'Stick Indians' (was...RE: Re: The Stick Samish)

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Not that the Oxford English Dictionary will necessarily be interested in recording every nuance of every dialect of the language, but here's a further twist in the discussion.
>
> 'Stick Indians' would appear to be a current term in the English spoken by some Interior Indians, for example near Spokane, Washington.  The sense can be, I think, either 'quasi-mythical unacculturated tribes of Indians who live in the remaining wilderness areas', or else something verging on 'sasquatch'.  In the latter sense, the Spokane Salishan translation as I recall it is /sc'w'en'eyti/.

One cryptozoological reference I saw on the bigfoot-species in Interior
Washington was "Seahtick"....also "spike-toe" as they were supposed to
have had an upright protruding claw where the big toe might be....

>
> The sense 'Indians of the Interior', and the specificity of usage by coastal tribes, is unfamiliar to me.  Is the phrase still in use in that context?
>
> It isn't hard to imagine CJ /stik sawash/ having spread from coastal to interior usage, mutating its sense as geographic and social surroundings shifted.  Once you're in the Interior, you might find no 'Other' groups who are much more geographically isolated than your own, and the term 'Stick Indians' could then shift toward a legendary sense.

Well, in BC there's "town Indians", not exactly meaning off-reserve
since a good many reserves are in or on the edge of town; so "stick
Indian" meaning someone who lives in a more remote area makes sense; and
in BC there's certainly some that qualify - the Stony Chilcotin, the
Sekani, and others; Alan's example cited the Tahltan (by whatever
spelling) of the Stikine, who are definitely in a remote hinterland
(behind the Panhandle, and incredibly isolated from the rest of BC until
the building of the Stewart-Cassiar Highway)and the Tagish, also in a
remote area.  I'm wondering about the Jargon term "lemolo" which
apparently was used to refer to backwoods residents/natives, i.e. who
still lived the old way in remote areas.

>
> (Note:  Isn't it in Melville Jacobs' "Chinook Jargon Texts" that one northwestern Indian narrator uses the term /stik injEn/?)


MC