A Story as Sharp as a Knife Page 2
them. They couldn't have been individual artists and thinkers, employing the tools and techniques of traditional narrative to overreach
or question societal norms, much less to interrogate the nature of
the world. They could not have been poets. It couldn't be true - and
even if it were, only their consanguineal descendants ought to be free
to lay out the evidence supporting such a perverse and insensitive
claim. One (but only one) of these interlaced issues merits tender
consideration. That is the question of who is entitled to handle the
evidence and to offer interpretations. I have tried to speak to this
question briefly in the afterword (page 419).
Laramie, Wyoming * 8 October 2010
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Prologue :
Reading What Cannot Be Written
A hundred miles into the Pacific, drenched in
rain and wind and mist and sunlight, lie the islands known as Haida
Gwaii. In September 1900, a young, soft-spoken linguist with a new
degree from Harvard and a bundle of instructions from his mentor
stepped ashore there, planning to stay half a year, learning what
he could of the Haida language, and of Haida life and thought and
social structure.
The linguist found himself confronted by great art, great devastation and great literature. His teacher had forewarned him to expect
the devastation and the art as well. It was the literature that took
him by surprise. And so for three and a half years he did nothing
whatsoever but transcribe, translate and study Haida mythtexts,
stories, histories and songs.
Back in Washington and Boston and New York, the linguist's
learned colleagues did not hear what he had heard nor see what
he had seen in the texts that he transcribed, and he was not a man
to force his views on others. He published what he could, blamed
himself for others' failings, and went on to other work, with other
persecuted languages, elsewhere in the world.
The fact remains that he had heard, and had recorded as well as
he was able, one of the world's richer classical literatures, embody—
ing one of the world's great mythologies.
Everything we have in the way of classical Haida literature comes
through the transcriptions of one man - and so the subject is a small
one. It is one specific phase of one specific oral literature, shrunk now
to only about forty thousand lines of written text. But the world as
a whole is what that literature, like every healthy literature, is really
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a story as sharp as a knife
all about - and so the subject is beyond the ability of any human
being, or of all human beings, to exhaust.
*
All classical Haida literature is oral. By definition, therefore, it is
something printed books cannot contain, in precisely the same sense
that jazz, or the classical music of India, is music that a score cannot
contain. Every healthy, living culture holds its stories to its heart,
and so the book, in the fundamental yet intangible sense, is a cultural universal. This, however, is a book composed in homage to what
script and print omit - and to the intellectual richness of a world
where no manuscripts or printed books exist.
Reading, like speech, is an ancient, preliterate craft. We read the
tracks and scat of animals, the depth and luster of their coats, the
set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of
sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the
wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken
rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of
course, the voices that we hear. We read the speech of jays, ravens,
hawks, frogs, wolves, and, in infinite detail, the voices, faces, gestures, coughs and postures of other human beings. This is a serious
kind of reading, and it antedates all but the earliest, most involun—
tary form of writing, which is the leaving of prints and traces, the
making of tracks.
The works of literature translated and discussed here were made
in such a world - where the performance could be read but the work could not. Now they are frozen, verbatim transcriptions of single
performances. Voices hide in these transcriptions. If they are to speak,
we must find a way to listen. That is difficult to do, so long as we keep
thinking of the fixed and silent texts that have come to overshadow
every other kind of literature in the European tradition.
All literature is oral at its root, so the dilemma is unreal. Dante,
Shakespeare, Melville, Flaubert, Joyce are read because they speak,
although the pedants' books are mum. Yet the oral poet's strategies
and tactics differ from the writer's, and the tactics of the listener
are different from the reader's. Once it is transcribed, oral literature
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prologue
looks like writing - but as every reader senses, that is not quite
what it is.
Native American oral literature in general, and Haida oral literature in particular, seem to me far closer in spirit and in form to
European painting and to European music than to European literature.
This is one way out of the dilemma. Reading works of oral literature
is more like reading musical scores and narrative paintings than it
is like reading books. In my attempts to set the best Haida poets in
a global context, I have found Bach and Titian and Velazquez more
immediately helpful than Racine.
