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Introduction

What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout is not the scope of his field work, though in the ten years from 1896 to 1906 he covered most of the Salish tribes, and so competently that, Teit’s mastery of the Interior notwithstanding, Hill-Tout’s reports remain probably our best panoramic view of pre-white civilization in the Victoria-Vancouver-Lower Mainland area. Neither is his linguistic versatility his most striking quality, rare though it is to see a self-taught scholar compiling grammars for eleven separate Salish dialects. What is most striking about Charles Hill-Tout, what distinguishes him from most early ethnologists in North America, is his English prose style. It is a stately Victorian prose, where scientific objectivity combines with lofty sentiment to ennoble his subject matter. It is a prose which provides us with practically the only corpus of B.C. Indian literature — literature defined minimally as a body of writing sufficiently interesting in structure and content, sufficiently intriguing in the way it moves, that one is willing to re-read it for pleasure. Indian tales, those in the early collections at any rate, tend to come through to us as mere specimens of a culture, something to examine and categorize; and in bulk they constitute one of the world’s great unread masses of printed material. Hill-Tout, on the other hand, cared that the stories he collected should be readable. He didn’t look down on them, so we don’t either. We are attracted inside a story, and learn the dimensions of its world from the inside. This rare circumstance was not achieved by sophisticated techniques of recording and transcribing; rather, somehow, by being true to himself, he was able to be true to the tale. We can see how this works in a simple example:

Once there was a large village, and among the people

who lived in it was a certain man who had a wife

whom he loved very much.

In this instance, a Chehalis story entitled “Myth of the Man Who Gains Power to Restore the Dead to Life" (in volume III of the present edition), Hill-Tout supplied a literal, interlinear translation, and we see that the phrase “whom he loved very much" does not appear in the Chehalis text:

Sta-tsa te qolmuq (There were a people) tla-so stcaukq te-laletsa sweeka lakwa kwilatel (and then marry one man lived together) te side anales yehets kelotl kakai (the woman not long after sick) etc.¹

Perhaps the word kwilatel, translated as “together,” denotes an extraordinary degree of harmony, equivalent to “loved very much"; or perhaps the story-teller provided a reverential overtone at this point. In any case, Hill-Tout knew that the great love of the man for his wife was the essential truth of the situation, and simply stated it with the dignity of a family man who knows about such things. Because he has good instincts, and obeys them, we get an alive story out of it. Hill-Tout knew that “the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of';² so he made his English equivalents “fuller" in an attempt to be really equal to the original as he saw and heard it. This is a debatable point: there are probably ways of communicating the full impact of a story other than by adding unsaid words to a text; for instance, even an old-fashioned footnote about the story-teller’s tone or the audience’s reaction might do the job better and leave the text cleaner. However, I will stand by Hill-Tout on the basis of the results, the most readable body of Indian literature from the Northwest Coast.

Hill-Tout’s first experience of story-collecting represents a unique circumstance. In the “Notes on the Cosmogony and History of the Squamish" below, he tells how he took a boat over to the Mission in North Vancouver on a visit prepared for by the Bishop (which is possibly why the version of the flood story he got there is closer to Genesis than many other Indian flood stories). The advanced age of his informant, the gathered audience, the need for an interpreter, all these prevented him from doing his work properly. Yet, it is precisely these awkward circumstances that give the account its special place in folklore collecting. Hill-Tout’s visit was built up as an important occasion, and the real historian of the tribe was found. The correct preliminaries were attended to; the tally sticks were made and used in the traditional manner.³ “The first tally was placed in the old man’s hands and he began his recital in a loud, high-pitched key, as if he were addressing a large audience in the open air.” If Hill-Tout had been skilled enough as an ethnologist to bring about the desirable conditions for taking down the precise language of the myth, he would have effectively destroyed the blind old man’s sense of proper space for the event. Hill-Tout’s incompetence got him only one fifth of the story as narrated, but he gives us what I have not found elsewhere for this area, a picture of a story-telling performance as it might have occurred before the advent of the white man.

One cannot stress enough how uniquely informative are such asides as Hill-Tout gives us in two places in the text, one where fine snow is being described: “In this point of his recital the old man was exceedingly interesting and graphic in his description, the very tones of his voice lending themselves to his story, and I had gathered, long before the interpreter took up the story, that he had told of something that was very small and had penetrated everywhere.” And again, where the Squamish dead are described: “Here the old man’s voice was hushed to a plaintive wail, and the faces of his audience were an eloquent index of the tragic interest of this story of their ancestors’ misfortunes.”

