CJ song from Ft. Babine, BC.............Re: Father Francois Marie Thomas OMI

[David D. Robertson]

"Shortly after his arrival in the north, the Indians began to give [Father
Nicolas] Coccola [the Oblate missionary] a tumultuous welcome.  Martin
Starret recalled the first time he witnessed the arrival of Father Coccola
at Fort Babine:

'Indians were shoving cartridges into their magazines to fire a salute.
They must have fired off all of twenty boxes of thirty cartridges to
welcome the priest, and there were answering shots from the boats coming
in, too...just as they were landing the Indians started to sing in
Chinook:  and it seems to me right now that I can sing you that song right
perfectly.  This is the way they sang it.

'Ay, Pell Cola!  Ay mesika papa!
Ay, Pell Cola!  Ay mesika papa!
Mamook Klahowya mika tenas
Mamook klahowya kuna mokst mesika.

'Hi, Pere Coccola, hi our father!  Make greetings your children, make
greetings altogether we.'"

(From page 72 of Whitehead, Margaret, ed.  1988.  "They Call Me Father:
Memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola."  Vancouver, BC:  UBC Press.)

Fort Babine was also known as Fort Kilmaurs, and was located on Babine
Lake to the north and west of Stuart Lake, BC.  So this was
northern "Carrier" Athabaskan country, in my crude understanding; see the
message below, quoted from a year ago.

The CJ above is interesting.  Granted that it's someone's reminiscence, so
maybe a bit inexact.  That might help explain the use of "Cola" instead
of "Coccola", and the use of "mesika" for "our" and "we" ("nesika" would
be appropriate).  But the given English translation may be as much at
fault, I suggest:  "Hi" for "Ay" may be misleading -- "Ay" might be an
interjection of pleasure, for example, instead of being just a greeting
like the English word.  And the translation of the third and fourth lines
might be better as "greet your children / let's greet each other."

It's worth pointing out that the closest counterpart to "mamook klahowya"
that I can think of in BC Jargon is "mamuk klahawiam" in Kamloops Wawa,
where it means "take pity (on someone)."  But some varieties of CJ made a
distinction between "klahowya" (a greeting) and "klahowyam" (the
adjective "poor, pitiful"), and the variety used in the above song may
have done so.

And if Starret's recollection of the song was accurate, the use
of "mesika" for "we/our" actually parallels some of the distortions in
another sample of Carrier CJ I've seen.  (Again, see the message quoted
below.)  Overall, it's an interesting question whether a consistent and
distinct kind of Jargon was spoken in Carrier country.

--Dave R.





On Sun, 1 Sep 2002 14:11:06 -0400, David D. Robertson <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU>
wrote:

>On Sat, 31 Aug 2002 17:50:07 -0700, Theresa Kishkan
<tkishkan at UNISERVE.COM>
>wrote:
>
>>I don't know if this has been mentioned before but Sound Heritage Number
34
>>(1981), Now You Are My Brother: Missionaries in British Columbia, edited
by
>>Margaret Whitehead, has a section on Father Thomas. He preached in
Chinook
>>and insisted that the other missionaries did so as well. This would have
>>been in the Chilcotin area from about 1897 on....
>
>Hi, Theresa,
>
>Thanks for this good pointer.  Sounds very useful for the research I'm
>trying to do!  I'll have to look for mention of a "pir toma" (Pere Thomas)
>in Kamloops Wawa.
>
>Sound Heritage is an interesting series, from what I've seen, e.g. some
>Lillooet tales whose accompanying cassette was unfortunately lost.  Is
>there a complete list somewhere of the series?
>
>Chilcotin country seems approximately the northern border of Chinook
>Jargon's realm of usefulness in BC.  Someone's just recently sent me a
>Jargon hymn to the Virgin Mary from Chilcotin territory, as (it seems)
>remembered by a Carrier.  It's written as heard by a Carrier ear, with
>strong distortions that obscure the Jargon words.  (Something like the
>Finnish nursery rhyme I just read about which is nonsense in Finnish
>because it's a distorted copy of a Swedish one!)  And in Carrier country
>the Jargon was not much help in communicating with Native people, if I've
>understood Mulhall's book on Father Morice correctly.
>
>Cheers,
>
>--Dave