Chinook Jargon--call it what it is!
There is an amazing snack company from Seattle, WA called Sahale Snacks. Wow. They make good snacks. They also employ recently arrived refugees. I highly recommend buying their products (they’re also sold in California!). Their name ‘Sahale’ is a Chinook Jargon word. Most commonly, it means ‘high, upper, above’. It’s commonly seen in the phrase ‘Sahale Tyee’, which means God but literally translates to ‘High Chief’.
http://www.sahalesnacks.com/frequently-asked-questions
Take a look at the info page on their website. It states that ‘Sahale’ is a “Northwest Native American word”. Saying that ‘Sahale’ is simply a Native American word is like saying the word ‘amigo’ is a Southwest European word. I need to be more specific and say that the word is Spanish.
Chinook Jargon is not quite a language. It’s a mash-up of various languages that had been used to communicate between various peoples who had been living in the Pacific Northwest. It helped to connect diverse indigenous linguistic groups as well European ones. The basis of Chinook Jargon is the actual Chinook language (spoken around the mouth of the Columbia river), Nuu-chaa-nulth (also known as Nootka, spoken on Vancouver Island, Canada), various other indigenous languages including Lushootseed, Kalapuya, and Chihalis. Chinook Jargon also contains a lot of French and English words.
Chinook Jargon wasn’t originally spoken as a first language but was rather a secondary form of communication with people not in one’s own cultural-linguistic group or background. This is what’s known as a ‘pidgin’ in linguistics. Later on, French speaking traders married indigenous women. Chinook Jargon became the common linguistic ground for these households and for their children, who grew up speaking it as something of a first language.
I think it’s a wonderful legacy to the history of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, it fell into disuse some time after the turn of the 20th century. Yet Chinook lives on in place names all around the Pacific Northwest. A few of these in Washington state include Mt. Pilchuck, Tumwater, La Push, Alki Beach, and Tillicum Plaza (in Seattle).
Pilchuck, for example, comes from two Chinook words. Pil means red. Chuck means water. So, Mt. Pilchuck means ‘red water’.
http://leg.wa.gov/Symbols/pages/default.aspx
‘Alki’ is the unofficial state motto of Washington state. On the Washington state legislature website, Alki is considered to be “an Indian word”. That’s a bit too vague. That could refer to Hindi. It could refer to any of the nearly 300 indigenous languages in the US and Canada. Let’s start giving more respect to indigenous cultures and languages by at least providing the name of the language a word comes from.
Chinook Jargon was a means of communication between people who may not have always seen the world in the same way or agreed on how to live life, but they found common ground, learned each other’s words, and built bridges into each other’s lives.
Check out this video on Chinook Jargon and its influence in the development of British Columbia, Canada:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6-F3s6E3do&t=3s