This is exactly reveal on the reports regarding animal-human-spirit changes and in its moral instruction, and this alerting against managing the nation that have disrespect
When you look at the 1900 an earlier anthropologist, John Swanton, transcribed a number of mythology and you can reports – called qqaygaang on Haida vocabulary – told through the proprietor Haida storyteller Ghandl. The latest tales share with tales regarding animal and people transformations, from heroes just who wed wild birds, out of wild birds who take off their skins and become females, out of mussels who manifest this new spirit sort of whales, as well as poles mounted for the heavens.
Immediately following she would offered him something to eat, Mouse Lady considered him, “As i was providing a little bit of cranberry right back of my personal berry plot, you helped me. ”
She introduced a box. She taken out five a lot more packages inside packages. In the innermost box are your skin layer from a good mouse that have small bent claws. She said to him, “Set that it into the.”
Brief although it is actually, he got into they. It actually was effortless. He went in the wall and you will onto the roof of your household. And Mouse Lady said to your, “Do you know what doing when you wear they. Be on your way” (Ghandl, cited for the Bringhurst, 2011).
With the ear of contemporary Canadians, this type of reports tend to check confusing. They lack the basic inner psychological characterization out of protagonists and you can antagonists, the newest “realism” out-of absolute configurations and you can chronological day sequences http://datingranking.net/it/incontri-indu, or perhaps the spot devices out-of guy facing man, child against himself, and you can man up against character. Although not, given that Robert Bringhurst (2011) argues, that isn’t while the stories commonly high books or have not entirely “advanced.” Within his estimate, Ghandl is thought to be one of the most intelligent storytellers that has previously lived in Canada. Instead, simply because brand new tales consult with, and you will from, a basically more contact with the nation: the experience of nomadic google search and you will get together some body compared to the brand new inactive folks of modern capitalist societies. Why does how exactly we give reports mirror the firm and you may public structures of your communities i reside in?
Possibly alot more notably having sociologists, this new search and you may collecting existence of Haida along with produces good completely different link to the newest natural industry and to the fresh non-peoples creatures and plant life that it coexisted
Ghandl’s tales is actually informed in this a dental lifestyle in the place of a great written otherwise literary lifestyle. He or she is intended to be listened to, perhaps not see, and therefore the latest storytelling skills comes to weaving in subtle repetitions and you may mathematical habits, and plays towards Haida words and you may well-known mythological images as opposed to doing page-turning dramas off emotional otherwise conflictual anticipation. Bringhurst shows that actually as compared to Indo-Eu dental tradition time for Homer or the Vedas, brand new Haida stories do not have confidence in this new auditory exhibitions out of verse. While verse utilizes acoustic equipment particularly alliteration and you may rhyming, Haida mythic storytelling was a type of noetic prosody, counting on habits out-of information and you will photographs. This new Haida, once the an effective preagricultural anybody, don’t get a hold of a description to provide overt sounds functions in order to their usage of vocabulary. “[V]erse regarding the purely acoustic feeling of the expression will not play the same role in preagricultural communities. Individuals, as a rule, don’t begin to ranch its words up until he’s begun to before environment and shape the organization from herbs and you can animals.” Once the Bringhurst puts it, “misconception is that sorts of words where poetry and you may songs haven’t as yet diverged“(Bringhurst, 2011, italics inside the brand new).
Figure 4.dos. An excellent Haida ceremonial rattle in the way of the newest mythical thunder bird. (Images thanks to Uk Art gallery/Wikimedia Commons)