Tommy McGinty's Northern Tutchone Story of Crow: A First Nation Elder Recounts the Creation of the World (review)

For the northern Athabascans and Pacific coastal Indians, the Raven stories form the core of mythological narratives that explain the creation of the world and the nature of both human beings and animals. While the Raven stories are often considered a cycle in academic literature, indigenous people usually refer to specific adventures by name, like How Raven Stole the Sun. The Story of Crow presents 21 texts from the Raven cycle that French anthropologist Dominique Legros recorded over a span of twenty years from the late Tutchone elder, Mr. Tommy McGinty. The book is both tantalizing and troubling. Its appeal lies in its promise of a rare look at the trickster character through the repertoire and interpretive discussion of an indigenous storyteller. However, this promise is compromised because the author has conflated different recorded versions of the stories with information from undocumented discussions to create the texts presented as those of Tommy McGinty. The book will be problematic for American scholars because it displays little knowledge of American concerns about the academic collaborator's filtering of indigenous texts.

The Tutchone Indians inhabit the northern Yukon territory along the border with Alaska. Previously, the best-known collections of Tutchone narrative were those published by Catharine McClellan and Julie Cruikshank, both of whom worked with female storytellers. Tommy McGinty is the first male Tutchone storyteller to be featured in an academic publication, and this collection offers many well-known Raven stories in robust versions rich in ethnographic and cosmological detail. Retaining much of the traditional earthiness heard in the field but rarely seen in print, McGinty's stories portray the funny, lusty, immortal Crow while explaining the character's actions and motivations. For Western and Christianized Indian audiences alike, a trickster god seems a contradiction in terms. McGinty's texts discuss the complicated nature of Crow, who transformed the world with both irresponsible passion and practical compassion.

Both shaman and Christian, McGinty often pauses in the course of his narration to compare elements and themes in biblical and Athabascan myth that reconcile the old and new religions in his own philosophy. McGinty explores common themes like virgin birth, the destruction of a world by flood, and the creation of land from water.

The real excitement in The Story of Crow is this chance to glimpse an elder of considerable philosophical sophistication ponder the reasons why his mythology has been misunderstood, and to view his personal integration of two different mythologies. McGinty's interpretive discussions of the stories offer rare access to indigenous theological discourse.

Dominique Legros frames the texts with a discussion of his methodology and postmodern/postcolonial concerns of text creation. Legros did graduate fieldwork among the Northern Tutchone in the 1970s, and twenty years later he collaborated with the modern Northern Tutchone Band leaders to document McGinty's version of the Raven cycle and produce this book. Legros offers several personal narratives to characterize the professional friendship he and McGinty enjoyed. Their respect for each other and their mutual relish for sexual humor no doubt contributed to the unexpurgated content and the genuine fun of the texts.

Legros devotes 41 pages to a presentation of his text-making process, in which he explains that the texts are amalgamations of elements taken from different versions of the stories documented in three recording sessions over twenty years. American readers may disagree that the creation of "complete" texts is more important than exploring how and why McGinty's performances for Legros as a college student differed from those he offered to Legros as the two men visited twenty years later. The lack of any mention of performance theory or the relationship between text and context may be jarring for some American and Canadian...