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Chapter I Introduction

Of the proposed series, The Indian History of British Columbia, Wilson Duff completed one volume only, The Impact of the White Man (B.C. Provincial Museum 1964). Presumably a subsequent volume would have dealt with Indian history as seen by the Native people themselves: the creation of the world, the flood and other disasters, the legends behind local topography, the founding of the great families and their crests, the doings of shamans and warriors. Attention would have been paid to the important tales about Raven, Coyote, Bear, Beaver, Mink, Bluejay, and all the other animals whose adventures in the early times were just as real as later history, so it was said. This book does not attempt such a comprehensive treatment of the Indian world view, but presents a survey of the materials available for doing so.

To use the present-day provincial boundary of British Columbia as a cut-off point is not so arbitrary as it might seem. Of course, myths and legends know no such confines; to track any single theme would take us beyond the Pacific area into the world at large. But since we are concerned not so much with myths as with myth collecting, British Columbia presents an interesting case. Franz Boas and his close associates did their earliest field work here, concurrent with an indigenous strain of folklorists. The rise and fall of the National Museum’s interest in the West Coast is a curious phenomenon. Lately we have had a rush of expert linguists doing a massive salvaging of the languages, which has abetted the new concern by Native leaders for all aspects of their old culture, including myths and legends. B.C. thus provides a varied panorama for what I shall call “mythography,” the study of how a people’s oral traditional literature becomes available to us in published form.

I want first, however, to focus on three individuals who worked just outside the perimeter of British Columbia. They are exemplary: their myth collecting is notable not only for its intrinsic quality but also for the clarification it provides on the process of transmission of myths from performance to paper. (1) Emile Petitot was an Oblate missionary in the Northwest Territories from 1862 to 1883, and in the midst of extreme privation wrote down serene ethnographic observations. His Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (1886) is still kept in print by its Paris publisher. (2) Archie Phinney worked in the field for only one season to produce his outstanding Nez Perce Texts (1934); but among Franz Boas’s students, Phinney was unique, a full-blooded Native of the tribe he was assigned to study. (3) In 1970, a well-respected anthropologist, Catharine McClellan, decided to throw caution to the winds and used the word “masterpiece” in relation to a Native story. In publishing The Girl Who Married the Bear (Ottawa 1970) she dared to add the subtitle: “A Masterpiece of Indian Oral Tradition.”

Petitot and Missionary Predilections

Until the last decade there was nothing by or about Emile Petitot in English, beyond a few encyclopedia entries. When attention was recently focussed on the Mackenzie Valley, the Northern Science Research Group of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development astutely apportioned some of its funds to the editing of two resplendent volumes entitled The Amerindians of the Canadian North-West in the 19th Century, as seen by Emile Petitot (1971). The samples of stories reprinted from Traditions Indiennes du Canada NordOuest (1886, with the Native language texts as found in the 1888 edition) are strictly confined to the Mackenzie Valley Eskimo and Loucheaux, but there are enough of them to convince us that Petitot had a deft hand at taking down a specific telling of a story without losing its clarity and charm. I am persuaded as to his authenticity by one passage in particular. Not only is the teller of the story named, with date and place of telling (Fort Good Hope, December 1870—Petitot in his eighth year of residence in those parts), but the precise wording seems “right”:

Emil Petitot, ordained priest on 15 March 1862, just before his departure for the Canadian Northwest.

. . . when day came, the evening-wife disappeared once more, but her husband followed her at a distance. “Where is she going, and why does she want to go?” he wondered. Then he saw her walking naked into a black, filthy swamp. There she stood upright, with a black snake wound around her. Witness of this abomination, Dindjie was thunderstruck, and left the evening-wife where she was. . . she ran into the swamps and disappeared. Nothing was ever heard of her again. When the Hudson’s Bay Company came here, we thought it was the bad evening-wife who had returned to us.¹

The business about the snake is surely something a priest shouldn’t listen to outside of confession, and the comment on the Hudson’s Bay Company is practically sedition; but Petitot does not hesitate to put them in. This passage is a touchstone which indicates to me that one can read Petitot with confidence.

