I was drawn here by a couple of firsts. But it was the type that beckoned me.
If the constant reader had noted the quizzical bit about the title ... because where do you usually see a super-scripted 'h' in any normal parlance ... I'm glad. There's a story there. Seeing it on a map sure caught my eye, and a gradually burgeoning interest in the indigenous culture of what we now call Oregon and Washington, got me and Olivia to the corner of NE 52nd Avenue and Alberta Street here, during the August 2020 heatwave, at a clement hour in the morning.
This is where you'll find Kʰunamokwst Park.
The arrival of Kʰunamokwst Park (since 2015, so, really, new to me) signifies two geographic breakthroughs which deserve to be noted. In no particular order:
First.
It's the first developed park in the Cully neighborhood. That's big and dissonant news for Portland, which has a reputation for public green spaces and plenty of 'em: in some areas it seems as though you're never more than a few minutes away from even the most modest Portland park. But there are areas of the city which were just outside of it for a great long time, and Cully is one of them. The area was annexed into Portland back in the 1980s, when Portland and Gresham finally began to devour the land between them, but it wasn't until 2015 before Cully got its first honest-to-goodness city park.
It's a lovely place. Here's the ingress at 52nd and Alberta, with Olivia striking a pose:
And another thing.
This is the very first Portland city park commissioned with an indigenous name. The word kʰunamokwst (pronounced KAHN-uh-mockst) comes to us from the Chinuk Wawa, the language that started as a trade jargon then evolved into a pidgin then matured into a creole that first peoples all along the lower Columbia, from Celilo on down, and through the area we now call Portland, where the Multnomahs once lived, spoke amongst each other.
And speaking of speaking, if the constant reader is wondering about that supered 'h' next to the k, here's the thing about that: Most of our words that we annexed from the first peoples have been anglicised into English, and the sounds of English are not wholly congruent with that of the Wawa. We do, however, have the International Phonetic Alphabet at our disposal, and it allows for a more precise written representation, and, briefly, in this cast, the sound 'k' makes is still 'k', but adding the ʰ like a diacritical mark to create the kʰ glyph makes it an aspriated k sound, which more approximates the way the sound was actually made by a speaker of the Wawa. Sort of saying "k" but breathing out like you're saying "h" at the same time.
And what's the meaning of all this? Well, kʰunamokwst means "together", which is a great thing for a lovely park to make happen. This continues an evolution I'm seeing in which we make a collective effort to honor and acknowledge the peoples that our ancestors displaced by keeping some shred of their intellectual tradition alive and in front of us.
We can see it beginning to happen here, in these modest ways. I'm hoping they catch on.
The foliage at Kʰunamokwst Park is mighty lovely, as well. It's a park that's been too long in coming. Cully got a real gem.
And here's a link to the Portland Parks and Rec press release that has a lot of good background.
And so it goes skookum.
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