Petitot and Missionary Predilections
Until the last decade there was nothing by or about Emile Petitot in English, beyond a few encyclopedia entries. When attention was recently focussed on the Mackenzie Valley, the Northern Science Research Group of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development astutely apportioned some of its funds to the editing of two resplendent volumes entitled The Amerindians of the Canadian North-West in the 19th Century, as seen by Emile Petitot (1971). The samples of stories reprinted from Traditions Indiennes du Canada NordOuest (1886, with the Native language texts as found in the 1888 edition) are strictly confined to the Mackenzie Valley Eskimo and Loucheaux, but there are enough of them to convince us that Petitot had a deft hand at taking down a specific telling of a story without losing its clarity and charm. I am persuaded as to his authenticity by one passage in particular. Not only is the teller of the story named, with date and place of telling (Fort Good Hope, December 1870—Petitot in his eighth year of residence in those parts), but the precise wording seems “right”:
Emil Petitot, ordained priest on 15 March 1862, just before his departure for the Canadian Northwest.
. . . when day came, the evening-wife disappeared once more, but her husband followed her at a distance. “Where is she going, and why does she want to go?” he wondered. Then he saw her walking naked into a black, filthy swamp. There she stood upright, with a black snake wound around her. Witness of this abomination, Dindjie was thunderstruck, and left the evening-wife where she was. . . she ran into the swamps and disappeared. Nothing was ever heard of her again. When the Hudson’s Bay Company came here, we thought it was the bad evening-wife who had returned to us.1
The business about the snake is surely something a priest shouldn’t listen to outside of confession, and the comment on the Hudson’s Bay Company is practically sedition; but Petitot does not hesitate to put them in. This passage is a touchstone which indicates to me that one can read Petitot with confidence.
Up to a point. Can a missionary really allow himself to place a high value on pagan mythology? In his History of the Catholic Church in Western Canada (1910) Father Morice does not mention that Petitot collected and published myths and legends. What is more, the role of priest as ethnologist is not dealt with at all in that two-volume history—which is quite schizophrenic, seeing that Father Morice was himself one of the greatest ethnologists of Western Canada. The situation is paradoxical. Perhaps the Church felt it could go more freely about its task of eradicating paganism if one or two of its priests recorded the old ways for posterity. Morice wrote many brilliant papers for scholarly journals, and he would figure much more prominently in our discussion here but for the fact that he published very few legends. He knew masses of them; why did he not print more?
We have no complaint about his “Three Carrier Myths” article. Indeed, it is a pleasure to hear him tell how he transcribed them:
I have a reliable Indian narrate me as clearly as possible the whole of one myth (when this is not too long) in his native language. I then repeat as verbatim as I can what I have heard, subject to corrections when such may be necessary, and then I write down the whole in Indian . . . . As I speak Carrier more fluently than English or even than my native French, my thoughts are generally through the channel of the aboriginal idiom, so that I find no great difficulty in repeating, and afterwards in writing down in almost the same terms what has been told me. This method has also the advantage of preventing the narrative from being cut up in those short, half-line sentences common to the stories transcribed on dictation, and which some may wrongly believe to be the normal condition of Indian phraseology.2
Father Morice, O.M.I., “a 1’entree de son jardin, felicite (mai 1933) de son elevation au grade de Docteur en Droit”; with the noted Vancouver historian, Judge Howay. Photo courtesy of Archives Deschatelets, Ottawa.
Good; but why not publish more? From his commentary on the “Three Carrier Myths,” it becomes clear that each was chosen for a purpose. The first is connected to the Fall and the Hood; the second to the burning of Sodom; and the third to Greek mythology (p. 35). Morice apparently desires to discover for his wards a kinship with the Mediterranean cradle of civilization, the lost tribes of Israel hinted at (p. 26). We find Petitot saying the same kind of thing: “the traditional story of Moses has been preserved in a more archaic form among the peoples of the far north. . . .We have, in the Dene-dindjie people, some of the lost remnants of Israel now converted to Catholicism” (Vol. I, p. 64). Thus, the two Catholic missionaries who are on record as attending to myth and legend have something of an axe to grind. Whether or not it affected in subtle ways what seems so authentic in Petitot is probably not susceptible of proof. Clearly, it affected Morice’s choice of what myths he published. And when he defends himself against “the charge of negligence in not having, to this day, collected more than fragments” by stating that their epic is “merely a Carrier version of a myth which is the original property of the Pacific Coast Indians” (p. 1), then we are doubly disappointed. He neglects the Carrier heroic narrative because it is similar to what he has heard elsewhere: the argument is unworthy of him. The hidden motive must be his instinct that the old imaginative cosmology is too powerful. With their own epic intact, the Carrier would not be a lost tribe, needing to be saved.
Let us not leave the other denominations out of the discussion. The Rev. Thomas Crosby, who speaks for the Methodists in his Among the An-ko-me-nums (Toronto 1907), writes: “Of their [the Halkomelem] traditions we have not much to say” (p. 114). In the later autobiography, Up and Down the North Pacific Coast by Canoe and Mission Ship (Toronto 1914), he allows his daughter a few pages for some stories she heard as a teacher of Indian children (pp. 100-111). They are slender offerings. They might be of interest to an expert on the tribe concerned. This would be a general rule in all these cases: a scholar with vital interest in a subject will find even the most peripheral material pertinent—the smallest pieces have an essential place in his big jigsaw puzzle. Pursuing our aim of trying to find reliable texts which are interesting in themselves, we may have to cast aside, with ungracious haste, contributions such as Miss Jessie Crosby’s.
And even the Rev. Charles Harrison’s. He was the Anglican clergyman in the Queen Charlotte Islands for forty years, published a Haida grammar, and could speak to the people in their own tongue; but he used his competence in the cause of conversion only. In the chapter of Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (London 1925) on the Indian’s view of life after death, it is curious how precisely it reflects his own; for it is a world of the good and bad injun. The virtuous one goes to heaven: “the gates of cedar, beautifully carved and ornamented with shells, were thrown open for his admittance, and his soul, which by this time had assumed the shape of his earthly body, but clothed in ethereal light, was delivered to the Chief of Light. . . .The bad Indian, in the region of the clouds,” the Rev. Harrison reports, “was suppposed to be tortured continually” (p. 126). This seems a wee bit High Church. The Raven story of Chapter XI (pp. 149-164) has merit; but there is no reason to seek out this version, unless, of course, one is working on a Haida jigsaw puzzle, in which case Harrison is quite a large piece to find a place for.
Archie Phinney and the Limits of the Printed Page
If an intelligent young man from an Indian band went to college, got good training in ethnographic techniques, and then returned home to collect and edit his tribal stories, he would, to say the least, be a better bet than your average missionary. This is what we have in the case of Archie Phinney, B.A. Kansas, 1926; graduate courses in anthropology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; thence to Columbia, where he had the good sense to seek out Franz Boas, who, after further training,
