... Tlingit Myths and Texts, Recorded by John R. Swanton
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(The Haida are a Canadian Native American group which live...)
The Haida are a Canadian Native American group which lives on the Queen Charlotte Islands, just off the coast of British Columbia. This is the triangular archipelago which looks like it is a piece broken off of Alaska. This collection of Haida songs, collected early in the 20th century, gives many insights into Haida culture, including class divisions, belief in reincarnation, and the status of women. This etext is presented with the full Haida interlinear text. (Quote from sacred-texts.com)
About the Author
John Reed Swanton (1873 - 1958)
John Reed Swanton (19 February 1873 - 2 May 1958) was an American anthropologist who worked with Native American peoples throughout the United States.
Born in Gardiner, Maine, Swanton's work in the fields of ethnology and ethnohistory is well recognized. He is particularly noted for his work with indigenous peoples of the Southeast and Pacific Northwest. He attended Harvard University from which he earned a Masters in 1897 and a doctorate in 1900. His mentor was the famous Franz Boas, whose influence on Swanton is clear. Following his education, he did fieldwork in the Northwest, and then began working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, where he remained employed for almost 40 years.
In his early career in the Northwest, he mostly worked with the Tlingit and Haida. He produced two extensive compilations of Haida stories and myths, and transcribed many of them in Haida. These transcriptions have served as the basis for Robert Bringhurst's recent (1999) translation of the poetry of Haida mythtellers Skaay and Gandl. Swanton spent roughly a year with the Haida.
After that, Swanton studied Muskogean speaking peoples in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. He published extensively on the Creek people
(Smithsonian I nstitution, Bureau of American Ethnology, W...)
Smithsonian I nstitution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D, C, May 20, 1908, Sir: I have the honor to submit herewith for your consideration the manuscript ofT lingit Myths and Texts, by 6r. John R. Swanton, with the recommendation that it be published in this Bureau sseries of Bulletins. Yours, respectfully, W. H. Holmes, CM f. The Secretary of theS mithsonian I nstitution, Washington,
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians
...)
Excerpt from Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians
The greater part of the accompanying material was collected by the writer between the years 1908 and 1914. Among the Creek myths, however, are included most of those secured by W. O. Tuggle many years ago, the originals of which are preserved among the docu ments in the Bureau of American Ethnology. The rest were taken down at various places and from various persons, and for the most part in English, no systematic attempt having been made at what might,be called a Creek collection. The Alabama stories are from the Alabama Indians living in Polk County, Tex., and the Koasati stories from some of the same informants and from the Koasati near Kinder, La. The Hitchiti stories were Obtained from a few speakers of the Hitchiti language in the northern part of Seminole County, Okla., part of them having been recorded directly, while part were written down in the original by an Indian. The Natchez collection, so called, was secured from one Of the few remaining speakers of the ancient Natchez tongue residing near Braggs, Okla., a man named Watt Sam. This informant had drawn not merely upon his own people but upon his Cherokee and Creek neighbors, and it would now be impossible to say how much of the collection is pure Natchez, or, indeed, whether any of it may be so denominated. These stories and those from the Hitchiti, Koasati, and Alabama were also recorded in text form.
No attempt has been made to separate these stories into classes, but the following general order has been Observed. Stories which deal with natural phenomena or the doings of ancient native heroes, such as might more properly be called myths, have been placed first. Next have been entered stories of visits to the world Of the dead, of which there are few, as it happens, except in the Alabama series. Then come stories detailing encounters between men and animals or supernatural beings in animal form. After these have been placed tales dealing with happenings among the animals, concluding with all of those having to do with the Southeastern trickster Rabbit. Then appear stories - or other stories - known to have been bor rowed from the whites or Negroes, or such as probably had such an origin, and at the end a few war tales of miscellaneous character.
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A structural and lexical comparison of the Tunica, Chitimacha, and Atakapa languages
(Excerpt from A Structural and Lexical Comparison of the T...)
