Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country ed. by Jarold Ramsey (review)

Essay Review Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country. Com­ piled and edited by Jarold Ramsey. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1977. 295 pages, $14.95.) Although the contents of this book are drawn only from the Oregon country, the literary lesson they contain really concerns the whole American West: these are examples of a literature which has style and symmetry, aesthetic and cultural focus, richness of meaning and depth of vision— a literature which has nonetheless been left to anthropologists, writers of children’s books, and romantic gurus. Ramsey does not answer the implied question: if this is literature, and if it’s so good, why have the perceptive literary critical minds of the past century not recognized its excellence, its bearing on our concept of literature? It is over this time span of the last hundred years that both the American West (as a concept) and American Literature (as a field of inquiry) have matured. What happened to the Indian in the West (economically, politically, philosophically) has appar­ ently happened to American Indian literature in Academe. Ramsey’s book gives a small view of how much we have deprived ourselves as a result. The arrangement of the book is as straightforward as the geographical area it represents: stories and myths are presented from Northeastern Oregon, the Columbia River area, the Willamette Valley, the Coast, the Oregon Southwest, and the Great Basin. The tribes living within these areas had some linguistic and cultural affinities (some more than others), and shared similar subsistence methods. The stories themselves are chiefly though not exclusively from printed and archived sources and represent the best of those few texts now' available to us. Not all of them concern Coyote, as the title might suggest, but they are all excellent examples of the various kinds of oral literature found throughout the Oregon country (oratory, dramatic tale, legend, myth, anecdote), and of course Coyote is as well-represented in the book as he is in the traditions of the Northwest tribes. Not the least of the book’s many attractions is the fact that the compiler is a literary scholar and teacher of wide and deservedly high repu­ tation. His presentation is clearly that of a person who is committed to the excellence of the texts he offers, and to their importance in the field of literature. There is none of the apologetic or condescending tone of the “primitive” anthologist, none of the missionizing of the ardent faddist. He is 166 Western American Literature not repaying a debt to the native ecologist, or worshipping a Cherokee grandmother, or acknowledging adoption by a tribal chamber of commerce, or coyly showing off his new Indian name (believe it or not the substance of several recent anthology introductions). The material is well chosen and readable (which will comfort those who have encountered only Boas’ literal interlinear translations) ; each piece is matched with a succinct note which supplies its provenience, its narrator, its date, and other pertinent information (unlike such infuriating collections as Sanders and Peek, Literature of the American Indian) ; the choice of items includes materials which have been excluded as “earthy” by other anthologists (which will come as a pleasant surprise to those who have admired Ella Clark’s collections but have felt limited by her genteel focus). In all these respects, Ramsey’s book is just plain tops, a genuine relief. For many readers the first response to this book will be amazement: surprise that so much has been found, or retained. Indeed, it is evident from the restrained anger in Ramsey’s introduction that he recognizes the sickening extent to which Native Oregon literature was lost, destroyed or ignored, right along with its live performers: of more than forty entirely separate tribes and languages in the Oregon country of just over a century ago there now survive only a handful, of the hundreds of thousands of myths and tories only a few hundred (and those not always taken down accurately, or translated well, or stored carefully). Another response slowly matures in the reader’s mind, then: if these powerful items are the random remnants of a once widespread set of oral...