A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
“from the point of view of native style, completeness and continuity” — continuity, here, in the sense that “these tales were handed down from one narrator to another, going back three generations” (Nez Percé Texts p. viii). All these judgments are valuable in building up coherent criteria for appreciating Indian myth and legend, as there have not been, to my knowledge, any recorded attempts at formal literary criticism by Native intellectuals up to the present time. I am not at all sure that ethnologists (with but one or two noted exceptions) have asked questions about the qualities that make a myth or legend attractive and enjoyable.
5 Dell Skeels has made a contribution with his articles, “A Classification of Humor in Nez Perce Mythology” Journal of American Folklore 67 (1954) 57-63, and “The Function of Humor in Three Nez Perce Indian Myths” American Imago 11 (1954) 249-261; but he by no means exhausts the topic.
6 J. Barre Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives” Genre 2 (1969) 211-235, quotation pp. 215-216.
7 Since the above was written Toelken has surprised us with a new rendition of Yellowmaji’s story, published with Tacheeni Scott (a Navajo Ph.D. candidate in biology at the University of Oregon) as “Poetic Retranslation and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman” in Karl Kroeber ed. Traditional Literatures of the American Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1981) pp. 65-116. New devices are used, which further the aims of the original article. The pace of exploration into the various ways of transcribing performance is quickening. One excellent example is Linguistic Convergence: An Ethnology of Speaking at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta (New York:Academic Press 1979), where Ronald and Suzanne Scollon’s indebtedness to Toelken is expressed and clearly evident. (Note that the book is a somewhat expanded version of Ronald Scollon’s monograph in the Mercury Series, National Museums of Canada 1979, The Context of the Informant Narrative Performance.)
8 ln Alaska University, Anthropological Papers, Vol. I (May 1953) pp. 25-36. It is a useful survey, with a well-selected bibliography, of previous scholars who have attempted to discuss and portray the “dynamic factors in myth making” (p. 26). One of the earliest of these was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose essay “Myth in Primitive Psychology” (1926) is now conveniently available in Anchor paperback, Magic, Science and Religion ed. Robert Redfield (1948) pp. 93-148, where we find the following pertinent passage:
The whole nature of the performance, the voice and the mimicry, the stimulus and the response of the audience mean as much to the natives as the text; and the sociologist should take his cue from the natives. The performance, again, has to be placed in its proper time setting—the hour of the day, and the season, with the background of the sprouting gardens awaiting future work, and slightly influenced by the magic of the fairy tales. We must also bear in mind the sociological context of private ownership, the sociable function and the cultural role of amusing fiction. All these elements are equally relevant; all must be studied as well as the text. The stories live in native life and not on paper, and when a scholar jots them down without being able to evoke the atmosphere in which they flourish he has given us but a mutilated bit of reality (p. 104).
9 It is clear that McClellan and her teacher Frederica de Laguna have a meeting of minds on the importance of context in presenting a tale, see de Laguna’s Under Mount Saint Ellas: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1972), especially “The Story of the Woman Who Married a Bear” pp. 880-882.
10 Jarold W. Ramsey “The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives” PMLA 92 (January 1977) 9-18. Ramsey’s recent “From ‘Mythic’ to Tictive' in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth” appears in Traditional Literatures of the American Indian ed. Karl Kroeber (1981) pp. 24-44.
Chapter II Before Boas
In the summer of 1896 Charles Hill-Tout, an immigrant schoolteacher newly arrived in Vancouver, took a boat across Burrard Inlet to the Squamish Mission village in what is now North Vancouver. Bishop Durieu had prepared the way, and the chief men of the tribe soon brought the visitor to the old, blind “historian,” Mulks. “I first sought to learn his age,” says Hill-Tout, “but this he could only approximately give by informing me that his mother was a girl on the verge of womanhood when Vancouver sailed up Howe Sound at the close of the last century. He would, therefore, be about 100 years old.”1 What Hill-Tout then witnessed is, as far as I know, unique in the annals of myth collecting on the Northwest Coast of America: this Squamish “Homer” proceeded to orate the epic of the origin of his people as though in a formal ceremonial occasion.
Before the old man could begin his recital, some preparations were deemed necessary by the other elderly men of the tribe. These consisted in making a bundle of short sticks, each about six inches long. These played the part of tallies, each stick representing to the reciter a particular paragraph or chapter in his story. They apologized for making these, and were at pains to explain to me that these were to them what books were to the white man. These sticks were now placed at intervals along a table round which we sat, and after some animated discussion between the interpreter, who acted as master of ceremonies, and the other old men as to the relative order and names of the tallies, we were ready to begin. The first tally was placed in the old man’s hands and he began his recital in a loud, high-pitched key, as if he were addressing a large audience in the open air. He went on without pause for about ten minutes, and then the interpreter took up the story. The story was either beyond the interpreter’s power to render into English, or there was much in it he did not like to relate to a white man, for I did not unfortunately get a fifth of what the old man had uttered from him, and it was only by dint of questioning and cross-questioning that I was enabled to get anything like a connected narrative from him at all. The old man recited his story chapter by chapter, that is, tally by tally, and the interpreter followed in like order (pp. 19-20).
In his paper communicated to the Royal Society of Canada in 1897, Hill-Tout presents as much of this Squamish Flood story as he was able to record. In spite of the difficulties, it is more detailed than the large majority of such origin stories. Most important to our mythographic concerns are a couple of notes that Hill-Tout adds about the actual performance. Mulks is telling how “the Great Spirit” punished the tribe with an especially crippling kind of snowstorm: “In this part of his recital the old man was exceedingly interesting and graphic in his description, the very tones of his voice lending themselves to his story, and I gathered, long before the interpreter took up the story, that he had told of something that was very small and had penetrated everywhere” (p. 21). Starvation and cold caused the death of hundreds, and here “the old man’s voice was hushed to a plaintive wail, and the faces of his audience were an eloquent index of the tragic interest of this story of their ancestors' misfortunes” (p. 21). When so much of what we have of Native myth is little more than a minimal report of how the story used to be told, it is refreshing to have the sense of a “performance”: Mulks is truly “on stage.”2 Hill-Tout’s inexperience worked in his favour here. If he had been better trained he would have taken Mulks aside and got the original Squamish down by slow dictation; instead, we get a picture of something that might have happened before any white man came on the scene.
Charles Hill-Tout, the frontispiece photograph to his volume, Man and his Ancestors in the Light of Organic Evolution (Vancouver 1925).
Franz Boas was working on the Coast by 1886, quite a few years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. But chronology does not count. Hill-Tout is “Before Boas” in the naivete with which he began his work. His background was rural England, a Church of England upbringing. He might have become a clergyman but for some “intellectual difficulties” of a Darwinian sort. He arrived in Toronto in 1884 with a letter of introduction to Dr. (later Sir) Daniel Wilson, and must have seemed just the kind of “young Dominion man” Wilson had prophesied would “arise to bear a part in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll.”3 Wilson spoke to him of “the vanishing race”