Haida sun mask, Royal British Columbia Museum
The quote is from “Being in Being: the collected works of a master Haida mythteller, Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighaway,” translated by Robert Bringhurst. The stories were transcribed phonetically in 1900, in what were then called the Queen Charlotte Islands and are now called Haida Gwai, and then sent to the American Philosophical Library in Philadelphia. I can’t find the exact quote, but in his book “A Story as Sharp as a Knife,” Bringhurst tells of finding the manuscript incomplete and having to work from carbon copies so old that the words on them literally blew away when he breathed on them!
Haida moon mask, Royal British Columbia Museum
The episode I quoted appears at the beginning of two of the stories, and in each case it seems to be a ritual which strengthens the hero for the task of retrieving his eight younger brothers. It is followed in each story by a sequence in which he goes swimming and catches one of every marine mammal in the area. Then he is off on his quest.
I hadn’t even noticed the ‘freudian’ elements until commenters pointed them out. I wonder what Skaay would have made of that!
