Kwakiutl Tales
Also known as: Kwakiutl Myths and Tales, Kwakwaka'wakw Tales, Kwakiutl Folktales
A landmark collection of Kwakwaka'wakw narratives recorded by Franz Boas from master storytellers, presenting origin accounts, crest-legends, trickster episodes, ceremonial foundations, and clan histories. The volume preserves language, motifs, and social meanings central to Northwest Coast mythic tradition.
Description
Franz Boas’ Kwakiutl Tales assembles oral narratives of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of northern Vancouver Island and adjacent coasts. Recorded in the field in Kwak’wala (often with interlinear translation) and rendered into English, the tales range from cosmogony and flood accounts to the exploits of Raven, Mink, and Transformer figures, as well as the supernatural origins of ceremonial institutions like the winter dances. Many stories are tied to particular houses and crests, situating myth within kinship and geography. The collection documents encounters with beings such as Thunderbird, Sisiutl, Bakwas, and Dzunukwa, along with visits to the house of the Undersea Chief. Rather than a continuous epic, the book preserves a catalogue of discrete episodes and variants that encode moral instruction, resource knowledge, and rights to names, masks, and songs, offering a detailed window into Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology and social identity.
Historiography
The narratives were recorded by Boas (with extensive collaboration from George Hunt) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using phonetic transcription and interlinear glossing. Portions appeared across Boas’s publications, with this English collection published in 1910 alongside earlier and later Kwakiutl Texts volumes (1905; 1908). The texts influenced comparative mythology and structural analyses of Northwest Coast traditions and informed later ethnographies and museum collections. Reprints and digital facsimiles (HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Sacred-texts) have broadened access; orthographies and some translations vary across editions.
Date Notes
Collected from Kwakwaka'wakw narrators (notably via George Hunt) and published by Columbia University Press; related Kwakiutl Texts series appeared in 1905 and a second series in 1908.
Archetypes
Major Characters
- Raven
- Mink
- Transformer
- Thunderbird
- Dzunukwa
Myths
- Raven the Transformer
- Baxbakwalanuksiwe the Cannibal Spirit
- Origin of Salmon and Cedar
- Potlatch Origins and Ancestral Privileges
Facts
- The 1910 volume presents English translations of Kwak’wala narratives recorded by Boas, often from George Hunt’s documentation.
- Stories encode crest rights, house histories, and ceremonial prerogatives, not just entertainment.
- Key figures include Raven (culture hero), Thunderbird, Undersea Chief (Kumugwe), Sisiutl, Bakwas, and Dzunukwa.
- Several tales explain ritual foundations for winter dances, including Hamatsa.
- Flood and creation episodes align with broader Northwest Coast cosmological motifs while retaining local variants.
- Narratives frequently situate events at specific inlets, rivers, and village sites on northern Vancouver Island.
- Boas’s orthography and translations vary across publications; later reprints sometimes normalize names.
- Related primary compilations appear as Kwakiutl Texts (1905) and Kwakiutl Texts, Second Series (1908).
- Digital facsimiles of the work are available via HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and the Sacred-texts archive.
- The collection remains foundational for comparative studies of Northwest Coast myth and social organization.