FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS
Canada is losing some of its many Native languages
Aboriginal misery is an inter-generational consequence of the genocidal and racist colonial settler-state that Canada was at its inception — and remains to this day.
This being Canada Day week, and the wounds of the Indian residential schools having been so recently and dramatically reopened by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a certain lost language that it’s worth knowing something about. A couple of dozen people gathered at the Creekside Community Centre in Vancouver last Saturday to learn a few words from it.
It was not an aboriginal language, exactly, and not quite a language of any kind, really, although it was something more than a jargon, perhaps more precisely a creole. Known as Chinook, or lelang, or wawa, at least 200,000 people were conversant in it at the outset of the 20th century.
It consisted of only a few hundred words, a grafting of French and English branches to a trunk of mostly Coast Salish and Columbia River words. There was even a newspaper in Chinook, called Kamloops Wawa. Its articles were usually printed in Duployan script – an antique Parisian shorthand.
Chinook arose in the early trading posts and went on to become the language of the railroads and the multiethnic salmon canneries and the logging camps. It was the language of Vancouver before the Great Fire of 1886. It wasn’t just a trade jargon or a workplace lingua franca. It had a mind of its own.
British Columbia formally declared last Saturday Chinook Wawa day, and apart from a handful of breezy features in the local news media and the event at Creekside, there wasn’t much attention.
After all, Chinook is useless now. Its story is utterly pointless to either of the clashing versions of history that vie to explain away the gravest challenge to national unity that Canada faces — the dysfunction and disaffection of this country’s aboriginal peoples.
Not to be too crude about it, but the argument goes more or less like this:
Aboriginal misery is an inter-generational consequence of the genocidal and racist colonial settler-state that Canada was at its inception and remains to this day, mostly to the benefit of multinational resource corporations, pipeline companies and rich white people generally. Or, the dysfunction in aboriginal communities is the predictable consequence of the nanny state’s coddling of corrupt Indian bureaucrats who preside over the ruins of an unavoidably lopsided encounter between a superior European civilization and Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Discuss. That’s how the shouting starts, the pukpuk, and it never goes anywhere. But that’s why Chinook is worth knowing something about. It’s because it opens up a hidden history that has been nearly expunged from the national memory, a history of collaboration, coexistence, and practical, organic and even faintly glorious traditions of the “reconciliation” to which we are all now summoned, as though we’d never even been here before.
Unlike any trade argot, Chinook was wildly ambitious. The Métis people conjured the grand Michif language by blending French with Objibwe and Cree in a “mixed” tongue otherwise unintelligible to outsiders. There was an Algonquian Basque pidgin spoken around the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. There is the Inuktitut English pidgin of Nunavut, Labrador and Quebec. But Chinook intended to be more than just a means to mediate trade.
There is a vast body of song and love poetry in Chinook, and it was profoundly democratic. Nobody was left out. All the back-of-the-throat sounds between “g” and “k” that enliven coastal aboriginal languages were jettisoned because white people couldn’t pronounce them, and so were the “f"s and “r"s of French and English that aboriginal people had a hard time getting their tongues around. It told its own story about Canada, too.
The Columbia River origins of so many of its aboriginal words give an account of the northward exodus of thousands of Métis, Orkney Islander, Hawaiian and Iroquois settlers from Old Fort Vancouver to points above the 49th parallel, which was drawn from the Rockies to the coast in 1846. These people were known even then as Canadians, and they were fleeing the ravages of the warlike Bostons (Americans) to the sanctuary of the Kinchotch Illahie (King George country, now known as Canada).
They settled first among the welcoming Songhees people around Fort Victoria (Bictoli) under the protection of British Columbia’s first governor, the “free coloured” Sir James Douglas. A stern abolitionist, Douglas later made sure that the ships carrying hordes of Americans headed for the Fraser River goldfields in 1858 were met at dockside by a militia of the all-black “African Rifles.” Nine years later, while Eastern Canadians were celebrating Confederation, Sir James was celebrating the first major aboriginal-rights victory in Canada’s history: a Quebec court decision upholding the equal-marriage rights by Cree customary law of Sir James’ own in-laws.
The Chinook lexicon also encodes the story of Canada as a westward advance of mostly Catholic and Frenchspeaking aboriginal people who would go on to join local aboriginal communities in forming the nucleus of the “settler” cultures of the west – the railroad workers, farmers, sawmill workers, longshoremen, and the rest. Kopa lamonti (from across the mountains) came leplet (priest), lableed (bridle), lametsin (medicine) lashandel (candles), and so on. It was from the sea that the English came, in ships, with tzum sail (calico), pollalie (gunpowder) klahanie pepahs (envelopes), and so on.
This is not a history to be ashamed about.
But then came the First World War, Spanish influenza, and the residential schools and the “white” schools that drummed the language out of all of us. By the 1960s, even the word Siwash had degenerated into a derogatory term for “Indian” by louts who had no idea where the word came from. It derives from the neutral French term sauvage, meaning only anything local, or native. One Chinook variant — Sibashi — was the way early Japanese fishermen would respectfully address their fellow fishermen who were aboriginal.
In the conventional histories, the first man to traverse the North American continent north of Mexico was Alexander Mackenzie, in 1793, and Mackenzie is owed much credit for the great thing he accomplished. But the evidence is also fairly plain that Mackenzie was long preceded by others in service of the binding of what would become Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Like Sir James Douglas, those earlier explorers weren’t exactly “white people” either.
Aboriginal people were making trading forays to the Pacific as early as the 1720s, from Fort Michilimackinac, in what is now Michigan. The explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes was given explicit and vivid directions to the West coast by an old Algonquian chief from Hudson Bay, whose name is lost to us, who described in extraordinary detail his own 1728 journey to the Pacific.
The old man’s explanation for the West coast’s short, stocky bearded men who lived in planked houses and put out to sea in huge boats presents a twist to the silly mistake white people are said to still make, more than five centuries after Columbus, whenever the word “Indian” is spoken. The coast tribes must be white people, the old chief reckoned. They sure looked and acted more like Europeans than Crees.
So we all make mistakes. Some of them are a lot worse than others.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has made some fine recommendations about reviving the ancient aboriginal languages that the residential schools robbed of its inmates, and I didn’t set out to argue here that the old wawa be added to the list (although, come to think of it, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea).
It’s just that this being Canada Day week, we might at least remember that ahnkuttie, long ago, we used to sing songs and recite poems to one another in a language we could all claim as our own. Remembering it might for a brief moment allow us to mamook mesika youtl tumtum, to make our hearts glad again, about who we were, and about what, if we could just find the right words, we can be.