Excerpt from A Structural and Lexical Comparison of the Tunica, Chitimacha, and Atakapa Languages
In the main the culture of all of these peoples did not differ materially, but that of the Tunica and Chitimacha partook of the higher or at any rate more complicated civilization of the lower Mississippi, while the Atakapa Were on a much lower level, measured by our ordinary standards. The Tunica peoples had special religious houses or temples set On mounds like the other lower Mississippi tribes, and they were probably organized into exogamous clans, although of that there is no proof other than indications embodied in the terms of relationship recorded at a late date. The Chitimacha also had special religious houses and a cult which seems to have resembled in general that of the Choctaw. If the testimony of the survivors may be relied upon they also had totemic clans with matrilineal descent. The Atakapan peoples, however, seem to have been divided into a great number Of small bands having little coherence, either inside or with one another. There is not the slightest evidence that they had clans or gentes and the terms of relationship preserved are such as are encountered among loosely organized peoples without artificial exogamous groups. Like the Chitimacha, their principal reliance for food was upon fish and Shell fish. While they seem to have raised some corn, they cultivated the ground far less than either the Tunica or the Chitimacha. Their cultural allies were the Karankawa, Tonkawa, and other peoples of central and southern Texas lying west of them.
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A Dictionary Of The Biloxi And Ofo Languages: Accompanied With Thirty-One Biloxi Texts And Numerous Biloxi Phrases (1912)
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A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language - Primary Source Edition
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect (Classic Reprint)
(XnTIIS SKIDE liATK DiALHCT Kccordod ))y John H. Swanton I...)
XnTIIS SKIDE liATK DiALHCT Kccordod ))y John H. Swanton INTKOD rCTIOX The followin texts and myths were ()l)t:iiiicd on the Queen Charlotte ishinds. British Cohiinhia, (hirin -the winter of 1900-01. They eouil)iisc all those procured atS kide ;ate, the more southern of the two towns on these islands still regularly occupied, which is made up of j)(M)ple from a number of towns that formerh existed along the eastern and western coasts, whose speech dirt ered in certain particulars from that of the Haida on the northern coast. Since, however, all now live atS kidejate, their lano-uao( is conveniently called theS kidegate dialect. For a similar reason the language of the northern Haida is called theM asset dialect, although it is spoken also in three Alaskan towns I lowkan, Klinkwan, and Kasaan. For study and comparison one text in each dialect has been given with interlinear translation, and tweh eothers with translations on the page opposite. Although the remaining stories were also obtained in I laida. Knglish versions only are given, but they are kept as close to the original as possible. I have tried to handle the translations in such a way as to assist the )hilologist without too far obscuring the meaning. Where obscure passages occur the notes will usually clear them up. My interpreter wasH enry bloody, who belongs to the principal familv of Skedans. Those-born-at-Q a gials. and has ince lccome its chief. Fuidentitications of many of the plants and animals named in thoc stoi-ies 1am indehted toD r( .F. N( wcoml)e, of Nictoria, r.i-iti-h (oluml)ia. Mj hh.f For convenience in study phonetic signs have been adopted similar to those employed in the publications of the lesup North Pacilic Fxi)editi()n on the trihes of the northwest coast of .V merica.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writi
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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John Reed Swanton was an American anthropologist, folklorist, and linguist. He is distinguished for being one of the founders of the Swedenborg Scientific Association in 1898 and for working extensively with Native American peoples throughout the United States.
Background
John Reed Swanton was born on February 19, 1873 in Gardiner, Maine, the son of Walter Scott Swanton and Mary Olivia Worcester. After the death of his father, he and his two brothers were raised by his mother, grandmother, and great-aunt in modest circumstances and under a strict moral code.
Education
At an early age John Swanton showed a studious bent; he began writing a world history in a notebook at ten. Reading William Hickling Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, especially the section on the pyramids of Teotihuacan, kindled his interest in anthropology.
After preparing at a high school in Chelsea, Massachussets, he entered Harvard University in 1892, and there received a B. A. in 1896, an M. A. in 1897, and a Ph. D. in 1900 in anthropology.
As an undergraduate Swanton found stimulation outside the classroom in folklore, joining a small society organized by his friend Roland Dixon. As a graduate student he dutifully undertook archaeological digs in Maine, New Jersey, and the Southwest.
But it was the two years (1898 - 1900) in New York while at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History under the tutelage of Franz Boas that directed his interests to the ethnological fields in which he achieved his major work.
Career
But it was the two years (1898 - 1900) in New York while at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History under the tutelage of Franz Boas that directed his interests to the ethnological fields in which he achieved his major work. Upon attaining his doctorate, Swanton joined the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1900 to 1944, when he retired, he devoted himself to field research and reports on North American Indian tribes.
The bureau had been established by congressional act in 1873 for the sole purpose of investigating the conditions of the American Indian, and this nonacademic work perfectly suited Swanton.
He poured his energies into his research and writings, which reached 167 publications, a number of them full-length monographs, collections, and dictionaries. He published chiefly in the Annual Reports and Bulletins of the Bureau of American Ethnology and major professional journals such as the American Anthropologist, the Journal of American Folklore, and the International Journal of American Linguistics.