Up to a point. Can a missionary really allow himself to place a high value on pagan mythology? In his History of the Catholic Church in Western Canada (1910) Father Morice does not mention that Petitot collected and published myths and legends. What is more, the role of priest as ethnologist is not dealt with at all in that two-volume history—which is quite schizophrenic, seeing that Father Morice was himself one of the greatest ethnologists of Western Canada. The situation is paradoxical. Perhaps the Church felt it could go more freely about its task of eradicating paganism if one or two of its priests recorded the old ways for posterity. Morice wrote many brilliant papers for scholarly journals, and he would figure much more prominently in our discussion here but for the fact that he published very few legends. He knew masses of them; why did he not print more?

We have no complaint about his “Three Carrier Myths” article. Indeed, it is a pleasure to hear him tell how he transcribed them:

I have a reliable Indian narrate me as clearly as possible the whole of one myth (when this is not too long) in his native language. I then repeat as verbatim as I can what I have heard, subject to corrections when such may be necessary, and then I write down the whole in Indian . . . . As I speak Carrier more fluently than English or even than my native French, my thoughts are generally through the channel of the aboriginal idiom, so that I find no great difficulty in repeating, and afterwards in writing down in almost the same terms what has been told me. This method has also the advantage of preventing the narrative from being cut up in those short, half-line sentences common to the stories transcribed on dictation, and which some may wrongly believe to be the normal condition of Indian phraseology.²

Father Morice, O.M.I., “a 1’entree de son jardin, felicite (mai 1933) de son elevation au grade de Docteur en Droit”; with the noted Vancouver historian, Judge Howay. Photo courtesy of Archives Deschatelets, Ottawa.

Good; but why not publish more? From his commentary on the “Three Carrier Myths,” it becomes clear that each was chosen for a purpose. The first is connected to the Fall and the Hood; the second to the burning of Sodom; and the third to Greek mythology (p. 35). Morice apparently desires to discover for his wards a kinship with the Mediterranean cradle of civilization, the lost tribes of Israel hinted at (p. 26). We find Petitot saying the same kind of thing: “the traditional story of Moses has been preserved in a more archaic form among the peoples of the far north. . . .We have, in the Dene-dindjie people, some of the lost remnants of Israel now converted to Catholicism” (Vol. I, p. 64). Thus, the two Catholic missionaries who are on record as attending to myth and legend have something of an axe to grind. Whether or not it affected in subtle ways what seems so authentic in Petitot is probably not susceptible of proof. Clearly, it affected Morice’s choice of what myths he published. And when he defends himself against “the charge of negligence in not having, to this day, collected more than fragments” by stating that their epic is “merely a Carrier version of a myth which is the original property of the Pacific Coast Indians” (p. 1), then we are doubly disappointed. He neglects the Carrier heroic narrative because it is similar to what he has heard elsewhere: the argument is unworthy of him. The hidden motive must be his instinct that the old imaginative cosmology is too powerful. With their own epic intact, the Carrier would not be a lost tribe, needing to be saved.

Let us not leave the other denominations out of the discussion. The Rev. Thomas Crosby, who speaks for the Methodists in his Among the An-ko-me-nums (Toronto 1907), writes: “Of their [the Halkomelem] traditions we have not much to say” (p. 114). In the later autobiography, Up and Down the North Pacific Coast by Canoe and Mission Ship (Toronto 1914), he allows his daughter a few pages for some stories she heard as a teacher of Indian children (pp. 100-111). They are slender offerings. They might be of interest to an expert on the tribe concerned. This would be a general rule in all these cases: a scholar with vital interest in a subject will find even the most peripheral material pertinent—the smallest pieces have an essential place in his big jigsaw puzzle. Pursuing our aim of trying to find reliable texts which are interesting in themselves, we may have to cast aside, with ungracious haste, contributions such as Miss Jessie Crosby’s.

