INTRODUCTION BY DELL HYMES
This dramatization of incest, death, and renewal has drawn repeated attention since its publication in 1931.[1] It has been the focus of a special article (Demetracopoulou 1933), retold in a popular book (T. Kroeber 1959), and addressed at length in a major analysis of myth (Lévi-Strauss 1981).
The Source
We know the text because of the work of two women at the start of their careers, Dorothy Demetracopoulou (Lee) and Cora Du Bois. Both went on to become well-known for other work, Demetracopoulou-Lee for essays on languages as forms of thought (Lee 1944, 1959), Du Bois for study of culture and personality among the people of Alor (an island
Formerly myths were told only on winter nights. A good teller would have a good memory and be a good singer; evidently one could change voice with a change in characters or situation, and animate narration with gesture (Demetracopoulou and Du Bois 1932:376, 379, 497). The “Loon Woman” myth was told in the summer of 1929 by Jo Bender (Upper Sacramento). He was about eighty-five, esteemed as a teller by other Wintu (Demetracopoulou and Du Bois 1932:496, 498, 499) and by the two young anthropologists (379, 392).
I should explain this new translation. Demetracopoulou's transcriptions of Wintu texts are unpublished, and their location was not known to Herbert Luthin, the editor of this volume, or myself. Fortunately, Alice Shepherd had the text of “Loon Woman” and sent a copy to Luthin. It had only Wintu, no English, so the original translation must have been done separately. That translation was published twice, but the two are not quite identical.[3]
Thanks to the grammar and dictionary of Harvey Pitkin (1984, 1985), supplemented by the dictionary of Alice Shepherd (Schlicter 1981), I was able to match Wintu elements with English meanings and identify their grammatical roles. I could then look for further relations among them.
When “Loon Woman” was transcribed, such stories were thought to be prose. Division into larger units (paragraphs) was ad hoc. Recently it has been realized that stories may indicate ways of their own of going together. Intonation contours may indicate units (verses), which enter into longer sequences (stanzas, scenes). For “Loon Woman,” the manuscript shows no contours, but patterns do emerge. It is common in stories for some sentence-beginning words to mark units, and that turns out to be true of “Loon Woman.” So as to carry over the e ect of the original, each such word has been translated always the same way, and each di erently from the others: note “After,” “After that,” “And then,” “At last,” “At that,”
Fundamentally, interpretation of the shape of the whole depends upon the hypothesis that, like many other oral narratives, Native American and English, the story makes use of certain kinds of sequence. The common alternatives among traditions are relations of three and five, or of two and four. A narrator may shift between them, to be sure, and one set may include something of the other. Awareness of such relations contributes to an appreciation of the rhythms of a story. This translation attempts to display them on the page.
Some texts in Shepherd (1989) suggest that Wintu narrators use relations of three and five; “Loon Woman” certainly does. But sequences of three and five are sometimes sequences of pairs: the scene in which the elder sister discovers the heart of the hero (part 3, scene [1]), and the final two scenes of the story as a whole, have each five pairs of stanzas (sets of verses). When units are paired, I put a single closing brace in the right margin to mark the end of the pair.
In such patterns a turn at talk is always a unit, and a sequence may consist of alternating turns, as in five pairs of interaction between mother and daughter (lines 56–68). Speeches count as a single unit (turn at talk) in large sequences, but may have internal patterning of their own. The long speech by the helpful bird in act 6 has three parts, each ending with a verb of speaking. (I mark these internal parts with the designations “E/1,” “E/2,” “E/3.”)
Sometimes a three-step sequence has a sense of the onset, ongoing, then outcome of an action, or an object of perception, as when the daughter matures (21–23) and discovers a long hair (cf. 27–29, 30–32 and 33–35, 36–38). Repetition of words sometimes has one pair enclose another—what is called “chiasmus,” as in lines 19–20, 234–35, 258–60, 497–98. Sometimes members of a pair alternate, as when twice the mother ponders and the daughter measures (73–74, 78–79: 75, 87–88).
A run of three or five can elaborate a single action or activity. When the two boys set out, they “play, play, play” (430–32). The second time Loon Woman cries for her parents, she “cries, cries, cries” (236–38). When earlier she prepares a bed for herself and her brother, repetitious wording
Translation as Retelling
Mr. Bender evidently controlled patterns in English as well as Wintu, and his translating was also in part retelling. When the sister first says, “Whose hair?” (34), the next line in Wintu means literally “she wants to know.” Bender's translation is more dramatic: “I want to know.”
