It’s skookum to speak Chinook Wawa
Saturday is Chinook Wawa Day — and if you think that’s skookum, you’re halfway there.
Chinook Wawa, or Chinook Jargon as it’s also called, is a pidgin language that First Nations people, English and French traders and settlers, missionaries and government officials used to communicate with each other up and down the West Coast in the 1800s and early 1900s, but now it’s virtually nonexistent.
A former Vancouver mayor, a retired UBC anthropology student and an animator are hoping to spark a revival of the language that introduced such words as skookum (robust, strong or ‘cool’), saltchuck (ocean water), muckamuck (to eat; ‘high muckamucks’ were those in power, the ones with lots of food) and potlatch (giving, or a ceremony where goods are provided).
“Chinook Jargon arose as a common language to allow all the people who lived along the West Coast to communicate,” said Jay Powell, 77, a retired professor who learned to speak the language 55 years ago when he was stationed on various native reserves in the Pacific Northwest and who is still fluent.
The language has just 500 words primarily from the Lower Chinook language and borrows from the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Salish, English, French and Hawaiian languages.
Understanding the origin of the pidgen language can help us understand B.C.’s early history and culture and it’s important that it be kept alive, Powell said.
“I’m not certain a full-scale revival of Chinook Jargon is anybody’s goal, but if everyone in the area would learn 20 or 40 words over the years, we would be richer for it,” he said.
Powell is one of several speakers scheduled to speak at a daylong event Saturday at the Creekside Community Centre organized by the Global Civic Policy Society, founded by former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and his partner, Lynn Zanatta.
Wawa (which means talk) was the working language of the Hastings lumber mill 100 years ago and Sullivan noted it’s significant the dominant language is native, proving the importance of natives in the culture then.
He knows of a native community in Oregon called the Grande Ronde that still practises it and was shocked and pleased to overhear two people speaking Chinook in a coffee shop in Portland recently.
“They said to me, ‘It looks like you’re going to cry,’ ” he said.
Native languages are in danger of being lost because fewer use them and Sullivan said the threat is compounded for Wawa because it’s not a traditional native language.
Lucas Green, 29, considers himself a language hobbyist and was instantly intrigued by Chinook Wawa, enough that he taught himself about 200 words.
“I could have a very slow conversation about the weather,” he said.
The Burnaby animator created a oneminute animated Chinook Wawa primer he hopes will air as part of a 10-part series on the language and B.C.’s history if the funding becomes available. He said for him, Chinook Wawa is a “gateway drug” that sparked his interest in other aboriginal languages.
“It’s all about keeping the legacy of dying languages alive,” he said.
Christian missionaries used Chinook Jargon to convert Native Americans, translating hymns and prayers into the language, and Father Jean-Marie LeJeune, stationed in Kamloops, published the Kamloops Wawa newspaper, which included Chinook written in French shorthand, from 1891 to 1904.
There were word lists and dictionaries published in the early 1900s. But expanding trade and increasing white settlement led to the language being replaced by English and Chinook Jargon was eventually forbidden in schools.
But it continued in small pockets and the Grand Ronde community has an immersion program for preschoolers and Chinook Wawa is used on signs and at public events.
Sullivan said he would like to see Chinook WawausedinaceremonialwayattheB.C.Legislature, as former Lieutenant-governor Iona Campagnolo did at her swearing-in ceremony in 2001. She ended her inaugural speech with the Chinook phrase “Konoway tillicums klatawa kunamokst klaska mamook okoke huloima chee illahie,” or “Everyone was thrown together to make this strange new country.”