Chehalis Stories, edited by Jolynn Amrine Goertz with the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, strives to be more than just another Franz Boas collection, elevating Chehalis voices diminished in the mad dash to capture cultures destined to drown (according to conventional wisdom of the time) in the wave of an unrelenting westward expansion of empire.
The Chehalis people suffered the same fate of tribes throughout the Northwest US in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, forced into treaty-making schemes that would remove them from their ancestral lands, suffering the scourge of European diseases, and losing their children to boarding schools that functioned as centers for cultural reprogramming (and all manner of abuse). As a consequence of this period of tumultuous trauma, many Chehalis stories, according to Goertz, “were put away.” The salvage ethnographers, including the famed Franz Boas, were there to coax them out, and as privileged white academics they would do it on their own terms. This volume, largely drawn from fourteen field notebooks produced by Boas in 1927, is comprised of Chehalis stories shared by Robert Choke, Marion Davis, Peter Heck, Blanche Pete Dawson, and Jonas Secena. In an effort to reassert their collective voices, Goertz provides biographical details of each storyteller in the introduction and has sought to retain the unique idiomatic qualities of their expressions. In addition, the spelling of characters, place names, and lower case proper names reflect Dale Kinkade’s Upper Chehalis Dictionary (and follows his “Guide to Pronunciation,” reproduced in the preface). When Goertz encountered questions that could not be answered using Boas’s notebooks, the subsequent typescript, or Kinkade’s methodology, she consulted storytellers and descendants of storytellers in the Chehalis community, including Curtis Du Puis, Beverley Johnson, Elaine McCloud, Helen Sanders, Roberta Secena, Jerrie Simmons, and Mel Youckton.
It’s important to note that the stories in this collection are static textual representations that at the time of telling, were part of a fluid oral tradition within which stories would vary over time, with contemporary or subsequent storytellers sharing them in their own way. These changes, however subtle or nuanced, are indicative of a living and vital tradition. Goertz addresses the limitations of textual representations of oral stories, admitting that when a story is committed to the printed page (in particular in English), “a part of it is lost.” While acknowledging what goes missing “in the transformation…from orality to textuality,” she “hope[s] that material collected by Boas might be reintroduced into Chehalis oral tradition,” “to gather [the stories] here so that they may once again be held by the families that first generously shared them.” One can assume that her Chehalis collaborators tacitly embrace this worthwhile notion. Despite the methods of salvage ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which remain indefensible in terms of the colonial cultural theft that marks the era, the return of songs, stories, and tangible culture, when pursued with Indigenous consultation and agency, empowers communities to retrieve what was so callously taken.
Goertz rightly frames Chehalis stories, not as bits of history to be viewed chronologically, but cyclical and part of a “continuous cycle of going away and coming back.” The stories rendered in Boas’s notebooks, which are inexorably tied to Chehalis lands, also went away for a time. Anyone interested in gaining a sense of a unique Chehalis worldview, through the vivid, colorful, and often comic adventures of Blue Jay, Badger, Salmon, Owl, Yellow Jacket, Chipmunk, and many others will resonate with these stories, which despite being taken, published, and shared beyond the lands of their ancestors, in some sense have “come back” with this collaborative work, belonging (as they always have) to past, present, and future generations of Chehalis people.
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[Review length: 615 words • Review posted on December 19, 2019]