A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 23
One important factor - not in itself an explanation - is that most
of the linguists themselves were men.
Swanton was physically small and profoundly shy - "an elf of a
man," as a larger, more ebullient friend remembered him.14 Later in
life, he described himself as someone who "cordially loathed from
the ground up the entire competitive system." 15 He put storytellers
at ease, and he listened to what he was told, but he did not, so far
as we can tell, press people for information they were reluctant to
divulge. In the case of the women he spoke to, that often included
even their names. Twenty years earlier another elf of a man - the
hunchbacked geologist George Dawson, who brought the first camera
to Haida Gwaii - had remarked on the reluctance of Haida women
to be photographed.16
Franz Boas heard a number of stories from women (including
Haida women) on the Northwest Coast between 1886 and 1900,
but in those years Boas often worked with urbanized and displaced
people. Boas's Haida teachers were working for wages in Victoria,
where village rules of deference and reticence were waived. And
Boas recorded their stories only in German or English. The first
woman mythteller on the Northwest Coast to be recorded in her own
language was a Kwakwalan elder by the name of Qasa_las. She told
Q'ix_itasu' a story in Kwakwala about a woman who was murdered
by her husband and whose four brothers then avenged her death.
Q'ix_itasu' transcribed this tale at Fort Rupert, probably in the fall
of 1900 - just as Swanton was starting to work in Haida Gwaii. Ten
years later, a Nuuchahnulth man named Qiix_a, speaking Nootka, told
"the same" story - in fact, of course, a very different story built from
the same events - to Edward Sapir. There is much to be learned by
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reading the stories of Qiix_a and Qasa_las together - and a detailed
comparison of tone and style is made less difficult, in this case, by
the fact that Nootka and Kwakwala are sister languages.17
In 1933 two anthropologists, Kaj Birket-Smith and Frederica de
Laguna, met the Eyak mythteller Anna Nelson (later Anna Nelson
Harry) in Cordova, Alaska, near the mouth of the Copper River. Their
experience casts some further light on the problems facing Swanton
in 1900 and 1901. Anna Nelson answered her visitors' questions
about linguistic and ethnographic matters, but she left the telling
of stories to her husband Galushia. It was clear to Birket-Smith and
de Laguna that Galushia had learned these stories from his wife and
still often needed her assistance when he told them. Moreover, one
of the anthropologists asking for these stories was a woman. Yet
household protocol was such that Anna told her stories to Galushia
and Galushia told them to the guests.18 When another thirty years
had passed, Anna Nelson Harry agreed to tell her stories directly to
the linguist Michael Krauss - but conditions then were different in
several respects. Galushia was dead ; Anna was living in the Tlingit
community of Yakutat with her Tlingit-speaking second husband ;
Krauss was young enough to be her grandson and was passionately
interested in Eyak ; and Anna was keenly aware that she was one
of the last three or four fluent speakers of Eyak still alive. Most
importantly, perhaps, she could whisper as quietly as she pleased
- and that was often very quietly indeed - to the impassive ear of
Krauss's tape-recorder.
Swanton too had some of these advantages - he was young,
and he was passionately interested - but that was not enough. His
method of taking dictation still required a degree of public presence
on the storyteller's part. The stories he heard were told instead of
confided. Under these conditions, it is inconceivable that Swanton
could have recorded the stories of Haida women as fully as he did
the stories of men - and unlikely he could have recorded them at
all without resorting to subterfuge.
Classical Haida narrative as we know it bears some interesting
resemblances to Haida formline painting and carving - and these,
so far as we know, were almost exclusively male arts in the classical
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a story as sharp as a knife
period. There is proof, as we shall see, that some women knew the
mythology just as well as or better than men. And there are women
mythtellers now in Haida Gwaii (but there are also, now, several
women painters and sculptors). It would be nice to know if there was
formerly a distinct women's tradition of narrative art in the Haida
language, and if it corresponded in any way to other arts - weaving,
basketry and spruceroot embroidery - practiced by women.19
In recent years, several women anthropologists have transcribed
stories from Haida elders of both sexes,20 and Haida women elders
in the present day seem as open with their stories as the older men.
No one has reported any evidence of a separate body of myths told
by Haida women and not by men. But the emphases and styles of
Haida women mythtellers, along with all the content of women's
personal stories and medicine tales, are absent from the record of
classical Haida literature.
