A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, and: Nine Visits to the Mythworld/Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (review)

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, vol. 1 of Masterworks of the Haida Mythtellers by Robert Bringhurst. University of Nebraska Press, 1999

Nine Visits to the Mythworld/Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, vol. 2 of Masterworks of the Haida Mythtellers translated by Robert Bringhurst University of Nebraska Press, 2000

The Haida mythtellers were poets, maintains Canadian poet, linguist, and scholar Robert Bringhurst in his book Story as Sharp as a Knife. His apparently straightforward claim requires 414 pages (plus another hundred pages of appendices, notes, and bibliography) to explain, including the meaning of terms like "mythteller" and "poet." Bringhurst must also develop deep context: the history of the Haida; the transmission of Haida culture through orality (and thus, the Haida language as instrument), totem and mortuary poles, and ceremonial feasts; the villages, moieties, and ecology of Haida Gwaay itself; and most decisively, the genius of two of the Haida mythtellers ofwhom we have record, Ghandl and Skaay. The result of Bringhurst's many years of labor on this project is one of the most engrossing books on traditional indigenous literature that I have ever read.

At the end of September 1900, the anthropologist John Swanton, a self-effacing, "elfin" man of twenty-seven, landed at Skidgate in Haida Gwaay (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia). Swanton had completed his graduate work the previous June at Harvard, though he had done most of it at Columbia under Franz Boas. Swanton had worked with the Lakota language, and, like Boas, he had an excellent ear for learning languages. Boas arranged for Swanton to conduct ethnography and to collect material artifacts among the Haida under the combined auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the American Museum of Natural History. Swanton did not begin to learn the Haida language until he actually arrived in Haida Gwaay, but within ten days he began the "serious taking of texts." Swanton became so engaged with the oral literature of the Haida that he had no time to fulfill Boas's requests for material artifacts—a change of purpose with which Boas could only concur.

Swanton hired as his teacher, guide, and assistant a bilingual Haida named Henry Moody (Swanton paid his Haida helpers about the same rate as he himself received). They developed a systematic approach whereby the mythteller would present a story in Haida a few sentences at a time, which Moody would then repeat slowly enough for Swanton to transcribe phonetically. On a later occasion, Swanton and Moody would work out interlinear translations into English. Such a system sounds cumbersome, but as all parties to it gained experience, it worked, says Swanton, "quite admirably."

After first taking a story from Sghiidagits, the headman of the village (thereby showing his respect for Haida protocol), Swanton through Moody met the mythteller that Bringhurst calls "the finest poet he would ever meet, in any language or tradition" (A Story as Sharp as a Knife, 73). He was Skaay, about eighty, with a crippled back, of the lineage Qquuna Qiighawaay ("descendants of the village known as Quuna") of the Eagle side. Henry Moody turned out to be the son and heir of Gidansta, the headman of Skaay's ancestral village of Qquuna, and even though the village had been abandoned for twenty years, hisparticipation in the sessions lent a certain formal gravity to Skaay's performance—because oral performance always depends upon the occasion and the audience.

Between mid-October and the beginning of November, Swanton transcribed some 7,000 lines of...