Kla-How-ya, Tilikum! — British Columbia Chronicles

The study, revival and use of British Columbia’s various First Nations languages is steadily gaining ground today, along with the inevitable challenges posed by spelling and pronunciation.

So it was for the explorers, fur traders and Native tribes of old: how to converse effectively in a multitude of European and Indigenous languages.

To trade, one had to be able to communicate; hence, over time, the improvised hybrid that became Chinook Jargon. —*www.pinterest.com*

The short-term but efficient solution came to be known as the Chinook Jargon, an amalgam of various Native dialects, English, French and Spanish. It’s classified as being extinct today but some words remain with us, verbally and on our maps. For example: tyee for chief, skookum for strong, tilikum for friend.

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You never know what you're going to turn up when you surf for information on the internet. While researching the history of the Duncan’s Methodist Mission House, I found an intriguing reference to the Rev. Charles Montgomery Tate.

I'd written about him before and probably saw the same reference, but it didn't register at the time. I'm referring to one of Tate's more ambitious projects, a dictionary of Chinook Jargon, that mixed bag of languages used for a century as a simplified means of communication between Whites and First Nations peoples in the Pacific Northwest.

Pioneer missionary the Rev. Charles M. Tate with family. —*Vancouver City Archives*

Published by M.W. Waitt, Victoria, in 1889, Tate’s slender volume (only 30 pages) is entitled—take a deep breath—Chinook As Spoken By the Indians of Washington Territory, British Columbia and Alaska: For the Use of Traders, Tourists and Others Who Have Business Intercourse With the Indians: Chinook -English, English-Chinook.

This isn't the only jargon dictionary, my copy having been published by T.N. Hibben & Co., also Victoria, in 1931. But the fact that it uses the same subtitle as Tate’s makes me believe that it's really his book, reprinted without acknowledging the author. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that the Lord's Prayer, in jargon, appears on the last page.

This handbook was published in Victoria as late as 1931. —*Author’s Collection*

Whatever the case, this English-born Methodist missionary arrived in Duncan in 1899 after previous postings as a lay minister working with Native peoples in Nanaimo, Vancouver and Chilliwack.

Tate's one of those rare gems for historians, a pioneer who kept detailed diaries, as the late author Bill Owens rejoiced when researching his history of the Duncan United Church in the late 1960’s.

From Tate's diaries in the British Columbia Provincial Archives, we know that he and his wife arrived in Duncan, June 15th, 1899. Their reception was less than warm: “No one met us or offered help. An Indian told us we were not wanted, as the Indians were all good. A day later, this man came and expressed sorrow for his remarks and promised to attend services."

On October 11th, Kate “bought two lots through Mr. Whittome, Real Estate, for $225 for a Mission House. Mr. David Spencer [wealthy Victoria department store owner] paid for them.

By December, he had men excavating the site, then set a Mr. Williams to work. The 29th of that month was the great day that Mrs. Tate “laid the cornerstone and in the cavity placed copies of the Colonist, the Guardian [Duncan didn't have its own newspaper in 1899] and Conference Reports.

The Rev. and Mrs. Duncan departed Duncan in 1910. By all indications, they were warmly regarded and highly respected for their work among the Cowichan tribes.

Among his legacies, besides that of the Duncan mission, were “two-day schools and a night school, a fisherman's union, a grist mill, a printed vocabulary of the Cowichan (Hul'qumi’num) tongue, and a dictionary and hymnal in Chinook.

The 1931, possibly pirated, edition of Chinook Jargon. —*Author’s Collection*

But back to Chinook jargon, which takes its name from a tribe that lived on the Columbia River in the American Northwest. In the late 1700’s, when the traders of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Co. and the Northwest Co. set up shop in Oregon Territory, they found the Chinook language to be tongue-tying for English and French speaking employees.

So they coined a hybridized jargon of French-Metis, English, Spanish and Chinook. It worked so well that, within 10 years, it had become the language of choice between traders and Native tribes throughout Oregon and Washington territories.

(This is a simplification as scholars continue to debate when and how Chinook Jargon originated, some believing that it existed among tribes previous to the arrival of Europeans who popularized and further hybridized it to facilitate the fur trade.)

