6. Carlson writes:
“Harry Robinson’s account of literacy being stolen from Coyote by his white twin conform to all the standard criteria associated with a genre of Salish narratives commonly referred to by outsiders as legend or mythology with one exception – they appear to contain post-contact content” (Carlson 56).
Why is it, according to Carlson or/and Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).
Why is it that Aboriginal stories influenced by post-contact European proceedings and disputes are not addressed by scholars? Wendy Wickwire asserts that the impact of this absence is a lack of Indigenous participation in documenting their own history because “the ethnographic archive …is… devoid of cultural context” (Stories 456). Keith Carlson, in Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History, says that some Salish stories tell of Indigenous literacy lost or taken away and notes that those stories that are ”informed or influenced by post-contact European events and issues” are ignored by scholars (56). In Wendy Wickwire’s introduction to Harry Robinson’s Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory she contemplates the distinction between Robinson’s stories and Aboriginal mythologies she researched in preparation for her meetings with Robinson and her own original unconscious bias to exclude stories that don’t conform to the traditional mythologies. This blog will demonstrate how both Carlson and Wickwire attribute the lack of scholarly interest to a model of “historical purity” (Orality 56) that is applied to Aboriginal stories.
Carlson’s exploration of Indigenous stories of the Salish people to understand Indigenous literacy history in comparison to Western chronologies leads to his explanation as to why Indigenous literacy is ignored by scholars. He explains that Indigenous stories such as the Bertha Peters’ story of the three chiefs that would otherwise be considered “legends” or “mythology” worthy of study are dismissed because they contain post-contact content, rendering them inauthentic. Prophecy stories, such as those of Mrs. Peters, are also dismissed because they are interpreted by Westerners to include post-contact knowledge in supposed prophecies and thus are inauthentic as well. As Carlson says, “[w]e have grown so accustomed to associating authentic Aboriginal culture with pre-contact temporal dimensions that we have dismissed or ignored Native stories that do not meet our criteria for historical purity” (Orality 56). Carlson identifies that the Salish, too, want authenticity. However, they do not measure authenticity in terms of “historical purity” and verifiable evidence, but rather in terms of whether it matches the collective memory and ongoing stories of the community.
Wickwire, who worked with Harry Robinson to help him fulfill his mission to make sure that his stories did not die with him, confronts the challenges of being a good listener and a good publisher. When Wickwire notices herself distinguishing the story of Coyote and the king and his free travel between prehistoric and historic times, she recognizes that it is because there are so few documented Aboriginal myths and legends with post-contact content. Wickwire references Franz Boas’ and James Teit’s collections of stories from Salishan-speakers as documented myths and legends. While she finds many similarities to some of Robinson’s stories, most of both Boas’ and Teit’s work (except a post-humous Teit work published by Boas) had a “fixation on the deep past” (Living 22) creation stories. The post-humous Teit publication contained many post-contact references to white people, biblical stories, and the story of Coyote meeting the king, confirming Wickwire’s suspicion that the “collectors” passed over any stories that they deemed too Westernized in their search for “authentic” mythology.
Wickwire’s search for explanation for this fixation on the deep past leads her to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind as theoretical literature on myths and legends. In this book Lévi-Strauss theorizes that there are “hot” and “cold” zones of peoples. According to this theory the Salish would be “cold”, so their stories should be “mainly timeless and ahistorical” (Living 11). Wickwire identifies Michael Harkin saying that Boas worked within this Levi-Straus theory and limited his publications to a single genre, the myth, as his he sought to capture “some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people” (Gateways 93-105).
Wickwire goes on to reference another ethnographer who, like Boas, was “entrenched in the salvage paradigm” (Living 23), Charles Hill-tout. Hill-tout claimed that the pre-contact Indigenous myth was the only “reliable record” and the only way to get “genuine glimpses of the forgotten past” (The Salish 137). Like Boas, Hill-tout questions the authenticity of post-contact stories. Wickwire appropriately challenges this assumption of reliability given that the myth storytellers talking to Hill-tout have only ever lived in post-contact times.
Carlson and Wickwire both identify that the early ethnographers and “collectors” of Indigenous stories systematically ignored stories with post-contact content, or combined or edited the stories to eliminate such references in their quest to capture the timeless myth of the Indigenous. Wickwire says that this early framing of “authentic” indigenous stories has limited our ability to be reliable storytellers and listeners of indigenous stories which are fluid in time and space. The “Boasian paradigm reified the mythological past and promoted the stereotype of the “mythteller” –the bearer of the single, communal accounts roots in the deep past” (Living 29). Teit, who lived in the community, says that it was not his intent to ignore the current stories containing issues and challenges in living with white people. However, he said that the American and Canadian governments who paid for his work were not at all interested in the current stories, so he de-emphasized them. Was the lack of government interest a purposeful disinterest to hide the protests of the theft of land and rights?
Works cited:
Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines. Eds. Carlson, Kristina Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 43-72.
Harkin, Michael. “(Dis)pleasures of the Text: Boasian Ethnology on the Central Northwest Coast, in Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Eds. I. Krupnik and W. Fitzhugh. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2001. 93-105.
Hill-Tout, Charles, and Maud, Ralph. The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1978. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories : A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Talonbooks, 2005. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.
Wickwire, W. (2005). Stories from the margins: Toward a more inclusive british columbia historiography. Journal of American Folklore, 118, 453-474. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1714581?accountid=14656
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