the anthropology of northwest coast arc00000 thom.qxd …aa.uwpress.org/content/40/1/1.full.pdf ·...

The Anthropology of Northwest Coast Oral Traditions

Brian Thom

Abstract This paper is a critical history of anthropological research on the oral traditions of thecultures of the Northwest Coast of North America where much influential work has been doneusing the vast text collections compiled by Boas and his collaborators The paper reviews thedevelopment and legacy of the Boas collection and analyses of Northwest Coast texts In addi-tion the paper analyzes responses to this body of work by functionalists who have looked toNorthwest Coast myth as a way of understanding property and responses by structuralists whohave sought ways of understanding underlying meanings in these traditions Recent contribu-tions have focused on a more literary analysis of oral traditions Finally suggestions are made asto some future avenues for future study of Northwest Coast oral traditions

Brian Thom Department of Anthropology McGill UniversityMontreal Quebec H3A 2T7 Canada

Oral Traditions and TheoreticalApproaches to Discourse

For Anthropologists working in Native NorthAmerica the verbal textual performed and artis-tic discourses of the people that we study are thecentral if not the defining elements of how wecome to understand and describe other culturalsystems Anthropologists studying the cultures ofNative North America have built an academic tra-dition by discussing their positions in these dis-courses and their continuing efforts to repositionand recontextualize themselves within them An-thropologists have written presented testified ex-hibited and sometimes even acted out ourever-changing understandings of the discourses ofthe communities in which we work The messagewe have tried to express has changed since Boascollected his first Native text but the objects of ourstudy Native discourses on myth legend folklorehistory life history and (auto-) biography have re-mained a core focus for the production of meaningand understanding within our discipline

ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY Vol 40 No 1 pp 1ndash28 2003 ISSN 0066-6939copy 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

This paper presents a critical history of an-thropological writing about Native NorthwestCoast1 oral traditions Emphases and perspectiveshave changed throughout this rich history of studyranging from Boasrsquo expansive collection of texts tostudies of the social function of oral traditions tointerest in symbol structure and meaning of mythsto a more literary interest in the ethnography ofspeaking Though not reviewed here in detail oraltraditions of Northwest Coast Native people havealso been at the core of the current political and le-gal debates in Canada over aboriginal title andrights (Thom 2001)

The current theoretical position of manycontemporary Americanist anthropologists is rele-vant to the study of Northwest Coast oral tradi-tions This position holds that culture is a systemof symbols and that underlying culture is a com-plex interplay of basically inseparable elements oflanguage thought and reality (Valentine and Dar-nell 19996) By focusing on one kind of Nativediscoursemdashoral traditionsmdasha rich set of texts isgenerated which can be studied to learn some-

arc00000_thomqxd 81603 1230 PM

2 Arctic Anthropology 401

Table 1 Synonymy for Northwest Coast Cultural and Linguistic Group Names

This list of names represents the widely practised (Suttles 1990) English spellings of the Northwest Coast cultural regional and linguistic group names with their equivalents from the literature cited here Culturalor regional groups not mentioned are in square brackets [ ] and often on one line Regional groups are notelaborated for those cultural groups which are only mentioned generally in the text As there are so manylocal groups those not mentioned in the text are not elaborated on here

CULTURAL GROUPS Languages Regional Groups Local Groups Region

EYAK

NorthernNWC

TLINGIT

HAIDA KaiganiMassettSkidegate

TSIMSHIAN TsimshianNisgaaGitksan Gitanyow

(=Kitwancool)

KWAKIUTL (=KWAGUL=KWAKWAKAWAKW)

Kwakwala

CentralNWC

[HAISLA HEILTSUKOOWEKYALA]

NOOTKA(=NUU-CHAH-NULTH)

BELLA COOLA

COAST SALISH

Halqemeacuteylem(=Halkomelem)

Straits Salish

Lushootseed

Island Comox (= Ccedilatloltq)PentlatchKlahooseSliammon[Homalco Sechelt]SquamishIsland HalkomelemUpriver Halkomelem(=Stoacutelocirc)Straits Salish (=LkuntildegEn)

LushootseedQuinaultTwana[Chehalis Cowlitz]

Katzie

SaanichKlallamUpper Skagit

QUILEUTE

[CHEMAKUM]

CHINOOKSouthern

NWC[CATHLAMET]

TILLAMOOK

arc00000_thomqxd 81603 1230 PM Page 2

thing of that culturersquos communicative systems andnorms and the way these norms are put into ac-tion through the practice of telling the stories It isin this interplay between structured culturallin-guistic practice and the agency of individual story-tellers where culturally situated meanings lie Tobe able to navigate this conceptual territory be-tween the structure of oral traditions and theagency of narrating them one needs to explore theconnections between form and meaning Such anexamination grapples with the interplay of litera-ture linguistics and ethnography in the realms ofcosmology marriage descent succession politicalinequality and the nature of human relations tonon-humans By laying out these communicativepractices we can begin to see how individuals usethem to make meaning in their own social context

It is clear however that this kind of aca-demic discourse is not centered on the object ofNative discourse (Hill 1999181) Native oral tradi-tions on the Northwest Coast are often concernedwith negotiating power relations between individ-uals in that society In being told and retold theyare often concerned with very particular andhighly local social processes and situations Eachnarrative in Native discourse is ldquoconnected toevery other [narrative] and to a highly contextual-ized discourse that assumes familiarity with biog-raphy and shared experiencerdquo (Ridington199922) Thus Native discourse is ldquoin conversa-tion and dialoguerdquo (Ridington 199919 see alsoSarris 19935) and it is a dialogue in which an-thropologists by and large are not engaged Theybecome particularly removed from this dialoguewhen stories are abstracted from their social set-ting and presented as ldquothe mythology of such-and-such a triberdquo Readers must keep in mind that theanthropological discourse is very seldom about thereal object of the Native discourse on this finelevel but tends to operate at a level of abstractiontrying to narrow the gap in meaning between theculture of the discourse makers and that of theirnon-local (often unintended) audience

The objects of anthropological studymdashourimplicit or explicit theoretical goalsmdashare seldomthose of the narrators of the oral traditions fromwhich the anthropological goals are met The gapbetween the meanings of oral traditions told byNative narrators and those meanings ascribed byanthropologists becomes greater as the goals of an-thropological theory move further away from un-derstanding local culturally and historicallysituated contexts Of course particular studies ofthe local (at which Boas excelled) are not the only

kinds of questions which can be asked of oral tra-ditions Still when researchers ask questionsdriven by their theoretical interests we must rec-ognize such questions and answers are a differentkind of social act than that involved in the originaltelling of the oral traditions themselves All socialacts are imbued with relations of power and theaccompanying potential for dominance hege-mony and resistance Thus even the seeminglyinnocuous categorization of Native oral traditionsas myth or legend house story or tale can take ona highly potent social life in arenas where myth istransformed into common law and house storiesbecome legal codes

Franz Boasrsquo Native TextsmdashOralTraditions as History and Culture

Any analysis of the anthropological discourse onNorthwest Coast oral traditions must consider thefoundational work of Franz Boas who personallydid more towards the collection and publication ofthese as texts than any other scholar (Jacobs1959a) For Boas his colleagues and students Na-tive texts were first seen as important kinds of datafor obtaining information about the history anddistribution of culture In his early work for theBritish Association for the Advancement of Sci-ence and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition Boasprimarily studied the distribution of elements inoral traditions in order to show relative historicalmovements of cultural groupsmdashresolving histori-cal questions about the prehistory of Native Amer-ica and the contacts between the Northwest Coastof North America and the northeastern regions ofAsia (Boas 1903 Cole 2001) In his later work atColumbia University Boas struggled with theproblem of how cultural outsidersmdashwith all theirbiases and preconceptionsmdashcould gain insightinto the ways that Native people understood theirworld and the ways in which they ascribed mean-ing to the stories (Boas 1935) Documenting oraltraditions provided a means to discover what wasimportant to Native people in their own wordsuntroubled by the pre-selected responses of thequestion-answer methodology of participant obser-vation The legacy of this work holds major impor-tance for the development of anthropology ingeneral and to the current shape of anthropologi-cal studies on the Northwest Coast

During his career Boas made collections oftexts in a great many of the languages spoken onthe Northwest Coast2 Boas had an acute ear forphonetic dictation and was able to record (and

Thom The Anthropology of Northwest Coast Oral Traditions 3


publish) a great deal of material in the original lan-guage Boas was forced to work in Chinook Jargonand English when dealing with some of the lan-guages with which he was completely unfamiliaror when he did not have much time to take dicta-tions In these cases the published versions are al-most always in English only

Of greater importance in terms of sheer vol-ume however are the two major collections of Na-tive language texts that came out of Boasrsquofirst-hand work with collaborators living in thecommunities they were documenting The mostwell known are the Kwakiutl texts which GeorgeHunt produced for Boas (Boas 1910 1935 Boasand Hunt 1905 1906) Boas also had a long activecorrespondence with Henry Tate which ulti-mately produced a series of Tsimshian texts (Boas1912 1916) Given that these are among Boasrsquomost thorough and well-known works they willbe the focus of this paper

While Boas collected several hundred pagesrsquoworth of Kwakrsquowala texts himself (ie Boas19101ndash243) most of the Kwakiutl texts weretaken down phonetically by Hunt in theKwakrsquowala a translation provided and then sentin notebooks and letters back to Boas in New YorkHuntrsquos transcriptions and translations were re-viewed and corrected by Boas from his officeThese were subsequently published normallywith the Native language version some with amorpheme-by-morpheme translation and mostwith a running summary English translation Thisseparation of the texts from their contexts makesthem daunting objects to approach The highlytechnical phonetic transcription and often awk-ward literal translation make the texts seem likeoddities to the student with little prior knowledgeof Kwakiutl culture Boas was criticized for this atthe time by Sapir who argued that he had not pro-vided adequate annotations of these texts whichcould help ldquothe student of Kwakiutl mythologyand culture towards the understanding of thetalesrdquo (Sapir 1912197)

For Tatersquos Tsimshian texts the path to publi-cation took a more complicated route Tate tookdown versions of the stories he knew or heard inEnglish and then proceeded to translate them intoTsimshian which he sent to Boas (Barbeau1917562 Maud 1989158) Boas was never satis-fied with Tatersquos transcriptions of Tsimshian so hehad Archie Dundas a Tsimshian-speaker who wasstudying on the East coast read Tatersquos Tsimshianout loud which Boas then re-transcribed Notwanting to be biased by Tatersquos English Boas drew

on his own limited knowledge of Tsimshian to re-translate the Dundas transcriptions in the samefashion he had done with the Kwakiutl materialThe final results were published in the style ofHuntrsquos Kwakiutl work The Tsimshian texts aresubject to the same critique as the Kwakiutl mate-rial though the long path of translation makes itmore difficult to be satisfied with this material asrepresenting the narratives of a living communityWhile Maud has critiqued the Boas-Tate collabora-tion as something of a scientific charade (Maud2000)3 these texts represent more the work of aunique anthropological collaboration Boasrsquomethod of publishing the Kwakiutl and Tsimshiantexts is important to review because the texts arethe basis of several subsequent generations of an-thropological study of these communities Anthro-pologists frequently use the texts as if they areauthoritative original sources that stand for nine-teenth century Northwest Coast cultures

Apart from presenting the texts themselvesBoasrsquo analyses are limited Boas was loath to seethese oral traditions as forming a cultural systemunlike his colleagues overseas who were influ-enced by Durkheim and Malinowski or the olderAmericanist school of Holmes and Dorsey fromthe Bureau of American Ethnology who saw oraltraditions as an indicator of general processes ofunilinear cultural evolution For Boas oral tradi-tions reflected particular historical processes ofeach tribe in which they were told Thus by col-lecting a wide range of texts from many NorthwestCoast communities Boas attempted to addressquestions concerning the history of the distribu-tion of Northwest Coast cultural groups Some ofhis investigations along these lines have becomeuseful contributions to an overall historical pic-ture while others have not stood the test of timeTwo examples of his numerous observations willillustrate the point

Boas successfully proposed that the Tsimshianembarked on a late migration into the area theynow inhabit arguing this point on the basis of thesimilarity of their myths to the myths of interiorand southern North American Native peoples(Boas 1916872) Though this movement occurredon a much longer time-scale than Boas had pro-jected his hypothesis has been further substanti-ated with linguistic and archaeological evidence(Sterritt et al 199815ndash24)

Boas similarly proposed that the village-based Coast Salish were recent migrants to thecoast having come originally from the interior andthen influenced by their clan-based neighbors the



Kwakiutl (Boas 1898a17-18) The hypothesis of alate Coast Salish migration to the coast has nowbeen rejected by archaeological and linguistic evi-dence (Ames and Maschner 199986 Matson andCoupland 1995242-6 Thompson 1979) Snyderconcludes that for texts such as these it is difficultto know where these stories really originally camefrom as so many narrative elements are widelyshared throughout western North America (Snyder196456ndash7) and thus rejects using myth as amarker of historical distributions of culturalgroups

Boasrsquo second main theoretical position forunderstanding oral traditions drew on his positionas a cultural relativist By the time the Jesup Expe-dition had run its course Boas had become moreinterested in trying to understand Native cultureon its own terms For Boas an observer from out-side the culture being studied would not necessar-ily know the significance of what had been saidand done or even what was significant and whatwas not To counter this problem Boas workedwith Native informants who collected material inthe language spoken by the community they werestudying He felt that these texts

probably contain all that is interesting to thenarrators and that in this way a picture of theirway of thinking and feeling will appear that ren-ders their ideas as free from the bias of the Euro-pean observer as possible (Boas 1935v)

This would be published in its entirety so that allsignificant material was present Making completecollections of Native oral traditions from a particu-lar community provided a methodology to achievefairly rich cultural descriptions This perspectivewas developed in explicit opposition to the evolu-tionary ideology of his American counterpartswho viewed mythology as being ldquoprimitive ration-alizationrdquo which survived as irrational customBoas then set out to use these texts as a basis forethnographic observations on the culture of thepeoples from whom the stories were taken

