A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 48
2 "Canadian Fate and Imperialism," Winnipeg : Canadian Dimension 4.3 (1967) : 24. The essay is reprinted in Grant's Technology and Empire (Toronto : An-ansi, 1969). Two decades later Northrop Frye, in a lecture entitled "Levels of Cultural Identity" (1993 : 168-182) went to some trouble to contradict this
assertion, though here too the language smacks unhappily of "them" and
"us."
3 As of 2010, internet resources for Haida in particular and for Native American phonology in general are not yet as rich as one might expect, but they are growing. Some even show signs of becoming fairly reliable and stable.
notes to chaPter one
1 For preference I have used native place names in this book. When a standard reference is required, I use the names from current marine charts published by the Canadian Hydrographic Service. These are indexed in the relevant coast
pilot (Canada, Dept. of Fisheries & Oceans 2002a, 2002b). A partial list of Haida village names and their colonial equivalents is given in appendix 2,
pp 436-437.
2 The name Haida Gwaii is probably a 19th-century coinage, and the spelling fits none of the systems now in use for writing Haida. It has been ratified, however, by the Council of the Haida Nation, the British Columbia Legisla—
tive Assembly and the Geographical Names Board of Canada.
3 George Dawson transcribed the name in 1878 as "Skatz-sai," and gave the
puzzling translation "angry waters" (Dawson 1993 : 52). Newton Chittenden, a real-estate promoter hired by the provincial government to visit Haida Gwaii in 1884, heard it as "Scotsgi" (misprinted "Seotsgi" in Chittenden 1884 : 68).
But the name was current well before that. John Boit, a 21-year-old ship's
443
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 443
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
captain from Massachusetts, met a Haida he called "Scorch Eye" on 20 June
1795 and killed him the following day (Boit 1794-6 : folio 7r). A belated
census made in 1901 by Charles Newcombe confirms that Sqaatsigaay was
one of the names of the headman of the Qayahl Llaanas lineage (Newcombe
n.d. 1 : v 38 f 1).
4 The baptism is recorded in the old church ledger for Skidegate, Gold Harbour and Clue (Crosby et al. n.d. : 48). Gold Harbour in this case means New Gold Harbour, or Xayna (rather than Old Gold Harbour, or Qaysun), and Clue
means New Clue, or Qqaadasghu (rather than Old Clue, or Ttanuu).
5 Details are given in Boyd 1990 & 1994 and in Galois 1996. Postcontact epidemics with a serious effect on the Haida population include at least the following : smallpox 1775-6, smallpox or measles circa 1810-11, measles
and influenza 1848, smallpox 1862-3, measles 1868.
6 Swanton never mentions this important fact. It was remembered nonetheless by Gidahl Qaa'anga (Hazel Stevens of Skidegate, 1900-2002), who listened
to Ghandl when she was a child. See Enrico 1995 : 10. Where congenital resistance is low and vaccines are not available, blindness is a common side
effect of smallpox, measles, diphtheria and other infectious diseases. These three in particular plagued aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast during the 18th and 19th centuries.
7 Many people less dedicated than Swanton have doubted that such a process
can work, but it very often has, and has sometimes produced better results
than the tape recorder. According to William Bright, it was formerly the
custom of Karuk mythtellers to tell stories to children one sentence at a
time for verbatim repetition. Such procedures may have been in wide use in
North America before the European invasion. Albert Lord's Epic Singers and Oral Tradition includes some pertinent remarks on the effects of dictation as compared with normal performance or audio recording, based on Lord's
experience with oral poets in Bosnia and Montenegro (Lord 1991 : 45-48).
8 The original text of the poem is in Swanton n.d.2 : folios 354-358.
9 What Swanton wrote here (and again at line 84 of the poem) is tc!al - i.e., ttsaahl, which means shore pine. It appears that what he should have written is ttsi' aal, which is the Haida name for the edible roots of the coastal cinquefoil or silverweed, Argentina pacifica (formerly Potentilla pacifica). I am grateful to John Enrico and to Nancy Turner for help with this passage.
Enrico's emendation has allowed me to improve on the translation that appeared in the first edition of this book.
10 Zostera marina, called ttanuu in Haida and eelgrass or seagrass in English, is a submarine plant of the pondweed family, Zosteraceae. People eat the lower parts of the plant - rhizomes, stems and the bases of the leaves. Geese appear to like the upper leaves as well.
444
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 444
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
notes to chapters 1 & 2 (pages 31-52)
11 Trifolium wormskjoldii, which grows in tidal meadows, is the common clover in the Haida country and possibly the only indigenous species. The
rhizomes are important food for shorebirds, deer and human beings. In
Haida these rhizomes are called naa and the whole plant is naahlqqaay, "naa-branches."
12 Readers familiar with ravens will recognize this behavior. It is documented superbly in Lawrence Kilham's The American Crow and the Common Raven
(1989). Another informative work on avian intelligence is Alexander Skutch,
The Minds of Birds (1996).
13 Swan Maiden stories from elsewhere in the world are summarized in a
number of sources - e.g., Dixon 1916 for Oceania and Kleivan 1962 for the
North American arctic - but original texts with identifiable authors have
been published very rarely. Around 1910, on the island of Ambae (formerly
known as Aoba) in Vanuatu, two men named Guero and Tai dictated stories on this theme in the language now called Northeast Ambae. These are
published, with French translation, in Suas 1912 : 54-60.
Barbara Fass Leavy's In Search of the Swan Maiden (New York University Press, 1994) is not untypical of studies in the field. Works by Europeans (e.g., Ibsen) are treated as the works of individuals. Works from elsewhere in the
world are treated as if composed by a committee of the whole - and even that imaginary committee is not always very carefully identified. Leavy quotes,
for example (p 59), Swanton's synopsis of Ghandl's "swan maiden" story and
attributes it to a tribe she calls "the Jesup of North America." Jesup, however, is not the name of a Native American nation ; it is the name of a philanthro-pist, Morris Jesup, who subsidized a program of research directed by Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History. Results of this research
- including two of Swanton's books about the Haida - were published as a
30-volume series called the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.
14 Keith Basso's essay "Speaking with Names" (Basso 1996 : 71-104) is a fine case study of this phenomenon. It illustrates how stories can be usefully
called to mind, in Apache culture, by quick but pointed reference to the
places where they occurred.
15 There is a damaged early replica of the edited version, now in the Art Institute of Chicago.
notes to chaPter two
1 If we letter the objects in the order of acquisition, we can write this transformation in these terms : (a) (b)(c2)(defgh) (i) - (bd) (ae)(if) (gh)(c2), where a = marlinspike ; b = oil ; c2 = pair of wedges ; i = mouse skin, etc.
The parentheses represent the grouping of objects, or in a musical sense
445
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 445
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
the phrasing of images. The dots represent degrees of delay or suspense
or disjunction.
2 Analogous scenes appear in many contexts, not only in the literatures of the Northwest Coast. In the story of creation that Yellow Brow dictated in Crow
to Robert Lowie in Montana in 1931 (Lowie 1960 : 210-215), the bear gives
claws instead of getting them. Later they are used, in a surprising move, to make the dancing prairie chicken's wings. Cf. Bringhurst 2006 : 149-152.
3 Bogoraz was a skilled linguist and dedicated revolutionary, born in the
Ukraine in 1865. He was jailed in 1886 for his political activities, and his career as an ethnologist began when he was banished to Siberia in 1890.
From 1901 to 1904 he was in New York at the invitation of Franz Boas. He
published extensively in Russian under his own name and also under the
pseudonyms N. A. Tan and V. G. Tan. In English, he more often used the
name Waldemar Bogoras.
4 Bogoras 1918 : 38-40. Other stories told by Rumyantsev appear on pp 48-49, 52-58, 67-69 & 72-73 of the same volume. There is more Yukaghir material in Jochelson 1900 & 1926.
5 Swanton's translation is in Swanton 1905b : 264-268. Snyder wrote his
study, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, in 1951, when he and Dell Hymes were roommates at Reed College. It remained unpublished until
1979. Paraphrased and plagiarized versions of the story also exist (the first such is probably the version in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian [vol. 11 : pp 168-171; Seattle : Curtis, 1916]), but these have not supplanted the original.
notes to chaPter three
1 The Haida certainly grew tobacco in precolonial times, and they began to
grow potatoes at a very early date - probably before the beginning of the
fur trade. The tobacco question is addressed in Turner & Taylor 1972, and in Turner 2004 : 165-168.