*
To those concerned about such things, I think it will be clear how
much I owe to the work of several scholars. Dell Hymes and Claude
Levi-Strauss are among the first who come to mind.
My differences from Hymes, I like to think, are superficial. He
used the words measured verse to describe the structural patterns of thought and language he patiently unearthed in Kathlamet, Kiksht
and many other oral literatures. Hymes and I were completely in
agreement about the reality, vitality and importance of these patterns - and I wish I had his great gift for discerning them. I also
wish that he had given them a different name. Perversely, then, I
have expressed my admiration for his work, and for his skills as a
polylingual critic, by redefining or avoiding his key terms.
I would be happy to have Levi-Strauss's gift for seeing narrative
patterns too - since I suppose, as he did, that stories very often tell
us more than their tellers ever know, and that structural analysis
is one important means of finding out what stories have to say, to
us and to each other. Unlike him, I think it quintessential to root
this kind of listening in real and original texts, and to identify the
speakers and occasions as precisely as I can. I want to know, as he
did, how myths think themselves in people, 1 but I also want to know The end-how people think themselves in myths. These are two quite differ- notes begin on page
ent modes of thinking. Only one of them is, strictly speaking, hu- 443.
/> man, though both are in the broad sense humanistic, and both take
place in human hearts and heads. When we listen to a real human
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a story as sharp as a knife
being telling a real myth, we can hear, feel and see the way these
two modes of thinking interact.
Walter Ong and others have written at great length on the nature
of oral culture, but rarely in such works do we encounter an actual
oral text. Still less often do we meet an actual speaker. The result
is that the real human beings who inhabit oral cultures disappear,
and stereotypes replace them. Native American oral poets have so
often been mistreated in this way that their namelessness has come
to seem routine. It is true that a few mythtellers, working in unusual
conditions, have preferred to remain anonymous. But myths - in
the serious sense of the word - are always told by individuals, not
by language groups or tribes. Even when the speakers are unnamed,
to hear what they are saying, we have to learn to hear them one by
one, in the time and in the place where each is speaking.
Not many of the immigrants arriving in North America, from
the sixteenth century through the twentieth, have grasped the fact
that they were coming to take refuge with indigenous societies of
genuine antiquity and cultural complexity. Not many immigrants
have taught this simple truth to their children either. Even the philosopher George Grant - a man not often tolerant of unexamined
assumptions - could call North America "the only society on earth
that has no indigenous traditions from before the age of progress." 2
Grant made it his vocation to fight against defining human life in
terms of human will, but he was captured, in that sentence, by the
will that he decried.
The Old World and the New are not two regions marked reliably
on maps. The Old World is wherever indigenous traditions are permitted to exist and acknowledged to have meaning. The New World
is wherever such traditions are denied and a vision of human triumph
is allowed to take their place. The Old World is the self-sustaining
world - worldwide - to which we all owe our existence. The New
World is the synthetic, self-absorbed and unsustainable one - now
also worldwide - that we create.
Every language and its literature - written or oral - is also a
world, linked to other worlds, of which the speakers of that language
are often unaware. Every language and its literature form an intellectual bioregion, an ecosystem of ideas and perceptions, a watershed
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prologue
of thought. The several hundred oral literatures indigenous to North
America - though constantly remade in the mouths of oral poets
and new to every listener who comes from somewhere else - are
parts of the old-growth forest of the human mind.
Because this is a book about a Native American literature, I have
used native names for places and for people as often as I could. I
use, for instance, the old village names Hlghagilda, Qquuna and
Ghadaghaaxhiwaas in place of the more current English names,
which are Skidegate, Skedans and Masset (or Massett - a spelling that many Haida prefer). Except in a few cases where I know
the individuals or their communities would disapprove, I also use
people's indigenous personal names : Skaay instead of John Sky ;
Daxhiigang rather than Charlie Edenshaw ; Kilxhawgins in preference to Abraham Jones. I know most readers of this book will find
the Haida and other native names harder to spell, remember and
pronounce. Acknowledging these names seems to me nonetheless
an essential gesture of respect and recognition - one I hope most
readers of this book will also want to make.