In his work with Hunt and Tate Boas felt hehad a sufficient body of material to make authori-tative statements on the cultures as wholes Boasrsquotwo major analyses exploring this idea TsimshianMythology (1916) and Kwakiutl Culture as Re-flected in Mythology (1935) were lengthy projectsthat drew solely on mythology to state ldquoethno-graphic factsrdquo about the culture of the societiesfrom which the myths were recorded These worksread like long detailed lists of cultural elementsThey provide an annotated index to the myths ontopics of material culture personal and family life

tribal organization emotional life and ethics cere-monial objects and procedures supernaturalpower and objects numbers the world supernatu-ral beings animals and plants and the origin of lo-cal geographic features This range of topicscovered was constructed inductively from the con-tent of the myths themselves and thus accordingto Boasrsquo theory were the things important from theNative point of view unbiased by the interests ofthe observer The conclusions of these works re-turn to his previous interests in the connectionsand differences between the groups on the North-west Coast connections which he believed couldbe seen from patterns of similarities and differ-ences in the content of the myths

Boasrsquo peers critiqued him for not providingadequate context to interpret whether the mythcontains borrowed events or themes and thusmight represent non-local cultural practices (ieBarbeau 1917551) This critique did not pose aproblem for Boas who saw each culture as beingconstituted by its unique historical developmentin interaction with neighboring groups Thus aborrowed element was just as important to theNative view as a local one in a culture which atany given moment was the product of a dynamichistory

Boas also ran into trouble in his assertionthat the oral traditions told or collected by his in-dividual informants represented notions held bythe culture as a whole His final cross-culturalcomparisons illustrate the difficulties inherent inthis view Boas concluded that there is a directcorrelation between the number of occurrences ofparticular kinds of historical events mentioned inthe myths like starvation and natural disastersand the actual relative frequency of those events inthe history of the societies which the myths are be-lieved to describe (Boas 1935173) In making fur-ther distinctions between the interests of thecultures being described Boas distinguished ldquotheselection of preponderant themes the style ofplots and their literary developmentrdquo (Boas1916878) The Kwakiutl Boas lamented are inter-ested mainly in rank and privileges and are other-wise ldquolacking in variety of subject matter and inskill in compositionrdquo (Boas 1935190) TheTsimshian on the other hand were said by Boasto be mainly interested in Ravenrsquos voraciousnessMinkrsquos amorousness and the marriage betweenhumans and animals (Boas 1916877) Since Tatedid not provide stories of ownership Boas con-cluded that they were missing from Tsimshianmythology (Boas 1935176) Though Boas claimed



that he had published all there was to collect ofKwakiutl and Tsimshian mythology his criticsstrenuously disagreed noting ldquoalmost endless arethe storiesrdquo in complex cultures like these (Bar-beau 1917552)

All of these conclusions were based on thecentral notion that the oral traditions recalled orrecorded by Hunt and Tate represented a completebody of narratives from their respective culturesThis is clearly a problematic position to take if oneconsiders the possibility of personal agency How-ever although Boas frequently published severalversions of stories by different narrators in hisanalyses he did not consider the relationship be-tween individual style and variation in narrativeform Nor did he see oral traditions as being partof an active social context For Boas the content ofthe stories stood as the substance of what therewas to be analyzed regardless of individual styleor use of a story as a social tool Thus as ethnogra-phies of living communities these works are dis-appointing

If we reject Boasrsquo practice of allowing thetexts narrated almost exclusively by a single col-laborator to stand for the society as a whole wecan make sense of the differences in the interestsof the Kwakiutl and Tsimshian Berman points outthat in Boasrsquo correspondence he certainly askedfor a range of texts His requests however weremet with silence from the collaborators who wereeither unwilling (Hunt) or unable (Tate) to producetexts from outside their relative social sphere(Berman 199145 Maud 1989161) It seems clearthat these emphases in myth are a reflection of theindividual tellerrsquos interests and abilities (those ofHunt and Tate) and cannot necessarily be extrapo-lated for application to whole societies GeorgeHunt for instance was a potlatching communitymember very much worried about the same issueshe recorded and thus was apt to pay special atten-tion to recording for Boas stories which wereconcerned with property (Berman 1991 Suttles1991)

Tatersquos own narratives were guided firstly byhis status in the community Tate was not a high-standing community member like Hunt (Barbeau1917553) and likely did not have access to therange of stories recorded by Hunt Viola Garfieldwho worked with the Tsimshian in the 1930s and1940s confirmed this She noted that Boas hadpresented the mythology ldquoas if it were generalcommunity property Only a few stories in Boasrsquopublished collections were identified as propertyor as explanations of historical details of lineages

and clansrdquo (Garfield 196652) Garfield saw thatnot a single Raven story told to her by Gitksanpeople bore any similarity to those collected byTate from the Tsimshian (Garfield 196653) Thisdemonstrates the highly limited range of storiesTate had access to or that he was willing to telldue to the proprietary nature of many NorthwestCoast myths Barbeau further observed that Tatehad often simply restated Nisgarsquoa stories that Boashad previously collected and published Tatersquos re-stating the Nisgarsquoa stories arose in part from a mis-understanding of Boasrsquo instructions (Maud198916)

More careful attention to the range of narra-tives from any particular ethno-literary categorymight have drawn Boasrsquo attention to these prob-lems Seguin notes that Tatersquos texts ldquoinclude few ofthe adaox [adaawk] and more of what might becalled lsquostoriesrsquo The Beynon texts [which werecollected in collaboration with both Boas and hiscritic Barbeau] are much richer in the adaox buthave figured little in the published literaturerdquo(Seguin 198524) Hunt on the other hand ldquocon-sulted a wide range of Kwagul in producing thesetexts and the variability the texts display is proba-bly a more accurate picture of the state of cosmo-logical opinion in many societies than whatanthropologists show usrdquo (Berman 1991132)

A more contemporary critique of Boasrsquo projectcomes from Hymes who has challenged the ideathat the oral traditions told by individuals canstand as authoritative representatives of the tradi-tions of the entire culture (Hymes 1996) Hymes haslooked at different tellings of Coyote stories and hasshown that very different meanings emerge fromthe various tellings of the same stories This obser-vation points to the real shortcomings of the analy-ses of Boas who was so interested in the objectivecontent of the stories that he virtually ignored thestructure of particular tellings and the meaningsthat individual tellers may have intended ForHymes Boasrsquo legacy of presenting oral traditions asdisconnected from the social process of their tellinghas had an impact on more mainstream (non-academic) publications of Native mythologyHymes suggests that we would best honor thethought of Native storytellers ldquonot by extravagantgeneralization but by close attention to the detail oftheir narrative skillrdquo (Hymes 1996 131)

Though these observations suggest that thereare serious problems with Boasrsquo attempt to under-stand culture from the Native point of view thereare a number of important points that Boas makesthat are useful today The methodological implica-



tions of Boasrsquo program of collecting texts in Nativelanguages in order to say something emic aboutNative culture has become a very important ideain Americanist anthropology Edward Sapir notedthat these seemingly massive collections of textsare the minimum necessary for making a properstudy of the language and culture of Native groups(Sapir 1912194) The theoretical implications ofBoasrsquo methodology was the starting place forSapirrsquos vision of the relationship between languageand culture (Darnell 1990) which in turn has hadan impact on the development of the study of dis-course in structural linguistics (Sherzer 1987) andanthropologists who study discursive practice associal action (Valentine and Darnell 19996)

Boasrsquo work has laid the foundation for muchfuture research on the Northwest Coast No otherresearcher has shared his ambition to record andpublish so many oral traditions in their Native lan-guage though many research projects have usedhis material (largely the English translations) topursue new theoretical problems Before examin-ing the post-Boas work Boasrsquo unusual position incontemporary Native communities should be dis-cussed Gloria Cranmer-Webster great grand-daughter of George Hunt and curator of theUrsquomista Cultural Center has written about the im-portance of Boasrsquo work to her community In a pa-per detailing the contemporary significance of theBoas material to her community she mentions theimportance of the Kwakrsquowala texts

We are re-claiming what was lost during the lsquodarkyearsrsquo as our old people say The missionariesalmost succeeded in their efforts to wipe out ourlanguage so that we utilize the BoasHunt texts indeveloping language materials to teach Kwakrsquowalato both adults and children (Cranmer-Webster19976)

Though the process today is very different than inBoasrsquo time his contributions in recording oral tra-ditions continue to be used by the descendants ofthe Native peoples with whom he worked

The Social Function of NorthwestCoast Oral Traditions

British Functionalism after BoasIn the decades after Boas and his colleagues haddone their fieldwork new questions arose con-cerning Northwest Coast oral traditions The newgeneration of anthropologists were more keenly in-terested in looking at how oral traditions func-tioned in society What were their functions aslaw in ritual guidance or as cosmological expla-

nations Oral traditions like other institutionssuch as the potlatch filled a social role that couldbe described in relation to the functioning of tradi-tional Northwest Coast societies Many of thesefunctions were recognized due to the influence ofMalinowski who saw myth as a social charterwhich validated the cultural institutions and cus-toms of a culture providing a common bond of so-cial solidarity (Malinowski [1926] 1948) Finnegan(199234) reviews this literature noting that em-phasis was placed on the stability and homogene-ity of the systems of oral traditions and littleemphasis was placed on local meanings or indi-vidual creativity All oral traditions with mythicalqualities tended to be viewed as myth and mostother forms more or less ignored as they had littlerelevance for gaining an understanding of socialstructure

Boas largely dismissed this perspective andrepeatedly argued that there was too much localvariability to see oral traditions as forming a socialsystem to explain cosmology This view comes outforcefully in his condemning review of LocherrsquosThe Serpent in Kwakiutl Religion (Locher 1932)For Boas Locher had badly misread Boasrsquo owndata on Kwakiutl mythology and religion in sug-gesting that Kwakiutl myths form a systematic in-tegrated social system (Boas [1933] 1940) GivenBoasrsquo commanding presence in American Anthro-pology in general and on the Northwest Coast inparticular very few people attempted to take thisperspective while Boas was alive

One exception to this was Boasrsquo own readingof Bella Coola oral traditions where Boas did posita connection between the particular social organi-zation of an individual society and the content oftheir myths (Boas 1935173) This connection wasevident for Boas in the seemingly conflicting tradi-tions of the Bella Coola where each village has itsown tradition concerning the origin of the worldBoasrsquo explained the great variation in narratives asa reflection of the conception of property in BellaCoola communities each community owns a dis-tinct myth of origin and accompanying it areunique rights and privileges over resource areas(Boas 1898b48) Thus what seem on the surface tobe conflicting cosmologies are in fact an inte-grated set of traditions around property each heldprivately by the property-owning social unit

The other exception to this hesitation to chal-lenge Boas comes from the work of T F McIl-wraith who also worked with the Bella CoolaMcIlwraith corrected an observation of Boasrsquo thatthe Bella Coola all shared a systematic account of



the universe noting that the systematic accountwas only shared by two families (McIlwraith194825 294) In fact Boas had only worked witha single man for ten days (Maud 198288ndash9) re-minding us again of the problems of making gener-alizations about whole cultures based oninformation from single individuals NonethelessMcIlwraith (who was trained in Cambridge) sawthe mythology of the Bella Coola as having a socialfunction in integrating attitudes towards animalsand supernatural beings (McIlwraith 194830) andas an integrating force in their social organizationwith ldquomyths now accepted as facts [and] hav[ing]had a great influence on the lives of the people Infact the social structure of the tribe has tended toconform to the mythsrdquo (McIlwraith 1948118)McIlwraith also viewed Bella Coola origin mythsas giving authority to the rituals performed (McIl-wraith 1948292) McIlwraith as Maud (1982139)points out sees oral tradition from the perspectiveof its actual use in society presenting the materialfirmly from the stance of having been there andheard oral traditions in use While it is difficult toargue with McIlwraithrsquos analysis on one level hisemphasis on cultural homogeneity still alludes toa sense of oral traditions being used in dynamicways for a multiplicity of social purposes by dif-ferent people at different times For the time how-ever McIlwraithrsquos two-volume ethnography of theBella Coola stands in stark contrast to Boasrsquo work

The Function of Myth as a Charter forProperty RightsThe students in American universities who weretrained by Boasrsquo students set about a project ofpublishing a fairly standard range of descriptiveethnographies focusing on the memory culture ofthe older generation of Native people living inNorthwest Coast communities in order to saysomething about traditional culture These re-searchers generally worked only in English andwere less concerned than Boas had been with col-lecting and publishing Native texts (ie Barnett1955 Collins 1974 Drucker 1951 Duff 1952) Theybrought with them some of the critiques of the Boasschool from British structural-functionalism andset about to describe the operation of various so-cial systems like the potlatch winter ceremonialsand cosmology The ethnographies were written ina fairly standard formula and did not tend to in-clude a section on mythology or oral traditionsTheir Native informants however continued tobring up their stories during interviews with

ethnographers These oral traditions were inte-grated into the salvage ethnographies by beingsummarized for the purpose of a description oftheir role in Native explanations for social institu-tions or beliefs

Nowhere was this more common than in de-scriptions of the social institutions of property andland tenure among Tsimshian and related commu-nities on the northern Northwest Coast and in anexploration of Coast Salish cosmologies on the cen-tral Northwest Coast These issues have continuedto receive critical attention since the presentationof oral histories as evidence for land ownershipand Native jurisdiction over the territory in theDelgamuukw case (Thom 2001) This section re-views some important publications from these ar-eas showing some of the commonalities anddifferences in approaches toward interpretation oforal traditions and examining what the oral tradi-tions themselves say about the cultures in whichthey originated

Myths and PropertymdashTsimshian Gitk-san and Nisgarsquoa AdaawkOral traditions for the Tsimshian Gitksan andNisgarsquoa (though certainly not a practice in onlythese communities on the Northwest Coast) havefrequently been presented as being important inestablishing hereditary rights and privilegesThough these oral traditions are almost always re-ferred to as myths the stories are more clearlyfrom that intermediate class of myths and legendswhich is concerned with property rights andwhich may be unique to the Northwest Coast (asdiscussed above) Three sources are useful to re-view in this regard Viola Garfieldrsquos short but well-regarded ethnography of the Tsimshian (1966)Wilson Duffrsquos publication of the oral traditions as-sociated with the Tsimshian poles he collected forthe British Columbia Provincial Museum (1959)and the recent presentation of Gitksan and Nisgarsquoaoral traditions in support of a Gitksan land claim(Sterritt et al 1998)4

