"Eulachon" among the Kwakwaka'wakw - PLUS a full accounting of variants etc.

[James Crippen]

On 10/2/06, Terry Glavin <terry.glavin at gmail.com> wrote:
>  NB "gow" is a common term for grease on the north coast, and it, too, is
> said to be a "Haida word," although I seem to recall Tsimshian people using
> the term.

That's an interesting word right there. I unfortunately don't have a
Haida dictionary handy (can't afford the $200 for it!) nor a Tsimshian
one. The Tlingit term for eulachon is "saak". But the Tlingit term for
herring, which is notably rather similar looking to eulachon unless
you're looking closely, is "yaaw". Now that's not obviously related to
"gow" on the surface, but the initial "y" was once pronounced as a
velar approximant, a very weakened form of "g", seen in transcription
today as "ÿ" but often written as "g" by anthropologists e.g. "gaay"
for "ÿaaÿ", "whale". Since as best as I recall both Haida and
Tsimshian lack that sound, it would be easy to convert it to "g". It
would seem then that "ÿaaw" is not too far from "gow" after all. So
perhaps the word is originally Tlingit, first generalized from
"herring" to "small herring like fish", then specifically to the most
valuable little fish, the eulachon.

I should also note that the Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit people,
being in regular but not terribly close contact with each other, have
a pervasive habit of referring to anything native-foreign (but not
euroamerican-foreign) as being arbitrarily from one of the other two
tribes. Among us Tlingit we have "Haida" love songs which have no real
Haida words or tune, and "Tsimshian" stories which aren't recognizably
Tsimshian at all. But they're ultimately of some sort of foreign
origin (or possibly the creators wanted them to seem that way) so they
have to be attributed to someone. The nearest weird foreigners down
the way are the most recognizable, so they get stuck with the
provenience. Or that's how the reasoning seems to me, anyway. We also
stick stuff on the Athabaskans ("Ghunanaa", "other people"), but
usually only if the attributed thing is clearly not very coastal in
origin or if there's a really good story attached to it. This foreign
attribution is extremely important in these societies where nearly
everything is clan property of some sort, since something belonging to
a foreign group means that it usually can be used without concern for
ownership and potential property law violations in nation-internal
interactions.

James

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