Shaping a Jargon future (Kahkwa Mamook Alki Wawa)

[Mike Cleven]

barbara harris wrote:
>
> I'm just using Mike's title as an appropriate one for a request to all of you.
> I'm giving a paper at the upcoming ILA conference in April entitled "Chinook
> Jargon Redivivus" dealing with the tremendous upsurge of interest in CJ, how
> it's being brought up to date (like "raydyo haws" - I don't think that's quite
> the right spelling), etc. What I would like to know is how did you all get
> interested in the Jargon in the first place? (I'll tell you my story some
> other time.) And if any of you would like to contribute coinages, new
> circumlocutions etc., I'd be eternally grateful, too. Be sure you'll all be
> mentioned in the References!

I'll try and come up with something; I'm prone to poesy and verbiage but
will try and get something out; please slice and redice whatever I send
when I do send it.

I thought the bit in the list that David Robertson just posted from
Spuzzum was very historically/linguistically provocative.  I'm willing
to wager (dinner out? your town or mine?) that if we investigated just a
bit deeper into the remaining records in the canyon towns (list below)
that we'll discover another "version" or dialect of the Jargon; another
range of words, certainly a lot more known about another period in the
Jargon's (and the region's) history.  This is what I think we'll find if
we look at washem/pashem and holaporte (I'm pretty sure it's "au
d'abord" but I stand ready to be corrected if someone can come up with a
more obvious borrowing; who knows, maybe the original's Nlaka'pamux or
something) and cayoosh and lapote-meaning-pail; a lexicon that Shaw or
whomever missed and which maybe had mostly vanished by the Oblate period
of the BC Jargon, or which was just never used in Kamloops or the
Cariboo, but only in the Canyon; maybe because it was only used locally,
on a micro-locational basis ("holaporte" for example might only survive
in Spuzzum and Yale, but not in Boston Bar or Emory Creek....or like
"cayoosh" in the Lillooet Country) which therefore excluded it from the
good Fathers' efforts to codify and further the use of the Wawa.

I wouldn't be surprised if "Canyon Jargon" if we could find a broader
range of words for it might turn out to contain more Kanaka and Chinese
borrowings, maybe even some Klaleman borrowings; there were many, many
West Indians in the Canyon, like all other "coloureds" they hit the
goldfields upstream from Yale, mixed in with native life; same with
Kanakas and Chinese; they lived apart, but not separate from, native
life as the whites did (except maybe the Irish).  One account of the
Canyon's history I just read described the difficult region upstream
from Yale as largely forgone by the Americans, who had really only
penetrated it briefly during the Fraser Canyon War, and it was left to
the non-white peoples to mine for the vicious yellow sand, at least more
in the easier pickings downstream from Saddle Rock (just above Yale
Tunnel); other than Boston Bar, which was obviously a large American
settlement by its name; once the Canyon road got built (1861) this mixed
"other" life in the Canyon disappeared, although it essentially moved to
lumber camps and, in the 1880s, railway camps.

We've all heard, I think, that the Jargon had Russian, Chinese, Hawaiian
etc. in it but there just isn't any evidence in the published 19th
Century word lists; as with the patter that Gov. Simpson mentioned at
Ft. Vancouver, I think the way the so-called "minorities" used the
Jargon was probably peppered with more of their own native argots, which
would vary by ethnic content according to where you were.  Obviously
around a place like Kanaka Bar any pidgin/wawa that was used was
probably going to acquire aat the very least a Hawaiian flair to the
prononciation, but probably in the local slang a small array of imported
Hawaiian words; same at China Bar, same at Black Canyon (which yes, was
named for its black population; a spectacular cascade of wooden catwalks
and cabins across a black basalt canyon face; somewhere near Yale; I saw
a picture in the BC Archives; pretty wild looking.  Maybe the Russian
words that supposedly existed in the Jargon were in the version spoken
in the Skeena and Haida Gwaii as well as Russian America.  One issue
that can't be resolved because Simon Fraser wasn't a very good
note-taker IMHO is what the Stl'atl'imx called the Russian muskets
there were carrying; there had been NO French or English contact in the
canyon by the time Fraser arrived, but the Lillooets (or Askettih as he
called them) had already acquired Russian trade goods, although by what
route is somewhat mysterious and rather intriguing to consider (we'll
discuss it over dinner, OK?).  You'd think that a Russian-obtained trade
good would retain the Russian name; anyway, it's too bad Fraser as a
diarist didn't record their words for various things, including these
rifles.  Unless the Russian word for mukset is simply
musket....obviously as an HBC man Fraser was a bit dosconcerted to see
this evidence of Russian trade activity, although it was indeed a clue
that they were close to the Coast.

I think maybe the reason the ethnic elements or regional variations in
the Jargon didn't get recorded - were they real and not only my
speculation - was that they weren't necessary as the native "base
Jargon" nor as desirable as the anglo-french borrowings for the usual
prejudicial reasons; why record Kanaka words if they were only used in
towns where there were no Kanakas?  And again, Shaw and his ilk focussed
on Puget Sound and the Columbia, not in the Fraser and upper Georgia
Strait and Cariboo and Okanagan, which surely were areas in which the
Jargon was current from 1858 onwards (the Straits from the 1820s,
maybe).  The Canyon was also isolated country for a long time; really
only being of active interest during the Gold Rush, and ever afterwards
only a corridor northwards; at one time it had been among the most
densely populated places on Earth (not so long before).  During the Gold
Rush its population ran swelled by an extra 50-100,000 people (depending
on who's counting, and I don't think the Brits ever did have an accurate
idea of exactly how many people there were or who); that's about a
thousand people per mile of riverbank, some of it concentrated near
certain bars and sandbanks.

There are different historical issues that have occurred to me while
writing this that I'll have to think about before going on; I know I
write long posts, also.  I'm starting to wonder if the different history
of interethnic usage of the Jargon in BC not only might have fostered a
further range of words than we're familiar with as "Jargon" per se, but
also that the greater density of native and other non-white settlement
in BC might have contributed to greater usage of the Jargon in the wider
community; BC was never as heavily settled by whites as Oregon or
Washington were (even now).  This might explain in part why the two or
three non-native "native speakers" of the Jargon who've come forward to
the list over time have come from rural BC - Chilliwack, Kitimat and
Merritt, IIRC.  Native life was, I think, much more dominant in the
backcountry and smalltowns of BC than you find in Washington or Oregon;
I'm not trying to cut down Grand Ronde or its equivalents elsewhere in
the States; what I mean is that a town the size of Bellingham or, um,
Vancouver WA would have a large and prominent native community and
territory within it; in smaller towns like Lillooet and Bella Coola the
combined reserves often outnumber even tourist season non-natives.  And
not long ago, a lot of the elders spoke the Jargon (thanks to the
Oblates, ironically enough), so there was lots of opportunity and _need_
by non-natives to learn it.

I'm really hepped up about these words that Dave found from Spuzzum.
Like I think I may have said in another post I'm going up that way next
week and might do some digging.  Maybe I can even kowtow enough in
Lillooet to get at least a glance at the size and catalogue of their
Jargon archives....

Klatawa kopa lamonti, kopa stowbelowayhut
Klatawa kopa olo illahee
naika iskum olo kopa lamonti....