Catholic ladder = "soul stick" for Lushootseed CW users

[David Robertson]

I read in Chief Martin J. Sampson's "Indians of Skagit County" (Mt. Vernon, 
WA: Skagit County Historical Society, 1972) on page 14 about the Catholic 
ladder.  

This was a tool for teaching Catholic doctrine to people whose language you 
don't (or barely) know.  It's called the "soul stick" by Sampson.  That 
term is new to me.  I haven't been able to find it with Google.  

I suggest this is a case where a Chinook Jargon word got reinterpreted in 
Lushootseed Salish, then taken into local English.  

My reasoning is that the term began as /saXali stik/ in Jargon.  
(Literally "tall stick".)  "Tall" might have been pronounced more like 
[sahali...] or [sEhali...] by some people, like the French Oblate priests 
who worked in the Northern Puget Sound area.  (My /E/ = schwa.)  Maybe the 
priests even lapsed into a pronunciation like [sEali], given the tendency 
for the written French <h> to be silent.  

That pronunciation could have led speakers of the local Lushootseed and 
other Salish languages to reanalyze the first Jargon word according to the 
rules of their languages.  This might result in something like /s-(h)
Eli7/.  (My s- = Salish nominalizing prefix; 7 = glottal stop.)  

In fact this is the Lushootseed word for "soul"!  (See the Bates-Hess-
Hilbert dictionary.)

More interesting yet, the Oblates imported this Salish word into their 
Chinook Jargon.  It would have been nearly identical in form throughout 
Coast Salish.  Compare Sto:lo /sh-xw-Eli/ "spirit".  

A Salish word for "soul" would've been useful, if there was no clearcut 
term for that concept yet in local Jargon.  This word was used by Bishop 
Durieu, who taught Jargon to Father Le Jeune, later of Kamloops Wawa fame.  
Le Jeune uses the word sometimes in his own Jargon, in the form /sili/.  

If the Oblates were already using this "soul" word around 1839, when they 
began preaching to Lushootseed speakers and invented the Catholic ladder, 
the Native people may have been hearing this word and "tall" being 
pronounced more or less identically.  This may have reinforced the new 
interpretation of /saXali stik/.  

Funny little story, eh?

--Dave R

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