Koasati Traditional Narratives

Preface

xvii Preface This volume contains a collection of Koasati traditional narratives gathered between 1910 and 1992. The Koasati speak a language of the Muskogean family most closely related to Alabama and more distantly related to Mikasuki, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw–all of which are still spoken. At the present time, the largest community of Koasati speakers is found in the forests to the north of Elton, Louisiana, where they homesteaded land in 1882. Over the previous two centuries they had wandered far from their aboriginal homeland, the upper Tennessee River valley. Despite the great shifts in material and social culture in the past centuries, the Koasati have preserved their native language and traditional oral literature. Social change is still going on, however, and although the Koasati language is still vital, persons who know traditional narratives are becoming fewer, and the repertoire of those who still know them has diminished. This work owes a great debt to John R. Swanton, who, in the first decade of this century undertookfieldwork,bothethnographicandlinguistic,amongtheIndianpeopleswhohadonce inhabited the Southeast. When he came to work among the Koasati in 1910, he not only recorded their tales in English, but also laboriously took them down in Koasati (Swanton 1910), even though he knew almost nothing of the language. Many times I have struggled with garblings and errors in Swanton’s texts, wishing that he had been a better linguist, or at least had had a clearer penmanship. Nonetheless, without his work, this collection would have been a poorer one, not only for the tales themselves, but also because reading them aloud to people often would bring to mind other stories, some of which Swanton had never heard. There is a debt owed as well, to the late Mary R. Haas, who very kindly gave me copies of the texts that she had gathered in her short period of fieldwork in Louisiana in 1939. She also offered great encouragement for the grammar and the dictionary of Koasati that have been published (Kimball 1991, 1994a) and for the putting together of this collection of narratives. Together, these three volumes represent the ideal that she laid before her students at the University of California at Berkeley, and I am glad that I was able to live up to her ideal and only regret that she did not live to see its completion. I was encouraged to persevere in this work by Bel Abbey (1916—1991), one of the best modern-day storytellers among the Koasati. He was enchanted by the ancient tales preserved by Swanton and felt that if such stories were written in both Koasati and English, they would be accessible for his children and their descendants, even if the language itself should fail. In addition to relating his repertoire of traditional narratives, he encouraged his cousin Martha John and other relatives to do likewise. Perhaps even most remarkably, he attempted to pass on traditional narratives in the old way, by teaching them to his younger relatives–two of the stories in this collection were preserved in such a manner. Bel Abbey acted as a friend and as an advisor to me in the process of doing this work, and was actively engaged in it at the time of his sudden and untimely death. The work is now finished, and perhaps the spirit of Bel xviii PREFACE Abbey will be satisfied when he watches his family reading these ancient tales. This project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RL-21726-91) and by a grant from the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society. In addition, a number of the narratives were recorded during the course of the Koasati Dictionary Project, which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BNS 8719269). In addition to Bel Abbey and Martha John, much-needed help was given by Sam Thompson, Bel Abbey’s brother-in-law, during the period after Mr. Abbey’s death. To all these people I give my heartfelt thanks. There are also a number of people worthy of thanks during the long process (interrupted by Hurricane Katrina and long exile without text, tapes, or notes) of bringing this manuscript to publication. I would like to thank Raymond J. DeMallie of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, for his care and encouragement. In addition, I would like to thank Mrs. Cherry R. Hudson and Dr. Stephen L. Pearce of Byers Green, Co. Durham, England, for reading over the manuscript...