When the sister and brother go, she calls for evening to come quickly, and then the two are said to “go” six times (given the doubling of “go” elsewhere, this presumably constitutes three pairs). The English has five verbs, not six: “They went, and went, and went, and went, and went.”[4] Evidently Mr. Bender knew that English does not ordinarily multiply pairs but does multiply single words, and so he substituted a run. Even so, a run in English would usually be three; Mr. Bender goes to five. I suspect that in Wintu three pairs was a maximal e ect, and that a run of five seemed an equivalent maximal e ect in English.
In the five pairs of lines in which the brother wakes and leaves his sleeping sister, the third and fifth pairs (166–67, 170–71) exist in English only. The additions extend and do not disturb the pattern of the stanza.
It remains to be seen to what extent other Wintu narrators and translators have made use of possibilities such as those mentioned here.
Proportion
The whole of a story has to make sense in terms of a pattern of relations, and Jo Bender's “Loon Woman” does. Its verses, stanzas, and scenes combine into six acts, paired in three parts. (For other work of this kind, see Hymes 1992, 1994a, 1994b, 1995.) Recognition of such connections of form and content makes clear the proportions and emphases of the telling.[5]
Two acts present a beautiful boy, hidden, then discovered (part 1). Two central acts present incest and destruction (part 2). Two final acts present restorations and retribution (part 3). Within each part something accidental prompts what happens. The sister discovers a hair fallen from her brother's head, and so prepares for incest (act 2); Coyote, although warned, looks down as the family escape upward, and so they
Interpretations
Some of the meaning of the story involves understandings that members of the community would take for granted. Many are shared with other Native American traditions. Here are several such.
The opening and closing—“many people came into being” and “So they say it ends”—are conventional and show that the story was told by someone still conversant with such devices. (Young narrators were becoming less conversant during the period in which the story was taken down.) The opening sets the story in the earlier time when the human age was given shape. The closing indicates that the story is vouched for by what others have said. If it had been told in winter, someone would have followed the closing with words wishing for spring.
The sister's attention to a hair fits the first requisite for physical beauty, long, thick, shiny, black hair (Du Bois 1935:59; cf. restoration of such hair in Hymes 1983, and Lévi-Strauss 1981:389).
That the daughter goes west may foreshadow her transformation into a dangerous being. The word nom-yo (‘west-?’) describes persons likely to become animals, or “werebeasts” (Du Bois 1935:5).
When the mother at last accedes to the daughter's refusal to go except with the eldest son, it is not because she cannot recognize danger. One cannot forever refuse a kinsperson or partner.
That it is Coyote who looks down, causing escape to fail, is no surprise. He is the father in some versions of the story, but not here, and is not restored to life at the end. Having an isolated Coyote at just this point, a sort of walk-on numskull, fits well with the story's view of the family as not to blame. Given a boy so beautiful as to cause (illicit) desire, they hide him. That the daughter finds a telltale hair is accidental. A proper mother cannot at last keep her daughter from choosing her brother. The son leaves the sister as soon as he can awake, and the family do at once what he runs to tell them to do. A new generation kills what the daughter has become.
As for the two women who find the oldest son's lost heart, they are shown to be good at the very start (of act 5): they do useful work every
That the son's heart has song shows power. That there are deer tracks where it is found indicates a prototypical male power, hunting deer. Another version has his tears create a salt lick that attracts deer. Absence of that here may indicate that deer recognize power as such.
That the restored son has two women as wives indicates high status. Usually co-wives were sisters, and their husband slept between them.
Instruction from a wounded bird is a popular device in many traditions. The bird goes unnamed here, but perhaps its cry is an identification. The cry “Tuwétetek” is like a name for killdeer in the neighboring and related language, Nomlaki, te-wé-dé-dik.[6] Notice that the usual step of bandaging the wound, and being given advice in return, is absent. The bird is already on the side of the boys, somehow related to them, referring like their father to “she who made us kinless.”
Title
In the manuscript and publications of the myth, the title has the name of the older brother in Wintu, but “Loon Woman” in English. In the story he is named, but she is not; not even a word for “loon” occurs. Perhaps that is because no loon survives. The story does not tell, actually, why a loon will look as it does in a world to come. One would have to speculate about that; this loon is di erent. The distinctive necklace has been taken back, the hearts are human beings again. So far as the story goes, the loon is an evil forever gone.[7]
I translate the hero's name with one of its possibilities (cf. Pitkin 1985: 36, 37, 38, 271). Shepherd (personal communication) says that the name could suggest most or all of those possible senses. Since the story is about what a sister as well as a brother becomes, lacking a Wintu name for her, I use “become” for her in the title.
