“And he knew our language”: Missionary linguistics on the Pacific Northwest Coast

Serious investigation of the grammatical structure of the indigenous languages of North America's Pacific Coast did not begin with anthropological linguists such as Franz Boas and his students. This historiographic study is pioneering in being the first to describe and analyze the published results of language study performed still earlier in this area by Christian missionaries, specifically those sponsored by the Church Missionary Society of Africa and the East (CMS), an organization founded in 1799 to partner with Anglican missionaries working among non-Christian indigenous peoples. The author's central thesis is that missionary linguists made important contributions to the scientific study of Canada's First Peoples that should not remain underappreciated. The geographic and temporal scope is mainly the areas of British Columbia occupied by Tsimshian, Haida, and Kwak'wala speakers, with primary emphasis placed on CMS activity on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after smallpox and other epidemics had begun ravaging the native populations, and contact with English speakers had become ongoing.

Several features of this book recommend it for even the most well-read specialist interested in the history of language studies in North America.

First and foremost, Tomalin contextualizes the early Haida grammars and Bible translations prepared by resident missionaries such as Charles Harrison (Harrison 1895) and John Henry Keen (Keen 1906) by identifying their diverse intellectual roots, which extend much farther afield than Greco-Roman grammatical models and reflect informed awareness of Japanese and other non-Indo-European languages. Historiographies of Native American linguistics often omit or gloss over linguistic efforts by early missionaries where additional fieldwork with native speakers was performed by secular, university-trained specialists. This is unfortunate, since missionaries were sometimes the only outsiders who interacted on a daily basis with native societies before the spread of fluency in Western languages. As such, missionaries were often the first (if not also the last) observers to document now vanished aspects of the traditional culture. Their observations are worthy of the attention of modern linguists and anthropologists, even if much of their analysis has become outdated. Tomalin makes the valid observation that analyses made by contemporary linguists often rapidly become superseded as well, yet are routinely included in linguistic historiographies (2).

Tomalin argues that mainstream twentieth-century anthropology as a discipline profited from trails blazed by Christian missionaries, though the results of the latter have remained largely unsung. He documents correspondence showing that Boas was well aware of linguistic and anthropological data gathered by Harrison and other missionaries among the Haida before starting his own work in the area. As one of the first long-term observers of Haida traditional spirituality, Harrison's published description of Haida culture (Harrison 1925) offers much of value, as do his linguistic observations. Missionary linguists were the first to notice what today would be termed the semantic alignment of Haida, which marks active and inactive intransitive subjects differently. Early observations by missionaries on the diversity of Haida idiolects are also worthy of further consideration, since the two language forms documented during the twentieth century in the villages of Masset and Skidegate may simply be all that remained on Haida Gwaii in the wake of a series of devastating smallpox epidemics that reached the islands beginning in 1862. Harrison (1895: 124–5) carefully lists 39 distinct villages that flourished on Haida Gwaii before the mid-nineteenth century.

One feature of the book that could have been explored more thoroughly is the existence of a “missionary sociolect of Haida” (181), which Tomalin references a number of times but does not explicitly define. His long and interesting digressions on the lexicography of Bible translations do not address the extent to which the missionary usage of Haida linguistic structures for translating English religious texts influenced the actual native speech of the communities in which they worked. Tomalin's exploration of how missionaries co-opted traditional Haida spiritual terms to convey Christian concepts is only the first step in understanding how English-based missionary activity impacted spoken Haida during the twentieth century.

A final valuable feature of this book is its extensive bibliography (187–97). It cites not only a host of difficult-to-find early publications on Northwest Coast languages by missionary linguistics, but also offers a complete listing of the numerous articles on Haida sentence structure by twentieth-century linguists that were inexplicably omitted from John Enrico's two-volume magnum opus on Haida syntax (Enrico 2003). These include, among many other titles, pioneering articles by Carol Eastman and Elizabeth Edward describing Haida as a pragmatically configured language (Eastman 1979; Edwards 1979). It would seem that the accomplishments of missionary linguists are not unique in being ignored by standard treatments of Pacific Northwest languages.

The author takes pains to be clear about the limited scope of his study, which focused so heavily on CMS activity among the Haida in connection with the Masset mission station. Tomalin notes that linguistic work by Methodists and other denominations were also taking place among Canada's First Nations in the same time frame (180). He also makes the important observation that little has yet been done to investigate how early missionary linguists in different parts of North America influenced one another's work through cross-pollination within their respective church organizations (182). Given that authors of linguistic works do not always candidly identify all relevant intellectual precedents, the full story often requires explicit historiographic investigation. This book importantly expands our knowledge of early linguistic research on the Pacific Northwest Coast and could easily serve as a model for additional study of nineteenth-century language descriptions undertaken in the same geographic area in connection with Christian proselytizing activity.

EDWARD J. VAJDA

Russian Language and Eurasian Studies, Western Washington University, WA

© 2015, Edward J. Vajda