ScholarWorks at University of Montana

Words in His Mouth? The Openings and Closings of Barnaby's Stories in Kutenai Tales

Looking at the notebooks Boas used to record the stories later published as Kutenai Tales, it is obvious that the titles and subtitles of individual stories were subsequently added by Boas. The titles are often not written in the same ink as the story text and subsection headings are squeezed in between lines of already dictated text. By contrast, the formulaic introductory and concluding sentences that bookend most of the stories told by the narrator, Barnaby, were likely captured at the same time as the body of the stories. They are written in the same hand, and their seamless spacing on the page makes it difficult to imagine that they were retrofitted to pre-existing gaps. However, if one focuses on the linguistic, rather than material form of these introductory and concluding sentences, the question arises whether these too may be traced to Boas. That is, the question arises whether these introductions and conclusions were introduced by Boas in English during the story-telling event itself. Apart from the significant fact that introductions and conclusions of this sort don't seem to appear elsewhere in Ktunaxa story-telling, these sentences exhibit some linguistic anomalies that would be explained on the assumption that Barnaby translated these sentences from English into Ktunaxa and that Boas then recorded them as integral parts of the stories. In this talk, I discuss two such anomalies: (i) the placement of the adverb peik̓aᐧk, 'long ago' and (ii) the use of prolepsis in relative clause constructions with ya-...-ke. While my argument is hardly dispositive, it seems worthwhile to consider as a step toward a more definitive account of the provenance of these introductions and conclusions, for several reasons. First, if they originate with Boas, this finding would contribute to the body of evidence showing Boas to be no mere passive recorder of indigenous Native American texts, but a metadiscursively active producer of them (See discussion in Bauman and Briggs (2003 pp. 274-282)). Second, perhaps as a measure of Boas's success in this regard, the particular form of these stories as they appear in Kutenai Tales has become a reference both for community members and linguists. And, third, because, to the extent that these framing devices turn out not to be organic aspects of the stories, they obscure other ones which are.