai
learned some CJ words from their neighbors, as well as from Whites.
I explicitly do not know what the Kutenai term for "Skukum Chuck"
literally means.

For those whom it will benefit:  Kutenai / Ktunaxa land is around the
current US - Canadian border, centering around the region where Idaho, BC,
Alberta and Montana meet.

It looks to me as though Kutenais perhaps had late contact with CJ, to
judge by this meagre vocabulary list.  Whether or not they "disdained" it
is another question.  A.F. Chamberlain's "Report on the Kootenay Indians
of Southeast British Columbia" (circa 1886; reprinted in _Northwest
Anthropological Research Notes_ vol. 8, no. 1/2, Fall/Spring 1974) states
that "the widespread" Chinook Jargon "hindered" the development of
Kutenai Jargon, however.

The role played by the "Kutenai Jargon" is not very clear; I notice the
printed source saying that local White settlers used a highly restricted
vocabulary and sound system in this jargon, which might make it more like
Trader Navajo (whose White speakers could not understand native Navajo)
than like ChInuk Wawa.  This information comes from Chamberlain as well,
which I am reading as I compose this email, and in fact he says,

	"Many of those who speak this 'Kootenay jargon' imagine they are
	acquainted with the real aboriginal tongue; but it consists, in
	fact, of Kootenay words changed in form and sound to conform to
	English grammar and phonetics."

I quote from Emanuel J. Drechsel's "Native American Contact Languages of
the Contiguous United States" (in Wurm, Stephen et al. (eds.):  "Atlas of
languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the
Americas", Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, p. 1229-1230):

	"We had a hard time with some of the white boys that thought
	they knew the Navajo language...They spoke the language like
	coffee, sugar, and flour and counting of money.  They knew how
	to say that.  But there was always a fraction of a syllable that
	they could not pronounce exactly as well and precise as it
	should be so there was would be no maybe and if about it...There
	were [some] words that they'd never heard.  All they knew was what
	was known as trading-post language...But they could not carry on a
	conversation outside of the Navajo trading post language."  [World
	War 2 code-talker Jimmy King; original in Margaret T. Bixler,
	"Winds of Freedom:  The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers of World
	War II."  Darien, CT:  Two Bytes, 1992.]

By 1941, Harry Holbert Turney-High was writing (in his "Ethnography of the
Kutenai" = _Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association_, no.
56, p. 189-190):

	"Men between sixty and seventy, old enough to know of old Kutenai
	life but not old enough to be considered 'old timers who lived the
	old Indian customs,' say that the language has changed so much
	that their grandparents would hardly understand modern Kutenian.
	*This is not because of loan words* from English or words of
	Kutenai coinage for elements of Machine Age culture.

	"The younger generation is changing the language through lip-
	laziness...they are being influenced by the local Montana or
	boundary English phonetics....

	"Perhaps the strain of bilingualism is as much as we can ask of
	the young folk, for most of the young Kutenai are really
	bilingual, having absorbed as much English as the average
	neighboring white rancher knows, but having a similarly restricted
	knowledge of the Kutenaian vocabulary."   [Emphasis added by me.]


Again, it would be of tremendous interest to learn more about the Haida
Jargon.

Lhush chxi pulakli,
Dave




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