A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend. Ralph Maud
as their exchange of highly practical letters reveals.13 He was on the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that hired Boas for his second field trip (1888) and five subsequent trips. He was the Chairman of the Association’s new Committee for the Ethnographic Survey of Canada in 1897, nominating Hill-Tout for membership. Here was a man big enough to sponsor a multiplicity of attitudes and modes in anthropological research. If he had lived, the Anthropological Division which was established in 1910 within the Geological Survey would surely have been a more catholic and at the same time a more Canadian entity. As it was, Boas was consulted, and a staunch Boas man, Edward Sapir, appointed as head of the new Division. The “Canadian pioneers” were, in the words of Marius Barbeau, “virtually eliminated.”14
There was one Canadian pioneer who, it is safe to say, got all the recognition he deserved. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, 1893, “a massive Scotchman, as rugged as his native climate, 65 years of age, with iron gray hair and beard,” lorded it over the miniature Haida village he had set up there and gave daily “readings from the totem poles,” telling and retelling “the quaint old stories connected with them.”15 The crowds of “admiring listeners” kept asking him for a book, so he went home and put together Tales from the Totems of the Hidery (1899).
James Deans of Victoria, presumably around 1893.
Home was Victoria, B.C., called Fort Victoria when James Deans arrived there in January 1853 off the Puget Sound Agricultural Company’s barge, “Norman Morrison.” Thus, Deans had begun his field work more than thirty years “before Boas”—as a farmer in the midst of the Indians, and then, with the aid of Chinook, as an amateur ethnologist among the many tribes represented at the Fort. “I was surprised to find that each nation had a wonderful mythology … My next step was to collect all I could find and write it down, in order to preserve it from oblivion” (p. 6). During 1869-70 he was on the Queen Charlotte Islands, building a tramway for the shipping of coal. He was there again in 1879, and began spending a few weeks every fall among the Haidas. In the summer of 1883, starting from Skidegate, he visited most of the villages by canoe. Between 1887 and 1899 he published seven stories in the Journal of American Folklore, and many small pieces in the American Antiquarian, all of which found their place in Tales from the Totems of the Hidery, though sometimes with interesting variants. For, even when the informant is named in one instance (“Mr. George Cunningham, of Port Essington”), and even though Deans states flatly that he has given it “as near to the original as I can remember” (p.37), the prior publication in the Journal of American Folklore 4 (1891) 32-33 differs so much as to suggest that neither comes very near the original. For example, at one point the love-struck hero is ordered by the cruel maiden to cut his hair short like a slave’s:
Hearing this last request he hesitated, well knowing the consequences; however, after a while he went and had it cut, and presented himself, in order to claim his reward. When she saw him she said: “You fool! to cut your hair for a woman, and become like a slave. . . . ”
In the book ten years later, this passage becomes:
No doubt, when Sun Cloud heard this last request, he had a hard struggle within himself, a struggle between true love and dishonor. Reaching home, true love prevailed. He went to a friend’s house and had a close cut. Afterwards hoping all would be well he went over to her house, in order to claim his reward. As soon as she saw what he had done for her love, she said, “You fool, do you think I would wed a slave?”
At least one of these is an embroidery upon the “original”—possibly both. Deans obviously had fun travelling the country he loved, picking up these yarns, and getting them published. We would be well advised, also, to treat them as fun.
What else is there “Before Boas”? Very little. One collection of legends is of special interest not only because of its early date. History and Folklore of the Cowichan Indians (Victoria 1901) is a charming book compiled by Martha Douglas Harris, the daughter of Governor James Douglas by his part-Cree wife.16 The stories are presented lightly and modestly.
As a little girl I used to listen to these legends with the greatest delight, and in order not to lose them, I have written down what I can remember of them. When written down they lose their charm which was in the telling. They need the quaint songs and the sweet voice that told them, the winter gloaming and the bright fire as the only light—then were these legends beautiful (p. 57).
This book contains a rare item, the transcription of a story in Chinook jargon, followed by a translation (pp. 43-49).17
G.M. Sproat was an early homesteader before he became a well-known government representative in Indian affairs. There is legend material in Sproat’s Scenes and Studies of Savage Life (London 1868),18 among the earliest recorded for this area. In a footnote to the mythology chapter (p. 177) Sproat mentions the Rev. A.C. Garrett of Victoria, and the “active and observant traveller,” Dr. Robert Brown, as both possessing “extensive information on this subject.” Brown’s known publications do not include mythology,19 and the Rev. Garrett did not apparently publish at all.
It would perhaps put things in perspective to mention that the classic Alaskan ethnology is Aurel Krause’s The Tlingit Indians, first published in Jena in 1885, translated by Erna Gunther in 1956, and available in a University of Washington paperback since 1970. Chapter 10 contains several wellauthenticated legends, including some from previous explorers, Veniaminof, Lisiansky, and Liitke. The latter’s Voyage autour du monde, 1826-1829, published in Paris in 1835, takes us back into the early nineteenth century.20
1The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout ed. Ralph Maud (Vancouver: Talonbooks 1978) Vol. II p. 19.
2 Dell Hymes defines true performance as “the taking of responsibility for being ‘on stage’”—see his “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth” Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975) 352.
3 The Salish People Vol. I p. 13.
4 The Salish People Vol. IV p. 60.
5 The Salish People Vol. II p. 122.
6 The Salish People Vol. I p. 21.
7 The Salish People Vol. II p. 97. The interlinear translation may be found in the original Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; for reference, see The Salish People Vol. II p. 27.
8 The Salish People Vol. Ill p. 156.
9 Franz Boas, letter to Mrs. Boas, 3 June 1897, in The Ethnology of Franz Boas ed. Ronald P. Rohner (1969) p. 201. See The Salish People Vol. I p. 15.
10 The exchange of letters between Boas and Hill-Tout is printed in The Salish People Vol. IV pp. 35-40.
11 Boas’s letter to R.W. Brock of 1910—see footnote 9 of Chapter VI (below)—refers to Hill-Tout as having “a most remarkable ability of exasperating everyone with whom he comes into contact.”
12 “On the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands” Report of Progress, Geological Survey of Canada, 1878-79 (Ottawa 1880) pp. 103B-179B, “Traditions and Folklore” section pp. 149B-154B; “Notes and Observations on the Kwakiool People of the Northern Part of Vancouver Island and Adjacent Coasts, made during the Summer of 1885” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 5 (1887) Sect. II pp. 63-98, myths on pp. 81-87; “Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 9 (1891) Sect. II pp. 3-44, “Mythology” pp. 28-35. A concise discussion of Dawson’s contribution to Pacific Coast ethnology is John J. Van West “George Mercer Dawson: An Early Canadian Anthropologist” AnthropologicalJournal of Canada 14 (1976) No.4 pp.8-12.
13 Excerpts included in Jacob W. Gruber “Horatio Hale and the Development of American Anthropology” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 111 (February 1967)