Two Plains Cree Performances of a Pre-Victorian Kunstmärchen

Old World tales found their way into the indigenous languages of North America mainly through the fur trade. Against the background of written translations by francophone missionaries, this study documents another complementary mode of transmission: the translation of literary texts from English by a speaker of Plains Cree. It is based on two performances recorded in 1982 by kâ–mimikwatowêt/William Greyeyes on the authority of his father’s brother, Louis Ahenakew. The formal structures, both literary and linguistic, of the two texts (derived from a literary fairy tale first published in 1835) show them to be reinvented as instances (if marginal, perhaps) of classical Plains Cree texts.