good to have you on this discussion gayle.
i took care of a cleint from grand mound, found his last name in the chinook dictionary, he didnt know what it ment though, he was more interested in being a thug.
do you think any one from grand mound would be interreted in taching wawa at the oly t free school? do you have any contacts there?

Well, phonology is internal evidence. But talking about syntax, other than SVO word order, there is solid evidence even in the earliest extensive materials (e.g. Hale 1846) of Native-like syntax -- "not" usually at the beginning of the sentence, an imperative construction ("good if you do X") like the Native imperatives, VS word order in sentences with adjectives as predicates (as in "Hungry John" , for instance, rather than "John hungry"), etc.

SVO word order does not point to a post-European origin; pidgins and creoles the world over, as well as sign languages (including Plains sign language), overwhelmingly use SVO, which is a fact of great interest in linguistics. (I have a degree in linguistics, btw.) SVO word order correlates very strongly with analytic / isolating morphology -- that is to say, languages in which the forms of words change little or not at all, and which depend on word order instead of changes in the words, almost always use Subject-Object-Verb word order. A pidgin by definition drops word changes (prefixes, suffixes, etc) and uses word order, and almost all pidgins end up using SVO.

Most areas of the world where pidgins developed as a result of European contact or colonialism developed pidgins with vocabularies based on English, French, or other colonial language. One would have to wonder why the whites of the Pacific Northwest, if the Wawa originated with their arrival, would start adopting and adapting Indian words into a pidgin instead of English and French. It wouldn't be because speakers of Salishan and other languages were more familiar with Chinook than with English -- unless, in fact, they already were. The Pacific Northwest was an extremely active trading area, especially up the Columbia and Fraser River systems. And Chinuk-Wawa was actively used =among Indians= throughout the Pacific Northwest -- it was well-established even in areas far from the places where white traders usually came.

But, this doesn't mean that the Wawa "only belongs to Indians" and is not the heritage of everyone who belongs to the Pacific Northwest. The Wawa spoken post-contact was certainly not the same as pre-contact. Not only the French and English words but the many Nootka words in Chinuk-wawa entered as a result of European contact, since the traders seemed to have been the ones to fuse the Nootka pidgin and Chinuk-wawa together. So it is still the common heritage of all people of the Pacific Northwest.