Jim Buchanan’s Flood Stories, the Short Quiver people, and the Giants.

There are several versions of Coos ‘flood stories’ – Jim Buchanan told a couple of different versions in 1909 to Leo Frachtenberg (a linguist that did some work on Hanis, Siuslaw and Alsea), and Lottie Evanoff told yet another version (in 1942 to another linguist, J. P. Harrington). Jim kind of referenced this story again in a brief conversation he had in 1932 with Melville Jacobs (from the University of Washington). Jim said “It’s history that there was a flood that made the people get on qa’látƚ (Kentuck) mtn. On Coos Bay, the only one that stayed above water. Lots of whales got inland. They say lots of people who went inland never came west again, but settled east.”

Of Jim’s “Flood” stories, only one was published, from his Hanis language work with a visiting linguist, Leo Frachtenberg. In this version, he says there were many people who one day saw the water keep coming in, no ebb tide. All who could jumped in to canoes. Only a hill by Qalatƚ (Kentuck slough) stuck out of the water, but many other people got carried far away by the water. So that when the water went down there were people scattered all over the world. In Lottie’s version, she says the flood began due to the tears of a grieving crow. The only ‘hill’ that floated in her version was Glasgow. When the waters receded, a canoe was overturned on top of Blue Ridge mountain (remember this detail, it will come up again). 

But Jim told another version of this story that has never been published, that Frachtenberg jotted down in a notebook in English only, and this version is different in some details from the published version that was told in Hanis and translated into English.

Below is the story that was never published. I changed the paragraph breaks a little and changed the grammar slightly here and there to make it more ‘readable’ & added my own notes in parenthesis, but it closely follows the version in the notebook:

“The Flood” from Frachtenberg’s notebook

There were two men. One they call tcêxtī´yu kwî´sîts (chextiiyu kwisits, “short quiver”), the other they call cī´ƚwā´ya (shiiƚwaya, the tall people of the forest). They act like persons. Sometimes they steal women for their wives. Tcextiyu kwî´sits has very strong power. If you meet him and wrestle with him and if you can throw him down he will kill you. If he has the best of you he disappears and you don’t know how and when – you fall in a sleep. And then wake up. You are a strong man (you have gained spirit power from the chextiiyuu kwisits). Cī´ƚwāya (shiiƚwaya) was a rich man.

There are many people living on one river. Many people lived there. It was in Coos Bay. One day the tide came in River kept filing up all the time. The people don’t notice it at first. Afterwards the bottom of the river is covered up with water. One man says; “What’s the matter, the water keeps filling up. We never get as big a tide.” 

Another says: “It must be something wrong.” Some of the fellows had a big canoe, some have small canoes. Some have grass braided ropes. They keep it. Some have none, most of them. Some have very long pieces of rope. The water came up to their houses. The people get to their canoes, and get ready to get in the canoes. The water was rising. All the places are covered with water. The water was very swift. They tie their canoes to the tops of trees that stretch out from the water. Some of the people have no ropes and have to hold on the tops of trees-for a while. Most of them have no canoes. A little piece of land remain dry, and those that have no canoes, go on this piece. About half of the people pile up there. The place is called qalátƚ it is a hill and creek and both still exist today, today known as Kentuck Slough. People pile up there very thick in pairs. Also beasts come there in pairs. And also birds of all kinds. The people that are in the canoes, drift and drift without knowing where they go. They had no ropes to tie their canoes, and are carried by the water in all directions. Those that have rope tie their canoes to trees, but some times the ropes break and the canoes begin to float. The flood lasted one day. Then the water began to recede. Slowly the trees, hills, emerge from the water. Night comes. The people get sleepy, those that have their canoes tied. The water runs swift. The people do not watch their canoes, who break loose, and tip over and the people die. Good many of them tip over. The people on the piece of land are safe. In no time the land is dry again. 

The people on the land are scattered about; because they want to find their homes. They go across in pairs. The land looks different after it got dry and they came to find their homes. The game goes back in hills. The people settle down where they can and make a living. All canoes are lost. Only one big canoe come on land somewhere. I do not know how many people were in this canoe. They go in & from canoe and look around. They do not know where they are. One says, “Let us turn over the canoe.” They left the canoe that way.

The other fellows in canoes that broke loose drift in all directions. They cannot come back where they lived before. They scatter all over the woods and become wild people. They are called tcêxtī´yu kwî´sîts (short quiver). 

(And so the story ends).

There are two things that jump out at me with this version: one is the mention of the ‘short quiver’ people, the chextiiyu kwisits, and a mention of the giant people, shiiƚwaya. Also, Jim also mentions a canoe being turned over on a mountain top. Though he does not name the mountain, this sounds much like the detail in Lottie’s story, where a canoe was overturned on top of Blue Ridge mountain, called in Hanis jogiiyat.

So who were the chextiiyuu kwisits, ‘short quiver’, and shiiƚwaya, giant people? Well, there are a few stories of the giants. They were quite tall – 7 to 9 feet. They had long hair at least on some parts of their bodies. They usually did not interact much with humans and most people said they weren’t malicious, though one time they say they stole some fish from a camp on Coos River. Of the “quiver people” though, sadly very little is mentioned. 

Annie Miner Peterson mentioned them briefly, though she gives there name slightly different, Hanis ngwosdze’me, Miluk nogwosde-k’a, meaning ‘with a quiver’. She said, “These beings are seen in the woods, and if you meet him you ought to leave him alone. If he challenges you to wrestle you ought to refuse, because he is so strong. He is the only Dangerous Being who tries to fight. He gets rough, though. He talks perfect Coos. If one wrestles with one of these, he’ll defeat you and you’ll be badly bruised from the tustle. But left alone they do no harm. They are just like people, travel with bow and arrow.”

