INTRODUCTION BY BRUCE NEVIN
Probably they ought to be called the Is, or the Ish, their word for “people.” Anthropologists call them the Achumawi, from their word ajúm:á:wí, meaning dwellers on the ajúm:á or ‘river’, though the people themselves applied that term only to families who lived in the valley midway up the Pit River where the Fall River flows into it from the north. We will call them the Pit River people, for that is what they call themselves today.
Their territory overlaps two ecological zones. Traveling up the Pit River, one passes from deeply wooded intermountain declivities through valleys that are progressively higher, broader, and drier. Downriver from the place called wíní'ha:'lí'wa ‘where it [the salmon] turns back’, below the junction of the Fall River, one finds typically Californian deer and salmon, pine and oak. Upriver from that point, the land opens out to the high plateau ecology of sagebrush and juniper, jackrabbit and elk that one associates with Nevada and Eastern Oregon.
The people trapped animals in pits, hence the name. European explorers surely saw too the people's semisubterranean, earth-covered homes.
The ancestors of the Pit River people were evidently among the earliest settled inhabitants of California, speakers of Hokan languages whose descendants include Yana to the south, Shasta, Chimariko, and Karuk to the west, and others which are now separated from this northern group by intervening populations, such as the Pomo and Yuman groups of languages.
From ancient times they have maintained an annual cycle of land use: descending to the great rivers to fish for salmon in the spring; scattering to small family camps in the cooler foothills and mountains in the summer and autumn to hunt and to harvest crops planted for them, as they saw it, by the hand of God; retiring for the winter (asjúy) to separated villages of permanent earth-covered homes (asjúy) in sheltered mountain valleys; then returning to the riverside for the salmon run, cycle after yearly cycle of life in the Garden.
After centuries, or perhaps millennia, speakers of Penutian languages, whose descendants include the Wintu and the Maidu, brought di erent forms of land use and social affiliation. They occupied their riverside villages throughout the year, making expeditions for hunting and for the gathering of particular foods or craft supplies. When the Hokan people returning in the spring found a small Penutian settlement at some choice fishing spot, they shifted to another just as good, or almost as good. But the newcomers spread along the river into chains of villages whose inhabitants responded with quick allegiance to ties of blood and marriage if conflict arose with returning Hokan fishermen. The autonomous families and bands of Hokan speakers could not compete. Gradually, but with no evidence of settled warfare so far as we can tell today, the Hokan people retreated from the great Sacramento Valley to its periphery and outlying regions, where they continued their way of life, adapting to changed ecological conditions where they needed to.[1] The annual reunions for the spring salmon run, in which now both peoples were represented, continued to be the occasion of celebration, with feasting, dancing, singing, and gambling at the stick games.
At such a “big time” much trading was accomplished, and much courtship, for these were exogamous communities, proscribing marriage to relations calculated to a degree of remoteness that concerns only genealogists among us today. It was not uncommon for one of these small Pit River communities to include Modoc or Maidu or Wintu in-laws, and indeed one of these in-laws has an important role in our story. The
Mrs. Lela Rhoades, whom it was my privilege and delight to call “Grandma,” told me this story about her father's work as a shaman on November 28, 1970, at her home in Redding, California, when she was about eighty-seven years of age. I had met her that summer, not long after the beginning of my first experience of linguistic fieldwork. She lived alone in a large trailer home south of town. I say “alone,” though her daughter and granddaughter were much present, her two sons lived nearby and visited, and before long her great-granddaughter's cradle was often at her feet as we sat and worked at her kitchen table—I with my tape recorder and notebook, she with her seemingly endless fund of stories and songs remembered from childhood. Once, she was singing me a song, remembering it, with her eyes closed, and she stopped suddenly and would not go on. “Something's looking at me,” she said—a spirit animal, such as her father worked with. “I don't want to catch it.” She explained that she could have been a doctor too, but she didn't want it, because it was an all-consuming profession. “People always want something from you,” she told me, “or blame you for something.”
