man, and performs sex with them both using a pestle hammer. Hill-Tout’s Victorian style is tested to the full here, and comes off reasonably well.
Little in published scholarship helps us to understand and absorb the experience of “Kaiyam,” which involves transvestite sadism, murder by tickling, followed in the second part by the casual kidnapping of a baby, with further incest and murder, and the creation of a new baby from a dirty diaper. Jarold W. Ramsey has given a close reading of a story containing some of these elements, admiring the dramatic tensions they generate.10 But the grotesque and lurid events here go beyond the familiar bounds of literary effects. With the psychotic11 grandmother of “Kaiyam,” or the yearning Orpheus of the “Man Who Restored the Dead" (not to mention the man who horribly failed), or the Dostoevskian loser of the “Gambler,” or the acerbated Cinderella story of “The Deserted Boy": with these stories (to mention only some of those in the present volume) we seem to be entering a compensatory dream world which can best be studied as dreams are studied by an analyst. We look for psychological causes; we ask what these stories are saying not only about the past of the tribe but also about the future of the teller and his audience.
Perhaps we can pose the question differently. The Lillooet “Kaiyam" story, below, has the same ingredients as the Chehalis version in volume III of the present edition, and the Chehalis version in Boas’ Indianische Sagen, and Teit’s Lower Thompson.12 If we turn from this regional version to the parallel Squamish story, “Te Skauk, the Raven,” below, do we find differences that are meaningful in terms of tribal context? The Squamish story has the Raven creating the two girls from salmon roe intending them for his wives; when he falls asleep after dinner the women scoff at him and run away. The Raven wakes, and tries to pursue, but cannot because his back and feet are burnt. In effect, the pathetic Kaiyam has turned into a comic Raven; his impotence is farcical, and the weird sexual antics are absent. J. Barre Toelken asked Yellowman why Coyote does foolish things on one occasion, good on another, and terrible on another. The answer was: “If he did not do all those things, then those things would not be possible in the world.”13 Like Odysseus, the trickster of another society, Coyote runs the gamut of all that can be experienced, like an encyclopedia of circumstances. On this basis, one could say that the Squamish had a vision of possibilities more limited than the Lower Lillooet region. Or is it the individual story-teller’s malaise that puts a very dismal ending to the Squamish version, where the kidnapped child is dead when the mother finds it, and the two culprits have simply disappeared? What is the source of this sense of futility? The ending of the Lillooet version below is more equitable by our standards: the girls have not killed the abducted child but reared him, married him, and had children by him; when their wickedness is revealed the young husband changes them into bears and the children into birds, bums down the house he has shared with them, and returns to his former kin. The two Chehalis informants (of volume III) dispute over the ending, so that we get a glimpse into individual preferences. In Francois’ version the two salmon-roe wives are turned into white fleecy clouds of summer and black clouds of winter, respectively, and their children become the robin and the raven. From the conflagrating house come snow-birds. The young man and his half-brother (the one squeezed from a napkin) become the sun and the moon. In Mary Anne’s version, the wives become the sturgeon and the sucker, while the children become snow-birds. Her story ends with the diaper-boy sitting too close to the fire and being dissolved into urine. What one can make of these individual differences I am not sure. Even the broader differences are puzzling. In Teit’s Thompson version the young husband is not worried to learn that his wives had kidnapped him as a baby, and simply brings the half-brother into his menage, giving him one of the wives for his own. This ethical amnesia makes us uneasy, and if we then go on to suggest that it is a tribal characteristic our unease merely increases. Yet, if we are to take these stories seriously, we must read them as a reflection of a reality, tribal or individual. How are the stories to be explained in any other way? As borrowings which are not vitally felt by the borrower? As tribal narratives that have “collapsed" (Toelken’s useful term) in varying ways without rhyme or reason? Or are they just yams that don’t deserve this kind of serious investigation?
That they survived up to Hill-Tout’s time, and beyond up to our own in some cases,14 indicates that they are deeply embedded in the value-structure of the tellers. To recover this value-structure and understand its art form will require much further scrutiny of the texts and the process of transmission from the oral origins. Some good material for a study of these questions can be found in the Squamish and Lillooet stories of this volume. In approaching Native texts one often has the feeling that the crucial clue to unlocking their significance will always be found somewhere other than where one is actually reading at the moment. It is probably safer to assume the contrary: that the quest for meaning has no better place to begin than the material at hand.
Ralph Maud
Cultus Lake, B.C.
December, 1978
1 It has unfortunately been impossible to reproduce interlinear texts in this edition. It is hoped that a facsimile of the linguistic sections of Hill-Tout’s articles might be made available. Meanwhile, the text and literal translation of this story may be consulted in the original printing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 34 (July-December 1904) p. 336.
2 Quoted from volume III of the present edition, where Hill-Tout adds: “I have seen women shed tears, and men’s faces grow pale and tense over the recital, by some of the elders of the tribe, of the traditions of their people, the text of which would make one marvel that such bald dry statements could call forth so much emotion.” Teit’s analogue “The Medicine-Man and his Sweetheart" in “Traditions of the Lillooet" (1912) strikes a lighter tone: “A young man in the Lillooet country had a sweetheart who died. He was very fond of the girl, and her death was a great blow to him" (p. 332).
3 I have not seen reference to the use of such tally sticks in story-telling on the Northwest coast. Their use here is similar to that mentioned by Jack A. Frisch in “Folklore, History, and the Iroquois Condolence Cane" Folklore Forum vol. 9 no. 15 (1976) pp. 19-25.
4 The Content and Style of an Oral Literature (1959) p. 3, where he mentions that his Clackamas Chinook Texts themselves had followed “the traditional format that was set for folkloristic anthropologists by Franz Boas in the 1890’s.”
5 The Girl Who Married the Bear (1970) pp. 1-2: “Because my academic preoccupation was then with classic distribution problems, I first judged the tale’s chief importance to be its probable extension of the known distribution of bear ceremonialism; I paid little attention to other aspects of the story. Only later did I ask myself - Why its great popularity? Why did both men and women so often volunteer to tell it?”
6 I note that Dauenhauer’s dissertation at the University of Wisconsin is entitled Text and Context of Tlingit Oral Tradition (1975).
7 J. Barre Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman" Genre 2 (1969) pp. 211-235 seems to me the best exposition of a single story to date. Dennis Tedlock’s Finding the Center (1972) is a book-length compilation of texts the author gathered from the Zuni. Performance elements are communicated directly to the reader by the typographical format.
8 Dell Hymes “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun Myth" Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975) p. 352.
9 Even when we have fifty-two tales from a single named informant, as we have in Teit’s The Shuswap (1909), it is amazing how little of the man’s character comes through. That the “following traditions were told with variants" (pp. 621-622), alerts us to expect report rather than performance.
10 Jarold W. Ramsey “The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives’ PMLA 92 (1977) pp. 9-18.
11 Sally