Tom Hollis, one of Lottie’s cousins, described the “short quiver” people quite differently – as tall white, heavily tattooed men. He said of them that “You could not see him. He went around in the night or in the day time. They say he made a kind of gun. He made it out of a forearm or leg bone. They called the gun kyuukyuu. He would take this gun, which he always carried sidewise; he packed it on his side. He would point it at something and it would kill it without any noise or shooting. There are all kinds of stories about that kind of man. He had a way of making a kind of dog out of himself and he would get into this dog and go around at night and see a girl. She got pregnant and one of her brothers shot at this dog but he ran away. This woman knew that it was her husband. She had 5 or 6 children and one of the children had sort of dog hair on one shoulder.”

And this sadly is about all I have been able to find out for sure about the “with a quiver”/”Short quiver” people. 

It is very curious to me that Jim Buchanan explicitly mentions “short quiver” people and the giants in one version of the story, but doesn’t hint at them at all in the other version. Perhaps he was making the Hanis version a little shorter. Apparently the way the stories were captured in the language was laborious and time consuming work. Jim would have to tell the story slowly, while Frachtenberg jotted it down, and then with the help of Frank Drew acting as a translator they all went over the lines again to write down meanings for the different words. A process that surely took a lot of time and perhaps Jim tended to simplify some aspects of some stories just for that reason when told in that format.

Solstice

Winter Solstice

The cycle of the seasons were important to our ancestors. They watched the phases of the moon, annual cycles of movement of the sun and stars, the seasonal flowering of different plants. In this way they noted the seasons to go harvest camas, when to expect various fish runs, and all other important seasonal activities. One way of tracking time was by counting days with bundles of sticks. For each day, one stick was removed from the bundle.

As a part of this knowledge our ancestors marked the Winter Solstice, which this year falls on December 21. The winter solstice is the day when the sun appears at its lowest,southernmost point on the horizon, has the shortest hours of daylight and longest hours of night. After the winter solstice, the daylight hours begin to lengthen again (until the summer solstice in June). The winter solstice was called “when the sun goes back/returns”; la t’kalis biinats’ andq’wale’es biinats’ in Hanis and Milluk Coos respectively. I think the name may be the same for the summer solstice as well-when the sun returns. Annie’s friend Agnes Johnson (Hanis) once remarked that both solstices were noted and recognized the north and south motions of the sun over the course of the year. 

The word for ‘return’ that Annie uses here, biinats’, is interesting. The verb appears several times in the Miluk texts, but only appears in the form biinats’ in Hanis with the phrase for solstice, tk’alis biinats’. In Miluk the root for ‘return’ is bii- and does appear in other constructions, such as biitsiim-return it to me! Now in Hanis, there is a verb that appears as pii(x)- or bii(x)-and it means to go home. (In Miluk to go home is wos-). However I have not found any other instances of pii(x)-/bii(x)- as biinats’. If I had to guess at the structure, in Hanis -n can be a distributive affix. Which usually means distributing the action to each and every subject and/or object. But the only ‘subject’ mentioned in conjunction explicitly mentioned here is the sun, but maybe it refers somehow to traveling back and forth the same route in the sky year after year. The -ts in Hanis usually marks a transitive verb (a verb with an object; unlike verbs like ‘sleep’ and so forth that do not have objects). But curiously this ts does not appear to be a regular suffix at all in Miluk. In Annie’s Miluk texts, it almost never appears except as biinats’. Regardless, it does seem the root bii-/pii- has some meaning of ‘return’, ‘go back’ in both Hanis and Miluk, and in Hanis it has come to spedifically mean ‘go/return home’.

Alas, a term or phrase for solstice was never recorded in Siuslaw-Lower Umpqua. But, based on the literal meaning of the Coosan versions, we could coin one. The usual word for ‘sun’ in Siuslaw is tsiitiix, pronounced tsiitiixa in the Quuiich (Lower Umpqua) dialect. There are a couple of different verbs that mean ‘to return’, chiin- xwiitl’-. So we could construct a phrase like tsiitiix(a) chiin or tsiitiix(a) xwiitl’atl’ for ‘sun returns’.

Annie Miner Peterson was the only person from our tribes that left a record of a solstice dance, and she had never seen the dance herself, only heard a description of it from her mother. According to Annie, there was a dance held at night. The adults all wore what she described as ‘ugly masks’ which were made of:

…dried deer heads…[or] sewed-together eel skins; or of half or less of salmon skin. The skin would be fastened over the head…. Some may have on a dried wild cat head. Mrs. P. thinks all the dancers, men and women both, have masks. Some women weave maple leaves for garments (cape and skirt) for just this dance, or ferns are made in a cape and skirt for this dance. The men wear a hide (wild cat, panther, deer) of some sort with fur on, for this dance. (Jacobs notebook 93, page 101).

Children were frightened of the masks. Annie was told that the children were so scared that they might become sick so they were not allowed to go to this dance.

Unfortunately that is all Annie Peterson learned of the dance from her mother. The meaning behind the masks and the dance is now lost. 

However it is illuminating to note that many northern cultures celebrated Winter Solstice as a time that symbolizes death and rebirth. The sun appears to come near death as it reaches its nadir at the solstice, but then it appears to return to life as it climbs higher in the horizon and the days lengthen, and many cultures had feasts or religious ceremonies to help (in their view) bring the sun back to life. Perhaps this dance also held a similar meaning for the celebrants.

Does the Alsea World Transformer S’uuku have a Siuslaw name?