Several Haida speech sounds have no counterpart in English
and require a little time and effort to learn. A rough guide to Haida
pronunciation is printed overleaf. Appendix 1 (page 425) gives more
detailed information on the spelling and pronunciation of Haida
and neighboring languages. Parts of that appendix are, I am sorry to
say, written in technical language and could not serve their function
otherwise. Every human language selects from the large array of possible speech sounds and lives its life within its chosen subset. There
is no dependable way to convey, in a natural language, the sounds
that it has opted to exclude. This is why linguistics, like all the other
sciences, relies upon an artificial language of its own, and why this
language - though that is not its aim - shuts the uninitiated out.
Mouth-to-mouth training in phonetics is the only real solution, but
anyone prepared to spend an hour reading the article on phonetics
in a decent encyclopedia will be able to make headway. All that is
really involved is learning the geography of the human mouth.3
A few Haida names also appear - simply because they seemed
to invite it - in English translation. Xhuut Tsiixwas ("Harbor-Seal
Ebb-Tide"), for example, has turned into Seal Beach, and Jaat Sttagha
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a story as sharp as a knife
r o u g h g u i d e t o h a i d a p r o n u n c i a t i o n
Bringhurst
ship
Rough
Notes
1999 ff
2008
approximation
a
a
father / lad
1 All doubled
a / u
a / i
rather
vowels are long.
aa
aa
Latin mater 1
2 Voiced uvular
b
b
jab
stop : like g in
d
d
tidy
go but deeper in
dl
dl
Adler
the throat.
g
g
agate
gh
g
3 Ejectives are
_
voiced q 2
h
h
aha
pronounced
with a simul—
i
i
sit
taneous glottal
ii
ii
Latin vinum 1
catch.
j
j
a jar
k
k
kill
4 Voiceless lateral
kk
k'
ejective k 3
fricative : like l
l
l / ll
little
with no voicing.
ll
'l
ejective l 3
5 Where adjacent
hl
hl
Welsh llawn 4
n and g are
m
m / 'm
amid
separate (as in
n
n / 'n
anew
Wingate), they
ng
ng
singer 5
are written with
br /> q
k_
Arabic Iqbal 6
an intervening
k_'
ejective q 3
dot : n[?]g .
s
s
sister
6 Voiceless uvular
t
t
water
stop : like k in
tt
t'
ejective t 3
rake, but deeper
tl
tl
Atlantic
in the throat.
ttl
tl'
ejective tl 3
7 The glottal
ts
ts
itself
catch, routinely
tts
ts'
ejective ts 3
spoken but
u
u
mud
not written in
uu
uu / oo
Latin lumen 1
English uh-oh
w
w / 'w
water
and before the
x
x
German ich
second syllable
xh
x_
German Bach
in "an ice house,
y
y
layer
not a nice
'
'
'uh-'oh 7
house."
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prologue
Gaxhiigans into Thunder Walking Woman. I could not translate every
Haida name, because the meanings of some are obscure, and to do
so would in any case anglicize the Haida texts too much.
Very literal, inch-by-inch translation - what scholars call a strict
morphemic gloss - is fashionable now in Native American linguistics,
and such translations can be wonderfully revealing. They also give
a false sense of security and of scientific precision. (To anyone who
doubts this, I suggest taking a short passage of poetry, or a snippet
of conversation, and translating it morpheme by morpheme from
English into English.) I have resorted now and then to such forensic
translation myself, but on the whole I think that this procedure tends
to cast its light entirely on language and leave literature in the dark.
I confess that all translation seems to me at best approximation
- but translation also seems to me a necessary part of what Ngugi
wa Thiong'o calls decolonizing the mind, and what Plato calls noe+n :
that is, approximately, thinking.
*
Together with its rucksack of appendices, the book now carries a substantial load of endnotes. Most readers, I imagine, will need some of