When discussing Tsimshian myths Garfieldnoted that the greatest number of texts concernedanimals marrying humans in order to punish in-struct and give power crests and gifts to them(Garfield 196649) She concluded that the motiva-tion behind many of these myths is the deep inter-est of the Tsimshian in lineages territories andpossessions (Garfield 196652) This relationshipis evident when examining which individualshave knowledge of myths as not everybody knows



all the stories to the same degree nor does every-one have rights to tell those that they may knowRaven-cycle myths for example are known byeverybody However some particular episodes inthe Raven cycle are family property a fact whichis publicly recognized on totem poles in front ofthe house of the owners

Wilson Duff also discussed the relationshipbetween pole owners territories and myths in hispublication Histories Territories and Laws of theKitwancool (1959) The Kitwancool now calledthe Gitanyow are a politically independent sub-group of the Gitksan In the 1950s they reached anagreement with the British Columbia ProvincialMuseum to exchange their decaying totem polesfor having their territories and laws recorded andpublished Duff asked a non-Native who had longtaught in the community and who spoke the lan-guage of the Kitwancool to record the stories ver-batim He accompanied the stories with a shortethnography that described the ownership of thestories and poles by individual house each with achief ranked according to the respect and author-ity he commands from others

When a pole is erected or changed it is erected atthe same place A feast is always given and the ter-ritories are discussed They tell the people the sizeof their village the mountains they own theirhunting and fishing grounds they tell eachclan which mountains they can have and what ar-eas the can hunt and fish in (Duff 195918)

Personal names and place names explicitly men-tioned in the stories are the link of ownership be-tween people and places Thus when chiefs tellmyths or rather have a hired speaker tell them at apotlatch feast storytelling becomes an explicitlypolitical act authenticating claims to land andopening up the possibility of challenges from peo-ple with other stories

The Gitanyow have made this argumentagain using oral traditions in a recent publicationcountering the overlapping land claim of their Nisgarsquoa neighbors Sterritt et al (1998) have arguedthat in signing a treaty over a large territory theNisgarsquoa have violated the indigenous law whichrecognizes the Gitanyow connection to some ofthose lands This indigenous law the authors ar-gue emerges from retelling the oral traditions thatdocument land ownership (adaawk) markinghousehold ownership of land on totem poles andvalidating the land tenure at potlatch feasts

Sterritt et al (1998) claim that inGitksanNisgarsquoa law the existence of an adaawkproves ownership to the specific lands named in

that story Mentioning place names is critical intelling adaawk to connect mythological elementsof stories to specific owned areas on the groundwhich can be recognized today Potlatch feasts areheld to formalize the recognition of these owner-ship rights and to allow them to be contestedThus telling the adaawk and holding potlatchesform an unambiguous system for asserting owner-ship of traditional lands

In assessing their adaawk the authors havedone a remarkable job of working through a verylarge diverse body of these stories from oldanthropological texts to court transcripts toresearchersrsquo field-notes pulling out concise state-ments about land ownership and boundariesWhere there appear to be inconsistencies in thevarious adaawk the authors provide ample histor-ical and ethnographic context to understand theirplace within the indigenous system of land tenure

In interpreting these oral traditions Sterritt etal have given serious consideration to the founda-tions and content of aboriginal common law Thepublishing of the adaawk in a peer-reviewed aca-demic press is in keeping with potlatch traditionthat requires witnesses (readers) to claims beingmade and authorities (reviewers) to validate orchallenge the claims In reality however an aca-demic publication is no potlatch Unlike an oralrecollection of an adaawk at a potlatch feast noone is able to stand up during the reading of a textand contradict what is being written

Despite Boasrsquo clearly mistaken claim that theTsimshian were uninterested in property (Boas1935) it is clear from these works that sorting outterritories boundaries and property rights is oneof the central functions of at least one type(adaawk) of Tsimshian oral tradition This is nothowever the only interpretation of Tsimshian oraltraditions since Boas did his work as these andother myths also have been the subject of struc-tural and post-structural analysis by Leacutevi-Straussand others There can be little doubt however ofthe importance of this functional reading ofTsimshian oral traditions in the context of contem-porary land claims Given that the land question isnot settled in the rest of British Columbia thiskind of analysis has important implications for fu-ture research from this perspective

Coast Salish Cosmology Power and PropertyThe dominant themes cited when describing andinterpreting Coast Salish mythology in the post-



Boasian ethnographies have been their importancein understanding cosmology and spirit powerGiven the emphasis on inherited privileges andproperty in the Tsimshian (much of the othernorthern Northwest Coast) literature since Boasthis focus is striking The difference in interpretiveperspectives may partially be explained by the in-fluence of the then-unresolved Boasian hypothesisthat the Coast Salish were relative newcomers tothe Coast and their property systems were a mereshadow of envy of those held by Boasrsquo KwakiutlAnthropologists working in the salvage mode andinterested primarily in traditional culture may nothave been tuned in to or listening for concernsabout property However given that recording oftexts is supposed to alleviate ethnographers fromthe burdens of their interests it does not seem likethis would account for such a difference in ethno-graphic emphasis

Some of this difference may be accounted forby the particular historic situation of the timing ofthe field work By the time trained anthropologistsstarted to work in Coast Salish communities (the1890s for the likes of Hill-Tout [1978] and Boas5the 1930s to 1950s for Jenness Barnett Collinsand Codere) Coast Salish communities were notthen actively involved in making protests over theland question They had been very active in the1870s (Tennant 1990) and again during theMcKenna-McBride commission hearings in the1910s However the ban on hiring attorneys formaking legal arguments about land title broughtthese arguments to a temporary halt This situationis in contrast to the Tsimshian communities whowere actively engaged in protests continuallythrough the early parts of this century (and indeedwell into the end of it with the Calder and Delga-muukw cases and the Nisgarsquoa Treaty) (Sterritt et al1998) The anti-potlatch laws were also strictly en-forced in Coast Salish communities which werenearer the urban centers and the eyes of the lawthan their more northerly neighbors In fact it wasin a Stoacutelo (Coast Salish) community in Chilliwackthat the first arrest and conviction under the anti-potlatch law was made (LaViolette 197370) Thusit was seywen (spirit dancing) cosmology andspirit power and not systems of property rightswhich caught the attention of this new generationof anthropologists interested in traditional cultureIn spite of these particular interests of the post-Boasian anthropologists working in Coast Salishcommunities given the contemporary politicalcontext of unresolved land claims it is importantto see how Coast Salish communities may have

framed oral traditions in terms of property andhow this is similar or different from the practicesof other Northwest Coast groups like theTsimshian

Diamond Jenness produced two of the firstpost-Boasian ethnographies dealing with severalCoast Salish communities though one of thesetexts has languished as an unpublished typescriptat the National Museum in Ottawa (now the Cana-dian Museum of Civilization) since 1934 (Jennessnd 1955) Jennessrsquo unpublished manuscript re-ported on the Coast Salish communities of south-east Vancouver Island where he had done severalinterviews with older men His published accountis the celebrated Faith of a Coast Salish Indianthat is a verbatim reporting of a very long myth cy-cle told by the charismatic shaman Old Pierre (Jen-ness 1955) Jenness was always interested incollecting oral traditions following the Boasianparadigm as a means of understanding Native cos-mologies Like Boas Jenness was struck by thehighly variable responses to his questions to in-formants about their beliefs and cosmology (Jen-ness nd105) By systematically describing thecosmological issues reported in the oral traditionshe collected however Jenness was able to makeseveral generalizations about how Coast Salishpeople understand their own existence soulthoughts power and relationship to animals (Jen-ness nd108 195535ndash37)

Jenness made some interesting observationsabout the connection between oral traditions andproperty He noted that some rituals and associ-ated stories were held privately though it is un-clear if he meant household family or village asthe property-holding group (Jenness 195571)These private rituals and storiesmdashcollectivelycalled ccedil x

wtrsquonmdashinclude mask dances powerfuldolls and stuffed animal rituals supernatural fishand funeral rituals Jenness does not explicitly re-port these traditions as being linked to territoryHowever the stories of the origins of many of spe-cific ritual objects that may be used only by thefamily who owns the ccedil x

wtrsquon take place at spe-cific named locations to which those familieshave special association including exclusive useof resources at these places Additionally in thelong transformer-cycle myths recorded the ori-gins of particular communities are recountedwith named individuals establishing communi-ties at named locations (Jenness 195510-34)Like the Tsimshian adaawk both the personaland place names are recognizable in modernpost-mythological times

e

e



Homer Barnett a student of Kroeberrsquos wasthe next person to do substantial ethnographicwork in Coast Salish communities during the1930s His primary interests were in collectinglists of cultural traits and collecting data for verytraditional descriptive ethnography Working en-tirely in English he made little effort to collectoral traditions However stories were an importantmedium for his informants Tommy Paul aSaanich from Vancouver Island explained to Bar-nett about a violation taboo on telling the wrongstories (Barnett 1955141) Stories are exclusiveknowledge particularly those about the originalancestors in the transformer-cycle myths This ex-clusive knowledge (staalaumlngan in Saanich otakanin Comox) is ldquofamily owned and had to do withfamily history myths and privileged actsrdquo

One would not think of publicly claiming anotherrsquosstaalaumlngan He would be ridiculed unmercifullyunless he could show a legitimate blood connec-tion with its owners and could back up his claimwith a property distribution (Barnett 1955141)

This sounds very much like the ccedil xwtrsquon described

by Old Pierre to JennessIn 1945 Helen Codere participated as a grad-

uate student in an Columbia University ethno-graphic field school in Stoacutelo territory Codereproduced a number of locally important articles asa result of this project one of which was a discus-sion of the Coast Salish swairsquoxwe mask and associ-ated origin myths (Codere 1948) The swairsquoxwe is amask and regalia worn by a man who dances hav-ing been granted the privilege by a femalerelative6 Women whose families can claim theright to dance in this mask trace the privilege fromspecific stories that tell about the origin of themask at a particular place and how it is that thefamily came to possess it After providing a fullrecollection of the myth from three different tellersand ample ethnographic details surrounding itsimportance in the community Codere goes on toposit a very unsatisfying analysis (see Suttles1957) claiming the myth and mask resulted from amixing of more sophisticated northern NorthwestCoast ideas of crests with the indigenous south-erncentral Northwest Coast ideas of spirit powerThis is clearly a revival (or continuation) of Boasrsquotheories of story-structure being a useful indicatorof history and the same criticism mentioned con-cerning Boasrsquo analysis would apply here

June Collinsrsquo research with the Upper Skagit(one of the Coast Salish peoples of Puget Sound)was ongoing from 1942 through to the 1970s In anearly article Collins described the relationship be-

e

tween humans and animals that Skagit oral tradi-tions explain (Collins 1952) She outlines how re-spect for animals is expressed as a relationship ofreciprocity Taboos are outlined in oral traditionsset in the time of the myth-world and examplesare provided for how to be courteous to animalsThe origins of the first salmon ceremony is ex-plained in these myths and the philosophies be-hind the ritual practices of returning the bones ofthe first salmon to the river are described (Collins1952354) Like the ontological findings of JennessCollins discusses the relationship between thepower of animals and humans to change form inmyth and the actual experiences of contemporarySkagit individuals in their personal guardian spiritquest (Collins 195235) Another important onto-logical distinction is made visible in Collinsrsquoanalysis of myth the distinction between food andnon-food animals Animals that can be eaten asfood are also competing with humans for access tofood whales eat seals as do humans bears eatberries as do humans (Collins 1952353) Theseare the animals that marry humans (Collins1952356) thus the production-reproductionmetaphor in these myths and the necessity for respect Those that are not eaten as food (lizardssalamanders etc) are considered dangerous andare associated with shamanic powers in both mythand practice (Collins 1952358)

After several decades of research Collinspublished an ethnography of the Upper Skagitwhere many of these ontological principles arerestated (1974) Here she considers the functionof myth as history with history being dividedinto two periodsmdashmythological and folkloric(Collins 1974211) These historical periods aregenerally separated by the actions of the Trans-former who during the end of the myth-time setorder or natural laws in the world Beyond usingthese stories to mark historical time Collins rec-ognizes the importance of myth for the relation-ships people have with their guardian spirits andwith each other Myths have moral content thatis often quite explicit Violations of the moralvalues described in myths have real world conse-quences The victims of the violations will beprotected by their guardian spirits This concreterelationship between the telling of moral storiesand the actual physical (spiritual) danger ofbreaking these moral values creates a cautiousand circumspect social system of interactions be-tween individuals (Collins 1974214) This cau-tion is extended from the unknown personalguardian spirits of other persons to the well-



known powerful spirits that live at particularplaces which are also the subject of Upper Sk-agit myth and provide guidance for proper be-havior at places away from the community(Collins 1974241)

More recently Collins has asked how peopleresolve for themselves the paradox of having aclass-divided society that is essentially organizedaround kin unitsmdashwhere members of your ownkin could occupy very different social statuses(Collins 1994) For Collins this problem was re-solved for the Coast Salish by borrowing traditionsfrom the Kwakiutl in accordance with the argu-ment made at the time that this group had workedout a more complex system of social hierarchythan had their more simple southern neighborsHere is Boasrsquo pervasive argument again Howeverthe problem still remains and may be better re-solved by looking at the meanings bound up in theoral narratives themselves

Sally Snyder developed this perspective oforal traditions as a means of expressing unre-solved conflict three decades earlier in her highlyinteresting but frequently overlooked PhD disser-tation (1964)7 In this comprehensive analysis ofover 100 narratives she collected in Skagit com-munities Snyder moves back and forth between apicture of social organization constructed fromethnography to the content of myths and storiesthat bears on social organization In the latter shefinds social tensions abound (Snyder 196412) In-laws are caught in the tension between privilegeand obligation Women and older men are bothpositive and negative in that they have powerMyths chart courses through these social tensionsgiving the listeners (whom she calls ldquosophisti-catedrdquo) food for thought about the social tensionsin their lives (Snyder 196459)