Other Discussions
Demetracopoulou (1933) analyzes versions of “Loon Woman” in terms of some eighteen incidents and their distribution among versions from the Achumawi, Atsugewi, Maidu, Karuk, Modoc, Shasta, Wintu, and Yana.
Theodora Kroeber (1959:39–65) reframes and retells the story, drawing on several of the same versions (Achumawi, Atsugewi, Karuk, Maidu, Shasta, Wintu, and Yana).
Lévi-Strauss (1981) makes the Loon Woman story an essential part of his great enterprise, to show the unity of myth throughout the New World. By way of a recently published Klamath myth, he connects the Loon Woman stories of Northern California to the bird-nester theme in South America, with which he began the four volumes of his Mythologiques. He takes the hidden child in Loon Woman to be an inversion of the bird-nester, and by a series of further inversions, oppositions, and transformations, he finds that “the whole northern part of North America is the scene of a vast permutation” (215), reaching as far as the Wabenaki of New England. His argument takes Demetracopoulou to task at several points (e.g., 60–62, 388–89)—for instance, for treating the hair incident as arbitrary and specific (389).
Lévi-Strauss's work is indispensable for its vast command of detail, its attention to natural history and geography as factors, and its recurrent sensitivity and insight. At the same time, its conception of mythical thought as often a playing out of formal possibility, its overriding concern for indications of the emergence of culture out of nature, and for certain kinds of coding—astronomical, gastronomical, and so forth—omit what may be perfectly good reasons for a story to be the way it is. In the case of Jo Bender's telling of Loon Woman, one reason may be pain felt for an intelligent, determined child cleaving to a fatal course. Another is to fit with a cultural cognitive style.
The two Wintu versions, this by Jo Bender, and another by Sadie Marsh (Du Bois and Demetracopoulou 1931:360–62) can be understood as alternative ways of portraying and thereby thinking about lust as a woman's motive. The daughter in the Marsh story is immediately impulsive, aggressive, and ultimately cannibalistic. The denouement takes
As to hair, having found the hair, she looks and looks, and later matches and measures. All this is in keeping with a Wintu concern for bases of knowledge, expressed in a recent development of a system of evidential suffixes (see the lucid analysis in Schlicter 1986). The first major action of the story is the scenes in which the daughter looks and looks to be sure of the source of a hair (act 2, scenes [1] and [2]). Visual knowledge, the kind most assured, is again in focus in lines in which her counterpart sees and hears speak the lost heart of that source (319–30). Even so, her conclusion as to who it must be (329) is marked as inference (-re:m). Sight is again in focus in the lines in which her younger sister sees what she has discovered (388–96), and when the boys who have killed Loon take their father to see. Hearing, to be sure, begins the long process by which she discovers, then nourishes, He-whois-made-beautiful. The women at the center of the first and third parts, she who destroys and she who recovers, are akin in deliberate response to evidence.
In this respect the hair incident is indeed “important aesthetically to the form of the myth” (Demetracopoulou 1935:121) and is to be explained, not by distant analogues (Lévi-Strauss 1981:389), but from within Wintu language and culture. The myth as a whole is distinctive in its steady marshaling of detail to show a family almost destroyed and in the end surviving evil.
Native Language Passage
Here are lines 24–35 in Wintu, with word-by-word glosses and translation. The lines, in which the sister, She-who-becomes-loon, discovers the fateful hair, are taken from the incident that precipitates the main events of the story.[8]
'uni-r p'o·q-ta k'éte hima me·m-to·n hará·, they-say. sca woman-that one morning stream-that. loc goes After that one morning the woman goes to a certain stream,
― 200 ―me·m-tó· me-s-to· pi-to·n hara·, stream-that. obj water-gen-that. obj she-that. loc goes she goes to where they get water,kén·la· pi p'o·q-ta. Pómin-winé, wine tómoi, sits-down she woman-that ground-looks.at sees hair she sits down that woman. She looks at the ground, she sees a hair,
číne·. Wine·, wine· tómoi, k'ete·m tómoi. catches/takes.it looks.at.it looks.at hair one. obj hair she takes it up. She looks, she looks at the hair, one hair.
Tómoi niqa·'a wíne: “Héket-un tómoi?” t'ipna·-s-kuya. hair find-sta look.at who-poss hair know-stat. int-want She looks at the hair she has found: “Whose hair?” she wants to know.