A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
Perce Texts (University of California Press 1979), not only to note that Archie Phinney has not suffered disesteem at the hands of a contemporary specialist in the field, but also to see what sorts of things the editor, Haruo Aoki, feels should be included nowadays to give proper support to a text. Aoki does not lean toward the techniques of Tedlock or Toelken. There is merely the Native text with literal interlinear translation, followed by a free translation. But he is careful to add biographical information on the informants, including photographs; a statement of the circumstances in which the stories were recorded; and ethnographic notes on certain details, on the significance of the story as a whole, and on its position in the widespread themes of world mythology. This is all in keeping with the trend to provide context for the “raw material”— “raw” being Viola Garfield’s word for an objectionable severity in the way most ethnographers had presented their collections of myths up to the time of her “Contemporary Problems of Folklore Collecting and Study” in 1953. This was a milestone article;8 as Melville Jacobs' The Content and Style of an Oral Literature was a further milestone in 1959. The trend, of which the 1979 Nez Perce Texts is a good recent result, is characterized by a concern for the narrator and his precise purposes, and for providing enough comment on the narrator’s skills and audience reactions, so that a literary judgment might one day be made. Jacobs thought such judgments “premature” (p. 8); Catharine McClellan provided another milestone when in 1970 she published The Girl Who Married the Bear (National Museum of Man, Publications in Ethnology, No. 2) and termed it “a masterpiece.”
She confesses that the bear-bride story at first interested her in a very limited way, as merely one more statistic in the distribution of bear ceremonialism. Then she began to ask why: why this story’s great popularity? Value judgments followed. She saw that it was “an outstanding piece of creative narrative”:
For the first time I began to realize that many of the Indian myths that I had been reading in professional collections were more than rather one-dimensional “fairy stories.” Today I believe that this particular story attracts the Southern Yukon natives with the same power as does a first-rate psychological drama or novel in our own culture. The themes probably evoke the same intense response in the Indians as those evoked in the Greeks by the great Attic dramas (p. 1).
Catharine McClellan is here saying that Northwest Native Indian myths are as great as Greek tragedy within their own social context. Even if she were only fifty percent right, her statement would still be magnificent; and manifold in its implications. Mythographers have now come of age, and can make judgments about these materials, which have suffered because of our timidity. There is now one “masterpiece,” and there will be others.
Moreover, myth-critics have a special role in this. It is not only that some stories will be judged more powerful than others on the grounds of style and substance, but also that what one is essentially judging cannot usually be a single text but a continuum where storytellers have “thrown” versions of a story, like several potters trying for the same shape of pot. Catharine McClellan’s subtitle, “A Masterpiece of Indian Oral Tradition,” refers to no one telling of “The Girl Who Married the Bear,” but to the eleven versions of it which together give it scope, and by means of which the scholar can discern a pan-tribal artifact of fullness, coherence, and beauty. She is eager to talk about the personality of an informant and the way special circumstances in the situation may have contributed to the details of a story.9 She is very much within the modern trend here. But this concern with differences does not lead her to pick out the best telling as the masterpiece, but to take the term we usually reserve for the finest work of an individual master and apply it to something she herself, in effect, has created, a “story” enlarged beyond the sum total of the different tellings. The mythographer sees and appreciates a whole denied to individual raconteurs.
No other mythographer has yet undertaken the task of “creating” a masterpiece myth in exactly this sense. Dell Hymes, an anthropologist and linguist, has been moving, with due deliberation, into the role of literary critic of myth, and has now collected pertinent papers into a volume, “In vain I tried to tell you” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1981). This volume constitutes a clear announcement that, in Hymes’s opinion, the oral tradition in North America (as, indeed, mostly elsewhere) was a verse tradition, and that this is revealed by minute attention to extant texts. Jarold W. Ramsey, a younger Oregonian follower of Hymes and a professor of English, has the distinction of having introduced North American Indian myth analysis into the august pages of PMLA.10 In their sensitive approach to a handful of classic published texts, Hymes and Ramsey have, in a sense, elevated them beyond what the original teller and recorder would have claimed for them. This is not unusual in literary criticism, which is always at work to transform a bewildering multiplicity of blocks and pieces into a corpus of literature, within the coherent framework of which they can be better understood, enjoyed, and judged. The stage is set for the entry of North American Indian myth and legend into a much larger role in the pageant of world literatures.
We have gone somewhat outside our chosen area of British Columbia to take a look at a number of missionary collectors of legend, the exceptional work of one full-blooded Native ethnologist, and the advance-guard of the growing movement to treat Indian storytelling as a major literature. The issues raised will be hovering continually over our subsequent discussion. I will not be telling the history of myth-collecting in British Columbia without bias. I am biased in favour of what Petitot did, what Archie Phinney did, and what Catharine McClellan did. I instinctively recognize what they did as authentic; and their work helps me to define the term. It has something to do with the ethnologist’s honest care for the storyteller and his or her people; with recognizing a born raconteur when one hears one; with valuing the dramatic elements of a story at least as much as the linguistic and ethnographic; and with striving for techniques to bring the living story on to the printed page.
1 Told by Sylvain Vitoedh to Emile Petitot, The Amerindians of the Canadian North-West in the 19th Century, as Seen by Emile Petitot, Vol. II: The Loucheux Indians, ed. Donat Savoie (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development 1971) pp. 133-134. Translation from the French by L.A.C.O. Hunt. Another translation, by Thelma Habgood, appears in “Indian Legends of North-Western Canada, by Emile Petitot” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 2 (1970/1) 94-129 on pp. 99-100. The translation in The Book of Dene, issued by Programme Development Division, Department of Education, Yellowknife, N.W.T. (1976), has been “compared with versions in the original tongues.”
2 “Three Carrier Myths” Transactions of the Canadian Institute 5 (1894-95) 1-36, quotation on pp. 3-4. The four interlined texts offered in The Carrier Language (1932) Vol. II have a rather apologetic introduction: “The author of this work has, in various monographs, considered the Carriers from every possible angle, and studied their ethnology, sociology, archaeology, technology, history and, now, language. One viewpoint, mythology, he may be accused of having perhaps a little neglected, because he has consecrated only one paper exclusively to it. Yet, apart from the four legends whose text is hereunder given, the following myths scattered in his works will, we think, lead one to realize that he has not altogether overlooked this part of their ancestral heirloom” (p. 513). Morice lists eleven myths, a meagre total.
3 Franz Boas, a letter of recommendation for Archie Phinney, 23 February 1934. From microfilm of the Professional Correspondence of Franz Boas, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The short obituary of Phinney in American Anthropologist 52 (1950) 442 summarizes his career as an Indian agent, but strangely forgets his Nez Percé Texts.
4 Paul Radin Literary Aspects of North American Mythology Canada Geological Survey Museum Bulletin No. 16 (1915) pp. 42-43, where he adds:
Anyone who has spent any time among Indians must have been impressed by the fact that only a few Indians in any tribe have the reputation of being excellent raconteurs. And it is a different kind of excellence with which each raconteur is credited. . . one man was famous for the humorous touches which he imparted to every tale; another, for the fluency with which he spoke and the choice of his language; a third, for his dramatic delivery; a fourth, for the radical way in which he handled time-worn themes; a fifth, for his tremendous memory; a sixth, for the accuracy with which he adhered to