[Fwd: P. Bakker re 3 factors tending against pidgins in N. America]

[Mike Cleven (by way of Mike Cleven <ironmtn@bigfoot.com>)]

Mikael Parkvall <parkvall at ling.su.se> wrote:

>As a pidginist/creolist with limited knowledge of the American north-west
>who has recently joined the list, I find Dave Robertson's comments
>interesting. Why is it that some contexts generate pidgins, whereas others
>fail to do so?

Time, and power....

>One thing that struck me in Dave's suggestion that the relative rarity of
>mestizos would be responsible for pidginisation, is that this would imply
>that a pidgin didn't emerge until the arrival of whites in the area. What
>is the evidence for or against this?

Quite a bit, I'm afraid - at least on my side of the border (British
Columbia).  I don't know enough about the social history of the Oregon
Territory to know to what degree there was intermarriage between natives
and whites there.  But in BC, on both Island and Mainland Crown Colonies
and in the first few early decades of the Province, there emerged a large
population of "mestizos" - the Spanish equivalent to "Metis", one must note
- both in terms of the issue of "casual union" as well as a result of the
colonial-era institution of "marriage according to the custom of the
country".  This latter phrase meant that a white (or other non-native, such
as a Hawaiian or West Indian, as was relatively common compared to the
numbers of those groups) married a local girl by the traditions of her
people - gift-giving and the permission of the father.

 There was quite a deal of controversy during the formation of the Colonies
and again during and in the decade or two after concerning recognition and
formalization of such marriages within the newly-applied system of British
law; this was resoundly defeated in public debate and policy, although many
non-native husbands re-married their natives spouse.  in too many cases,
white husbands abandoned their native wives when the country became
"civilized enough" for them to bring wives over from the Old Country
(generally the British Isles), also abandoning their offspring in the
process.  There are notable exceptions - Governor Douglas, the barman Gassy
Jack, and Donald MacLean were all true to their native kin, despite the
opprobrium this earned them among other colonialists (except in MacLean's
case, perhaps, because of his martyrdom during the Chilcotin War).  "Elite"
imperialists such as Governor Seymour, the nefarious Lt-Gov. Trutch, and
pioneer lumber industrialist Sewell "Sue" Moody all abandoned their natives
wives within a decade, either importing a wife or bringing over an existing
"legal" one.  Among the general population (at least by Irish, Scots,
Germans and Scandinavians, and on the Charlottes, Russians)
non-native/native lineage is relatively common; and IIRC there is a high
incidence of European and Hawaiian descent among coastal peoples.  The term
"Metis" was not used in BC until recently, as a result of the
constitutional debates and the recognition of mixed-blood aboriginal
peoples in all provinces; "Metis" now in Canada is a legal term for anyone
who can prove their native ancestry, even if they do not have "status"
lineage.  Many "status" native families have "white blood", but there are
many more "non-status" whose part-non-native ancestry denied them the
"rights" "enjoyed" by native people; nonetheless they still found (and
find) themselves in a netherworld between the two communities.

What I'm getting at in my typically long-winded fashion is that there was
and is in BC a LARGE "mixed-blood" or "halfbreed" population, who lived in
a dual existence in between native and non-native societies.  The old
frontier term - "breed" - is now considered derogatory, but before the
advent of "non-status" and "Metis" as descriptors this was the locally-used
word, if any.  The point is that, living in a not-fully-tribal upbringing,
Chinook was necessarily a lingua franca.  There is actually a strong case
to be made that Chinook's relationship to the identity and culture of the
mixed-blood community in BC is more than a bit similar to the relationship
between Michif and the Metis.  It is also worth considering that the
importation of the smattering of native words in the Jargon from east of
the Rockies is quite probably (I am willing to be disproven) a result of
the importation of these words by the Metis themselves, in their capacity
within the fur trade and as the crews of the "explorers" (Mackenzie,
Thompson, etc.)

Perhaps the difference with the Oregon Territory lies in the lack of major
Indian wars up this way; there was less animosity between the First Nations
and the new peoples in BC - nothing like the Cayuse or Nez Perce Wars, for
instance, and also more scattered settlement of isolated white settlers and
traders within an overwhelmingly larger native population.  There were few
Hudson's Bay traders and back-country ranchers who did not have part-native
offspring, if they had offspring at all; and native Catholicism also led to
the high number of Irish surnames and heritages in many BC reserves.  Of
course the early French voyageurs who also left bloodlines here were
already themselves Metis.  BC's history books are filled with notable
"half-breeds", such as the war hero Captain Frank Gott, or Donald MacLean's
own sons.  MacLean's sons, by the way, were notorious rather than
illustrious, having grown up frustrated by being accepted by neither white
or natives societies, and so went on a rampage of killing in the southern
Interior - at the rampage's start their intent was to provoke a rising
against the colonists uniting natives and halfbreeds.  A while back I
posted their speech - in Chinook - to the Chief of the Nicolas
(Merritt-area Nklapamux), whom they were trying to incite to rebellion
(they failed).  In Gott's case, he found himself in between native culture
and white law when shooting elk out of season - elk liver being the
prescribed native remedy for tuberculosis, which he had contracted while
serving as a warrior (at the age of 67) in the trenches of Flander; he
killed a game warden in a confrontation over his hunting rights as a
non-status, and was himself killed shortly thereafter by the assistant game
warden (despite his remarkable and highly-decorated military career).




>Also, while most creolists hold that limited access to the alleged target
>language is responsible for pidginisation, I rather believe that it is a
>question of motivation. If so, what would have made people in the
>respective areas more eager to learn "proper" Huron or Cree (the eastern
>lingua francas), whereas the creators of Chinook Jargon wouldn't even have
>tried to learn "proper" Chinook? Is it a question of attitude towards the
>Chinooks (different from that which the neighbours of the Hurons and the
>Crees would have had vis a vis these tribes and their languages), or does
>it rather have to do with the nature of contacts?

I've only been loosely following the debate over whether the Jargon is a
creole or a pidgin; I think it doesn't fit quite into either category,
though, because of its origins in a synthesis of Chinook and Nootka (as
seems apparent); I think this is why the term "Jargon" was applied to
describe it; certainly it seems more of a creole than a pidgin, to me at
any rate.  Even the French contribution to the Jargon, as suggested above,
must itself also be construed to be of aboriginal origin, both in the sense
that the voyageurs were themselves and aboriginal people (with their own
unique variant of French) and that native borrowings from the Catholic
French-speaking clergy (LeJeune, Durieux et al.).  These are not
pidginizations of French, nor are the word-borrowings from English.  We
know that the Jargon also employed English words in the same way - the
Jargon is not simply a "corruption" of English as are the various English
pidgins around the world (without meaning to be derisive about them, as
they have their own rich forms of expression, whether in Africa or
Oceania), but rather added English words into an already eclectic and
polycultural argot.