A story as sharp as a kn.., p.20
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 20
and fifty pages since then. ... I do not know how much I could collect
before the first of June, but according to present indications it might
amount to two thousand more.
Now that I am here on the spot, have the text taking business re-
duced to the easiest terms and yet have plenty of money to continue
the work, it seems to me it would be a shame to break off as early as I
must to be in Washington by July. ...
The following programme is the one I should like to fill out before
returning.
a) Collect Masset texts until the end of May.
b) Go to Skidegate the first of June, meet Dr Newcombe if he comes up, complete a little of my work which is left over and ship what articles I am having made.
c) Return to Masset, complete the translation of my Masset texts, complete my investigations of the customs, tabus and so forth, and
work a while with the assistance of Henry Edenshaw [ Kihlguulins]
upon the language, in which the tenses are very puzzling. ...
d) I should like to follow that up with a trip to the Kaigani country.
...
e) It will be an easy matter when I am among the Kaigani to secure one or two Stickeen [ Stikine] or other Tlingit texts... . I am rather anx-ious to have one or two texts to compare with my Haida. ... Unless I make a very prolonged stay in the Kaigani country I shall be through
with all my work by the end of summer. ...
To fulfill this plan, Swanton needed a further extension of his
leave from the Bureau of Ethnology. Boas secured it on Swanton's
behalf and replenished his Victoria expense account with funds from
the Museum. He was not now expected back in Washington before
the end of September.
On Sunday, May 12th, Swanton had been nearly eight months
in Haida Gwaii. He had not, so far as we know, come there consciously intent on doing nothing except documenting Haida oral
literature, but that is where the whole of his energy had gone. As
he put it to Boas :
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I have written nearly three thousand pages in Haida and have translated
most of the same. ... I have found it impossible to resist the temptation to get any new-old story I hear about, and text taking has consequently
monopolized ninety-nine one-hundredths of my time. ...
Another thought that my studies this year have awakened is that
in commonly supposing scriptures to be things of comparatively recent
historical development we are exactly wrong. It seems to me that, al-
though unwritten, the entire life of an ancient Haida was referred to
nothing but scriptures or what may fairly be called such. 12
At the end of February 1901, Swanton imagined he had captured
these scriptures in written form. By the end of May, he wondered
whether all his work had been in vain. He had still heard nothing
about the 1,500 pages of transcript and translation mailed to New
York three months before. Only his steady involvement in new work
tempered his anxiety over the possible loss of the old.
Sunday, June 2nd :
I am worried that you say nothing of my manuscripts. ... I had almost
as soon drop out two years of my life as to lose them. ... By the first
of July I hope to be about through translating the stories still left and ready for my Alaskan trip. ... By the first of August I hope to reach
Inverness 13 on the Skeena where Charlie Edenshaw [ Daxhiigang] , who is doing carving for me, will be camping during the summer. After shipping my purchases from there I shall go to Port Simpson and thence to Victoria and home.
Mail normally travelled between Haida Gwaii and New York
in 1901 at pretty much the same speed it did in 1991 : two weeks
each direction. But the bundle of pencilled phonetics encoding the
voices of Ghandl and Skaay took twelve weeks to make the same
trip. Boas reported its arrival on May 27th. After a few days basking
in relief, Swanton was faced with worry of another kind. Thursday,
June 20th, he was back at Hlghagilda, checking details with Henry
Moody and deep in discussion with Ghandl about the structure of
the universe. Then :
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I have just learned that smallpox has broken out in Alaska, and has been brought to the Skeena. Charlie Edenshaw has been quarantined. ...
The century of grief was not yet over. The scare, in this case,
was short-lived, but Swanton registered the message : living voices
are just as easy to lose, and just as impossible to replace, as voices
transcribed onto paper.
On July 3rd, despite the smallpox warning, Swanton sailed north
with Kihl guulins and Newcombe to visit the Alaskan Haida villages.
He was back in Masset on July 18th and remained there stormbound
for a week. On Thursday, July 25th, there was a short break in the
weather, and he sailed with Kihl guulins to Port Simpson, groping
into the harbor well after dark and sleeping on board in rain-soaked
blankets. He saw Haida Gwaii for the last time that afternoon, when
it vanished into the fog. When he finally headed east, catching a train
from Vancouver on August 14th, he carried two thousand pages of
fresh text and the knowledge that Daxhiigang - who had just turned
62 - was still alive and well and carving.
Within a few days of Swanton's return to what is called the civilized world, the principal item of news was the assassination in
Buffalo, New York, of President William McKinley.
