him that I would. And I promised myself to first survey the ethnographies and oral narrative collections for this region to see how Harry’s forebears had depicted Coyote. A number of anthropologists—James Teit, Leslie Spier, Charles Hill-Tout, Walter Cline, Rachel Commons, May Mandelbaum, Richard Post, and L. V. W. Walters—had travelled through the Okanagan region between 1888 and 1933 collecting stories.3 So too had the Okanagan novelist Christine Quintasket (Mourning Dove) recorded traditional stories among her relatives and friends.4 Franz Boas and Teit had also published several collections of stories of neighbouring Salishan-speaking peoples.5
I was pleased to discover numerous fragments of Harry’s Coyote story scattered throughout the early collections. But the extensive variations among them made it impossible to find anything close to a single storyline. It was clear that Harry’s predecessors had held conflicting views about Coyote’s travels along the Similkameen. I skimmed the hundreds of Coyote stories featured in these collections: “Coyote Juggles His Eyes,” “Coyote Fights Some Monsters,” “Coyote, His Four Sons, and the Grizzly Bear,” “Coyote Steals Fire,” “Coyote and the Woodpeckers,” “Coyote and the Flood,” and so on. At the end of this survey, I did not feel particularly enlightened. In fact, Coyote seemed more contradictory and elusive than ever.
The print versions of these stories were short—on average, a page or two in length—and lifeless. Most lacked the detail, dialogue, and colour of Harry’s story. Many were also missing some vital segments. Coyote’s sexual exploits along the Similkameen River had been excised from the main text of an 1898 collection, translated into Latin and then transferred to endnotes.6 Such editing seriously disrupted the integrity of the original narrative. Names of individual storytellers and their community affiliations were also missing, thus making it difficult to assess the roles of gender, geographical location, or individual artistry in shaping the stories. In many cases, collectors had created composite stories from multiple versions, which erased all sense of variation in the local storytelling traditions.
Despite these problems, merely surveying the published sources prepared me for my next session with Harry—or so I thought until I turned up at Harry’s house exactly two years later. I was with Nellie Guitterrez, a Douglas Lake elder who was also an old friend Harry had not seen in years. He was delighted to see us. I was relieved that he remembered me. At the end of this visit, I arranged to return the following week on my own.
During the latter visit, I brought up one of my favourite topics—James (Jimmy) Teit, a Shetlander based at Spences Bridge on the Thompson River. I wondered if Harry had met Teit before the latter’s death in 1922. Teit had worked with New York-based anthropologist Franz Boas between 1894 and 1922. He had also served Aboriginal chiefs throughout the province in their campaign to resolve their land problems with European and American newcomers. I obviously struck a nerve because Harry began reconstructing the days of the “big meetings” (as he called them) attended by Teit at the behest of these chiefs. “Nowadays they call it the Land Question. Still going, you know.” There was a problem with these “big meetings,” he explained. Everyone had ignored how “Indians” had come “to be here in the first place”:
The Indians, they don’t say,
they don’t say how come for the Indians
to be here first before the white.
See?
They never did tell that.…
They never say how come for the Indians
to belong to that what they have claimed…
How come the Indians to own this place
and how come to be here in the first place?
Underlying this statement was the implication that the Indians belonged to the land, not vice versa, and that no justification was needed for their presence.7 Harry insisted that current disputes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples over land were flawed because people continued to avoid the issue of how these lands had been originally assigned. The answers, he explained, were contained in a story.
In a now familiar pattern, Harry sat upright, cleared his throat, and began telling the story. Once again Coyote loomed large. But much to my surprise, so did my first ancestor. The story featured a pair of twins charged to undertake a series of important tasks related to the creation of the earth and its first inhabitants. The elder twin performed his duties exactly as instructed, but the younger twin stole a written document—a “paper”—he had been warned not to touch. When confronted about his actions, he denied having done this. Because of this, he was immediately banished to a distant land across a large body of water. The elder twin was left in his place of origin.
The younger twin, Harry explained, was the original ancestor of white people; the elder twin was Coyote—“the Indians’ forefather.” “That’s how come,” Harry explained, “the Indians [were] here first before the white.” He then stressed that “that’s why the white man can tell a lie more than the Indian.… ” Part of the deal struck with the younger twin (my first ancestor) at the time of his banishment was that his descendants would one day travel to the home of the elder twin’s descendants to reveal the contents of the written document.
Time passed and all proceeded according to plan. The descendants of the elder twin multiplied and populated the North American continent while the descendants of the younger twin did the same in their designated homeland across the ocean. Eventually, after many years, the latter made their way to North America. But, things went badly astray when, true to their original character, the descendants of the younger twin began killing descendants of the elder twin and stealing their lands. They also concealed the contents of the “paper.” When the conflicts between the two groups escalated, Coyote travelled to England to discuss ways of resolving these problems with the king of the younger twin’s descendants. Harry recalled a segment of Coyote’s speech to the king:
Your children is coming.
Lots of them.
They come halfways already from the coast to the coast.
And they don’t do right to my children.
Seems to me they’re going to run over them.
And they don’t care much for them.
Now we’re going to straighten that up.
And we’re going to make a law.
And the law that we’re going to make
is going to be the law from the time we finish.
Together Coyote and the king produced a book that outlined a set of codes by which the two groups were supposed to live and interact. “When they finish that law,” Harry explained, they call it the “Black and White” because “one of them was black and the other was white.” They made four copies, three of which they agreed to distribute to the descendants of both groups.
Harry’s sources for this story were able to trace the movement of the “Black and White” from England to various points in Canada. One man, TOH-ma, told Harry in 1917 that he had travelled with a man who was charged with delivering a copy of the “Black and White” to the legislature in Victoria. Another of Harry’s acquaintances, Edward Bent, had gained access to the book. Having attended residential school, he could read English. But he died before he could reveal its contents to his colleagues.
By now I was very confused. This Coyote story had so little in common with the quaint and timeless mythological accounts in the published collections. I wondered about the references to my first ancestor. I had not encountered anything like this among the published accounts for this region. The Coyote at the centre of this story was not portrayed as the trickster/seducer/pest that he had been in the story Harry had recounted for us two years earlier. Rather, this original ancestor of the “Indians” was the obedient twin who dutifully followed the orders of his superior. In this story he represented goodness. My first ancestor, by way of contrast, represented the opposite: he was a liar and a thief. Even more surprising was Coyote’s ability to travel freely between prehistorical and historical