Great article! Thanks for sharing it.

Interesting story. I wonder if there's a Chinook word for slave. One of the nastiest little secrets regarding West Coast Indians is that they practised slavery long before the Europeans arrived. It was an integral part of West Coast society.

The Makah chiefs even left orders for their slaves to be killed after the chief died so as to take their property with them so to speak.

Slaves were often killed just to satisfy the violent whims of the slaveholders.

Maybe Nicholas Klassen will do a story on slavery among the West Coast Indians.

They liked to get their slaves from way down the California coast so as to discourage them from trying to escape.

I don't think that's much of a secret.

For those willing to travel the former HBC Fort Nisqually located in Tacoma, WA occasionally offers classes in Chinook. they have serval re-enactors who speak it. their website is: http://www.fortnisqually.org/index.html

You're probably right, Stump, but I've only known about it for three or four years, which shows my own ignorance, I guess.

I don't recall a word of it in any textbook I ever read in school. Do you?

Fascinating stuff! I've heard the word "skookum" used a few times, but I had not idea about this.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be more widely known, to show that First Nations people were NOT sitting around doing nothing before 1492. They had their own history and civilization and innovations.

Here's some more on Chinook, including some vocabulary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon

Truman Green, sounds like Stump is probably a little pissed because you beat him to the punch on the slave story,first time Ive heard either of these stories,very interesting.

Long ago, one of the Vancouver newspapers (can't recall whether it was Vancouver Sun or Vancouver Province) had a pen pals club, called The Tillicum Club. The greeting was Klahowya, Tillicum!and I believe the kids learned various other Chinook terms, too.

To Nicolas Klassen:

An excellent gem. Thankyou.

"I don't recall a word of it in any textbook I ever read in school. Do you?"

Read bio's of Captain Cook and Vancouver as a kid. Lots of mention of John Jewitt IIRC.

Not even close Woody. Just an opinion that it's more well-known. Maybe I'm wrong about it being a secret, but the behaviour has been well-documented for a few centuries.

Chinook is a wonderful device for story writing. A great way to integrate several threads into one story. Nicely done.

But it is a pidgeon, not even a creole, after all. That is, a pidgeon is usually a trading language of limited vocabulary that is not passed onto one's children, and a creole is a pidgeon that is passed on from generation to generation. There is arguement that Ebonics (sometimes called Black American English) is a creole of English and East African languages. The word "okay" is an example of this creole which is still spoken in its purest form on Gullah Island off of North Carolina.

It is more important to revitalize First Nations languages rather than pidgeons. Pidgeons are not used for ceremonial rites, songs and other cultural aspects of a language. So focusing resources on revitalizing this pidgeon just takes away from resources that might go to more worthy language revitalization projects.

By the way, I learned about Indian slavery when I was in grade 4.

Actaully, I never learned about Canadian slavery of Indians in school. The Canadian slavery system used far more Indians than Africans.

Maybe Truman Green (Rafe Mair) can try to write an article on that. He can't devote a talk show segment to it since he's been fired again.

What's the Chinook word for loser?

Klahowyam tilikum.

Several disparate comments.

1) Chinuk-wawa is a creole in a number of reserves/reservations, eg the Grande Ronde (GR) outside of Portland, where a number of different peoples were forced together. No one denies the necessity for teaching "real" aboriginal languages, but chinuk IS the language of many aboriginal peoples now. I just got an invite to the GR Chinuk weekly classes in Portland.

2) What this wonderful article ignores is that chinuk-wawa was a working class language of our region.

3) When i grew up in portland (I'm 48), I learned perhaps 2 dozen words of the chinuk-wawa just from everyday talking.

4) A couple of the GR chinuk teachers were regulars at the cafe i owned and we would start talking to each other in Chinuk, dlet? The other customers would get confused and ask what language it was- the three of us are white - and we wold tell the story of chinuk. it would invaritably blow their minds, making them interested in the possibilities of a different culture on the NW coast.