Like Jenness and Barnett Snyder recognizedmyth as being a kind of private knowledge [ldquoad-vicerdquo xwdikw] owned by Coast Salish upper classfamilies (1964167ndash168 210) Upper class genealo-gies are connected to oral traditions in the true sto-ries told which outline the rights and privilegesbelonging to that family The advice given con-cerning myths is not only the narrative of myth it-self (which is important and also held privately)but advice concerning the interpretation of moralsand proper (upper-class) behavior that are embed-ded in the myths This concern with the privateproprietary nature of myths was in part responsi-ble for her Skagit informantsrsquo concern to get thestories right They said they would rather staysilent than to guess at meanings or ldquopad impro-

vise paraphrase or omitrdquo the telling of a story(Snyder 196421)

Studies from this era of anthropological in-vestigation of Coast Salish communities on theNorthwest Coast successfully showed how theseoral traditions serve an important function in ex-pressing moral values and examples of how to (orhow not to) have relationships with fellow com-munity members (within and between genders andsocial classes) and with the spirit world In the lat-ter regard these are not unlike myths told acrossNorth America Of particular interest though isthe role of Coast Salish myth as a discourse onproperty Unlike the Tsimshian adaawk the ethno-graphies of Coast Salish communities do not havea harmonious interpretation about the role of mythin the Native discourse of ownership of propertyThe nature of this system of property and the par-allels to the Tsimshian adaawk need further clari-fication through further research in Coast Salishcommunities

Structuralism and the Search for Meaning in Northwest Coast

Oral TraditionsThe massive corpus of texts made by the Boas-Tate(Boas 1912 1916) and Barbeau-Beynon (Barbeau1961 Barbeau and Beynon 1987) collaborationshas provided the basis for several major forays intostructural analysis When Claude Leacutevi-Strauss casthis eye to the Northwest Coast it was the mythol-ogy collected by Boas and his collaborators towhich he would turn John Coversquos densehermeneutic exploration of Tsimshian mythology(Cove 1987) was also based largely on these collec-tions These kinds of analyses use mythology asthe core of their investigations but unlike Boasthe investigators are less interested in Native ideasfrom the Native point of view

Leacutevi-Straussrsquo widely read analysis of one ofthese myths the Tsimshian ldquoStory of Asdiwalrdquo(Leacutevi-Strauss 1958 1967) has been celebrated anddebated (see Adams 1981368ndash370 for a review)Leacutevi-Straussrsquo particular arguments about the struc-ture of Northwest Coast mythology have been chal-lenged from both an empirical perspective (ieAdams 1974) and from the perspective of the inter-nal logic of his argument (Codegravere 1974 Thomas etal 1976) Possibly the best summary of why Leacutevi-Straussrsquo structural approach to myth should beabandoned comes from Berman who rejects

its inexplicable blindness to the importance ofcultural provenience its divorce of narrative form



from the social cultural and personal contexts inwhich that form is manifested its preoccupationwith discovering a single simple universal type ofnarrative form and finally its inability to demon-strate how analytical lsquostructurersquo or lsquoformrsquo relates tothe visual and aural lsquotexturersquo of actual oral-literaryperformances to what is actually said and done inthem (Berman 19916)

Although the structural approach to the study ofmyth on the Northwest Coast has not been suc-cessful overall there are some useful observationsthat can be made from examining the literatureand some of the critiques The debate provided anopportunity to bring into sharper focus some issuesthat had not been particularly well-articulatedspecifically the skill with which some myths ex-plore the consequences of broken social rules

For Leacutevi-Strauss this Tsimshian myth pro-vides resolution and balance where the ldquocontra-dictionsrdquo of cross-cousin marriages thatLeacutevi-Strauss identifies in the story are all resolved(Leacutevi-Strauss 196725) Unconcerned with originalnarrative form or the quality of translation Leacutevi-Strauss identifies and defines four levels of sym-bolic opposition that like music operate ondifferent levels of abstraction (Leacutevi-Strauss196717ndash21) These opposites are not based on anethnographically informed reading of the mythnor on Native views about the meaning of theirown stories Leacutevi-Strauss goes so far as to claimthat these levels cannot be separated by the Nativemind According to Leacutevi-Strauss these structuralopposites serve the function of subconsciously re-solving problems posed by actual contradictionsin society (Leacutevi-Strauss 196728)

In critiquing the idea that the Tsimshianmyth provides a symbolic balance Adams saysthat Leacutevi-Strauss set up ldquoa non-existent problemfound a solution to it (in a form of marriage) andthen declared the solution inherently unstable thusldquoprovingrdquo his assertion that normative rules onlyappear to resolve inherent contradictionsrdquo (Adams1974171) Adams whose reading of Tsimshianmyth is informed by his own extensive ethno-graphic research in the area has an alternate read-ing no two people who share rights to the sameresources (ie who share kin ties) can marry eachother The only time that kin marriages can occur iswhen a person has been adopted into a different re-source-owning group than the one into which theywere born For Adams this myth is not about re-solving subconscious contradictions but ratherplays the very familiar role of serving as a title orcharter for resource-owning groups UltimatelyLeacutevi-Strauss sees that the form of the myth and its

meaning are linked but his methodology for de-scribing the form of myth draws on his own imagi-nation and cultural constructions rather than beingattentive to Native literary style and culture

John Cove (1987) has presented a more re-cent investigation of symbolic meaning inTsimshian mythology Cove looks at theTsimshian myths recorded by Tate Boas Beynonand Barbeau to build a model of the Tsimshianview of reality Cove sorts out myths which arecommon property (Cove 198746) from house nar-ratives (adaawk) shamanic narratives secret soci-ety narratives legends and folktales He suggeststhat these commonly known myths contain a cen-tral integrated message for the Tsimshian who tell them Like the findings of both Jenness andCollins for the Coast Salish the message is a kindof answer to the basic philosophical question ofwhat it means to be human

Cove looks at the symbolic significance ofparticular elements of mythsmdasha stone the salmonskinmdashin order to get at these categories of human-ness The stone represents immortality and fixed-ness in this world The salmon are immortal andcan powerfully move back and forth between theirworld and the world of humans Skin representstransformation between human and non-humanforms Cove reads meaning into these symbols byclose exegesis of the content of the myths he hasassembled rather than in discussions with inform-ants (who when asked were not able to give himthe kinds of philosophical answers he was lookingfor) as Jenness and Barnett did or by seeing howmyths were used by people to make meaning inactual living situations

The reading of Tsimshian mythology as beingfoundationally about the basic question that hasalso pre-occupied Western philosophy seems re-markable in light of the wide array of charactersthemes and incidents in the stories Cove himselfrecognizes that only a single story the very shortand enigmatic Elderberry and Stone (see Kroeber1986 for an enlightened discussion of the perform-ances of this narrative) addresses directly this ba-sic human dilemma The symbolic meaning is notimmediately obvious in the other stories Rather itmust be investigated by a hermeneutic process ofgoing back and forth between readings to see howthe strands of symbolic significance connect fromone story to the next creating a deeper web ofmeaning than the one on the surface

In drawing his hermeneutic circles howeverCove underplays other interpretations of the verystories with which he is trying to come to terms



When his conclusion describes myth as beingabout one basic philosophical question it placesin the shadows the meanings that individual nar-rators and listeners might ascribe to the narrativeSuch a symbolic study freezes meaning or risksclaiming that alternate readings of these stories areillegitimate Coversquos use of the authoritative third-person voice throughout the book reinforces thisauthoritative stance

If one takes a different theoretical perspectiveand proposes that the ultimate meaning of oral tra-ditions are completely contingent on the particularmoment of the social context in which they aretold then such a hermeneutic analysis as given byCove is unsatisfying If however like Cove oneconsiders that meaning is held in the semiotic re-lations of the literary elements within the storythen these oral traditions have meanings whichstand on their own outside any particular use ofthem in social practice Of course every time anoral tradition is heard (or read) it is in a social con-text of one kind or another so taking such an ex-treme view will lead to the problems such as thoseassociated with Leacutevi-Straussrsquo interpretations Ifhowever we take the post-structuralist (decon-structionist) view that meaning only exists at themoment of practice we neglect the important ob-servation that language and discourses are struc-tured in ways so that meanings can be shared andunderstood by groups of people Otherwise com-munication would be impossible Thus we are ledto the middle ground of trying to see the relation-ship between structure and agency between semi-otic relationships and the momentary performanceof a communicative act Cove does a better jobthan Leacutevi-Strauss of trying to understand agencybut could have spent more time sorting out the so-cial contexts of recalling oral traditions to high-light the more nuanced ways in which meaningunfolds

The differences between these two theoreti-cal positions concerning symbolic meaning areclear when one looks at an analysis of Coast Salishmythology Jay Miller and Lushootseed storytellerVi Hilbert have published a short article describ-ing the symbolic meaning of Lushootseed myths(Miller and Hilbert 1996) These myths describethe origin of contemporary villages each of whichhas an ancestor who dropped from the sky Asidefrom providing satisfying origin stories Hilbertsays myths teach you to live with your mistakesSuch a brief almost obvious interpretation ofLushootseed stories by Hilbert in an academicpublication defies the complex relationship she

has with the power and meaning of the mythsHilbert has worked with linguist Thom Hess andanthropologist Crisca Bierwert for many yearsboth translating texts and providing personal in-sight into their meanings and contexts (Bierwert etal 1996 Bierwert 1999) The superficial explana-tion given in the academic publication is furtherilluminated by Hilbertrsquos comments in her pub-lished collaboration with Bierwert et al ldquoIf I wereto explain fully some incidents I would disgracemyself On these points therefore I trust theintelligence of our audience to perceive the fullsignificance of the eventrdquo (Hilbert in Bierwert etal 19964) Trusting the intelligence of the audi-ence is a recurring theme in the presentation ofNorthwest Coast texts

For Bierwert the depth of meaning ofHilbertrsquos Lushootseed stories becomes richer forthe anthropologists who have made themselves fa-miliar with the culture from which the storiesemerge

The depth and resonances of the stories are diffi-cult to grasp at first because the narrations are thinin descriptive detail they acquire depth on studyand relistening and they are best at cuing a per-sonally constructed image for someone whoknows the culture (Bierwert 1999147)

The problem arises in building cultural knowledgethrough personal experience Does this mean thatthe texts in and of themselves have no meaningOf course not Nevertheless in ascribing meaningto a text taken out of its social setting there willnecessarily be less social and cultural context Thecontext that does emerge is likely to be less so-cially potent for texts taken out-of-context than fortexts that are analysed in active discourse As amethodology Bierwert suggests that if we can seesomething of the form and style of their originaltelling at least some of the intended meaning ofmyths will be clear to the new listenersreaders(Bierwert 1999154) From this she concludes thatthe greater the listenersrsquo knowledge of the rules ofform and style the greater their own understand-ing of the meaning It is from a reading like thisthat we can move to more recent literary ap-proaches to Northwest Coast oral traditions

Literary Approaches to NorthwestCoast Oral Traditions

Out of this century of academic discussions onNorthwest Coast discourses emerges a fairly con-cise set of theoretical and methodological con-cerns Paramount among these is a concern with



cultural meaning As Morantz has asked of oralhistories generally how can one presume to knowthe meaning of oral traditions when there is greatsocial temporal cultural and linguistic distancebetween teller and interpreter (Morantz 2001) Inmany of the cases presented above at least one ofthese interpretive barriers poses a central problemfor an analysis of Northwest Coast myth Since theimportant work of Dell Hymes in the early 1970sseveral anthropologists and linguists working onthe Northwest Coast have taken steps to addressthese problems Some of these scholars haveposited that oral narratives have been and con-tinue to be an important part of Native culturaland political discourses Also important is the re-newed recognition that there is an important con-nection between language and culture and thatattention must be paid to this connection in thetranslation of oral traditions The most importanttheoretical innovation however has been to recog-nize that the actual performances of oral tradi-tions where culturally and linguistically encodedmessages are transmitted are critical to under-standing their meanings

TranslationWhen theoretical concerns turn to meaning theproblem of translation becomes a critical issueThe translator is faced with the problem of notonly providing correct morphological equivalentsfor the words uttered but also giving them shapein a syntax which reads well in the new languageThis can be a problem where systems of syntax arevery different In Haida (like other NorthwestCoast languages) phrases and sentences are cen-tered on verbs while in English they are centeredon nouns In making a smooth gloss translationinto English Bringhurst (1999) struggled with try-ing to evoke the motion and action being ex-pressed in a verb-centered language The Englishversion given by Bringhurst is clearly different inboth form and meaning than another translationthat was not so attentive to the shape of the Eng-lish language (ie Swanton 1905) The distinctionbetween nouns and verbs is similarly ambiguousin Kwakrsquowala making possible fine punning thatis lost in translation unless extra context is givenby the translator (Berman 1992143) The transla-tor has to consider the kinds of meanings the audi-ence will read into the term when choosing a wordfor use in translation Some terms may be best leftuntranslated and explained in a footnote Othersmay be translated using awkward or heavy phras-

ing in English to give it the same kind of sense asthe original term In other situations the originalsense may be simply lost or modified Much asthe discussion of poetic form makes clear dependson the audience

In the fall of 1999 a flurry of controversy wasreported in prominent newspapers and magazinesin Canada over the publication of a book of ldquonewtranslationsrdquo of Haida myths by critically ac-claimed Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst(Bringhurst 1999)8 This book and the two othersin its trilogy which followed (Bringhurst 20002001) translated some of the Haida mythology col-lected by one of Boasrsquo proteacutegeacutes John SwantonThe issue that caught the mainstream mediarsquos at-tention was the relationship between Bringhurst anon-Native scholar and members of the Haidacommunity who argued that their myths are theproperty of particular Haida Houses that have ex-clusive rights to tell the stories Bringhurstrsquos high-profile publications and the controversysurrounding them raise a number of important is-sues The books themselves are centrally con-cerned with the problem of translating oraltraditions passed on by individual master story-tellers across boundaries of time (over 100 years)medium (oral to written) languages (Haida to Eng-lish) and of course culture However the mainintended audience for Bringhurstrsquos book is thenon-Native interested sympathetic reader Thebooks are an excellent presentation of Haida his-tory and oral narratives and take into accountmany of the problems of presenting Native textsdiscussed here Nevertheless in excluding Haidapeople from the process Bringhurst has alienatedone of his most important audiences

