This volume contains fifteen Oowekyala Wakashan texts originally recorded at Rivers Inlet Village on the British Columbia coast with interlinear English translations and general comments on the language and culture.

Gathers stories and songs from thirty-one native groups in North America, including the Inupiaqs, the Lushoots, the Catawbas, and the Maliseets.

In an incisive and wide-ranging critique of ethno-history and historical anthropology, Michael E. Harkin develops an innovative approach to understanding the profound cultural changes experienced during the past century by the Heiltsuks (Bella Bella), a Northwest Coast Indian group. Between 1880 and 1920, the Heiltsuks changed from one of the most traditional and aggressive groups on the Northwest Coast to paragons of Victorian virtues. Why and how did this dramatic transformation occur? These questions, Harkin contends, can best be answered by tracing the changing views the Heiltsuks had of themselves and of their past as they encountered colonial powers. Rejecting many of the common methods and assumptions of ethnohistorians as unwittingly Eurocentric or simplistic, Harkin argues that the multiple perspectives, motives, and events constituting the Heiltsuks' world and history can be productively conceived of as dialogues, ongoing series of culturally embedded communicative acts that presuppose previous acts and constrain future ones. Historical transformations in three of these dialogues, centering on the body, material goods, and concepts of the soul, are examined in detail.

An archival and ethnographic account of Coast Tsimshian feast traditions with emphasis on their role as forms of discourse shaped by idiosyncratic textual conventions.

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swanton met a number of fine mythtellers during his year in the Haida country. Each had his own style and his own repertoire. Two of them—a blind man in his fifties by the name of Ghandl, and a crippled septuagenarian named Skaay—were artists of extraordinary stature, revered in their own communities and admired ever since by the few specialists aware of their great legacy. Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes all the finest works of one of these master mythtellers. In November 1900, when Ghandl dictated these nine stories, the Haida world lay in ruins. Wave upon wave of smallpox and other diseases, rapacious commercial exploitation by fur traders, whalers and miners, and relentless missionization by the church had taken a huge toll on Haida culture. Yet in the blind poet’s mind, the great tradition lived, and in his voice it comes alive. Robert Bringhurst’s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information.

A study of the development of contemporary Inuit literature, in both Inuktitut and English, including a discussion of its themes, structures and roots in oral tradition. The author concludes that a strong continuity persists between the two narrative forms despite apparent differences in subject matter and language.