5) the chinuk word for slave is "elitee". What's your point? because the first nations held slaves, they somehow are lesser? What's the American or Canadian term for Japanese internment camp? Should "our" cultures be held in such high standards?

6) Loser in chinuk? I don't know. Perhaps we could make up a term together.

Wow. Okay thanks. In university linguistics class I was taught that Chinook was a pidgeon. They even used it as a prime example of a pidgeon. Thanks for correcting me.

As for a Chinook word for loser, well, Rafe Mair (aka Truman Green) wrote the Foreword to the anti-Indian bible in Canada, so maybe something derived from his name.

Pelton is the Chinuk term for foolish or mad after an american madman who preceeded the rush out to the Willamette Valley and whom the natives watched out/cared for circa 1810s.

How about "tluman" for loser as chinuk has no "r"s - "tl" is an asperated l like the "ll" in welsh. But it has to catch on! So use it in conversation.

tsiatko:

I know what you mean about growing up learning Chinook words w/out even realizing it. Wasn't till I was an adult that I figured out that every time we said we were going fishing in the 'saltchuck' as kids (instead of the nearby creeks, rivers, or lakes) that I had picked up some of the language. Not that I ever caught a tyee!

A good friend with an expertise in languages pointed out the Chinook that's incorporated into part of the seawall (near the Roundhouse) to me a while back. Check it out Vancouver tillicums.

My father was raised at Sliammon, near Powell River, where his parents were the teacher and the field matron, during the 1910's and 20's. He and his two brothers spoke Chinook and sang Christmas Carols as well.
He told me Sliammon was an evolving language and gave "cultus" as an example. He gave it an initial meaning of worthless, useless but said that after the behavior of one "Cultus Jack" it took the meaning crazy, bad.
In about 1956 he was visiting me in hospital in Williams Lake while an elderly native man from Sugarcane was drifting in and out of consciousness in another bed, under an oxygen tent. They had a ten minute conversation in Chinook. The excitement and animation it gave the man was remarkable to me.
I was a member of the Tillicum Club mentioned earlier. There was a club pin, a little silver totem pole. I wonder where it is.

Great article!
It's always refreshing to see positive, honouring stories.
Terry Glavin has done much to honour our interesting history in BC. Iona Campagnolo does the same in reflecting our strength and beauty back to us with the LG's wine awards, writer's awards, focus on native plants, and taking the Lt. Governor-ship out on the road to all parts of this great province.

Check out Terry Glavin's blog about the story of Louie Sam a sad event in our history that we should not forget.
http://%20transmontanus.blogspot.com/

We have a lot to be proud of in BC and Canada. A language that reflects how we have always been a diverse gathering of people, who are willing to work together [Chinook] is another example of how great we are.

Just to define terms, according to Wikiepedia:

Pidgin: A Pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. Pidgins have simple grammars and few synonyms, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are learnt as second languages rather than natively.

Creole: A Creole is a language descended from a pidgin that has become the native language of a group of people.

tluman. Great! Did you get that Rafe?

Does anyone know how to say liar in Chinook?

Does it in anyway sound like Brain?

Great article and so appropriate it surfaced in the Tyee.

Stump: maybe I'm wrong on this, but since we're surrounded by the stuff ... doesn't saltchuck mean the ocean? What do you think?

As a guess, I'd say that fresh water would be simply chuck... and I've heard loggers use both terms when working on log booms.

reread my post BC Mary! :-)

(instead of the nearby creeks, rivers, or lakes)

Oops, now I reread my own post and see how you could be confused.

