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ALGONQUIAN TRADE LANGUAGES

Richard Rhodes Eastern Ojibwa Dictionary Project University of

In this paper,1 I will turn from my more usual concerns of linguis­ tic analysis to a question of language use—a question of perhaps broader interest to the current audience since the implications of this paper touch on the domains of anthropology and ethnohistory as well as on linguistics. I will develop the hypothesis that intertribal contact among Algonquians in the area was mediated via trade languages or koines rather than through interpreters or by some other means.2 By the term trade language I mean a language customarily used for communication between speakers of different languages, even though it may be that neither speaker has the trade language as his dominant language. Some familiar examples include Greek, which in Roman times was the trade langauge of the Medi­ terranean, and Latin, which was the trade language of Europe. More recently Portuguese, French, and English have served as trade lan­ guages in various parts of Africa and Asia. Other well-known non- Indo-European trade languages include Swahili in East Africa and Fulani in West Africa, and one could argue that Modern Standard and constitute trade languages in their respective parts of the world. It is characteristic of trade languages that there is a relatively high degree of bilingualism involving the trade language. As we will see later, this fact lends significant support to our position on Algonqui­ an trade languages. The hypothesis that certain midwestern and once served as trade languages arose out of an incongruity in my field work that has bothered me for a number of years, namely that most of the speakers of that I have been working with are descendants not of , but of and Chippewas, i.e. American Ojibwas.3 Moreover, many of these people say that 1 Earlier versions of this paper were read by Fred Lupke. The paper has bene­ fited immensely from his suggestions. The preparation of this paper was sup­ ported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities grant RT20086- 81-2179. 2The medium of communication on the plains is sign language, but there is no evidence that such a thing existed among the woodlands Algonquians. 3Those who live on the various Canadian reserves, Walpole Island up through Sarnia to Cape Croker, are descended from Indians who came to Canada mostly 2 Richard Rhodes they speak a mixture of Ojibwa and Ottawa, but they call the lan­ guage Chippewa. The obvious question is: why are these people speaking Ottawa? And why do they call it Chippewa? This paper is an attempt to provide an explanation for how this situation arose, and to examine the implications of this explanation for Algonquian studies. Specifically, I want to propose that in the early 19th century there were four general regions in the Great Lakes area with respect to lan­ guage use: an eastern region covering the area east of ; a southern region covering the area between Lake Erie and along with the lower penisula and the eastern end of the upper peninsula of Michigan, , the north shore of Georgian Bay, and various islands adjacent to this area; a western re­ gion extending from the western part of the upper peninsula of Mich­ igan through northern Wisconsin and out to the Mississippi River; and a northern region of indeterminate extent north of the lakes. These regions each had a different language or as their koine: in the eastern region the trade language was called Algonquin, but it is now know to be part of the Eastern Ojibwa dialect rather than part of the true Algonquin dialect (Rhodes and Todd 1982). In the south the trade language was Ottawa. In the west the trade language was Southwestern Ojibwa. And in the north the trade language was some dialect of Cree, possibly Plains Cree. Perhaps it would be more cor­ rect to say that these languages, Eastern Ojibwa (called Algonquin or Nipissing) in the east, Ottawa in the south, Southwestern Ojibwa in the west, and Cree in the north were the trade languages among Al­ gonquians, as there is, to the best of my knowledge, no evidence whatever that the speakers of Siouan or of these areas spoke Algonquian languages.4 A map giving the approximate regions for each trade language is given in Figure 1. The evidence I will present in support of the hypothesis of this pa­ per varies for the different regions in kind and weight. Let us start during the period 1830-1840, and therefore often do not realize that their an­ cestors came from territory claimed by the United States. Of historical interest is the fact that the terms "Ojibwa(y)" for Ojibwas in Canadian territory and Chippewa for Ojibwas in United States territory must have been well estab­ lished by the time of the migrations to have remained to the present. 4Bloomfield (1927) mentions at least one instance of a Menominee who also spoke Winnebago. Paul Voorhis (personal communication) cites a number of b ox families with partial Winnebago ancestry who are still bilingual in Fox and Winnebago. Sagard-Theodat (1936:86) mentions Ojibwas who spoke Huron in contrast with Huron monolinguals. This suggests that contact between Algonqui­ ans and non-Algonquians (e.g. Menominee-Winnebago, Spindler 1978 719) was carried on through Algonquian interpreters. This was certainly true in the main of Algonquian-English contact. ' Algonquian Trade Languages 3

