CONTENTS OF VOLUME 38 ARTICLES. PAGE Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society Stylistic Aspects of Primitive Literature Mountain White Folklore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge. Popular Beliefs and Customs Among the Yiddish- Speaking Jews of St. Louis, Missouri Noa Words in North Sea Region Franz Boas 329 We should like to purchase the following back numbers of the Journal. Please notify the editor if you know where any of these numbers is available. AMERICAN FOLK-LORE VOL. 38. — JANUARY-MARCH, 1925. — No. 147. MONTAGNAIS AND NASKAPI TALES FROM BY FRANK G. SPECK. There exists at present no collection of myths and folktales from the widely scattered bands of Montagnais. Their territories lie in a zone about eight hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the mountains forming the Height of Land of the southern Labrador peninsula. Although they were visited and described by the Jesuits early in the seventeenth century, no systematic attention has since been given to their beliefs and traditions. As a beginning toward an exposition of the life and beliefs of this littleknown but important group of the Algonkian family, the following sets of tales have been selected from material, some of it in text, taken from the lips of these Indians during the last fifteen years. Being spread over so wide an area, the various divisions of the Montagnais vary somewhat in dialect and in customs. Their folklore has not yet been collected from all parts of their habitat in sufficient quantity to justify us in speaking definitely of its character as a whole. But so far as we can judge from the material in hand, there is a noticeable stability in incident and concept throughout the area. It would seem that the mythology of the Laurentian tribes from James Bay to the Atlantic is of the same general character. The relationship of Montagnais folklore to mythologies outside this area is fairly evident. Some of the human tales suggest Eskimo influence, and this is not too improbable, since the Montagnais of the seventeenth century broke out into the domains of the Eskimo and finally extirpated them from the Gulf and southern Labrador coast. On the whole, however, the resemblance of these tales to those of the Algonquin, Cree, and Ojibwa is their most striking characteristic. Practically every incident related among the Montagnais, from one end of their territory to the other, can be found, for instance, among the Ojibwa somewhere in the now numerous published collections from this group of tribes. The western extension of the Laurentian culture is along the St. Maurice River which separates from the Montagnais the people known as Têtes de Boule, who speak a dialect more closely related to the Ojibwa. In the province of folklore this frontier marks the eastward limit, in this northern area, of certain well-known and widely distributed tales which are notably absent among the Montagnais and the Naskapi. I have frequently asked narrators for the Earth Diver story, but have never found that it was known to any one in the Montagnais territory. Nor is it found among the Wabanaki. No sign of the tale has been discovered in northern New England or in eastern Canada, except for the one reference in the Jesuit Relations,' the authenticity of which may be doubted. Other stories which have not crossed the boundary of the St. Maurice River are the legend of the Celestial Bear, and the beaver lodge incident in the Transformer cycle. 2 The same frontier also marks the eastern limit (in this northern territory) of social customs which play an important role to the westward, such as the mother-in-law taboo, the mide'win or shaman's medicine society, and the dice-and-bowl game; in the field of material culture, of the cradle-board, twill-woven rush mats, basswood or cedar-bark baskets, porcupine quill-work, the square-headed snowshoe, and other characteristic objects. Nevertheless, as I have said, in folklore this western limit in this northern area marks a lesser differentiation than the southern frontier along the St. Lawrence. While comparisons are perhaps premature, it would seem safe to say that the character of folklore differs more between the Montagnais and the Wabanaki directly south of the St. Lawrence, than between the Montagnais and the Cree. There is a noticeably low proportion of cognates found among the peoples on the opposite sides of the St. Lawrence, though an increase of material from the Montagnais may later cause us to reverse this estimate. This cleavage along the course of the St. Lawrence River holds good not only in regard to folklore, but in the degree of differentiation of dialects and of physical type. On the other hand, it is noticeably absent in material culture. 1. Le Jeune, Jesuit Relations, 5: 155. 2. This refers to the beginning of the transformer cycle in which the hero attacks a monster beaver, drives him from his hiding place, breaks his dam, which becomes transformed into a water fall, and throws a boulder after the animal which becomes a landmark. This tale is known to the Ojibwa and has a distribution south of the Montagnais territory among the Wabanaki as far east as the Micmac. TSIQA BEC 2 SNARES THE SUN, AND BECOMES TRANSFORMED INTO IT. In ancient times there was an old man who had a wife and a son whose name was Tsaqa'bec, "Finished Man. "3 They were the only people living and Tseqa'bec was the first finished child. The old man was the master of all the birds and small mammals of the earth. They lived in the woods near him. When he wanted any of them he only had to call them to him. The sun was so hot in those days that these small animals and the birds could not live, and the old man was in great di stress because his birds and animals were being killed by the sun. Accordingly the old man planned to capture the sun and so put an end to the trouble among his beasts. He built a dead-fall of logs where the sun arose from the edge of the world, intending to capture it by this means. But the boy Tsǝqa'bec, when he saw what this father was doing, said, “That will not do! If you are going to capture the sun it will have to be with something better than a wooden trap. I, however, will make a snare for you that will catch the sun. That night he made a loop-snare of babiche and set it at the place 1. The tales in this section were taken down from the narration of the wife of Joseph Nicolar, Marie Denis and Aleck Denis at Tadousac and Escoumains from 1915 to 1921. They had heard their stories from parents and relatives at Escoumains and had no intimate contact with individuals of other Montagnais bands. There were no noteworthy formalities in narration, and no religious attitude seemed to be attached to the telling. The Lake St. John stories were narrated principally by Pitabǝno'kweo, "Woman who brings the dawn," the wife of Simon Rafaël by Simon himself, David Basil and Tsibi'c. The last set of tales, coming from the remote nomads who hunt over the country about Lake Mistassini were narrated by an old man of this band in 1915, named Ka'kwa and taken down mostly in native text at Pointe Bleue. The son of Ka'kwa acted as interpreter and contributed the other Mistassini tales himself. 2. Throughout the Montagnais area the hero-transformer is known as Tsǝka'bec. In the Mistassini dialect and in that of the Lake St. John Montagnais the name appears phonetically as Tsaka'bec. Lower down on the St. Lawrence at Tadousac and Escoumains it is Tsaqa'bec. It is translated " Young man who draws a line (or cord) behind him. "This proper name for the hero seems to extend over the tribes known in literature as Montagnais and Naskapi as far as they have been investigated. Just how far north and east the name Tsǝka'bec is used we have no means of knowing, and it will be a long time before a collection of tales can be made from these distant and thinly populated regions. 3. Note the translation given by the narrator which differs from that given by the Lake St. John Montagnais, 66 man who draws a string behind him. " The difference is evidently due to idiom. 4. The common French-Canadian name for prepared raw-hide string. |