/purported professional writer hangs head in shame and shuffles off to reread "Elements of Style"

A couple other Chinuk words you see;

Potlatch - to give
Muckymuck - to eat
(A muckymuck - big shot - in English came from Hiyu Muckymuck, "Big/Important Eating" to eat with the powerfull people)
Cheechaco - new comer
Tumwater - Waterfalls
Tukwilla - hazelnuts/filberts
Saghalie - High
Six/Sikhs - friends

A good intro book is available on-line as a pdf at:

http://www.adisoft-inc.com/chinookbook/

Thanks for the excellent article Nick K! Now I finally have confirmation that I am using the word "skookum" in the proper context. That makes me feel good.

Slave and Liar

Mitschimass - slave
Liar - kliminawhite (from klimin = smooth, whit var. of iht = one, i.e. someone).

There's a word for "to lose", too, just can't think what it is. To win or to earn is "tolo" but it's not a negative of that; have to think about it.....

And to the person who thought that the article didn't mention that this was a working-class language; that's pretty implicit when someone talks about canneries, woods, ranches and so on; but the fact of the matter is it wasn't ONLY working-class, as the abilities of elite Victorians and Vancouverites for many years serve to remind.

I've got other opinions on some of the responses above, and on certain details of the article, but will blog them elsewhere and provide a link here. Dave Robertson's revisionism of Jargon history is getting a bit tiresome, though.

I really enjoyed this story. Thank you for helping me discover this part of our history.

Sometimes Friendly Giant, I suspect you could tell us an interesting story or two to put Chinook into perspective from a different perspective.

I don't mean to slight the author of this well written piece, who I thank for putting this into words. Rather, I would like to encourage more discourse on some of our history.

Sort of a revisiting of some of the high points in history and viewing them through
the eyes of those other than the victors.
Please do provide that lnk. I want more details of history from other persepctives, especially people still tied to the roots of their culture, as I suspect you are.

Give us some of those opinions.

I see someone else has found the other word for slave, elite or elitee. I'm not sure but I think there's a distinction between elite and mitschimass; one may be born a slave, the other made slave by conquest/enslavement.

Looked up "lose" on my online annotated version of Shaw's lexicon, at http://www.cayoosh.net/hiyu/shaw.html and found only "lose the way", which is "tsolo" or "tseepie wayhut" (mistake the road/path). Tsolo I THINK is the opposite of tolo, in which case a "loser" (one who loses games, has bad luck, as opposed to loser in the "hoser-dialect" sense) would be tsolowhit, but I've never seen that in print. (liar should have been kliminawhit, not kliminawhite, which was a typo).

"Saltchuck" and "chuck" can both mean the ocean, but "chuck" theoretically can mean a freshwater body of water, or a river. "Out on the chuck", as you know maybe around Vancouver, can mean "out on the Straits of Georgia", which of course is saltwater. The open ocean is "hyas saltchuck" (the great saltwater).

Quotes from the article for comment:
"Some folks like to paint a picture of settler and native arm-in-arm having a rollicking good time on the frontier. And while that wasn't the case, everyone did know from the start that Chinook was not the white man's language. That was an important point."

Dave Robertson just doesn't know about life in backcountry or frontier BC (he's from Spokane) and like other debunkers of the idea that the Jargon belongs to ALL peoples of the Northwest he's willing to make disparaging comments without backing them up. "While that wasn't the case" - really? And have you lived in Anahim Lake, Comox, Merritt, Lillooet, Williams Lake? Nope; but easy for you to make a sweeping judgement on what you WANT to believe was the case. "Everyone knew from the start..." etc is another comment along the same lines; really, huh? And who did Dave R. talk to in order to make this statement? It may have been most widely used among natives, but it was quickly adopted by all others, including for conversations between natives and non-natives; as historic Chinook scholar Duane Pasco (who helped author the Yaletown inscription) commented, the best example of creative Chinook usage he ever heard was between a Chinese and a Swede (though he used the Chinook word for Chinese, which is now semi-officially banned in English because of political correctness).

