Indigenous Consultation - Shawnee

[Zaarin]

- And, it might be added, what it does will depend not only on the Myth, but the background both people also bring to it: the Haida myths about the ancient story of their people mean something very different to a member of that culture than they do to the Canadian or American anthropologist or historian encountering it . . .

The Haida are extraordinary storytellers. I have several books on PNW mythology, but none quite matches A Story as Sharp as a Knife.

 

[j51]

I love this forum.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Well, yes, but I’m interested in that contemporary Haida meaning more than any “original” meaning.

Working in isan and lanna, the myths I normally come up to are eg the Toad King, pu sae nya sae, Chao luang kham daeng or local stories that haven’t been really written down.

A recent one, nang nak phrakhanong, from bangkok, is really interesting to me because it’s been retold so many times, from so many very different points of view, in film, folktale, even kids’ cartoon form.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Well, yes, but I’m interested in that contemporary Haida meaning more than any “original” meaning.

Last outrageously Off Topic post, but it's actually very pertinent to contemporary versus 'original' meaning in oral tradition.

Many years ago, about 1963 in fact, I went to a concert by Oscar Brand, who was at the time one of the experts on American folk music. He had a radio show out of New York City and reputedly had over 3000 sets of song lyrics committed to memory.

The concert amounted to a 3-hour lecture on American folk music with an example every few minutes accompanied by 6 or 12-string guitar. The example I vividly remember to this day was one of the oldest of the Child Ballads (Number 12, I believe) from Britain, a 'Border Ballad' from the English/Scots border, called Lord Randall My Son, a pleasant little ditty about a nobleman who has been poisoned by his fiance and is being questioned by his mother as to why he is slowly dying in front of her: the refrain: "Oh where have ye been, Lord Randall, my son?"

This grim little piece came to America with the Scots settlers, to the Carolina hill country before the revolution. Not having much truck with Lords, they cut his title and the song became about "William Randall, my son." After a century or so, the song migrated downhill, to the flat cotton country, where it was picked up by the Black population. Their musical tradition being considerably different from the iambic pentameter of most British/English material, they syncopated it, stripped out the last bit of poison story, and the refrain became: "Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?"

- And the old murder ballad became a children's song filtered through three different populations and cultures and two very different musical traditions.