The Salish People: Volume II. Charles Hill-Tout
view of Fornander’s receives a striking accession of evidence from the use of these seemingly identical terms in British Columbia. I have shown that the term stands for God among the Haidas. It is also seen in the compound name of one of their ancient deities, Het-gwalana; and from information supplied me by the Rev. H. H. Gowen, who was a missionary for some years among the Hawaiians, this term is used by the Polynesians in the same sense. “Everyone,” he writes me, “of the Kamehameha line had the name Kalani forming part of his or her full designation. It appears to have been equivalent to ‘exalted,’ ‘heavenly,’ ‘divine.’” Again, we find a remarkable resemblance to this term Kalana or Kalani in the name of the great chief who led the Yuehchi across the Indus and conquered India about 20 B.C., whose name, as given by the Chinese historians, is Karranos, or Kalanos.
These facts will receive an accession of interest when I state that my studies of the languages of the natives of this province have resulted in yielding evidence of intercourse or relationship of some kind between the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish stocks and the Malay-Polynesians, between the Haida-Tlingit and the Japo-Corean, and between the Dene, or Athapascan, and the Chinese and cognate races. Of the Dene tongue it is no exaggeration to say that 50 per cent of its radicals are pure archaic Chinese. I append a short comparative vocabulary of these:
| English | Chinese | Dene |
| water | tsui | thu, tsoo |
| face | men | nin |
| feet | gea | khe |
| mouth | how | fwa |
| skin | p | eve |
| mountain | tsan | tsal |
| stone | tse | tse |
| grass | to | tlo |
| corpse | kle-zie | ezie |
| sky | hen | ya |
| star | slen,sen | shen, sen |
| snow | sbeat | tsi |
| bird | dea, tea | ta |
| a fly | yain | tain |
| wood | chi | chin |
| tree | tsi | tsel |
| small | thlo | tsol |
| wet | tsil | tsil |
| arrow | chi | kie |
I might extend this list almost indefinitely, but I think enough radicals have been given to show the marked lexicographical similarities between these two languages.4 Nor are these Chinese similarities confined to the vocabulary; they extend to the morphology of the language as well; and the characteristic methods of denomination in Chinese find their exact counterpart in the first three of the four classes of nouns into which, according to Father Morice — than whom there is no higher authority — the nouns in the Dene language may be divided.5
It is my intention to offer a fuller paper on these Asian affinities later. Our lack of analytical knowledge of the language of British Columbia makes it difficult at times to proceed and be sure of one’s ground. The Dene radicals here offered are some of those given by Father Morice, and may, therefore, be considered correct. The Chinese terms are either from Edkins or from local Cantonese, the dialect of which, as Edkins has pointed out, is a purer and more archaic form of Chinese than the court or literary forms.6
“Eleven of these photographs have been preserved in the Vancouver Centennial Museum.” (Vane. Mus. photo)
1 Reprinted with acknowledgement, from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 2nd. series, 3 (1897) Section II, pp. 85-90. The paper was communicated to the 23 June 1897 meeting by Dr. G. M. Dawson on Hill-Tout’s behalf.
2 Mulks, according to Louis Miranda, never had an “English name.” He was Miranda’s mother’s father’s younger brother. See Kennedy and Bouchard Utilization of Fish, Beach Foods, and Marine Mammals (1976) p. x. Dominic Charlie told Oliver Wells in 1965 that Mulks lived just behind the mission church in a “little shack" which had been there before the church. He describes Mulks and his wife, both blind, paying a visit to English Bay by canoe. Information from Louis Miranda’s 1978 transcription of the Wells tape, with acknowledgement to the B.C. Indian Language Project and Marie Weeden.
3 Oliver Wells read Mulks’ version of the three catastrophes to August Jack Khahtsahlano, who commented on it; see Squamish Legends (1966) p. [12]. Boas obtained a brief version from Chief Joseph [Capilano?] in 1888, where fire, flood, smallpox, and deep snow were sent as a punishment by Qais; see Indian-ische Sagen (1977 typescript, p. 58). The punishment aspect is absent in other versions, e.g. Dan Milo’s in Oliver Wells Myths and Legends of the Staw-loh Indians (1970) p. 19; Harry Uslick’s in Lerman Legends of the River People (1976) pp. 23-25; and Baptiste Ritchie’s in Bouchard and Kennedy Lillooet Stories (1977) pp. 10-12. Overpopulation is the reason given by Old Pierre, in Diamond Jenness The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian (1955) pp. 33-34. A recent overview is provided by David Andersen American Indian Flood Myths (1970).
4 The original printing of this article had a more extended list. See the Introduction to volume IV of the present edition for a discussion of Hill-Tout’s linguistic theories. His reliance on vague resemblances between word-roots is considered unsound.
5 The classification of Dene nouns is in Morice “The Dene Language" Transactions of the Canadian Institute (1889-90) pp. 181-185. The Dene words used in the list come from Morice’s article in the same journal (1891-92) “Dene Roots" pp. 153-164.
6 The volume by Joseph Edkins referred to is probably China’s Place in Philology (1871), which has a purpose similar to Hill-Tout’s own. The paper on Asian affinities, “Oceanic Origin of the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish Stocks of British Columbia" (1898), suffers from flaws in methodology - see the letter to J. W. Powell in volume IV of the present edition.
NOTES ON THE SKQOMIC [SQUAMISH] OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, A BRANCH OF THE GREAT SALISH STOCK OF NORTH AMERICA 1
The following notes on the Skqomic [Squamish], a division of the Salish stock of British Columbia, are a summary of the writer’s studies of this tribe. While he has sought to make them as comprehensive and complete as possible, he is fully conscious that they are far from being exhaustive. There are, indeed, insuperable difficulties in the way of making really exhaustive reports on any of our tribes at the present time. There are, in the first place, many invincible prejudices to be overcome. Then there is the difficulty of communication, and when these have been partially overcome there yet remains the difficulty of finding natives who possess the knowledge you are seeking. Not every Indian is an iagoo, a story-teller; and only the older men and women remember the practices, customs, manners, and beliefs of the tribe, and even these have forgotten much that is important to know. These and other difficulties stand in the way of complete and exhaustive investigation; and I cannot better illustrate the need of pushing on our work among these interesting peoples without further delay than by stating that since my last report was sent in my principal informant among the Ntlakapamuq [Thompson], Chief Mischelle, from whom I secured so much valuable information a year or so ago, has passed away, and can render us no further aid.2 In a few years, all those who lived under the old conditions in pre-missionary days, and who now alone possess the knowledge we desire to gather, will have passed away, and our chances of obtaining any further reliable information of the past will have gone with them. In my work among the Squamish I have been more than usually fortunate, and have been able to bring together much interesting matter not previously known or recorded.
Ethnography
The Squamish constitute a distinct division of the Salish of British Columbia and both in language and customs differ considerably from the coast tribes on the one hand, and the interior tribes on the other. The structural differences of their speech are so great as to shut them off from free intercourse with the contiguous Salish tribes. The tribe today numbers less than two hundred souls, I believe. Formerly they were a strong and populous tribe, numbering, when the white men first came into contact with them, many thousands. Some of their larger okwumuq, or villages, contained as many as seven hundred people, and that