Mrs. Wilson's Tales

From the Foreword:

These tales were recorded when Mrs. Wilson and two others were the only surviving Native Americans who could speak Kathlamet and could possibly tell them. No other person in those days understood the language in which they were spoken.  Now, no one tells these tales.  No one speaks the language.  None of its people have survived….

When a tale or a symbol comes into your mind, just as a food or a drink is consumed, it is integrated materially with who you are.  Who you are changes by it, just as who you are changes it.  Incorporation is necessary. Otherwise, what is other than you will implant like a cyst; it will not nourish.  I am not Kathlamet.  I am one mote of the Great Diaspora of Great Britain that drifted, pioneer and pilgrim, across the Midwest of the American continent.  You must take your self, like your ancestry, as it is given.  Hence, what Mrs. Wilson has told I heard in myself as myself, and so I have retold them in words that are mine.  As her tales are told of the Pacific Northwest and her people and the creatures and flora of that place in the times before the Twentieth Century, so mine are told of Wisconsin and my people and the creatures and flora of that place in the times before the Twentieth Century.  
 

These are no imitations. I have tried to retell her tales in faith to their original subtle expression of life, to be alive in the moment that we feel—that feeling which bursts in the laughter at the baby, in kittens playing for no reason, in the taste of a ripe peach, or, for that matter, in remorse for the death of that infant or kitten or the rotting of the neglected fruit at an abandoned orchard—qualities reflective of a natural truth, but they will not be some dead moon to her sun. In the entangling reflection sometimes what is she is less distorted by me, than what is I is distorted by she.  Mrs. Wilson’s tales are included, largely as Boas told them, following my renditions, hoping that you will read them along with mine.