2 "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry" (1932), in Sapir 1949 : 515. The same passage is quoted, with relevant excerpts from other authors, in Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952 : 126.
3 "The Ethnological Significance of Esoteric Doctrines" (1902), in Boas 1940 : 314.
4 Letter to Mary O. Swanton, dated Victoria, 14 Sept. 1900. (With the rest
of the surviving letters to his mother, this is now in the Swanton Family
Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Mass.) The chronology of Swanton's movements during this period
is clarified in several such letters, dated Sept. 13th & 14th from Victoria, and Oct. 5th & 7th, from Skidegate.
446
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 446
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
notes to chapters 2 & 3 (pages 54-72)
5 Several spellings of Edenshaw's names are still in use. The Haida form,
Iidansaa, is from Tlingit iitinashu' , "leaving nothing behind," a term that refers to the face of a calving tidewater glacier. The spellings Edensa, Edensaw and Edenshaw are frequent in the secondary literature. One of the earliest
spellings was Edenshew. Gwaayang Gwanhlin (Albert Edward Edenshaw,
Da xhii gang's uncle and mentor) had a nameplate with that spelling fixed
beside the housepole of the house he built at Ghadaghaaxhiwaas about 1875.
But Edenshaw is the form chosen by Gwaayang Gwanhlin's son, Kihlguulins
(Henry Edenshaw). Kihlguulins was a schoolteacher by profession, and his
advice on matters of this kind held sway in the community. That was the
form adopted by Swanton. (Boas, not Swanton, is responsible for the spelling Edensaw in Swanton's 1905 Ethnology. )
"Tahayren," a form that appears from time to time in the tertiary literature, was Marius Barbeau's attempt to spell Daxhiigang.
The shipboard meeting with Daxhiigang is reported in Swanton's letter
to Boas, 23 September 1900 (Dept. of Anthropology Archives, amnh, New
York) and in an undated letter to his mother, written on shipboard "near Port Simpson," probably on the same date.
6 Original in the Dept. of Anthropology Archives, amnh, New York.
7 Swanton 1908a : 273.
8 Original text on folios 490-493, Swanton n.d.2. Swanton's translation is in his ethnology, Swanton 1905a : 94-95. There is a discussion in Kane 1998 :
46-51. John Enrico has recently re-edited the text ; this is published, with his translation, in Enrico 1995 : 160-168. The identity of the storyteller is confirmed in the Haida typescript and in Swanton's letter to Boas dated 30
September 1900, though in a later letter (14 October) he mistakenly attributes the story to Henry Moody instead of his father, Job.
9 The name Gumsiiwa or Cumshewa has been a subject of confusion among
scholars since Swanton first recorded it. Ghandl made it clear to Swanton
that the word was connected with the coming of white traders (Swanton
1905a : 105). Someone else - possibly Gumsiiwa himself - also told him,
correctly, that it was Heiltsuk in origin. But it does not mean "rich at the mouth of the river," as Boas supposed (Swanton 1905a : 105 n 1). The root is Heiltsuk q' vemxsiwa, which means someone or something that stands out or protrudes. For close to two centuries, this has been the Heiltsuk term for white man. The Heiltsuk were active intermediaries in the fur trade, especially in the 1830s, when the only Hudson's Bay post in the area lay in their domain - and Heiltsuk now includes such cognates as the verb q' vemxsiwak' ala, "to speak English." There is evidence, however, that "Gumsiiwa" was in use
as a headman's name in Haida Gwaii when the first Europeans arrived. Its
precontact meaning - and the metaphor behind its early use as a name for
Europeans - may be visible in the Tsimshian noun umksiwa. This is a common Tsimshian term for European or Caucasian ; it also means driftwood.
