A story as sharp as a kn.., p.13
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 13
his instructions, she returns this child to the sea, midway between the
Islands and the mainland.
The second movement opens in a mainland town, on the bank of
the Nass River. The headman's wife is a woman distinguished by her
modest appetite. A creature emerges from the forest, kills the woman,
enters her skin and returns in her stead to the village, eating like a
fiend. The woman's two sons ( one of whom is very young) run away from home and marry superhuman wives ( Mouse Woman and another, unnamed, who is a powerful shaman's daughter) . These women take charge of a voyage to find and revive the boys' mother, and to kill
the imposter.
( Skaay called this second movement of the poem Simnaasum nang
awgha daghiyalaghan, "One Who Acquired Simnaasum for a Mother."
The name Simnaasum conceals a Tsimshian pun, and only by unravel-
ling the pun do we discover the identity of the ravenous forest creature
at the center of the story. In Tsimshian, the prefix sm- means real, important or genuine, and noo [ becoming naa in Haida] means mother, but noosu means wolverine. This is the story of "One Who Obtained What-was-actually-a-Wolverine for a Mother." )
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In the third movement, the shaman's daughter from the second story has borne her husband seven boys and a girl. The boys are married ; the
girl is not ; and the whole extended family has settled at a place called Qqaaduu, on an island off the Tsimshian coast. Just across the strait
is a larger town called Qaahlaqaahli. When the eldest brother dies in
an accident, the cause is divined as his wife's infidelity. This suspicion is tested and confirmed. The youngest brother then kills the adulterer,
whose father is the Qaahlaqaahli headman. When the murder is dis-
covered, there is a war between the towns. The six remaining brothers
are killed, and their mother and sister escape alone into the trees. There the mother offers her daughter in marriage. Animal suitors emerge from
the forest and are rejected one by one. The son of a headman living in
the sky then presents himself. He is accepted and marries the girl. In
the world above the clouds, the girl bears her husband eight sons and
two daughters. These children return to earth, resettling at Qqaaduu.
War breaks out again with the town across the channel. The eight
brothers are fine warriors, and both sisters have miraculous powers
as healers ; even so, they are beaten back. The youngest brother seeks
their celestial grandfather's aid, and the grandfather drops a deadly
cloud on his grandchildren's opponents. Here the final movement of
the suite comes to an end.
Human beings, in classical Haida, are called xhaaydla xhaay-
daghaay, "surface people." Skaay also calls them xhaaydla xhitiit ghidaay, "ordinary surface birds." Such ideas are widespread in Native American philosophy. The corresponding Navajo term, for example, is nihokaa dine' e, "earth-surface people." But the Haida term evokes in particular the surface of the sea. "One They Hand Along"
is a narrative map locating the world of surface people in relation
to the world beneath the waves, which is of special concern to the
Haida. The trilogy of which it is a part extends this map to the forest
and the sky. We can pass from one world to another, according to
these stories, by paddling a canoe across the horizon, or by making
a moral choice.
This is the first story Skaay chose to tell John Swanton, and only
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the third Haida text Swanton transcribed. Not surprisingly, there are
glitches in the transcription. Understanding precisely what Skaay
said or meant to say is sometimes a difficult task. But I think he
chose this story for a reason. Skaay had spent much of his lifetime
watching a long and immensely destructive cultural war. The old
matrilineal order was centered on reciprocal relations between Raven people and Eagle people, and between human beings and the
sea, whose power is incarnate in the killer whale. Skaay had seen
this system crushed under the force of insatiable greed and then
displaced by a new order, patrilineal and fixated on the powers of
a father in the sky. Even the pun that the new language makes of
Skaay's name records this transition. The war he had witnessed was
a catastrophe on a scale the older mythtellers, who taught him his
art, had never known. Yet I think they had left him a means with
which to address it.
