Publications
NORTHEAST
FOLKLORE
Volume VI: 1964
MALECITE AND PASSAMAQUODDY TALES
Contents
|
Introduction |
Stories and the Art of Story-Telling
|
Kluskap Tales from the Malecite
|
Miscellaneous Malecite Tales |
Passamaquoddy Tales |
Bibliography
I.
INTRODUCTION
Map
Etchemin is what
they used to call the Indians who occupied the border country
between Maine and New Brunswick. Today we speak of Malecite and
Passamaquoddy. Linguistically and culturally they belong to the
Eastern or Wabanaki group of that great Algonkian stock that once,
except for the Iroquois in New York and the upper St. Lawrence
valley, covered the entire Northeast. Most of the present day
Malecite (less than a thousand strong) live in several small
reserves and settlements along New Brunswick's St. John River from
the mouth of the Tobique to Fredericton, and we can think of this
stretch of valley as the focus of the old Malecite territory, which
once extended well up toward the St. Lawrence and westward into
Maine's Aroostook County. To the south and west were the Penobscot
(now centered in Old Town, Maine). To the east and southeast were
the Micmacs, whose territory covered all the rest of the Maritimes
and the south shore of the Gaspe. Directly to the south lived the
Passamaquoddy, whom the Micmac spoke of as “those Maliseet who live
in Maine.”
[1] Their territory is centered in the St. Croix River
valley that separates Maine and New Brunswick. Although it is hard,
in fact impossible, to speak of definite borders, their territory at
one time may have covered most of present-day Washington and Hancock
counties in Maine and Charlotte and southern York and Sunbury
counties in New Brunswick. Today they number less than five hundred,
most of them living on the reservations at Peter Dana Point, the
Indian Strip in Princeton, and Pleasant Point, all in Maine.
The Malecite and
Passamaquoddy had many things in common with other Wabanaki and
Northeastern Algonkian groups. They were nomadic hunters and (in
summer) fishermen, living in conical bark- (sometimes skin-) covered
wigwams, traveling after the game on snowshoes or in birchbark
canoes. The basic political unit seems to have been the “band,” a
definite but loosely organized group of related families that
traveled and lived together in a most democratic sort of way. There
seems to have been very little organization beyond that; in
politics, society, and religion these Indians can best be described
as individualist. Of course, it should be understood that the
description just given refers to a time now past, a time that few,
if any, of the members of these tribes can now recall in any form.
It was the time before the white man came in great numbers, and it
was a time that stretched back forest-dark centuries to the
time-before-our-time, when Kluskap shied rocks at a beaver.
Now the birchbark
canoes are in the museums, what wigwams there are are in the tourist
business, and the Indians are in the reservations. They wear the
white man's clothes, practice his religion, go to his schools, and
eat his food. Acculturation has gone a long way here in the
Northeast, and it will go even further, we can be sure, perhaps even
to a time when the old days will not even be what they are today: a
tale, a legend, a bright place in the forest dark at the back of the
mind, something told in the old tongue by a mother to her daughter
of a long winter evening.
Tales are funny
things. They die hard, yet sometimes even the trained anthropologist
or folklorist won't find them. The Wallises, working at the Tobique
reservation in 1953 did not make a rich collection of tales; they
speak of “the scraps that remain today,” and they found only a
“single fragment of a myth concerning Gluskap (the culture hero).”
[2]
Nine years later, in the fall of 1962, Dolores Daigle, Marilyn
Daigle, and Geraldine Hegeman took my Saturday extension course in
American Folklore at Presque Isle, Maine. Since each student was to
turn in a collection of his or her own, and these three had decided
to work together, they wondered whether or not they could turn in
some Indian tales. I was perfectly agreeable but owlishly skeptical;
however they insisted. Mrs. Hegeman, it seems, had an “in.” At the
end of the semester these three women turned in a collection that
ran to 134 pages and two seven-inch reels of tape. The tapes and
about twenty pages of typescript represented Mrs. Hegeman's portion:
a rather remarkable collection of tales from Mrs. Viola Solomon of
the Malecite reservation at Tobique, New Brunswick, and her
daughter, Mrs. Henrietta Black, then of Loring, Maine.
Mrs. Black, Mrs.
Hegeman's neighbor, was 33 at the time this collection was made.
Although she had married out of the tribe and was no longer
considered a Malecite, she was born and educated on the Tobique
reservation. When Mrs. Hegeman asked her about old stories, she
responded with several that she remembered hearing from her mother.
