People who had Chinook Jargon names

[David D. Robertson]

LaXayam,

[What CJ personal names have you seen or heard?  --That's the point that
this longish message gets to.]

Some research I've done lately brought this up.

Leslie Tepper edited a volume titled "The Interior Salish Tribes of British
Columbia:  A Photographic Collection" for the Canadian Museum of
Civilization's Mercury Series (Canadian Ethnology Service, Paper #111),
Ottawa, 1987.

There's a photo on page 81 of "John Tsikamin", a Thompson Salish
(Nlha7kapmx) man, in clothing made of buckskin, musquash skin, flicker
feathers, and so on.  The photo was taken by the well-known James A. Teit,
who lived among the Thompson, in 1913.  Tsikamin's last name is written in
this book with a bar or macron over each letter "i", the intent of which is
hard to discern.  (Cf. Ivy Doak's "The 1908 Okanagan Word Lists of James
Teit", University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics no. 3,
Missoula, 1983.)

You have to wonder, is the name "Tsikamin" a version of the Chinook Jargon
"chickamin" / "chikmin", the word for "metal" and "money"?

PRO:  (1)The alternation of "ts" with "ch" is not unknown, and in fact it's
frequent among the Native languages of the Northwest.  (2)And Teit provides
the Native name of almost every person he photographed, along with a
translation of that name -- while providing no translation at all of
"Tsikamin".  (3)The time around 1913 was within, if towards the end of, the
period when Chinook Jargon was a useful medium of communication in Interior
BC.  (4)The form of the name is an extremely close match for the CJ word.

CON:  (1)Perhaps this is a Thompson name, for which Teit simply forgot to
supply a translation.  (2)There is a suffix "-min" in several Salish
languages, including Thompson (cf. the place names "Hozomeen" & "Tulameen"),
so maybe "Tsikamin" consists of an entirely native structure of a root
"tsik(a)" (roots usually end in a consonant in Salish) + suffix "min".

My judgment leads me to suspect a Jargon origin over a Salish one for this
name.  Perhaps John Tsikamin had plenty of money, was a blacksmith, or was
otherwise characterized by a salient relation to metal.  (How's that for an
imitation of anthro-talk?)

What's interesting here is that people wound up having Jargon names.

WHO?  Indians, mostly -- sometimes Whites too had CJ names, but these were
apparently treated as mere nicknames, whereas sometimes Indians seem to have
passed their Jargon names down to later generations.

WHAT?  As mentioned, salient characteristics of the person named seem to
have been the most frequent basis for Jargon names.  "Tyee", "Cultus",
"Tsikamin", "Coxee" (an Okanagan name, deriving from CJ "kakshEt" =
"broken", per the autobiography of Mourning Dove), and many others were
used.

WHERE?  Predictably, over the entire geographical range in which CJ was ever
used as a medium of interethnic communication.

WHEN?  My own guess is this took place at least from circa 1800 and well
into the 20th century.  The date of the earliest known CJ personal name is a
very good question to ask.

WHY?  Were these names chosen by their bearers, I wonder?  Indian names, in
the other Native languages, were often perceived as unpronounceable and
incomprehensible.  Those names may often have been spontaneously translated
for outsiders' benefit into Chinook Jargon, and the Jargon version of the
name (which I suppose was sometimes pretty wide of the semantic mark
represented by the original name) could then have become the name by which a
given person, or family, was known.  (At first glance, this first idea fails
to convince.)  For that matter, if a person's Indian name was not
appropriate material to share with outsiders, even members of other tribes,
a nickname in CJ may have purposely been chosen.  Not unlikely also is that
Indian people were given CJ names in the course of conversation with
outsiders, again including members of other tribes, in just the same way
that sometimes an Indian would spontaneously be named "Ned", "Sally", or
"Tom":  For convenience's sake in the new post-contact world.

HOW?  Much of the answer to this question is contained in the preceding, but
it's still a good idea to consider what mechanisms, or what forces, led some
 people to accept being known by a CJ name, self-identify by such a name, or
do both.

All of this looks like yet another excellent subject for some linguist to
research in depth.

What other Chinook Jargon personal names can you think of?  Share them on
the list, and maybe we'll figure out more answers to these questions.

Dave