*
Swanton saw his southern Haida notebooks again on Friday, 18
October 1901, seven months after he had mailed them from Haida
Gwaii. He was freshly installed in his office at the bae in Washington, and Boas shipped the parcel, still smelling of wood smoke, fish
and beach weed, down from New York. Swanton was eager to get
to work, but now the Bureau had him in its hands as well as on its
payroll, it found things for him to do. He complained of these delays,
Boas lobbied on his behalf, and he was freed at last to work on the
Haida materials at the beginning of December. The first task he set
himself was typing out, in Haida, a fair copy of the poems Skaay
had spoken to him fourteen months before. On Saturday, December
7th, he wrote to Boas :
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I am working away copying the Raven story and shall have it done in
a little more than a week. I believe, however, it will take a whole year
to copy off all of my texts - probably more. ...
The Raven was reconstituting himself in a sixth-floor cubicle
on F Street in Washington, DC, a few hundred yards from Theodore Roosevelt's White House.14 But Swanton was the juniormost
employee of the Bureau of American Ethnology and, by his own
account, "the only member of it who had even what purported to be
an anthropological education." 15 Swanton's superiors at the Bureau
grumbled from time to time that he was still working for Boas, not
for them. And bit by bit, Boas proved that even he had no idea what
Swanton really saw in all those Haida texts. The gulf between the
elfin, unassertive Dr Swanton and his hale and hearty colleagues
deepened, but Swanton persevered. Saturday, 2 August 1902 :
Since the first or middle of May I have copied and translated on the
typewriter about one thousand pages of my texts. I expect to have all
the Skidegate texts copied and translated before the end of Novem-
ber. ... Six months from that time, if I work steadily, the Masset texts
might be completed.
Two other tasks filled Swanton's time while he was typing these
texts and revising his translations. He was writing his own first book,
Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, and from the summer of
1902 to the fall of 1903, he also served as editor of the Swedenborg
Scientific Association's quarterly journal, The New Philosophy.
Late in 1903, he had finished drafts of all the Haida texts and
what he thought was a final draft of the ethnology as well - but he
was not through having to defend what he had edited and written.
As early as the end of 1902, Boas had asked him to remove all Haida
place names and words from the ethnology. Swanton diplomatically
refused. Then there were disputes over who should publish the works
and how. In May 1903, Boas agreed to allow the Bureau to publish
the Skidegate texts - in the mistaken belief that they were the least
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important. He held out for both the ethnology and the Masset texts,
which he wanted to include in the American Museum's series entitled
the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.
Nothing in this arrangement suggested to Boas that he should
relinquish editorial control over any of Swanton's Haida publications,
and he continued to offer instruction and advice on the Skidegate
texts. But Boas was baffled, far more than Swanton was, by the size
and shape of many of the stories. He asked Swanton to abridge and
rearrange these texts, and to sever Skaay's trilogies into individual
tales. Swanton admitted his own inability to explain why or how the
stories were linked, but he stood by the mythtellers, insisting that the
texts be printed bilingually and in full, and that most of Skaay's work
be organized in print in the same way Skaay presented it aloud.
Once the texts were published, Swanton gave up quarrelling
with Boas's harsh view that Skaay's trilogies, and even the components of the trilogies, were linked by nothing but the storyteller's
whim.16 But so long as Skaay's legacy was actively under his care, he
refused to give in. Swanton was a quiet and deeply courteous man,
and the letter he wrote to Boas on Monday, 12 October 1903, is the
only one I have ever seen in which he flatly rejects his imperious
teacher's authority.
Dear Prof. Boas :
I will answer your questions categorically.
1) The woodpecker [ Sapsucker] episode at the end of the story of The One They Abandoned for Eating the Flipper of a Hair Seal belongs to this story according to my informant. I think it should be left where
it is, inserting a line before it or indicating in some other way that it stands somewhat by itself.