Mrs. Black said that her mother would start telling Kluskap tales to
her children in the fall and it would take her until the following
spring to complete the cycle. She added that her mother did not like
to, and in fact would not, tell tales in the summertime.
[3]
The inevitable question was asked: “Does your mother still know the
stories?” Yes. “Would she tell them to us?” Well. . .It was not long
before Mrs. Solomon came to visit her daughter for a week, and
during that time she agreed to try and tell some of her stories to
her daughter's friends. Mrs. Hegeman invited them both over to her
home and set up a tape recorder; much of what will follow is the
product of the two evenings they all spent together.
Mrs. Solomon had
her problems. To begin with, she obviously preferred to tell her
tales in Malecite rather than in English. Then too, although she
could hardly be described as old (she was only 51), she was not
well. Finally, she was exceedingly shy. “She fought shyness of the
microphone all the way,” the collectors said. “She spoke in a very
low voice, often waving the microphone away, or refusing to face it,
turning her face completely away from it. Often we feared we would
lose the battle.”
[4]
Ultimately her shyness gave away to her desire to please her new
friends, but she finally found it far easier to tell her story in
Malecite. Some time later, her daughter sat between two tape
recorders, listening to her motherís narration on one and reading
her translation into the other. The completed collection
demonstrates that with even a little training, even just a few
encouraging nudges, sincere workers can achieve valuable results.
When students turn in term projects like this one, I feel better
about the world(and I rejoice that I teach folklore.
In the course of my
work I came across references to the manuscripts of the late Edwin
Tappan Adney at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Since
they were mainly on the Malecites, and since they were supposed to
contain tales and myths, I arranged with Ernest Dodge, Director of
the Museum, for an opportunity to look through them. What I found
was over seventy boxes of typescript covering a wide range of topics
relating to the Malecites, from material culture to decorative art
to language. Unfortunately, at least from my point of view, a large
part of the material on mythology was theoretical and discursive;
there were very few tale texts. Finally I did find a few tales,
almost all of them collected in the early forties from William
Neptune, Passamaquoddy Governor at Pleasant Point, Maine. Together
with the essay on story-telling, it seemed to me that these tales of
Governor Neptune would make a real addition to the collection the
Society was already planning to publish. Ernest Dodge was
enthusiastic about the idea, and thus a little more of Adney's
voluminous but unfinished life's work now appears in print.
A word or two about
Adney himself will not be out of place. Born in Athens, Ohio, in
1868, he studied at The Art Students' League in New York. In 1887 he
went to Woodstock, New Brunswick, on a vacation and developed a
close friendship with Peter Joe, a Malecite who lived nearby. Adney
was particularly interested in his canoe-building, and not only
built a birchbark canoe himself but left the most complete record
available anywhere of how one was built. Later he went to the
Klondike as an artist to report on the gold rush. He became a
Canadian citizen (he had married a Woodstock girl in 1899), served
in the Canadian Army, and ultimately moved back to Woodstock where
he spent the last twenty years of his life until his death in 1950.
Always he was writing on Malecite culture and language, but he died
without ever bringing his work to completion, without even getting
his papers well organized. His material on canoes went to the
Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia; all the rest of his papers
are in the Peabody Museum.
[5]
Thus the present
collection of tales grows out of the lives and personalities of two
people; one a tale-teller too shy to face a microphone directly, the
other a self-educated scholar too busy to pay attention to his
health or his poverty. They meet on the common ground of Malecite
life the former living it from within, the latter observing it from
without. They believed in its worth, and this booklet is gratefully
dedicated to them both: Viola Solomon and E. Tappan Adney.
The tales
themselves can be presented for their own sake. However, since I
have already succumbed to the temptation of writing an introduction,
and (as everyone knows) an introduction is a place where one puts
his conclusions, there is really no reason not to go on. I will
limit myself to four general observations (a better name for them,
than conclusions) that I hope will make the tales that follow more
interesting.
Any general reader
of these pages will find them dominated by the figure of Kluskap,
and may well wonder who he is or was. Kluskap is the Wabanaki
culture hero. He is not a god; that is, he is neither a judge of men
nor a creator. He is a transformer. The world was here when he
arrived, and all he did was to fix it up a little to make it more
habitable for men by getting the monster and ferocious squirrel down
to a manageable size, tempering the winds, and releasing the waters
by killing the giant frog Aglebemu who was holding them back.
