A Story as Sharp as a Knife
"Robert Bringhurst comes to us like night lightning: the dark
is suddenly lit by language beautifully crafted and by riveting thought. He writes for the eye, the ear, and the mind all
at once, and he doesn't waste a sentence." barry Lopez
"Bringhurst's work encompasses the world with its passionate curiosity; its breadth and depth, its miraculous clarity
and complexity, the blend of head and heart, make it, in my
mind, completely unique." erica wagner, in The Times of London
From the fall of 1900 through the summer of
b r i n g h u r s t
1901, linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets
and historians. His Haida hosts and colleagues had been
a
raised in a wholly oral world where the mythic and the pert he
sonal interpenetrate completely. They joined forces with
their visitor, consciously creating a great treasury of Haida
s to ry
oral literature in written form. Poet and linguist Robert
cl a ssIc a l
a sto ry
Bringhurst brings these century-old works to life in the
English language, setting them in a context just as rich as
a s
t h e c L a s s i c a L
the stories themselves--one that reaches out to dozens of
h a IDa
Native American oral literatures and to mythtelling traditions around the globe.
s har p
a s s h a r p a s
robert bringhur st is one of Canada's most respected
M y t h t el l er s
poets and most probing cultural historians. His transla—
a s a
h a i d a m y t h t e L L e r s
tions of Haida oral poetry have appeared in major scholarly
journals and in Brian Swann's groundbreaking anthology
a nD t heIr
Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native
kn i f e
Literatures of North America.
a kn i f e
wor l D
a n d t h e i r w o r L d
b
Dougl as & McIntyre
$24.95
D&M Publishers Inc.
Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
r o b e r t b r i n g h u r s t
Cover design by Naomi MacDougall
2 n d e d i t i o n
Front cover photograph (c)The Field Museum, #A102063
"Bringhurst's achievement is gigantic, as well as heroic."
Printed and bound in Canada
d o u g L a s &
Printed on fsc-certified paper
m a r g a r e t a t w o o d
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
m c i n t y r e
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a story as sharp as a knife
the classical haida mythtellers
and their world
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Praise for a story as sharp as a knife
"One of the most important books to grace Canadian literature in
many years.... Bringhurst offers new translations of such penetrating
beauty that they fully justify his contention that Haida poetry is, at its
best, great art." -- john bemrose, in Maclean's
"Just about every verse is touched with magic.... The voices of the
Haida glow in this book." -- hugh brody, in the National Post
"What a charge this discovery sent through me! The brilliant analysis
of myth and culture will find its place alongside such popular investigations as Radin's The Trickster, Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Santillana & von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill or Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked.... A Story as Sharp as a Knife will make academics tremble with jealousy and students of mythtelling shiver with excitement." -- brian brett, in Books in Canada
"Bringhurst's accomplishment is beyond praise. His translations are
spare and eloquent; his commentary is judicious and invariably
thought-provoking; his breadth of reference is startling.... Meticu—
lously and beautifully produced, A Story as Sharp as a Knife merits a wide readership and a passionate response. It also deserves to win
every literary award in sight."
-- mark abley, in the Montreal Gazette
"Bringhurst, I believe, is one of the country's literary treasures, quite
possibly a genius.... [His] great endeavour, the one by which he stands
to be remembered, is A Story as Sharp as a Knife. " -- noah richler, This Is My Country, What's Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada
"A beautiful weave of poetry anthology, poetics and anthropological
adventure, it's a vivid journey of the imagination.... It's dense, it's lush, it's a whole world to live in." -- Toronto Star
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"For twelve years Bringhurst -- with the aid of many helpers -- hacked his way through the brambles of the staggeringly difficult language,
rubbed the tarnished old lamp, prised the cork out of the bottle....
As in the tale of Aladdin, out came the genie. And one hum dinger of
a genie it is.... Bringhurst's achievement is gigantic, as well as heroic.
It's one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head -- a
profound meditation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on
the habits of thought and feeling that inform them."
-- margaret atwood, Writing with Intent
"Robert Bringhurst comes to us like night lightning : the dark is suddenly lit by language beautifully crafted and by riveting thought. He
writes for the eye, the ear, and the mind all at once, and he doesn't
waste a sentence. His insights into story are engaging, the range
of his imagination impressive, his tone friendly. Like Gary Snyder,
he is a polymath whose particular convergence of knowledge is
unique and whose ability to convey knowledge about subjects as
diverse as classical music and Native American thought is singular."
-- barry lopez
"Once in a while a book appears that changes the way we see things.
This is such a book. Bringhurst reclaims an extraordinary body of
literature and teaches us to hear its sinewy, haunting music. In the
process, he rewrites North American literary history and lays a depth
charge in the assumptions of cultural anthropology. Rigorous and
enchanting, A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a superb adventure of the mind and imagination. I couldn't put it down." -- dennis lee
"The translation is linguistically accurate as well as poetically exquisite ; the narrative and notes render the retranslated Haida poetry accessible for the first time to a larger Canadian public, both Native and
non-Native. Bringhurst sets a new standard for scholars in and out of
the academy : to write well does not preclude rigorous cutting-edge
scholarship." -- prof. regna darnell, Founding Director, First
Nations Studies Program, University of Western Ontario
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Masterworks
of the Classical Haida Mythtellers
volume 1
A Story as Sharp as a Knife:
The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
volume 2
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas,
Nine Visits to the Mythworld
volume 3
Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay,
Being in Being
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A S?o?y
as Sharp as a Knife
The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
second edition
Robert Bringhurst
Douglas & McIntyre
d&m Publishers inc.
Vancouver Toronto Berkeley
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Copyright (c) 1999, 2011 Robert Bringhurst
Cataloguing data available from Library and
Archives Canada
11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1
isbn 978-1-55365-839-9 (pbk.)
isbn 978-1-55365-890-0 (ebook)
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
Cover design : Naomi MacDougall
system or transmitted, in any form or
Book typography : Robert Bringhurst
by any means, without the prior written
The text face is Aldus Nova, designed by
consent of the publisher or a licence from
Hermann Zapf. Haida quotations, captions
The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency
and supplementary matter are set in the
(Access Copyright). For a copyright
same designer's Palatino Sans.
licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or
call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Cover art
: Detail of The Raven and His
Bracket Fungus Steersman. Argillite
douglas & mcintyre
plate carved by Daxhiigang, circa 1882.
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
Cover photograph (c) The Field Museum,
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
No. a102063.
Vancouver BC Canada v5t 4s7
Other photo credits are listed on page 529.
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
We gratefully acknowledge the financial
Text printed on acid-free, 100% post—
support of the Canada Council for the
consumer paper
Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council,
Distributed in the U.S. by
the Province of British Columbia through
Publishers Group West
the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the
mix
Government of Canada through the
Paper
fscTM c016245
Canada Book Fund for our publishing
activities.
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In memoriam
bill reid
of the Qqaadasghu Qiighawaay
of the village of Ttanuu,
whose names were
Iihljiwaas, Kihlguulins, Yaahl Sghwaansing,
1920-1998
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Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