447
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 447
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
10 The red chiton, sghiidaa, is a leathery-looking mollusk, Cryptochiton stelleri, widely known in English as a gumboot. The suffix -gits is a diminutive, meaning little, plain or ordinary. Its use here, in the headman's ceremonial name, is affectionate and ironic, and it is often used in a similar way in naming some of the creatures of Haida myth.
11 This tale is translated, in part, in chapter 5 and discussed in chapter 6. See p 431 in appendix 1 for details of Tsimshian orthography.
12 Skaay appears, in his various guises, on pp 1, 87, 88 & 94 of the church ledger for Skidegate, Gold Harbour and Clue (Crosby et al. n.d.). His age on 13 March 1892 is given as 64. No reason is given for his multiple Christian
names, but it is clear from the officiating clergymen's cross-references that all these names belong to the same person. An undated note on the first
page of the ledger implies that he was dead by 1916, at which date he would
have been 88 or 89.
13 This was Rev. John Henry Keen's The Gospel According to Saint Luke in Haida (London : British & Foreign Bible Society, 1899). Daxhiigang showed his
copy to Swanton, who reported it to Boas on 23 September 1900. (The letter
is now in the Dept. of Anthropology Archives, amnh.) Keen also translated
the Gospel of John (1899), the Acts of the Apostles (1898) and excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer (London : Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1899). His predecessor Charles Harrison had published a
translation of the Gospel of Matthew in 1891.
Keen's translations may owe their merit chiefly to the help of Da xhii gang's cousin Kihlguulins (Newcombe 1906 : 149). But Swanton was impressed by
Keen's "very considerable ability" as a linguist and by "his great superiority to other missionaries in the region when it comes to matters of this kind"
(Swanton to Boas, 23 November 1903; now in the Boas papers, aPsl, Philadelphia). Keen's 1906 Haida grammar bears this statement out, though it was
soon superseded by Swanton's own (far from perfect) grammar of 1911.
14 Original in the Dept. of Anthropology Archives, amnh. This letter is quoted at greater length on p 174.
15 Original on folios 102-111, Swanton n.d.2.
16 By far the best documentary source on Haida ornithology is the extensive list of bird names dictated by Tlaajang Quuna (Tom Stevens) of the Naay
Kun Qiighawaay (Newcombe n.d.4). But the legendary blue hawk or blue
falcon (Haida skyaamskun) does not appear there. The word is clearly related to the Tsimshian word sgyaamsm, meaning kestrel or merlin - but the name that Tlaajang Quuna gave for the kestrel was dawghatlxhayang. This was evidently his name for any small hawk or falcon, since he used it also for
the sharp-shinned hawk. Sharp-shins breed in Haida Gwaii ; kestrels and
merlins do not.
448
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 448
01/12/2010 2:55:23 PM
notes to chapter 3 (pages 73-98)
17 What the head servant says to the suitors is Haw jiigha gwawugha, "Permission to get water is denied." This is a formulaic phrase for denying the proposal without directly acknowledging that a proposal has been made.
Its force rests on the similarity of jiighaa, "to go for water" and jigaa, "to copulate, to make love."
18 Swanton's interpolation, evidently in consultation with Skaay himself (1905b : 151, 171 n 8).
19 Haida gwaaykkya, Latin Veratrum viride, also known in English as cornlily.
This is a highly toxic plant widely used on the Northwest Coast as a ritual
purgative. (It is not at all the same as the edible cornlily of eastern North America, Clintonia borealis. )
20 Halibut hooks were of wood (usually alder), with a bone or (after European contact) metal barb lashed on with spruceroot twine. The scraps Skaay has
in mind could be of these materials. Another possibility is devil's club ( Op-lopanax horridus in Latin ; jiihlinjaaw in Haida). This potent plant was used to purify the hooks when they were baited. Even mundane substances like bits of twine might work if they had come from well-used hooks, because
of the enormous ritual energy that fishermen in Haida Gwaii and elsewhere
on the Northwest Coast expended on the tackle used for halibut.
21 Sea-pickles (or sea-cucumbers, ghiinuu in Haida) are edible holothurians, especially those of the species Parastichopus californicus. These are the food of the poor, and Wealth Woman is commonly met collecting them. (See also pp 475-476 : note 5 to chapter 11.)
