Targeting Indian syntax & phonology ... was ... Re: WPA Historical Records Benton Co. Oregon

[Jeffrey Kopp]

On a related note, I received this email a couple days ago, which I was holding until I got permission from the sender to post it to the list.  Anyway, here is the body:

>Being somewhat of a history buff, I purchased" Town on the Sound ", stories 
>of Steilacoom.  One of the stories is about a prominent attorney named Frank 
>Clark who was defending his client accused of cutting timber on Federal land. 
> The jury consisted of loggers & ranchers.  The Federal attorneys arrived 
>with huge law books & spoke their own legal jargon.  Clark addressed the jury 
>using the Chinook jargon.  The jury quickly found the man not guilty.  This 
>probably would not work today.  

This has a whiff of legend to it, but being a court case, can be investigated.  While there would be no printed transcript of a non-appeals case, having the attorney's name and nature of the case, if we knew the year, one could probably find it listed in court reports in a Washington law library.  (Actually, it sounds like a federal case, in which case it would be in the Pacific Reporter, which I could view locally.)  The use of Jargon, being unusual, would probably be noted.

Regards,

Jeff

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002 15:57:53 -0400, "David D. Robertson" <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU> wrote:
>[Dave adds] --with which I heartily agree.  A fascinating aspect of the
>Jargon's career among scholars is that they, like those who used CJ as a
>matter of course in their lives, made it a utilitarian vehicle, getting
>what they could from it for their own purposes.  Anthropologists and
>linguists for much of the 20th century tended to pay attention to the
>Jargon only to the extent that it could further their own efforts at
>documenting supposedly vanishing Indian cultures.  The White and other non-
>indigenous speakers of Jargon did go largely unstudied.  Dan Macey's visit
>to the Chinuk Lu7lu a couple of years ago was a rewarding glimpse into the
>latter subset of CJ speakers.]