“He took a boat over to the Mission in North Vancouver on a visit prepared for by the Bishop.” (B.C. Prov. Mm. photo)

It was not until Melville Jacobs, I believe, that we got this kind of attention to the progress of a story, and then not in the Clackamas Chinook Texts themselves, but in the separate critical study, The Content and Style of an Oral Literature (1959), where his informant’s precise intentions in eight of the stories are considered. He is working from notes and memories of 1929-30 field work with Mrs. Victoria Howard: “I have attempted to reconstruct for each story as much as I could of what I deduced was happening before, during, and after the narrator’s recital. I have tried to ‘hear’ the audience and the community as well as the raconteur.”⁴

Independently of Jacobs, Catherine McClellan put into a single pamphlet, The Girl Who Married the Bear (1970), several tellings of a story, and traced some of the variations “directly to the special life circumstances of the individual narrators.”⁵ This is the work of someone who has earned friendly and natural family tellings of stories, and knows the context of individual and tribal concerns. Richard Dauenhauer has followed along this path; his careful regard for the personal content of stories, even introductions and endings, can be seen, for instance, in his article “The Narrative Frame: Style and Personality in Tlingit Prose Narrative" (1976).⁶ I would like to add two more names to this brief list, J. Barre Toelken and Dennis Tedlock, both of whom have shown what magnificent results can be achieved from a careful transcription of recorded performance, especially when audience reaction is inserted and the reasons for it explained.⁷

Dell Hymes, the chief theorist of the current concern with performance, sums up a crucial distinction: “If one thinks of’true performance' as the taking of responsibility for being ‘on stage,’” he explains, “then persons may engage in a genre without engaging in performance. A Navaho may tell someone a tale, in the sense of knowing and telling how it goes, without embarking on a performance of the tale in the sense proper to the genre. A fair part of what we know in published form about Native American traditional narrative smacks of report, rather than performance.”⁸

By this distinction we would have to say that James Teit’s collections of stories, for instance, are “report" rather than “performance.” Only rarely does Teit communicate the circumstances of the telling; the texts usually seem like compilations of several tellings, often with variants in footnotes or in the text itself.⁹ Now, as we have seen, Hill-Tout from the start was pushed into a performance situation, and recorded it as such, his own heightened English style being a valiant attempt to equal the pitch of the histrionics. Then, in Lytton he met Chief Mischelle, a “born raconteur,” who was happy to be “on stage" even though Hill-Tout might on some occasions have been his only audience. (Mischelle’s performances are contained in volume I of the present edition.) After Mischelle died, Hill-Tout met nobody with his “on stage" presence; or perhaps Hill-Tout had become more “professional.” In the present volume, the Squamish and Lillooet stories are given a more conventional undemonstrative transmission, with only the occasional footnote to show the transcriber’s interest in the details of the story. The saving grace, as we began by saying, is Hill-Tout’s fine command of English, which makes them eminently readable on that level.

It is not merely a question of avoiding pidgin-English on the one hand and inflated euphemism on the other, but where in the middle ground to find a style. One can be too flat, too matter-of-fact, for some of the horrendous or pathetic happenings in these stories. How, for instance, should one treat “Kaiyam" (a Lillooet story, below)? An old woman raises two girls from salmon roes, and in a bizarre attempt to provide them with a husband she feigns death, returns disguised as a young 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 Snyder applies the word “psychotic" to the Grizzly Woman who serves up feces, calling them “good berries" - see her “Stylistic Stratification in an Oral Tradition" (1968) p. 251.

12 See translation of Boas by Dietrich Bertz (1977) p. 28-30; and Teit Mythology of the Thompson (1912) pp. 283-285.

13 Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman" (1969) p. 221. Coyote is “an enabler whose actions, good or bad, bring certain ideas and actions into the field of possibility, a model who symbolizes abstractions in terms of real entities" (p. 222). For instance, when Coyote loses his eyes and replaces them with amber balls, this “allows us to envision the possibility of such things as eye disease, injury, or blindness.”

14 It should be significant that “Kaiyam" is not told among the Lillooet today (information from Randy Bouchard).