Bierwert et al (1996) have considered multi-ple audiences in their excellent presentationtranslation and contextualization of LushootseedTexts Here the audience is taken to belong tothree primary groups 1) academic readers inter-ested in Native oral literature in general and Salis-han languages in particular 2) Lushootseedcommunity members interested in the stories orstudying the Lushootseed language in a languageprogram and 3) a general audience of readers Toachieve a presentation that would appeal to allthree audiences the text was presented in a care-fully transcribed poetically organized Lushoot-seed form with a smooth English gloss (made atthe sentence level ) on the facing page Explana-tory notes for culturally and linguistically particu-lar features are left out of the translation of the text(not adding anything significant at the level of the



sentence) but are provided in endnotes and inshort contextualizing essays at the beginning ofeach story Tapes are made available on request sothat the stories can be heard as well as read Sig-nificantly (and possibly uniquely) the copyrightnotice inside the cover of the book states ldquoThetexts of the Lushootseed stories are understood tobe part of Native cultural tradition and thereforeno claim of copyright is here made upon themrdquoThis is a work that clearly acknowledges the com-munity as both owner and potential audience ofthe stories Unlike Bringhurstrsquos Story as Sharp as aKnife Lushootseed community members (particu-larly renowned storyteller Vi Hilbert) were inti-mately involved in producing the translations andexplanations In the recently published Lushoot-seed Dictionary (Bates et al 1994) the editorshave made cross references to the occurrence ofwords in these texts so that those who are lookingto see words in action may cross-reference backand forth between the Dictionary and Texts

Several different schemes for presentingtranslations have been tried including 1) English-only publication as translated by the editor 2) Na-tive texts with technical morpheme-by-morphemetranslation followed by smooth gloss 3) Nativetext and smooth English gloss on facing pages and4) English-only publication as given by originalteller Several problems in meaning should be considered In the first method the text given isfurthest from the original with the most opportu-nities for mis-communications to occur

The second approach is the most widelypracticed linguists are frequently the ones record-ing the texts The morpheme analysis is an enor-mous task and often leaves little opportunity forfurther consideration of the context social mean-ings in the stories Such works are however thestuff of grammars and dictionaries and are vital ac-ademic productions Tedlock (198331) has arguedthat the kinds of highly literal morpheme-by-morpheme phrase-by-phrase translations of Boasand his colleagues and students is for the mostpart ldquowhat professional translators would call alsquocribrsquo or a lsquotrotrsquomdashnot a true translation into literateEnglish but rather a running guide to the originaltext written in an English that was decidedly awk-ward and foreignrdquo (Tedlock 198331) The smoothEnglish glosses produced in the second and thirdmethods raise their own interesting problem Theyare intended to give a close translation of the Native text They do not represent the diction ofNative speakers using English but rather the in-vented English of the scholar working on the text

This approach might best be done in collaborationwith a poet and Native speaker to give the fullestand richest translation Both Bringhurst (19992000 and 2001) and Krauss (1982) have risen ad-mirably to this task in their respective translationsof Haida and Eyak oral traditions The problemraised in the fourth method is a matter not of au-thenticity but rather that of the possibility of los-ing devices and forms that are inherent in Nativelanguage and that give stories a unique meaning intheir own context It may be that a Native speakeris bilingual enough to reproduce these aspects inan English version but this has not been exploredon the Northwest Coast as it has been by Cruik-shank (1999) in the Yukon For her documentingoral traditions in English by fluently bilingual sto-rytellers creates more lively performed versionswhere the teller structures the translation on-the-fly to make sure that their intended listeners hearwhat is being said

Richard and Nora Dauenhauer have longbeen active in recording translating and publish-ing Tlingit oral narratives from the genres of lifehistories (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1994) ora-tory (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1990) andmythological oral narrative (Dauenhauer andDauenhauer 1987) This work has formed an im-portant body of accessible texts for students inAlaska wanting to learn and practice Tlingit Theytypically present the Tlingit version organizedinto verse form at the level of the phrase and asmooth English gloss given on the facing pageTechnical translations are left out of the printedtexts subverting the scholarly goal of linguisticanalysis to the beauty and power of the Native-language stories

Extensive notes are included for each text toprovide cultural and historical context includingextensive biographical information about thetellers and the event where the narratives weregiven and recorded As a collection these threelarge texts form a useful standard for languagelearning in a community that is already close tomany of the cultural issues that the texts raise

Richard Dauenhauer has published a numberof scholarly analyses of Tlingit texts some ofwhich focus on the particular problems of transla-tion In an interesting brief consideration of theproblem of translating Native texts Dauenhauerturns to two of the texts of mythological songsrecorded in Tlingit by John Swanton during hisfieldwork under the direction of Franz Boas(Dauenhauer 1981) Dauenhauer demonstrates theprocess of making careful translation at the level



of both phrase and morpheme He pays particularattention to the complex set of Tlingit kinshipterms which often have no English equivalentsHe shows how in Swanton and Boasrsquo translationsinto English and German there is a fundamentalloss in

everything functional and contextualmdashthesense of what moved the singer to compose it anda sense of the songrsquos impact on the Tlingit audi-ence Such deletions of kinship terms are the chiefcause of the anger and hostility knowledgeableTlingits universally experience and generally ex-press when they see such translations in printFrom the Tlingit point-of-view such versions arenot only un-Tlingit but anti-Tlingit (Dauenhauer1981362)

These comments reflect the importance of oral tra-ditions to contemporary Native groups as part oftheir identity Getting the words right means notonly being respectful during the field workprocess but in on-going collaborative efforts withthe community Old-style anthropology wheretranslations of texts are made thousands of milesaway with little subsequent involvement from Na-tive speakers who are engaged in their communi-ties are no longer politically welcome nor do theystand as useful academic translations In additionto just being able to translate the language it isclear that knowledge of linguistics and a poeticsense of English are both required to do justice to atranslation of Native oral traditions

Ethnopoetics and the Performance of MythScholars working on the Northwest Coast in thegeneration after Boas had a keener interest in try-ing to describe oral traditions in ways other thanthe usual categories of song narrative poetry orprose Jacobs for instance suggested that oral tra-ditions might best be presented as theater (Jacobs1959b7) rather than the straight prose presentedin Boasrsquo texts Theatrical figuring of oral traditionswould allow for more literary kinds of analysisthat could highlight the relationships betweencharacter plot and theme Jacobs trained a genera-tion of scholars who worked on the NorthwestCoast making new recordings transcriptions andtranslations of these discourses (Seaburg andAmoss 200012ndash13)

The most well known of these students isDell Hymes Hymes has built on Jacobsrsquo literaryapproach to Native oral traditions to lay the foun-dations for the school of the ethnography of speak-ing Hymes is keenly interested in the importance

of conventions of narrative form that generatemeaning in oral traditions beyond the semantics ofthe words in the texts themselves Hymesrsquo analysisof Northwest Coast oral narratives has beenworked mainly from Boasrsquo texts re-presentingthem in verses stanzas and acts to reflect some-thing of their narrative structure (Hymes 1981) InHymesrsquo own analysis of these old texts the mainstatements he has been able to make about infer-ring meaning have been in recognizing patterneduse of culturally important numbers (like 3 4 or5) in narrative rules (Hymes 199992) Scholarsworking in other indigenous communities such asDennis Tedlock have tried to capture more of theperformance aspects of oral narrativemdashlike theparticular evocative sounds and stresses inspeechmdashin their transcriptions and translationsbut these kinds of analyses have rarely been usedon the Northwest Coast

Linguist John Dunn who has spent a careerworking on the Tsimshian language regards oralnarrative as a kind of literature that can be use-fully studied using the techniques of poetic analy-sis This is an analysis of a first contact narrativethat is still owned by the house descending fromone of the sisters of the main character in the nar-rative (Dunn 1989396) Where this fairly typicalTsimshian oral narrative becomes literature is inthe stichometric (lines and stanzas) and stropho-metric (aural performance features) structuresLines can be identified in the story by the use ofthe Tsimshian marker ldquoadardquo (which is somethinglike the English ldquothenrdquo) which occurs with greatfrequency during the telling of the story The sto-riesrsquo stanzas form quatrains which is significantas the Tsimshian culture number has been well es-tablished as being four The strophometric featuresinclude regular pauses after the use of ldquothenrdquo dra-matic length added to the syllables of some wordsand a regular pattern of cadences in the telling ofthe story These performative features reveal anelaborate but regular set of parallelisms in thetelling of this story and of stories of this class ingeneral However beyond a detailed description ofthis structure and the recognition of the culturenumber pattern Dunn draws little else from hisanalysis of this text as literature

In contrast to Dunnrsquos claim that Tsimshiannarratives are a form of poetry Halkomelem lin-guist Brent Galloway has made a careful examina-tion of the narrative form of a Salishan Mink storyto conclude that ldquothere is no feeling of poetryhere but artistry and traditionrdquo (Galloway1996159) Rhymes and tight meters are what



Galloway uses to distinguish a poem butHalkomelem (and other Northwest Coast) narra-tive forms lack these features Galloway de-scribes several dominant narrative patterns (ofdiscourse conjunctions timing and repetition)from the story but concludes that ldquothere is notnecessarily one and only one correct structurethat can be proposedrdquo (Galloway 1996167) Thislong technical analysis by Galloway shows thateven if very careful attention is paid to form(which in translation can help bring the storymore authentically alive) a rigorous understand-ing of meaning may not ensue

Poetic form has been attended to by otherwriters who do not concern themselves with try-ing to represent performance as much as theywant to represent something of the literary feelingof oral narrative Brian Swann (1985) for examplehas re-presented narratives collected by Swantonas free-verse poetry Swannrsquos argument is thatthough his work does not capture the literal orperformance quality of the original oral traditionshe offers an accessible representation for a West-ern audience Such representations mask real dif-ferences between cultural concepts embedded inthe poems (Krupat 199215)

Presentations like these shy away from theoften difficult task of either trying to understandNative languages or work collaboratively (with allthe power-sharing that this requires) with someonewho does The results of the collaboration betweenBierwert Hilbert Hess and Langen have master-fully shown what can be done (Bierwert et al1996) The book includes both poetic and prosearrangements of the Native texts (depending onthe style of the oratory) drawing on performancefeatures an English translation which revealsLushootseed poetic structures on the facing pageand extensive footnotes to provide linguistic andcultural annotations for the text given (Bierwert etal 199624) The editors suggest that this kind ofpresentation can ldquocarry their reader farther intothe organization of thought and the art of theLushootseed language and storytellersrdquo (Bierwertet al 199637) than more sparse translation proj-ects might do

In another effort to mediate this debate Salis-han linguist Anthony Mattina has also insistedthat the ldquounderstanding which readers gain fromthe script is in direct proportion to what theyknow about the tradition and the context of thetextsrdquo (Mattina 1987143) Thus the results of thelaborious efforts to make poetic transcriptions thatcapture something of the form of the performance

can be equally well achieved using prose tran-scription The prose transcriptions Mattina pro-vides are highly accessible yet maintain anauthentic relationship to the speakers of the oralnarratives The key to these accessible translationsis his use of a close-to-literal translation using thekinds of English words that would commonly beused by the Native speakers This technique isuseful for traditions that are living which con-tinue to be told and recorded as in the Haida sto-ries presented by Eastman and Edwards (1991)who also give a closer line-by-line translation inthe appendix to their volume of stories

Form Memory and MeaningIn an interesting analysis of form in Lushootseedstories Langen recognizes a certain seeming para-dox in the form of storytelling the narratives oftenhave very few words but are highly repetitiousLangen asks us to think about how these two pat-terns of speech might interact with each other inthe telling of Lushootseed narratives as a vehiclefor information not declared (Langen 198980)Langenrsquos first conclusion is that the very regularform of repetition in the oral narratives told byLushootseed tellers likely serves as a mnemonicdevice for the complex set of incidences that arerecounted in the long stories that the storytellerldquoheld the story in her mind as much by its shapeas by its contentrdquo (Langen 198981) Thismnemonic function is likely important but stilldoes not solve the problem of the paradox raised

To understand how the laconic (but repeti-tive) telling of these stories can make sense to thelistener Langen compares them to the tellingsdone in English by storytellers who choose not tofollow these narrative traditions so closely Langenfinds that in the stories that keep these narrativeforms the narrator uses a parallelism of actionsand events to highlight the deeds of the main char-acter In the same story told by the other tellerswithout holding strictly to these narrative conven-tions a short sermon is given at the end to capturethe meaning of morals (Langen 198990) It wouldappear then that such morals should become evi-dent to those listeners who are attuned to the con-ventions of repetitive parallelisms In a similardiscussion Langen critiques curriculum projectsthat have developed new tellings of Lushootseedstories and that emphasize (linear-thinking) ratherthan form (lateral-thinking) (Langen 1992) Langensuggests that Lushootseed storytellers working intheir own language and in English use conven-



tions of form to create richly embedded storiesbut this is missed in following Western conven-tions of emphasizing linear developments in plot(Langen 1992196)

Haida oral tradition also uses particular ora-tory devices to embed culturally-specific meanings(Boelsher 1991) Boelsher observed the operationof some of these practices in contemporary publicdiscourse which when practiced with culturaloutsiders poses a potential problem of cross-cultural communication where serious misunder-standings can occur from not recognizing narrativeforms She takes the example of political oratorywhere allusion inversion repetition pausing andsilence are important rhetorical devices These aretypical of small-scale face-to-face societies whereit becomes possible to say things without actuallyarticulating them These ideas which are onlyhinted at would be lost on the outsider (Boelsher-Ignace 1991118ndash121) Thus when public oratorycenters on land claims or fishing disputes thesematters of sensitive literary translation have highlypolitical consequences

