A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
a sequence of circumstances brought Hill-Tout to settle in Vancouver in 1891 he was ready and eager to do his bit. His residence in the area gave him the advantage of being able to renew by continued visits the friendships he made with local Indians.
He had an interest in spiritualism, as did John Swanton; but I do not know that Swanton gained an insight into the visionary experience in quite the direct manner that Hill-Tout did. In a report to the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1895, Hill-Tout tells of the seances being conducted in Vancouver and his own shaman-like experience at one of them. Like a spirit-dance song, the hymn “Nearer, my God, to Thee” induced in him “strange sensations”:
I stood up and began to sway to and fro, and soon lost all sense of my surroundings. I seemed to be far away in space. The feelings of distance and remoteness from all other beings were very marked, and a sense of coldness and loneliness oppressed me terribly. I seemed to be moving, or rather to be drawn downward, and presently felt that I had reached this earth again; but all was strange and fearful and lonely, and I seemed to be disappointed that I could not attain the object of this long and lonely journey. I felt I was looking for someone, but did not seem to have a clear notion of whom it was, and as the hopelessness of my search and the fruitlessness of my long journey forced itself upon me, I cried out in my wretchedness and misery. I felt I could neither find what I wanted nor get back from whence I had come. My grief was very terrible, and I should have fallen to the ground but that the other sitters had gathered round me. . . . 4
The Native gaining of a guardian spirit is not dissimilar, in essence. Hill-Tout’s Indian friends must have had some sense of this:
It was not till Captain Paul [of the Lillooet tribe] and I had spent several weeks in each other’s company and I had won his confidence and esteem and he had bestowed upon me one of his ancestral mystery names, thereby relating me to himself, that he gave me. . . esoteric information concerning the abnormal sight powers he claimed to have formerly possessed. I do not, for my own part, doubt his possession of them for a moment.5
Such a profound relationship between Indian and white is rarely so convincingly documented. It makes for good story collecting.
Hill-Tout’s most productive friendship was with Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field worker could ever hope to meet.
Having acted as interpreter for many years to the missionaries, and also in the law courts, Mischelle was quite fluent in English. “My method of recording was as follows,” writes Hill-Tout by way of preface to a single masterpiece, which takes up over twenty pages of small type. “I made copious notes at the time, and expanded them immediately after. When written out, I read them to him and corrected them where necessary according to his instructions.”6 This methodology may not seem very promising; but the result is the most readable body of Native literature in the canon. “Mischelle was a good raconteur, and took the liveliest pleasure in relating to me his store of lore.” Hill-Tout won a prize of $25 from the Folklore Society of Montreal for the story in question; it is certainly, as “performance,” worth the price of admission.
When he gains some proficiency in the Salish languages, Hill-Tout provides interlinear texts, so that we can test his free translations against them. He consistently heightens the diction to make a story warmer and more heartfelt. He likes to add adjectives. For instance, in the Squamish story of the origin of the “Wildmen,” a chiefs daughter is made pregnant by a slave; then, according to the interlinear literal translation:
when he-finds-out the father, then he-takes-into the
canoe the daughter-his and the slave.
Chief Mischelle of Lytton. Photograph annotated: “Michel, Head Chief of Nekla-kap-amuks, May 1879.”
Hill-Tout’s free translation reads: “And, on learning who it was who had caused this disgrace to fall upon him, he took both the guilty slave and his hapless daughter away in his canoe.”7 If this sounds like Victorian melodrama, it is because Hill-Tout is trying to meet fully the melodrama of the original: Indian daughters are sometimes never told to darken doorsteps again. He knows that the hearers of this story were moved by it, and he wants us to be likewise moved. This is the perennial problem. Hill-Tout’s way of meeting it is to supply the emotive adjectives which the storyteller would imply in his manner:
. . . although nothing is more wearisome than consecutive reading of collections of Indian texts, there is nothing wearisome in listening to the recital of these by the Indian himself. Most Indians possess natural dramatic powers, and their ready, graceful and appropriate gestures, and their command of those tones of the voice that appeal to the emotions, make it distinctly pleasurable to listen to their stories of long ago or their recitals of the traditions of their people. So that if the English equivalents of my native texts in this or in former reports seem fuller than the baldness of their expressions justifies, it must be understood that this is because the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of. I have seen women shed tears, and men’s faces grow pale and tense over the recital, by some of the elders of the tribe, of the traditions of the people, the text of which would make one marvel that such bald dry statements could call forth so much emotion.8
Hill-Tout is quite clear on Native showmanship, and his own.
As a member of the Ethnological Survey of Canada Committee, Hill-Tout issued full ethnological reports to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the Thompson (1899), the Squamish (1900), the Mainland Halkomelem (1902), continuing with similar scholarly reports in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on the Sechelt (1904), the Chehalis and Scowlitz (1904), the Lillooet (1905), the South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island (1907), and the Okanagan (1911). This work involved the collection and publication of grammars and vocabularies for eight quite different Salish languages, material which linguists today find useful. All this was accomplished in spare time during his years as a teacher in Vancouver and then, from 1899, when he moved out to the farm he had purchased in Abbotsford, in time wrested from business and family. It was a life-long grievance that he never received employment or proper recognition from academic Anthropology. It goes back to the rebuff from Boas, the exact nature of which we do not know. Hill-Tout and Boas met in Vancouver on 3 June 1897. Hill-Tout gave Boas five skulls, “one of them very valuable.”9 And that’s all we know. Hill-Tout had certain expectations. He had written Boas a long letter on 3 October 1895, and Boas had replied: “It is very likely I shall be on the coast about the month of May and should be very glad if I could assist you in your interesting work. I may be able to obtain funds for this purpose.”10 Hill-Tout had rejoined: “I am exceedingly enthusiastic over the whole question and would like nothing better than to devote the next ten years of my life to the work in this district.” Boas had now finally arrived on the coast; the Jesup Expedition was well financed; but Hill-Tout was not taken on. Something about Hill-Tout annoyed Boas, his tone, his intellectual demeanour, his presumption.11 The result was that Hill-Tout was never published in the nice hard-cover volumes of the Jesup Expedition, nor in the Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins, nor in the publications of the American Folklore Society, nor in any of the influential series of Anthropological volumes emanating from Columbia University. Hill-Tout’s field reports never got a Library of Congress catalogue number, and thus were condemned to oblivion, or at least an eighty-year delay.
George M. Dawson could have made a great deal of difference, and his premature death in 1901 is lamentable. He was the son of the Principal of McGill, and a brilliant geologist. As a member of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, he overcame his physical disability, the result of polio at the age of eleven, and made many arduous explorations of the Northwest, and also did three substantial ethnographic reports in the midst of his cartography: on the Haida (1880), the Kwakiutl (1887), and the Shuswap (1891). Dawson included Mythology sections in each of these reports.12 They are interesting as being very much “Before Boas”; but he is essentially reporting on the stories rather than presenting them. What