Snass Sessions 09.09.2023: Patrick Felix’s land rights letter, 18951
David Douglas Robertson, PhD
Consulting linguist, Spokane, WA, USA
Some background information:
Patrick Felix seemingly wrote at least two letters that we’ve found in archives, one from Cayoosh
Creek in St’át’imc (“Lillooet” Salish) country and one from Hallout in Secwépemc (“Shuswap” Salish)
country.
1•
If you see [SIC] in square brackets it shows possible mistakes in the writing; other material [in square brackets] is
inferred and added by me.
• *Asterisked* material shows an uncertain reading of the Chinuk Pipa writing.
• Underlined material is in other languages than Chinook Jargon.
• Anything < in angled brackets > is non-Chinuk Pipa, i.e. written as standard English in the original document.
• The notation (Ø) shows that you can understand a clause to contain either “silent IT”or a “silent preposition”.
• I have put line breaks between every clause-containing sentence, and added punctuation, to help the reader. (But
I’ve tried to preserve punctuation marks used by the Indigenous writers.) I’m experimenting with extra indentation
to show the existence of subordinate clauses. (And to reflect the flow of the speaker’s thoughts.)
T
Lilwat Oktobir siks2 < 95 >:
‘Lillooet, October six, ’95:’
Ukuk son, naika tiki mamuk-pipa kopa maika, naika papa liplit.
‘Today, I want to write to you, my father the priest.’
Pi pus naika ilo mitlait chikmin, pi naika, ayu sik naika tomtom.3
‘And when I don’t have any money, then me, I’m very sad.’
Pi alta naika tlus;
‘But now I’m all right;’
Naika mitlait sitkom-tala.
‘I have 50 cents.’
Pi ankati, naika komtaks, pus4 naika mash sitkom-tala kopa iht sno.
‘And a while ago, I remember, whether I sent 50 cents for a year (of the newspaper).’
Pi maika wawa pus5 naika o6 sitkom-tala kopa maika.
‘And you said supposedly I (still) owed 50 cents to you.’
Pi nawitka, alta naika mash sitkom-tala wiht kopa maika.
‘And sure enough, now I’m sending 50 cents more to you.’
Pi tlus maika mamuk-komtaks kopa naika, pus-kata7 naika alki, kopa iht8 sno.
‘And please let me know, how I’ll be, for another year (of the paper).’
Naika ilo komtaks pus-kata9 naika mamuk ukuk.
‘I don’t know how I’ll do this.’
Kopit, ukuk.
‘Enough of that.’
2 Siks is the normal Northern Dialect word for ‘6’. The old Southern Dialect word taham is hardly known. No surprise,
the old Southern Dialect word for ‘friend’, siks, is also unfamiliar; Northern speakers would say tilikom.
3 You’ll find that Northern Dialect speakers, especially Indigenous people, often repeat naika in a sentence. This seems
to be connected with how languages like Secwépemc reduplicate the “I” form of the verb.
4 …naika komtaks pus… = ‘…I remember/know whether…’ Northern Dialect speakers make lots of use of pus to
convey something like ‘I know very well whether…’ It kind of reinforces the speaker’s viewpoint on what’s going on.
Look for further examples that I’ll point out in this letter.
5 The pus here is again conveying something like ‘You said as how…’ In other words, it recognizes that your viewpoint,
which I’m quoting in my letter to you, was such-and-such.
6 O is a useful new discovery for us, a verb meaning ‘to owe’ money. A much more common synonym is the noun ja-bon
‘debt, credit’. Both words are unique to the Northern Dialect.
7 Northern Dialect speakers, especially Native people, like to combine pus ‘if/whether’ with a WH-question word. The
result, like pus-kata here, emphasizes the speaker’s lack of knowledge on a subject. I’ll highlight additional uses of this
pattern as we go along.
8 The context of what Patrick Felix has been talking about makes me understand this occurrence of iht (‘one’) as the
frequent secondary sense of that word, ‘another’.
9 Pus-kata again.
Pi wiht naika tiki mamuk-siisim kopa maika.
‘But also I want to give some news to you.’
