Living by Stories. Harry Robinson
and a goat-hair robe—for the old woman’s “blankets of birds-skins.”20 Yet, when Boas edited the story for publication, he had removed the word “gun” from this list, thus transforming what may have been intended as a historical narrative into the more desirable “precontact” myth.21 Boas was familiar with the story as he had recorded a Nlaka’pamux version at Lytton in 1888.22 I was curious to see that just as Harry had told me that story during one of our first sessions, one of the Nlaka’pamux storytellers had similarly told it to Boas during his first session at Lytton.23
Such examples raised questions about the messages that collectors gleaned from their narrators’ stories. Could Boas have mistaken a contemporary— even quasi-Christianized—story for a traditional “myth/legend”? Could he have edited a historical account to make it fit his vision of a prehistorical myth? And what about the Nlaka’pamux storytellers? Could they have selected this story for Boas, as Harry did in my case, to convey a political message—that whites were, and would always be, visitors on “Indian” land? Could they have told it to establish their superiority in relation to whites, that is, that they had had knowledge about the arrival of whites before their actual arrival? Did their “Sun” have associations with Harry’s “God”? The Sun of the 1888 Lytton session was, after all, “a man” who lived in the sky above an “ocean” somewhere far to the east.
Determined to resolve some of these issues, I scoured the old collections hoping to find further references to guns, whites, and other such things. Although Boas was preoccupied with suppressing such “impurities,”24 I knew that one of his most active field associates, James Teit, was not. Teit was fully immersed in the contemporary lives and languages of Aboriginal peoples through his Nlaka’pamux wife, Antko, and his work as a translator for the Aboriginal political protest organizations.25 Through such cultural immersion, he was more aware than many of his colleagues of the full range of stories in their natural settings.
I quickly found a little-known Teit collection featuring seven stories literally peppered with cultural “impurities.”26 It was exactly what I needed. Even better, these were Similkameen stories. They were published as “Thompson Indian Tales,” but this was in fact an error. Teit’s fieldnotes had indicated clearly that some of the stories had originated with “Bert Allison,” a prominent Similkameen chief.27
The opening story was perfect. Entitled “Coyote and the Paper,” it featured an encounter between “Old One or Great Chief” and Coyote in which the former tried to replace Coyote’s excrement (from whom Coyote often sought counsel) with paper so that Coyote would have an easier time carrying it around. Coyote accepted the paper but then lost it a few days later. The narrator considered this a major loss. “If Coyote had not lost it [the paper],”he explained, “the Indians would now know writing, and the whites would not have had the opportunity to obtain written language.”28 In the context of this story, Harry’s accounts of the twins and the paper, and others about meetings between Coyote and the king were not so unusual after all.
There were references to whites scattered throughout this collection. Several stories featured groups of young men—brothers/companions—who travelled to “towns” in search for work: blacksmithing, carpentry, farmwork, cowboying, and splitting wood. Life was not easy as they had to deal with nasty employers and landowners who made impossible demands on them. For example, in one story, a boy named Jack encountered a man who so objected to his marriage to his daughter that he threatened to kill him if he could not clear a dense piece of forest in a single day, or if he could not make water flow instantly from a distant creek to his house.29
Several stories targeted white authority figures. In one account, a young man, Jack, was challenged by his employer to steal the priest from the next village. So he concocted a grand plan. He dressed himself up as a priest, went to the church in the next village, lit the candles, and began to perform mass. When the resident priest saw this, he knelt down and prayed. Jack told him that God had sent him to tell the priest that he was so pleased with his work that he wanted him to go to heaven without dying. All he had to do to get to “heaven tonight” was to climb into a sack and allow himself to be carried to a designated spot. The priest did as he was told. Jack then carried the sack to his uncle’s place. Once there, he told the priest that when he heard “the cock crowing, [he would] know that heaven is near, and [he would thus] be taken up soon after that.” When the people arrived the next day, they found the priest in the sack crying, “Let me be! The cocks have crowed and I will soon ascend to God.” On realizing that it was all a trick, the priest returned home.30
I could see many connections to Harry’s stories. But what interested me most about this collection was its 1937 publication date. Since this was fifteen years after Teit’s death, I deduced that these were stories that Boas had withheld from publication due to their “impurities.” He must have changed his mind toward the end of his career because he assigned Lucy Kramer to the task of editing the stories for publication in the Journal of Folklore.31
These little-known Okanagan stories provided a rich historical context for Harry’s stories. Finally there was tangible evidence that Harry’s forebears were not strictly “mythtellers” locked in their prehistorical past. I was now keen to look more closely at how Teit had handled the issue of individual variation in his earlier publications. His 1917 presentation of three Okanagan creation stories offered some valuable insights on this. Instead of following the usual pattern of turning the three stories into one composite story, Teit presented each story on its own.32 The end result was a set of three very different perspectives on how the world and its first peoples came into being. The first, entitled “Old One,” explained creation as follows:
Old-One, or Chief, made the earth out of a woman, and said she would be the mother of all the people…. Old-One, after transforming her, took some of her flesh and rolled it into balls, as people do with mud and clay. These he transformed into beings of the ancient world…. (80)
The second story, told by a Similkameen narrator, offered a different view:
The Chief above made the earth…. He created the animals. At last he made a man, who, however, was also a wolf. From this man’s tail he made a woman. These were the first people. They were called “Tai’en” by the old people, who knew the story well, and they were the ancestors of all the Indians. (84)
Later, “Old-One” made “Indians” in much the same way. He blew on them “and they became alive.” Teit noted that this story evolved into “the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man nearly in the same way as given in the Bible.”
The third story, entitled “Origin of the Earth and People,” had some obvious links to the first one, but it was still quite different from the other two:
The Chief (or God) made seven worlds, of which the earth is the central one. Maybe the first priests of white people told us this, but some of us believe it now.… Perhaps in the beginning the earth was a woman.… He transformed her into the earth we live on, and he made the first Indians out of her flesh (which is the soil). Thus the first Indians were made by him from balls of red earth or mud.… Other races were made from soil of different colours.… (84)
An Okanagan creation story published in 1938 by anthropologist Leslie Spier shed more light on the issue of individual variation. Collected by L. V. W. Walters, one of five students in Spier’s anthropological field school, the story was attributed to Suszen Timentwa, chief of the Kartar Band. Like Harry’s origin story, Timentwa’s story included references to whites, books, and laws. “[I]n the beginning as in the Bible,” explained Timentwa, “God created the world, and created animals.” This God gave Coyote a “little book” that he explained would “get you help to watch you from today.”33
Like Teit’s second account above, Timentwa included Adam and Eve in his story:
After Adam and Eve did wrong, God took away one land from the top and put it to one side for the Indians-to-be. God took the laws with the Indian land and left the other land without laws. Then God built an ocean to separate these lands: one land was for the Indians, another for the white people.