Margin notes in old field notebooks occasionally offer important insights into the meaning of a word or story, and sometimes these notes raise questions. I found one of these puzzling questions completely by accident while looking for the field notes of a Siuslaw story that was told by an Alsea Indian known by the English name U.S. Grant. But to make sense of the question I stumbled on, I need to give some background first.

In the summer of 1900, scholar and doctor Livingston Farrand worked with two Alsea men – U.S. Grant and Alsea George. Then Leo Frachtenberg came to Siletz in 1910 and worked with Alsea speakers William Smith and Thomas Jackson (and was able to record one more story in 1913 from Jackson). He was not able to work with Grant and George, as they had died by 1910. Frachtenberg got Farrand’s field books and make some of his own margin notes in them, and used Farrand’s notebooks to re-elicit or translate some stories from English to Alsea. 

You might recognize the name William Smith. He was a fluent speaker of Alsea and Siuslaw-Quuiich, and with his Quuiich wife Louisa Smith (who spoke the Quuiich dialect, and reportedly understood Alsea but did not speak it) they worked with J.O. Dorsey in 1884 to record several words and phrases in Alsea and Siuslaw-Quuiich. Smith than worked with Frachtenberg on Alsea, and with his wife Louisa worked on the Siuslaw-Quuiich language. Frachtenberg did not think highly of Smith’s storytelling style or memory. In Frachtenberg’s introduction to his book “Alsea Texts” (which you can see in a link on the side bar) he said “William Smith was not so reliable an informant as I should have liked. He was an old man, possessed of an exceedingly poor memory, and having but an imperfect command of English.” In comparing his texts to Farrand, he also thought Grant and George had a more archaic old fashioned way of speaking, as they were older than Smith and Jackson.

So, now that I have weighed everyone down with back story…in one of Farrand’s notebooks is a story told by US Grant that Frachtenberg eventually published in his book on page 66, titled “Sᵋūku, the Transformer”. However, Farrand does not write the transformer’s name out as Sᵋūku (s’uuku), but rather Sʰīō´k (siyok, pronounced like See-Oak). This difference had long puzzled me, as Siyok is quite different from S’uuku. Then in margin notes, Frachtenberg wrote “William Smith claims that Shiok is a Umpqua name meaning “murder” and that the story was made up by Grant. Tom [Jackson] Sᴱūku name of Creator.” It probably was not a ‘made up’ story but one Smith simply was unfamiliar with. 

I went to check what word lists exist to see if this name is related to ‘murderer’ in Siuslaw or Alsea. In Frachtenberg’s Alsea wordlist he has mELxamnīyaᵋt (motlxamniiya’t) or Lxamā´nīyū (tlxamániiyuu), both derived from the Alsea verb ‘to kill’, Lxamn- (tlxamn-). Neither of these words look at all like the versions of the name for the Alsea Trickster-Transformer.

In Frachtenberg’s Siuslaw-Quuiich word list, he does list two words for murderer: sī´yukᵘ and sʰā´ya hītc (hītc means person). These words are not related to any recorded verbs I can find. In 1942 Harrington asked Frank Drew about these words. He gave sI•yú•K‘ (siiyuuq) and he said he did not know sá•yá• hÍ•tʃ (saya hiich) ‘well’, so the origin of this phrase is still murky. But, using both the Harrington version siiyuuq, and Frachtenberg’s sī´yukᵘ, this word looks very much like US Grant’s name for the Trickster-transformer Sʰīō´k. It even kind of resembles the second version of the name that Smith favored, S’uuku.

I went looking for more clues in Harrington’s notes. Harrington worked on Siuslaw and also worked with an Alsea speaker, John Albert. He asked John about the name, but John said he knew nothing about it. He said that his parents “mentioned the Alsea word for Creator they would not allow John to listen.” I have also heard that John Albert was a Shaker and he may have avoided talking about the old Alsea stories for that reason also. Harrington also noted that he could find no other words in Alsea began with s’-. And that’s an important observation, for in no word lists I can find of Alsea (Frachtenberg or Harrington) are there any words besides S’uuku that start with an s followed by a glottal stop. It is a combination that appears in some commonly used Siuslaw words though – such as s’a meaning he, she, or it. S’a is also the root for other third person pronouns, and some variations of words for ‘thus’ or ‘that’. It’s distinctive enough that s’a became a mocking sort of particle in Takelma stories, as an exclamation sometimes used by Coyote, or more rarely, Brown Bear. Its origin might be the Takelma noticing this s’- as a regionally unique sound and incorporated it as part of the speech of those characters (see “How to talk like a bear in Takelma” in Dell Hymes’ “In Vain I Tried to Tell you: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics”.)

So it looks like Smith was exactly right when he told Frachtenberg that the name for the character was Siuslaw-Quuiich in origin, and meant murderer. 

This is the moment when I wish Frachtenberg had asked Smith more questions. Why did an ostensibly Alsea world transformer/trickster character have a distinctly Siuslaw-Quuiich name? And why that name of ‘murderer’? (As a character, he does not seem particularly homicidal). Unfortunately, he did not ask and I have found no clues to the answers to these questions.

I can only make a small guess. The S’uuku-Siiyuk epic does take place in part in Umpqua and Siuslaw country. It seems likely to me there was a Siuslaw-Quuiich version of this epic, but sadly we don’t know of any surviving versions. Much of the story may have been well known with related versions in both the Siuslaw-Quuich communities and the Alsea-Yaquinna communities. Given the trickster’s name, perhaps its ultimate origins is Siuslaw-Quuiich. 

On Articles (which is more interesting than you might think. Really!)

OK, you might be thinking today’s post about articles (that’s the fance word for little words like “the” and “an” and “a”) may be dull or pointless, but stick with me. It’s interesting! I promise. So here goes.

