Living by Stories. Harry Robinson
different twists and turns was not a concern. In fact, Harry often incorporated their twists into his own stories. And although he would never tamper with storylines or fictionalize any part of a story, he incorporated seemingly extraneous details where he felt they belonged. For example, when he learned that whites had landed on the moon, Harry immediately incorporated this detail into his story about Coyote’s son’s trip to and from an upper world.
While assembling the first two volumes, I had not appreciated the full scope of Harry’s perspective on storytelling. Along with several generations of scholars and others, I had been seduced by the Boasian paradigm which reified the mythological past and promoted the stereotype of the “mythteller”—the bearer of the single, communal accounts rooted in the deep past. Harry’s stories about Coyote’s meeting with the king and others about cats, cows, horses, and everyday animals doing supernatural things did not fit this model. But no amount of editing would make a “mythteller”45 of Harry Robinson. He would have been insulted had the label been applied to him. He was a storyteller in the broadest sense of the term.
Harry had stressed in 1984 that he was “going to disappear and there will be no more telling stories.” At the time, I assumed that he was referring to the demise of his stories. However, when I re-listened to this comment, I realized that I had missed his point. He perceived his death as a blow to the process of storytelling. He had worked hard over the years to ensure its well being. In the 1970s he had painstakingly adapted all of his stories in English to accommodate a growing number of listeners who spoke little or no Okanagan. Through the 1980s he had submitted these English versions of his stories to audio tape so that they could carry on without him. He had also spent afternoons in his local band office telling stories in his Okanagan language. His final move was to release his oral stories in book form so that they would reach a broad audience “in all Province in Canada and United States” (letter, 27 January 1986).
Living by Stories brings Harry’s objective closer to fruition. And once again, Coyote looms large. The way Harry put it, everything hinged on the book produced by Coyote and the king. Although he never read its contents, he knew the story about it and that was what mattered. He would pass the story on through his own book. And its message would be clear to all: that whites were a banished people who colonized this country through fraudulence associated with an assigned form of power and knowledge which had been literally alienated from its original inhabitants.
NOTES
1. Two members of our party, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, knew Harry well. They had notified him in advance of our visit. The third member was Michael M’Gonigle.
2. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schoeken Books, 1956); Gary Snyder, The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977); and Barry Lopez, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, Coyote Builds North America (New York: Avon Books, 1977).
3. James A. Teit, Marian K. Gould, Livingston Farrand, and Herbert J. Spinden, in Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, ed. Franz Boas (New York: Stechert & Co., 1917); Charles Hill-Tout, “Report on the Ethnology of the Okanaken of British Columbia, an Interior Division of the Salish Stock,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 41 (1911): 130–161 (reprinted in Ralph Maud, ed., The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout, Volume 1: The Thompson and the Okanagan [Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1978], 131–159); and Leslie Spier, ed. (with Walter Cline, Rachel S. Commons, May Mandelbaum, Richard H. Post, and L. V. W. Walters), The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington (Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Co., 1938).
4. Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Publishers, 1933; reprint, Jay Miller, ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
5. Franz Boas, Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Küste Amerikas (Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1895); for a recent English translation of this work, see Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, eds., Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002); James A. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898); and id., “Mythology of the Thompson Indians,” vol. 8, part 2 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1912), 199–416.
6. Teit, Traditions, 28. The Latin segment appears in footnote 73 on p. 105.
7. I am grateful to Lynne Jorgesen for this comment.
8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
9. Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 9.
10. A quick survey of the historical records uncovered nothing about John P. Curr. Historian Richard Mackie concluded on the basis of the pack train, the men with uniforms, the mention of a few white men living here and there, and the execution of the chief that the setting for this story was probably circa 1858–62. He noted that it seemed typical of “the American overland militaristic migration to the Fraser or Cariboo gold rushes.” Mackie explained that the chief would not have had a letter from Ottawa before 1871; however, he could well have had such a letter from a surveyor or a government employee from Victoria or New Westminster by then. He dated it at 1858–59 (e-mail correspondence, 1 August 2005). Historian Dan Marshall offered a similar view. He suggested that Curr’s brigade may have consisted of miners. “Starting in 1858,” he explained, “large companies of miners, many of them old Indian fighters, took the Columbia-Okanagan route to the BC goldfields. These companies ranged in size, many of them amounting to hundreds. The number of deaths that occurred on either side of the border during that year suggests that 1858 may be the time period in question, references to Ottawa and Vancouver aside” (email correspondence, 5 August 2005).
11. Vancouver and Penticton: Talonbooks and Theytus Books, 1989.
12. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992; reprint, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004.
13. See, for example the following: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Michael Harkin, “Past Presence: Conceptions of History in Northwest Coast Studies,” Arctic Anthropology 33, no. 2 (1996): 1–15; Judith Berman, “‘The Culture As It Appears to the Indian Himself’: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Volksgeist’ As Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 215–256; Rosalind Morris, New Worlds from Fragments: Film Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
14. Michael Harkin, “(Dis)pleasures of the Text: Boasian Ethnology on the Central Northwest Coast,” in Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, eds. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 93–105.
15. Jonathan D. Hill, ed., Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
16. Terence Turner, “Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact with Western Society,” in Rethinking History and Myth, ed. Jonathan D. Hill, 174.
17. Emilienne Ireland, “Cerebral Savage: The Whiteman as Symbol of Cleverness and Savagery in Waura Myth,” in Rethinking History and Myth, 172. In British Columbia, anthropologists Julie Cruikshank and Robin Ridington were drawing attention to similar issues. See Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) and id., “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 1 (1992): 20–41. See also Robin Ridington, Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre,