A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 45
all immigrants here" and moving toward a condition in which all of
us are natives. It means erasing the false boundary between "native
art" and "high art." It means pooling the contents of art museums
and ethnographic collections, then shaking down the result on the
basis of quality instead of cultural origin. I think those are good and
healthy principles, every bit as applicable in the literary realm as in
the domain of visual art.
It is true that literature relies in part on language, and there are
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political afterword
far too many Native American languages for anyone to learn to read
them all, much less to speak them. So I suppose that if classical Native American literature is going to be listened to and read, it will
mostly have to be heard and read in translation. I have no doubt that
translations far better than mine can be made, but I don't expect they
will be made if the literary value of these works, and their genuine
pertinence to our lives, are ignored and denied, as they have been,
so widely, for so long.
It is also true that literature is not the word most Haida people
use nowadays to speak of their verbal inheritance, left to them in
large part through the labors of John Swanton. The fact that I was
reading and celebrating this inheritance as literature was exciting
to Bill Reid, but to many other Haida (and to some anthropologists
and linguists) it has seemed misguided at best. The fact that I have
called the stories poems, identified and singled out their speakers, researched their biographies, and celebrated them as poets has
seemed to some especially perverse and intrusive. For some, this
sense of intrusion, and the anger that came with it, may never wear
off. Within the Haida community, that reaction is not hard to understand. People whose culture and identity have been relentlessly
squeezed over more than a century, and then, with equal mindless—
ness, romanticized and commercialized for the tourist trade, are entitled to be angry and suspicious for as long as they can bear to feel
that way. But the view that no outsider should speak of the Haida
mythtellers without Haida permission is not the view I was taught
by my Haida teacher and not a view to which I subscribe.
There are masterworks of classical Haida visual art - carvings,
weavings and formline paintings - in public and private collections
around the world. Most are nineteenth-century works ; their makers were roughly contemporary with Skaay. The practical value of
these works, and the practical value of having them in museums, is
clear on two fronts. A growing number of younger artists, beginning with Iihljiwaas, the young Bill Reid, could and did go, and are
still going, to study them, applying what they learn to the making
of new art. And the rest of us can study them, applying what we
learn to our understanding of human artistry as a whole, and to the
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endless, poignant question of how to live our lives. Classical Haida
literature has the same potential value, global and local. It deserves
the same respect as the visual art, the same privilege and protection,
and given those conditions, the same universality of access.
There are dangers here, it is true. Treating Native American
mythtellers as individual artists, thinkers and poets doesn't just
threaten entrenched opinions and upset a few comfortable chairs.
It upsets the detente between colonizers and colonized, now that
the war between them is theoretically over. It implies that the wall
between them is built out of misinformation and would, if we let it,
simply fall down. This threatens identities, not just positions. But
perhaps what it offers is richer and truer - more truthful about the
past, more honest with the future - than what it undermines.
Human history looks like a mess, and it probably is one. Natural
history, by comparison, looks to many like a masterpiece of design.
We ought to remember, though, that to those who thought they
were winners, human history has also often looked like a well—
written script, with fireworks and crescendos at suitable intervals
and a burst of glory waiting at the end. I do not think, myself, that
humans are actually competent to take full charge of their history,
to plot their own ideal course through time, any more than they
are competent to redesign and improve the natural world. I think,
however, that storytelling - of which history is a branch - is at its
best a means of seeking truth, not a way to exercise control, and not
a form wishful thinking.
Part of the truth is that much is in flux and much is now lost. We
can nevertheless be grateful for what we have. That would include,
in this instance, the revival of Haida art, music and dance that is well
underway ; the protection of Haida work both old and new in museums around the world (including the new museum on Haida Gwaii) ;
the preservation of many fine works of Haida oral literature in written
form ; and the active reassertion of Haida sovereignty - though some
of those campaigning for Haida sovereignty have once in a while,
and understandably, been suspicious of what I was doing.
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Appendix 1 : Spelling, Pronunciation
and Native American Typography
Haida, like most Native American languages, employs a number of speech sounds that are not present in English and
for which the basic Latin alphabet has no conventional symbols. To
represent these sounds, we can do any of several things. We can
borrow letters from other established alphabets - Greek chi (q),
Lithuanian a-macron (a) , Polish barred l (l) , or Turkish dotted g (g) , for instance. We can borrow symbols such as the eng (NG), schwa (@), esh (S), or barred lambda (l) from one of the technical inventories used by professional linguists - the International Phonetic Alphabet
( iPa) or the Americanist Technical Alphabet ( ata). We can invent
new symbols wholesale - as James Evans did for Cree and Sequoyah
for Cherokee. Or we can redefine familiar Latin glyphs and combinations of glyphs ( x, xh, or x_ ; q, qq, or q' , for example) to represent whatever sounds we need to write and read. All these methods have been tried many times, and are still being tried on a daily basis as
Native American writing systems continue to evolve.
The first, tentative version of the iPa was published in 1888. An
improved version was published in 1900, but the system remained
fundamentally inadequate for Native American languages until 1932.
Phonetic transcription was, in other words, still in its infancy when
Swanton started work on the Northwest Coast. The writing system
he used for Haida and Tlingit was one devised and taught by Franz
Boas specifically for Native American work. (In effect, therefore, it
was one of the many early prototypes of the ata.) This alphabet
included a number of practical alternatives suited to handwriting,
typewriting, and typesetting. The typewritten forms required manual
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a story as sharp as a knife
annotation, while the typographic forms were sufficiently complex
that most Native American texts published during the early twentieth
century had to be set and corrected by specialists in the Netherlands.
Boas and his students also kept learning new things, so their system
was steadily under revision.
The purpose of a technical alphabet is accurate representation
of the sounds of human speech regardless of the language to which
they belong. So-called practical alphabets are meant for writing one particular language, or a few phonologically similar languages, with
a minimum of fuss. But fuss can be hard to avoid. There are Native
American languages with forty or more consonants, sixteen different vowels, and vital distinctions of pitch or tone that must all be
signaled somehow.
For much of the twentieth century, linguists did a lot of their
work with typewriters, and in devising practical alphabets there
was a strong incentive to stick with the stunted symbol-set that the
typewriter keyboard allows. One could backspace and overstrike to
get symbols such as , but this produced unfortunate results with
descending letters such as g and y. One could use the apostrophe,
but only in its noncommittal typewriter form ('). One could also redefine the upper case. This doubled the size of the character set but
yielded constructions such as NEngkilstLas agEng indatLXaga:GEni.1
Alphabets were concocted with the ampersand, at-sign, asterisk, dollar and per cent signs, various punctuation marks, and even some
of the numerals doing double duty as letters. They were "practical"
for the typist, but the end result was an orthographic cartoon. These
spelling systems suggested that Native Americans spoke unwritable,
unpronounceable and laughably unsophisticated languages.
The personal computer, when first introduced, had a character
set as stunted as that of the typewriter, but this limitation soon
disappeared. There has not for twenty years been any technical or
financial impediment to making and sharing custom-tailored alphabets that evoke the spirit of humanist scholarship and indigenous
self-determination rather than that of mechanical desperation. The
impediment is that not all linguists - nor all readers and writers of
Native American languages, nor all of those who publish Native
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appendix 1: Spelling, Pronunciation & Typography
American texts and reference materials - are adherents of the humanist tradition or sympathetic to it.
Any alphabet used for Haida must be able to represent a number
of features that are absent or insignificant in English.
(1) vowels. In Haida, as in Arabic, Latin, classical Greek, and
Tiberian Hebrew, the vowels are of two main kinds, long and short.
The long vowels can be written with macrons ( a, i, etc), iPa length-marks (a:, i:, etc), ata length marks ( a*, i*, etc), or colons ( a:, i:, etc), but the usual method in practical alphabets is simply to double them ( aa, ii, etc). It is important, however, to understand that long and short mean what they say. Some of us were taught as children to call
the vowel in fate long and the vowel in fat short. Even now, there are dictionaries that mark them a and a, implicitly endorsing that deceptive terminology. It is better to speak of the former vowel as
tense, the latter as lax. A long vowel is not necessarily tense, but it
does last longer than a short vowel (twice as long, in theory).
(2) consonants. All the indigenous languages of the Northwest Coast, including Haida, involve several consonantal contrasts
that are not employed in English.
