A story as sharp as a kn.., p.19
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 19
promised to tell, and I consider him quite a find. ... My old man says
he has still longer stories of wars between the different towns, which I
shall move heaven and earth to secure "in the original." My method of
taking down texts is not perhaps what you would altogether recom-
mend, but under the circumstances I think it is best. The story teller first repeats a short section of his story which my interpreter then dictates to me very slowly and I take down. ... I find that the old man easily gets
reconciled to frequent pauses while I think it would be very difficult to get him to tell me directly, slow enough to get it all in. So far the plan has worked admirably. 1
It worked so admirably, in fact, that by the beginning of Novem—
174
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 174
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
ber, Swanton had recorded Skaay's complete extant works, a total of
some seven thousand lines of oral poetry.
Swanton's friend Charles Newcombe, whom he had met in Port
Simpson the month before, was at that time buying Haida artifacts
on contract for a number of museums.2 Newcombe and Swanton
are two of the most devoted foreign students Haida culture has ever
had. But Swanton turned his concentrated year in Haida Gwaii into
three thick books and a couple of thin ones. Newcombe on the other
hand spent twelve or fifteen seasons in the Islands, accumulating
massive notes on Haida history, geography, zoology, botany and
art, and published next to nothing. Swanton turned to him at first
for help in satisfying Boas's requests for artifacts. In time, he would
turn to Newcombe for ethnobotanical specimens, for identifications
of plants, shellfish and birds, for maps of empty village sites, and
much else. He was already making excuses to Boas - in the same
long letter of 14 October - explaining his decision to put off several
tasks, especially buying older artifacts.
The texts keep me too busy, besides, and I care more about them. ... I
have not investigated many of the problems, architectural and other,
which you set before me in your letter because I am too busy with the
stories and the language. ... If the stories keep me as busy as I have
been the past week, other matters will be crowded out.
Sundays - because the missionary discouraged Swanton's teachers from working on that day - became the anthropologist's best day
for writing letters. His next report to Boas therefore comes exactly
a week later, on Sunday, October 21st :
I am especially delighted over the discovery of this "Haida Epic," a
sequence of five stories. I have three of these complete in Haida and
sixty-nine pages of another. The Raven story comes last. If nothing
interferes I shall have them all by the end of this week.
Skaay did indeed tell Swanton five long stories in addition to
Xhuuya Qaagaangas or Raven Travelling. Three of the five stories are 175
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 175
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
three-part suites or trilogies ; the others can be heard as two long,
single movements. And Raven Travelling, as Skaay chose to tell it,
is itself a five-part suite. But Swanton's letters make it crystal clear
that Skaay was not dredging half-forgotten tales one by one from a
cluttered memory, nor was he assembling episodes at random. Skaay,
not Swanton, was in control, and Skaay mapped the whole dictation
project out for Swanton in advance. He told Swanton what was on
the program before his concert series began.
Later on, when he was making his translations, Swanton had
trouble understanding how even the individual trilogies hung together - but if Skaay said what Swanton thought he was saying, then
to Skaay the entire series, including the three trilogies, is one large work. If this is the case, it is a Haida epic poem - or a mythological
partita for solo speaking voice - about ten hours long. That would
make it close to half the length of the Odyssey. And if that is what it is, we should learn how to read it.
On the same Sunday, Swanton wrote in a different tone to his
brother Walter :
You may simply picture me like Homer on the shores of Ionia rescuing
from oblivion the ancient lore of these North American Greeks, and
spending my evenings deep in a modern novel. 3
This is not a conceit he adopted merely for his brother's enter—
tainment. Writing to Newcombe the following Monday, he was
more specific :
I have nine or ten stories covering in the neighborhood of four hundred
pages. I have a poetic feeling about my work, as if I were constructing a nation's literature or rather like Homer collecting and arranging a literature already constructed. I have the whole of the saga or epic and am now adding short figurative tales, many of which are however of great inter-
est. Wednesday I shall begin to work out the English. ... I hope to have
the spirit to infuse into the body you are so patiently putting together. 4
Three weeks later - on Sunday, November 18th - he reported
to Boas again :
176
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 176
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
chapter eight: The Epic Dream
I have now become so familiar with the Haida phonetics that I can
take down forty-five pages a day, an increase of about fifty per cent.
I finished taking stories from the Skedans man [ Skaay] ... and have been working with one from the west coast [ Ghandl ] . I must have at least six or seven hundred pages of manuscript by this time and shall probably increase it above a thousand here in Skidegate. ...
