Canoe culture remains vital to the Chinook Nation.
If you traveled back in time and stepped onto the docks of Seattle around 1880, you might be surprised at one of the languages you’d hear. Rich in k sounds, with clicks and pops unheard in English, it might sound to your ears like a tongue from halfway around the world.
But Chinook jargon is as homegrown as it gets. Once widely spoken on the waterfront, in the courts, and in the stores of early Seattle—as well as in other parts of the Northwest, from Alaska down to California—it was a trade language, a lingua franca largely composed of
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