Boas and Ethno-PoeticsThese literary approaches to oral narrative havebeen discussed as providing a useful perspectivefrom which to approach oral traditions made inclose collaboration between the storyteller and theresearcher The texts produced are seen as beingengaged in a highly active social context wheremeanings are negotiated between the tellers andthe audience sometimes through the interpretingmedium of the translator who would ideally oper-ate with an almost-invisible highly poetic touchSo what can be made of older recordings of sto-ries Can it be that there is no meaning that can bebrought out from the shelves of texts recorded byBoas and his colleagues Or would an investiga-tion of meaning in such texts be left to structuralor symbolic analysts There is one analysis whichstands out as a highly successful attempt to drawon this literary perspective to investigate the prob-lems of meaning in Boasrsquo Kwakiutl texts attendingto the problems of the social context of the pro-duction of the texts their social context as anethno-literary category the difficulties of negotiat-ing both linguistically accurate and literate trans-lation and the connection between form andmeaning in the texts This is the excellent work ofJudith Berman who has drawn on these importantinsights into the analysis of oral narrative in a ma-jor re-evaluation of Boasrsquo Kwakiutl texts (Berman

1991 1992 1994 1996 2000 2001 in press)Berman proposes that we must examine how

the texts came to exist how they were translatedand build an ethnographic understanding of therole of texts as social objects Boas she assertsknew that getting texts in the Native language wasimportant but often made mistakes in his transla-tions and more importantly said very little in theway of interpreting the patterns of performance(rhetorical) and genre form which we now under-stand to be critical for interpreting meaning fromstories (Berman 1992126) In fact in the case ofthe story ldquoOolachan-Womanrsquos Roberdquo Boas couldnot have been more wrong in both his translationand interpretation of what Berman has shown tobe a pun-filled highly metaphorical ribald story(Berman 1992)

In her PhD dissertation Berman sets out toinvestigate systematic relationships between theform and rules of oral literature and the cosmolog-ical concepts and cultural meanings expressed inthe stories published by Boas The analysis is sub-stantial She begins by giving a biographical re-view of Boasrsquo collaborator George Hunt and thehistorical and social context for how the volumesof ldquoKwakiutl Textsrdquo were generated (Berman199158ndash116 see also Berman 1994 1996 whichrework this section of her dissertation) and fol-lows this with a robust description of nineteenthcentury Kwagul social organization based on alinguistically informed reading of Huntrsquos workwith Boas Berman looks to the myths to say some-thing about the relationship among tribe-village-household-hearth to provide some new insightinto the dynamic nature of these groups over timeto make commentary on social rank within and be-tween groups and to present the ldquochiefrdquo as ametaphor for the whole social body of the Kwagul

From this ethnographic position Bermanworks her way back to conducting an analysis ofmyth by discussing Kwagul ethno-literary cate-gories placing the nuy m into context with othergenres of Kwagul oral narrative (see Table 2)These ldquohouse-storyrdquo myths have few plot struc-tures but a great diversity of individual formationbeing that they are ldquocharters of social politicaland personal identity rdquo like a ldquo birth certifi-cate or passportrdquo (Berman 1991128-9) This obser-vation is important as myths have often beentaken to be ldquoDurkheimian collective representa-tions that transcend the opinions and understand-ings of any one individualrdquo which can beinterpreted as forming ldquoa neat symbolic or concep-tual systemrdquo (Berman 1991132) For Berman

e



however the patterned variability of the text pro-vides a better picture of the cosmological opinionsheld by Kwagul society (Berman 1991132) Thushaving deconstructed static or largely structural-symbolic interpretations of Boasrsquo texts Bermanmoves on to present a picture of what the patternsin narrative actually are and how these may helpin making more sound interpretations

Berman examines one story closely ldquoNightHunter and Day Hunterrdquo starting with looking at thecontext of how it was produced by Hunt and (mis-)translated by Boas then providing a re-translationbased on a highly sophisticated understanding ofKwakrsquowala grammar and organizing the new trans-lation into ethno-poetic notation to reveal its form ofverses stanzas scenes and parts She describes pat-terning in 1) auxiliaries used 2) performance form3) plot-types zones and dramatis personae in nuy m generally 4) names and imagery used in per-formance 5) thematic aspects of characters in nuy m generally 6) motifs in nuy m generally andfinally 7) the symbolic oppositions posed in thestructure of genre (and corresponding forms in reallife) This part of her analysis takes up some 476pages of double-spaced text and is a careful well-illustrated analysis

At the end of the dissertation Berman comesback to the first questionmdashwhat can be understoodfrom Boasrsquo texts or this text in particular In re-sponse to Boasrsquo unspoken theoretical concern withthe problem of relativity Berman suggests thatHuntrsquos texts do in fact present what is importantand meaningful to the Kwagul Hunt himself par-ticipated in Kwagul winter ceremonial life both asa dancer and in initiating his son What is impor-tant and meaningful is a basic concern with rever-sal and reciprocity ldquoin which relations betweenhuman and spirit power and powerlessness giv-ing and takingrdquo are expressed in a variety of imagi-native ways by different presenters of the mythstold (Berman 1991712)

ee

e

This is a very satisfying analysis and seemsto get to the heart of the many of the methodologi-cal and theoretical issues raised Howeverweighty re-analyses like these speak mostly to anacademic audience They lack a level of accessibil-ity that would make them useful for people notschooled in this kind of analysis Nevertheless ifthe goal of this kind of work was to be accessiblethe author would have to rely on the audience tobring the requisite knowledge to make an in-formed interpretation Such an audience presum-ably already fluent in the Native language wouldlikely not need to have these very basic principlesabout language and narrative form stated The an-thropological project is about producing storiesabout stories in a context other than the ones inwhich the original stories were presented The an-thropological project can be very good indeed atbridging the cultural and linguistic gap that mightotherwise make these other discourses so difficultto understand by attending to the problems of thesocial and political contexts of the stories themanner in which they are translated as texts andthe relationship between form and meaning Asmost of these efforts have however produced an-thropology that is accessible to very few readersexcept for other anthropologists we need to ask ifthe cultural divide is being adequately bridgedClearly there is room for more accessible but rigor-ous discussion of Native discourses

Conclusions The Past and Futureof Oral Tradition Research

on the Northwest CoastThe anthropology of Northwest Coast oral tradi-tions has been a long tradition which has seenmany changes in its theoretical goals and methodsof analysis The anthropology of Northwest Coastoral traditions has completed something of its ownhermeneutic circle starting with Boasrsquo project of


Table 2 Bermanrsquos Partial Taxonomy of Kwagul Ethno-literary Categories (redrawn from Berman1991118)

nuy m ldquomyth historyrdquo qrsquoayuldquotale of recent

eventsrdquo

nuy mi ldquohouse storyrdquo [animal story]

nuy mi nuy mgiwiʔ lagwa m(short public) (long secret) [] ldquowailing songrdquo

eee

e

e


documenting Native texts in their own languagesand his inductive analyses which was counteredby the British-influenced project of looking for thefunction of oral traditions in Northwest Coast soci-eties Leacutevi-Strauss moved the discourse to a dis-cussion of meaning and symbolic structure whichwas countered by a return to a Boasian attention toindividual performances of oral traditions but thistime with a discussion of meaning through the in-terplay of narrative form and content Thougheach approach has its own set of problems the in-sights generated are worth summing up here to-gether with suggestions for future research

Boasrsquo efforts in transcribing texts in Native lan-guages have provided an essential methodology forlearning principles of Native grammars and to a cer-tain degree Native world views Boasrsquo monumentalefforts involving the publication of Native languagetexts are obviously an important legacy now thatmany of these languages are endangered moribundor extinct Continuing in the spirit of this traditionis of utmost importance if these languages are to sur-vive a transition into a textual world

The extraordinary volume of material left byBoas and his collaborators has been so influentialin all of these studies that few are produced with-out at least reference to the original works and of-ten using them as the central set of data foranalysis Archaeologists and scientists with an in-terest in natural history have continued to useNorthwest Coast oral traditions in the spirit ofBoasrsquo early analyses using them to aid archaeolog-ical investigations and to understand geologicalevents of the ancient past (ie MacDonald 1984Marsden 2001 McMillan and Hutchinson 2002)However given the continued problems of transla-tion and the frequent difficulty of seeing the socialcontext for the performance of these collections ofnarratives scholars using this material can easilymisinterpret the intent of the narrators and misun-derstand the more general pattern of culturalmeaning Continuing work like Bermanrsquos andHymesrsquo re-translations of Boasrsquo efforts into poeti-cally sophisticated English is a worthwhile taskTranslations of oral traditions work best whendone collaboratively with researchers familiarwith linguistic principles of Native languages (anda poetic sense of their own language) and in col-laboration with fluently bilingual Native speakersThis kind of work must not eclipse the more im-portant task of continuing to work with holders ofthese traditions listening to how narratives areused in Native communities and providing newopportunities and venuesmdashfrom the courtroom to

the classroommdashfor narrators to use oral traditionsas a way of expressing themselves Cruikshankprovides important guidance in working with oraltraditions given in English establishing the tellersthemselves as their own best translators

The other of Boasrsquo major contributions washis attempt at grand comparisons of NorthwestCoast oral traditions Boasrsquo Tsimshian Mythologystands unparalleled (though not without its criticssee Maud 2000) in seeing the patterns of motifsepisodes and themes across Northwest Coast oraltraditions (and again in larger contexts of NorthAmerica and Siberia) Miller (1989) has drawn onBoasrsquo analysis to make some general statementsabout the style and content of Northwest Coastmythology that can be held as some importantdefining elements of a vastly complex range of dis-courses A few of these are worth repeating hereConcern with social ranking is shown through amirroring of mythological worlds and human so-cial statuses Supernatural power is essential inacquiring food and prestige with one of lifersquos com-plexities involving the way in which that power isobtained controlled and maintained To this listof elements we can add Adamsrsquo summary of thecontribution of structural studies of NorthwestCoast myths which hold that ldquoin-law relations areimportant and that the relations between husbandand wife are considered to be particularly evenmystically closerdquo (1981380)

Symbolic and structural accounts have beenheavily criticized for moving too far from the intel-lectual lives of the people whose meanings theypurport to uncover This critique leaves open thequestion of how it is that researchers can try tomake sense of the oral traditions that have beenrecorded over the last century One way to movebetween flat historic narrations and translations oforal traditions and contemporary social contexts isby comparing the kinds of meanings the traditionshave held over time Harkin (1998) provides a re-cent exploration of the persistence of symbolicmetaphorical meaning in Nuu-chah-nulth oral tra-ditions Harkinrsquos analysis shows how overcomingthe whale in traditional narratives is a highly po-tent and pervasive metaphor for the necessity forleaders to be ldquocleanrdquo in their own livesmdashovercom-ing their personal whalesmdashin order to be respectedby their communities Harkin sees these oral narra-tives as important in Nuu-chah-nulth communitiestoday as leaders face new kinds of ldquowhalesrdquo intheir efforts in co-management and self-determina-tion This and other work by Harkin (1997) pro-vides a refreshing approach to such narratives



through his appreciation of the complexity of his-toric cultural patterns and recognition of the waysin which oral traditions continue to hold powerand meaning for contemporary community mem-bers More work should be done to examine thecontemporary social role of oral traditions and tosee how these roles play against each other (ie inpopular culture contemporary politics school cur-riculum) Studies like Boelsherrsquos work with con-temporary Haida political discursive practice(1988) are highly relevant in the current politicalmilieu where Native culture is drawn on to makearguments for social justice and equality

Finally what have been the contributions ofthe studies of Northwest Coast oral traditions as lit-erature Clearly such studies bring a careful andcreative methodology to the processes of transla-tion and in the discovery of the relationships be-tween narrative form and the range of meaningsexpressed in a story These literary perspectives re-mind us of Boasrsquo cautions in ascribing certain sin-gular meanings to narratives and move us towardsan appreciation of the complexity and interplay oflanguage and culture tradition and artistry Theyalso encourage anthropologists to engage in con-versation with the people we study to reflect onthe way our work is seen by others and to appreci-ate that these stories and narratives have sociallives outside the scope of our academic discussionIf we read the end-pages of these books (ie Bierw-ert et al 1996 Enrico 1995) they provide somemoral guidance on issues of cultural propertyrights and copyright sometimes taking the indige-nous social contexts of the stories being reported toheart bringing them along with their messages andartistry into the textual world

In this discussion of Northwest Coast oral tra-ditions individual stories have not been high-lighted This has been a critical study of ananthropological tradition and is less about a set ofNorthwest Coast narratives themselves Having re-flected on these treatments of Northwest Coast oraltraditions it is time to return again to the storiesmdashthe Raven and the Transformer the Boy who re-ceived his mask and spirit power from the lakethe Mouse who would not marry Beaver andSnakemdashand read hear or tell them with a new ap-preciation for how they can be meaningful andpowerful in all their social lives to come

End Notes1 This review is limited to an examination of theldquocentralrdquo and ldquonorthernrdquo Northwest Coast omit-

ting the literature for the ldquosouthernrdquo region fromthe mouth of the Columbia River down into north-ern California As the spellings of the names andthe relationships of one group to another is oftendifficult to follow on the Northwest Coast a tableof synonymy and standard groupings is providedin Table 1

2 During his tenure as coordinator of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition Boas directed his col-leagues to also record textsmdashresulting in impor-tant volumes such as Swantonrsquos Haida Texts(Swanton 1905 1908) and the work of James Teitwith the Nlakapamux (Thompson) (Boas [ed]1917 Teit 1898 1912 see also Wickwire 19931998 2001) and less voluminous works such asFarrandrsquos Quinault and Quileute texts (Farrand1902 Farrand and Mayer 1919 respectively)While working at Columbia University Boas in-spired a number of students to collect and publishmyths and oral traditions in areas he had nottouched himself including the important work ofEdward Sapir with the Nuu-chah-nulth (Sapir1924 Sapir and Swadish 1939) and some minorworks in Coast Salish communities which he hadnot worked in himself (ie Andrade 1931 Gun-ther 1925 Haeberlin 1924)

