Chintimini

[Ros' Haruo]

Here's the text David was presumably referring to. I think it's better to
copy and disseminate pages that "no longer exist" (if they are of any
interest) rather than assuming Google will still have its copy a day or two
later. The no longer extant page was
http://www.peak.org/vh/maryspeak/real.htm . I had to add "kalapuya" to
"Chintimini" in order to find it through Google.

lilEnd

        ROS' Haruo / 2355 Eastlake Ave E / Seattle WA 98102 / Usono
    lilandbr at scn.org / lilandbr at hotmail.com / tel 206-324-3176
              ROS' Haruo = Leland Bryant ROSS


"Chintimini" may be garbled version of Kalapuya name
by Frank Hall
reprinted by permission of the Corvallis Gazette-Times
first appeared in Corvallis Gazette Times - July 27, 1992
Updated July 1998

Frank Hall, today's guest columnist, is a project manager at Hewlett-Packard
Co. He has distant Native American ancestry, being 1/128th Cherokee. As a
hobby he pursues cultural anthropology, which he studied for a master's
degree at the University of Texas.

The Kalapuya did not call Marys Peak "Chintimini" as is commonly believed,
nor did they name it after a heroic maiden. These popular ideas were
apparently introduced in 1900, as Ken Munford has recently shown, with the
publishing of B.F. Irvine's poem "Chintimini" and John Horner's "Legend of
Chintimini".

I appreciate Ken's invitation to review for you some evidence recently
uncovered in the University of Washington Archives. This evidence has helped
to clarify the actual name and its meaning. Irvine was nearly correct about
the name, but Horner was very wrong about the maiden. Yet each likely had
good reason to think he was correct. And the French probably had something
to do with it.

First, we need to ask how the original name for something as prominent as
Marys Peak could get lost. The short and tragic answer is that most of the
Kalapuya culture itself was lost.

The Kalapuya, who primarily occupied the Willamette Valley, are thought to
have once numbered more than 13,000, but they were rapidly reduced by
Western disease to an estimated population of 300 by 1842. Mixed in 1856
with survivors of several other tribes on the Grand Ronde and Siletz
reservations west of Salem, the Kalapuya blended with the other tribes and
soon lost their distinct language and cultural identity. On the
reservations, missionary churches and schools worked diligently to scrub
their minds clean of the native ways. When the pre-reservation generation
died out around 1910, there was little knowledge left of the original
Kalapuya culture, apart from a few notes and interviews recorded by
linguists and anthropologists. By the 1930's only one or two elderly
speakers of Kalapuya were known to be alive. Today there are many Kalapuya
descendents, but they have integrated so well with mainstream America that
many do not identify themselves as Native Americans. And if they do, they
are most likely to identify themselves not as Kalapuya but as members of the
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde or of Siletz.

Fortunately, anthropologist Albert Gatschet collected in 1877 a spirit-song
that contained a reference in Kalapuya to Marys Peak, quite possibly the
only such reference recorded. Gatschet's notebooks were archived in the
Library of Congress, and Irvine and Horner probably never saw them.

Next, we need to understand that Marys Peak was the greatest of Kalapuya
spirit quest sites. On coming of age, each young tribe member went alone to
a spirit site on a five-day fast to learn the identity of his or her
guardian spirit. The spirit, be it eagle, deer, thunder, or so on, would
reveal itself in a dream and teach the child a spirit-song that he or she
would use lifelong to rejuvenate contact with the protective spirit. These
spirit sites were called tamanwis or tamanawis sites in the Chinook jargon a
pan-tribal language that the
Kalapuya and other area tribes used for trade.

We are now ready to watch as the native name surfaces through time. In 1984,
Stephen Dow Beckam of Lewis and Clark College and two associates published
"Native American Religious Practices and Uses in Western Oregon." They
published, for the first time, Gatschet's 1877 spirit-song referencing Marys
Peak, but in English only:

Full of blood, full of blood,
Full of blood, full of blood,
Here from Timanwi.

This made clear that something was wrong with the "Chintimini theory. Maria
Serrot noticed this, and with the help of Ellen Wegner (now Ellen O'Shea),
soon began publicizing the new name for the peak in their Corvallis
neighborhood newsletter "Potlatch."

With the help of the Benton County Historical Society staff, they acquired
obscure documents about the Kalapuya, but none shed further light on the
name of the peak, and the earthy Kalapuya legends bore no resemblance to
Horner's sweet tale. It appeared that "Chintimini" was quite wrong, and they
theorized that Horner may have made up both name and myth as an example for
his mythology class. Yet it seemed odd that Horner had apparently believed
the myth was true.

Intrigued by this mystery, in 1988 I gained permission to access the
Melville Jacobs Collection in Seattle's University of Washington Archives.
This is where most of the Kalapuya linguistic and anthropological records
are now stored. I soon had two surprises.

First, I had the great fortune to meet there a linguistics graduate student
who had just completed a "slip file" catalog (still unpublished) of all the
Kalapuya words in the Archive's texts. He had learned to read the Kalapuya
language, and was very likely the only person alive who could do so.

Second, when I located the transcription of Gatshet's spirit song that
mentioned Mary's Peak, I found that the English translation written above
the Kalapuya was exactly as Beckham had published it: Timanwi. But when I
showed this to my linguist friend, he quickly pointed out that the English
translation was misleading. In the Kalapuya words of the song, the complete
name given for the peak was "tca Timanwi." The prefix "tca," he explained,
means "place of" and is often part of Kalapuya place names. (As later came
to realize, this prefix is reflected in "Chemeketa,""Champoeg," and several
other modern versions of Kalapuya place names.)

My spine tingled as I realized that the actual Kalapuya name for Mary's
Peak, pronounced "Cha TEEmanwi" (hard "Ch" as in Tchaikovsky), matches the
word "Chintimini" so closely, including the exact placement of the accent,
that the latter must simply be a softened, nasalized, French-like corruption
of the Kalapuya name! Irvine and Horner hadn't been lying; they'd just had
flawed information, possibly from an old French-Canadian settler from French
Prairie who had known or married a Kalapuya.

So the name means place of... what? My spine tingled again when I realized
that the "Timanwi" part of the name must be cognate with (derived from the
source as) the Chinook word "tamanwis," and the Kalapuya name for Mary's
Peak probably means exactly what it was to them, simply "place of spirit
power" or "place where the spirits dwell."

This little mystery is a case where everyone was right, except the Frenchman
about the maiden. My guess is that the tale will prove to be a French
folktale dressed up in Kalapuya clothing.



>From: David Robertson <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU>
>Reply-To: David Robertson <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU>
>To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Subject: Chintimini
>Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:05:37 -0500
>
>Hi,
>
>I'd include a link, but the one I found was available only in cached form
>on
>Google.  So, go search Google for Chintimini for a nice little puzzle (now
>apparently solved) about a Jargon loanword into Kalapuyan.
>
>Cheers,
>
>--Dave R.

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