18. Hill-Tout, in Maud, The Salish People, Vol. 1, 137.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. James A. Teit, New York City: Fieldnotes, Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
21. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 34.
22. Boas, Indianische Sagen, 52.
23. Ronald Rohner, ed., The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the Northwest Coast from 1886–1931 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 99–100. For a more detailed examination of this story, see Wendy Wickwire, “Prophecy at Lytton,” in Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, ed. Brian Swann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 134–170.
24. For more on this, see Judith Berman, “The Culture As It Appears to the Indian Himself.” See also Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, “‘The Foundation of All Future Researches’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1999): 479–527.
25. For more on James Teit’s political activism, see Wendy Wickwire, “‘We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall You’: James A.Teit and Native Resistance in British Columbia, 1908–22,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1998): 199–236.
26. Teit, “More Thompson Indian Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 50, no. 196 (1937): 173–190.
27. Teit, Philadelphia: Fieldnotes, American Philosophical Society (APS).
28. Teit, “More Thompson Indian Tales,” 170.
29. Ibid., 180.
30. Ibid., 184.
31. Ibid., 173. Footnote 1 explains that “the following hitherto unpublished tales have been taken from manuscripts by the late James A. Teit and edited by Lucy Kramer.”
32. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 80–84.
33. Spier et al., The Sinkaietk, 197–198.
34. Teit, Mythology of the Thompson Indians, 320.
35. Ibid., 321.
36. Ibid., 323–324.
37. Teit et al., Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, 82.
38. Hill-Tout, in Maud, The Salish People, Vol. 1, 134.
39. Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories. See also Alanna K. Brown, “The Evolution of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, nos. 2 & 3 (1992): 161–179. A new collection of stories recorded by Darwin Hanna and Mamie Henry—Our Tellings: Interior Salish Stories of the Nlha7kapmx People (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995)—helped to reverse this trend. Herb Manuel’s presentation of Coyote was never static or abstract. In fact, Manuel described Coyote so vividly that one would think that he had met Coyote: “He was kind of always undernourished. He was, in human flesh, a skinny, tall man with drawn-in cheeks [who] … spoke with a drawn-in voice. He spoke funny. You knew it was him when you heard his voice” (32).
40. National Archives, RG10, vol. 7781, file 27150-3-3, Teit to Duncan Campbell Scott, 2 March 1916.
41. One notable document, a “Memorial to Laurier,” presented by the Interior chiefs to Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier at Kamloops in 1910, was a history of the nineteenth century from the perspectives of the chiefs. For more on this, see Wickwire, “James A.Teit and Native Resistance,” 1998.
42. Rohner, The Ethnography of Franz Boas, 86.
43. Ibid., 38.
44. Ibid., 239.
45. British Columbia poet Robert Bringhurst has recently introduced the term “mythteller” to the British Columbia anthropological lexicon. Based on his study of the Haida oral narrative collections of Boasian ethnographer John Swanton, Bringhurst concluded that the storytellers were “mythtellers.” See A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999).
A SPATLA WAS KILLED BY RABBIT AND CHIPMUNK
Eliminating spatla was no easy task.
I could tell that stories, three, four days
and never end.
But I can’t tell ’em all now.
Just a part of it, just the first part.
The Indians, they know, just like they do in the Bible says.
They know the same way almost,
not exactly the same way, but likely.
And these woman, Indian,
they say there’s four of them.
Women.
Big one.
Extra big.
And they call that spatla in our language.
But I cannot say what it would be called in English.
But only in my language, they call ’em spatla.
They are bad.
They packs that basket and they got the babies—
the two-year-old or more, or little baby,
and throw ’em in that basket.
Then they kill ’em by that cactus.
Then they take ’em in the bush and cook ’em and eat ’em.
They make a fire, and they roast ’em.
They roast ’em on the stick,
get ’em cooked, and eat.
They might eat the whole baby at one meal.
Then they look for another one for the next meal.
That’s what the spatla do.
They eat person.
They eat people.
Not the big one, but the small one.
They like the baby ones, because they tender.
Just like little deer.
And the chance they will get,
it will eat the big person if they can only kill ’em.
Well, they can kill ’em.
They easy to kill because him, herself, they’re big.
They do anything to the other person like we are.
They kill ’em and eat ’em.
But they like the smaller one more than they do the big one,
or the big person.
That’s the stories in Indian.
And in the Bible, that these two man,
they’re big too.
They alike and they sound the same way.
And these stories in Indian—spatla,
the white people, they must’ve heard that from some Indian
somehow in Omak maybe long time ago.
And one time, at the rodeo time,
that was about the 1980 or ’81, one of these years,
I was there.
And I see the white people,
they make a show, like that spatla.