Living by Stories. Harry Robinson
the other land.… When the white people came to the Indians here, the priest told the Indians what they had forgotten. (177)
It was difficult to determine a common storyline among these stories.
A survey of neighbouring Nlaka’pamux creation stories collected by Teit revealed a similar range of diversity. According to one, “Old One” took some soil from an upper world, formed it into a ball, and threw it into a lake. On hitting the surface of the water, it shattered and became “a broken mass of flats, hollows, hills and islets” much as we see now.34 According to another, Earth was a woman who lived with Stars, Moon, and Sun long before the world was formed. Because of her constant pestering, Sun abandoned her. Eventually, Stars and Moon did the same. “Old One” then took pity on her by transforming her into the present earth who gave birth to “people, who were very similar in form to ourselves.” But they knew nothing until “Old One” travelled around teaching them things.35
An elderly “shaman … from Sulus” told Teit that his grandfather had told him that “Old One” descended on a cloud from an upper world to a large lake. He pulled five hairs from his head and threw them onto the surface of the lake, at which point they became five “perfect” women who were endowed with “speech, sight, and hearing.” He asked each what they would like to be in life. The first said she would like to be “bad and foolish, and … seek after my own pleasure.” She claimed that her relatives would “fight, lie, steal, murder and commit adultery. They will be wicked.” The second wished to be good and virtuous and have children who would be “wise, peaceful, honest, truthful and chaste.” The third wanted to be the “earth” upon which her sisters lived. The fourth wanted to be “fire.” And the fifth wanted to be “water,” from which people drew “life and wisdom.” He then transformed them. The third daughter “fell backwards, spread out her legs, and rolled off from the cloud into the lake, where she took the form of the earth we live on.” The children of two of the women were male and female. They married “and from them all people are descended.” According to yet another account, “Old One” encountered a woman who was alone and very unhappy about her situation. To make her happy, “Old One” transformed her into “the earth, which he made expand, and shape itself into valleys, mountains, and plains.” Her blood dried up and became “gold, copper and other metals.” Then “Old One” moved on to “make the Nicola country.” He then created “four men and a woman,” (some thought “four women”) who became the first inhabitants. After teaching them how to survive, he left. But before doing so, he promised to return at which point “your mother, the Earth, from whom all things grow will again assume her original and natural form.”36
The collections were just as divided on the subject of Coyote. In fact, Teit recorded so many varied Okanagan perspectives on Coyote that he added a note to highlight this point:
Some think Coyote belonged to the earth, like other people. He was an Indian, but of greater knowledge and power than the others. Some think he was one of the semi-human ancients. Others think he did not belong to this world, but to some other sphere, such as the sky or spirit-land. Still others think he was a kind of deity or chief, or helper of the Chief, before he came to earth. In the opinion of some Indians, Coyote acted with a purpose, and knew that he had been sent to fulfill a mission. Others think he did not know, but that his actions were prompted by some other power, and that he did not transform the monsters or perform other acts for the purpose of benefiting mankind. All agree that he was selected for the mission he performed; but whether he was living in the sky when selected, or on the earth, or elsewhere, is not certain.37
Teit’s emphasis on cultural fluidity, however, was offset by others’ efforts to draw hard conclusions. Hill-Tout, for example, had claimed in 1911 that Coyote was “not a native product of the mythology of the stock” at all, but rather adopted from elsewhere.38 Heister Dean Guie, a newspaper journalist, concluded that Coyote was better understood as a children’s storybook character. With this in view, he edited and sanitized a collection of adult stories collected by Christine Quintasket. In the process, Guie turned Coyote into a generic “Imitator/Trick Person”—a fairy tale figure of sorts—who rarely acted in truly offensive ways. The book sold well. But Coyote suffered badly in the process.39
Viewed against this backdrop, Harry’s stories assumed much greater significance. His account of the twins, for example, was now one of a series of diverse creation stories maintained by his people over a long period. Similarly, his account of Coyote’s meeting with the king of England was just as distinctive a version as numerous others. Harry’s historical narratives— about unusual employees who turned up to work in local ranches—were part of an established genre of stories set in towns, farms, and ranches and featuring all sorts of people in search of jobs as blacksmiths, farmworkers, and carpenters. That Harry’s stories of white/Aboriginal conflict had few parallels in the early collections did not mean that his predecessors had not told such stories. Early collectors simply did not have any interest in them.
Comments by both Teit and Boas revealed that Aboriginal peoples were extremely eager to exchange stories about contemporary political issues. In 1916, Teit explained that his success as a salvage ethnographer depended on listening to stories about local political issues:
For many years back when engaged among the tribes in ethnological work for American and of late for the Canadian government, the Indians almost everywhere would bring up questions of their grievances concerning their title, reserves, hunting and fishing rights, policies of Agents and missionaries, dances, potlatches, education, etc. etc. and although I had nothing to do with these matters they invariably wanted to discuss them with me or get me to help them, and to please them and thus to better facilitate my research work I had to listen and given them some advice or information.”40
Although he assisted the chiefs in disseminating their contemporary histories, in political contexts, he was unable to incorporate these into his ethnographic collections.41
Boas also noted in his field diaries and letters that many of his interviewees were eager to engage him in discussions about current issues. A Squamish chief, for example, saw Boas’s interview session as an opportunity to air some of his current political concerns:
“Who sent you here?” “I have come to see the Indians and to tell the White people about them.” “Do you come from the Queen’s Country?” “No, I come from another country.” “Will you go to the Queen’s Country?” “Perhaps.” “Good, when you get there go to the Queen and tell her this. Now write down what I say: Three men came [i.e., the Indian agent and two commissioners] and made treaties with us and said this is the Queen’s land. That has made our hearts sad and we are angry at the three men. But the Queen does not know this. We are not angry at her.”42
Little of this sort of discussion made its way into his publications. Boas also noted inconsistencies among storytellers and often worried that many were telling him nothing but “nonsense.”43 Comments on this issue from his assistant, George Hunt, did not help: “You know as well as I do,” he wrote to Boas, “that you or me can’t find two Indians tell a storie alike.”44
In all of this I could see the potential for a new Harry Robinson volume highlighting the breadth of his stories. Whether they were old (i.e., “myths” about Coyote and others) or new (i.e., stories about recent murders or floods) was not of great concern to Harry. What mattered most to him was “living by stories.” He wanted to show the cultural importance of maintaining a full range of stories. If people—whites and “Indians”—knew that stumps could turn into chipmunks and that chipmunks could turn into “grandfathers,” they would cultivate a very different relationship to the land. If they knew about people like George Jim of Ashnola who had been wrongly abducted from the New Westminster prison in 1887, and Tom Shiweelkin who was wrongly killed by an early brigade of whites, they would carry a different view of their history. Knowing about large birds that could carry humans, lake creatures that could swallow horses, and grizzly bears that could shelter travellers in distress would show people that the world around them consisted of many different forms and layers of life.
Through disseminating such narratives,