I have the words of thirteen cradle songs from the west coast with
the promise of more. Of course, and much to my regret, I can do noth-
ing with the music, which is very sweet... .
I am somewhat appalled by the amount of manuscript which I
have to translate. I do not see that I can get away to Masset before
February. ...
The Bureau of Ethnology, on Swanton's instructions, sent part
of his salary to him and part of it to his mother, and the American
Museum opened an account with a Victoria bank on which Swanton
could draw for research expenses. He paid his tutor, interpreter and
coworker Henry Moody $ 1.50 a day and kept him busy six full days
a week. He paid poets, singers and storytellers twenty cents an hour
and budgeted $ 35 per month for this purpose. If we compare these
rates to Swanton's own workload and salary, we will find that he
was paying his Haida colleagues pretty much the same hourly rate
he was making himself.5 But the size of the task he had undertaken,
and the amount he stood to learn from a few old men and women
inhabiting the wreckage of a preliterate civilization, continually
amazed him. On Tuesday, December 4th, he wrote Boas a 12-page
letter, saying among other things :
The chief anxiety I now have is about time. Since the first of Octo-
ber, I have put in nearly six solid hours a day taking down texts and
must have in the neighborhood of one thousand pages. I know of only
two [ mythological] stories which I have not in my collection, though undoubtedly a very careful canvass would reveal more. I am now upon the war stories, and the man who is telling them [ Sghaagya of the Yaakw Gitinaay] will probably fill in the entire week that way. I am continually impressed with the importance of taking these texts.
Only today a historical point was discovered in one of the war stories
177
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 177
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
which my informant had forgotten in every other connection. Besides
a great many new words turn up in them which have dropped from
the modern language. ... But meantime I have only had opportunity
to get a small amount of my material translated, and at the rate we
usually do it, it will be far into February before I can complete it. ...
That would not leave time to repeat my work at Masset or begin to. ...
Now, shall I hurry through, take my time at Skidegate, or may I dare
to hope for an extension ?... If I could stay here next summer while the
Indians are away and put in my time studying what material I have
gathered, very likely a couple of months of work and questioning in the
fall would clear things up and I could be home not later than January
1902. Privately, I do not want to remain isolated for so long. I simply
write what it seems may be necessary to complete my work. ... You told
me to be thorough, and I am trying to be so. In one point I cannot be
thorough, and that is when it comes to the songs, for I am no musician.
I am satisfying myself with taking the words. ...
In mid December, Swanton stopped taking texts and began working over his transcriptions word by word with Henry Moody. Early
the next year - another Sunday, 13 January 1901 - he brought Boas
up to date :
During the last four or five weeks I have been doing nothing but trans-
late, and there are still about eight days of this kind of work before
me. ... My interpreter and I have now got matters running very smoothly
when it comes to taking down texts, and I cannot bear to leave until
my resources run dry. ...
On the following Wednesday, Swanton was ill as well as exhausted. The letter he wrote to Boas that night is scrawled, partly in
pencil, and the prose is running wild, but in the midst of his delirium
he was taking an even longer perspective :
I have got to that point in my career on this coast when my career seems
to call me to a seriatim conquest of legends, beginning at Skidegate,
extending to Masset and Kaigani and thence continuing its papery
178
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 178
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
chapter eight: The Epic Dream
way from the Tungas [ Tongass] to Copper River. 6 At the same [ time] , I should shrink from the undertaking and I expect I shall be back within a year. But supposing I cannot make a complete sweep of Masset and
Kaigani before it is time to return, it would break my heart to feel
there was a story left that I had failed to gather. ... Haida mythology,
I want to state here, can not be defined as animal worship. The Haida
pantheon was decorated just as lavishly as the Roman, and they seem
even to have risen to the level of an Olympian Jove.
On the heels of this fevered celebration of a culture he had just
begun to know, Swanton suddenly lost heart. On Sunday, February
10th, just before his 28th birthday, and perhaps under pressure from
Boas, 7 he had in essence reversed his position :
I think it is entirely possible to put in too much time taking texts. I
can take new ones now with very little trouble, but it would only be
adding the known to the known. After having taken a good number
of texts, unless one has unlimited time, it seems to me just as well to
take the rest in English.
That is a plan which Swanton did, alas, put into practice among
the Alaskan Haida six months later, and again in 1904 during his
brief stay with the Tlingit. But so long as he remained in Haida
Gwaii - this February letter notwithstanding - his idealism held,
and he continued to transcribe in the original virtually every story
he heard.
The gloomy coastal winter and long hours of labor had nevertheless taken their toll, and when he wrote to Boas on Friday, March
1st, he said, "I get along very well now but I am afraid I should find
trouble in getting through another winter in isolation, especially
on the Alaskan coast."
