This book continues William Seaburg’s long-standing involvement with the ethnography and ethnohistory of the Oregon coast and with the legacy of Elizabeth D. Jacobs. Her fieldwork in the 1930s, in part benefiting from the advice of her husband, the anthropologist Melville Jacobs, resulted in publications on the Tillamook--an important collection of narratives (Jacobs 1959) and an ethnography of the Tillamook, the latter edited by Seaburg (Jacobs 2003). The present book moves a bit farther south, to an Oregonian Athabaskan group; like the Tillamook narrative collection, Pitch Woman presents myths and legends obtained almost entirely in English from a single knowledgeable and talented storyteller. (Coquelle Thompson also provided Jacobs with a good many narratives of personal experience and with ethnographic information, which are not included in this book.)
Besides editing the narratives themselves, Seaburg provides us with an introduction (chapter 1, 1-30) that discusses Coquelle Thompson, Jacobs, and the text collecting and editing practices from which this volume resulted; a cultural sketch of the Upper Coquille Athabaskans (chapter 2, 31-50); and a survey of features of style and performance in Thompson’s narrations, including some in sound recordings by other collectors (chapter 3, 51-68). The introduction includes a comparison of Elizabeth Jacobs’s text-collecting and transcription practices with those of John Peabody Harrington, who also recorded stories from Coquelle Thompson (23-28); Seaburg finds this kind of comparison “quite useful for sorting out the voices of the storyteller as of the recorder” (28) and indicating “different dynamics between the consultant and the investigators” (27). Four of the stories are accompanied by extended discussions of features of style and content (chapter 4, 69-130), drawing to varying degrees on Jacobs’s own notes. The other forty-three stories (chapter 5, 131-269) are presented without such discussion, though endnotes and bracketed insertions in the text provide various clarifications, while abstracts and lists of similar stories from the region appear in headnotes. Two stories are experimentally presented as verse, more or less in the manner advocated by Dell Hymes (110-30, 136-40); the rest appear as prose. A brief afterword (270-74) reflects on the value of Native (Indian) stories narrated in English. Appendices contrast complete versions of a single story as it appears in Jacobs’s and Harrington’s fieldnotes (275-78) and explain the orthography used for the Upper Coquille Athabaskan words that occasionally appear (279-82).
Seaburg’s contributions are unprententious and helpful; in part, they reflect his concern with contact-era and reservation-era ethnohistory in the Northwest. (He had previously collaborated on a biography of Coquelle Thompson [Youst and Seaburg 2002].) Perhaps of particular interest is his comparison of the style of Thompson’s English narrations with that of other collections from the region that were originally recorded in a native language (51-60). While in many respects Thompson’s storytelling is comparable to that found in native-language narratives, his narration and the quoted speech of his characters include a good many more statements about characters’ feelings, motives, and thoughts, and more evaluative and explanatory comment. Returning to this issue in the afterword, Seaburg raises the possibility that "Native storytellers telling stories in English may have developed their own expressive style over time" (271); he notes that features similar to those of Thompson’s stories appear as well in the English narrations of other storytellers from the region, a form of "oral literary criticism...embedded within the text itself" (273-74).
Seaburg’s foreword (xi-xiii) also offers sound advice for the general reader approaching a collection of oral literature for the first time--for instance, the suggestion that the stories will make an increasing amount of sense the more of them one reads and the more often one reads them, allowing their interconnections to emerge (xii).
In her field notebooks, Jacobs transcribed the narratives in a form evidently quite close to what Coquelle Thompson said; subsequently she prepared versions that edited out Thompson’s less standard English and his explanatory asides. Seaburg, however, presents the stories in a form closer to that of the field notebooks (28-30), and this seems a sound decision; it certainly produces livelier prose than rewriting in more standard English would. (Seaburg in fact thereby continues a trajectory seen in Jacobs’s own practice; she prepared two rewritten versions of the collection [20-23], the later of which retained more features of the field notes than the earlier one had done.) Seaburg’s policy entails a large number of bracketed insertions in the texts, containing clarifications, translations of Athabaskan words, and so on. Some may find this annoying, but one gets used to it, and it is beneficial to have substantive editorial additions set off in this way.
A substantial corpus of well-told narratives from the Oregon coast, a region from which few such things have appeared in print, is self-recommending to anyone concerned with native literatures of the Northwest. But this well-presented collection should repay the attention of other readers as well.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Elizabeth D. 1959. Nehalem Tillamook Tales. Edited by Melville Jacobs. Eugene: University of Oregon Press.
Jacobs, Elizabeth D. 2003. The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography. Edited and introduced by William R. Seaburg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.
Youst, Lionel, and William R. Seaburg. 2002. Coquelle Thompson, Athabaskan Witness: A Cultural Biography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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[Review length: 858 words • Review posted on September 3, 2008]