CJ origin

[David Lewis]

>That non-natives may (or may not)
>have been as fluent as (some) native speakers does not exclude the FACT
>that non-natives used and popularized the Jargon as much as any native
>or native people may have.

I'm not so sure that non-natives would or did choose to use CJ in as many
situations as native people. Did, in fact, non-natives go to Indian shaker
churches and sing CJ hymns? Did they do so in the same numbers as Indian
people? Did non-natives use CJ in their homes to the point of creating a CJ
dialect as happened in Grand Ronde and other remote Indian communties?


>It's clear from our discussions that
>certain words passed to and from cultures in the region; I'd bet that
>"mowitch" and "moolack" and other food/hunting/fishing words may have
>been around; but it's the generation of trade and the
>movement/disruption of peoples that created the Jargon in its "modern"
>form.

Indians had trade, quite extensive trade, before contact with European
peoples. The Fraser and Columbia rivers were huge interconnected trading
zones. How did they speak to one another? Indian sign language doesn't
really answer the question and CJ seems the most reasonable answer.

>To say that _CJ_ existed before Contact is a fallacy, as CJ "as we know
>it" is the intercultural argot summed up in Shaw, Gibbs and the other
>sources, and in the forms that have come down to us from surviving
>speakers, be they in Grand Ronde or somewhere in the hills of British
>Columbia; to say that whatever intercultural argot/jargon existed before
>Contact is "the real CJ" or "the pure native CJ" is a non sequitur; and

CJ, as well as all languages, is a cultural construct. This means it is
dynamic. CJ, like all cultures, changes with time. As non-native cultures
came to the Pacific Northwest, they lent words to CJ. But CJ was already in
existance among native cultures. So I don't understand this last argument.
Is it "who really owns the name Chinook Jargon?" This, to me, is a
non-issue. no one can own a language, we can only debate about its origins
and negotiate with one another of whether things happened in the long
history of the Pacific Northwest.


>  What strikes me as
>most odd about this "there must have been a pre-Contact CJ" argument is
>that native historians themselves don't have any comment on it; and that
>in a vast region of very similar languages (such as the
>Straits-Fraser-Puget) there was no such "common tongue" that anyone
>knows of, either now or back then.......

Uh, I am a native historian and I have already presented my comments of
this issue before this note. And how do you know that there was no common
language? Just as it is difficult to prove that there was, it will be very
difficult to prove there wasn't.

I think it is necessary for people with a definite opinion to be careful
throwing words around like "racism" and possibly inciting anger in their
fellow listserve community members. We are all here for the same purpose,
to share information, debate the issues, and lend support to those who need
it. I know that is why I'm here.

David Lewis



David Gene Lewis                        Department of Anthropology
Graduate student                        University of Oregon
         cell 541-510-0217                               Eugene, OR 97403

coyotez at oregon.uoregon.edu                      talapus at kalapuya.com
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~coyotez           http://www.kalapuya.com

Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde,  Kalapuya Tribe