(Boundaries only approximate) (ca. 1830-1880) (Map adapted from Hanzeli 1969) FIGURE I with the situation in the western region, where the evidence is most straightforward. There Menominees have historically used Ojibwa (presumably Southwestern Ojibwa) as their trade language (Goddard 1978a:584). As mentioned above, trade languages characteristically involve a high degree of bilingualism, and that is still the case with Southwestern Ojibwa among the Menominee (Bloomfield 1928 :xii; Nichols, personal communication).5 Furthermore, at least some Po-

5For an example in the literature, see Medler's texts 8 and 9 (Bloomfield 1957) whose point is that at the Carlisle Indian School he met a Menominee girl who spoke Ojibwa. 4 Richard Rhodes tawatomis living in this area who still speak also speak Southwestern Ojibwa (Nichols, personal communication), which shows that speaking Ojibwa is not just a peculiarity of the Menomi­ nee. It is also worth noting that although the Southwestern Ojibwa, Menominee, and Potawatomi had all been contacted by the middle of the 17th century, only the Ojibwa language was recorded before the 19th century (Pilling 1891). No extensive recording of either Menominee or Potawatomi was done before well into the 20th cen­ tury, a stark contrast with the extensive 19th century recording of Southwestern Ojibwa. We take this difference as reflecting the fact that Southwestern Ojibwa was a trade language, while Menominee and Potawatomi were not. In the south we have both circumstantial evidence and direct evi­ dence that Ottawa was the trade language of the region. There are three pieces of circumstantial evidence: 1) all Algonquians whose forebearers were in this area in the 19th century and who still speak an Algonquian language either speak Ottawa as their sole language, or in the case of some Potawatomis, speak Ottawa as a second language; 2) speakers of the call their language by two names: on Manitoulin Island, where the population is predominantly of Ot­ tawa descent, the language is called Ottawa; elsewhere in the dialect area, where the people of Chippewa and Potawatomi descent pre­ dominate, the language is called Chippewa;6 and 3) there are a num­ ber of phonological differences, co-extensive with the naming diffe­ rence, that set Ottawa Ottawa off from Chippewa Ottawa. The spea­ kers of Ottawa Ottawa have a distinctive "accent" which consists of: 1) the deletion of intervocalic semivowels, 2) the glottalization of /w/ in preconsonantal position, 3) a very noticeable adjustment of quality adjacent to /w/, and 4) a difference in intonation.7 6The confusion of names seems to be fairly recent. To this day, older spea­ kers, especially those of Potawatomi descent, still call the language Ottawa. Of course, it might be correctly observed that the confusion in names was there as early as the 1930's. Andrew Medler, Bloomfield's informant, called his lan­ guage Chippewa, whence the name of Bloomfield's (1957) work, Eastern Ojibwa, but subsequent inquiry has shown that Medler later realized that this was a mis­ take and that the language he spoke was properly called Ottawa. Volney Jones, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Michigan who arranged for Medler to be Bloomfield's informant, has repeatedly verified this, expressing some embarrassment at having failed to get a "real" Chippewa speaker as Bloom­ field had requested. 7Some of the phonological features distinguishing the subdialects in question are known to be more recent than the population shifts which they seem to mark. For example, a number of them follow the deletion of unstressed , a change which itself is less than 100 years old. That these changes should follow the lines of the naming of the language, and the other, possibly older sound changes points all the more strongly to the validity of recognizing a true break between the subdialects, with all the historical implications that this points to. Algonquian Trade Languages 5

