The Salish People: Volume II. Charles Hill-Tout

have not killed the abducted child but reared him, married him, and had children by him; when their wickedness is revealed the young husband changes them into bears and the children into birds, bums down the house he has shared with them, and returns to his former kin. The two Chehalis informants (of volume III) dispute over the ending, so that we get a glimpse into individual preferences. In Francois’ version the two salmon-roe wives are turned into white fleecy clouds of summer and black clouds of winter, respectively, and their children become the robin and the raven. From the conflagrating house come snow-birds. The young man and his half-brother (the one squeezed from a napkin) become the sun and the moon. In Mary Anne’s version, the wives become the sturgeon and the sucker, while the children become snow-birds. Her story ends with the diaper-boy sitting too close to the fire and being dissolved into urine. What one can make of these individual differences I am not sure. Even the broader differences are puzzling. In Teit’s Thompson version the young husband is not worried to learn that his wives had kidnapped him as a baby, and simply brings the half-brother into his menage, giving him one of the wives for his own. This ethical amnesia makes us uneasy, and if we then go on to suggest that it is a tribal characteristic our unease merely increases. Yet, if we are to take these stories seriously, we must read them as a reflection of a reality, tribal or individual. How are the stories to be explained in any other way? As borrowings which are not vitally felt by the borrower? As tribal narratives that have “collapsed" (Toelken’s useful term) in varying ways without rhyme or reason? Or are they just yams that don’t deserve this kind of serious investigation?

      That they survived up to Hill-Tout’s time, and beyond up to our own in some cases,¹⁴ indicates that they are deeply embedded in the value-structure of the tellers. To recover this value-structure and understand its art form will require much further scrutiny of the texts and the process of transmission from the oral origins. Some good material for a study of these questions can be found in the Squamish and Lillooet stories of this volume. In approaching Native texts one often has the feeling that the crucial clue to unlocking their significance will always be found somewhere other than where one is actually reading at the moment. It is probably safer to assume the contrary: that the quest for meaning has no better place to begin than the material at hand.

      Ralph Maud

       Cultus Lake, B.C.

       December, 1978

      1 It has unfortunately been impossible to reproduce interlinear texts in this edition. It is hoped that a facsimile of the linguistic sections of Hill-Tout’s articles might be made available. Meanwhile, the text and literal translation of this story may be consulted in the original printing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 34 (July-December 1904) p. 336.

      2 Quoted from volume III of the present edition, where Hill-Tout adds: “I have seen women shed tears, and men’s faces grow pale and tense over the recital, by some of the elders of the tribe, of the traditions of their people, the text of which would make one marvel that such bald dry statements could call forth so much emotion.” Teit’s analogue “The Medicine-Man and his Sweetheart" in “Traditions of the Lillooet" (1912) strikes a lighter tone: “A young man in the Lillooet country had a sweetheart who died. He was very fond of the girl, and her death was a great blow to him" (p. 332).

      3 I have not seen reference to the use of such tally sticks in story-telling on the Northwest coast. Their use here is similar to that mentioned by Jack A. Frisch in “Folklore, History, and the Iroquois Condolence Cane" Folklore Forum vol. 9 no. 15 (1976) pp. 19-25.

      4 The Content and Style of an Oral Literature (1959) p. 3, where he mentions that his Clackamas Chinook Texts themselves had followed “the traditional format that was set for folkloristic anthropologists by Franz Boas in the 1890’s.”

      5 The Girl Who Married the Bear (1970) pp. 1-2: “Because my academic preoccupation was then with classic distribution problems, I first judged the tale’s chief importance to be its probable extension of the known distribution of bear ceremonialism; I paid little attention to other aspects of the story. Only later did I ask myself - Why its great popularity? Why did both men and women so often volunteer to tell it?”

      6 I note that Dauenhauer’s dissertation at the University of Wisconsin is entitled Text and Context of Tlingit Oral Tradition (1975).

      7 J. Barre Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman" Genre 2 (1969) pp. 211-235 seems to me the best exposition of a single story to date. Dennis Tedlock’s Finding the Center (1972) is a book-length compilation of texts the author gathered from the Zuni. Performance elements are communicated directly to the reader by the typographical format.

      8 Dell Hymes “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun Myth" Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975) p. 352.

      9 Even when we have fifty-two tales from a single named informant, as we have in Teit’s The Shuswap (1909), it is amazing how little of the man’s character comes through. That the “following traditions were told with variants" (pp. 621-622), alerts us to expect report rather than performance.

      10 Jarold W. Ramsey “The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives’ PMLA 92 (1977) pp. 9-18.

      11 Sally Snyder applies the word “psychotic" to the Grizzly Woman who serves up feces, calling them “good berries" - see her “Stylistic Stratification in an Oral Tradition" (1968) p. 251.

      12 See translation of Boas by Dietrich Bertz (1977) p. 28-30; and Teit Mythology of the Thompson (1912) pp. 283-285.

      13 Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman" (1969) p. 221. Coyote is “an enabler whose actions, good or bad, bring certain ideas and actions into the field of possibility, a model who symbolizes abstractions in terms of real entities" (p. 222). For instance, when Coyote loses his eyes and replaces them with amber balls, this “allows us to envision the possibility of such things as eye disease, injury, or blindness.”

      14 It should be significant that “Kaiyam" is not told among the Lillooet today (information from Randy Bouchard).

NOTES ON THE COSMOGONY AND HISTORY OF THE SQUAMISH INDIANS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA ¹

      The following notes on the cosmogony and history of the Squamish Indians of British Columbia, a sept of the great Salishan stock, were gathered by myself from an aged Indian of that sept some time last summer. Through the kindness of the Roman Catholic bishop of the district, Bishop Durieu, I received a cordial reception at the hands of the chief men of the tribe, and on learning what I wanted they brought out of his retirement the old historian of the tribe. He was a decrepit creature, stone-blind from old age, whose existence till then had been unknown to the good bishop who himself has this tribe in charge. I am disposed, therefore, to think that this account has not been put into English before.

      I first sought to learn his age, but this he could only approximately give by informing me that his mother was a girl on the verge of womanhood when Vancouver sailed up Howe Sound at the close of last century. He would, therefore, be about 100 years old. His native name, as near as I could get it is Mulks.² He could not understand any English, and as his archaic Squamish was beyond my poor knowledge of the language, it was necessary to have resort to the tribal interpreter. The account will, in consequence, be less full and literal.

      Before the old man could begin his recital, some preparations were deemed necessary by the other elderly men of the tribe. These consisted in making a bundle of short sticks, each about six inches long. These played the part of tallies, each stick representing to the reciter a particular paragraph or chapter in his story. They apologized for making these, and were at pains to explain to me that these were to them what books were to the white man. These sticks were now placed at intervals along a table round which we sat, and after some animated discussion between the interpreter, who acted as master of ceremonies, and the other old men as to the relative order and names of the tallies, we were ready to begin. 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. He went on without pause for about ten minutes,