And even the Rev. Charles Harrison’s. He was the Anglican clergyman in the Queen Charlotte Islands for forty years, published a Haida grammar, and could speak to the people in their own tongue; but he used his competence in the cause of conversion only. In the chapter of Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (London 1925) on the Indian’s view of life after death, it is curious how precisely it reflects his own; for it is a world of the good and bad injun. The virtuous one goes to heaven: “the gates of cedar, beautifully carved and ornamented with shells, were thrown open for his admittance, and his soul, which by this time had assumed the shape of his earthly body, but clothed in ethereal light, was delivered to the Chief of Light. . . .The bad Indian, in the region of the clouds,” the Rev. Harrison reports, “was suppposed to be tortured continually” (p. 126). This seems a wee bit High Church. The Raven story of Chapter XI (pp. 149-164) has merit; but there is no reason to seek out this version, unless, of course, one is working on a Haida jigsaw puzzle, in which case Harrison is quite a large piece to find a place for.

Archie Phinney and the Limits of the Printed Page

If an intelligent young man from an Indian band went to college, got good training in ethnographic techniques, and then returned home to collect and edit his tribal stories, he would, to say the least, be a better bet than your average missionary. This is what we have in the case of Archie Phinney, B.A. Kansas, 1926; graduate courses in anthropology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; thence to Columbia, where he had the good sense to seek out Franz Boas, who, after further training, sent him back to his home reservation in Idaho during the winter 1929-30. The result was a collection Boas considered “among the best told myths that we have from American Indians.”³ It should be emphasized that, after the first push, this was all Phinney’s work: a Native ethnologist in control of every stage from field transcription to the printed page. One has to look far for anything similar; even the Osage work of Francis La Hesche did not give us a polished gem like Phinney’s Nez Perce Texts (New York: Columbia University Press 1934).

The proceedings of the American Ethnological Society for 1976, compiled by Margot Liberty with the title American Indian Intellectuals (1978), has made a start on giving due prominence to the Native co-workers previously hidden in the shadow of their anthropologist employers. I intend to continue the process in this book, and introduce Archie Phinney at the head of the list. Nor should I forget his informant, his mother. They made a good team:

. . . the narrator Wayilatpu, who is not conversant with the English language, felt no restraint, no unnaturalness in reproducing these tales on the basis of her excellent memory. . . the recorder’s familiarity with the native language eliminated laborious recording and made it possible to deal expeditiously, and without artificiality and looseness, with phraseology no longer current (p. vii).

In this Introduction to the texts, Phinney is groping for a vocabulary by which to describe what he considers desirable in a well-presented tale. His concern to find a style equal to the reality of the storytelling is demonstrated further in his correspondence with Boas. “A sad thing in recording these animal stories,” he writes from Idaho to New York on 20 November 1929, “is the loss of spirit—the fascination furnished by the peculiar Indian vocal rendition for humor. Indians are better storytellers than whites. When I read my story mechanically I find only the cold corpse.” Boas replies that Phinney should “try to learn to tell a few stories just as lively as the Indians do and with all their gestures. We can then try once more to get it down on phonographic discs so that we get really the way a good story teller tells it. Of course you must practise on it a good deal to get it in the right, lively form” (letter 27 November 1929). “With the practice you suggest,” Phinney unenthusiastically replies (3 December 1929), “I can render the subtleties of humor, derogation, exclamation, etc., if you see a way to portray this element to students lacking an understanding of the Indian habit of thought, who see mostly only symmetrical mechanics in primitive languages.”

Phinney became more encouraged when he had a chance to compare his own results with others: “It is particularly gratifying to me to find in our collection a more natural spirit, higher plot unity, and generally fuller elaboration of particular incidents” (letter to Boas 5 December 1930). If we pounce on this casual statement and use it to forward our main argument, it is because one rarely finds criteria stated so succintly and from so eximious a source:

(i) “natural spirit”—I take this to mean the ease of flow of words which a born story-teller has, so that his or her pleasure in the performance is communicated to the audience (and, if we can find a way to do it, to the reader) as a shared feeling of confidence and buoyancy;

