[FWD: Re: Slave(y) Jargon (was RE: Re: about a new friend ofours)]

[Mike Cleven]

terry glavin wrote:
>
> bella coola is a good example, but in fact they would more likely have
> picked it up first from the east (their neighbours the chilcotins, with whom
> they appear to have been on persistently friendly terms; i.e. "sitax," one
> of the chilcotin war leaders, was actually nuxalk) as much as from their
> participation in the cannery culture. shortly after a voice great within us
> came out, i got a call from an old old guy who was throughly conversant in
> chinook, far more so than i have ever been. he'd been the manager of the
> talleo cannery, where all the bella coola people worked, alongside some
> heiltsuks and owikeenos and japanese and chinese and t'kope men like us. he
> insisted that everybody spoke it, everybody needed to, and for him, as
> manager, it was an explicit job requirement.

Timeframe/era?  How old is this guy?  Mid-20th Century sounds like;
suggesting that the south-of-the-border saw that the Jargon was extinct
by the 1880s or so is even more incorrect than we already knew it to
be.....

One of the other veteran speakers that wrote me when I first started up
my pages was a Heiltsuk; I think he was in Terrace, or Kitimat.  Makes
me wonder exactly how much the Jargon _was_ used north of Johnstone
Strait; sounds like a lot.....not earlier on, that is, but relatively
more recently....

MC

BTW I have Charles Lillard's "Mission to Nootka"; he doesn't seem to
make any mention of the Jargon; at least not in the index - I've only
browsed the rest of the book.