In Miluk and Hanis, there are two articles – in Miluk they are tlo and kwo and in Hanis they are lo and ho (although Jacobs tends to write them as le and he). Now you might be thinking so, it’s like English – the for definite articles, a/an for indefinite. However, that’s not the case. At first glance it looks like there is no obvious difference-tlo/kwo and lo/he both are used with definite or indefinite. So what is the difference?

Leo Frachtenberg addressed it briefly in his grammar from 1914. Frachtenberg thought it had to do with phonology – the sounds of words around lo and ho. He wrote “No fixed rules can be given for the occurrence of the two different forms Le and He but the following general principle may be said to hold good: ho tends to occur at the beginnign of a sentence and after words ending in vowels, dentals and silbiliants while lo occurs in all other cases.” The problem is, that is a weak assocation at best.

Some possible clues appear in some work on Miluk and one of Frachtenberg’s word lists. Christopher Doty wrote a thesis on Miluk in 2012 proposing to show that Miluk is a Salish, not Penutian language. (Some linguists I have spoken to think there is a strong Salish influence on Miluk, but it is not descended from a Salish language). Doty thought the Miluk articles were related to certain Salish ones. Based on the numerous texts in Miluk, Doty thought the use of tlo or kwo reflected distance. Tlo referred to something near to the speaker, and kwo something distant. Below is a quotefrom his thesis:

Although the distinction between the two Miluk articles is somewhat difficult to nail down using only textual material, it appears that the main factor conditioning the selection of one or the other is distance – whether physical or metaphorical – with tlǝ used in conjunction with nearby nouns and kwǝ used with more distant ones. Consider, for example, the stretch of text from a single story presented in 5.27 – 5.31, where the main character moves from one place to another, with the same entity being referred to in each place. While the young man is killing the giant (5.28), the article used is tlǝ. Later, when the man returns home and reports his actions, the article switches to kwǝ (5.31). 

Linguist Larry Morgan has a slightly different (but, I think, not unrelated) observation of these articles. He refers to kwo as ‘unrealized’. Which could be interpreted to mean that something is distant or out of sight, but could also mean a reference to something associated with an unreal event (ie a possibility, or future) or something unfinished.

Turning to Hanis, there are some notes forgotten or passed over by Leo Frachtenberg, he made the following observation in his notes:

lâłxâ´ᵘ akᵘLâtc		their father (father not seen, absent)
hâł ā´kᵘLâtc		their father (when father is present in the room)
hâᵘxxâ´ᵘ		their two, when absent, unseen
lâᵘx		their two, when present, seen? (I think, it wrote l over h)

From Frachtenberg’s notes

So in Frachtenberg’s examples, he writes lo and ho as lâ and hâ. In some possessive constructions (here their and their two) in Hanis, the article is combined with the pronoun to make the possessive. In the first pair he thinks l is the distant/absent one, h- the present; and the opposite in the next. If the association holds, it makes more sense for the lo version to be present or near, and ho distant or absent (physically or metaphorically). 

There might be a meaning of ‘unrealized’ associated with it too. It’s hard to be sure, as we are working from texts and no longer have living fluent speakers to ask. So taking a look at some of the Hanis stories that Frachtenberg recorded, lo and its cousin lau (that one) appear much more often than ho and hau.

Sometimes lo/lau and ho/hau appear in the very same line! Is it possible to figure out what is going on based on context of their use in stories? Let’s take a look at the opening lines of “The Flood.” I’m bolding the instances of lo/lau and ho/hau and what they are associated with. Here are the opening lines, all lo or lau:

I lau tl’uunii hats in towitsu.

When the flood tide came there was no ebb tide.

Pa’ats lo xap.

All was full of water.

Xtluwe’ench lau pa’ahiit.

All was filled.

Lo mehentoch lo tl’ta.

The world was full of people.

Halt’yu hlnuwii lau nant lo me.

There were too many people.

But now, in the next line, appears our first appearance of ho in this story:

Lau ihl kwina’iiwat, I lau hla pa’awos ho xap.

They looked, when that water reached its fullness.

So in the first lines, James Buchanan is telling us that the tide kept rising, until water was everywhere. Then he explains the world is full of people – indeed it’s downright crowded. The crowds of people look and see water rising. Up until this mention of ‘the water’, it is lo and lau. Now we have ho xap, the water. Is this implying perhaps that the water is still filling up – ie, a not fully realzed event?

The next lines have some more appearances of ho:

Ho estis me atlimaqau ix.

Some people had large canoes.

Ho estis me lau tseyeneu ix.

And some had small canoes.

Xguus chiich me pa’ahiit, I lau ihl tluukwaya ho tl’ta.

All kinds of people crowded in when they settled down on the earth.

Ho estis me lau ch’payau k’a nuuyem ihl hauwiiwat.

Some people were ready with braided ropes they’d stored away.

So we have the appearance in this sequence of “ho estis me” three times (but never “lo estis me”) which means loosely ‘some people’ (estis can mean a group, a crowd; me is person or people). It makes sense to interpret the ‘ho estis me’ as indefinite and nonspecific, and might also be referring to how scattered or distant from one another these different groups of people are. The canoes, interestingly appear with lo. Then we have ‘ho tl’ta’, the earth the groups of people are settling down on in their canoes. This also might point to the people being scattered to various distant lands.

Continuing on:

Tsuu hlaisama ixech ihl xtl’iituu.

So they quickly went into the canoes.

Xguus me lau wench ihl aqalqsuunaya.

All people became scared.

Tok’wíl lo xapach lo tl’ta.

The earth sank into the water.

Qanch ho tsuyuxw eniikexom lau chii he ihl hla.

