A scarce primer of the Indigenous trade language Chinook Jargon, intended to instruct an English speaker in its use. Including a guide to the Duployan shorthand writing system championed for this language by the author’s serialised publication the Kamloops Wawa, with a descriptive index of issues, and a list of prices for available copies at the end. Whilst this booklet has a distinct title, the issue number could equally qualify it as an instalment in that series. This Chinook Rudiments is, however, far more substantial than the majority of Lejeune’s Jargon publications, and as such offers the greatest insight into the vocabulary and grammar of this language.
The Chinookian language group is a family of distinct and fully developed Native dialects from the Columbia River region of present day Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Chinook Jargon however represents no single Indigenous culture. Developed in the nineteenth century as a lingua franca with which diverse communities could communicate in the trading posts of British Columbia and the wider Pacific Northwest, it was not only an important tool for commercial negotiations between First Nations, Native Americans and organisations like the Hudson’s Bay Company, but was also “the working language of canneries and mills, and was often learned by early Chinese immigrants” (Canadian Encyclopaedia). Bibliographer J.C. Pilling notes that it is an amalgam of Salishan, Wakashan, Shahaptian, English, and French, with onomatopoeic additions. Unsurprisingly, it was enthusiastically picked up by missionaries and was used variously by Catholics, Protestants and Shakers for both proselytising and worship. It was estimated in 1875 that 100,000 people spoke the language.
This glossary is the work of Fr. Jean-Marie Lejeune (1855-1930), a missionary and linguist who spent much of his life documenting the evolutions of this language. After attending the Oblate Seminary in Nancy, France, Lejeune volunteered for a missionary posting to British Columbia in 1879. He adopted the Chinook Jargon as a means by which to communicate with (and propagate the Catholic gospel to) First Nations peoples in the area surrounding New Westminster, and then further inland at Kamloops.
In order to help illiterate adult speakers, Lejeune proposed a simplified writing system based upon the French Duployan shorthand, which came to be known as Chinuk pipa or “wawa” (an onomatopoeic word meaning “speech”). In a surviving manuscript account held in Lejeune’s papers at Archives Deschâtelets in Ottawa, he describes how in a meeting with Bishop Durieu it was initially posited that they employ Oblate Fr. Adrien Morice’s recently developed Déné and Carrier writing system. They opted for shorthand instead as it was applicable across languages, and could be used to aid the teaching of French and English by the missionaries, as well as a tool for communicating in Chinook and other native languages. Lejeune even established a school to teach this system to First Nations peoples, headed by his first pupil, Charlie Alexis Mayous, a young man of the Coldwater Nation.
In 1891 Lejeune launched a small handprinted periodical called the Kamloops Wawa, which combined religious content with lessons in shorthand, local news, and international news of an ecclesiastical nature. He printed and distributed issues intermittently until 1918 with a circulation of between 25 and 300 copies. Though he initially solicited subscriptions primarily from his Indigenous congregations, he did supplement this revenue with appeals aimed at the burgeoning field of ethnography. After 1918 he continued to issue occasional iterations of his linguistics work, the present example being the most prevalent, likely because it was aimed at an audience outside of the immediate Chinook Jargon speaking population of Kamloops.
Lejeune was well liked in his community, and his aptitude for language came with a sense of humour — he claimed to be able to swear in twenty-two different tongues. His industrious printing efforts ran parallel to his ministry, which in 1918 he documented as having a total population of 1875, spread between twelve remote congregations. His journeys between these parishes were conducted by train, and in a year he estimated a total of 7,500 miles commuted.
A single copy only in Rare Book Hub: Decker, 1944.
Poser, William J. ‘How the Shorthand was Introduced among the Indians Father Jean-Marie Lejeune, O.M.I. (1855–1930)’ Transcribed, translated, and annotated by William J. Poser in Northwest Journal of Linguistics 5.3.1–10 (2011); James Constance Pilling. Bibliography of the Chinookan Languages (including the Chinook Jargon) (Washington: G.P.O., 1893), vi & 45-51.