Another comment somewhere, either in the article or one of the comments, has to do with how the Jargon supposedly existed before its French and English components were added in. Again this is an unfounded assertion, much put forward by the linguistic/ethnographic community but not one of those supposed scholars has provided evidence, only sentiment for the supposed existence of an unrecorded pan-regional Jargon. Yet ethnologist James Teit states clear out that the Jargon did not come to the Okanagan until the 1840s (due to voyageur traffic between Fort Vancouver and New Caledonia), and Terry Glavin's research on the Chilcotin country turned up the interesting fact that Chinook was unknown in that region until it was adopted in order to forge a tripartite peace between the Tshilqot'in, Stl'atl'imx/Lil'wat (Lilooet) and Secewpemc (Shuswap). And Annie York's book on Spuzzum is clear that, despite the gold rush decades earlier, the use of the Chinook Jargon did not become current in the Spuzzum area until the building of the CPR.(cont. in next post)

The GR Chinookologists and their clique/claque are intent on "purging" the unwanted white influences from the Jargon, and have been demonstrably hostile to the idea that how non-natives spoke and used the Jargon is of no relevance and should be discounted as superficial.

Nice of them to do that to our culture. I guess it's just getting even. History does get written by the victors; but lately it hasn't been the "white imperialists" and "white male patriarchy" that's been doing the writing, or the winning. Rewriting history doesn't change the facts; all it does is hide them until someone else is brave enough to discover them and speak out.

My culture? According to the po-mo p.c. types, because I'm a white anglo Canadian, I don't have a culture, or at least have been told that I don't, and treated rather rudely on the idea by people who've only been in BC for a few years (whether from another part of Canada, or from Asia or Europe). BC history to be culture needs to be more widely known, to be sure; but not when viewed throughy the jaundiced, negative world-view of p.c. post-modernism. Such people aren't writing history; only expressing ideology. I'll get around to the blog I've mentioned, some of which will discuss the various instances of selective evidence and stilted logic that is so damnably current in BC historiography of late (other than in Terry's writing, and that of certain others; Barman's and Bowering's books make me gag for their too-opten glib and trite tone, and also for various major mistakes of fact, and far too much biased opinionating).

One last item for today: I'm still trying to find, years later, the colonial hansard for the week in which the idea of making the Jargon an official language of the colony was tabled and discussed; not sure if there was ever a member's bill, but it's an interesting side-story.

Ooops; one more, and only correctional, not disputatious:

Quote from article:

"Campagnolo's image of everyone being 'thrown together' is perhaps a more constructive metaphor than the rhetoric of solitudes."

That's only an English approximation, y'see. "Klatawa kunamoxt" means go/come together; I'm not Her Honour, and she may speak it better than I do, but I would have said "chako kunamoxt" (come together). The Chinook word for "throw" and also to send, to pitch, to put down and more, is mahsh (from Fr. marcher), but it couldn't be used, I don't think, in the construction "mahsh kunamoxt"; maybe it would work, idiomatically; like ingredients in a recipe, perhaps.

Oh hell, one bit more, just to add some perspective on the non-native contexts of the Wawa.

First, concerning Premier McBride.
In 1903 there was a nomination meeting for the leadership of the provincial Conservative Party going into the election of 1903, which was the first to officially feature political parties (individual party candidates had run previously, though rarely). Richard McBride, then not a "Sir", was a favourite of the local/BC faction of the party, which because of immigration from the east had a large faction of old-guard eastern Tories, who were widely viewed locally as carpetbaggers.

McBride didn't want the leadership, and had demurred on running for the job when he was nominated from the floor. Someone at the back of the hall called out him in Chinook - I wish I knew what was said, but no scribe in the room bothered to write it down (or could, if they were knew to BC and unfamiliar with the tongue) - and told him to run, and called him to the side of the room. A caucus ensued conducted entirely in Chinook in the course of which McBride was persuaded to keep the easterners from taking over BC, since the Conservative Party was bound to win, and that someone with the ability to do the job who was actually from the place, and a part of the local culture, so very different from that of the "Canadians".