(ii) “plot unity” —a beginning, a middle, and an end, encompassing an action of some scope and significance, so that, no matter how unpredictable the episodes, a good story will make them hang together to the satisfaction of the teller and his listeners;

(iii) “elaboration of particular incidents”—subtle clues to character, crucial hints about motivation, suspense sustained by attention to detail, pregnant pauses, the hidden tensions of repartee, dramatic irony: Indian legends are not famous for these qualities. Is it because we have had too many truncated versions put in front of us? Occasionally, thank goodness, we come across texts which have enticing intricacy, where the raconteur “has obtained complete mastery over his technique” and “plays” with his material.⁴

The spirited flow of narrative, the coherence of the action, and the richness of detail: these are not criteria we are unfamiliar with in literary criticism. They have been basic from the beginnings of art. But we are still left with the question of the style that different people use to fulfill these criteria; and specifically the job of registering that an oral performance has accomplished what it set out to do. Much of the “play” is in the paralanguage of gesture, tone of voice, and timing. The humour, especially, is in innuendo, which involves all three. This is what worried Phinney most in presenting his tales. For all his care to find “absolute equivalents” in his literal interlinear translations, “the specific conceptual formations” and “the inner feel so far as it is possible to do so” (letters 16 April and 18 November 1933); for all his care to have the free translation embody “the emotional flavor or usage of words in sentences—the spirit of the tale” (16 April 1933); for all his concern to distinguish between a coyote and Coyote, a meadowlark and Meadowlark, based “on a feeling for something that inheres to animal names” (letter 26 February 1934); for all his care to give animals their traditional speech characteristics, where “Fox always speaks with utmost clarity and directness,” “Bear slurs consonants,” and “Skunk nasalizes in a high-pitched voice” (Introduction, p. ix); for all this care, when it came to the essential humour of the episodes, no amount of care, he felt, could get it on to the page; and he was reduced to stating flatly in his Introduction that a certain couple of the tales are “excellent examples of the depth, and delightful flavor of Indian humor” (p. ix). He is right to worry; for these specified tales are not, on the face of it, more humourous than the general run of Coyote stories. Something vital is obviously lost in transmission, and we are in danger of being left, as he feared, with the “cold corpse” of a story.⁵

Archie Phinney was a man of independent mind—witness his research in Russia (1932-36) even before the Soviet Union had diplomatic recognition from the United States. In preparing his Nez Perce Texts, however, he did not have the genius to go beyond the rather staid format that his mentor expected of him. He could not allow himself to think of some of the solutions to the problem of humour which we have seen attempted in recent years. For instance, Dennis Tedlock has a Coyote story in Finding the Center (1972), and the typographical devices for loudness, pauses, prolonged syllables, and other performance features help, I think, to convey the humour. Coyote has annoyed Old Lady Junco by repeatedly asking her for her song:

He was coming for the fourth time when Old Lady Junco said to herself, (tight) "Oh here you come but I won’t sing, " that’s what she said. She looked for a round rock. When she found a round rock, she dressed it with her Junco shirt, she put her basket of seeds with her Junco rock. (tight) “As for you, go right ahead and ask. ”(p. 81)

As one becomes familiar with Tedlock’s notations, one begins to hear precisely the tone of voice which carries the humour. Coyote is going to ask for the song again; the rock, of course, is not going to say anything; and Coyote is eventually going to take a bite out of the rock at the expense of his molars. So much of the humour is in the anticipation of the outcome, and the way the hints of the outcome are allowed to leak into the narrative. Anticipatory laughter in the audience is triggered by a laconic quality in the way the denouement is prepared.

