Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay

John Stanley is a policy advisor at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

This book is based on a collection of 68 texts the author recorded in
Cree between 1955 and 1965. The 16 different narrators of the stories
were from the West James Bay area and spoke Swampy (i.e., -n- dialect),
Moose (i.e., -i- dialect), and the mixed Kaschewan Cree. Four were
unilingual Cree. The stories, which range from traditional legends to a
description of the occasion when the first airplane arrived at Moose
Factory, feature the “heroic” episodes of the culture heroes
Weesakechahk and Chakabesh.

The book is a masterpiece—the culmination of C.D. Ellis’s long
record of distinguished work with the Cree language, and a fitting
follow-up to his epic Cree instruction work, Spoken Cree. Its utility as
a tool for learning about Cree derives in large part from the meticulous
quality of the translation. Linguists working with Native languages will
very much appreciate the way in which Ellis organizes his
more-than–100-page glossary according to Cree rather than English
structural principles. Of course, the very qualities that make Ellis’s
books so academically sound will not necessarily enthral the general or
casual reader.