Kamloops Wawa, vols 1 and 2 - photo 1

Kamloops Wawa, vols 1 and 2

Lot 164
25.04.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 2 400
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 743824
Lot 164 | Kamloops Wawa, vols 1 and 2
Estimate value
$ 3 000 – 5 000
LE JEUNE, Jean-Marie-Raphaël (1855-1930), editor. Kamloops Wawa. Kamloops, BC, 1892. [Bound with:] Chinook Library: Our Lady of Lourdes. Saint Louis Mission, Kamloops, BC, 1893.The first two volumes of an ephemeral Chinook Jargon periodical, written in Duployan shorthand and hand-printed in British Columbia. Father Le Jeune, a Catholic missionary working in Western Canada, adapted Duployan for writing Chinook Jargon—a trade language of the Pacific Northwest which combines elements of Chinookian, Salishan, Wakashan, and Shahaptian along with additions from French and English. It had over 100,000 speakers by 1875, but no standardized orthography. Le Jeune began to offer classes in writing it using Duployan in 1891, aided by a Nlaka'pamux man named Charlie Mayous. These classes apparently attracted many more takers than the priest’s catechism classes, and soon there was a growing demand for written material in Chinook Jargon, and thus the Kamloops Wawa was born. Handwritten and then copied on a home-made hectograph duplicator, also known as a jellygraph, the first years of the Wawa were issued intermittently beginning in 1891. Le Jeune was aided by two Secwépemc women named Angele Edward and Emma Harry in this process. A labor-intensive yet portable and resource-minimal form of printing, the jellygraph was well-suited to the task: a medium with “the immediacy and freedom from type restrictions that suited the publications that he was producing, suspended as they were between oral and written cultures. Le Jeune’s publications, particularly through virtue of the longevity and consistency of their production, can tell us a great deal about the sound and evolution of this ever-changing lingua franca, and how it adapted to the needs of the people who spoke it” (Voremberg). Le Jeune eventually acquired a mimeograph machine on which later issues were printed. Subscribers were mostly members of Le Jeune's First Nations congregations, but bound volumes were also marketed to scholars in the fields of ethnography and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in "curiosities." As the circulation of the paper was increasing over time, from as little as 25 to the hundreds, Le Jeune had to re-print some of the earlier numbers to make up complete sets. The present bound copy seems to be one of these later issues, with pagination that differs from some of the earlier imprints. Over the years, many supplemental texts were issued by Le Jeune in the same manner, containing grammatical lessons, religious tracts, and other relevant material. Here, vols 1 and 2 of the Wawa are bound with one such text: Our Lady of Lourdes, on the French Marian apparition. In the words of Le Jeune himself: "The first volume of the Kamloops Wawa is now bound, and would make a very interesting item in any library. Price only $1.50." The works of Father Le Jeune on Chinook Jargon and Duployan are rare at auction, and the early issues of the Wawa are especially scarce; no copies of these first volumes are recorded at auction by ABPC or RBH. Bibliography of British Columbia 938 (complete run) and 1065 (second work); Pilling, Bibliography of the Chinookan Languages, pp. 45-51. See Fuchsia Voremberg, "Chinook Jargon and Itinerant Mimeography in the Pacific Northwest," in Printing History 26 (2019) and Marianne and Ronald E. Ignace, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 re Stsq'ey's-kucw (2017). Two works in one, 16mo (170 x 11mm). First work: nos 1-32 in volume 1 and 1-26 in volume 2, paginated pp. 1-128 and pp. 1-104; second work: title and pp. 64. Jellygraphed. (Paper quite browned and brittle, with some chips and tears around the edges and one corner detached but retained.) Contemporary morocco backed boards with ticket of Cadieux et Derome Libraires, Montreal (boards and flyleaf detached, last few gatherings detached). Provenance: acquired from Le Jeune in Kamloops by an ancestor of the present owner, to whom is passed by descent.
Place of origin:Canada
Auction house category:Printed books
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