Franz Boas’s Bella Bella Texts gathers oral narratives dictated by Heiltsuk speakers on the central coast of British Columbia, with an interlinear English translation and a substantial vocabulary. Boas collected part of the material at Rivers Inlet in 1897 and the rest at Bella Bella in 1923; the volume appeared in Columbia University’s Contributions to Anthropology series. It is salvage ethnography as much as a story collection. The tales are printed in a practical phonetic alphabet, and the book closes with a word list keyed to the texts themselves.
Boas is candid about how the collection was made. At Rivers Inlet most of the community was away and only two ailing men, who spoke no English, could dictate; those texts were set aside. At Bella Bella the various tribes of the group were assembled and the old culture had all but vanished, so connected narratives were hard to come by. Boas had the Rivers Inlet texts read aloud and repeated back, chiefly by a single informant, Willy Gladstone. Dialect differences proved slight, spelling is not uniform, and the vocabulary was compiled partly through Kwakiutl as an intermediary, a method Boas himself warns invites misunderstanding.
The Alphabet and the Preface
The volume opens with its front matter: Bella Bella Texts, issued as Volume V of the Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology by Columbia University Press, printed in Austria, and digitized through the Internet Archive. A short guide to the alphabet follows, setting out vowel values and a consonant table arranged by series and manner, with notes on the harder sonants, the breathy surds, and the fortis sounds whose glottal or lingual closure gives them stress and suddenness. The exclamation mark, readers learn, marks increased stress and glottalization. The table of contents then lists the tales to come—Mink, Raven, Tslumqalaqs, Baxbakwa’lanuxi’wa, Kuna’, the wars with the ewi’k’!enoxu and Haida, a hunting trip, a camp fire, a speech, eight string figures, and a vocabulary.
Boas’s preface explains how the collection came together. Some tales were taken down in 1897 at Rivers Inlet, where conditions were poor: most people were away, only two sickly men could dictate, they knew no English, and time ran short, so those texts were set aside. At Bella Bella in 1923 all the tribes of the group were assembled, with varied pronunciation, but the culture had practically disappeared and information came only by questioning. Connected texts proved remarkably hard to obtain, so the Rivers Inlet material was read to Bella Bella people and repeated back, mostly by a single informant, Willy Gladstone. Dialect differences are slight and the spelling is not uniform. The last tale carries an interlinear Kwakiutl translation, accurate on the whole though the Kwakiutl informant sometimes misunderstood Rivers Inlet words. The vocabulary draws partly on the texts and partly on a full Kwakiutl stem vocabulary obtained through Kwakiutl as an intermediary, so misunderstandings are likely, though the text references allow checking. No suffix list is given, since Boas had published one in the International Journal of American Linguistics.
Mink and the Sun
The tales begin with Mink, who works at his arrows, planning to play at fighting with Blue Jay. They shoot back and forth; Mink hits, Blue Jay misses, and Blue Jay grows furious, abusing him: “You bad one, you have no father!” Mink walks to his mother, Clay-on-her-Thighs, crying “Hee’,” and tells her what Blue Jay said. She scolds him—has he no sense? Is his father not Walking-from-End-to-End-Through-the-World, Shining-From-One-End-to-the-other? She sends him to ask Ha’nLlekunas the Archer to shoot up to the sky. The first arrow sticks in the sky, the second into the first’s nock, and four arrows hang joined almost to the ground; the bow is placed between and comes down. Mink climbs and arrives outside his father’s house, where Sun’s youngest child asks what he is doing. Mink names his father; Sun says, “Indeed I have a son,” having felt it long ago about the mother. Mink is told to take his father’s place so the father may rest, and is adorned with his ornaments and the sun mask, warned not to walk too fast lest the world grow brittle. He barely moves, then moves slowly at sunrise, then faster, and the world begins to burn and is burnt. They pursue him, strip off the ornaments, ask “Was my word to you that you should go fast?” and throw him down from the sky. He falls into the water, and when women passing ask what is wrong, he answers, “Pff. I have been asleep on the water for a long time”—he had been dead when he fell.
Mink and the Crab-Women
The women take him into the canoe and go to dig clams; Mink steals the clams they gather, and they go home. Next morning they dig again, and the Warriors—the wolves—appear.