At Hlghagilda in 1900, someone - we do not know who - said
to Swanton, "No one living knows the full story of this island. The
last who knew it was an old woman of Ninstints [Sghan Gwaay, one
of the southernmost of the major Haida villages] who died some
ten or fifteen years ago." 21 More intriguing still is the mysterious
unnamed woman with whom Skaay conferred, or said he conferred,
before telling Swanton his second magnum opus, Xhuuya Qaagaa-
ngas, or Raven Travelling.
*
The epic of the trickster lies at the center of the oral literature of the
Northwest Coast. Swanton recorded many portions and versions of
this tapestry of stories at Hlghagilda and Ghaw and tried his best to
fit these fragments into wholes. Out of all these pieces, there is one
sentence supplied by a woman. Swanton doesn't give her name, but
he tells us she belonged to the Stastas family of the Eagle side and
in 1900 was living at Hlghagilda.22 Daxhiigang was also a Stastas
from Hlghagilda, and the woman was therefore either Da xhii gang's
mother, Kkaawquuna, or one of his aunts. Because of the way her
sentence meshes with the story, it seems quite certain she was pres—
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ent as a listener - and possibly a critic - while Skaay was telling
Moody and Swanton his own version of Raven Travelling.
Skaay saved this work for last, and when he did begin to tell it, he
started near the end, with the bridge leading into what Skaay called
the Youngsters' Poem, Nang hittaghaninas qqaygaanggha. This is
the anthology of ribald trickster tales that Skaay, Ghandl, Haayas,
Kingagwaaw and others all apparently regarded as the right way to
conclude the poem. The earlier part of the story, which Skaay called
the Poem of the Elders, Nang qqayas qqaygaanggha, has its own fair
share of scandalous, hilarious events, but at the same time it recounts
in some detail the basic formation and arrangement of the world.
It deals with the separation of sea and land and day and night, the
establishment of the seasons, the coloration of the birds, and other
essentials. Skaay started with the profane part of the story, Swanton
says, "but next morning he said that he had been talking over the
proper place to begin with an old woman." 23 Then he started all over
again at what is plainly the beginning.
There is, by the way, no other early authority for these two terms,
the Youngsters' Poem and the Elders' Poem (or the Young Man's Story
and the Old Man's Story, as Swanton understood them). We do not
know whether these were Skaay's private terms or everybody's terms
or something in between. Neither do we know for certain what they
mean. Do they tell us who is expected to tell the story ? Or who is
expected to be listening ? Were they concocted on the spot, as part
of the elaborate joke Skaay played on Swanton when he started the
story near the end ? Or do they point to something present in the
myth itself ? The Raven is repeatedly reborn in the course of his
own story, so it seems that he is older (or at any rate no younger)
when his long biography begins than when it ends. But in the early
part of the story he is constantly surrounded by changing sets of
parents and other elders. In the latter part of the story, he is always
on his own. This contradiction can be stated even more concretely.
In the Poem of the Elders, the Raven is repeatedly reincarnated as
a newborn child. In the Youngsters' Poem, he repeatedly steals the
skin of an old man.
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a story as sharp as a knife
*
In addition to Skaay and Ghandl, Swanton recorded a number of
very interesting storytellers and poets of lesser skill or with a smaller
range. At Hlghagilda alone, there were more than half a dozen of importance. Sghiidagits, the headman of the village, was one. Sghaagya
was another. Henry Moody's father, Gumsiiwa, was a third. Tlaajang
Quuna (Tom Stevens), the nephew and heir of Da xhii gang's father,
was a fourth. A fifth was Xhaaydakuns (Tom Price), a capable sculptor as well as a mythteller, who was headman of the Saahgi Qiighawaay.24 And there were two who were especially close to Skaay : his
friend Kilxhawgins and his family headman, Xhyuu.
Some of these poets are fond of puns and some of them are not.
A few sometimes inflate their sentences with adjectives, while the
best ones, even in performances that last for hours, never waste a
word. Ghandl has a sense of pathos as delicate and exact as we expect
from a great violinist. Skaay has a narrative reach equalled by none
of the others, and Swanton's transcripts make it clear that Skaay also
made the greatest use of dramatic vocal gestures.
We might wonder why the two best poets Swanton met are
also the first he recorded at length. The answer, I think, is that the
people knew full well who were the poets in their midst, and once
Swanton had paid his respects to Sghiidagits, Henry Moody led
him directly to the best Haida poets - and maybe the only trained
professionals - still alive.