The parallel split in both name and accent suggests that there is a native" area whose inhabitants' ancestors have always spoken the Ottawa dialect, and a trade language area whose inhabitants' ances­ tors gave up their native dialect for the trade language dialect, Otta­ wa. The direct evidence comes from Baraga, who, working in the low­ er peninsula of Michigan learned Ottawa (Lambert 1967:56) even though there is good evidence that the population at that time was of essentially the same composition as at present (Clifton 1978; Rogers 1978). In confirmation of the hypothesis that there were two distinct trade language areas on the upper peninsula of Michigan, we find that upon his moving to the western part of the upper peninsula, Baraga, who already spoke Ottawa, learned Ojibwa (Lambert 1967:125). Putting this together with the interesting statement on language use in Baraga's biography:

. . . the two Indian works, one a prayer book and the other a life of Christ, were to receive wide distribution in the missions. There were printed in both the Ojibway and Ottawa dialects so that five tribes, the Ojibway, Ottawa, Pottawa- tomi, Menominee and Algonquin, could use them. (Lambert 1967:133) [empha­ sis mine] and with the full title of the first edition of Baraga's (1850) grammar:

A Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language, the Language Spoken by the Chippewa Indians: Which Is Also Spoken by the Algonquin, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Indians; for the Use of and Other Persons Living Among the Indians of the Above Named Tribes, [emphasis mine] one comes to the conclusion that Ottawa and Southwestern Ojibwa (the dialect that Baraga recorded (Rhodes and Todd 1982)) were in fact spoken more widely than just among the Ottawas and the South­ western Ojibwa respectively. Of course statements about language use by pre-20th century writers are often dismissed by modern lin­ guists as simply naive, but in the case of Baraga, whose descriptions of Ojibwa are so good, his evaluation of the situation cannot be taken lightly. Furthermore, his view is made all the more believable by the fact that in modern times, all speakers of Potawatomi in contact with speakers of other Algonquian languages speak anoth­ er Algonquian language too (Nichols, personal communication). Thus it is not likely that Baraga simply overlooked the differences between Potawatomi and Ojibwa. Indeed, it is almost certain that in Baraga's day the Potawatomi were also speaking dialects of Ojibwa. 6 Richard Rhodes

In the eastern region we propose that Eastern Ojibwa (called Al­ gonquin or Nipissing) was the trade language. The evidence here is more circumstantial than in the west and south. First, there are re­ cords of this language dating back to the 17th century (Hanzeli 1969), and the language was extensively recorded in the 19th cen­ tury (Cuoq 1886). In light of our experience with Menominee and Potawatomi as compared with Southwestern Ojibwa and Ottawa, the fact that a language was recorded early and extensively may consti­ tute evidence that it functioned as a trade language. Second, parallel to the situation in the Ottawa dialect, the Eastern Ojibwa dialect shows a coextensive split in language naming and accent. The split divides the Eastern Ojibwa of Maniwaki (where the descendants of Cuoq's (1886) speakers now reside) and Golden Lake on the one hand, from the rest of the Eastern Ojibwa reserves on the other. The first split is a difference in the name by which speakers refer to their language. In Maniwaki and Golden Lake, the language is called Algonquin, while throughout the rest of the dialect area it is called Ojibwa(y). The second parallel is that there is a phonological/mor­ phological boundary between Maniwaki and Golden Lake reserves and the rest of the dialect. The phonological and morphological dif­ ferences between Algonquin Eastern Ojibwa and Ojibwa Eastern Ojibwa include: 1) the loss of all unstressed vowels in Ojibwa Eastern Ojibwa,8 2) the devoicing of initial obstruents in Algonquin Eastern Ojibwa, 3) the use of /j/ rather than /d/ to mark 3rd person singular in conjunct in Algonquin Eastern Ojibwa, 4) the retention of the old /e/-/a/ alternation in AI in Algonquin East­ ern Ojibwa, and 5) the very distinctive intonation of the Algonquin Eastern Ojibwa.9 These parallels with the Ottawa case suggest that in the east there is also a "native" area whose inhabitants' ancestors have always spoken Eastern Ojibwa, and an area whose inhabitants' ancestors gave up their native dialect for Eastern Ojibwa, the trade language dialect. In the north, where we propose that Cree was the trade language, the evidence is also circumstantial. There is first the silence of the Hudson's Bay Company records regarding the Ojibwa language. The company did deal with Ojibwas, apparently without middlemen, but there is no evidence to suggest that any language other than Cree, or something that passed for Cree, was used (Pentland, personal com­ munication). Here the possibility arises that the company managers 8This is the same sound change which Ottawa and Potawatomi participate in.