Real-Chief and His Sisters
A speaker says “We made a mistake, younger brothers” when frightened; Four-Whale-Carrier nearly carries them to the door of Screecher-of-the-Sky’s house, but his wings stick to the pitch of the whale made by Real-Chief, and he comes down to the water and sticks to the ground. Muskrat digs again. Real-Chief had tried to kill all the children of Screecher-of-the-Sky, and there the tale ends.
Real-Chief’s sisters prepare berry cakes in boxes as a marriage present for the son-in-law of Crow-Woman, Saw-bill-Duck-Woman, Toad-Woman, and Snail-Woman. Lacking a canoe, Crow-Woman thinks to borrow Real-Chief’s folding canoe and asks him to steer. He agrees; the canoe is loaded end to end and, when told “Open out,” grows larger. At the rocks the sisters ease themselves; Real-Chief steps out and instructs his dung to cry that the Warriors are coming. The dung speaks with a man’s voice and obeys. Crow-Woman urges paddling to the far side of the big bay. Snail-Woman lingers on the rocks and climbs a tree, watching Real-Chief eat all the food intended for the son-in-law, empty the boxes, put on his squid-head hat, and fake blood using sea-slug intestines and squeezed blueberries. The sisters return, Crow-Woman cries, Snail-Woman reveals the deed, and Crow-Woman strikes him down with a paddle for eating the cargo.
Raven Creates the Salmon
Real-Chief makes a salmon trap but catches nothing; his alder-wood salmon lacks a nose bone and will not go straight. At Xa’mtSla the Owner-of-Salmon feeds him, and Real-Chief steals the salmon’s nose bone and hides it in his cheek. The bones he sucked out are thrown in the water but do not revive, since the stolen bone prevented it. He searches graves, calls four times, finds a dead twin, digs her up, and blows on her four times with his water of life; she revives and he marries her. She washes her fingers in the water and salmon enter his trap; she washes more of her hand, bringing ever more salmon, which she roasts and dries. His hair is combed and lengthened at his request. He foolishly says his hair was pulled by “you who came from the ghosts”; his wife hears, warns the little old woman to put fire under the drying salmon, whistles, and she and all the salmon and his hair disappear.
The World Is Burnt
Real-Chief goes up the mountains with four younger brothers—Deer, Porcupine, Muskrat, and Gull. They kill and eat a goat; the dog keeps barking because the bones were not cleaned, so they return and finish them. Real-Chief repeatedly reports a great dream of fire burning the whole world; one man puts his face in the water, his face turns black, and he is named Black Face, the clam.
Raven and Squirrel
Squirrel invites guests but not Raven.
Wa’walls and the Killing of the Lover
The narrative opens at Be’tsits, where Wa’walls lives with his son Ga’tsldalal at one end of the village and the chief Me’qlunts at the other. Wa’walls hunts seals by spear, singes and cooks them overnight on heated stones, packs the meat into baskets, and sets aside the hind feet, which his wife loves best. He sends his slave to summon the tribe, and they eat their fill in his house.
When the new moon comes his wife goes out, said to be menstruating, and returns. The child cries for more food, and Wa’walls proposes another hunting trip, but the day is lost. Struck by his father, the boy protests that he should strike his wife’s lover instead. Wa’walls keeps vigil all night, learns from his slave that the lover is G’l’i, son of Me’qlunts, and at night sits at the head of his wife’s bed listening. She murmurs to her lover, calling him a bad one and telling him to gnaw the heart of Wa’walls. When she sleeps, Wa’walls finds her arm beneath the lover’s neck, cuts off the lover’s head, and paddles away in the dark.
The Headless Body and the Revenge
The wife wakes to her child’s cry that the bed is soiled. She carries the headless body on her back to her lover’s summer seat, a flat stone, and lays it as if basking. In the morning Me’qlunts prepares breakfast and sends the youngest brother to wake G’lua; the boy finds the body has no head. The corpse is brought and instructions given to carry it to the head of the inlet at Wanuk, with a speech that the tribes will never die out and that the dead son will lie in a deep cave.
