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Upper Coquille Athabaskan Two Tales of Power Introduction by William R. Seaburg The following two texts, ‘‘Gambler and Snake’’ and ‘‘Wind Woman,’’ were recorded by Elizabeth D. Jacobs (1903–83) from her Upper Coquille Athabaskan consultant, Coquelle Thompson Sr. (ca. 1849–1946) in the late fall of 1935 at the Siletz Reservation in western Oregon. Jacobs worked with Thompson for about two months, recording by longhand myths, tales, personal experience narratives, and historical narratives, as well as ethnographic notes. She and her anthropologist husband, Melville Jacobs (1902–71), also recorded on phonograph records a variety of song types that Thompson sang for them.1 Most of this rich collection of oral and musical tradition remains unpublished. Jacobs was not formally trained as an anthropologist, but she was a very bright and capable person and quickly learned phonetic transcription and field methods from her husband. Although the Jacobses worked at separate field sites during the day, in the evening hours they would rehash the day’s findings, and Melville would assist Elizabeth in compiling the next day’s queries. Her work with Coquelle Thompson was not her first fieldwork; for several months in 1933 and again briefly in 1934 she recorded ethnographic notes and stories from her Nehalem Tillamook consultant, Clara Pearson.2 Jacobs’s ethnographic field questioning was rather unstructured, especially at the beginning of her work with Thompson. She would suggest a topic and let Thompson lead the way. Most of the narratives Jacobs recorded from Thompson seem to have emerged quite naturally from the discussion of a particular ethnographic or historical topic.Whenever Thompson volunteered a story, Jacobs wrote it down.3 She explained in later years that a nondirective approach ‘‘was our way of letting the informant run the show and showing our respect. It was their culture, not something we were supposed to dig out. They were telling us how they lived and how they felt.’’4 Jacobs’s goal was to transcribe faithfully Thompson’s words verbatim, especially in the narratives. Evidence for this can be seen in her preservation of Thompson’s nonstandard grammatical forms, pronunciations, rural English colloquialisms , certain lexical choices, and phonetic transcriptions of Indian words. 210 upper coquille athabaskan Occasionally Jacobs’s voice intrudes in the text, usually in the form of lexical choice or brief paraphrase. There is no evidence of bowdlerization. In editing her texts, perhaps the biggest frustration is not always knowing when an explanatory aside, enclosed within parentheses in the notebook, represents Jacobs’s or Thompson’s voice. Coquelle Thompson Sr. was born around 1849 in an Upper Coquille Athabaskan village in the Coquille River valley, southwest Oregon. After the disastrous Rogue River Wars of 1855–56 he and his people, as well as many other coastal southwest Oregon Indian groups, were removed from their aboriginal homelands and resettled some one hundred miles north on land that eventually become the Siletz Reservation. Many did not survive the emotional and physical deprivations of the early days on the reservation, but Coquelle was a survivor and he lived there the rest of his long life. Thompson was either a participant in, a witness to, or an oral recorder of all the major events at Siletz from 1855 to 1946, including an offshoot of the 1870 Ghost Dance, known at Siletz as the Warm House Dance. He was a noted singer and dancer of both Native and nativistic songs and dances. He knew virtually everyone on the reservation—and their kinship ties—as official heirship testimonies amply demonstrate. He spoke Indian English as well as the local lingua franca, Chinook Jargon, and his native Upper Coquille Athabaskan, a language that only a few still spoke at the time of his passing in 1946. Thompson worked at various times as a farmer, hunting and fishing guide, teamster, tribal policeman, and expert witness for six different anthropologists over a period of nearly sixty years, from 1884 to 1942. Most of what we know about the Upper Coquille Athabaskan language and culture comes from the memory of this incredibly able and willing consultant.Thompson was a perceptive, intelligent observer, and he had a phenomenal memory. He was also a master storyteller, and both Elizabeth Jacobs and Bureau of American Ethnology ethnologist and linguist John P. Harrington recorded hundreds of notebook pages of myths, tales, and historical-event narratives from him. The two texts presented here represent only a very brief sampling of his rich heritage.5 Aspects of Thompson...

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