In at least one of his early English-only publica-tions the editor of the journal Boas published inmade complete deletions from the translation ofthe text indicated by a string of asterisks becauseof ldquocertain expressions which are not suitable forpublicationrdquo (Boas 1888206)

3 Maudrsquos critique of the Boas-Tate collaboration(Maud 2000) has in turn received some highlycritical attention from anthropologists who are in-timate with Boas and his work (Berman 2002 Dar-nell 2001 Raibmon 2001)

4 Relevant to the understanding of myths andproperty on the northern Northwest Coast is alarge literature on the relationship between crestart (an important symbol for property and socialorganization) and oral tradition Space does notpermit reviewing all this literature in this paperbut the reader is directed to a number of excellentsources including Barbeau 1950 de Laguna 1972Garfield and Forrest 1948 and MacDonald 1983

5 Published texts of oral traditions from CoastalSalishan languages include collections in BellaCoola (Boas 1895 1898b 1981 2002) Island Co-mox (Boas 1888 1981 2002) Klahuse (Boas 2002)Sliammon (Boas 2002) the now extinct Pentlatch(Boas 2002 Kinkade 1992) Squamish (Boas 2002)Island Halkomelem (Boas 1889 1981 2002) Upriver and Downriver Halkomelem (Boas 18942002) Straits Salish (Boas 1891 1981 2002)Tillamook (Boas 1898c) and a comparative



analysis of Coast Salish Transformer stories (Boas1916586ndash610)

6 This has been of interest as one of the only ma-trilineal inheritance practices of the dominantlybilateral central and southern Northwest Coastpeoples and stands in contrast to the more wellknown matrilineal property-holding groups of thenorthern Northwest Coast

7 Unfortunately only one short publication onher theoretical perspective and methodology forunderstanding oral tradition came out of the dis-sertation work (Snyder 1968) and another articleon the potlatch (Snyder 1975) which has been re-viewed very favorably (Adams 1981376) but hasreceived little subsequent attention Snyderrsquos workdeserves closer attention in Northwest Coast stud-ies particularly her insights into the lives and so-cial position of women

8 Anne Moon Whose Culture Is It AnywayTimes Colonist (Victoria) June 20 1999 p 10Hugh Brody Pilgrimage To the Poem Using rawmaterials collected nearly a century ago an ac-complished Canadian storyteller takes a journey tothe cultural heart of the Haida nation NationalPost July 6 1999 p B11 Hans Werner The Soulof Haida Gwaii The Toronto Star July 11 1999Mark Abley Haida Tales Brought Back to Life BCpoet translates record of oral verse made by an-thropologist The Gazette (Montreal) April 101999 p J4 Candace Fertile Haida MythologyEchoes Inclusively Calgary Herald July 3 1999p D7 Norbert Ruebsaat Tricking the TricksterVancouver Sun May 29 1999 p E11 The Mythsand the White Man experts on the stories of theHaida First Nation are infuriated by Vancouverpoet Robert Bringhurstrsquos new book Globe amp MailNov 15 1999 p C3 John Bemrose The TimelyWisdom of Traditional Tales the penetratingbeauty and great art of Haida poetry shinesthrough in new translations by West Coast poetand linguist Robert Bringhurst Macleanrsquosv112(28) July 12 1999 p 56 Val Ross Lost Mas-terpieces Regained Globe amp Mail July 17 1999 pC8 Dorothy Bartoszewki Land to Stand On CBCRadio Ideas June 20 27 2001

Acknowledgements The author would like togratefully acknowledge a number of importantsponsors of my work First I would like to thank anumber of agencies who have funded my doctoraldissertation research during which this paper wasprepared The Social Sciences and Humanities Re-search Council of Canada provided a doctoral fel-lowship Wenner-Gren Foundation provided aDoctoral Small Grants award The Jacobs Fund pro-vided a Research Grant BC Heritage Trust provided

a Graduate Studies scholarship I would like tothank Toby Morantz for invaluable advice and guid-ance in preparing this paper and to Susan Kaplaneditor of Arctic Anthropology and the anonymousreviewer for their insightful suggestions

References CitedAdams John1974 Dialectics and Contingency in ldquoThe Story of As-

diwalrdquo An Ethnographic Note In The Uncon-scious in Culture The Structuralism of ClaudeLeacutevi-Strauss in Perspective Ino Rossi edPp 170ndash178 New York E P Dutton

1981 Recent Ethnology of the Northwest Coast An-nual Review of Anthropology 10361ndash392

Ames Kenneth and Herbert Maschner1999 Peoples of the Northwest Coast Their Archaeol-

ogy and Prehistory London Thames and Hudson

Andrade Manuel1931 Quileute Texts New York Columbia University

Press

Barbeau Marius1917 Review of Boasrsquo ldquoTsimshian Mythologyrdquo Ameri-

can Anthropologist 19(4)548ndash563

1950 Totem Poles 2 vols Anthropological Series 30Ottawa National Museum of Canada Bulletin119

1961 Tsimsyan Myths Anthropological Series 54Ottawa National Museum of Canada Bulletinno 174

Barbeau Marius and William Beynon1987 Tsimshian Narratives 1 Tricksters Shamans

and Heroes John Cove and George MacDonaldeds Canadian Museum of Civilization MercurySeries Directorate Paper no 3 Ottawa Cana-dian Museum of Civilization

Barnett Homer1955 The Coast Salish of British Columbia Studies in

Anthropology no 4 Eugene University of Ore-gon Press

Bates Dawn Thom Hess and Vi Hilbert1994 Lushootseed Dictionary Seattle University of

Washington Press

Berman Judith1991 The Sealsrsquo Sleeping Cave The Interpretation of

Boasrsquo Kwakrsquowala Texts PhD dissertation De-partment of Anthropology University of Penn-sylvania

1992 Oolachan-Womanrsquos Robe Fish Blankets Masksand Meaning in Boasrsquos Kwakrsquowala Texts In Onthe Translation of Native American LiteraturesBrian Swann ed Pp 125ndash162 WashingtonDC Smithsonian Institution Press



1994 George Hunt and the Kwakrsquowala Texts Anthro-pological Linguistics 36(4)483ndash514

1996 ldquoThe Culture as it Appears to the Indian Him-selfrdquo Boas George Hunt and the Methods ofEthnography In Volksgeist as Method andEthic Essays on Boasian Ethnography and theGerman Anthropological Tradition GeorgeStocking ed Pp 215ndash256 Madison Universityof Wisconsin Press

2000 Red Salmon and Red Cedar Bark Another Lookat the Nineteenth-Century KwakwakarsquowakwWinter Ceremonial BC Studies 12512653ndash98

2001 Unpublished Materials of Franz Boas and GeorgeHunt A Record of 45 Years of Collaboration InGateways Exploring the Legacy of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition 1897ndash1902 Igor Krup-nik and William Fitzhugh eds Pp 181ndash213Washington DC National Museum of NaturalHistory Smithsonian Institution

2002 Review of Transmission Difficulties Franz Boasand Tsimshian Mythology by Ralph MaudAmerican Ethnologist 29(3)775ndash777

In ldquoSome Mysterious Means of Fortunerdquo A Look press at North Pacific Coast Oral History In Coming

to Shore Northwest Coast Ethnology Tradi-tions and Visions Marie Mauzeacute MichaelHarkin and Sergei Kan eds Lincoln Univer-sity of Nebraska Press

Bierwert Crisca (ed) 1996 Lushootseed Texts An Introduction to Puget

Salish Narrative Aesthetics Lincoln Universityof Nebraska Press

Bierwert Crisca1999 Brushed by Cedar Living by the River Coast

Salish Figures of Power Tuscon University ofArizona Press

Boas Franz1888 Myths and Legends of the Ccedilatloltq of Vancouver

Island The American Antiquarian 10(4)201ndash211 366ndash373

1889 Notes on the Snanaimuq American Anthropol-ogist 2321ndash328

1891 The Lkursquontildegen Second General Report on the In-dians of British Columbia Report of the SixtiethMeeting of the British Association for the Ad-vancement of Science pp 562ndash582

1894 The Indian Tribes of the Lower Fraser River Re-port of the Sixty-fourth Meeting of the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Sciencepp 454ndash463

1895 Salishan Texts Proceedings of the AmericanPhilosophical Society 3431ndash448

1898a Traditions of the Tillamook Indians Journal ofAmerican Folklore 11(40)23ndash38 133ndash150

1898b Introduction to James Teit ldquoTraditions of theThompson Indians of British Columbiardquo InMemoirs of the American Folklore Society no6 Franz Boas ed Pp 1ndash18 New York Ameri-can Folklore Society

1898c The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians Mem-oir of the American Museum of Natural Historyvol 1 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition NewYork American Museum of Natural History

1903 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition The Ameri-can Museum Journal 3(5)69ndash119

1910 Kwakiutl Tales Columbia University Contribu-tions to Anthropology no 2 New York Colum-bia University

1912 Tsimshian Texts (New Series) Publications ofthe American Ethnological Society 365ndash285

1916 Tsimshian Mythology Based on Texts Recordedby Henry W Tate Pp 29ndash1037 In Thirty-firstAnnual Report of the Bureau of American Eth-nology for the Years 1909ndash1910 WashingtonDC Government Printing Office

1917 Tales from the Lower Fraser River In Folktalesof Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes Franz Boased Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Soci-ety 11129ndash134 Lancaster American Folk-Lore Society

1935 Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in MythologyAmerican Folklore Society Memoir 28 NewYork

1940 Review of ldquoThe Serpent in Kwakiutl Religion AStudy of Primitive Culturerdquo by G W Locker InRace Language and Culture Franz Boas edPp 446ndash450 Chicago University of Chicago Press

1981 Indian Folktales from British Columbia TheMalahat Review 6045ndash77

2002 Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pa-cific Coast of America A Translation of FranzBoasrsquo 1895 edition of ldquoIndianische Sagen vonder Nord-Pacifischen Kuacuteste Amerikasrdquo RandyBouchard and Dorothy Kennedy eds DietrichBertz trans Vancouver Talonbooks

Boas Franz and George Hunt1905 Kwakiutl Texts Memoirs of the American Mu-

seum of Natural History 5(1ndash3) New York

1906 Kwakiutl Texts Publications of the Jesup NorthPacific Expedition 10(1) New York

Boelscher Marianne1988 The Curtain Within Haida Social and Mythical

Discourse Vancouver University of British Co-lumbia Press

Boelscher-Ignace Marianne1991 Haida Public Discourse and its Social Context

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 11(1)113ndash135



Bringhurst Robert1999 A Story as Sharp as a Knife The Classical Haida

Mythtellers and Their World Vancouver Dou-glas and McIntyre Ltd

2000 Nine Visits to the Mythworld Ghandl of theQayahl Llaanas Vancouver Douglas and McIn-tyre Ltd

2001 Being in Being The Collected Works of Skaay ofthe Qquuna Qiighawaay Vancouver Douglasand McIntyre Ltd

Codegravere Heacutelegravene1974 La Geste du Chien drsquoAsdiwal The Story of Mac

American Anthropologist 7642ndash47

Codere Helen1948 The Swairsquoxwe Myth of the Middle Fraser River

The Integration of Two Northwest Coast CulturalIdeas Journal of American Folklore 61(239) 1ndash18

Cole Douglas2001 The Greatest Thing Undertaken by Any Mu-

seum Franz Boas Morris Jesup and the NorthPacific Expedition In Gateways Exploring theLegacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition1897ndash1902 Igor Krupnik and William Fitzhugheds Pp 29ndash70 Washington DC National Mu-seum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution

Collins June1952 The Mythological Basis for Attitudes towards

Animals Among Salish-Speaking Indians Jour-nal of American Folklore 65353ndash359

1974 Valley of the Spirits The Upper Skagit Indiansof Western Washington Seattle University ofWashington Press

1994 Kinship Social Class and Religion of NorthwestCoast Peoples In North American Indian Anthro-pology Essays on Society and Culture RaymondDeMallie and Alfonso Ortiz eds Pp 82ndash107Norman University of Oklahoma Press

Cove John1987 Shattered Images Dialogues and Meditations on

Tsimshian Narratives Ottawa Carleton Univer-sity Press

Cranmer-Webster Gloria1997 The Contemporary Potlatch In Chiefly Feasts

The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch Aldona Jon-aitis ed Pp 227ndash250 Seattle University ofWashington Press

Cruikshank Julie1999 The Social Life of Texts Editing on the Page

and in Performance In Talking on the PageEditing Aboriginal Oral Texts Laura Murrayand Keren Rice eds Pp 97ndash119 Toronto Uni-versity of Toronto Press

Darnell Regna1990 Edward Sapir Franz Boas and the Americanist

Text Tradition Historiographica Linguistica17129ndash144

Darnell Regna2001 Review Essay Transmission Difficulties by

Ralph Maud and Potlatch at Gitsegukla by Mar-garet Anderson and Marjorie Halpin BC Studies130118ndash121

Dauenhauer Richard1981 Notes on Swanton Numbers 80 and 81 Journal

of American Folklore 94(373) 358ndash364

Dauenhauer Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer1987 Haa Shukaacute Our Ancestors Tlingit Oral Narra-

tives Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature vol 1Seattle University of Washington Press

1990 Haa Tuwunaacuteagu Yiacutes For Healing Our SpiritTlingit Oratory Seattle University of Washing-ton Press

1994 Haa Kusteeyiacute Our Culture Tlingit Life StoriesSeattle University of Washington Press

de Laguna Frederica1972 Under Mount Saint Elias The History and Cul-

ture of the Yakutat Tlingit Washington DCSmithsonian Institution Press

Drucker Philip1951 The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes Bu-

reau of American Ethnology Bulletin no 144Washington DC

Duff Wilson1952 The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley

British Columbia Anthropology in British Co-lumbia Memoirs no 1 Victoria British Colum-bia Provincial Museum

1959 Histories Territories and Laws of the Kitwan-cool Anthropology in British Columbia Mem-oir 41-45 Victoria British Columbia ProvincialMuseum

