against this backdrop, Harry’s stories assumed much greater significance. His account of the twins, for example, was now one of a series of diverse creation stories maintained by his people over a long period. Similarly, his account of Coyote’s meeting with the king of England was just as distinctive a version as numerous others. Harry’s historical narratives— about unusual employees who turned up to work in local ranches—were part of an established genre of stories set in towns, farms, and ranches and featuring all sorts of people in search of jobs as blacksmiths, farmworkers, and carpenters. That Harry’s stories of white/Aboriginal conflict had few parallels in the early collections did not mean that his predecessors had not told such stories. Early collectors simply did not have any interest in them.
Comments by both Teit and Boas revealed that Aboriginal peoples were extremely eager to exchange stories about contemporary political issues. In 1916, Teit explained that his success as a salvage ethnographer depended on listening to stories about local political issues:
For many years back when engaged among the tribes in ethnological work for American and of late for the Canadian government, the Indians almost everywhere would bring up questions of their grievances concerning their title, reserves, hunting and fishing rights, policies of Agents and missionaries, dances, potlatches, education, etc. etc. and although I had nothing to do with these matters they invariably wanted to discuss them with me or get me to help them, and to please them and thus to better facilitate my research work I had to listen and given them some advice or information.”40
Although he assisted the chiefs in disseminating their contemporary histories, in political contexts, he was unable to incorporate these into his ethnographic collections.41
Boas also noted in his field diaries and letters that many of his interviewees were eager to engage him in discussions about current issues. A Squamish chief, for example, saw Boas’s interview session as an opportunity to air some of his current political concerns:
“Who sent you here?” “I have come to see the Indians and to tell the White people about them.” “Do you come from the Queen’s Country?” “No, I come from another country.” “Will you go to the Queen’s Country?” “Perhaps.” “Good, when you get there go to the Queen and tell her this. Now write down what I say: Three men came [i.e., the Indian agent and two commissioners] and made treaties with us and said this is the Queen’s land. That has made our hearts sad and we are angry at the three men. But the Queen does not know this. We are not angry at her.”42
Little of this sort of discussion made its way into his publications. Boas also noted inconsistencies among storytellers and often worried that many were telling him nothing but “nonsense.”43 Comments on this issue from his assistant, George Hunt, did not help: “You know as well as I do,” he wrote to Boas, “that you or me can’t find two Indians tell a storie alike.”44
In all of this I could see the potential for a new Harry Robinson volume highlighting the breadth of his stories. Whether they were old (i.e., “myths” about Coyote and others) or new (i.e., stories about recent murders or floods) was not of great concern to Harry. What mattered most to him was “living by stories.” He wanted to show the cultural importance of maintaining a full range of stories. If people—whites and “Indians”—knew that stumps could turn into chipmunks and that chipmunks could turn into “grandfathers,” they would cultivate a very different relationship to the land. If they knew about people like George Jim of Ashnola who had been wrongly abducted from the New Westminster prison in 1887, and Tom Shiweelkin who was wrongly killed by an early brigade of whites, they would carry a different view of their history. Knowing about large birds that could carry humans, lake creatures that could swallow horses, and grizzly bears that could shelter travellers in distress would show people that the world around them consisted of many different forms and layers of life.
Through disseminating such narratives, Harry was promoting an awareness that would generate more storytelling. That others told these stories with different twists and turns was not a concern. In fact, Harry often incorporated their twists into his own stories. And although he would never tamper with storylines or fictionalize any part of a story, he incorporated seemingly extraneous details where he felt they belonged. For example, when he learned that whites had landed on the moon, Harry immediately incorporated this detail into his story about Coyote’s son’s trip to and from an upper world.
While assembling the first two volumes, I had not appreciated the full scope of Harry’s perspective on storytelling. Along with several generations of scholars and others, I had been seduced by the Boasian paradigm which reified the mythological past and promoted the stereotype of the “mythteller”—the bearer of the single, communal accounts rooted in the deep past. Harry’s stories about Coyote’s meeting with the king and others about cats, cows, horses, and everyday animals doing supernatural things did not fit this model. But no amount of editing would make a “mythteller”45 of Harry Robinson. He would have been insulted had the label been applied to him. He was a storyteller in the broadest sense of the term.
Harry had stressed in 1984 that he was “going to disappear and there will be no more telling stories.” At the time, I assumed that he was referring to the demise of his stories. However, when I re-listened to this comment, I realized that I had missed his point. He perceived his death as a blow to the process of storytelling. He had worked hard over the years to ensure its well being. In the 1970s he had painstakingly adapted all of his stories in English to accommodate a growing number of listeners who spoke little or no Okanagan. Through the 1980s he had submitted these English versions of his stories to audio tape so that they could carry on without him. He had also spent afternoons in his local band office telling stories in his Okanagan language. His final move was to release his oral stories in book form so that they would reach a broad audience “in all Province in Canada and United States” (letter, 27 January 1986).
Living by Stories brings Harry’s objective closer to fruition. And once again, Coyote looms large. The way Harry put it, everything hinged on the book produced by Coyote and the king. Although he never read its contents, he knew the story about it and that was what mattered. He would pass the story on through his own book. And its message would be clear to all: that whites were a banished people who colonized this country through fraudulence associated with an assigned form of power and knowledge which had been literally alienated from its original inhabitants.
NOTES
1. Two members of our party, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, knew Harry well. They had notified him in advance of our visit. The third member was Michael M’Gonigle.
2. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schoeken Books, 1956); Gary Snyder, The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977); and Barry Lopez, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, Coyote Builds North America (New York: Avon Books, 1977).
3. James A. Teit, Marian K. Gould, Livingston Farrand, and Herbert J. Spinden, in Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, ed. Franz Boas (New York: Stechert & Co., 1917); Charles Hill-Tout, “Report on the Ethnology of the Okanaken of British Columbia, an Interior Division of the Salish Stock,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 41 (1911): 130–161 (reprinted in Ralph Maud, ed., The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout, Volume 1: The Thompson and the Okanagan [Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1978], 131–159); and Leslie Spier, ed. (with Walter Cline, Rachel S. Commons, May Mandelbaum, Richard H. Post, and L. V. W. Walters), The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington (Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Co., 1938).
4. Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Publishers, 1933; reprint, Jay Miller, ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
5. Franz Boas, Indianische