10
Prologue : Reading What Cannot Be Written
13
1 Goose Food
29
2 Spoken Music
51
3 The One They Hand Along
65
4 Wealth Has Big Eyes
102
5 Oral Tradition and the Individual Talent
113
6 The Anthropologist and the Dogfish
139
7 Who's Related to Whom ?
157
8 The Epic Dream
174
9 The Shaping of the Canon
200
10 The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu
212
11 You Are That Too
223
12 Sleek Blue Beings
237
13 The Iridescent Silence of the Trickster
263
14 The Last People in the World
277
15 A Knife That Could Open Its Mouth
297
16 The Historian of Ttanuu
317
17 Chase What's Gone
333
8
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a story as sharp as a knife
18 A Blue Hole in the Heart
341
19 The Prosody of Meaning
362
20 Shellheap of the Spirit-Beings
373
21 1 November 1908
385
22 How the Town Mother's Wife Became
the Widow of Her Husband's Sister's Sons
395
Political Afterword
419
Appendix 1: Spelling, Pronunciation and
Native American Typography
425
Appendix 2: Haida Geography and Village Names
436
Appendix 3: The Structure of Skaay's Raven Travelling 438
Notes to the Text
443
Bibliography
501
Acknowledgements
527
Photo Credits
529
Index
531
9
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Preface to the Second Edition
This is a book about what mythology is, and what it is
for, and a book about what literature is, and what it is for. It is also
a study of the work of two Haida mythtellers : Skaay and Ghandl.
They were oral poets, speaking a Native American language. Their
work survives only because it was transcribed, over a century ago,
by a linguistic anthropologist named John Reed Swanton. How he
went about his task is also crucial to the story.
It is a fact of life that oral literatures are fragile and easily lost.
Written literatures don't live forever either, but their erosion is often
slow. They can pretend to be immortal ; oral literatures cannot.
By extraordinary luck, the written record of classical Haida literature includes at least half a dozen oral authors of major stature.
I began to read them in Swanton's English prose translations in the
1970s. Even through that veil, their intelligence and scope as narrative poets took my breath away. By the late 1980s, I had graduated to
reading them, with difficulty, in Haida. Then, as often happens when
writers read in a half-learned language, I decided I would have to
make translations of my own. I once made my living as a translator
from Arabic, so I know what a thankless task translation can be. I also
know how important it can be as one of the stages of deep reading.
I needed to make translations of the work of Skaay and Ghandl not
for anyone else's sake, but for mine : to absorb and confirm what I
was learning, and to pay my personal respects to these two masters
of their art, who had died before I was born.
Haida was not the first Native American language I studied, nor
has it been the last, but it absorbed my full attention for many years,
and the debt I owe to the classical Haida mythtellers is as great as any
10
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a story as sharp as a knife
cultural debt I have ever incurred. Debts of that kind can be repaid
only in part, and never to those who made the loan.
I had not gone far with my translations before I also started work
on what I hoped would be a short introductory essay. When the introduction reached five hundred pages, I understood that it would
have to be a volume in itself. In 1999, it became the first edition of
this book, and the project as a whole became a trilogy. As I went on
with the translations, my understanding of the texts broadened and
deepened. By 2001, when the final part was published, I had made
what I thought were important improvements to some of the translations embedded in the introductory volume.
A little later, through the kindness of Swanton's granddaughter,
Dorothy Swanton Brown, I was granted access to documents that
had earlier eluded me : a cache of letters Swanton had written to his
mother and two brothers during his year in the Haida country. These
threw light on his state of mind while he was there ; they also clarified significant details of his arrival and departure. I had, then, two
strong reasons to dream of a second edition, incorporating things
that I had learned since the first version went to press.
There have been other important developments in Haida studies
since 1999. They include the publication, in 2003, of John Enrico's
two-volume grammar of Haida and, in 2005, of his two-volume
Haida Dictionary. If these impressive resources had been available
to me ten or twenty years earlier, I might have done many things
differently and better. One abiding point of disagreement, however, is
the question of how Haida should be written. Ordinarily the publication of a major dictionary would settle such a question. In the case of
Haida, it has not. As the topic is complex and somewhat specialized,
I have sequestered the discussion in appendix 1 (page 425).
The first edition of this book was warmly praised. It was also
warmly attacked. A number of people (some indigenous, some not)
insisted that it was wrong for an outsider to speak of Haida literature
at all without securing official permission. Other objectors were
more tribal. They expressed alarm (or, in a few cases, outrage) that
I had published contrarian views and transgressed privately held
11
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academic and professional domains. Native American mythtellers
living in oral cultures could not, I was told, have been as I described