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eastern cree Louse and Wide Lake Introduction by Richard J. Preston The story you are about to read is an Eastern Cree narrative of a conjuring contest , from the eastern Subarctic region of Canada, where ever since the melting of the great Wisconsin glacier, thousands of years ago, small groups of indigenous peoples have hunted for their living over a wide expanse of land, rivers, and lakes. Crees still go to the bush to hunt and trap today, though few families spend the entire winter. The Cree language continues to be spoken by many thousands of people, and along with Ojibwe and Inuktitutt, is considered to have a very secure future in Canada. The storyteller was George Head, a fine old man who told stories to me and to others who were respectfully interested in learning about the ‘‘old ways.’’ George said that this story is a tipachiman (Preston 2002), meaning that it is not one of the stories from time out of mind (not what we call a myth), but rather it describes a more recent—and local to the region—set of events. In addition to many stories, George also sang the traditional Eastern Cree songs, quiet yet exuberant expressions of hope for getting a living in the northern ‘‘bush.’’ George narrated ‘‘Kawichkushu’’ (‘‘Louse’’) in 1969 at the community of Fort George, Quebec, when it was translated by Gerti Murdoch of Waskaganish, Quebec , and recorded by Richard J. ‘‘Dick’’ Preston. The recounting was not done in a ‘‘traditional’’ bush camp, but George had recorded stories for non-Crees at Fort George on other occasions and was quite comfortable with the setting. Commentary on the story was recorded in Waskaganish in 1974 by Dick Preston in conversation with John Blackned, who was born in the 1890s and hunted inland up the Eastmain River, Quebec. Translation and comment was provided by Albert Diamond , a young university-educated Cree of Waskaganish. The session took place in John’s house. Of all the many Cree stories I have recorded, the storyof Louse and Wide Lake’s conjuring struggle against each other is the one that struck me most forcefully for its wealth of extraordinary images. When I first read through it, I wrote on the transcript, ‘‘ever metaphorical!’’ My enthusiasm set off in my mind an uneasy sense of caution, and this led me to ask the anthropologist’s question. Was I imposing my own culture’s notions of metaphor on this traditional Cree story? The short answer is ‘‘yes’’. But what were the Cree notions or habitual sense of ‘‘fit- 216 eastern cree ness’’ regarding the use of trope in language? When I asked Gerti about the Cree use of metaphor, she thought a while and replied that she thought that there were no metaphors in Cree. I had a problem. I reread the story, this time to try to discern which of the ‘‘metaphors’’ might almost certainly be something like a metaphor in Cree. I found only one for which I could feel confident, where the conjuring power rises, ‘‘like a wave’’. But perhaps even here my interpretation was misplaced or an artifact of translation from Cree to English. The wave was not a metaphor; it was deadly power. The rest of the images were probably to be taken literally, or as dream images, or perhaps something else. I had stumbled upon a profound problem in translating images of power. I had to discover how words were serving to communicate Cree meanings within an ethos and structure of knowledge that was the cultural context of this story and the rest of the oral tradition. I needed to ask the experts, beginning with the one from whom I had recorded the story, but George Head had died a few years after the recording, so I brought my question to John Blackned, who had been my mentor during the 1960s. The transcript of this conversation is included at the close of the story. I also looked for experts who have written on the topic of metaphor. I found the most help in Terence Hawkes’s little book on the history and types of metaphor (Hawkes 1972). But the problem did not yield very easily. What were those waves, really? How could a man cause another’s arm to swell enormously, without more physical contact than touching a bit of seaweed? How could a sorcerer travel underground, then move invisibly up a thin tipi pole, move across on a thin pole serving...

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