about this collection was its 1937 publication date. Since this was fifteen years after Teit’s death, I deduced that these were stories that Boas had withheld from publication due to their “impurities.” He must have changed his mind toward the end of his career because he assigned Lucy Kramer to the task of editing the stories for publication in the Journal of Folklore.31
These little-known Okanagan stories provided a rich historical context for Harry’s stories. Finally there was tangible evidence that Harry’s forebears were not strictly “mythtellers” locked in their prehistorical past. I was now keen to look more closely at how Teit had handled the issue of individual variation in his earlier publications. His 1917 presentation of three Okanagan creation stories offered some valuable insights on this. Instead of following the usual pattern of turning the three stories into one composite story, Teit presented each story on its own.32 The end result was a set of three very different perspectives on how the world and its first peoples came into being. The first, entitled “Old One,” explained creation as follows:
Old-One, or Chief, made the earth out of a woman, and said she would be the mother of all the people…. Old-One, after transforming her, took some of her flesh and rolled it into balls, as people do with mud and clay. These he transformed into beings of the ancient world…. (80)
The second story, told by a Similkameen narrator, offered a different view:
The Chief above made the earth…. He created the animals. At last he made a man, who, however, was also a wolf. From this man’s tail he made a woman. These were the first people. They were called “Tai’en” by the old people, who knew the story well, and they were the ancestors of all the Indians. (84)
Later, “Old-One” made “Indians” in much the same way. He blew on them “and they became alive.” Teit noted that this story evolved into “the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man nearly in the same way as given in the Bible.”
The third story, entitled “Origin of the Earth and People,” had some obvious links to the first one, but it was still quite different from the other two:
The Chief (or God) made seven worlds, of which the earth is the central one. Maybe the first priests of white people told us this, but some of us believe it now.… Perhaps in the beginning the earth was a woman.… He transformed her into the earth we live on, and he made the first Indians out of her flesh (which is the soil). Thus the first Indians were made by him from balls of red earth or mud.… Other races were made from soil of different colours.… (84)
An Okanagan creation story published in 1938 by anthropologist Leslie Spier shed more light on the issue of individual variation. Collected by L. V. W. Walters, one of five students in Spier’s anthropological field school, the story was attributed to Suszen Timentwa, chief of the Kartar Band. Like Harry’s origin story, Timentwa’s story included references to whites, books, and laws. “[I]n the beginning as in the Bible,” explained Timentwa, “God created the world, and created animals.” This God gave Coyote a “little book” that he explained would “get you help to watch you from today.”33
Like Teit’s second account above, Timentwa included Adam and Eve in his story:
After Adam and Eve did wrong, God took away one land from the top and put it to one side for the Indians-to-be. God took the laws with the Indian land and left the other land without laws. Then God built an ocean to separate these lands: one land was for the Indians, another for the white people. Indians did not need books because they knew things in their minds that they learned from the creatures. About the time of Christ, God made the creatures. This was before Christ was born, so that Christ could preach about the other land.… When the white people came to the Indians here, the priest told the Indians what they had forgotten. (177)
It was difficult to determine a common storyline among these stories.
A survey of neighbouring Nlaka’pamux creation stories collected by Teit revealed a similar range of diversity. According to one, “Old One” took some soil from an upper world, formed it into a ball, and threw it into a lake. On hitting the surface of the water, it shattered and became “a broken mass of flats, hollows, hills and islets” much as we see now.34 According to another, Earth was a woman who lived with Stars, Moon, and Sun long before the world was formed. Because of her constant pestering, Sun abandoned her. Eventually, Stars and Moon did the same. “Old One” then took pity on her by transforming her into the present earth who gave birth to “people, who were very similar in form to ourselves.” But they knew nothing until “Old One” travelled around teaching them things.35
An elderly “shaman … from Sulus” told Teit that his grandfather had told him that “Old One” descended on a cloud from an upper world to a large lake. He pulled five hairs from his head and threw them onto the surface of the lake, at which point they became five “perfect” women who were endowed with “speech, sight, and hearing.” He asked each what they would like to be in life. The first said she would like to be “bad and foolish, and … seek after my own pleasure.” She claimed that her relatives would “fight, lie, steal, murder and commit adultery. They will be wicked.” The second wished to be good and virtuous and have children who would be “wise, peaceful, honest, truthful and chaste.” The third wanted to be the “earth” upon which her sisters lived. The fourth wanted to be “fire.” And the fifth wanted to be “water,” from which people drew “life and wisdom.” He then transformed them. The third daughter “fell backwards, spread out her legs, and rolled off from the cloud into the lake, where she took the form of the earth we live on.” The children of two of the women were male and female. They married “and from them all people are descended.” According to yet another account, “Old One” encountered a woman who was alone and very unhappy about her situation. To make her happy, “Old One” transformed her into “the earth, which he made expand, and shape itself into valleys, mountains, and plains.” Her blood dried up and became “gold, copper and other metals.” Then “Old One” moved on to “make the Nicola country.” He then created “four men and a woman,” (some thought “four women”) who became the first inhabitants. After teaching them how to survive, he left. But before doing so, he promised to return at which point “your mother, the Earth, from whom all things grow will again assume her original and natural form.”36
The collections were just as divided on the subject of Coyote. In fact, Teit recorded so many varied Okanagan perspectives on Coyote that he added a note to highlight this point:
Some think Coyote belonged to the earth, like other people. He was an Indian, but of greater knowledge and power than the others. Some think he was one of the semi-human ancients. Others think he did not belong to this world, but to some other sphere, such as the sky or spirit-land. Still others think he was a kind of deity or chief, or helper of the Chief, before he came to earth. In the opinion of some Indians, Coyote acted with a purpose, and knew that he had been sent to fulfill a mission. Others think he did not know, but that his actions were prompted by some other power, and that he did not transform the monsters or perform other acts for the purpose of benefiting mankind. All agree that he was selected for the mission he performed; but whether he was living in the sky when selected, or on the earth, or elsewhere, is not certain.37
Teit’s emphasis on cultural fluidity, however, was offset by others’ efforts to draw hard conclusions. Hill-Tout, for example, had claimed in 1911 that Coyote was “not a native product of the mythology of the stock” at all, but rather adopted from elsewhere.38 Heister Dean Guie, a newspaper journalist, concluded that Coyote was better understood as a children’s storybook character. With this in view, he edited and sanitized a collection of adult stories collected by Christine Quintasket. In the process, Guie turned Coyote into a generic “Imitator/Trick Person”—a fairy tale figure of sorts—who rarely acted in truly offensive ways. The book sold
