Fitzgerald, Emily. "An Army Doctor's Wife on the Frontier" (msg 1)

[Liland Brajant Ros']

>Fitzgerald, Emily.  “An Army Doctor’s Wife on the Frontier:  Letters
>from Alaska and the Far West, 1874-1878.”  Pittsburgh:  University of
>Pittsburgh Press, 1962.
>
>Page 42-43:  Sitka, Alaska, August 23, 1874:  “There is a dirty little
>town scattered around the post full of Russians.  Then, off to one side, is
>the Indian village…They come to your backdoors every day with things to
>sell:  venison, birds, fish, berries, etc.  One woman quite frightened me
>yesterday by stopping  to speak to Bess.  She saw her and came back and
>said, ‘Your papoose?’  I said, ‘Yes.’  She pointed out the gate to
>a little Indian baby off on the grass and said, ‘My papoose.’”
>
>Page 90:  Sitka, January 23, 1875:  “I sent by this mail an Indian
>dollie…The little papooses here play with these charming dollies.”

Leaving aside the identification of cleck for the moment, I was struck by
the use of "papoose" here, especially in the first paragraph, and the
semantic shifts implicit in its employment in this way. I'm sure papoose is
of Eastern Algonquian origin, so it must have been introduced to Sitka
either by Canadian native people from farther east (who *might* have known
its origin but were probably influenced by its use in English or
English-based pidgins) or by whites for whom it meant specifically "*Indian*
baby", but the woman who so "frightened" the writer by merely speaking to
her child appears to have restored it to its proper, ethnically nonspecific
meaning.

lilEnd

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