*
Swanton was deeply interested in literature, and he was prepared, as
we shall see, to believe that a poet like Skaay, in an oral culture like
that of the Haida, could create an epic structure - a large, sequential
structure, built of concentric or linear episodes, like the Iliad or the Beowulf. Swanton knew much less about the architectural principles
of Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical painting and music. These
are subjects not routinely taught to American students of anthropology, in his time or our own. So the structures he encountered
in Skaay's first trilogy threw Swanton for a loop. He encountered
such an architecture first in simplified form, in the tale told to him
by Sghiidagits, just a few days before his encounter with Skaay.
That poem too unfolds the story of a woman who is kidnapped by
a more-than-human being, and it too is structured in three parts.
The three-part form was a puzzle to Swanton, precisely because he
knew the separate plots already. Boas had recorded them, linked in
the same way, on earlier trips to the Northwest Coast, but Boas liked
to think of them as separate, self-sufficient elements, not as parts
of a larger whole. He had tried to teach his students - Swanton and
others - to think in the same terms.12
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Surprised though he was to hear these stories linked, Swanton
had no trouble following Sghiidagits's path from scene to scene. In
the opening movement, a woman, finding grizzly dung in the berry
patch, says unkind words about the bear. A grizzly then appears to
her in the guise of a human being, brings her to his village and takes
her as his wife. She lives long enough among the grizzlies for all of
us to learn that bears are people too. And then, tlga ll gutdaghang-
gadaaghan, says Sghiidagits in a familiar sounding phrase : "she
came to dislike the country." The woman plots her escape from the
village of grizzlies, makes her break and is pursued. At the end of
an interesting chase scene, she reaches the beach with the bears not
far behind. Here the second movement begins.13
Wiidhaw qaada tluguugha nang gaayaangaghan.
Wiidhaw nang jaadas lla gi agang kingguusghaayaaghan.
100
Nang ittlxhaagidas dajing yuuwan gu dajaaghan.
Dajingaay ungut llagha xhitiit ngataaystlgaangaghan.
Saghadila' u hanhaw ll kighaayaghan....
Now someone sat offshore in a canoe.
[ 2 ]
Now the woman hollered to him.
100
He was wearing the big dancing hat of a headman.
Perched on the hat was a flock of waterbirds.
His name was Going Ashore. 14
<<
my father will give you ten copper shields,>>>
said the woman to the headman.
Now the headman tapped his club against the side of his canoe.
Now it came ashore in front of the woman.
Now she stepped aboard.
Again he tapped the side of the canoe,
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and it moved back out to sea.
Now the grizzlies erupted from the trees.
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A pack of wolves ran out beside them.
Again he tapped the side of his canoe.
Now the canoe sank its fangs in the throats of the grizzlies.
Now it bit open the throats of the wolves.
It killed them all.
Now he told the woman to look through his hair. 15
Frogs were what she found there.
She was too afraid to bite them.
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She squeezed them with her fingernails instead.
Going Ashore, as I said, was his name.
And now he headed home.
On the way he filled his boat with harbor seal.
And now he started walking toward his wife,
who was standing in front of the house.
And now his wife came down to meet him.
She was pleased that he had taken a second wife.
Dark Woman was his first wife's name.
He went with the two of them into the house.
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On the following day he went hunting again.
He gave his second wife instructions.
<<
She strangles those who see her.>>>
But the woman stole a look.
She saw the other woman swallow a whole seal.
She saw her spit the bones out toward the door.
And as she looked at her, she choked.
The woman died.
Dark Woman made it happen.
140
Now she lay dead in the house
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when their husband returned.
He saw the body of his wife,
Going Ashore did.
Now he killed the other wife.
He cut his first wife's body clean in half.
He set a whetstone in between the pieces.
That was it for her. 16
And now he brought the other back to life
and married her again.
150
Now she bore a child.
Now she was the mother of a boy.
His father held his feet down with his own feet
and stretched him with his hands,
and so he grew.
He made his son a small canoe just like his own.
He made him a club -
that too the same as his own -
and when the boy took his canoe out in the cove,
it chomped on little bullheads.