Wa’walls returns with many seals, paddling strongly with his paddles raised high, though his tribe warns him not to, since Me’qlunts’ child is gone. He disobeys, carries up the meat, and has his slave call the whole tribe to eat. He takes up his wife’s basket of favorite portions; she asks whether this is what she likes best, and he says there is something else she likes best. At the bottom she sees her dead lover’s head and cries out. Wa’walls strikes her between the legs with the head, kills her, cuts out her heart, and hangs it over the doorway—he had never believed her lies about menstruating. At each new moon drops fall from the heart above his door. His tribe tries to attack the house but cannot enter and leaves.
Wanuk and the Blind Old Man
Wa’walls flees toward Wanuk. Finding no one, he walks up the river to Ogwiwa, where only one small house has smoke. He peeps into several empty houses before finding a great blind old man lying by a little fire—Wanuk himself, the only one in the house. The old man asks whether his princess sits in her room and sends Wa’walls to her. Xaenyosemega tells him her father’s tribe has been killed off by a lake monster inland, and that her father cannot see. Wa’walls proposes to cure the old man and marry her. He blows his water of life on Wanuk three times, and the old man’s sight returns. Told the lake monster is the destroyer, Wanuk tells his daughter to go to the beach so he can try to kill it with his death bringer.
The Revenge of Ga’ts!da’lal
A speaker declares war on those who warred on Wa’walls. The sisters try on the “mother of the young sawbill ducks”; the eldest does not fit, and each younger sister tries until Ga’ts!da’lal is dressed and rightly imitates the young ducks, cutting through the water and fluttering. The big Adzl instructs her how to take revenge on those married to her father. She arrives opposite the village, enters the water using the young ducks as a decoy, and the great tribe launches canoes after them. She calls out to the Big-Canoe-That-Says-‘Wi’ to paddle, takes up her fire-making apron, strikes out with it, and burns those who followed the ducks; she throws it upward and the village burns. Wa’walls has returned, having gone after his wife.
The Jealous Brother
A man’s wife is loved by his younger brother. The elder asks the younger to split boards; the wedge falls in, the younger is sent down, the spreading sticks are knocked out and the tree snaps together, but supernatural power pulls it apart and frees him. The elder takes him fishing; his arrow sticks in a rock, and the younger is sent for it and told to stay on the rock. An ermine skin tied to his forehead comes onto his face, and he climbs to the top and returns home. The elder then puts him in a box set with abalone shells and throws it into the water, where it sinks. Four daughters of a chief, struck by their mother for not marrying the one in the box, find the shining box, carry it inland, open it, and marry the man inside. In the bedroom the mother urges her husband to look and asks whom he laughs with; he lights a torch and goes backward from the fire, and she answers that it is the one from the abalone box.
The house is cleaned and the tribe invited; the abalone box and the eagle mask of the Wlklwax t.’Enox tribe are brought out. The father-in-law tells him to take out the eagle mask of his future wife; the whale is blowing, and he puts on the mask and tries to grasp the whale but cannot lift it. His wife puts on her dress and goes down; the tribe puts on masks and tries; an old woman puts on the eagle mask, grasps the whale, and carries it ashore. Next day the whale blows again, and the child tells his wife not to look for him, as he will take revenge on his elder brother. He puts on the eagle mask, grasps the whale, flies off, puts it on the beach of his elder brother’s house, sits on a tree behind the house, and cries like an eagle. The elder comes out and stands on the whale’s back; the younger flies seaward, grasps his elder brother, and flies away with him, saying he will take revenge and is his younger brother. The elder protests; the younger says he will go down into the water to the bottom, flies out seaward holding him, and the eagle returns home.
Tslo’na and the Stone Chief
Tslo’na grew at No’ta, alone, with the name Only-Long-One-Reaching-Up-in-the-World, and was chief there. He asked that all countries be made right. Raven asks what salmon should be in their river—olachen, sockeye, or spring salmon—and Tslo’na says that is not good. Asked whether maggots are good as fish for No’ta, he says that is good, then thinks to send them away.