9 The subdialectal differences noted for both Ottawa and Eastern Ojibwa do not affect at all. There is, however, a mutual intelligibi­ lity drop between Eastern Ojibwa and Ottawa. Algonquian Trade Languages 7 mistook Ojibwa for Cree, but in the light of the substantial dif­ ferences in the languages, this does not seem likely. Second, in sup­ port for the position that there was a Cree trade language, we have the current language situation on the Turtle Mountain reservation in . There the common Algonquian language is Mitchif (French Cree), a dialect of Plains Cree with a substantial amount of French borrowing (see Rhodes 1977). But some of the Mitchif speakers also speak Plains Cree or Southwestern Ojibwa (John Craw­ ford, personal communication). Two of my Mitchif informants, a brother and sister, were the children of an Ojibwa woman who was born and raised at Red Lake, Minnesota. While neither informant was able to speak either Plains Cree or Ojibwa, both were able to quote things their mother had said in a language they called Chippe­ wa, but which was unmistakably Plains Cree. Since Red Lake is a Southwestern Ojibwa settlement, and has been for over 100 years (Ritzenthaler 1978), this woman apparently learned Cree as a trade language. It is also worth noting that on the Turtle Mountain reser­ vation there are numerous anecdotes about the relative status of high prestige Mitchif over low prestige Ojibwa, further strengthening the position that a trade language system existed there. Now let us consider some of the implications of the existence of trade languages among the Algonquians of the midwest. First and most obviously, if the Algonquians of the Great Lakes region used trade languages, there is a great likelihood that other Algonquians also had trade languages. This is apparently the function of Delaware Jargon (Prince 1912; Goddard 1971) in the Delaware-white contact, and it is likely to have been the case that there were non-pidgin trade languages in use in the various intertribal contacts in the east too, but I know of no evidence either direct of circumstantial at this time. A second and more problematic implication of Algonquian trade languages will affect our current practice of trying to establish the location of various groups in early contact times on the basis of lin­ guistic evidence. Given that there were trade languages, the fact that a particular language was recorded at a particular place is no guaran­ tee that the recorded language was the native language of the group contacted. In fact, it is more likely that it would have been a trade language. This is probably the source of much of the confusion in group identification noted for Ottawa speaking groups coming to Montreal to trade (Feest and Feest 1978:771). Similarly, the more tentative use of place names to locate a particular group in a parti­ cular place in very early times becomes even more suspect. For ex­ ample, the suggestion that the name "Manistique" with its Cree suf­ fix /-istik(w)/ places Crees in the upper peninsula of Michigan could 8 Richard Rhodes as well be the effect of a trade language.10 What is more, we have no guarantee that any of the people we work with in the 20th century are speaking the same language as their ancestors, because a may come about, not through a relatively visible mass assimi­ lation like the Mascouten (Goddard 1978b:670), but, as in the case of the Chippewa and Potawatomi speakers of Ottawa in Michigan and , by silently slipping into the trade language. Such lan­ guage shifts may well be undetectable. The onlyspossible trace of language shift that I know of in such cases is that in places where ori­ ginally non-native speakers predominate, substrate or features may be borrowed into the trade language. For example, Potawatomi /kokse/ shows up locally in Walpole Ottawa as /googse/ 'frog' in place of common Ottawa /makii/. And many Walpole Island speakers know where the Potawatomi post-consonantal /y/'s-belong, as in /daabyaan/ for normal /daaban/ 'car', even if they are not of Potawa­ tomi descent. But whether borrowing will tell us anything about early language use will have to await a fuller theory of borrowing among Algonquian languages. The situation is often complex. Not only do trade languages borrow from substrate languages, at least locally, but subordinate languages also borrow from trade langua­ ges, as in the case of the Menominee borrowings from Ojibwa. Thus in a case like Atikamek, which shows Ojibwa borrowings, we cannot tell if these were Ojibwa speakers who shifted to Atikamek, or if Atikamek was once in the Eastern Ojibwa trade language area.11 A third implication of the existence of trade languages is that they may well be part of a more complex system of language status. For example, in Wisconsin there seems to be a hierarchy of language sta­ tus: Ojibwa over Menominee over Potawatomi, in that Potawatomis learn Ojibwa and/or Menominee, and Menominees learn Ojibwa, but never the reverse. If we look at the Turtle Mountain situation, we see Mitchif over Plains Cree over Ojibwa. Given our view of Algonquian society as very egalitarian this seems a little out of place. Indeed, we may well be wrong about the lack of social stratification among northern Algonquians. Our inferences concerning trade languages and language status also have implications for language maintenance programmes. English and French come into the Algonquian world at the top, as the trade language. Perhaps the apparent ease with which the Algonquian 10In this particular case, however, I tend to agree with Goddard (personal communication) that the [s] in "Manistique" could as well be based on the trans­ cription of a particularly prominent Ojibwa preaspiration.

