From ‘Mythic’ to ‘Fictive’ in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth

University of Rochester J A R O L D R A M S E Y From ‘Mythic’to ‘Fictive’in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth* The Orphic story, of a hero’s unsuccessful quest to bring back a loved one from the Land of the Dead, is apparently universal among American Indian tribes.1 In its permutations, the story has a powerful intrinsic appeal that transcends cultural barriers, speaking to us all as mortal humans; and when looked at as oral literature, many of the Indian Orpheus stories reveal, even at the double remove of transcription into print and translation, a striking degree of narrative artistry, as if their anonymous creators were conscious of rising to the occasion of a great theme. Of such myths, surely one of the most compelling is the Nez Perce “Coyote and the Shadow People,” recorded and translated by Archie Phinney in Lapwai, Idaho, in 1929. Now, Phinney’s texts are of special value in the study of traditional Western Indian literature because they were collected and edited under nearly perfect conditions. Phinney was a Nez Perce himself, educated at Columbia University and trained in ethnography and linguistics by Franz Boas; and when he returned to the Lapwai Reservation he took as his sole informant his own mother, *A version of this essay was read at the 1976 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 1976. 1See Ake Hultkrantz’s very full study, The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition, in the Ethnological Museum of Sweden Monograph Series, No. 2 (1957) ; oddly enough Hultkrantz ignores our text. Also see Alice Gayton, “The Orpheus Myth in North America,” Journal of American Folklore, 48 (1935), 263-293. Gayton’s study apparently came out too early for her to consider Phinney’s collection. 120 Western American Literature “Wayilatpu,” a gifted story-teller who spoke no English, and whose knowledge of her repertory, Phinney tells us, extended back three genera­ tions and therefore “beyond the time when the influences of new inter­ tribal contacts and of wholesale myth-trading at non-reservation Indian schools became apparent in Nez Perce mythology.”2 In terms of classical Boasian scholarship, then, it would be hard to improve upon Phinney’s circumstances — they are probably unique among Far Western Indians — and it is clear from his textual work that he brought to it an unusual combination of editorial rigor and literary sensitivity. His translations aim at the more-than-literal recreation in English of stylistic features in the original narratives; there is a kind of elegance to them, which, to be sure, now and then does strike a some­ what stilted Latinate note, but which, overall, seems appropriate to stories as rich as these. One of Phinney’s great virtues, I think, is his constant awareness of what can be lost in transforming the drama of oral narrative into print — lines on a page. As he complained in a letter to Boas: “A sad thing in recording these animal stories is the loss of spirit — the fascination furnished by the peculiar Indian vocal tradition for humor. Indians are better story-tellers than whites. When I read my story mechanically I find only the cold corpse.”3 The final sentence of Phinney’s Introduction to his collection is an eloquent plea — one. worth heeding now as we set out to examine just one of his people’s stories — against reading the stories mechanically, out of context, and for, instead, opening the imagination to them as a mythology. He says: “Any substantial appreciation of these tales must come not from the simple elements of drama unfolded but from vivid feeling within oneself, feeling as a moving current all the figures and the relationships that belong to the whole mythbody.”4 New for the story, “Coyote and the Shadow People” — Coyote and his wife were dwelling there. His wife became ill. She died. Then Ccycte became very, very lonely. He did nothing but weep for his wife. There the death spirit came to him and said, “Ccycte, do you pine 2Archie Phinney, Nez Perce Texts, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, Vol. 25 (1934) vii. 3MS letter, dated Nov. 20, 1929...