(2.1) Uvulars. In Haida as in many African and North Asian
languages, there is a contrasting series of velar and uvular sounds.
The velar half of this series is familiar : g, k, and a fricative (usually written x) corresponding to the ch in German Bach or Scottish loch.
Their uvular counterparts are pronounced farther down in the throat.
(Linguists used to call these uvular consonants gutterals. ) Uvulars are often written with an underline ( g_, k_, x_), with a wedge diacritic ( gV, xV) or as digraphs with h ( gh, xh). Another very common way of writing k_ is q - because it has the same sound as Arabic qaf (q) and Hebrew qoph (q). The uvular g ( g_ or gV or gh) is the voiced counterpart of uvular k ( k_ or q). The x and its counterpart ( x_ or xV or xh), while routinely described as velar and uvular, are sometimes a step higher in the mouth (palatal and velar, like the ch of German ich and Bach), but the parallel contrast is still preserved.
(2.2) Ejectives. Ejective or glottalized consonants are consonants
in which a glottal stop is superimposed on the normal sound. Something like a fifth of all human languages include such consonants,2
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a story as sharp as a knife
but the tongues of Western Europe are not among them. On the
Northwest Coast, ejectives are ubiquitous and are always found
in company with their non-ejective counterparts, so the contrast
between the two is vital. In learning to pronounce them, it is best
to start with the simple glottal stop - itself an essential letter of the
alphabet in Haida and all its neighboring languages. The glottal stop
occurs in English too, though as an incidental sound not represented
in writing. It is the little catch at the beginning of each syllable in
the exclamation uh-oh. The phonetic symbol for this sound is ? (a
gelded question mark), and the commonest way of representing it
in the Latin alphabet is with an apostrophe : ' uh-' oh. The ejective or glottalized consonants are usually written with an apostrophe as a diacritic or, to make things easier, as a companion ( k' , t' , ts' , etc). Many consonants, however, are vowel-like in that they involve continuous airflow: English l, m, r, s, w, for instance. When these consonants are glottalized, the catch occurs at the beginning, and many people
prefer to write them that way (' l, ' m, ' w, rather than l' , m' , w' , etc).
My own eccentric preference is to write Haida ejectives as doubled
consonants ( kk, ll, qq, tt, ttl, tts) .
(2.3) Laterals. English has only one lateral (represented by the letter l) ; Italian has two ( l and gl) ; but Haida has six : a voiced pulmonic l (like l in English), an ejective l (written ' l or l' or ll), a voiceless l (written hl or lh or l), and three lateral affricates : dl, tl, and ejective tl.3 In addition, l can be a vowel in Haida.
(2.4) Disambiguation. Where necessary, I use a raised dot to distinguish adjacent letters from digraphs or trigraphs. For example,
n*g = ng as in Wingate, not as in singing.
In the northern dialects of Haida, several vowels have shifted,
gh has become a pharyngealized glottal stop - written ?? in iPa and
ata4 - while xh has often just disappeared. Wherever I can, I follow the literary convention that spelling should be consistent across a
language though pronounciation routinely is not. (There are a few
places in this book-e.g., p 123 - where I wanted to call attention to
a northern pronunciation and have written northern gh as a single
open quote [']. Otherwise, it is written like southern gh. )
*
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appendix 1: Spelling, Pronunciation & Typography
six systems of haida spelling
Swanton
ipa
ata
Enrico
Bringhurst
ship
1900-1912
1932 ff
1934 ff
1995 ff
1999 ff
2008
a, a, a
a / a
a / a
a
a
a
Symbols
a, a.
@ / ^
@ / ^
@, a
a / u
a / i
for different
a, a', e
a: / a:
a* / a*
aa
aa
aa
but related
sounds are
b, p
b
b
b
b
b
separated
d
d
d
d
d
d
by slashes.
x
l., l., l, l
dl
l
dl
dl
dl
Alternative
g
g, g
g
g
g
g
represen-
g., g
tations of
.
g
g
r
gh
g_
sounds
h
h
h
h
h
h
that are
i
i i i
i
i / e
i
i
essentially
ii / ei
i: / ei
i* / ei
ii / ee
ii
ii / ee
the same are
dj
dZ
zh / c
j
