Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban [Raban, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79726-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

If that had to go into Latin, one wonders how much of the story must have been unprintable in any language. Later folklorists, trying to gain a larger, younger audience for Indian “myths,” bled the stories dry of all remotely unseemly references, until all that was left behind was a milk-and-water residue of Native American Spirituality and a cast of animal characters who would not disgrace themselves in The House at Pooh Corner. The popular books—Ella E. Clark’s Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, for example—were so thoroughly permeated by the wholesome tradition of folktales-for-children that their versions bear almost no relation to the harsh, startling, and scatological narratives heard by Franz Boas and the other early anthropologists.

As my own trip took me deeper into a region that looked, at least, a lot like wilderness, I found that Indian art and stories were becoming daily more meaningful, losing their tophamper of exoticism and grotesquerie and gaining a melancholy realism that was rooted in the physical landscape through which I was traveling. It was easy to feel a personal resonance in the many stories about the bad things that happen to people who wander away from home. Loneliness was a dominant theme. Characters were constantly being driven to madness or suicide by the death of a spouse or the desertion of their friends. A man loses his family to a deadly epidemic; alone, he entertains pieces of floating ice to a ceremonial feast. When a man’s wife dies, he commissions the village’s best carver to fashion her image in red cedar, which he then dresses in his wife’s clothes and takes with him everywhere; the wooden statue begins to move, but only slightly, and never learns to speak.

No fate was worse than being an outcast or exile. The literature was rich in grim examples of people who, by bad luck or selfish actions, were excluded from the sustaining warmth of village and family life. Causes of exile included laziness, jealousy, offense to a powerful being, poverty, contentiousness, and having sex with the wrong person—or animal, as in the case of the young woman whose unseen lover turned out to be a dog, and who gave birth to a litter of puppies. The sole consolation of exile was that solitary people occasionally came into possession of shamanistic powers. Such rare, fortunate outsiders could enrich themselves with great hauls of fish or supplies of copper, and return to the village as persons of consequence.

The stories harped on the terrors of the unknown—the lonely island, the dark forest, the undersea grotto of the giant devilfish, the sky-domain of the thunder-eagle. You had only to dive a little too deep, walk a few steps too far, climb one hill too many, and you’d cross into the habitat of creatures to which the firelit masks at winter dance ceremonies offered a scarifying field-guide.

I was beginning, at last, to put all this in its proper context. The stories reflected an imperiled social world, in which humans were

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