Transmission Difficulties

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

Between 1903 and 1914, Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas
solicited written texts of myths and folktales, in Tsimshian and
English, from a bilingual resident of Port Simpson, B.C., Henry W. Tate.
This brief book is highly critical of the published works that resulted
from that relationship. Ralph Maud finds that Boas, who published this
material in 1912 and 1916, did not adhere to current standards of
folklore collection or to those set forward by Boas’s student, Viola
Garfield, in 1953. Central to Maud’s argument is the assertion that
Tate wrote the stories in English, possibly plagiarizing some from
Boas’s earlier published work of tales collected on the Nass River,
and then translated them into Tsimshian. He denies that Boas made any
significant attempt to work with the Tsimshian portion of the texts,
asserting what Boas claimed as his translation is largely a paraphrase
of Tate’s English text.

Maud is harsh with Boas, accusing him of giving “a false seal of
approval to texts of uncertain validity” and of committing “a major
hypocrisy in the annals of anthropology” in his treatment of sexual
elements in the stories. Boas was “ethically mixed up.” Boas’s
collection of Kwakiutl tales, produced with George Hunt, is “the most
dreary literary production that the world has ever been presented
with.” The longest chapter in the book (26 pages) is devoted to an
attack on a single sentence (28 words) used by Boas to introduce the
text of the Asdiwal myth.

The author, who has taught English, not anthropology, at Simon Fraser
University, finds Tate’s English text more vital and exciting than the
English texts produced by Boas. Maud may have a point with respect to
literary productions, but he has a strange view of what anthropology is
and what an anthropologist does. He defines an anthropologist as “an
ardent admirer of the way things are and were.” Maud’s lack of
sophisticated knowledge of the history and nature of anthropology will
exasperate many readers of this book.