The Salish People: Volume II. Charles Hill-Tout

Sundry Beliefs and Superstitions

       Linguistic

       Myths and Traditions

       Kaiyam

       Myth of the Origin of the Mountain-goat Kin

       Myth of the Man Who Restored the Dead

       The Gambler

       Myth of the Deserted Boy

       Myth of the Dead Woman Who Became a Bear

      Myth of the Marriage of North Wind and South Wind and South Wind

       List of Works Cited in Volume II

      Illustrations

Map of Squamish and Lillooet Territory

      Cartography by the Audio-Visual Centre of

      Simon Eraser University.

       Mission Reserve, North Vancouver

      R. Maynard photograph, date unknown. Courtesy of

      the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.

       Squamish Youth

      Plate in same series as Chief George, below; therefore

      taken by Charles Hill-Tout, circa 1900. Vancouver Centennial

      Museum photograph: “Collected by Maxine Pape and

      Laurie Peterson 1933.” Youth identified as

      August Jack by Louis Miranda.

       Salish Mother and Child

      From painting by Paul Kane. Courtesy of the

      University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology

      and Mrs. Shane.

       Tattoo Patterns

      Diagram from the original printing of the report.

       Squamish Canoe

      Vancouver Archives photograph, undated,

      taken at the Mission Reserve, North Vancouver.

       Chief George Chepxim

      Vancouver Centennial Museum photograph:

      “Chief George of the Snauq.” Hill-Tout included this

      photograph among those taken by himself to illustrate

      his report on the Sechelt (1904), opposite p. 90 in the

      original printing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological

      Institute. The profile of Chief George, also in the Museum,

      was used in Hill-Tout’s British North America

      volume (1907), Plate 8.

       Hill-Tout’s Map of the Lillooet

      Reproduced from the original printing of the report.

       Young Lillooet Chief, 1867

      Vancouver Centennial Museum photograph,

      Campbell Studios.

Introduction

      What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout is not the scope of his field work, though in the ten years from 1896 to 1906 he covered most of the Salish tribes, and so competently that, Teit’s mastery of the Interior notwithstanding, Hill-Tout’s reports remain probably our best panoramic view of pre-white civilization in the Victoria-Vancouver-Lower Mainland area. Neither is his linguistic versatility his most striking quality, rare though it is to see a self-taught scholar compiling grammars for eleven separate Salish dialects. What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout, what distinguishes him from most early ethnologists in North America, is his English prose style. It is a stately Victorian prose, where scientific objectivity combines with lofty sentiment to ennoble his subject matter. It is a prose which provides us with practically the only corpus of B.C. Indian literature — literature defined minimally as a body of writing sufficiently interesting in structure and content, sufficiently intriguing in the way it moves, that one is willing to re-read it for pleasure. Indian tales, those in the early collections at any rate, tend to come through to us as mere specimens of a culture, something to examine and categorize; and in bulk they constitute one of the world’s great unread masses of printed material. Hill-Tout, on the other hand, cared that the stories he collected should be readable. He didn’t look down on them, so we don’t either. We are attracted inside a story, and learn the dimensions of its world from the inside. This rare circumstance was not achieved by sophisticated techniques of recording and transcribing; rather, somehow, by being true to himself, he was able to be true to the tale. We can see how this works in a simple example:

      Once there was a large village, and among the people

       who lived in it was a certain man who had a wife

       whom he loved very much.

      In this instance, a Chehalis story entitled “Myth of the Man Who Gains Power to Restore the Dead to Life" (in volume III of the present edition), Hill-Tout supplied a literal, interlinear translation, and we see that the phrase “whom he loved very much" does not appear in the Chehalis text:

      Sta-tsa te qolmuq (There were a people) tla-so stcaukq te-laletsa sweeka lakwa kwilatel (and then marry one man lived together) te side anales yehets kelotl kakai (the woman not long after sick) etc.¹

      Perhaps the word kwilatel, translated as “together,” denotes an extraordinary degree of harmony, equivalent to “loved very much"; or perhaps the story-teller provided a reverential overtone at this point. In any case, Hill-Tout knew that the great love of the man for his wife was the essential truth of the situation, and simply stated it with the dignity of a family man who knows about such things. Because he has good instincts, and obeys them, we get an alive story out of it. Hill-Tout knew that “the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of';² so he made his English equivalents “fuller" in an attempt to be really equal to the original as he saw and heard it. This is a debatable point: there are probably ways of communicating the full impact of a story other than by adding unsaid words to a text; for instance, even an old-fashioned footnote about the story-teller’s tone or the audience’s reaction might do the job better and leave the text cleaner. However, I will stand by Hill-Tout on the basis of the results, the most readable body of Indian literature from the Northwest Coast.