Following the lead of Boas, Swanton first undertook fieldwork among Tlingit and Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast in British Columbia and Alaska.
By 1913 he had shifted his fieldwork to the Indians of Oklahoma and Texas, but he had also begun researches into the area he was to make distinctively his own, the southeastern tribes of the United States. During the colonial period these tribes had been dominated by the Spanish, English, and French, and had intermarried with whites and blacks.
Little remained of their organization and cultural traditions, so that fieldwork, in the words of the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, "was like working over tailings instead of following a fresh vein. " Swanton fleshed out the limited fieldwork opportunities with extensive library investigations, according to the technique of ethnohistory, which he largely developed. To these excerpts Swanton added the observations and recollections of living Indians.
He included photographs of some of his informants, among them the last speakers of the Chitimacha, Tunica, Atakapa, and Natchez languages. Because of the nonscientific character of the early chronicles and the fragmentary nature of the informants' knowledge, these ethnohistorical treatments fall short of the demands of the field anthropologist, but they did salvage and reconstruct in part the historical cultures of these tribes.
Swanton recognized the shortcomings of his sources, but he made little effort to analyze critically the documents he reprinted. In none of his work did Swanton develop full-fledged theories or hypotheses.
The substantial compendium he prepared in 1952 on The Indian Tribes of North America he called a mere "gazetteer of present knowledge" about the location of Indian tribes, and he contrasted it with the interpretive examination by Kroeber in Cultural and Native Areas of Native North America, which dealt with matters of environmental and historical relationships.
In his folklore collections, such as Haida Texts and Myths (1905) and Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians (1929), Swanton presented the oral tales, with representative linguistic texts, fully and meticulously recorded, but without any attention to the tellers and their narrative skills, to the social setting, or to the meaning and dispersion of the tales, points stressed by folklorists today. Swanton let his materials speak for themselves and declined to speculate. Thus, he relates without commentary an account of a Sitka shaman who, through his spirit, paralyzed the arms of a big American marine about to cut the Indian's hair.
So with his linguistic materials, as in the dictionaries of the Biloxi, Ofo, Choctaw, and Atakapa languages, he collated the lexical items painstakingly but abstained from abstract discussion. The ancient history of America should be studied, Swanton had written in 1910, along three lines of inquiry: among living peoples, in the science called ethnology; through archaeological explorations; and by the examination of early narratives descriptive of the Indians.
In 1935, in recognition of his historical knowledge, he was named chairman of the commission to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the DeSoto expedition, and he later prepared a report of that commission. Swanton's concept of ethnology included tribal customs, language, and folklore, and he published extensively on all three areas. Later scholars consider his Social Condition, Beliefs, and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians (1908) and Source Material on the History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians (1942) as exemplary of his ethnological, archaeological, historical, and linguistic multiple approach.
Yet Swanton could assume and vigorously defend a position, as in his response, with Roland Dixon, to Robert H. Lowie's denial of any historical value in native American traditional history.
He died in Newton, Massachusetts on May 2, 1958, at the age of 85.
His mother inculcated in him a Swedenborgian faith that caused him conflict with his scientific studies. A private side of Swanton's thought, his Swedenborgian belief in human communication with the spirit world and in a meaningful life after death, jarred with his scientific training and caused him inner anxieties.
Views
In papers on their social organization, Swanton supported the antievolutionism view of Boas and contended that the family structure and the system of patrilineal descent were the result of gradual diffusion. He accepted the existence of miracles in nature. The confirmation of extrasensory perception in the experiments of J. B. Rhine emboldened Swanton to speak against materialism, naturalism, and atheism.
Quotations:
Swanton once wrote: "I cordially loathe from the ground up the entire competitive system, a system which rewards dessert about as intelligently as a Ouija board. "
In an unpublished manuscript of 1944, "An Anthropologist Looks Backward and Forward, " he wrote: "Those who believe that ultimate knowledge can be attained by scientific methods alone are in for a disillusionment. "
Membership
Swanton was a member of the American Anthropological Association and of the American Folklore Society.
Personality
An elf of a man, as a colleague described him, Swanton suffered from extreme shyness, and any public appearance gave him anguish. In spite of his modesty and withdrawn nature, he possessed a cheerful disposition.
Interests
Writers
Swanton enjoyed quoting Gilbert and Sullivan at length, which was a Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900).
Connections
In his personal life John Reed Swanton considered his greatest success the marrying of Alice Barnard on December 16, 1903; they had three children.