Wishram texts / by Edward Sapir ; together with Wasco tales and myths, collected by Jeremiah Curtin and edited by Edward Sapir.

  • Sapir, Edward, 1884-1939.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Wishram texts / by Edward Sapir ; together with Wasco tales and myths, collected by Jeremiah Curtin and edited by Edward Sapir. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ]. VViiAT Coyote did in this Land.^ The Origm of Fish in the Columbia. Coyote^ heard about two women who had fish pre- served in a pond. 1 hen he went to them as they were collecting' driftwood from the river. He turned himself into a piece of wood trying (to get them to pick him up). He drifted along. But then they did not get hold of him. He went ashore, ran off to way yonder up river, and transformed himself into a boy. He put himself into a cradle, threw himself into the river, and again drifted alono*. The two women caught sight of him wailing. They thought: “Some people have capsized, and this child is drifting towards us.” The younger one thought: “Let us get hold of it.” But the older woman did not want to have the child. Now it was drifting along. The older one thought: “That is Coyote.” Nevertheless the younger woman took the child and put it in a canoe. The two women started home towards their house. The child was wailing, and they arrived home with it. They took off the cradle from it and looked closely at it. As it turned out, the child was a boy. The younger one said : graphic sequence of the villages at which they are localized. Compare the Coyote myth in Boas’s Chinook Texts (pp. 101-106) and Kathlarnet Texts (pp. 46-40) though the establishment of taboos, which is the chief conception in these is not at all strongly marked in the Wishram Coyote cycle. ’ ^ Compare, as a striking parallel of this myth, Goddard’s Ilupa Texts (pp- 124 125), where Vimantuvvinyai, the Ilupa culture-hero, is also fed with eels l,y a woman who guards all the salmon.