160
Now the woman came to dislike the country.
She returned to her own homeland,
and she took along the child.
Now they arrived in her own country.
He took his mother's brother's daughter as his wife -
the son, that is -
and now he started hunting.
Where they were is known as Qqaaduu.
This concludes the second movement. Without a pause, so far
as we know, Sghiidagits continued with the third :
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Now, when he had hunted for a while,
[ 3.1 ]
a silver otter swam in front of the town. 17
170
Now he headed out in his canoe.
He shot it just at the base of its tail. 18
Now he skinned it -
or rather, his wife did.
He asked her not to let the blood get on the skin.
She let no blood get on the skin.
Now she asked if she could have it.
He gave it to his wife.
She took it out to wash it in the sea.
She touched it to salt water.
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Now it swam away to seaward.
She swam out to bring it back.
It swam still further out to sea.
She swam after it again.
Now a killer whale caught her with its double dorsal fins 19
and swam along the surface with her, spouting.
Now her husband headed out in his canoe.
He chased the killer whale.
He chased it hard.
He followed it all the way up to the Nass.
190
In front of Spouting Killer Whale Mountain, 20
his wife went down below the waves.
Now he returned.
He paddled back to Qqaaduu.
He started picking hellebore.
He also gathered urine.
He collected things from menstruating women.
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He saved things from their puberty seclusion.
He stored them in a box.
Now he went to sea.
200
He went back where he had seen his wife go down.
[ 3.2 ]
He had cedar-limb rope, a marlinspike, a whetstone.
Where his wife had disappeared below the waves
grew a two-headed kelp.
Now he went into the water,
descending the kelp,
and Plain Old Marten stayed behind in the canoe.
Now he came upon a broad main trail.
He followed it.
He came to Lamas Channel. 21
210
Now near Gyadiigha he met a group of women.
And some of the women spoke.
<<>> 22
One of the women said that.
And another woman said,
<<>>
Now he went up to one of the women
and opened her eyes.
<<
She shouted with happiness.
220
Now he opened the eyes of another.
So at last he learned his name.
Now the women asked what he had come for.
<<
I want her back.>>>
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<<
Isniigahl's son married your wife.
Your wife's new husband's name is Northwest Wind. 23
<<
look out for yourself.
230
A Heron spirit lives at the edge of the village.
He keeps watch.
And he is constantly repairing a canoe.>>>
Now he continued on his way.
Now he came to the edge of town.
And now the Heron saw him.
Now he gave a cry -
the Heron did -
and Nanasimgit put the cedar limbs
and marlinspike and whetstone in his hands.
And now the Heron picked up Nanasimgit.
240
He stuck him under his arm.
The people of the town came rushing out.
<<
<<
<<>>
Now they all went home.
Now he let Nanasimgit out from underneath his arm.
<<
felling the dry hemlock 24
that stands behind the house
250
owned by the one who took your wife,
here in the middle of the town.
<<
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The other is known as Crow.
The wood is for steaming a dorsal fin for your wife.>>>
Now when it was evening,
he visited the town.
Now he peeked inside
where his wife was,
in the housepit of the house.
260
He saw his wife, seated close beside her husband.
He went back to the old man.
He stayed at his place for the night.
Next day, he went behind the town.
He came to where the leafless hemlock stood.
He sat there, waiting.
Now a pair of servants came along.
And now he slipped inside the hemlock.
Now they started chopping down the tree.
He nicked and cracked the blade of their stone axe.
270
And now they started wailing.
<<
one of the servants said.
Now he came back out of the dry tree,
Gunanasimgit did.
And now he sucked the blade of the stone axe.
Now it came to be as good as new.
Now he felled the hemlock for them.
Now he split it for them too.
<<
280
they are going to steam the fin for your wife,>>>
one of them said.
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<<
As soon as evening comes,
stand in front of the house.
When we have carried in a load,
we will carry you in too.
<<
we will trip ourselves and fall,
waterbuckets and all, into the housepit.