The ‘jargon’ advanced throughout much of the future province of British Columbia after the Hudson's Bay Co. absorbed the Northwest Co., as far north as the Alaskan Panhandle, and northern California to the south. Consisting of fewer than 500 words, Chinook served well until English became the common denominator. It has been described as a Pidgin English, “an amalgam of sounds derived from different locations”.

Modern-day linguists have determined that the famous trade jargon is composed, mostly, of 10 percent Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), 15 per cent English, 15 percent Metis-French, and 50 percent Old Chinook “with a sprinkling of words from Cree and Ojibway”.

Below the border, it was also known as Tsinuk Wawa or Chinuk Wawa.

Numerous Chinook terms and expressions are with us yet and some grace are maps. For example, skookumchuck, meaning a body of salt water and skookum, strong, meaning chief or someone of importance (which isn't given in the Hibbens dictionary).

Then we have such fascinating holdovers as: tilikum (friendly); bed and boat (exactly what they mean, some of the English terms used); kamas (the native plant Camas whose edible root was a food staple for Natives); kla-how-ya, how are you, greetings. Moon in Chinook, by the way, means a month, and mel-ass is almost as it sounds, molasses. 

Klootchman, woman; ma ma, mother; man; mesachie, bad, wicked; muck-a-muck, food; nose, or point of land; papa, father; potlatch, the Native ceremony that involves the mass distribution of gifts; salal, the native berry bush; Siwash, Indian; tenas, small, not much, a child.

Just a few examples of Chinook on provincial maps: Alki, Chikamin, dozens of Chinooks, Chum, Cultus, Hiyu, Illahee, Kalitan, Kanaka, Klahowya, Lolo, Malakwa, Memaloose, Mesachie, Ollala, Pillpill, Sitkum, Siwash, etc. There are no fewer than 107 geographical features named Skookum to be found in B.C., Alberta, Alaska and the northwestern American states.

In short, Chinook Jargon lives on; it’s even being taught in Oregon!

But don’t think for one minute that Chinook Jargon is obvious or easy. Here are the first three lines of Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me:

Jesus, nika kloosh tyee, Kloosh mika ipsoot nika:

Ankutte mika pilpil, Mika mash kopa nika;

Mamook kloosh nika tumtum, Pe wsh nika, okoak sun.

I’m sure that Iona Campagnolo, at her swearing-in as B.C. lieutenant governor in 2001, had to practise repeatedly to be able to conclude her speech in fluent Chinook: "Konoway tillicums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee illahie."

Translation: "Everyone was thrown together to make this strange new country [British Columbia]," meaning, "All people go together [to] make this strange new land."

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In 1901, Capt. John Voss set out to sail around the world in a 38-foot-long Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) dugout canoe he named *Tilikum*—Chinook for ‘friend.’ —*Wikipedia*

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As noted earlier, many Indigenous languages, some of them on the brink of extinction (like Chinook jargon), are not only making a comeback but finding their way into contemporary usage. For example, Hudson’s Bay Co. fur trader and colonial governor Sir James Douglas now shares his name thus: PKOLS (Mount Douglas Park).

Sooke School District’s newest school has been christened SCIANEW STELITKEL, meaning ‘salmon children” in English. It’s pronounced “schee-ay-nuh ska-leetk-luth.”

It should be noted that the bestowing of an Indigenous name to anything isn’t to be done lightly. As Times Colonist columnist Charla Huber recently noted, in western culture the naming of a public place is an honour. But when you ask for a piece of a language, or are offered it, isn’t the same from an Indigenous culture because “it’s more than words.

“It’s human culture, honour, trust and friendship...any request for Indigenous names or words should be rooted in that understanding.”

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Some Chinook terms, when you see the English definition, can bring a smile. I was particularly intrigued by Scotty, the word for crazy, which also means a lunatic asylum, aka Scotty House. This has to have originated in Victoria in the 1860’s when a mentally troubled pioneer of this name was forever in trouble with the police or in jail. I’m sure he never knew he’d been immortalized.

Kla-how-ya, Tilkikum!