How much laughter? In transcribing Yellowman’s Coyote story, J. Barre Toelken settled the question by stating how much. A recording of a particular telling before several of Yellowman’s children on the evening of 19 December 1966 was transcribed two years after, with the help of one of those children. It is instructive to see how early in the story the laughter begins:

(style: slow, as with factual conversational prose; regular intonation and pronunciation; long pauses between sentences, as if tired)

Ma'i [Coyote] was walking along once in a onceforested area named after a stick floating on the water. He began walking in the desert in this area, where there were many prairie dogs, and as he passed by them they called him mean names, but he ignored them. He was angry, even so, and it was noon by then, so he made a wish:

(slower, all vowels more nasalized) “I wish some clouds would form.” He was thinking about killing these prairie dogs, so he wished for clouds, and there were clouds, (audience: smiles and silent laughter)⁶

The children know that Coyote wants rain so that he can pretend to be drowned in the flood, so that he can get Skunk to bring the prairie dogs to gloat over his “corpse,” and then he can jump them. They are already smiling at the way this circuitous plan is initiated. The mimicry and the special animal voice probably have something to do with this early laughter; and also the feeling that their father is not going to rush the story—it is going to be told well. Toelken’s transcription indicates the different kinds of laughter, including Yellowman’s own laughter at certain points. There are also footnotes to explain certain comic devices, and an extended commentary which shows the social importance of the humour. It is a very full treatment of a performance text, one which Archie Phinney, I think, would have appreciated. It might be too cumbersome for everyday use—though I am not so sure about that.⁷ In any case, it allows us to go back to texts like Phinney’s, and understand how they “reveal currents of subtle humor” (Introduction p. ix), and why Phinney in a letter can state that “Indians are better storytellers than whites” without expecting to be contradicted.

"A Masterpiece of Indian Oral Tradition"

It is instructive to look briefly at the recent Nez Perce Texts (University of California Press 1979), not only to note that Archie Phinney has not suffered disesteem at the hands of a contemporary specialist in the field, but also to see what sorts of things the editor, Haruo Aoki, feels should be included nowadays to give proper support to a text. Aoki does not lean toward the techniques of Tedlock or Toelken. There is merely the Native text with literal interlinear translation, followed by a free translation. But he is careful to add biographical information on the informants, including photographs; a statement of the circumstances in which the stories were recorded; and ethnographic notes on certain details, on the significance of the story as a whole, and on its position in the widespread themes of world mythology. This is all in keeping with the trend to provide context for the “raw material”— “raw” being Viola Garfield’s word for an objectionable severity in the way most ethnographers had presented their collections of myths up to the time of her “Contemporary Problems of Folklore Collecting and Study” in 1953. This was a milestone article;⁸ as Melville Jacobs' The Content and Style of an Oral Literature was a further milestone in 1959. The trend, of which the 1979 Nez Perce Texts is a good recent result, is characterized by a concern for the narrator and his precise purposes, and for providing enough comment on the narrator’s skills and audience reactions, so that a literary judgment might one day be made. Jacobs thought such judgments “premature” (p. 8); Catharine McClellan provided another milestone when in 1970 she published The Girl Who Married the Bear (National Museum of Man, Publications in Ethnology, No. 2) and termed it “a masterpiece.”

She confesses that the bear-bride story at first interested her in a very limited way, as merely one more statistic in the distribution of bear ceremonialism. Then she began to ask why: why this story’s great popularity? Value judgments followed. She saw that it was “an outstanding piece of creative narrative”:

For the first time I began to realize that many of the Indian myths that I had been reading in professional collections were more than rather one-dimensional “fairy stories.” Today I believe that this particular story attracts the Southern Yukon natives with the same power as does a first-rate psychological drama or novel in our own culture. The themes probably evoke the same intense response in the Indians as those evoked in the Greeks by the great Attic dramas (p. 1).

Catharine McClellan is here saying that Northwest Native Indian myths are as great as Greek tragedy within their own social context. Even if she were only fifty percent right, her statement would still be magnificent; and manifold in its implications. Mythographers have now come of age, and can make judgments about these materials, which have suffered because of our timidity. There is now one “masterpiece,” and there will be others.