The Lexicon of Motion and Approach
The book closes not with narrative but with the apparatus that has been running beneath it all along: a Bella Bella vocabulary organized by initial sounds, each entry pairing a Heiltsuk form with its English gloss, a dialect siglum (H or R, occasionally K), and citations to the texts where the word occurs. The first run of entries gathers verbs of approach and nearness—coming near a doorway, drawing close, the night coming on, something happening nearby—alongside the single stark entry for menstruation, marked as having no K equivalent. Already the pattern of the whole word-list is visible: a language that thinks in fine distinctions of position and direction, where “to approach” splits into a dozen shadings depending on what is approaching and from where.
Weaving, Quickness, and the Dance
Under y the entries turn to craft and temperament. There are words for weaving and for the coarse square mats and wattling that weaving produces, for tying a bundle, for knitting a net, for the halibut hook. A cluster gathers around quickness—to try to be quick, to be a quick worker—and around drifting, whether down a river or on the tide. Then comes the dance: to dance and to spawn share a root, and from it branch the reason for dancing, dancing on a log, dancing on the floor, the heat rising from a chimney as the dancers move, the dancing-apron and the dancing-paraphernalia. The tide words follow naturally—flood tide, high water, the lake rising, the tide running to and fro, and at the far end of the scale the deluge itself. A run of entries on tying and binding, on rubbing a wound, on bursting open and spreading legs apart, gives way to the exclamation of disgust and to the many forms of returning and coming back, of going back upward, of returning in a single day, of going through things one after another, of becoming tangled, of making a mistake.
Floating, Twins, and the Numeral One
The next stretch, under m, opens with things found floating and long things coming up to float, with the twitching of a cheek, and with the kinship terms for the mother of twins, twins themselves, and dead twins. Diminishment follows—to make smaller, to decrease, to wither and shrivel and be downcast—and then desire, with its wish and its preterite “wished.” The numeral one expands into a small cosmology: one year, one flat one, alone on the ground, one inside, one in a canoe or a fellow hunter, alone in a house, one arrow or one person, having one of them, going one day, one round one going down the river in the World, one house, a one-carrier, one long one or one canoe, one canoe on water—and a personal name, Only-Long-One-Reaching-Up-in-the-World. Brother and its vocative, excrement, and the anas follow. Then gathering roots and berries, measuring and trying, staying away, satiety, driving a peg, swallowing slowly, and a wide spread of throwing—away, from the hand, into water, up, a canoe left on the water. The rainbow appears, and the bullroarer swung in a circle; lighting a torch, twisting rope and splicing it, whitish and white-haired, aiming and trying to aim, and at the last the hesitating, guessing, thinking, reminding cluster, where to remind and to be reminded sit side by side.
Telling, Mind, and the Order of Brothers
Under n the entries begin with telling—to tell, to be told, the telling—and with the proud, ostentatious, mean man who shows off. The root for mind yields the middle-aged, the little eldest one, the song leader, the phrases for thinking of something and resolving and speaking wisely, and the names “the wise one” and “wise talker.” Old man and its vocative, poisoning by clams, telling a myth and the myth itself, the family story, moon and month, furseal, aiming and wishing in vain, and the place names of the Bella Bella village and its soap berries with the spoon for them. Kinship returns with elder brother, elder brothers, eldest son, and the line of primogeniture; fear and foolishness and the command to stop talking follow. Sling-stone terms—the sling, the slingstone, putting stone to sling, throwing repeatedly—pass into flying and flying across.
Clan, Coming, and the Particle Then
The g’ entries open with clan and tribe, with adding on and counting how many persons, canoes, houses, flat things, with crawling on four feet and stepping out of a canoe, with the weasel and the canoe, and with length in all its derivatives. First and its derivatives, men’s names, the exclamation, going to the bottom of water, and then the great family of coming—from, out, down, home, to the beach—and the verb to come with its directional compounds: down river, to the head of an inlet, ashore, into the house, arriving, passing. The particle g’i, “then,” is given with its pronominal forms, distinguishing person, visibility, and presence; the locational verb to be somewhere follows, on root or inside house or on ground or put down on a flat thing. Lord, to pawn, and kinship by marriage—wife’s sister, brother’s wife, the same after death, making love to a sister-in-law—lead to take care, laying down grass, abalone, toothache, rubbing against each other, and two things moving sideways like wood along a canoe crack.
