A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
Perhaps the best stories in Tsimshian Texts (1902), though lacking the interlinear translation that the others have, are those told by Chief Mountain, who, in the British Association Report (1895), is given a welcome modicum of biography:
When he himself was a youth the supernatural beings were pursuing him all the time. One day a beautiful girl appeared to him and he fainted. She taught him her song which enabled him to make the olachen come in spring … She wanted to have intercourse with him. One night she took him through a fire, and since that time he was able to handle fire with impunity … At one time the Gyitqadeq disbelieved his power over fire. He asked them to build a large fire. He threw an iron hoop into it, moistened his hands, and covered his face, hair, and hands with eagle-down. Then he stepped barefooted over the glowing embers, took the redhot hoop, and carried it through the fire without burning his hands or his feet. He added that a few years ago he repeated this experiment, but as he failed and burnt his hands and feet he gave up his supernatural helper and became a Christian (pp. 580-581).
How refreshing that Boas does not turn this account into a disquisition on what shamans in general do. Mountain’s personal authority must have been too great for him to be turned into a class of behaviour patterns.
It was in 1927, thirty-three years after Boas, that Marius Barbeau went to see Mountain:
His white hair reached down his shoulders, and he seemed blind, unable to sit up; after a while he could raise himself on an elbow. He was quite deaf. For a chief of his high standing, whose main crest was the Double-headed Eagle, like that of the Tzar’s imperial emblem, there was certainly no mark here of power and prestige, and little promise that he might prove of much use in my research … Once he was launched on to his narrative, we went smoothly ahead for a good part of the afternoon, he muttering a phrase or two, the interpreter conveying the meaning to me in English, and I recording in shorthand the story as it moved along without a hitch. But the old man slowly grew excited at the recital of the unforgotten trials of his ancestors; he raised himself on his elbows and his hands, shouting at times and singing. I feared that he might collapse, and die, perhaps. We adjourned until the next day, and found him expecting us. The revival of his tradition had brought cheer to him and perhaps a new span of life.5
Barbeau thus prepares us very nicely for “Origin of the Salmon-Eater Clan,” given on pp. 16-21 of Totem Poles (Ottawa 1950) Vol. I, and for Mountain’s explanation of his totem pole, the tallest in existence at that time. Barbeau gives us further insight into Mountain’s character when he describes what Mountain replied to an offer to purchase his pole: “Give me the tombstone of Governor Douglas; I will give you the totem of my grand-uncles” (p. 33). Mountain died the following year, and when Barbeau came again, he bought the pole from his heirs, and it now stands in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He also picked up something else—a story about Mountain in his youth, deeply wounded in his pride because his wife had left him for the favours of a Hudson’s Bay official, Captain McNeill in Victoria:
To wipe off his shame in good style among his people, Mountain waited for his opportunity in a big tribal feast in his village of Gitiks. There he held up in his hand ten beautiful marten skins, and sang to an old tune a new challenge which he had just composed to cast ridicule on the fair deserter. He sang with sarcasm: “ . . . Wait and see what a chief can do! Wait, O sweetheart, that you may learn how, after my humiliation because of you, I have again raised my head! Wait, O flighty one, before you send me word of how you have failed in your foolish escapade and pine once more for my love! Time is now ripe, O woman who would rather belong to the bleached Victoria tribe (of white people) for you to send me a bottle of Old Tom. For my part I dispatch to you this small handful of mere beaver skins.”
Actually there was more than a “small handful,” and the skins were even more valuable than beaver. They were picked marten such as an indignant and wealthy chief could sacrifice to heap ridicule upon a woman unworthy of him. She would surely, after her desertion, be unable to reciprocate in kind.
But she was able. The following year, through her brother, she met the challenge with a carved canoe.
Now once more she had heaped humiliation upon him, and the tribe was not sure that he had the wit and the means to retaliate.
He had. After all his wealth in pelts, copper shields, blankets and trade goods was gathered, he invited the neighbouring tribes and made it known that he was about to cast off his unfaithful wife in a way which would brand her forever as worthless. While he lavished presents upon his guests at a feast, particularly upon those who had laughed at him, he sang a song composed for the occasion—a taunting song: “Hush! stop your idle chatter! Why do you mind my affairs?” … And the people had to repeat the refrain in chorus, after he had sung 6
Mountain’s ex-wife won in the end, for she erected the most fabulous of totem poles to the memory of her brother, confirming her status and freeing herself of Mountain’s power (Barbeau got the pole in 1929!).
The point is that chiefs live their lives in public, and as storytellers they are also people about whom stories are told. Mountain was undoubtedly a high chief, and at the time Boas came on the scene was ruling his domains augustly. But we now have information on two failures in his life: his retirement as shaman, and his losing against his wife in a notorious “fight with property.” We need not refrain, any more than his contemporaries would, from applying what we know. Here is Chief Mountain telling Boas about the origin of his own clan. The motif of the club which can turn whole towns into forest may be world-wide, but this is how Chief Mountain’s version ends:
The brothers travelled all over the world, and made war on all the tribes, and destroyed them by means of their club. The chief in heaven became angry because they abused his gift, and wished that they might forget the club on one of their expeditions. So it happened that they forgot the club when they went out to attack the town Gulgeu. Therefore the place has been called ever since that time Hwil-dakstsax, or Where-the-club-was-forgotten. Then they went to Demlaxam on Skeena river, where they settled, as they were unable to continue fighting on account of the loss of the supernatural club. Their descendants became the Gisqahast.
If Boas had been present at a communal telling of this origin story, and had known what the audience knew about the storyteller, and had been on the lookout for nuances in tone, and had sought a means to communicate them, we would have had quite a different text before us, I believe. With heroic figures, the public and the private are the same thing; the tribal loss of a supernatural club is the symbolic equivalent of the storyteller’s own.
The 1894 Fort Rupert Potlatch
In the introductory pages of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) Boas uses some of the material he obtained from Mountain, this time suppressing personal references, even his name. It is tedious to keep repeating how Boas’s need to appear scientific deprives us of the individual quality of the event. This 1897 volume is very close to being the personal document we want of him; a whole section gives a play by play account of “The Winter Ceremonial at Fort Rupert” (pp. 544-606)—“the ceremonial as it actually took place and so far as I witnessed it in the winter of 1895-96.”7 But Boas is so successful in his scientific aim that he manages to tell us what he saw there as though he were the proverbial “camera,” not a human observer. If we want to know how he felt, we have to turn again to the family letters (Rohner pp. 176-189). It would not have done any harm, even in a scholarly work, to indicate just how lucky he was to arrive, without precise expectation, at Fort Rupert in the middle of the winter dance season, and to see in the canoe that came to pick him up none other than George Hunt, whom he had met in 1888 in Victoria and who had been in Chicago for the World’s Fair Exhibition in 1893. It would not have done any harm to take us behind the scenes a little. As the narrative stands in the Social Organization
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