Jewitt etc [addendum]

[Mike Cleven]

>
>At 10:04 PM 1/16/99 -0800, you wrote:
>>Silly me, I'm getting into a habit of forgetting part of each message that
>>I intend to send out...
>>
>>Call this a kimtah-tzum (a P.S.):  Methinks that "pasiooks"/ "pasayuks"
>>was used equally well for the voyageurs of Me'tis extraction as for
>>Frenchmen per se.
>>
>>In fact, a majority of French speakers in the NW would likely always have
>>been Me'tis.  Among the rest, most were missionary priests, hein?
>>
>>Now let's note that "pasayuks" is, as someone just recently mentioned
>>here, a combination of the word "franc,ais"* with the Old / Lower Chinook
>>suffix for animate plural beings.  This alone very strongly suggests that
>>the term originated among the Lower Chinooks themselves, i.e. about the
>>mouth of the Columbia River.  In that particular geographic context, the
>>"maritime" as opposed to the "overland" trade, it would have been a label
>>for men from France.    But as the Jargon spread to new regions as a
>>lingua franca (get it?)  :-) it's easy to suppose that this term applied
>>to any who spoke French..  May I propose further that it was probably quite
>>easy to spot a francophone:  He was probably in black robes or a furtrader
>>married to a native woman.  You wouldn't have needed to know word one of
>>the language to label 'em as such.
>>
>>(*I reject fairly firmly the suggestion that "pasayuks" is derived from
>>"pasisse" i.e. "cloth".)
>
>Well, I hadn't considered before that franc,ais => pasay, but if that _is_
the case, then it seems possible that the origin of the word for cloth came
from the name of the people who first brought it, i.e. the Metis, rather
than the other way around as I'd thought was the case from the older
lexicons.  I guess the next question to ask is "did paseese for 'cloth'
exist in any local native language before the advent of the cloth
merchants/fur traders?".
>
>Further note - the term was coined long before Catholic missionaries were
evident in the region in large numbers.  The awareness of
French-from-France was minimal in the region, although if you note the
story about the talisman of the Squamish being relayed to Napoleon, it
seems that at least a couple of ships must have had French priests on them
(that these were Russian ships in the Squamish legend doesn't make much
sense, but oh well.....); by the time the Oblates and other Catholic
missionaries showed up, the word "pasiooks" was well-entrenched by
association with the Voyageurs (all of whom were Catholic, but to my
knowledge they didn't drag a priest along to keep up Confession.....)
>
>>
>>In such a scenario, identity as an "Eastern Indian" might well have been
>>submerged to that as "French".
>
>Actually, a lot of the native peoples of northern Ontario continue to use
French; it would have been these that were in the Company employ; Plains
Indians accompanying the Metis, of course, would have been largely
indistinguishable from their "half-breed" companions, and probably used
Metis French with them when not using their own languages or whatever
Jargon they may have acquired.....
>
>>
>>To leave you with a fun anecdote, I refer to L.V. McWhorter's collections
>>of Indian stories, particularly those about the Stick Indians or
>>stick-showers (i.e. those who show, or poke, sticks at you) which some
>>whites appear to call Sasquatch.  LVMcW records a ?Yakama man saying in a
>>Pidgin English, which is another fascinating subject entirely,
>>something like "Him bad stick-shower ... Him not like citizen
>>stick-shower!"  Had this man been speaking CJ, he might have used the
>>phrase "Boston stik sawash" in this sentence.   Does anyone else here
>>detect humor based on the idea that Stick Indians are unassimilated
>>tribes?  This is from memory, so help me out if I'm shaky, please.
>
>Could "stick-shower" here be "flogging with a switch"?
>
>"Stick Indians", I believe, referred to natives living in
forest/wilderness locations, i.e. "the bush"; whether or not they used
white-style cabins or still lived in traditional houses was not an issue.
"Renegade", of course, was "lemolo".....
>
>
>
>