Her father, Samson Grant, was of the Atsugewi or Hat Creek tribe.[2] These are close relatives of the Pit River people, living immediately to the south of them. Like many Atsugewi, he spoke both languages. Around 1852, when he was only a young boy, the majority of the Pit River and Hat Creek people were force-marched by soldiers to the concentration camp in Round Valley, Mendocino County. Indians from all over the state were confined there. After his parents died in the camp, he made his living by hunting and fishing for an elderly widow, who in turn cooked and provided a home of sorts. In his early teens he worked in various places around the Sacramento Valley as a ranch hand.
He knew that not all of his people had been captured. After a few years he returned to Pit River country. He found Buckskin Jack, the Hat Creek chief, who later arranged his marriage to Lela's mother. Her family
When Grandma Lela told the story to me in the Pit River language, it was somewhat as it might be told to one who knew the participants and their motivations, who was familiar with the customs and expectations of the community—the easiest and most natural way to tell it in Pit River. But when she retold the story in English, she provided background information interpreting one culture to the other—the easiest and most natural way to tell it in English. For example, in English she had to explain how Uncle Jack called Samson his son-in-law. In Pit River, she merely used a kinship term that, like many in the language, happens to apply reciprocally to both the elder and younger member of a relationship. This sort of di erence of rendition is one of the thorniest and most disputed of the translator's problems. To present a story that is meaningful for English speakers, yet still reflects faithfully the teller's intentions and narrative skill, I have begun with her English rendition and have made it conform more closely to her Pit River rendition. Where new participants or new themes are introduced, the English version interjects more detail, some of which I have kept. This is especially obvious at the very beginning of the story. Here are the first few sentences, for comparison:[3]
| Háné'gá tól chgí'wá:lujan twijí:ní Thence for long doctor he was | |
| qa itú wa'y:í:wílóo. the my late father | |
| A long time ago my late father was a doctor. | |
| Wíy:úmji twijí:ní. One who dwelt he was [An old Wintun man] was living there. | |
― 131 ― | |
| 'Amqhágam qa dó:si dét'wi, dí:qá:lami, When a deer kill carry home | |
| 'lá:sa'ch duji. happy to do | |
| When someone killed a deer, packed it home, he was happy. | |
The word wíy:úmji ‘one who [characteristically] dwelt’ has perhaps a bit of the sense of a “roomer” or “boarder” in English. The old Wintun doctor was around seventy years old. The elderly were dependent on relatives for sustenance. In the opening two paragraphs of the English rendition we are told much more about him, about Uncle Jack, and about their relationship.
The example shows the characteristic verb-subject-object word order of this language, but scarcely any of the complexity of pronominal, adverbial, and other prefixes and suffixes that Pit River verbs frequently have (for instance, twijí:ní, t-‘evidential’, w-‘3rd person’, -jí-‘be, do’, -n ‘durative past’), and only hints of the sound system, with its tones, its laryngealized consonants, and its uvular (q) sounds pronounced at the back of the throat; but these are after all matters for another kind of discussion. A particular problem for translation is ambiguity as to the reference of pronouns. In this narration, Mrs. Rhoades makes frequent use of a narrative infinitive construction, with no pronouns at all. This ambiguity was also a characteristic of the English rendition, which I have tried to remedy without disturbing the vernacular tone of the original.
Three details in the story may require clarification. First, when Samson Grant accepts and smokes the tobacco, it seals a contractual agreement. In earlier days, it would probably have been in a pipe (s'qoy'), but this was a rolled cigarette. Having served its ceremonial function, the tobacco cannot be used further, so the grandfather returns it to the earth. Second, in the matter of who is at fault—the uncle or his wife—for neglecting the old man's portions, I would accept at face value the uncle's claims about responsibility for the distribution of meat; he had presumably expressed his feelings to his wife about their elderly neighbor, and she may well have shared those feelings. Third, a doctor commonly worked with an assistant who “interpreted” the words of his song, but Samson Grant did this for himself.
Mrs. Rhoades's gifts as a storyteller, long whetted on the myths and