Home
A Voice Great Within Us (New Star $16)
As recently as the Sixties and early Seventies, it was not uncommon for home-grown British Columbians to pepper conversations with words such as 'klahowya' (hello), 'klahanie' (outdoors), 'chuck' (water) and 'skookum' (strong).
Most people didn't realize they were speaking Chinook, a creole language that evolved here as a hybrid of aboriginal languages, English and French. Today few British Columbians recognize place names such as Boston Bar, Canim Lake and Illahe Mountain are Chinook-based.
With the integral partnership of co-author Terry Glavin, the late historian and poet Charles Lillard has cobbled together a discussion of the origins and legacy of Chinook-our almost lost language-in A Voice Great Within Us (New Star $16). Lillard and Glavin's illustrated compilation provides personal reflections, a lexicon, a gazetteer of Chinook place names and examples of Chinook literature.
The authors quote claims that Chinook was once relied upon by a quarter of a million people. In British Columbia, where it was most prevalent, Chinook was sometimes used to conduct criminal trials, but by 1962 the Summer Institute of Linguistics estimated only 100 Chinook speakers remained in North America, all of whom were more than 50 years old.
"Nothing quite like Chinook occurred anywhere else in North America,"; says Glavin.
Linguistic concoctions, however, were not unprecedented. A creole of Choctaw, Chickasa and French called Mobilian was once spoken around the Gulf of Mexico. Bungay was a pidgin of French, English and Cree in Manitoba. And the Red River Metis spoke the Mechouf languague. But the spread and resilience of Chinook was unparalleled and A Voice Great Within Us dispels the myth that Chinook was 'invented' by Father Jean-Marie Le Jeune of Kamloops, possibly Chinook's most influential progenitor. As a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, he published a mimeographed Chinook newsletter, the Kamloops Wawa, that described itself as "the queerest newspaper in the world.";
First published on May 2, 1891, the Wawa was 'Indian news' printed in both the English alphabet and a bizarre form of shorthand developed in 1867 by two French clerics, the Duploye brothers. Thanks to the Wawa's wide circulation, many Native and non-Natives in the B.C. Interior became literate as Duployan readers.
Chinook's use was first documented as a vocabulary in 1846 by Horatio Hale
after he travelled with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. A history and dictionary of Chinook was compiled for the Smithsonian Institute by George Gibbs in 1863. Gibbs' work
was followed by a 'manual' of Chinook, published in London, in 1890, by Hale, then a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
"The language already has the beginning of a literature,"; Hale wrote. In his bibliography of Chinookian languages published by the Smithsonian in 1893, James Constantine Pilling listed 175 documents in which Chinook jargon was used. But its origins have always remained in dispute.
"A common misconception about Chinook,"; Glavin writes, "is that it was simply an argot, invented by fur traders, in order to facilitate communication with and among aboriginal trappers associated with the maritime fur traders.";
A Great Voice takes pains to rebutt this contention, one most notably voiced by historian F.W. Howay. Citing research by UVic linguist Barbara Harris, A Great Voice asserts Chinook arose prior to the influx of Europeans. Six of eleven aboriginal linguistic families in Canada were indigenous to territories within present-day B.C. Hence cultural diversity, born of the West Coast's diverse ecological and climatic zones, likely spawned Chinook as a trading language.
One piece of evidence to support this theory is provided. In 1788, John Meares, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, recorded a chief named Callicum using the word 'cloosh', meaning good. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition, at the mouth of the Columbia River, also recorded use of the word 'cloosh', meaning good. The dual use of the same Chinook word indicates cross-fertilization of languages didn't require the interventions of explorers, traders and missionaries.
Growing up on his parents' fish scow in Alaska, Charles 'Red' Lillard had an abiding fascination for Chinook. Throughout his life he monitored its flexibility and power of expression, initially incorporating its influence into his first poetry collection, Cultus Coulee.
