spoke with a drawn-in voice. He spoke funny. You knew it was him when you heard his voice” (32).
40. National Archives, RG10, vol. 7781, file 27150-3-3, Teit to Duncan Campbell Scott, 2 March 1916.
41. One notable document, a “Memorial to Laurier,” presented by the Interior chiefs to Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier at Kamloops in 1910, was a history of the nineteenth century from the perspectives of the chiefs. For more on this, see Wickwire, “James A.Teit and Native Resistance,” 1998.
42. Rohner, The Ethnography of Franz Boas, 86.
43. Ibid., 38.
44. Ibid., 239.
45. British Columbia poet Robert Bringhurst has recently introduced the term “mythteller” to the British Columbia anthropological lexicon. Based on his study of the Haida oral narrative collections of Boasian ethnographer John Swanton, Bringhurst concluded that the storytellers were “mythtellers.” See A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999).
A SPATLA WAS KILLED BY RABBIT AND CHIPMUNK
Eliminating spatla was no easy task.
I could tell that stories, three, four days
and never end.
But I can’t tell ’em all now.
Just a part of it, just the first part.
The Indians, they know, just like they do in the Bible says.
They know the same way almost,
not exactly the same way, but likely.
And these woman, Indian,
they say there’s four of them.
Women.
Big one.
Extra big.
And they call that spatla in our language.
But I cannot say what it would be called in English.
But only in my language, they call ’em spatla.
They are bad.
They packs that basket and they got the babies—
the two-year-old or more, or little baby,
and throw ’em in that basket.
Then they kill ’em by that cactus.
Then they take ’em in the bush and cook ’em and eat ’em.
They make a fire, and they roast ’em.
They roast ’em on the stick,
get ’em cooked, and eat.
They might eat the whole baby at one meal.
Then they look for another one for the next meal.
That’s what the spatla do.
They eat person.
They eat people.
Not the big one, but the small one.
They like the baby ones, because they tender.
Just like little deer.
And the chance they will get,
it will eat the big person if they can only kill ’em.
Well, they can kill ’em.
They easy to kill because him, herself, they’re big.
They do anything to the other person like we are.
They kill ’em and eat ’em.
But they like the smaller one more than they do the big one,
or the big person.
That’s the stories in Indian.
And in the Bible, that these two man,
they’re big too.
They alike and they sound the same way.
And these stories in Indian—spatla,
the white people, they must’ve heard that from some Indian
somehow in Omak maybe long time ago.
And one time, at the rodeo time,
that was about the 1980 or ’81, one of these years,
I was there.
And I see the white people,
they make a show, like that spatla.
Just how it was told for the stories.
One man, they make some kind of pack.
The other one make the two, three of ’em, maybe four.
And they packed a great big thing, you know,
but it’s not heavy.
They light but it looks like a heavy pack.
And they walks around in the ring,
on the outside the ring,
the way to go into a grandstand.
And they go around, the two of them.
That shows, they do that when they imbellable* stories.
The white man did that, not the Indians.
The white man can do.
Not the Indian.
But that was the stories
they know that from the Indian.
And they figure they do the same, but not exactly.
And a lot of people, white and Indian,
they don’t know what that is
when they see these mans around.
They only say,
“My, they’re a big mans too.
And they got a big pack.”
That’s
