Living by Stories. Harry Robinson
encountered so few references to whites and other postcontact details among the published “myths/legends” I had surveyed, I bracketed this story as an anomaly. The theoretical literature on the subject supported this move. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, one of the leading sources on myth at the time, had divided “myths/legends” into two separate zones—“cold” and “hot”—depending on their cultures of origin.8 “Cold” zones were associated with Indigenous peoples with a mythic consciousness that tended to resist change; “hot” zones, on the other hand, were associated with Western peoples with a historical consciousness that thrived on constant, irreversible change. As Harry was immersed in a cultural zone which Lévi-Strauss would have classified as “cold,” it followed that his corresponding narrative repertoire should be predominantly timeless and ahistorical.
But Harry’s stories did not fit this pattern. Immediately after recounting his story about Coyote’s origins and his meeting with the king of England, he proceeded to tell a series of four narratives situated squarely in the early twentieth century. Analyzed according to the Lévi-Straussian model, therefore, his repertoire was more “hot” than “cold.” There was certainly nothing timeless about it.
Harry told the four historical narratives to illustrate the importance of the special power given to “Indians” via Coyote at the beginning of time. The first was about Susan Joseph, an Okanagan woman who had used this power to “doctor” a seriously injured man. The other three were about various individuals who had used it to cure themselves during times of crisis. Harry stressed that this power was intimately connected to the natural world:
You got to, the kids, you know,
they got to meet the animal, you know, when they was little.
Can be anytime ’til it’s five years old to ten years old.
He’s supposed to meet animal or bird, or anything, you know.
And this animal, whoever they meet, got to talk to ’em
and tell ’em what they should do.
Later on, not right away.
I wondered why I had not encountered any such historical narratives among the early published collections that I had surveyed.
By September 1980, I was back again in Hedley. At Harry’s urging I began to extend my visits. If I wanted to hear stories, he explained, I had to stay for more than just an afternoon:
There’s a lot of people come here just like you do.
Some of them stay here two, three hours only.
Well, I can’t tell them nothing in two, three hours.
Very little.
But some people, one man, we talk, I and he, for over twelve hours.
So they really come to know something of me.
It takes a long time. I can’t tell stories in a little while.
Sometimes I might tell one stories and I might go too far in the one side like.
Then I have to come back and go on the one side from the same way,
but on the one side, like.
Kinda forget, you know. And it takes time….
He also warned me that if I were truly serious about his stories, I should not waste time: “I’m going to disappear and there’ll be no more telling stories.”
He was right about the value of longer visits. In addition to making time for more storytelling, extended visits enabled us to spend afternoons doing other things such as meandering through backroads at leisure, visiting people here and there, and running errands which served to prompt further memories and stories.
As always, Harry surprised me with his stories. He opened our first evening session in September 1980 with a long story about white newcomers. After establishing the story’s setting at the junction of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, Harry noted that it was a very old story that had taken place “shortly after when it’s become real person instead of animal people” but before the arrival of whites. The focus was a young boy and his grandmother who had been abandoned by the rest of their community because of the boy’s laziness. One day they were visited by an old man whom they invited to share a meal. This man taught them new and more effective methods of hunting and fishing in return for the gift of a patchwork blanket composed of the feathered hides of bluejays and magpies, which was all the boy and his grandmother had to offer.
Before departing, the visitor revealed that he was “God” in disguise and that one of his reasons for visiting them was to convey that “white-skinned” people would arrive someday to “live here for all time.” He explained in detail how these newcomers would give the land a patchwork appearance with their “hayfields” and “gardens.” But they would never take ownership of the land because “this island supposed to be for the Indians.” God told the boy and the woman, “This is your place.” As a testament to this statement, God placed the patchwork blanket on the ground, whereupon it transformed into stone. Harry explained that one of his lifelong goals was to travel to Lytton to find this important stone which had been concealed by an earlier generation to prevent discovery and possible theft by whites.
As with the earlier story about the twins, I decided to bracket this account. Although I had found numerous variants of the story among the old sources, the latter included no references to God or whites. Instead, the central figure was “Sun” or “Sun man” who gave the boy and his grandmother things like bows, arrows, and cooler weather.
I continued to visit Harry regularly throughout the rest of the fall. And Harry continued telling stories. After recounting the story about God’s visit with the boy and his grandmother, he initiated a long cycle of Coyote stories. Again, God turned up in these stories. Having overseen the creation of the world and its first people, this “God” was always lingering in the background of the stories. Although Harry often referred to him as “God,” he occasionally called him by other names. For example, in his story about how Coyote got his name, Harry used the term “Chief”: “that supposed to be the Creator, or the Indians call him the Big Chief. Could be God in another way.”
Harry’s point was that this “Chief” had also endowed Coyote with both a name (“Shin-KLEEP”) and special powers:
I can give you power
and you can have power from me.
Then you can go all over the place.
You can walk everywhere….
And there’s a lot of danger,
a lot of bad animal and monster in the country
and I want you to get rid of that.
One of the stories was about Fox, who could revive Coyote from death. While some of the stories focussed on Coyote’s good deeds, for example, his elimination of vicious cannibalistic monsters—spatla—who preyed on people, others highlighted Coyote’s “prankster/seducer” tendencies, for example, his plot to snatch his daughter-in-law by enticing his son to climb to a world in the sky, thereby exiling him to another level of existence. His son eventually returned and sent his lecherous father running. Coyote had few restraints on his power until he encountered God (in disguise) whom he challenged to a duel. Annoyed by Coyote’s hubris, God banished him to a remote place. “Just like he put him in jail,” Harry noted. Harry ended his Coyote series with an expanded version of his story about Coyote’s visit with the king of England. Except for the last story, all of these Coyote stories were firmly rooted in the deep prehistorical past—the time of the “animal people.” (Harry called these “imbellable” stories. When I asked what he meant by “imbellable,” he explained that when he asked for the English word for chap-TEEK-whl—the Okanagan term for stories from “way back” during the time of the animal people—someone had given him the word “unbelievable.” Harry heard this as “imbellable” and applied it to his chap-TEEK-whl thereafter.)
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