National Library News November 1999 Vol. 31, no. 11

From the Exhibition Room...

[Jean-Marie Raphaël Le Jeune, 1855-1930]. Chinook and Shorthand Rudiments, with which the Chinook Jargon and the Wawa Shorthand Can Be Mastered without a Teacher in a Few Hours. By the Editor of the "Kamloops Wawa". Kamloops, B.C.: 1898. 14 p.

At the end of the 18th century, as traders came from Europe and the United States to buy furs at Nootka on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and later near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, both traders and Natives began learning a few words of the other’s language in order to do business.

The resulting jargon was made up of words from the Nootkan, Chinook and English languages. According to most historians, this is how the Chinook jargon (not to be confused with the Chinook language) came to be, and was spread by the fur traders to the entire northwest coast of America, from Oregon to Alaska. Other specialists think an early form of the jargon existed among the Native tribes long before the arrival of the Europeans. When the Northwest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company traders established permanent settlements, the jargon came to include French words, the language of many voyageurs.

During the 19th century, Chinook jargon was spoken by many of the European settlers and travellers in daily contact with Natives: workers at the canneries, housewives buying produce, fishermen, lumbermen and missionaries. Chinook jargon was a spoken language, but soon missionaries and ethnologists saw the need for dictionaries transcribing the sounds into written words using the Roman alphabet. This led to much confusion, as the same sound can be rendered in many ways. These dictionaries were also much more useful to the settlers than they were to the Natives, who could rarely associate the sounds with the Roman alphabet. The first of these works was written by George Gibbs of the Smithsonian Institution in 1863. Gibbs’s A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon; or, Indian Trade Language, of the North Pacific Coast was reprinted numerous times (with some changes) between 1875 and 1908 by the T.N. Hibben Company of Victoria. Other versions were published as late as the 1930s.

The popularity and growth of the Chinook jargon during that period is due mainly to Father Jean-Marie Raphaël Le Jeune. Born in Britanny in 1855, Father Le Jeune came to British Columbia as a Catholic missionary in 1879. Starting at St. Mary’s Mission in East Kootenay during the construction of the railway, he continued his work at Fort Williams, and then finally settled in Kamloops, where he spent the rest of his life. Father Le Jeune was very concerned that the Natives could not read the Chinook jargon that was transcribed using the Roman alphabet, and thought that they would find it easier to connect the sounds of the language to shorthand characters. Having studied Duployan shorthand in his youth, Le Jeune applied it to numerous transcriptions of reading books and various religious works in Chinook jargon. His idea caught on, and his books ran through many editions. From 1891 to 1904, he wrote and published a newspaper called the Kamloops Wawa (Chinook for "talk") with the text in three columns, the first in Chinook jargon in Roman alphabet, the second in shorthand and the third in an English translation. By the time Father Le Jeune died in New Westminster in 1930, most of the Native population had learned English, and Chinook jargon eventually disappeared.

The Chinook and Shorthand Rudiments shown in "Impressions", the National Library’s major exhibition for 1999, is a representative example of the work of Father Le Jeune and his dedication to the spread of Chinook jargon. The National Library of Canada holds a vast collection of books printed in different Native languages, including several in Chinook jargon. It also houses a partial collection of the Kamloops Wawa.

To view "Impressions" on-line, visit the National Library’s Web site at <http://www.nlc-bnc.ca>.

Reid, Robie L. -- "The Chinook Jargon and British Columbia". -- The British Columbia Historical Quarterly. -- Vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1942). -- P. 1-11

Banks, Joyce. Books in Native Languages in the Rare Book Collections of the National Library of Canada = Livres en langues autochtones dans les collections de livres rares de la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. -- Revised and enlarged edition. -- Ottawa : National Library of Canada, 1985. -- 190 p.