Moreover, myth-critics have a special role in this. It is not only that some stories will be judged more powerful than others on the grounds of style and substance, but also that what one is essentially judging cannot usually be a single text but a continuum where storytellers have “thrown” versions of a story, like several potters trying for the same shape of pot. Catharine McClellan’s subtitle, “A Masterpiece of Indian Oral Tradition,” refers to no one telling of “The Girl Who Married the Bear,” but to the eleven versions of it which together give it scope, and by means of which the scholar can discern a pan-tribal artifact of fullness, coherence, and beauty. She is eager to talk about the personality of an informant and the way special circumstances in the situation may have contributed to the details of a story.⁹ She is very much within the modern trend here. But this concern with differences does not lead her to pick out the best telling as the masterpiece, but to take the term we usually reserve for the finest work of an individual master and apply it to something she herself, in effect, has created, a “story” enlarged beyond the sum total of the different tellings. The mythographer sees and appreciates a whole denied to individual raconteurs.

No other mythographer has yet undertaken the task of “creating” a masterpiece myth in exactly this sense. Dell Hymes, an anthropologist and linguist, has been moving, with due deliberation, into the role of literary critic of myth, and has now collected pertinent papers into a volume, “In vain I tried to tell you” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1981). This volume constitutes a clear announcement that, in Hymes’s opinion, the oral tradition in North America (as, indeed, mostly elsewhere) was a verse tradition, and that this is revealed by minute attention to extant texts. Jarold W. Ramsey, a younger Oregonian follower of Hymes and a professor of English, has the distinction of having introduced North American Indian myth analysis into the august pages of PMLA.10 In their sensitive approach to a handful of classic published texts, Hymes and Ramsey have, in a sense, elevated them beyond what the original teller and recorder would have claimed for them. This is not unusual in literary criticism, which is always at work to transform a bewildering multiplicity of blocks and pieces into a corpus of literature, within the coherent framework of which they can be better understood, enjoyed, and judged. The stage is set for the entry of North American Indian myth and legend into a much larger role in the pageant of world literatures.

We have gone somewhat outside our chosen area of British Columbia to take a look at a number of missionary collectors of legend, the exceptional work of one full-blooded Native ethnologist, and the advance-guard of the growing movement to treat Indian storytelling as a major literature. The issues raised will be hovering continually over our subsequent discussion. I will not be telling the history of myth-collecting in British Columbia without bias. I am biased in favour of what Petitot did, what Archie Phinney did, and what Catharine McClellan did. I instinctively recognize what they did as authentic; and their work helps me to define the term. It has something to do with the ethnologist’s honest care for the storyteller and his or her people; with recognizing a born raconteur when one hears one; with valuing the dramatic elements of a story at least as much as the linguistic and ethnographic; and with striving for techniques to bring the living story on to the printed page.

1 Told by Sylvain Vitoedh to Emile Petitot, The Amerindians of the Canadian North-West in the 19th Century, as Seen by Emile Petitot, Vol. II: The Loucheux Indians, ed. Donat Savoie (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development 1971) pp. 133-134. Translation from the French by L.A.C.O. Hunt. Another translation, by Thelma Habgood, appears in “Indian Legends of North-Western Canada, by Emile Petitot” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 2 (1970/1) 94-129 on pp. 99-100. The translation in The Book of Dene, issued by Programme Development Division, Department of Education, Yellowknife, N.W.T. (1976), has been “compared with versions in the original tongues.”

2 “Three Carrier Myths” Transactions of the Canadian Institute 5 (1894-95) 1-36, quotation on pp. 3-4. The four interlined texts offered in The Carrier Language (1932) Vol. II have a rather apologetic introduction: “The author of this work has, in various monographs, considered the Carriers from every possible angle, and studied their ethnology, sociology, archaeology, technology, history and, now, language. One viewpoint, mythology, he may be accused of having perhaps a little neglected, because he has consecrated only one paper exclusively to it. Yet, apart from the four legends whose text is hereunder given, the following myths scattered in his works will, we think, lead one to realize that he has not altogether overlooked this part of their ancestral heirloom” (p. 513). Morice lists eleven myths, a meagre total.

3 Franz Boas, a letter of recommendation for Archie Phinney, 23 February 1934. From microfilm of the Professional Correspondence of Franz Boas, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The short obituary of Phinney in American Anthropologist 52 (1950) 442 summarizes his career as an Indian agent, but strangely forgets his Nez Percé Texts.