Four days after that, his sense of mission had returned :
I have worked about three times as hard as I expected and twice as
hard as I ought, but it did not seem as if I could let anything I heard
of go. The result is contained in about seventeen hundred mss. pages,
179
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 179
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
about fifteen hundred of which I forward by the next steamer... . Day
after tomorrow I have arranged to leave for Masset where I shall stay
until the first of June. Then I propose to return to Skidegate, where I
hope to find and communicate with Dr Newcombe. ... Up to the very
end my time was practically absorbed in text taking and translation
of the same. ...
My judgement in regard to this work is as follows. To do the best
work and secure the best all around results, some one person ought to
take the north west work, or perhaps the Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit
work, together. By taking it in charge I mean being on the spot for most
of each year, if not [ continuously] for several years, taking texts and investigating all branches of Indian life. I have spent about five months now and have just got to where I can do comparatively rapid and ef-
fective work. My ear is now fairly well broken in to the sounds, and if
I work at Masset or among the Tlingit I can work five times as fast as
a person of my calibre sent there afresh. One thing leads to and bears
upon another in such a way that to make the most intelligent study
he should go back and forth from one tribe to another. At my single
sitting, I have to work much in the dark. ...
I hope the boxes will arrive safely, especially the manuscripts, which
indeed must arrive safely. I would not want to repeat my work con-
tained in them for any money.
*
Swanton left Hlghagilda as planned, going north by dugout canoe as
far as Naay Kun and walking west along the beaches, 30 km or so,
to the old Haida metropolis of Ghadaghaaxhiwaas8 - Masset to the
Europeans. There he spent three months wholly absorbed once again
in the task he had set himself, doing nothing but taking dictation.
He transcribed stories from five men during this period, and two of
them - the two most prolific mythtellers he met in Haida Gwaii -
are of particular interest. One was Kingagwaaw of the Ghaw Sttlan
Llanagaay, of the Raven side, from the village of Yan. The other was
Haayas, head of the Eagle family called Hliiyalang Qiighawaay and
titular head of the long-abandoned village of Hliiyalang.9
In the nineteenth century, even southern Haida found the name
180
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 180
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
chapter eight: The Epic Dream
Ghadaghaaxhiwaas (which means White Hillside) an unnecessary mouthful. They routinely used the nickname Ghaw (meaning
Inlet or Bay). Before the missionaries came, Ghaw was one of the
largest aboriginal settlements on the Northwest Coast and one of
the largest stable settlements of hunter-gatherers anywhere in the
world. John Work, a nineteenth-century trader with a keen interest in Haida demographics, estimated that there were 160 houses
and some 2,400 people there in the 1830s, but these figures are
plausible only for "greater Ghadaghaaxhiwaas," including perhaps
half a dozen villages ranged around the mouth of Masset Sound. In
1883, after smallpox had emptied the outlying towns and brought
all the survivors to Ghaw, there were 65 houses standing in the village proper, and most of these were new, but only forty or fifty were
occupied. The population then was perhaps 400.10
Swanton found lodging at Ghaw with Daxhiigang's cousin Kihlguulins (1868-1935). Kihlguulins's father, Gwaayang Gwanhlin
( c. 1812-1894), was hereditary head of the Stastas family of the Eagle side. When he was baptized at Ghaw in 1885, Gwaayang Gwanhlin
elected to be called by the same name as Queen Victoria's son and
heir, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. As a surname, he chose Edenshaw : an anglicized form of the Tlingit name Iidansaa, his hereditary
title in the matrilineal line.
By the old way of reckoning, Kihlguulins's primary parent was his
mother, Sinhlagutgaang of the Yaakw Llaanas,11 who was Gwaayang
Gwanhlin's second wife. Gwaayang Gwanhlin's rightful heir was
not his own son Kihlguulins but his sister's son Daxhiigang - and
Kihlguulins was rightfully the heir not to his father's name and position but to those of his mother's brother instead. Kihlguulins was
baptized nonetheless as Henry Edenshaw. Accepting that surname
meant rejecting the old system, in which the name was immutably
the property of people on the other side. It appears that no Christian
missionary posted to the Haida country ever doubted for a moment
that a right and proper life required patrilineal inheritance and the
nominal preeminence of the male line.
On Sunday, March 31st, after three weeks at Ghaw, Swanton
reported his progress to Boas and outlined his plans :
181
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 181
01/12/2010 2:55:06 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
I began text taking the fifteenth and have amassed about five hundred
