Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, eds., Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002); James A. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898); and id., “Mythology of the Thompson Indians,” vol. 8, part 2 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1912), 199–416.
6. Teit, Traditions, 28. The Latin segment appears in footnote 73 on p. 105.
7. I am grateful to Lynne Jorgesen for this comment.
8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
9. Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 9.
10. A quick survey of the historical records uncovered nothing about John P. Curr. Historian Richard Mackie concluded on the basis of the pack train, the men with uniforms, the mention of a few white men living here and there, and the execution of the chief that the setting for this story was probably circa 1858–62. He noted that it seemed typical of “the American overland militaristic migration to the Fraser or Cariboo gold rushes.” Mackie explained that the chief would not have had a letter from Ottawa before 1871; however, he could well have had such a letter from a surveyor or a government employee from Victoria or New Westminster by then. He dated it at 1858–59 (e-mail correspondence, 1 August 2005). Historian Dan Marshall offered a similar view. He suggested that Curr’s brigade may have consisted of miners. “Starting in 1858,” he explained, “large companies of miners, many of them old Indian fighters, took the Columbia-Okanagan route to the BC goldfields. These companies ranged in size, many of them amounting to hundreds. The number of deaths that occurred on either side of the border during that year suggests that 1858 may be the time period in question, references to Ottawa and Vancouver aside” (email correspondence, 5 August 2005).
11. Vancouver and Penticton: Talonbooks and Theytus Books, 1989.
12. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992; reprint, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004.
13. See, for example the following: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Michael Harkin, “Past Presence: Conceptions of History in Northwest Coast Studies,” Arctic Anthropology 33, no. 2 (1996): 1–15; Judith Berman, “‘The Culture As It Appears to the Indian Himself’: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Volksgeist’ As Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 215–256; Rosalind Morris, New Worlds from Fragments: Film Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
14. Michael Harkin, “(Dis)pleasures of the Text: Boasian Ethnology on the Central Northwest Coast,” in Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, eds. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 93–105.
15. Jonathan D. Hill, ed., Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
16. Terence Turner, “Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact with Western Society,” in Rethinking History and Myth, ed. Jonathan D. Hill, 174.
17. Emilienne Ireland, “Cerebral Savage: The Whiteman as Symbol of Cleverness and Savagery in Waura Myth,” in Rethinking History and Myth, 172. In British Columbia, anthropologists Julie Cruikshank and Robin Ridington were drawing attention to similar issues. See Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) and id., “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 1 (1992): 20–41. See also Robin Ridington, Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988) and id., Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1990).
18. Hill-Tout, in Maud, The Salish People, Vol. 1, 137.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. James A. Teit, New York City: Fieldnotes, Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
21. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 34.
22. Boas, Indianische Sagen, 52.
23. Ronald Rohner, ed., The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the Northwest Coast from 1886–1931 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 99–100. For a more detailed examination of this story, see Wendy Wickwire, “Prophecy at Lytton,” in Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, ed. Brian Swann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 134–170.
24. For more on this, see Judith Berman, “The Culture As It Appears to the Indian Himself.” See also Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, “‘The Foundation of All Future Researches’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1999): 479–527.
25. For more on James Teit’s political activism, see Wendy Wickwire, “‘We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall You’: James A.Teit and Native Resistance in British Columbia, 1908–22,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1998): 199–236.
26. Teit, “More Thompson Indian Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 50, no. 196 (1937): 173–190.
27. Teit, Philadelphia: Fieldnotes, American Philosophical Society (APS).
28. Teit, “More Thompson Indian Tales,” 170.
29. Ibid., 180.
30. Ibid., 184.
31. Ibid., 173. Footnote 1 explains that “the following hitherto unpublished tales have been taken from manuscripts by the late James A. Teit and edited by Lucy Kramer.”
32. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 80–84.
33. Spier et al., The Sinkaietk, 197–198.
34. Teit, Mythology of the Thompson Indians, 320.
35. Ibid., 321.
36. Ibid., 323–324.
37. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 82.
38. Hill-Tout, in Maud, The Salish People, Vol. 1, 134.
39. Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories. See also Alanna K. Brown, “The Evolution of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, nos. 2 & 3 (1992): 161–179. A new collection of stories recorded by Darwin Hanna and Mamie Henry—Our Tellings: Interior Salish Stories of the Nlha7kapmx People (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995)—helped to reverse this trend. Herb Manuel’s presentation of Coyote was never static or abstract. In fact, Manuel described Coyote so vividly that one would think that he had met Coyote: “He was kind of always undernourished.
