Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This collection is an important addition to the canon of Native American narratives and literature and an essential volume for anyone studying Salish languages and linguistics."—Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas
"The volume shows the value of deep engagement, of Seymour with his own elders and ancestral narrative traditions and of Mattina with the community of indigenous scholars and storytellers."—Bruce Granville Miller,
Pacific Northwest Quarterly“For nearly half a century Tony Mattina has been one of those extremely rare scholars to stick with the narrative legacy of a single mysterious, master storyteller, whose genius and wisdom he serves up in this career-culminating book. Working in close auspices with the Colville-Okanagan communities of Washington State and British Columbia, Mattina [has] . . . produced this stunning and original anthology of their collective imagination, as filtered through the old, old stories of the now-deceased sage, Peter Seymour. [It is] one of those quiet triumphs that took one humanistic spirit from academia to unearth, translate, and contextualize the genius of another humanistic spirit from another cultural world.”—Peter Nabokov, author of
Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Symbols and Abbreviations
Introduction
The Colville-Okanagan land and its people
The languages
Colville-Okanagan social organization
Colville-Okanagan knowledge
The Texts
Autobiographical and ethnographic texts
Autobiography
Harvesting
Racing horses
A hunting trip
Marriage customs
After the birth of a child
Partnership butchering
The attainment of provisions
The rainy hunting trip
Tales of European origin
Black Pig
The grateful dead version 1
The grateful dead version 2
The Devil and the black man
captikʷɬ
How Coyote got his powers
Coyote and Whale
Coyote and Grizzly
The two goats
Lynx and the virgin
BlueJay and Wolf
The transcription and analysis of the texts
Approximate phonemic transcriptions
Phrasal words and amalgams
Alternate forms
Inflectional and non-inflectional material
Derivational affixes
Inflectional affixes
Person Marking
The suffix -y̓
List in tabular form of remaining inflectional affixes
Word classes
Nominal and pronominal arguments
Autobiographical and ethnographic texts
Autobiography
Harvesting
Racing horses
A hunting trip
Marriage customs
After the birth of a child
Partnership butchering
The attainment of provisions
The rainy hunting trip
Tales of European origin
Black Pig
The grateful dead version 1 (unfinished
The grateful dead version 2
The Devil and the Black Face
captikʷɬ
How Coyote got his powers
Coyote and Whale
Coyote and Grizzly
The two goats
Lynx and the virgin
Blue Jay and Wolf
Index of stems and inflectional affixes
Index of roots
Lexical affixes
Index and chronology of Pete Seymour’s narrations
References.