4 Paul Radin Literary Aspects of North American Mythology Canada Geological Survey Museum Bulletin No. 16 (1915) pp. 42-43, where he adds:

Anyone who has spent any time among Indians must have been impressed by the fact that only a few Indians in any tribe have the reputation of being excellent raconteurs. And it is a different kind of excellence with which each raconteur is credited. . . one man was famous for the humorous touches which he imparted to every tale; another, for the fluency with which he spoke and the choice of his language; a third, for his dramatic delivery; a fourth, for the radical way in which he handled time-worn themes; a fifth, for his tremendous memory; a sixth, for the accuracy with which he adhered to the “accepted” version; etc.

Phinney referred to “the striking superiority” of his mother’s stories “from the point of view of native style, completeness and continuity” — continuity, here, in the sense that “these tales were handed down from one narrator to another, going back three generations” (Nez Percé Texts p. viii). All these judgments are valuable in building up coherent criteria for appreciating Indian myth and legend, as there have not been, to my knowledge, any recorded attempts at formal literary criticism by Native intellectuals up to the present time. I am not at all sure that ethnologists (with but one or two noted exceptions) have asked questions about the qualities that make a myth or legend attractive and enjoyable.

5 Dell Skeels has made a contribution with his articles, “A Classification of Humor in Nez Perce Mythology” Journal of American Folklore 67 (1954) 57-63, and “The Function of Humor in Three Nez Perce Indian Myths” American Imago 11 (1954) 249-261; but he by no means exhausts the topic.

6 J. Barre Toelken “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives” Genre 2 (1969) 211-235, quotation pp. 215-216.

7 Since the above was written Toelken has surprised us with a new rendition of Yellowmaji’s story, published with Tacheeni Scott (a Navajo Ph.D. candidate in biology at the University of Oregon) as “Poetic Retranslation and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman” in Karl Kroeber ed. Traditional Literatures of the American Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1981) pp. 65-116. New devices are used, which further the aims of the original article. The pace of exploration into the various ways of transcribing performance is quickening. One excellent example is Linguistic Convergence: An Ethnology of Speaking at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta (New York:Academic Press 1979), where Ronald and Suzanne Scollon’s indebtedness to Toelken is expressed and clearly evident. (Note that the book is a somewhat expanded version of Ronald Scollon’s monograph in the Mercury Series, National Museums of Canada 1979, The Context of the Informant Narrative Performance.)

8 ln Alaska University, Anthropological Papers, Vol. I (May 1953) pp. 25-36. It is a useful survey, with a well-selected bibliography, of previous scholars who have attempted to discuss and portray the “dynamic factors in myth making” (p. 26). One of the earliest of these was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose essay “Myth in Primitive Psychology” (1926) is now conveniently available in Anchor paperback, Magic, Science and Religion ed. Robert Redfield (1948) pp. 93-148, where we find the following pertinent passage:

The whole nature of the performance, the voice and the mimicry, the stimulus and the response of the audience mean as much to the natives as the text; and the sociologist should take his cue from the natives. The performance, again, has to be placed in its proper time setting—the hour of the day, and the season, with the background of the sprouting gardens awaiting future work, and slightly influenced by the magic of the fairy tales. We must also bear in mind the sociological context of private ownership, the sociable function and the cultural role of amusing fiction. All these elements are equally relevant; all must be studied as well as the text. The stories live in native life and not on paper, and when a scholar jots them down without being able to evoke the atmosphere in which they flourish he has given us but a mutilated bit of reality (p. 104).

9 It is clear that McClellan and her teacher Frederica de Laguna have a meeting of minds on the importance of context in presenting a tale, see de Laguna’s Under Mount Saint Ellas: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1972), especially “The Story of the Woman Who Married a Bear” pp. 880-882.

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 (January 1977) 9-18. Ramsey’s recent “From ‘Mythic’ to Tictive' in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth” appears in Traditional Literatures of the American Indian ed. Karl Kroeber (1981) pp. 24-44.