The Salish People: Volume II. Charles Hill-Tout

the “Notes on the Cosmogony and History of the Squamish" below, he tells how he took a boat over to the Mission in North Vancouver on a visit prepared for by the Bishop (which is possibly why the version of the flood story he got there is closer to Genesis than many other Indian flood stories). The advanced age of his informant, the gathered audience, the need for an interpreter, all these prevented him from doing his work properly. Yet, it is precisely these awkward circumstances that give the account its special place in folklore collecting. Hill-Tout’s visit was built up as an important occasion, and the real historian of the tribe was found. The correct preliminaries were attended to; the tally sticks were made and used in the traditional manner.³ “The first tally was placed in the old man’s hands and he began his recital in a loud, high-pitched key, as if he were addressing a large audience in the open air.” If Hill-Tout had been skilled enough as an ethnologist to bring about the desirable conditions for taking down the precise language of the myth, he would have effectively destroyed the blind old man’s sense of proper space for the event. Hill-Tout’s incompetence got him only one fifth of the story as narrated, but he gives us what I have not found elsewhere for this area, a picture of a story-telling performance as it might have occurred before the advent of the white man.

      One cannot stress enough how uniquely informative are such asides as Hill-Tout gives us in two places in the text, one where fine snow is being described: “In this point of his recital the old man was exceedingly interesting and graphic in his description, the very tones of his voice lending themselves to his story, and I had gathered, long before the interpreter took up the story, that he had told of something that was very small and had penetrated everywhere.” And again, where the Squamish dead are described: “Here the old man’s voice was hushed to a plaintive wail, and the faces of his audience were an eloquent index of the tragic interest of this story of their ancestors’ misfortunes.”

“He took a boat over to the Mission in North Vancouver on a visit prepared for by the Bishop.” (B.C. Prov. Mm. photo)

      It was not until Melville Jacobs, I believe, that we got this kind of attention to the progress of a story, and then not in the Clackamas Chinook Texts themselves, but in the separate critical study, The Content and Style of an Oral Literature (1959), where his informant’s precise intentions in eight of the stories are considered. He is working from notes and memories of 1929-30 field work with Mrs. Victoria Howard: “I have attempted to reconstruct for each story as much as I could of what I deduced was happening before, during, and after the narrator’s recital. I have tried to ‘hear’ the audience and the community as well as the raconteur.”⁴

      Independently of Jacobs, Catherine McClellan put into a single pamphlet, The Girl Who Married the Bear (1970), several tellings of a story, and traced some of the variations “directly to the special life circumstances of the individual narrators.”⁵ This is the work of someone who has earned friendly and natural family tellings of stories, and knows the context of individual and tribal concerns. Richard Dauenhauer has followed along this path; his careful regard for the personal content of stories, even introductions and endings, can be seen, for instance, in his article “The Narrative Frame: Style and Personality in Tlingit Prose Narrative" (1976).⁶ I would like to add two more names to this brief list, J. Barre Toelken and Dennis Tedlock, both of whom have shown what magnificent results can be achieved from a careful transcription of recorded performance, especially when audience reaction is inserted and the reasons for it explained.⁷

      Dell Hymes, the chief theorist of the current concern with performance, sums up a crucial distinction: “If one thinks of’true performance' as the taking of responsibility for being ‘on stage,’” he explains, “then persons may engage in a genre without engaging in performance. A Navaho may tell someone a tale, in the sense of knowing and telling how it goes, without embarking on a performance of the tale in the sense proper to the genre. A fair part of what we know in published form about Native American traditional narrative smacks of report, rather than performance.”⁸

      By this distinction we would have to say that James Teit’s collections of stories, for instance, are “report" rather than “performance.” Only rarely does Teit communicate the circumstances of the telling; the texts usually seem like compilations of several tellings, often with variants in footnotes or in the text itself.⁹ Now, as we have seen, Hill-Tout from the start was pushed into a performance situation, and recorded it as such, his own heightened English style being a valiant attempt to equal the pitch of the histrionics. Then, in Lytton he met Chief Mischelle, a “born raconteur,” who was happy to be “on stage" even though Hill-Tout might on some occasions have been his only audience. (Mischelle’s performances are contained in volume I of the present edition.) After Mischelle died, Hill-Tout met nobody with his “on stage" presence; or perhaps Hill-Tout had become more “professional.” In the present volume, the Squamish and Lillooet stories are given a more conventional undemonstrative transmission, with only the occasional footnote to show the transcriber’s interest in the details of the story. The saving grace, as we began by saying, is Hill-Tout’s fine command of English, which makes them eminently readable on that level.

      It is not merely a question of avoiding pidgin-English on the one hand and inflated euphemism on the other, but where in the middle ground to find a style. One can be too flat, too matter-of-fact, for some of the horrendous or pathetic happenings in these stories. How, for instance, should one treat “Kaiyam" (a Lillooet story, below)? An old woman raises two girls from salmon roes, and in a bizarre attempt to provide them with a husband she feigns death, returns disguised as a young man, and performs sex with them both using a pestle hammer. Hill-Tout’s Victorian style is tested to the full here, and comes off reasonably well.

      Little in published scholarship helps us to understand and absorb the experience of “Kaiyam,” which involves transvestite sadism, murder by tickling, followed in the second part by the casual kidnapping of a baby, with further incest and murder, and the creation of a new baby from a dirty diaper. Jarold W. Ramsey has given a close reading of a story containing some of these elements, admiring the dramatic tensions they generate.¹⁰ But the grotesque and lurid events here go beyond the familiar bounds of literary effects. With the psychotic¹¹ grandmother of “Kaiyam,” or the yearning Orpheus of the “Man Who Restored the Dead" (not to mention the man who horribly failed), or the Dostoevskian loser of the “Gambler,” or the acerbated Cinderella story of “The Deserted Boy": with these stories (to mention only some of those in the present volume) we seem to be entering a compensatory dream world which can best be studied as dreams are studied by an analyst. We look for psychological causes; we ask what these stories are saying not only about the past of the tribe but also about the future of the teller and his audience.

      Perhaps we can pose the question differently. The Lillooet “Kaiyam" story, below, has the same ingredients as the Chehalis version in volume III of the present edition, and the Chehalis version in Boas’ Indianische Sagen, and Teit’s Lower Thompson.¹² If we turn from this regional version to the parallel Squamish story, “Te Skauk, the Raven,” below, do we find differences that are meaningful in terms of tribal context? The Squamish story has the Raven creating the two girls from salmon roe intending them for his wives; when he falls asleep after dinner the women scoff at him and run away. The Raven wakes, and tries to pursue, but cannot because his back and feet are burnt. In effect, the pathetic Kaiyam has turned into a comic Raven; his impotence is farcical, and the weird sexual antics are absent. J. Barre Toelken asked Yellowman why Coyote does foolish things on one occasion, good on another, and terrible on another. The answer was: “If he did not do all those things, then those things would not be possible in the world.”¹³ Like Odysseus, the trickster of another society, Coyote runs the gamut of all that can be experienced, like an encyclopedia of circumstances. On this basis, one could say that the Squamish had a vision of possibilities more limited than the Lower Lillooet region. Or is it the individual story-teller’s malaise that puts a very dismal ending to the Squamish version, where the kidnapped child is dead when the mother finds it, and the two culprits have simply disappeared? What is the source of this sense of futility?