Wherever a small bit of land stuck out, that’s where they were going.

Tseyuxwinis eniikexom lo tl’ta.

A small bit of land was sticking out.

Lau chii hichuuniihiiye u men.

Here the people assembled.

Kind of an interesting juxtaposition here. Several lines appear with lo/lau. We have all people being scared, and the earth is sinking into the water. The first mention of a small bit of land poking out of the water is with a ho – ho tsuyuxw eniikexom means ‘the small [land] was sticking out’, then they were going there is with the definite or realized ‘lau’. It’s not entirely clear to me what is going on there, but I would guess it’s implying this little bit of land sticking out is somewhere distant, or not reached yet. But then they – lau chii he ihl hla (they there Habitually they go) do reach it. The next line the small bit of land sticking out (tseyuxwinis eniikexom lo tl’ta-smallness it was sticking out the land) is now appearing with lo, not ho.

Just looking at this one bit of text does not definitively solve the mystery of lo and ho, but using the interpretion Larry Morgan has for Miluk tlo and kwo, it kind of makes sense. As more and more sentences, phrases and words get entered into the language database, hopefully answers to these questions will become clearer. Because as we learn more about the subtle aspects of the Native languages, we gain deeper understandings of the traditional stories, and the richness and expressiveness of language.

Possible meanings of “Garden” words

There are words for garden recorded in Siuslaw (pa’naq) and Hanis (tlxanii).

The Hanis word, tlxanii, was only recorded once, in Leo Frachtenberg’s notes from his interviews in 1909 with Hanis speakers James Buchanan and Tom Hollis. It suddenly occurred to me about two days ago that it resembles the verb tlxan-, to discard or to throw (single object). Perhaps the word for garden is derived from this verb – it brings up an image of scattering seeds or bulbs in a garden plot. Now you may be wondering about the ‘single object’ part. Many verbs in Hanis (and Miluk & Siuslaw) have different verb roots for something that has single versus plural objects (and sometimes single versus plural subjects). In the case of tlxan-to throw (a singular object) its counterpart is xwkw-to throw (plural objects). And you may be thinking right now, well usually one isn’t just scattering one seed into a garden. However, I’ve noticed with these verbs ‘single object’ (or subject) isn’t math – it does not necessarily EXACTLY one, no more no less. It means one, or a few usually specific items or people. The plural ones often refer to a mass of somethings (or people) & is generally less specific about each individual item or person. So it does rather bring up an intimate image, of scattering a few specific seeds (or bulbs) at a time.

What about the –ii on the end? And there, I confess, I am not quite sure. As at least in Frachtenberg’s grammar, the only suffixes that might fit are verbal not nominal ones. The one I find most interesting is a distributive, nii. As in tlxan=nii, throw=one after another; thrown one after the other. But it’s not really a typical noun construction. But I do find it interesting.

Now, for Siuslaw, the word for garden was recorded twice: once by Bissell from his work with a Lower Umpqua speaker in 1881. He recorded it as pǐn nak´. Harrington recorded it from Spencer Scott in 1942 as p‘a’na•K (or to simplify his system a bit, pa’naq). Frachtenberg noted Bissell’s form and thought it came from the Alsea word for outside, pEnīk• (pǝnik^y). I note there is also a verb root Frachtenberg listed in his word list, pînq- (pinq-) meaning ‘to raise’. I’d say clearly pa’naq and pinq– are related. I am not sure at all if these words are also related but the similarity of these words is interesting: in the Lower Umpqua (Quuiich) dialect the word for doctor, shaman is panqa and a medicine dance is pinqai. 

In the Siuslaw dialect, many words (but not all, so far as I know) that have an n in Quuiich have an l; and it was attested that Siuslaw ‘doctor, shaman’ is palqa. Now Frachtenberg worked with people who knew Siuslaw forms but usually gave him the Quuiich forms, and Bissell’s informant was Quuiich and she only gave Quuiich forms (and, interestingly, a couple of words that look borrowed from Hanis, but that would be another post in itself). Harrington’s informants, Spencer Scott and Frank Drew, knew many Siuslaw forms and frequently made note of that to Harrington. I haven’t seen attestations of it yet but I would guess that since the Siuslaw word for doctor is palqa that the Siuslaw medicine dance word is palqai. So, does that mean ‘garden’ would be *pa’laq and to raise, *pilq-? Sadly, I don’t know, because I only found the garden word once in Harrington. And in Frachtenberg’s book “Lower Umpqua Texts” he only lists the verb root pînq-, but no examples of it. I am guessing there are examples of the verb in his copious notes, and as those eventually get processed for the language database project we may find some examples. 

Words for smallpox

Given that we are dealing currently with a pandemic it does bring to mind previous ones. Smallpox was one of many viruses introduced from Eurasia to the Americas during colonization. It was one of the more devastating. While numerous introduced diseases killed Native people (influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, measles, etc.) smallpox was one of the deadliest. Entire Native villages were destroyed by this virus. It was a terrifying, recurring threat until through decades and decades of widespread immunization, it was declared eradicated in 1980 (but not wholly extinct as two samples still exist frozen in two different labs). No one knows when exactly it arrived to the Oregon coast, but it was some time before even the fur trappers came through. The virus raced ahead of them. Some pinpoint it as early as 17^thcentury Spanish sailing ships brought it here.

There is a word for smallpox recorded in Hanis and Siuslaw-Quuich (Sha’yuushtl’a), and neither word is easily analyzed. The Sha’yuushtl’a word is recorded in Frachtenberg’s “Lower Umpqua Texts” word list, and I think he got it from Bissell’s wordlist of 1881.

