No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Wife Who Goes out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Interpreted along structuralist lines, the Clackamas Chinook story “Seal and Her Younger Brother Dwelt There” is a skillful dramatization of a fatal conflict between two goods: decorum and empirical alertness. Seal’s adult concern with propriety keeps her from heeding her daughter’s warning that Seal’s brother’s new “wife” “urinates like a man.” In the subsequent murder of Seal’s brother, the motives and identity of the homicidal “wife” are deliberately obscured so as to emphasize the tragic conflict between Seal and her daughter. Another Oregon Indian text, “The Revenge against the Sky People” (Coos), contains a version of the Clackamas story, but overall it is a narrative of heroic revenge, in which the killer’s motives and feelings are made known to us before he kills his victim. The two stories complement each other structurally and together represent Indian narrative art at its best.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977
References
Notes
1 Clackamas Chinook Texts, Pt. ii, Text No. 37 : Publication Eleven of the Indiana Univ. Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics (1959), pp. 340–41.
2 Jacobs, The People Are Coming Soon (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1960), pp. 238–42. This book of explications and Jacobs' The Content and Style of an Oral Literature, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No. 26 (New York : Viking, 1959), constitute the fullest treatment yet made of a native literature as literature. Hymes, “The ‘wife’ Who ‘goes out’ like a Man: Reinterpretation of a Clackamas Chinook Myth,” Social Science Information, 7, No. 3 (1968), 173–99. Kermode, “The Structure of Fiction,” Modern Language Notes, 84 (1969), 891–915.
3 Underhill, “The Autobiography of a Papago Woman,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, 46 (1936). 23. For a thorough and lucid description of the storytelling context of one Western tribe, see Theodore Stern, “Some Sources of Variability in Klamath Mythology,” Journal of American Folklore, 69 (1956), 1–9, 135–16, 377–86.
4 I give Hymes's slightly revised text, as printed in his essay, pp. 177–79.
5 Jacobs, The People Are Coming Soon, pp. 242–43.
6 I have adapted this idea from an excellent essay by J. Barre Toelken, “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives,” Genre, 2 (1969). 221. See commentaries by Paul Radin and Karl Jung in The Trickster (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), and Géza Roheim, “Culture Hero and Trickster in North American Mythology,” in Sol Tax, ed., Indian Tribes of Aboriginal America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967).
7 W. B. Yeats, “The Tragic Theatre,” Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 240–44.
8 Frachtenberg, Coos Texts, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, 1 (1913), 149–57. Another version is in Melville Jacobs, Coos Myth Texts, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, 8, No. 2 (1940), 235–37.
9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), p. 213. There are in fact forms of “The Revenge against the Sky People” in the recorded mythology of the Alsea and Tillamook tribes, both from the Oregon coast, and the Quileutes of the central Washington coast have a more distant analogue. See Frachtenberg, Alsea Myths and Texts, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, No. 67 (1920), pp. 141–49; Franz Boas, “Traditions of the Tillamook Indians,” Journal of American Folklore, 11 (1898), 136–38; Elizabeth Jacobs, Nehalem Tillamook Tales (Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Books, 1959), pp. 24–28; Manuel Andrade, Quileute Texts, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, 12 (1931), 69–71.
10 Jacobs, The People Are Coming Soon, p. 218.
11 For another instance of internal conflict dramatized with complete “behavioristic” objectivity and with great power, see “Coyote and Badger Were Neighbors” and Jacobs' interpretation in The Content and Style of an Oral Literature, pp. 27–36.
12 Frachtenberg, “Traditions of the Coos Indians of Oregon,” Journal of American Folklore, 22 (1909), 25. For additional ethnographic information on the Coos, see Jacobs, C oos Ethnologic and Narrative Texts, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, 8, No. 1 (1939), and H. G. Barnett, Culture Element Distributions vii : Oregon Coast, Anthropological Records, 1, No. 3 (1937), 155–203.
13 Jacobs, The People Are Coming Soon, ix-xi et passim.
14 Frachtenberg, Alsea Myths and Texts, p. 145.
15 Jacobs, Coos Ethnologic and Narrative Texts, p. 74.
16 E.g., see the mythic ending of an otherwise highly realistic Wasco tale, “A Wasco Woman Deceives Her Husband,” in Edward Sapir, Wishram Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society, 2 (1909), 248–52.
17 Jacobs, Coos Myth Texts, p. 129.
18 T. T. Waterman, “The Explanatory Element in the Folktales of North American Indians,” Journal of American Folklore, 27 (1914), 1–54.
19 When, at the end of a Myth Age narrative, the raconteur thus directed the story's long-ago action at his listeners, “The people are almost here.” what did they feel? Solidarity, a sense of historical continuity, and therefore, perhaps, a sense of responsibility as the People? Ignoring all sorts of obstacles to such a comparison, there is something of this effect at the conclusion of Shakespeare's history plays, notably Richard iii and Henry viii : the Shakespearean audience was made to see itself as “coming soon,” in the accession of Henry vii and in the birth of Elizabeth.
20 Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains (Ithaca, 1838), p. 235.
21 These issues are discussed more fully in my forthcoming anthology of Indian literature from the Oregon country, Coyote Was Going There (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press), and in a remarkable essay by Dell Hymes on the prospects of American folklore, “Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth,” Journal of American Folklore, 88 (1975), 345–69.