Book: A Story as Sharp as a Knife
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Prologue: Reading What Cannot Be Written
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1. Goose Food
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2. Spoken Music
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3. The One They Hand Along
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4. Wealth Has Big Eyes
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5. Oral Tradition and the Individual Talent
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6. The Anthropologist and the Dogfish
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7. Who's Related to Whom?
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8. The Epic Dream
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9. The Shaping of the Canon
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10. The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu
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11. You Are That Too
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12. Sleek Blue Beings
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13. The Iridescent Silence of the Trickster
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14. The Last People in the World
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15. A Knife That Could Open Its Mouth
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16. The Historian of Ttanuu
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17. Chase What's Gone
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18. A Blue Hole in the Heart
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19. The Prosody of Meaning
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20. Shellheap of the Gods
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21. 1 November 1908
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22. How the Town Mother's Wife Became the Widow of Her Husband's Sister's Sons
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App. 1. Haida Spelling and Pronunciation
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App. 2. Haida as a Written Language
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App. 3. Spelling of Other Native American Languages
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App. 4. The Structure of Skaay's Raven Travelling
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App. 5. Haida Village Names
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App. 6. A Short Pronouncing Glossary of Haida People and Places.
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The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. His Haida hosts and colleagues had been raised in a wholly oral world where the mythic and the personal interpenetrate completely. They joined forces with their visitor, consciously creating a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form. Poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst has worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, which have waited until now for the broad recognition they deserve.
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| ca.527pp |