In his hunting and other adventures, he left behind him all kinds of
things that are now part of the landscapemoose entrails here, a
cooking pot there, a snowshoe in the St. John River, and his canoe
near Castine. Far from being a god, he more often appears simply as
a man with a great share of supernatural power moving through a
marvel-filled landscape. And it is with this power that we must
concern ourselves for a moment, because it is at the heart of almost
all the stories that follow.
If the Wabanaki
lacked an organized religion, they seem to have shared an almost
universal belief in medeulin. That is the Malecite word for
it, and it is used to describe both a supernatural power and the
possessor of it. This is not the place for a full theoretical
discussion, especially when several good discussions are easily
available elsewhere.
[6]
It is like the power of witchcraft, except that it is not
necessarily maleficent. For good, for ill, or for whatever purpose,
it is power and we would have to describe it as supernatural since
our nature does not allow for it. The word shaman is useful for
describing the possessor of the power, if we broaden the word to
include a great deal more than the cause and cure of disease. The
closest analogy is perhaps the wonder-working Eskimo angakok.
Kluskap is, in many of the tales, medeulin. So is Jack
Laporte and the little dog who brought good luck. Here is what the
Wallises have to say about the belief as it exists today:
Malecite, like
Algonkin tribes near them, still believe they possess a power for
good and evil not shared by their White neighbors. How strong the
belief is today and to what age groups it is confined would be
difficult to determine. Certain informants, accustomed to Whites and
knowing what they like to hear about Indians, may present their
material as being more recent and more nearly related to them than
it actually is (“My father was a witch”). Their accounts, however,
are congruent with earlier observations.
[7]
Certainly many of
the tales that follow show this interest in medeulin. Some of
the minor tales have no other interest than as examples of the
manifestations of this power by its possessors. The Kluskap tales
are full of it too, for, as Speck pointed out, “the greater part of
Wabanaki mythology [is] shamanistic in character.”
[8]
Every stranger, it appears, is a magical antagonist who must be
tested. Wherever Kluskap goes, he must pit his power against that of
the local “champions,” and may the strongest medeulin (all
but once Kluskap) win.
In the tales, both
those in the present volume and those in other collections, the
interest seems to be more on incident, on particular conflicts, than
it does on sequence. Even the series of adventures that occur to one
hero seem to be more picaresque than plotted. Yet the long Kluskap
tale beginning on page 23 and the similar tales told, for example,
of White Weasel, Long Hair, Fond of Traveling and the like among the
Penobscot, make us wonder how important sequential narrative was
among the Wabanaki.
[9]
We should remember too that Mrs. Black claimed that her mother would
start telling Kluskap tales in the fall and go right on through
until the next spring. As a substitute for informed answers, I will
ask some questions that future collection and study can perhaps help
to answer: In the long narratives, to what extent are we dealing
with clear types, to what extent with infinitely variable
strings of motifs and motif clusters? Does the same narrator always
tell the same tale following the same sequence? When others in the
group tell the story of, say, Long Hair or even Kluskap, do they
follow the same sequence? In regard to Kluskap, both Speck and
Parsons played down the importance of sequence. As Parsons said,
“one anecdote may suggest another, but the anecdotes do not thread
or piece together as in a regular tale.”
[10] Finally, if this view is correct, is this lack of
sequence in any way a reflection of the highly individual and
loosely structured political, social and religious life of the
Wabanaki? The answer to that question calls for a competence far
broader than any the present editor can boast of possessing.
Finally comes the
vexed question of the separation of “real Indian” and European
traditions. Some of the stories are demonstrably European in origin;
others, for which we can find no European analogues, show what may
be European influence in details.
[11] In many cases, however, the problem may not be that
simple. For example, compare the concepts of medeulin with
those underlying European witchcraft. It would not be quite right to
speak of their identity, but each culture seems to have recognized
the common elements in the others concept, thus allowing an easy
flow of tales both ways. The witch, the local strong man, the man
who could throw his voice, and even the tall-tale hero all met on a
certain common ground with the medeulin, and he enriched
their tradition quite as much as they enriched his. As a cadence to
this theme of European influence, what the Wallises say of the
Micmac is quite relevant to the Malecite and Passamaquoddy:
One of the
satisfactions in studying Micmac culture, and also a source of major
exasperation, stems from the long period of European contacts. Four
hundred years is time enough for an intricate interweaving and
snarling of cultural threads into a fabric which the Micmac consider
wholly aboriginal. Much of it is native, for the Micmac have been
strong resisters as well as comfortable adopters and adapters of
foreign traits. To a greater extent than in most Indian cultures
there are, in some phases of Micmac belief(for example, witchcraft,
ghosts, and dreams unsolved problems of the amount of French or
British acculturation.