We might also wonder why these poets - Skaay especially, since
he was the first - confided their treasures to Swanton so readily. I
don't believe, myself, that the answer is money or vanity. I think
the credit goes to Swanton's colleague Henry Moody. Moody belonged to a family called the Qaagyals Qiighawaay, of the Raven
side. His mother was a sister of Gidansta, the head of that family
and hereditary headman of Qquuna, where Skaay was born. Henry,
in fact, was Gidansta's senior nephew and heir. He was therefore one
of the princes of the vanished Haida world. He brought Swanton to
Skaay. And when Skaay dictated his poems, he was speaking them
not to John Swanton the anthropologist, but to the future chief of
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Qquuna, his own ancestral village - even though that village had
by then lain empty for twenty years.25
It is not altogether inconceivable that Henry Moody made these
decisions and arrangements on his own, acting on Swanton's behalf.
But I think it much more likely that the guidance came from Moody's
father, Gumsiiwa. Moody brought Swanton to Gumsiiwa first of all,
and Gumsiiwa dictated the first Haida story Swanton transcribed.
He therefore saw how the transcription process worked and may
have played a crucial role in determining how it would go. I have a
hunch that Gumsiiwa understood how to turn Swanton's presence
to advantage, ensuring his son Henry not only a salary but a good
postgraduate course in classical Haida literature and culture. If this
is how it was, we have Gumsiiwa to thank for sending Henry Moody
and John Swanton to Sghiidagits, Skaay and Ghandl.
Swanton cannot have known at this point what was happening to him, even if he realized who was steering his course. In the
beginning, he didn't even know the meanings of the words that he
was patiently transcribing. He did know, from the outset, that the
mythtellers he met were individual human beings, and he took real
interest in their differences. So great, nevertheless, was his respect
for the work of his earlier teacher that even Swanton never freed
himself entirely from Boas's belief that oral literature is essentially
independent of individual thought and style.
It is a fact that oral poets very rarely claim to be original. It is
also a fact that no two are the same. At the other extreme, modern
artists in literate societies rarely claim to be anything less than
wholly original. Even those who know they are slaves of fashion,
and those who know they are dutiful servants of living tradition,
comprehend that this is not what their dealers or agents or publishers
want them to say.
Among the 150 narrative poems and stories that Swanton recorded
in Haida, many concern the shape and structure of the universe. In
many of these stories, we meet a repeating cast of characters : Xhuuya,
Nang Kilstlas, Tangghwan Llaana, Tl*laajaat - whose English names
are the Raven, Voicehandler, Sea Dweller, Fairweather Woman -
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a story as sharp as a knife
and others. The breadth and depth of thought in these stories is
enormous. But this thought is almost always expressed in terse and
concrete terms. It takes the form of images and events that can be
painted, carved or danced as well as spoken.
Line is a powerful force in Haida art - but it is line that shrinks
and swells and bends and flexes like a muscle. It forms attachments,
like the anchor points of muscles, bones or feathers, and it builds and
releases tension, like a bow. It also severs and rejoins itself, forming
out-of-round organic hollows, pockets and pools : knots, joints and
breathing holes in the tense, motionless current that keeps them
alive. That is the nature of line in Haida painting ; it is also the nature
of plot in Haida narrative. Neither the visual art nor the poetry has
room for picturesque detail. Their power and complexity demand a
sparer form. Yet to anyone who studies the art closely, no two Haida
carvers are the same. And no two Haida poets either.
In their last collaboration, Skaay spoke into Henry Moody's ear
and John Swanton's notebook a poem that sketches the creation of
the present world. It isn't the Haida vision of creation, nor even the Haida vision of creation ; it is Skaay's particular vision, or one of his visions : the one he agreed to spin into words in the final days of October 1900, surrounded by memories of the dead and by the counsel
and attention of a few surviving friends. Swanton asked other Haida
poets to tell him the same story, and they did. They told him Raven
Travelling over and over. No two of them are the same.
If Swanton had asked a single poet - Skaay, let us say - to tell
the same story again and again, how different would the versions
be ? For a scientist inquiring into the nature of oral literature, there
is no more obvious experiment than that. Boas had conducted such
experiments in the 1890s with the Chinook mythteller Q'elti 26 -
albeit for linguistic rather than literary reasons - and Swanton had
studied those texts in writing his dissertation, but Swanton never
tried such experiments with Skaay, nor with any other mythteller he
met, in any of the languages he worked in, during forty active years
as a linguist and ethnologist. That was not his kind of science : not
his notion of a healthy way of dealing with the world.
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What if he had called on Skaay in a different season or a different
year or with a different colleague - the heir-apparent of Hlghagilda,
perhaps, instead of Henry Moody, the heir-apparent of Qquuna ?
Would he then have heard the same ten-hour cycle, the same Big