11 The lack of early and extensive recording of Atikamek suggests that Atika­ mek was subordinate to Ojibwa and not vice versa. Algonquian Trade Languages 9 world is slipping into European languages is just a normal part of the Algonquian way of dealing with languages in contact.

REFERENCES Baraga, Frederic 1850 A Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language. . . Montreal: Beauchemin and Valois. Bloomfield, Leonard 1927 Literate and Illiterate Speech. American Speech 2:432-439.

1928 Menomini Texts. Publications of the American Ethnology Society 12. New York.

1957 Eastern Ojibwa: Grammatical Sketch, Texts and Word List. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Clifton, James A. 1978 Potawatomi. Pp. 725-742 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Cuoq, Jean-Andre 1886 Lexique de la langue algonquine. Montreal: J. Chapleau.

Feest, Johanna E., and Christian F. Feest 1978 Ottawa. Pp. 772-786 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Goddard, Ives 1971 The Ethnohistorical Implications of Early Delaware Linguistic Ma­ terials. Man in the Northeast 1:14-26.

1978a Central Algonquian Languages. Pp. 583-587 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smith­ sonian Institution.

1978b Mascouten. Pp. 668-672 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Hanzeli, Victor E. 1969 Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages. Janua Linguarum, Series Maior 29. The Hague: Mouton.

Lambert, Bernard 1967 Shepherd of the Wilderness. LAnse, Michigan: published by the author.

Pilling, James C. 1891 Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 13. Washington. 10 Richard Rhodes

Prince, J. Dyneley 1912 An Ancient New Jersey Indian Jargon. American Anthropologist 14:508-524.

Rhodes, Richard 1977 French Cree: a Case of Borrowing. Pp. 6-25 in Actes du Huitieme Congres des Algonquinistes. William Cowan, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University.

Rhodes, Richard, and Evelyn Todd 1982 Algonquian Languages in the Subartic. Pp. 52-66 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 16. J. Helm, ed. Washington: Smith­ sonian Insitution.

Ritzenthaler, Robert E. 1978 Southwestern Chippewa. Pp. 743-759 in Handbook of North Ameri­ can Indians, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Rogers, Edward S. 1978 Southeastern Ojibwa. Pp. 760-771 in Handbook of North Ameri­ can Indian?, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Sagard-Theodat, Gabriel 1939 Father Gabriel Sagard: The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons [1632]. George M. Wrong, ed. Toronto: The Champlain So­ ciety.

Spindler, Louise S. 1978 Menominee. Pp. 708-724 in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.