wapato

[Sally Thomason]

I'm surprised to hear that there's an "official" Cree
etymology for CJ wapato; my sources say it's Ojibwe,
a closely-related but different Algonquian language.
Algonquian speakers traveled with French trappers &
traders, often, I believe.  One of the Salish elders
I work with in Montana had a great-grandfather named
John Delaware, named after the Algonquian tribe he
came from.  There were also Iroquois speakers among
the Montana Salish (Flatheads) in the 19th century;
one of them, if I'm remembering the literature right,
was a member of one of the delegations that the
Salish sent east to request missionaries for their
tribe.  And that was in the first half of the 19th
century.  So the presence of a few words from eastern
Native languages in CJ isn't all that surprising.

  -- Sally