representative sense of the whole.
Over the next few years, however, I continued to reflect on the stories that I had left out of these two volumes—stories such as Coyote’s meeting with the king and others about talking cats and disappearing cows and horses. The latter were so unusual and so unlike anything in the Boasian collections that I had decided to put them aside. But then I began to wonder how much of Boas’s editorial decisions had influenced my own selection process.
My timing for such questioning was ideal. In the early 1990s the Boasian research paradigm had become the subject of intense critical scrutiny.13 The poststructuralist turn in the social sciences was partly responsible for this review. It had spawned a new generation of scholars intent on exposing the ideological foundations of anthropological practice. The Boasian project was an easy target. Critics such as James Clifford, Rosalind Morris, Michael Harkin, David Murray, and others focussed on a number of issues, in particular the Boasians’ fixation on the deep past. Although the Boasians had recorded hundreds of Aboriginal oral narratives, they had limited themselves to a single genre: the so-called “legends,” “folk-tales,” and “myths” set in prehistorical times. They had little interest in the fact that many of their narrators were horsepackers, miners, cannery workers, missionary assistants, and laborers who maintained equally vibrant stories about their more recent past. As Harkin explained, the collectors’ goal was to document “some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people.” Thus they “systematically suppressed … all evidence of history and change.”14 Such erasure had serious long term consequences for Aboriginal peoples.
Anthropologists working in South America were pursuing a similar line of argument at this time.15 Their target was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had used Amazonian examples to test his theories of “cold,” mythic societies. As Terence Turner explained, “To base one’s entire analysis of social consciousness … on one or a few traditional rituals and narratives and then to conclude that the culture as a whole is in the mythic phase, lacking a concept of history, may reflect a lack in the investigative procedure more than a lack in the culture.”16 Emilienne Ireland endorsed Turner with her study of “white man” stories of the Waura peoples of Brazil. She stressed that myth was important for its ability to “mak[e] statements about the present and the future.” The Waura “myth,” she explained, took “a historic tragedy of monstrous proportions and transformed it into an affirmation of their own moral values and of the destiny to survive as a people.”17 Charles Hill-Tout, a British ethnographer who worked among the Okanagan in 1911, was particularly entrenched in the salvage paradigm. His position on the “mythology” he collected was that it was valuable for revealing “the mind of the native as it was before contact with white influence.”18 “In no other way now,” he wrote, “can we get real and genuine glimpses of the forgotten past. They are our only reliable record.… ”19 Never mind that the “minds” in question were several generations removed from precontact times or that the tellers of the myths had not experienced life without whites.
The impact of this fixation on “myth” hit home one day when I was sifting through some fieldnotes sent to Franz Boas from British Columbia by his colleague, James Teit. Among the latter’s notes was a version of the story Harry had told me about God’s appearance at Lytton to trade his knowledge of whites for a patchwork blanket. According to Teit’s account the visitor was “Sun” who traded four items—a gun, a bow, an arrow, and a goat-hair robe—for the old woman’s “blankets of birds-skins.”20 Yet, when Boas edited the story for publication, he had removed the word “gun” from this list, thus transforming what may have been intended as a historical narrative into the more desirable “precontact” myth.21 Boas was familiar with the story as he had recorded a Nlaka’pamux version at Lytton in 1888.22 I was curious to see that just as Harry had told me that story during one of our first sessions, one of the Nlaka’pamux storytellers had similarly told it to Boas during his first session at Lytton.23
Such examples raised questions about the messages that collectors gleaned from their narrators’ stories. Could Boas have mistaken a contemporary— even quasi-Christianized—story for a traditional “myth/legend”? Could he have edited a historical account to make it fit his vision of a prehistorical myth? And what about the Nlaka’pamux storytellers? Could they have selected this story for Boas, as Harry did in my case, to convey a political message—that whites were, and would always be, visitors on “Indian” land? Could they have told it to establish their superiority in relation to whites, that is, that they had had knowledge about the arrival of whites before their actual arrival? Did their “Sun” have associations with Harry’s “God”? The Sun of the 1888 Lytton session was, after all, “a man” who lived in the sky above an “ocean” somewhere far to the east.
Determined to resolve some of these issues, I scoured the old collections hoping to find further references to guns, whites, and other such things. Although Boas was preoccupied with suppressing such “impurities,”24 I knew that one of his most active field associates, James Teit, was not. Teit was fully immersed in the contemporary lives and languages of Aboriginal peoples through his Nlaka’pamux wife, Antko, and his work as a translator for the Aboriginal political protest organizations.25 Through such cultural immersion, he was more aware than many of his colleagues of the full range of stories in their natural settings.
I quickly found a little-known Teit collection featuring seven stories literally peppered with cultural “impurities.”26 It was exactly what I needed. Even better, these were Similkameen stories. They were published as “Thompson Indian Tales,” but this was in fact an error. Teit’s fieldnotes had indicated clearly that some of the stories had originated with “Bert Allison,” a prominent Similkameen chief.27
The opening story was perfect. Entitled “Coyote and the Paper,” it featured an encounter between “Old One or Great Chief” and Coyote in which the former tried to replace Coyote’s excrement (from whom Coyote often sought counsel) with paper so that Coyote would have an easier time carrying it around. Coyote accepted the paper but then lost it a few days later. The narrator considered this a major loss. “If Coyote had not lost it [the paper],”he explained, “the Indians would now know writing, and the whites would not have had the opportunity to obtain written language.”28 In the context of this story, Harry’s accounts of the twins and the paper, and others about meetings between Coyote and the king were not so unusual after all.
There were references to whites scattered throughout this collection. Several stories featured groups of young men—brothers/companions—who travelled to “towns” in search for work: blacksmithing, carpentry, farmwork, cowboying, and splitting wood. Life was not easy as they had to deal with nasty employers and landowners who made impossible demands on them. For example, in one story, a boy named Jack encountered a man who so objected to his marriage to his daughter that he threatened to kill him if he could not clear a dense piece of forest in a single day, or if he could not make water flow instantly from a distant creek to his house.29
Several stories targeted white authority figures. In one account, a young man, Jack, was challenged by his employer to steal the priest from the next village. So he concocted a grand plan. He dressed himself up as a priest, went to the church in the next village, lit the candles, and began to perform mass. When the resident priest saw this, he knelt down and prayed. Jack told him that God had sent him to tell the priest that he was so pleased with his work that he wanted him to go to heaven without dying. All he had to do to get to “heaven tonight” was to climb into a sack and allow himself to be carried to a designated spot. The priest did as he was told. Jack then carried the sack to his uncle’s place. Once there, he told the priest that when he heard “the cock crowing, [he would] know that heaven is near, and [he would thus] be taken up soon after that.” When the people arrived the next day, they found the priest in the sack crying, “Let me be! The cocks have crowed and I will soon ascend to God.” On realizing