2) ... I do not wish to remove the story of G.oda.nxe'wat [ Ghudangxhiiwat] from the Skedans series of tales where it belongs. ... 17
The story of Ghudangxhiiwat, or Quartz Ribs, which Swanton
mentions in this letter, is the second movement of Skaay's third
trilogy.18
For all his trust in Skaay, Swanton did permit - in fact, he cre—
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ated - one important departure from Skaay's plan as he had earlier
understood it. He collated two large versions of Raven Travelling -
one composed of all the episodes he had heard from Skaay, Ghandl
and other mythtellers at Hlghagilda, and the other composed of all
the episodes he had heard from Kingagwaaw, Haayas and others at
Ghaw. Much as he admired Skaay and wanted to believe that he had
narrated "a kind of Haida saga," he still accepted Boas's teaching that
each aboriginal nation of the Northwest Coast possessed its own
ideal, communal version of the tale of the trickster. Swanton thought
of this accumulated narrative more as oral scripture than as a kind
of communal mindprint, but he accepted that it existed. And he accepted that one of the challenges of anthropology was to reconstruct
it, much as Elias Lonnrot claimed to have reconstructed the ideal
Kalevala out of fragments he had heard from many different Finnish
singers - and much, perhaps, as the editors of the Pentateuch had
conflated into one standard version the inconsistent texts that later
scholars have tried to sort back out again.
Sometime after writing his enthusiastic letters of October 1900,
Swanton also became convinced that Raven Travelling was after all
something separate from Skaay's monumental sequence, and not its
final act. He placed it first, not last, in his edition of the Skidegate
texts, and he confirmed at least three times that this decision was
deliberate.19 It would be nice to know exactly when and why he came
to this conclusion, but the evidence is scant. I suspect he had made
up his mind on the issue well before the end of 1901, when he started
copying texts in Washington, because he made a point, then, of beginning with Raven Travelling. My hunch is that Swanton changed
his thinking on this issue very early, perhaps during the last days of
October 1900, when Skaay was actually telling the story. There is
no doubt that Skaay did put it last when he unfolded what he chose
of his life's work to Moody and Swanton - but his performance of
the poem took a couple of strange turns, as we shall see.
We know, then, that in order to hear or read Skaay's version of
Raven Travelling, we have to disentangle it from the episodes told
by Ghandl and others, which Swanton strung together into one long
tale. This is not hard to do, because Swanton scrupulously labelled
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his additions to Skaay's text. But several questions still remain. Is
Skaay's large cycle of stories really an artistic whole ? If so, is Raven Travelling really part of it ? If so, does it come first in the series or last ? Before we tackle these questions, let us see what else John
Swanton's professional career reveals about the study of Native
American oral literature.
In October 1903, Swanton was still making corrections to his
typescript of the Masset texts. He was also still hoping to return to
the Northwest Coast to do comprehensive research on all the oral
literatures of the region. These plans got scant encouragement from
the new director of the Bureau, William Henry Holmes.20 Boas was
no longer the perfect ally either. Boas had harshly and publicly opposed the appointment of Holmes, and relations between the two
were accordingly chilly. Worse, Boas himself still had no grasp of the
importance of Swanton's encounters with the Haida poets nor even
the real focus of Swanton's interests. No one, it seems, understood
either the work he had already done or his reasons for wanting to do
so much more of it. Under these conditions, he allowed himself at last
to think of something other than that work, and in December 1903,
in his thirtieth year, John Swanton was married. Days later, he left on
his second and last trip to the Northwest Coast, to study Tlingit. But
the Bureau of Ethnology had given him a mere four months to do
a job that needed years, and Swanton could not work night and day
transcribing and translating texts in southeastern Alaska as he had in
Haida Gwaii, because he and his bride, Alice Barnard, were not only
on an anthropological field trip; they were also on their honeymoon.
The Swantons paid a brief visit to Newcombe in Victoria just before Christmas 1903, then crossed to Vancouver where they stayed
through New Year's Eve. By luck, Henry Moody was in town, and he
and Swanton spent several evenings deep in conversation. Moody
explained to Swanton some of the complexities of stick-gambling
- crucial to understanding some of the stories - and tried once
again to clarify the basics of potlatch etiquette. Then the discussion
turned to metaphysics. Swanton asked about the difference between
ghahlanda, the life-essence or parallel form ; xhants, the reincar-natable soul ; and qqatxhana, the ghost or spirit that hovers near a 188
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body after death, and he asked about the relationship between two
of the most important and elusive beings in Haida mythology : the
Raven and Ttsam'aws, the Snag. Moody's answers to these questions - scribbled hastily by Swanton onto a couple of scraps of paper
and then recounted in an eight-page letter to Boas, written on New
Year's Eve - have remained important keys to the interpretation
of classical Haida literature and visual art.21 There was much more
to ask, and there was no end of other things to learn, but this was
Swanton's last chance to talk with Henry Moody. It was, in fact, his
last conversation with any member of the Haida nation.
Swanton was in Sitka from early January to the middle of March
1904, then at Wrangell through the end of April. He met some
very capable mythtellers in the Tlingit country, just as he had in