Snapping, Whispering, and the Last Entries
Under k’ the list runs through snapping together, taking in the hollow of the hand, deserting, vituperating, descending a mountain, whispering into an ear, dropping the head, the cannibal’s assistant, muskrat, leaky, holding a dish, putting a kettle over fire. The exhortative particle k’a appears with its examples—split it, don’t laugh, what is the matter with him, what is it—then pulling apart, the long thing somewhere, nodding the head in pity, meeting, spoons and their distribution and the spoon basket, the chief’s wife who is not of the nobility, canoe collisions and canoe carrying, a boy’s name, the button blanket, chafing through, light brown hair, scraping with a knife and the scraper and scaling, dried clams, tucking in and buttoning and the button and unbuttoning, a place name, the negative k’e, “then you,” being surprised, and the tongs—holding with tongs, the basket for boiling on red-hot stones, taking up with tongs, the tweezers for pulling out eyebrows—before the list breaks off at biting off.
Tricksters, Chiefs, and the Making of the World
The figure who dominates the early tales is the trickster-transformer, called Real-Chief or Raven depending on the story. He is a creature of appetite and mischief: he fakes the war cry of the Warriors to scatter guests and eat their berries, cheats his way through a marriage journey, and ruins the world through sheer impatience. In “The Mink,” the hero climbs a ladder of arrows into the sky to find his father, the Sun, and is dressed in the solar mask; warned not to walk too fast, he speeds up at sunrise and sets the world ablaze. The same restlessness drives “Raven Creates the Salmon,” where the theft of a salmon’s nose bone and a wife resurrected from a grave with the water of life produce the first fish runs—until a careless taunt sends wife, salmon, and lengthened hair all away.
Against this anarchy stand the chiefs and culture heroes who impose order. Nno’aqaua, the Wise One, outwits the cannibal Bax’bakwa’lanuxuslwe by luring him and his family into a pit of heated water, then scatters the bodies to become the mosquitoes and horseflies of later people. A’sdas the gambler loses his children, his wife, and finally himself, then wins back a fortune in supernatural game animals. Kuna’ and Archer are abandoned on rocks by jealous in-laws and rescued by the mouse woman, attendant of a supernatural chief, who feeds them and sends them home in borrowed canoes. The recurring machinery—the whetstone that becomes a mountain, the hair oil that becomes a lake, the comb that becomes a thicket—shows how the landscape itself is explained as the residue of flight and pursuit.
Marriage, Murder, and the Human World
A second strand of the collection concerns the fragile arrangements between men and women. Wa’walis discovers his wife’s lover, cuts off the lover’s head, and serves it to her in the basket of delicacies she loved best; her heart, hung over the doorway, drips at every new moon. Tslu’mqalaqs bears a litter of puppies to a dog-husband, burns their dog skins so they become human children, and is abandoned by her ashamed father. The Jealous Brother is sealed in a box and thrown into the sea, only to be found by four chief’s daughters who marry him. These stories treat jealousy, shame, and revenge as the ordinary weather of household life, and they end not with moral judgment but with the custom or saying that supposedly survives from them.
The Wars and the Word List
The historical tales turn to real enmity. Wa’k’as is saved in a canoe fight when a companion shields him with his own body and is rewarded with the great river at Rivers Inlet. L.’alS’lsla, fishing with his wife, blackens his face and shoots the Haida chief in the stern while his wife lies hit across the paddle. In “A Fight with the Haida,” a boy ties up his hair and runs across a rooftop as a target so the defenders can waste the enemy’s bullets, and the Haida tie twisted branches around their necks so their bodies can be hooked from the water. The volume ends not with narrative but with the vocabulary—hundreds of roots and derivatives, from “to menstruate” and “mother of twins” to “water of life” and “Europeans,” each tied by page and line to the stories that precede it.
What the Book Preserved
The book’s value lies in its double character: it is both literature and record. Boas took down the tales at a moment when the Heiltsuk world they described had largely dissolved, and he printed them in the original language with a translation literal enough to expose the grammar underneath. The result preserves not only plots but the formulas of address, the marriage songs, the mourning songs, and the string figures that accompanied them. Later readers have treated the collection as a foundation for Heiltsuk linguistic and cultural study, and as a reminder of how much a patient listener can save from a vanishing telling.
