Living by Stories. Harry Robinson
and oats at Ashnola. He recalled every detail of the experience—driving the horses, cleaning up the straw, pushing all the grain into place, and piling it into baskets. Unfortunately, he hated it so much that he quit after a couple of months to try another job—pitching hay for fifty cents a day. When he quit the second job after just a few months, his mother, Arcell, took him aside, and scolded him for his poor work habits. She must have made an impact because he recalled that he took his next jobs as ranch hands much more seriously. The first of these was with family friend, Indian Edward, who gave him his first horse as payment for his work. Under Edward’s tutelage, Harry quickly became a skilled horseman and cattle hand.
Harry spoke constantly of horses and their place in his early life. “Those days the horses was a big business because no tractor, no truck, no nothing but only team of horses. And saddle horse and wagon and buggy. Use the buggy to go to town, kinda fancy. Wagon, more like a tractor, trailer, something. Heavy work, hauling rails, hauling hay, hauling something heavy with the horses.” Among his most poignant memories was the 1930s government campaign to exterminate the wild herds that roamed through the Similkameen.
He obtained his first ranch in December 1924, through his marriage to Matilda Johnny, a widow. Together Harry and Matilda established a good working relationship—buying, selling, and trading cows and horses. They bought and sold property until they had four large ranches between Chopaka and Ashnola. At one point, Harry employed a large crew to assist with his sixty horses and 150 head of cattle.
After Matilda’s death in 1971, Harry cut his ranching operation back to fifty head of cattle. A nagging hip injury forced him to retire completely two years later. He sold all of his ranches and rented a bungalow owned by his longtime friends, Carrie and Slim Allison. The hip injury turned out to be a good thing for his storytelling. Although he had spent lots of time listening to his grandmother and her contemporaries tell stories, he did not begin to tell stories until he was immobilized by the injury. While running his ranches, he simply had no time to sit for hours telling stories. “When I get older,” he explained, “and nothing I can do but tell stories.” He explained that the stories all came back to him much like “pictures” going by.
Many of these dated back to his early childhood when he was left for long periods to assist his blind grandmother, Louise Newhmkin. Among the stories of her family history was a special one about her aunt from Brewster, Washington, who married a prominent white man, John P. Curr. Harry’s grandmother adored this uncle whom she described as a highly respected “government man.” Curr had lived with the Okanagan Indians for five years until his Okanagan wife died. Louise passed on many of Curr’s stories to Harry. One of the most heart-rending stories chronicled the vigilante style murder of a prominent Similkameen chief by two members of Curr’s brigade in the 1830s.10
By now I had assembled a representative sample of stories for the book. I had hoped that Harry would assist with this, but he declined: “That’s really up to you,” he wrote in a letter of 27 January 1986. “Don’t have to ask me about it. I wrote the some of it or I mention on tape and you do the rest of the work. The stories is worked by Both of us you and I.” I included Harry’s story about the creation of the world and the twins as well as his account of God’s visit to Lytton. Along with a selection of Coyote stories, I included a number of stories about early and more recent human encounters with their shoo-MISH. I concluded the volume with a selection of historical narratives dealing with Aboriginal interactions with whites. Unfortunately the publication process took more time than we expected. By 1987, Harry was worried that he might not live to see the release of the book: “Im in Hospital but I can’t write…. We might see that Book yet I hope. Its all moste 2 years since we got start about that Book. Please let me know all you have know about for that Book” (letter, 8 March 1987).
Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller was finally released in late October 1989.11 The timing was perfect. Harry was frail but able to study the book’s contents. He was also well enough to attend the book launch celebration on 13 November in Keremeos. From his wheelchair, he was feted by a crowd of approximately one hundred friends and relatives, some of whom had come from distant points in Washington State. In addition to signing books, he made speeches, sang, and played his drum. In return, the local drumming group performed in his honour. This was his last formal outing. Harry died just over two months later on 25 January 1990.
Harry was very pleased with the book. His only concern was that it had not included all of his stories. I explained that we had recorded too many stories for one single volume and that presenting his words in poetic form had also consumed extra space. With Harry’s concerns in mind, however, I moved quickly to assemble a second volume of stories. Entitled Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller,12 it featured stories about human encounters with their shoo-MISH. Although I had not fully met Harry’s objective to have all of his stories in print, I nevertheless felt the two volumes gave a representative sense of the whole.
Over the next few years, however, I continued to reflect on the stories that I had left out of these two volumes—stories such as Coyote’s meeting with the king and others about talking cats and disappearing cows and horses. The latter were so unusual and so unlike anything in the Boasian collections that I had decided to put them aside. But then I began to wonder how much of Boas’s editorial decisions had influenced my own selection process.
My timing for such questioning was ideal. In the early 1990s the Boasian research paradigm had become the subject of intense critical scrutiny.13 The poststructuralist turn in the social sciences was partly responsible for this review. It had spawned a new generation of scholars intent on exposing the ideological foundations of anthropological practice. The Boasian project was an easy target. Critics such as James Clifford, Rosalind Morris, Michael Harkin, David Murray, and others focussed on a number of issues, in particular the Boasians’ fixation on the deep past. Although the Boasians had recorded hundreds of Aboriginal oral narratives, they had limited themselves to a single genre: the so-called “legends,” “folk-tales,” and “myths” set in prehistorical times. They had little interest in the fact that many of their narrators were horsepackers, miners, cannery workers, missionary assistants, and laborers who maintained equally vibrant stories about their more recent past. As Harkin explained, the collectors’ goal was to document “some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people.” Thus they “systematically suppressed … all evidence of history and change.”14 Such erasure had serious long term consequences for Aboriginal peoples.
Anthropologists working in South America were pursuing a similar line of argument at this time.15 Their target was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had used Amazonian examples to test his theories of “cold,” mythic societies. As Terence Turner explained, “To base one’s entire analysis of social consciousness … on one or a few traditional rituals and narratives and then to conclude that the culture as a whole is in the mythic phase, lacking a concept of history, may reflect a lack in the investigative procedure more than a lack in the culture.”16 Emilienne Ireland endorsed Turner with her study of “white man” stories of the Waura peoples of Brazil. She stressed that myth was important for its ability to “mak[e] statements about the present and the future.” The Waura “myth,” she explained, took “a historic tragedy of monstrous proportions and transformed it into an affirmation of their own moral values and of the destiny to survive as a people.”17 Charles Hill-Tout, a British ethnographer who worked among the Okanagan in 1911, was particularly entrenched in the salvage paradigm. His position on the “mythology” he collected was that it was valuable for revealing “the mind of the native as it was before contact with white influence.”18 “In no other way now,” he wrote, “can we get real and genuine glimpses of the forgotten past. They are our only reliable record.… ”19 Never mind that the “minds” in question were several generations removed from precontact times or that the tellers of the myths had not experienced life without whites.
The impact of this fixation on “myth” hit home one day when I was sifting through some fieldnotes sent to Franz Boas from British Columbia by his colleague, James Teit. Among the latter’s notes was a version of the story