Kopa nsaika ilihi,10 kopa Kayus Krik, o, drit ayu hom-bak11 samin kopa nsaika krik.12
‘At our reserve, at Cayoosh Creek, oh, there’s a lot of humpback salmon in our creek.’
O, drit drit ayu samin mitlait.
‘Oh, there’s really really lots of salmon.’
Drit patl samin kopa krik.
‘It’s really full of salmon in the creek.’
Pi wiht, kopa tkop-man,13
‘And also, about the White people,’
Klaska mamuk iht aias dam14 kopa iht krik.
‘They’ve built one big dam on this one creek.’
Pi iawa, ayu samin mitlait.
‘And there, lots of salmon are staying (trapped).’
Pi ilo-kah klaska klatwa.
‘And they can’t go anywhere.’
Pi kopa ukuk [krik]15 naika mamuk ayu gol16 ankati.
‘And it’s on that creek that I used to mine lots of gold.’
Pi klaska kolan pus17 naika tlap ayu tala kopa ukuk kriks.18
‘And they heard supposedly I’d gotten lots of money out of that creek.’
Pi alta klaska mitlait laisan19 kopa ukuk ilihi.
‘And now they’ve got the title to that land.’
10 Ilihi ‘land; place’, when used by Indigenous speakers in both dialects, tends to mean ‘Native territory; home place’.
11 Hom-bak ‘humpback’ is another new discovery for us in the Northern Dialect. The same phrase is used in Kamloops
Wawa to call ‘buffalo’ hom-bak musmus (‘humpbacked cattle’).
12 Krik is yet another new Northern Dialect discovery. It’s typical of the newer words in the dialect, being more exact in
its meaning than the older/Southern Dialect expression tanas-chok (literally, ‘little-water’).
13 Tkop-man is something of a discovery for us. It parallels the known Southern Dialect expression tkop-tilikom (‘white
people’).
14 Dam is another new discovery in the Northern Dialect.
15 I understand [krik] to have been accidentally left out by the writer. Without that word (or some synonym for it), this
sentence would be saying ‘And for that reason I used to mine lots of gold,’ which doesn’t make sense.
We might suggest that he indeed meant to say Pi kopa ukuk, meaning ‘And on that one,’ but my experience of the
Jargon is that people rarely if ever use ukuk ‘that; this’ in such a way.
16 Mamuk gol seems to be a new discovery, an expression for ‘mining gold’. It’s an example of Chinook Jargon’s way of
talking about harvesting natural resources: mamuk ‘do/make’ + a noun (gold; trees; fish; camas; etc.)
17 Another occurrence of pus as ‘supposedly’, etc.
18 Patrick Felix writes kriks in this instance, sounding like the English plural ‘creeks’, but as far as we can tell he’s still
talking about the one particular creek with the dam on it.
19 Laisan is from English ‘licence’. It’s another new discovery for us, unique to the Northern Dialect.
Pi alta naika, ayu sik, naika tomtom.20
‘And now me, my heart is very upset.’
O drit naika lost21 kopa ukuk ilihi.
‘Oh, I’m really lost in this land.’
Kopit ukuk naika wawa kopa maika, naika papa liplit.
‘That’s all I’ll say to you, my father the priest.’
O, tlus maika aiak kilapai22 naika pipa;
‘Oh, please answer my letter right away;’
pus-kata23 naika mamuk alki?
‘what on earth am I going to do?’
Naika ilo drit komtaks kopa [_?_] naika, Patrik Filiks.24
‘I don’t really know for me, Patrick Felix.’
20 Another doubling of naika ‘I’.
21 Lost is a common Northern Dialect word.
22 Northern Dialect speakers typically express ‘respond to’ a letter as kilapai, ‘to return’ it.
23 Another occurrence of pus-kata. Very often kata? in the Northern Dialect carries an emotional overtone of
expasperation or resignation.
24 The writer may have left a word out of this line, too. We expect Chinuk Pipa letters to end with “I am [name]”, thus
Naika Patrick Filiks. So the start of the line may have been meant something like Naika ilo drit komtaks kopa
[ukuk], ‘I don’t really know about this.