In his teens, Terry Glavin encounted Cultus Coulee; then decades later as the editor of New Star's Transmontanus series, he took the initiative to contact Lillard and suggest a book. Following Lillard's death on February 24, 1997 at 53, Glavin completed their Chinook volume as a joint project. 0-921586-56-6
[BCBW WINTER 1998]
Most people didn't realize they were speaking Chinook, a creole language that evolved here as a hybrid of aboriginal languages, English and French. Today few British Columbians recognize place names such as Boston Bar, Canim Lake and Illahe Mountain are Chinook-based.
With the integral partnership of co-author Terry Glavin, the late historian and poet Charles Lillard has cobbled together a discussion of the origins and legacy of Chinook-our almost lost language-in A Voice Great Within Us (New Star $16). Lillard and Glavin's illustrated compilation provides personal reflections, a lexicon, a gazetteer of Chinook place names and examples of Chinook literature.
The authors quote claims that Chinook was once relied upon by a quarter of a million people. In British Columbia, where it was most prevalent, Chinook was sometimes used to conduct criminal trials, but by 1962 the Summer Institute of Linguistics estimated only 100 Chinook speakers remained in North America, all of whom were more than 50 years old.
"Nothing quite like Chinook occurred anywhere else in North America,"; says Glavin.
Linguistic concoctions, however, were not unprecedented. A creole of Choctaw, Chickasa and French called Mobilian was once spoken around the Gulf of Mexico. Bungay was a pidgin of French, English and Cree in Manitoba. And the Red River Metis spoke the Mechouf languague. But the spread and resilience of Chinook was unparalleled and A Voice Great Within Us dispels the myth that Chinook was 'invented' by Father Jean-Marie Le Jeune of Kamloops, possibly Chinook's most influential progenitor. As a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, he published a mimeographed Chinook newsletter, the Kamloops Wawa, that described itself as "the queerest newspaper in the world.";
First published on May 2, 1891, the Wawa was 'Indian news' printed in both the English alphabet and a bizarre form of shorthand developed in 1867 by two French clerics, the Duploye brothers. Thanks to the Wawa's wide circulation, many Native and non-Natives in the B.C. Interior became literate as Duployan readers.
Chinook's use was first documented as a vocabulary in 1846 by Horatio Hale
after he travelled with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. A history and dictionary of Chinook was compiled for the Smithsonian Institute by George Gibbs in 1863. Gibbs' work
was followed by a 'manual' of Chinook, published in London, in 1890, by Hale, then a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
"The language already has the beginning of a literature,"; Hale wrote. In his bibliography of Chinookian languages published by the Smithsonian in 1893, James Constantine Pilling listed 175 documents in which Chinook jargon was used. But its origins have always remained in dispute.
"A common misconception about Chinook,"; Glavin writes, "is that it was simply an argot, invented by fur traders, in order to facilitate communication with and among aboriginal trappers associated with the maritime fur traders.";
A Great Voice takes pains to rebutt this contention, one most notably voiced by historian F.W. Howay. Citing research by UVic linguist Barbara Harris, A Great Voice asserts Chinook arose prior to the influx of Europeans. Six of eleven aboriginal linguistic families in Canada were indigenous to territories within present-day B.C. Hence cultural diversity, born of the West Coast's diverse ecological and climatic zones, likely spawned Chinook as a trading language.
One piece of evidence to support this theory is provided. In 1788, John Meares, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, recorded a chief named Callicum using the word 'cloosh', meaning good. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition, at the mouth of the Columbia River, also recorded use of the word 'cloosh', meaning good. The dual use of the same Chinook word indicates cross-fertilization of languages didn't require the interventions of explorers, traders and missionaries.
Growing up on his parents' fish scow in Alaska, Charles 'Red' Lillard had an abiding fascination for Chinook. Throughout his life he monitored its flexibility and power of expression, initially incorporating its influence into his first poetry collection, Cultus Coulee.
In his teens, Terry Glavin encounted Cultus Coulee; then decades later as the editor of New Star's Transmontanus series, he took the initiative to contact Lillard and suggest a book. Following Lillard's death on February 24, 1997 at 53, Glavin completed their Chinook volume as a joint project. 0-921586-56-6
[BCBW WINTER 1998]
Submitted on July 7, 2003 in By David.