It is hlíixtsniisi (łī´xtsnīsî, in Frachtenberg’s orthography). Frachtenberg lists -iisi as a little used suffix for nouns. The pattern he noticed is that it is on nouns that ‘denote an abstract idea’. It does appear on one other associated with illness – plhníisi ‘sickness, cough’ (from the verb phln– to be sick). But it is also a part of qaixíisi ‘darkness’ from qaix ‘dark, night’, and nishchanúwiisi ‘year’ from nishchinwái, ‘spring comes’. Unfortunately from his word list I cannot yet puzzle out what word hlíixtsniisi was derived from.

The Hanis word is also a bit unusual. Annie Miner Peterson mentioned it once in her work with Melville Jacobs in 1933. She told a story that if one heard a dead person crying near a graveyard, smallpox would be coming around again. She told him “smallpox Gɛndjí•wiyɛ “visitor” meaning it came from afar to visit them.” In modern orthography I tend to write it as qenchiiwiye, and it does not come from any of the verbs for ‘to visit’. The derivation is a bit more oblique, with a pairing of suffixes I have never seen paired up before and so far cannot find another example of this. Qanch, or qench as Annie often says it, means ‘place’, in a generic sense. Any place, some place. I think it is related to the word ‘outside’, qanuuch. Qanch/qench is the root of this word for smallpox. Fair enough – it can carry the sense that ‘it came from some place (far away)’. Where it gets weird for me is the rest of that word because I think it is two suffixes squished together -iiwe and iiye. iiwe means begin to do something. Also unusual for Hanis, iiwe is almost always preceded by a prefix, qa. So the verb gets sandwiched between qa and iiwe most of the time. So if we take the verb tluuw, to eat, we get qatluuwiiwe, began to eat. iiye means roughly ‘it became, it turned out to be’ but also sometimes with verbs is translated as ‘began to’. Unlike iiwe which so far as I can tell only attaches to verbs, iiye will quite happily attach to nouns, pronouns and other words. So we can take a verb phrase like kwina’iiwat, looking, and get kwina’iiwatiiye, began looking. Het– means ‘to be rich’ and as hetiiye means ‘become rich’, as in ihl hetiiye, they became rich. Tshlim, summer, becomes tshlimiiye, it became summer/was getting to be summer. It will even attach to wench, thus: tsu shil xwenchiiye “now surely it was that way” (litterally “now sure thus-became).

But I’ve never seen the two paired with each other. Until now. Because Annie’s smallpox word qenchiiwiye looks like qench (place) plus iiwe (began) plus -iye (became). Trying to interpret this word from its 3 apparent parts, I think it carries a sense of ‘it began some unknown place and became (here)’. That’s the best I can interpret what all these together might mean. A very oblique and interesting sort of way to say visitor.

Translating for film; or, You’ll Never Work In This Town Again

Jed Smith Documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeNtFRLDrnA

I picked up a book of essays about translating Native American speech and stories, “Born in the Blood” edited by Brian Swann. One of the essays is “In the Words of Powhatan: Translation across Space and Time for The New World”. “The New World” was a movie that came out in 2005. I confess I have never seen it but it is a retelling of Pocahontas, John Smith and John Rolfe. The filmmakers wanted the Native actors speaking Powhatan in their roles – a language apparently not spoken for some two centuries. Luckily, there were 17th century word lists and many closely related languages to look at to help write Powhaten dialog. They hired linguists to translate the script writer’s dialog as best they could. This essay was by the main linguist who worked on the project, Blair Rudes, and I am a bit jealous of his positive experience (working with interested filmmakers and actors) versus may own sad and small interaction with a film company. Ironically at about the same time as Rudes.

I got roped into working with a small film company working on a documentary about Jedediah Smith, famous (infamous?) fur trapper who had more than few bad run ins with cranky Spaniards, wary Indians, and dangerous grizzlies. I say ‘roped’ but I am stupid and was quite my own fault I let myself get into this.

So to establish the differences of the productions “Jedediah Smith Into the West” from “The New World”: it was a documentary, not a Hollywood production, it was for a tv movie with a small budget rather than a comparatively well financed studio film. And there was no money involved for a linguist (did I mention I was stupid? I think we need to establish that as one of the facts here).

So why was I so stupid as to agree to help them? Well, since the Quuiich (aka Lower Umpqua aka Kalowatset and 100 other spellings thereof) people are generally little known outside our lovely green corner of the world, and little published (and of what is published I cannot vouch for the accuracy of much of it in older sources) I wanted to try to make sure they got the correct information. I may as well have faxed notes into a void. (Did I mention I was stupid? Of this fact I am pretty sure). For I did inded fax them (oh remember the days of faxes?) sheets of paper about history and culture of Quuiich people and their neighbors.

Then they requested I translate a few lines of dialog into the language. Since Siuslaw-Umpqua has verbs, I swallowed my nervousness, beat myself up with Frachtenberg’s “Siuslaw Grammar”, and made my best stab at it. (Did I mention there was no money involved in this? Did I mention I was an idiot?). I had rather a bad feeling about this as somewhere along the way I learned they’d be filming the Umpqua River scenes in the mountains of New Mexico. Now, New Mexico is a lovely place but nowhere in that desert state will you find scenery that looks like the lower Umpqua River country, with its mile ride river mouth, tall dunes, and green hills of conifers, ferns and berries. Not even close. Strike one.

So they gave me the 4 lines of dialog they wanted translated. Now, like Rudes on “The New World” production I saw an error or two – namely at one point the “Umpqua chief” refers to the white fur trappers as ‘heathens’ and that struck me as culturally incorrect. I just stuck with bástani, the widely known Chinook Jargon term for white Americans.