Nobody can tell me there was a native in that group of old-BC politicians, the very elite of the province (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_general_election%2C_1903), although no doubt some had native mistresses and friends of theirs had had native commonlaw wives for years, as was traditional in the old colony/early province.

Another story concerns a pair of young women, endowered by the wealth of the Klondike and "fair daughters" of some well-known old Northwest family, I believe from Vancouver, were visiting New York and able to stay in one of the grandest and most high-society of New York hotels. Happily talking amongst themselves in Chinook, as they would have at home, they shocked the New Yorkers and other travellers around them, who had never expected to hear two white girls utter such "barbaric, savage" sounds and yet still comport themselves as ladies. (You won't find that last phrase, true though it is culturally of the time, in a po-mo academic tract unless it is accompanied by a condemning phrase about "ladies" and how women were treated etc at the time. Yawn; not as if these two girls would have cared about THAT).

The casual penetration of English dialogue is another hallmark of Chinook's impact on the region; which is why we still have skookum and saltchuck and certain other words which survive in certain areas (one theory suggests, by the way, that "in the sticks", where sticks is forest or trees, is such an adaption from CJ). What I mean here is the way certain words or phrases are peppered into English speech, or one is flipped back and forth. Paul St. Pierre's writings record several examples of this; in his latest "Tell Me A Good Lie" and in "Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse", for sure.

I've talked to a dozen elder-whites (we have elders too, y'see, some of them "skookum tillikums" - old-timer frontiersmen, sort of) who do or did speak the Jargon, either because of work or because they lived in a native area in the appropriate period.

Most Jargon usage among natives, which became widespread and a bit standardized because it became a secret lingua franca in the residential schools and at pan-native gatherings such as pow-wows and potlatches, died out in the 1960s. The focus has been on the traditional languages instead, with CJ being viewed as a distracting influence from the energy that should, perhaps rightly, be put onto the old languages - at least as far as native languages studies go; this isn't the case in Oregon, but there the Jargon has been augmented by Klickitat and Yakima and Wasco and other languages of the many groups in Oregon, as well as the Wawa foundation, which was a simplification, mixed with Nootka and a bit of Chehalis and all that awful French and English vocabulary which is so prevalent in the historic Jargon, as recorded by its contemporaries (rather than theorized upon latter-day ivory towerists).

The tribes gathered at Grand Ronde, over time, made a deliberate effort to "indianize" the Wawa, and even call it a creole; they now present this is the authentic one, and dominate study of Chinook along its parameters and cultural biases. Among those biases is the premise that non-native could not pronounce natives sounds, that if natives in northern BC had learned the Chinook from the Chinooks/GR people, they'd pronounce it the right way (yeah, but did the Chinooks take it up there?), and more such twisted-logic drivel.

Sorry for the blue cheese; it sticks in my craw and I have to pick at it with my tongue....

Much the same arguments apply to the idea of a BC culture, or cultures, which is distinct from the rest of Canada's and, though similar, from the cousin-territories to the south, which share a common heritage and ecocultural identity both among natives and non-natives. In discussions in Wikispace about Canadian English, the issue comes up that any particular linguistic variation in BC, other than purely lexical, cannot be a "dialect" in the way that Cape Breton or Newfoundlander is, and that because academics have decided that all English Canadians (other than Maritimers) talk the same, there was never a BC dialect or dialects within the province. But of course if you never condescend to study something, you never have to admit it exists, do you? So you can go keep on building your synthetic nationality known as "Canadian", which has been so re-branded in recent years. Linguists here have obsessed over native languages; I don't think there's even been any local academics or anyone write on the specialized version of Toi Shan Chinese that is the main old Vancouver dialect, or the specialities of Doukhobour Russian, or the Dutch or German communities of the Fraser valley, or the Italians in Trail, Revelstoke and certain other localities (other than the East End, I mean).

