Michel Revais & Chinook Jargon in the Interior

[Sally Thomason]

I've asked Salish and Pend d'Oreille elders on the Flathead Reservation
about Chinook Jargon, and they all say it wasn't ever spoken there.  They
say that people knew the Sign Language, though; and my guess has been
that CJ stopped spreading eastward at about the same point where the
Sign Language stopped spreading westward -- that is, that the two
contact languages, used for similar functions in intertribal
communication, didn't overlap much.

There aren't many loanwords in either Montana Salish or Pend d'Oreille
from CJ.  There are a few, but it's quite possible that the were borrowed
from neighbors to the west, not directly from CJ itself.  Both tribes had
close ties with the Spokanes, Kalispels, Nez Perces, for instance, and
all three of those tribes may have been, as Dave suggests, within CJ
territory -- maybe at its easternmost point of spread.

All this is hard to prove, or even to find *any* evidence for, at this late
date.  It is certainly possible that the current elders (I think I first
asked about this ca. 1985) remember the use of the Sign Language but not
of CJ because the Sign Language hung around longer in the region; that is,
it's possible that CJ was once used in western Montana but it vanished
early from use and then from tribal memories.  Still, without direct evidence
of the use of CJ east of Idaho, it is probably most reasonable to assume
that it was never used there.

Well, except possibly by Michel Revais!  -- Jocko, where he was an interpreter,
is on the modern Flathead Reservation.  But note that he was half Kalispel, and
the main bands of the  Kalispels live farther west.  (There are said to be some
Kalispels on the Flathead Reservation, but I've never met any there.)

   -- Sally

P.S. There's quite a bit of controversy about whether the Pacific Pidgin English
     *arose* on those plantations -- many people believe that it arose as a pretty
     typical trade pidgin -- but it may now be generally accepted that it was
     *nurtured* on the plantations of Queensland and/or Samoa (etc.), as Dave
     suggests.