So in English here are the dialog lines I attempted to translate:

Umpqua chief: “This is a very good looking axe. I can use this.”

A 2^nd Umpqua chief: “Give the white men their axe.”

Umpqua Chief: “We must attack these bad men now!”

Elder: “We should wait until the time was right.”

However, while wrestling with Frachtenberg’s nearly century old grammar of Siuslaw, and looking for vocabulary from JP Harrington’s interviews with Siuslaw-Umpqua speakers in 1942, I had an idea that there was another tradition that needed to be honored in some way during this process. A Hollywood Indian tradition, if you will. For many years on the silver screen and the early decades of television, westerns were very popular. And in some of these productions, even though the main leads were often white men in bad wigs, ridiculous make up and a mishmash of clothing of what Hollywood costumers constituted ‘Indian”, many productions had Indian extras. And since Monument Valley was a popular filming location (such as in John Ford’s films), Navajos were often cast in small roles. And they had fun with it, often joking in their Diné language (which the filmmakers did not understand) continuously. Perhaps most famously in Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn”, where the extras often made obscene and hilarious jokes. So, to honor this “Hollywood Indian” tradition (as it were) I thought I ought to sneak in a naughty insult somewhere. So, I did.

Now below are the lines where I wrote out the Siuslaw-Quuiich lines as best I could in a sort of phonetic way that I thought might help the actors sound it out:

Umpqua chief: “This is a very good looking axe. I can use this.”

tuh cham-cham-mee wan hee-sa. Si-nikh-yan

A 2^nd Umpqua chief: “Give the white men their axe.”

Wakh-wakh-oohl-oon-ankh oohl bas-tan-nee su-aymhlch-nukh cham-cham-mee

Umpqua Chief: “We must attack these bad men now!”

Tuh-ma tl-khimee-yay-yoo-nan-khanhl ants smak-wees-yaukh

Elder: “We should wait until the time was right.”

Kwna chin-nanhl ants su-atsa khneew-na-au

Only now 15 years later do I noticed I did not note syllable stress. Sigh. Well I did mention I am an idiot didn’t I? We did establish that above already. So. On to the tradition of sneaking rude insults into dialog in an indigenous language.

In line 3, I decided to sneak in my little joke. Instead of ‘bad men’ which would be properly miik’a hiich (bad people) or miik’a taxmuunii (bad men) I instead snuck in smak-wees-yaukh. Which came from a word Clay Barrett gave to Harrington in 1942, tsmáqwiis which I spelled out here as smak-wees (with the yaux suffix that I had in my notes but at this point cannot recall what on earth that meant. I hope I knew what I was doing in 2005!). Anyway that word means ‘play with the penis’ so, basically, in British slang I was called Smith and his party ‘wankers’. Hey, I hope the Diné cast of “Cheyenne Autumn” would approve. They apparently made a few of their own penis jokes in that production.

So, there it is. My first and probably last brush with a commercial film production. A sad failure, from my point of view. They did not use even so much as a syllable of those 4 little lines I sweated over. Perhaps it was judged too difficult or time consuming to teach their actors, filming in the desert mountains of New Mexico to look like genuine Oregon coast country (*snort*). Also, I don’t think much of the other information got in there. In the film they still refer to the Lower Umpqua people as “Kalawatset”, and yes they are widely known in historical sources by that name but I wanted to get a mention in at least they are the Quuiich. So all the work I put together was for nothing. Nothing at all. As I said above, I may as well have faxed everything into a void.

Anyway, here is a copy of the film I found on youtube. The “Umpqua” section starts roughly about one hour four minutes in. Sorry for the bad sound quality of the vid but at the moment it is the only one I could find on youtube.

And the little token they sent me? My grand remuneration for my sad efforts? A videotape when it was done. Sigh. In 2005 they could’ve at least sent a DVD but…nope. Yee Olde VHS Tape. I guess I am not cut out to be a Hollywood Indian nor a Documentary Indian either. To steal a line from a famous author: and so it goes.

Postscript: While researching Smith a bit to recall what year the attack on his party at Umpqua happened – it was 1828 and for some reason my brain keeps trying to locate it in 1826 – I found this Oregon Encyclopedia entry. It erroneously attributes the attack to the “Na-so-mah” (do we need hyphens? Nasoma is hardly difficult to read) aka Lower Coquille. Weird. But, I think as we get closer to 2028 we’ll see more articles and books and videos about Smith, so keep an eye out for the “Na-So-Mah” attack, as I am sure this error will get perpetuated now. (Anyone know who we could write to at the OE to get the error fixed? Before it breeds?? Cuz that is what errors in print – or online – do. They get quoted. And the quotes quoted. And…on to infinity).

Coosan words for lizards

There were three words given in Hanis for ‘lizard’: ika’chos (ɨgá’čǝs), yigát’sos (yɨgát’sǝs), and chommillii (čǝmmɨ´lli). It’s been rather confusing to sort them out, for not only do they appear to describe different species but at least one seems wholly mythological – and related to a mythological creature with other names.

Harrington’s notes has helped sort out some of it. Chomillii is probably the common western skink, as it was described as the smaller of the lizards. ika’chos is probably the western alligator lizard. Frank Drew said it was greenish (which some western alligator lizards are), nine inches long and smelled bad. Now, western alligator lizards do not stink all the time but when disturbed they can produce a nasty stink from their vent (they also can bite, so don’t pick up these lizards). So from Drew’s description I am pretty comfortable with ika’chos as the name for this species. He did say if you found one in the mountains while hunting it was bad luck.

