The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale

6. The Mediated and Theatrical Tale

119 CHAPTER SIX The Mediated and Theatrical Tale Art and song everywhere begins in folk culture: celebration, dance, music, story, song, poem. —GARY SNYDER, BACK ON THE FIRE In her ground-breaking book, American Folklore and the Mass Media (1994), Linda Dégh discusses what happens to folklore when it is enters the electronic world. While purists might think this is a bad thing, a corruption, Dégh argues that mass media actually liberates folklore and makes it more accessible to all. “The time is ripe,” she writes in anticipation, “for folklorists to think about a new type of fieldwork for a more systematic, scientific study of folklore transmission in the age of the electronic explosion” (1994, 13). For Dégh and other folk narrative scholars, media continues to be a hot topic at the annual meetings of The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. Starting in the nineteenth century, oral tradition has become more and more entwined in mass media, and the process of that entwining , called mediation, consists of various forms of communication. The mediated world consists largely of books, newspapers and magazines, radio and television, records, tapes, and compact discs, the telephone and smartphone, and the Internet. Except for telephones, smartphones, and the Internet, these are essentially impersonal, one-way means of communication. And, compared to oral tradition, they are oftentimes commodified. That is, you usually have to pay money to access them. In addition to its many published texts and its artistic representation in the graphic arts, the tale of the Blind Man and the Loon has now been interpreted in the form of three short films, several audio compact discs, a ballet, a piece of classical chamber music, at least two radio broadcasts, and untold theatrical performances by professional THE MEDIATED AND THEATRICAL TALE 120 storytellers and actors. Through these multiple delivery systems, as well as its dissemination on the Internet, the tale has rocketed from terrestrial folk culture (affectionately known in Alaska as “the mukluk telegraph”) into the orbit of mainstream popular culture. Films 1. The Loon’s Necklace (1949) Since its release when it won the first-ever Canadian Film of the Year Award, The Loon’s Necklace has had wide distribution across the United States and has become a staple in Alaskan and Canadian elementary school film libraries. The film was initially released in English and French (as Le Collier Magique). The credits for this eleven-minute film are: produced and directed by F.R. “Budge” Crawley (1949), scripting by Douglas Leechman, cinematography by Grant Crabtree, editing by Judith Crawley, and narration by George Gorman (English) and François Bertrand (French). It was a product of Crawley Films and was distributed by Encyclopedia Britannica Films.1 One can openly speculate that this film has influenced oral performances of the tale outside of southern British Columbia, where Douglas Leechman first found it. The trait by which the blind man rewards the loon with a dentalium shell necklace appears to be a symbolic extension of Dene culture from Alaska, the Yukon, and northern British Columbia, where chiefs are distinguished by such necklaces at potlatch ceremonies and other formal occasions (see map 1, Group F). However, the film is not at all representative of the many Eskimo variants or the Eskimo subtype. The film script for The Loon’s Necklace was written by the ethnographer , archaeologist, and folklorist Douglas Leechman, who was affiliated with the National Museum of Canada. He presents it to viewers as a morality tale, prefaced with the scrolled text: “This story is based on a Canadian west coast Indian legend. It is a tale about the spirits of good and evil which these people believed were all around them.” The first words of the film are “In the Indian village of Shulus, on the banks of the Nicola River, there lived an old blind medicine man named Kelora.” The Nicola River is a tributary of the Thompson River in southern British Columbia and is the homeland of the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) and Okanagan First Nations, who both speak Interior Salishan THE MEDIATED AND THEATRICAL TALE 121 languages, and of the now-vanished Nicola Athabaskans or Stuwix.2 Today Shulus is occupied by the Lower Nicola Indian Band. To my knowledge, the story of the Loon’s Necklace has never been recorded among these people or in any of these languages, unless Leechman himself did it, and there is at...