Dunn John1989 Tsimshian Poetics In General and Amerindian

Ethnolinguistics In Remembrance of StanleyNewman Mary Keyand and HenryHoenigswald eds Pp 397ndash406 New YorkMouton de Gruyter

Eastman Carol and Elizabeth Edwards1991 Gyaehingaay Traditions Tales and Images of

the Kaigani Haida Seattle University of Wash-ington Press

Enrico John1995 Skidegate Haida Myths and Histories Skide-

gate Queen Charlotte Islands Museum Press

Farrand Livingston1902 Traditions of the Quinalut Indians Memoir of the

American Museum of Natural History no 2 NewYork American Museum of Natural History

Farrand Livingston and Theresa Mayer1919 Quileute Tales Journal of American Folklore

32(124) 251ndash279



Finnegan Ruth1992 Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts A Guide to

Research Practices London Routledge

Galloway Brent1996 An Upriver Halkomelem Mink Story Ethnopo-

etics and Discourse Analysis In Papers for the31st International Conference on Salish andNeighboring Languages Vancouver ICSNL

Garfield Viola1966 The Tsimshian and Their Neighbours In The

Tsimshian Indians and Their Arts ViolaGarfield and Paul Wingert eds Pp 3ndash70 Seattle University of Washington Press

Garfield Viola and Linn Forrest1948 The Wolf and the Raven Seattle University of

Washington Press

Gunther Erna1925 Klallam Folk Tales University of Washington

Publications in Anthropology 1(4) 113ndash170

Haeberlin Herman1924 Mythology of Puget Sound Journal of American

Folklore 37371ndash438

Harkin Michael1997 The Heiltsuks Dialogues of Culture and History

on the Northwest Coast Lincoln University ofNebraska Press

1998 Whales Chiefs and Giants An Exploration intoNuu-Chah-Nulth Political Thought Ethnology37(4) 317ndash332

Hill-Tout Charles1978 The Salish People (in four volumes) Ralph

Maud ed Vancouver Talonbooks

Hill Jane1999 The Meaning of Writing and Text in a Changing

Americanist Tradition In Theorizing the Ameri-canist Tradition Lisa Philips Valentine andRegna Darnell eds Pp 181ndash194 Toronto University of Toronto Press

Hymes Dell1981 ldquoIn Vain I Tried to Tell Yourdquo Essays in Native

American Ethnopoetics Philadelphia Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press

1996 Coyote the Thinking (Wo)manrsquos Trickster InMonsters Tricksters and Sacred Cows AnimalTales and American Identities James Arnolded Pp 108ndash137 Charlottesville UniversityPress of Virginia

1999 Boas on the Threshold of Ethnopoetics In Theo-rizing the Americanist Tradition Lisa PhilipsValentine and Regna Darnell eds Pp 84ndash107Toronto University of Toronto Press

Jacobs Melville1959a Folklore In The Anthropology of Franz Boas

Walter Goldschmidt ed Pp 119ndash138 MenashaAmerican Anthropological Association

Jacobs Melville1959b The Content and Style of an Oral Literature New

York Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology

Jenness Diamondnd VII-G-9M Box 39 F1 Coast Salish Mythology

Canadian Museum of Civilization Hull

1955 Faith of a Coast Salish Indian Memoirs in An-thropology no 3 Victoria British ColumbiaProvincial Museum

Kinkade M Dale1992 Translating Pentlatch In On the Translation of

Native American Literatures Brian Swann edPp 163ndash175 Washington DC Smithsonian Institution Press

Krauss Michael1982 In Honor of Eyak The Art of Anna Nelson Harry

Fairbanks Alaska Native Language Center

Kroeber Karl1986 Elderberry and Stone Studies in American

Indian Literature 10(1) 38ndash42

Krupat Arnold1992 On the Translation of Native American Song

and Story A Theorized History In On theTranslation of Native American LiteraturesBrian Swann ed Pp 3ndash32 Washington DCSmithsonian Institution Press

Leacutevi-Strauss Claude1958 La Geste drsquoAsdiwal In Extrait de lrsquoAnnuaire

1958ndash9 Ecole Pracirctique des Hautes Etudespp 2ndash43 Section des Sciences ReligeusesParis Ecole Pracirctique des Hautes Etudes

Leacutevi-Strauss Claude1967 The Story of Asdiwal In The Structural Study of

Myth and Totemism Edmund Leach ed Pp 1ndash47ASA Monograph 5 London Tavistock

Langen Toby C S1989 The Organization of Thought in Lushootseed

(Puget Salish) Literature Martha LamontrsquosldquoMink and Changerrdquo Melus 16(1) 77ndash93

1992 Translating Form in Classical American IndianLiterature In On the Translation of NativeAmerican Literatures Brian Swann edPp 191ndash207 Washington DC Smithsonian Institution Press

LaViolette Forest1973 The Struggle for Survival Indian Cultures and

the Protestant Ethic in British ColumbiaToronto University of Toronto Press

Locher G W1932 The Serpent in Kwakiutl Religion A Study in

Primitive Culture Leiden E J Brill

MacDonald George1983 Haida Monumental Art Villages of the Queen

Charlotte Islands Vancouver University ofBritish Columbia Press



MacDonald George1984 The Epic of Nekt The Archaeology of Metaphor

In The Tsimshian Images of the Past Views forthe Present Margaret Seguin ed Pp 65ndash81Vancouver University of British ColumbiaPress

Malinowski Bronislaw 1948 Myth in Primitive Psychology In Magic Sci-

ence and Religion and Other EssaysPp 72ndash124 Boston Beacon Press

Marsden Susan2001 Defending the Mouth of the Skeena Perspec-

tives on Tsimshian Tliingit Relations In Per-spectives on Northern Northwest CoastPrehistory Jerome Cybulski ed Pp 61ndash106 Archaeological Survey of Canada Mercury Se-ries Paper no 160 Hull Canadian Museum ofCivilization

Matson R G and Gary Coupland1995 The Prehistory of the Northwest Coast New

York Academic Press

Mattina Anthony1987 North American Indian Mythography Editing

Texts for the Printed Page In Recovering theWord Essays on Native American LiteratureBrian Swann and Arnold Krupat edsPp 129ndash148 Berkeley University of CaliforniaPress

Maud Ralph1982 A Guide to British Columbia Indian Myth and

Legend Vancouver Talonbooks

1989 The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration onTsimshian Mythology American Ethnologist16(1)158ndash162

2000 Transmission Difficulties Franz Boas andTsimshian Mythology Vancouver Talonbooks

McIlwraith T F1948 The Bella Coola Indians in two volumes

Toronto University of Toronto Press

McMillan Alan and Ian Hutchinson2002 When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced

Aboriginal Traditions of Paleosceismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America Ethnohistory 49(1) 41ndash68

Miller Jay1989 An Overview of Northwest Coast Mythology

Northwest Anthropological Research Notes23125ndash141

Miller Jay and Vi Hilbert1996 Lushootseed Animal People Mediation and

Transformation from Myth to History In Mon-sters Tricksters and Sacred Cows Animal Talesand American Indian Identities James Arnolded Pp 138ndash156 Charlottesville University ofVirginia Press

Morantz Toby2001 Plunder or Harmony On Merging European

and Native Views of Early Contact In De-centring the Renaissance New Essays on EarlyModern Canada Germaine Warkentin edPp 48ndash67 Toronto University of Toronto Press

Raibmon Paige2001 Review of Transmission Difficulties Franz Boas

and Tsimshian Mythology by Ralph Maud Native Studies Review 14(1) 144ndash146

Ridington Robin1999 Theorizing Coyotersquos Cannon Sharing Stories with

Thomas King In Theorizing the Americanist Tradition Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell eds Pp 19ndash37 Toronto University ofToronto Press

Sapir Edward1912 Review Article Kwakiutl Tales by Franz Boas

Current Anthropological Literature 1193ndash198

1924 The Rival Whalers a Nitinat Story (NootkaTexts with Translation and Grammatical Analy-sis) International Journal of American Linguis-tics 3(1)76ndash102

Sapir Edward and Morris Swadesh1939 Nootka Texts Tales and Ethnological Narratives

with Grammatical Notes and Lexical MaterialPhiladelphia University of Pennsylvania Lin-guistic Society of America

Sarris Greg1993 Keeping Slug Woman Alive A Holistic Ap-

proach to American Indian Texts BerkeleyUniversity of California Press

Seaburg William and Pamela Amoss2000 Badger and Coyote Were Neighbors Corvallis

Oregon State University Press

Seguin Margaret1985 Interpretive Contexts for Traditional and Cur-

rent Coast Tsimshian Feasts National Museumof Man Mercury Series Ethnology Service Pa-pers no 98 Ottawa National Museum of Man

Sherzer Joel1987 A Discourse-Centered Approach to Language

and Culture American Anthropologist89295ndash309

Snyder Sally1964 Skagit Society and its Existential Basis An Eth-

nofolkloristic Reconstruction Ph D disserta-tion Department of Anthropology University ofWashington

Snyder Sally1968 Stylistic Stratification in an Oral Tradition

Anthropologica 10(1) 235ndash259

1975 Quest for the Sacred in Northern Puget SoundAn Interpretation of Potlatch Ethnology14(2)149ndash161



Sterritt Neil Susan Marsden Robert Galois Peter Grant and Richard Overstall1998 Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed Van-

couver University of British Columbia Press

Suttles Wayne1957 The ldquoMiddle Fraserrdquo and ldquoFoothillrdquo Cultures A

Criticism Southwestern Journal of Anthropol-ogy 13156ndash183

1991 Streams of Property Armor of Wealth The Tra-ditional Kwakiutl Potlatch In Chiefly FeastsThe Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch Aldona Jonaitis ed Pp 71ndash134 Vancouver Douglasand McIntyre Press

Swann Brian1985 Song of the Sky Versions of Native American

Songs and Poems Ashuelot Four Zoas NightHouse Press

Swanton John1905 Haida Texts and Myths Skidegate Dialect Bu-

reau of American Ethnology Bulletin no 29Washington

1908 Haida Texts Masset Dialect Memoirs of theAmerican Museum of Natural History 14(2)New York

Tedlock Dennis1983 The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpreta-

tion Philadelphia University of PennsylvaniaPress

Teit James1898 Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of

British Columbia Memoirs of the AmericanFolklore Society 1161ndash137

1912 Mythology of the Thompson Indians FranzBoas ed Memoirs of the American Museum ofNatural History 12 Publications of the JesupNorth Pacific Expedition 8(2) New York

Tennant Paul1990 Aboriginal Peoples and Politics The Indian

Land Question in British Columbia 1849ndash1989Vancouver University of British ColumbiaPress

Thom Brian2001 Aboriginal Rights and Title in Canada after Del-

gamuukw Part One Oral Traditions and An-thropological Evidence in the CourtroomNative Studies Review 14(1) 1ndash26

Thomas L L J Z Kronenfeld and D B Kronenfeld1976 Asdiwal Crumbles A Critique of Leacutevi-Strauss-

ian Myth Analysis American Ethnologist3(1)147ndash174

Thompson Laurence1979 Salishan and the Northwest In The Languages

of Native North America Historical and Com-parative Assessment Lyle Campbell and Mari-anne Mithnun eds Pp 692ndash765 AustinUniversity of Texas Press

Valentine Lisa Philips and Regna Darnell (eds) 1999 Introductions Timely Conversations In Theo-

rizing the Americanist Tradition pp 3ndash18Toronto University of Toronto Press

Wickwire Wendy1993 Women in Ethnography The Research of James

A Teit Ethnohistory 40(4) 539ndash562

1998 ldquoWe Shall Drink from the Stream and So ShallYourdquo James A Teit and Native Resistance inBritish Columbia 1908-22 Canadian HistoricalReview 79(2) 199ndash236

2001 ldquoThe Grizzly Gave Them the Songrdquo James Teitand Franz Boas Interpret Twin Ritual in Aborig-inal British Columbia 1897ndash1920 American In-dian Quarterly 25(3) 431ndash452




Table 1 Synonymy for Northwest Coast Cultural and Linguistic Group Names

This list of names represents the widely practised (Suttles 1990) English spellings of the Northwest Coast cultural regional and linguistic group names with their equivalents from the literature cited here Culturalor regional groups not mentioned are in square brackets [ ] and often on one line Regional groups are notelaborated for those cultural groups which are only mentioned generally in the text As there are so manylocal groups those not mentioned in the text are not elaborated on here

CULTURAL GROUPS Languages Regional Groups Local Groups Region

EYAK

NorthernNWC

TLINGIT

HAIDA KaiganiMassettSkidegate

TSIMSHIAN TsimshianNisgaaGitksan Gitanyow

(=Kitwancool)

KWAKIUTL (=KWAGUL=KWAKWAKAWAKW)

Kwakwala

CentralNWC

[HAISLA HEILTSUKOOWEKYALA]

NOOTKA(=NUU-CHAH-NULTH)

BELLA COOLA

COAST SALISH

Halqemeacuteylem(=Halkomelem)

Straits Salish

Lushootseed

Island Comox (= Ccedilatloltq)PentlatchKlahooseSliammon[Homalco Sechelt]SquamishIsland HalkomelemUpriver Halkomelem(=Stoacutelocirc)Straits Salish (=LkuntildegEn)

LushootseedQuinaultTwana[Chehalis Cowlitz]

Katzie

SaanichKlallamUpper Skagit

QUILEUTE

[CHEMAKUM]

CHINOOKSouthern

NWC[CATHLAMET]

TILLAMOOK

















































































e

e









e

















































































e






ee

e







eventsrdquo



eee

e

e


































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press























































































































































e

e









e

















































































e






ee

e







eventsrdquo



eee

e

e


































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press














































































e

















































































e






ee

e







eventsrdquo



eee

e

e


































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press




















































































































































e






ee

e







eventsrdquo



eee

e

e


































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press











































































ee

e







eventsrdquo



eee

e

e


































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press








































































































Press










Washington Press


























































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press




























































































































































32(124) 251ndash279










Washington Press





















































York Academic Press















































































Washington Press





















































York Academic Press















































































York Academic Press








































































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