When the Rains Came and Other Legends of the Salish People

Richard W. Parker is an assistant professor of classics at Brock
University in St. Catharines.

This modest volume attempts to preserve for posterity a number of myths
of the Salish people, as well as warm memories of the several
storytellers themselves. The legends were told to the author by elders
of the Khenipsen band and other Salish of Cowichan Bay between 1929 and
1992. It is of particular interest that all the tellers save one were
born in the last century (two in the 1860s), the “youngster” being
born circa 1907.

The collection comprises five legends, each framed by tender and
respectful vignettes of its Salish teller and how she or he came to
share the story with the author. The collection is itself framed by the
author’s reminiscence of her early encounters with the Salish of
Khenipsen as a young girl and teenager, and by her reunion some six
decades later with their descendants. This story-within-a-story approach
serves to present the legends not as if plucked from the ground like
quaint anthropological artifacts for a collection, but rather as a fond
tribute and memorial to the several tellers as auteurs.

Stories include a flood myth (“When the Rains Came”); a quest into
another world aided by three magic talismans (“Legend of Red Eye and
White Eye”); a tale of the first man (“Legend of See-la-tha”); a
myth of combat against a sea serpent replete with etiologies of local
topography (“Monster of Octopus Point”); and, perhaps most
interesting of all, a story of ill-fated love and revenge by a shaman
hero (“Legend of Kisack and the Stonehead People”). The book is
illustrated with vintage portraits and photographs of Cowichan Bay and
its inhabitants, and with drawings by D. Johnnie Seletze, a descendant
of one of the storytellers.