[12]
We cannot claim to
have solved these problems in this booklet; but perhaps, like
Kluskap fighting the giant Beaver, we have made the waters more
interestingly muddy.
A Note
On The Editing
The Malecite tales
all were taken from the collection of Dolores Daigle, Marilyn
Daigle, and Geraldine Hegeman, which is Accession number 179 in the
Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History. It is my
understanding that Mrs. Hegeman was mainly responsible for the part
of the collection we are interested in here, the material from Mrs.
Viola Solomon and her daughter, Mrs. Henrietta Black. An asterisk
before a title indicates that the story was transcribed from tape.
This taped material was completely and carefully transcribed by
Wilford J. H. Saunders. Working from Will Saunders' manuscript and
checking it against the tape, I have done some editing to make the
stories easier to read. Where the tape is not clear, my conjecture
as to what was said is in brackets. Where I have added words to make
the sense clearer, my additions are italicized and in brackets.
Omissions are indicated by ellipsis marks ( . . . . ). However, I
have not felt it necessary to mark the omission of every false
start, every self-correction, every hem and haw. For example, Mrs.
Black, in her translation of her mother's long tale, kept reassuring
her listeners with “you know.” I have omitted meaningless uses of
the phrase. All “stage directions”(indicating gestures, audience
reaction, etc. ) are in double brackets and are both italicized and
underlined.
In the texts taken
from manuscript, I have followed the same procedure outlined above
for additions and omissions. I have also taken the liberty of
adjusting the punctuation and paragraphing to allow for easier
reading, and I have standardized some of the spelling, especially
that of the name of Kluskap. The titles to the tales are in almost
every case my own.
I have tried to be
as complete as possible in citing parallels in Malecite and
Passamaquoddy. I have also tried to give a good representation of
the major collections of other Wabanaki groups. The occasional
references to other Algonkian and even Iroquois sources are largely
chance ones; that is to say, they are those I have hit upon in my
reading but are in no sense exhaustive. Type and motif numbers are
cited wherever it seemed to me they were specific enough to be
helpful. For all citations of sources I have used a shortened form
almost entirely, and in the case of certain authors, Speck and
Mechling in particular, I have added roman numerals to distinguish
particular articles. For easy reference, these abbreviations precede
the title in the Bibliography.
Special thanks are
due not only to the collectors and transcribers mentioned above but
to several other people as well. Mrs. Dorothy MacDonald, Reference
Librarian at the University of Maine Library, was a wonder when it
came to getting material on interlibrary loan. Paul Blanchette,
Librarian of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Museum, Salem,
Massachusetts, was very helpful during my visit there, and thanks
are also due to Ernest S. Dodge, Director of the Museum, both for
his help and for his permission to use material from the Adney
Manuscripts. Professors Horace Beck (Middlebury College) and Alan
Dundes (University of California, Berkeley) read a summary of Mrs.
Solomon's tales and gave me much encouragement. The map is the work
of James Conlin. Credit should also go to Professor John E. Hankins
(University of Maine), Sharon Sperl, and my wife Bobby, who read and
proofread the entire manuscript, and to Marilyn Emerick, who typed
the final copy for the press.
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Footnotes
All abbreviated
forms are fully explained in the Bibliography. For motifs, see Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington
Indiana: 1955-1958). For type references see the same author's
The Types of the Folktale, FFC 184 (Helsinki: 1961).
[1]
Wallis II, 1.
[2]
Wallis II, 42.
[3]
Speck speaks of “the almost universal American belief that legends
must not be related in summer lest snakes overhear and bite the
offenders.” Speck VIII, 25.
[4]
Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History (hereafter referred
to as NAFOH) Accession # 179, pg. 133.
[5]
All of this biographical material is drawn from Chappelle's short
sketch in Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard J. Chappelle, The Bark
Canoe and Skin Boats of North America (Washington, D.C.: 1964),
p. 4.
[6] See
especially Speck IV and Exkstorm II.
[7]
Wallis II, 31.
[8]
Speck IV, 258.
[9] See
Speck VIII, 50-73.
[10]
Parsons, 85; Speck III, 479.
[11]
See Stith Thompson, European Tales Among the North American
Indians (Colorado Springs, 1919). For an easily available
summary, see the same author's The Folktale (New York, 1946),
286-193.
[12]
Wallis I, 9.
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