Similarly there's a nasty bias about the heady British-imperial flavour here before the 1960s, and how awful it was that it was easier to buy the Guardian or the Times at Vancouver corner-stores than it was to find a copy of the Globe and Mail or the Montreal Gazette. Shame. And even worse, they established their own social and sporting organizations and their own theatrical companies and food provisioners. Shame, shame, shame. How dare they maintain their traditional culture here in Canada??? Outrageous. And, as infamous devil-worshipper and heroin addict quipped on his way through, no doubt picking up a fix or two on his way, he had no use for the place - it was "far too Scots".

Fact is, the British element was so omnipresent here that when I was young ('50s-'60s) you didn't think twice about someone with a British accent being "foreign" (mind you, you didn't really think that about someone with a Scandinavian or Slavic or various other accents, either). They were a part of the linguistic and social landscape; yet po-mo history has it that this was a disgusting legacy of Empire, and that these people were all snobs (actually, most of the Brits I knew were anything but tweedy, and usually were funnier than anyone else in the room, as ever); and that it was WRONG for British Columbia to have been so British and so attached to the Mother Country, as if us joining Canada in 1867 meant we should learn to become sentimental about Guelph and Sherbrooke and aped the fashions of Westmount and York. Yeah, right. "We" did anyway, but "we" were also British (my family didn't move here until the '40s, and I'm only 3/8 English-Irish) and had a right to our culture - especially because we keep on getting told we don't have one (funny thing, natives heard that thing at one time too, huh?).

The thing that really got me upon reading the negative accounts of British-British Columbian society in the Okanagan, Vancouver, Victoria and the Cowichan Valley is that if you had substitued "Chinese" or "Sikh" or "Japanese" in the text where "Briton" or "Scot" or "English" appeared......well, at risk of starting a flame war, you get my drift.

Celebrating our historical cultures is supposedly now part of the Canadian identity. Except if that culture is British, it seems.

So on the one hand, I'm not allowed to have that culture, and even should be wary of my Norwegian, Irish and Burgundian prececessors, all of whom were invariably racist barbarians (wasn't everybody?), and the historical local culture here either doesn't exist, or it rightfully belongs to the natives. And the new cultures come in and pay no heed to ours, nor care for the fact of its existence of anything within it except if it has to do with their own group.

It's all pretty sad, and very frustrating. A procrustean cultural box that gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. I hate to sound Nietzschean, but it may be time to smash through to the truth and shake the intelligentsia out of their assumptions and ingrained biases (but do they deserve it?). I know what the history was here, what it was like here, and what kind of men and women and people(s) were involved; and I don't see it reflected in the abbreviated "fuzzy history" offered up in the media, or in academia either.

"infamous devil-worshipper and heroin addict" - missed on his name: Aleister Crowley.

Sometimes Freindly Giant. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the British in British Columbia had guys like Joseph Trutch to create part of the British legacy that some are now (rightfully) trying to erase.

I certainly wouldn't blame Aboriginal revisionists for BC's fuzzy history. Much of it was quite cloudy long before there were Aboriginal scholars in our public education system.

I agree. But lately there's a been a hell of a lot of smudging going on, sometimes quite innocuous but entirely wrong. Example is the elderly Chinese-Canadian who drove his bike to Ottawa, profiled in the Sun's Observer section this last weekend. The account of the history of the Head Tax given there described the policy as the result of "racist politicians in Ottawa" and a few other finger-pointings in that direction; no, Ottawa had resisted the head tax, or anything of the kind, for over 30 years by the time it was brought in; it was a British Columbian policy, and it was Ottawa who for long had supported Chinese immigration.

Trutch was a vicious, greedy do-do. But associating him with the British legacy as if that were all there is to the British legacy is just nonsense. The vibrant British cultural life of the Okanagan or Greater Victoria or parts of Vancouver and certain other communities was no different, in a multicultural sense, than any other immigrant community, and they are associated with the culture of BC in all Canadian histories (usually, as noted, the Canadians throw up their hands about how awful this was).