Now we get to the mysterious yigát’sos which is one Annie Peterson mentioned briefly to Jacobs. The word itself looks similar to Frank’s word ika’chos, but her description is of a mythological creature. She said these were ‘black water lizards’. They were shiny, black and had horns. In Hanis and Milluk she said Pacific Giant Salamanders, walamtii, were bad luck and called yigat’sos when seen on land (which they usually are not, giant salamanders tend to stay in the water). They are also not black or horned, but I guess they took on the bad luck name when seen on land.

Now, a description of a black horned water lizard sounds rather like a sea serpent. But other informants always call these nephew (kilmiya’wach). Jim Buchanan gave their actual name as qaskiiwas. So what is Annie’s yigat’sos?

It’s possible there were two different water serpents. The sea serpents that grew large, and were called ‘nephew’, were beings that could bring good fortune to a person. But there are also hints of stories about dangerous smaller ones that lurked in lakes and creeks. My great grandmother Frances Elliott said there was some kind of dangerous creature to be avoided in Triangle Lake – was this one of these yigat’sos? Lottie Evanoff said there was a small snake that had lived at the little lakes at the head of Cut Creek and when miners cut a channel it washed out to sea where it was attacked by larger sea serpents. It isn’t clear if these smaller ones were regarded as a separate species from the larger ones. The big serpents could potentially be dangerous but they were also spoken of as a good power to have. Maybe “yigat’sos” is the dangerous and bad side of that power. Unfortunately it just is not clear.

EDITED TO ADD: There might be a real species of salamander that is the ‘black, shiny, horned’ yigat’sos that Annie described. There is a type of salamander known as the Northwestern Salamander (Ambystoma gracile) that can vary in color but are often dark, and have  “Paratoid glands form large oval swelling behind each eye” (per the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians). You can see several photos of them on this site – some of the swellings behind their eyes look rather large. They are dark and usually ‘shiny’ due to their wet skin – could these be Annie’s yigat’sos? I think they could be.

Reconstructing some snake and salamander names in Siuslaw/Quuiich

The other day I mentioned Bissell and his work in 1881 on getting a word list from an unidentified Lower Umpqua speaker. He did get a lot of words no one else got, and from his peculiar way of writing down sounds it isn’t always clear what he meant but comparing how he wrote things down with later linguists like J. P. Harrington might make it possible to reconstruct some of these words.

For instance he got a lot of words for reptiles and amphibians no one else got, such as:

English	Bissell 1881	Harrington 1942	My notes
‘lizard’	tcáptci	ch’apchii	Rough skin newt is ch’apchii
gartersnake	ttci ǐ ká	hlchiixa
rattlesnake	mái kwă
snake	pi pi wí
dry land lizard	ká kŭt l		ikachas
big water lizard	yá nätc		Probably Pacific giant salamander, and likely yánach

Bissell recorded tcáptci for lizard, but it looks so very much like ch’apchii for rough skin newt I am sure this is what was meant.

He gives gartersnake as ttci ǐ ká, which looks very much like the only word Frachtenberg and Harrington recorded for snake which is hlchiixa (łčíxa). However, when Harrington was interviewing his informants (the Barrett family, Spencer Scott, Frank Drew) no one could recall the word for rattle snake, and these other words Bissell has for snake and dry land lizard never came up in another source so far as I can find. Reconstructing Bissells’ word for rattle snake it probably is máikwa or máixwa. With ‘snake’ this seems to point to a generic word for snake, pi pi wí.

His ‘big water lizard’ is certainly Dicamptodon, the giant pacific salamander. I often see in Harrington and other sources the salamanders referred to as ‘water lizard’, and it is probably pronounced yánach. It’s Hanis & Milluk equivalent is walamtii. They are usually found in rivers and creeks, but Annie Miner Peterson once said if one was seen on land it was bad luck.

Chasing after mystery fish and semantics

I often wish I could climb into a TARDIS (forget HG Well’s machine, no I would much rather hitchhike with the Doctor, given a choice) and visit some fluent native speakers of Hanis, Miluk or Siuslaw. Because sometimes in the texts I find a word that only appeared once or twice, and the translations ethnographers jotted down are not always completely clear, or feel 100% reliable. So we are left to puzzle and guess from whatever context we can find.

I found one of these word puzzles in a story Annie Miner Peterson told in both Hanis and Miluk to Melville Jacobs. Her version of “Rock Point Person Lost his Good Luck Thing” is a story of a poor man who meets a strange fish that is actually a good luck power, a mixsuuwii. This mixsuuwii brings him good fortune – until the man gives in to his wife’s greed when she sends him to ask the mixsuuwii for outrageous amounts of wealth. In the English translation, the fish is just described as ‘queer’ – an odd an unknown type of fish to the man. The word in the Hanis version she uses is suht, and Miluk suudet. The word is only vaguely defined as ‘queer’, and so far I have not found any other instances of the word in the Miluk texts. I might have found one more instance of it in Hanis.

In Annie’s “Coyote and Blue Crane”, there is a scene where Coyote is walking along with two bumblebee girls. They constantly hum, and Coyote gets annoyed and complains about their ‘funny song’: li-yúusuht léxw-meqé’en. “The-funny their-song” is what Jacobs basically wrote down from what Annie told him that these words meant. But the ‘suht’ in yúusuht looks exactly like the suht in “Rock Point Person. I think “yúusuht” might be two words: yuu (very) and suht(odd, strange, queer).

So even though I now have just one Miluk and two Hanis attestations of this word (or at least I am assuming they are all equivalent) based on context in the stories I am fairly confident suudet/suht has a meaning something like ‘odd, unique, unusual’ and I suppose as in the bumblee girl scene, funny in the sense of funny-peculiar rather than funny-haha (that would be more like chiinam or chi’newetl’ in Hanis).