The Salish People: Volume II. Charles Hill-Tout
href="#litres_trial_promo">Sundry Beliefs and Superstitions
Myth of the Origin of the Mountain-goat Kin
Myth of the Man Who Restored the Dead
Myth of the Dead Woman Who Became a Bear
Myth of the Marriage of North Wind and South Wind and South Wind
List of Works Cited in Volume II
Illustrations
Map of Squamish and Lillooet Territory
Cartography by the Audio-Visual Centre of
Simon Eraser University.
Mission Reserve, North Vancouver
R. Maynard photograph, date unknown. Courtesy of
the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
Plate in same series as Chief George, below; therefore
taken by Charles Hill-Tout, circa 1900. Vancouver Centennial
Museum photograph: “Collected by Maxine Pape and
Laurie Peterson 1933.” Youth identified as
August Jack by Louis Miranda.
From painting by Paul Kane. Courtesy of the
University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology
and Mrs. Shane.
Diagram from the original printing of the report.
Vancouver Archives photograph, undated,
taken at the Mission Reserve, North Vancouver.
Vancouver Centennial Museum photograph:
“Chief George of the Snauq.” Hill-Tout included this
photograph among those taken by himself to illustrate
his report on the Sechelt (1904), opposite p. 90 in the
original printing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute. The profile of Chief George, also in the Museum,
was used in Hill-Tout’s British North America
volume (1907), Plate 8.
Hill-Tout’s Map of the Lillooet
Reproduced from the original printing of the report.
Vancouver Centennial Museum photograph,
Campbell Studios.
Introduction
What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout is not the scope of his field work, though in the ten years from 1896 to 1906 he covered most of the Salish tribes, and so competently that, Teit’s mastery of the Interior notwithstanding, Hill-Tout’s reports remain probably our best panoramic view of pre-white civilization in the Victoria-Vancouver-Lower Mainland area. Neither is his linguistic versatility his most striking quality, rare though it is to see a self-taught scholar compiling grammars for eleven separate Salish dialects. What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout, what distinguishes him from most early ethnologists in North America, is his English prose style. It is a stately Victorian prose, where scientific objectivity combines with lofty sentiment to ennoble his subject matter. It is a prose which provides us with practically the only corpus of B.C. Indian literature — literature defined minimally as a body of writing sufficiently interesting in structure and content, sufficiently intriguing in the way it moves, that one is willing to re-read it for pleasure. Indian tales, those in the early collections at any rate, tend to come through to us as mere specimens of a culture, something to examine and categorize; and in bulk they constitute one of the world’s great unread masses of printed material. Hill-Tout, on the other hand, cared that the stories he collected should be readable. He didn’t look down on them, so we don’t either. We are attracted inside a story, and learn the dimensions of its world from the inside. This rare circumstance was not achieved by sophisticated techniques of recording and transcribing; rather, somehow, by being true to himself, he was able to be true to the tale. We can see how this works in a simple example:
Once there was a large village, and among the people
who lived in it was a certain man who had a wife
whom he loved very much.
In this instance, a Chehalis story entitled “Myth of the Man Who Gains Power to Restore the Dead to Life" (in volume III of the present edition), Hill-Tout supplied a literal, interlinear translation, and we see that the phrase “whom he loved very much" does not appear in the Chehalis text:
Sta-tsa te qolmuq (There were a people) tla-so stcaukq te-laletsa sweeka lakwa kwilatel (and then marry one man lived together) te side anales yehets kelotl kakai (the woman not long after sick) etc.1
Perhaps the word kwilatel, translated as “together,” denotes an extraordinary degree of harmony, equivalent to “loved very much"; or perhaps the story-teller provided a reverential overtone at this point. In any case, Hill-Tout knew that the great love of the man for his wife was the essential truth of the situation, and simply stated it with the dignity of a family man who knows about such things. Because he has good instincts, and obeys them, we get an alive story out of it. Hill-Tout knew that “the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of';2 so he made his English equivalents “fuller" in an attempt to be really equal to the original as he saw and heard it. This is a debatable point: there are probably ways of communicating the full impact of a story other than by adding unsaid words to a text; for instance, even an old-fashioned footnote about the story-teller’s tone or the audience’s reaction might do the job better and leave the text cleaner. However, I will stand by Hill-Tout on the basis of the results, the most readable body of Indian literature from the Northwest Coast.