Fact of the racist matter is, by the way, that in early BC it was the Canadians, not the existing British Columbian element, who were the most racist against Indians and Chinese; and the railway workers who rioted against the Chinese taking their jobs in 1886 and 1907 (true, true, true, no matter how many times Barman and her ilk pronounce this only a "perception") were not British Columbians - they were from Ontario and the Maritimes.

Ethnopolitical revisions of history do not serve to illuminate the public of the fog created by poorly-written histories; they make that fog worse, and do a disservice to the ethnic elements they presume to elevate, because by perpetrating mistruth on their behalf it can only be to their discredit when the actual context/reality of the misrepresented stories finally comes to light. As it inevitably will.

Pointing at Trutch on this is a one-trick pony, as is the idea that the British in BC should be judged on the issue of Chinese relations (funny how no one has asked China for an apology for the massacres of the Boxer Rebellion, though, isn't it?....a rebellion which was much closer to BC than it was to Ontario, and also a part of the increasing anti-Chinese sentiment here that led to Ottawa being forced by the increasingly dangerous situation in BC to implement the head tax (which by the way, was not applied to wealth, merchant Chinese, who could still come and go as they pleased). The men came home from the Great War and found that whole economic sectors had been taken over, not just by the Chinese and the newly-surging Japanese-Canadian community, but also by "Southern Europeans" (sic, i.e. Italians and Croats); and they were getting downright restive about 1920 or so, and Ottawa was worried about renewed violence as well as about angry voters; so the Head Tax was brought in.

In the end analysis, we have "historians" like Barman and Bowering (a sociologist and a poet) pronouncing and bemoaning on the British identity and culture of BC, and even gloating that it's been done away with (forcibly, by changes to Ottawa's policy concerning the status of British subjects, who were most numerous in BC until their voting rights here were revoked; funny that other nationalities can have duality, but not the British, no?).

(cont:)

Aboriginal revisionists, for their part, have painted a picture of happily-button-blanketed natives singing and dancing and revering mother nature and being all holistic and spiritual and all. The brutal wars of the pre-colonial period and the ongoing slavery and cruelty of their economy are verboten to discuss, as are instances of white-native cooperation; and there are native theorists who maintain that all native wars in North America are a domino effect from Christopher Columbus, as if before 1492 they were all living in hippie communes and meditating or something. Interestingly the same aboriginal historians have stayed away from the long history of Chinese-aboriginal violence and discord in the early province.

Nah sikhs!

Maika mamook naika tumtum kloshe. Wawa like the above shows why we need our own media like the Tyee.

Klosh nanage peklosh comtox.

Thanks. There's another bit of non-native Chinook Jargon cultural history: "Kloshe nanage", as you spell it, was as "Kloshe Nanitch" the motto of the Rocky Mountain Ranges, the Kamloops militia regiments earlier in the century. Literally means, as I know you (westcoast chick) obviously know, "watch well", or, figuratively, "stand guard", and also implied "good sights" (on your journey); an all purposes greeting and farewell for travellers on the gold trails.

Similarly, apparently in Washington State, the entire Boy Scouts network is organized in lodges with Chinook names, and Chinook titles for officers and ranks; most kids in the program only know that the words are "Indian"; but it's another example of the penetration of Chinook into non-native culture and identity, even on the US side of the line where its role was much less significant than it was and is in BC. But find me an academic or a linguist who's bothered to study those influences, and the specialities of cross-cultural (not mono-ethnic) Chinook usage, and I'll find you an academic or linguist who can't get it published. Actually going out to the ranches and backcountry to find older non-natives who remember some of the Jargon, also, is not seen as a worthwhile endeavour for Chinookologists; who want only to advance the cause of Grand Ronde Wawa and have no use or time for other versions, or for the history that doesn't suit their particular world-view and cultural biases.