A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend: A Short History of Myth-Collecting and a Survey of Published Texts

Nora T. Corley is a librarian in Ottawa.

Early anthropologists found British Columbia a treasure trove of myths, legends, and tales. The Indian tribes living there had a rich oral tradition that attracted many collectors who recorded, translated, and published these tales in many forms, from word-by-word interlinear translations to fanciful reworkings. This guide is a “mythography,” a word coined and defined by the author as “the study of how an oral traditional literature becomes available to us in published form.” Maud traces the evolution of B.C. myth collections (B.C. is the area of research rather than the area covered by the myths themselves), including grammars and vocabularies, from the last two decades of the past century, through Franz Boas, his collaborators and students, to Marius Barbeau, Diamond Jenness, and others from the National Museum of Man, to those doing similar

research today. The work of each researcher is briefly described and evaluated, and their most important and interesting publications are noted, discussed, and in some cases criticized. Of interest, too, is the information included about their Native informants and collaborators, who originally recounted these wonderful stories. Since the amount of material available on B.C. myths and legends is overwhelming, this guide attempts to “sort things out, using criteria based on the methods of myth and collecting, so that the general reader might have some idea where to begin.” Maud, who teaches English at Simon Fraser University, has also taught courses in Indian oral tradition. He has recently published a collection of the works of Charles Hill-Tout, The Salish People. In A Guide to B. C. Indian Myth and Legend, the author has done a comprehensive job of outlining the various authors and their works, resulting in a book useful to the prospective myth and legend collector, and interesting to the general reader (even the footnotes are interesting). The book ends with a “Table of Field-Trips within B.C. and Resulting Publications” arranged alphabetically by author, and a detailed index. This is a most useful handbook for libraries, researchers, and the general reader.