Franz Boas’s account of the Bella Coola people of the central British Columbia coast is an ethnographic study built around a large body of translated oral tradition. Drawing on his own fieldwork and on earlier collections made by himself and other travellers, Boas sets out the tribe’s location and language, then lets the myths speak at length: creation and the five-tiered universe, the origin of salmon, the doings of the Sun and his children, the cannibal monster Snéné’iq, the secret societies, and the migrations of ancestral village groups. The result is part monograph, part anthology, and it is the stories that carry most of the book.
“The Bella Coola are a small tribe inhabiting the coasts of Dean Inlet and Bentinck Arm, two long and narrow fiords situated in about latitude 52° north, in British Columbia.”
Boas opens by placing the Bella Coola on Dean Inlet and Bentinck Arm, near latitude 52° north, along the river that empties into North Bentinck Arm. “Bella Coola” is a corruption of the Kwakiutl name Bilxula, and no native word covers all the Bella Coola-speaking tribes. Epidemics and introduced diseases had reduced a formerly populous people to a few hundred. Their language belongs to the Salishan family, closest to the Coast-Salish dialects far to the south, though Athapascan and Kwakiutl tribes now separate the two branches; Boas takes the similarity to mean the speakers once lived in contiguous territory. Physical traits and customs show long contact and intermarriage with northern coastal and interior Athapascan peoples. He is candid about his sources, including his own early misconceptions: Bella Coola visitors shown masks from Vancouver Island they had never seen explained them by resemblance to their own, so those explanations had to be discarded.
What sets this mythology apart, in Boas’s view, is system. Other North Pacific coast tribes honour the Sun above all but scatter their belief among many supernatural beings, so their stories stay unsystematic. The Bella Coola instead arrange their beings into a coherent scheme that earns the word “deities.” Five worlds lie one above another: our earth in the middle, two heavens above, two underworlds below. In the upper heaven dwells a supreme goddess who meddles little in human fates; in the centre of the lower heaven, at the zenith, stands the house of the gods, where the Sun and the rest reside. The earth is an island swimming in the ocean. Ghosts inhabit the underworld and may return to heaven, whence they can be sent back to be reborn; a ghost who dies a second death sinks to the lowest world and never returns.
The People and the Problem of Their Mythology
Boas begins by placing the Bella Coola on Dean Inlet and Bentinck Arm, near latitude 52° north in British Columbia, along the river that empties into North Bentinck Arm. The name itself is a corruption of the Kwakiutl word Bilxula, and no native term covers all the Bella Coola-speaking tribes. Epidemics and introduced diseases had reduced a formerly populous people to a few hundred. Their language belongs to the Salishan family, closest to the Coast-Salish dialects of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia; Boas infers from the strong resemblance that these speakers once occupied contiguous territory, though Athapascan and Kwakiutl tribes now stand between them. Vocabulary and grammar are heavily modified, above all by extensive vowel elision, and the relation to Tillamook on the Oregon coast—itself cut off from the rest of Salishan territory by Chinook—offers the nearest parallel. In physique and custom the Bella Coola show long contact and frequent intermarriage with northern Coast and interior Athapascan tribes, which sets them apart from southern Salishan peoples.
Boas then reviews his predecessors: Adrian Jacobsen, Fillip Jacobsen, and Goeken, alongside his own early work. His brief 1886 notes, Goeken’s 1886 remarks on religious life, and his own description drawn from tribespeople travelling in Germany all contain misconceptions—he had shown those informants masks from Vancouver Island they did not know, and they explained them by resemblance to their own, so the explanations are wrong. In 1890 he met Bella Coola fishing salmon on the Fraser River, publishing the results in the British Association reports of 1891; A. Jacobsen described ceremonies in 1891, Fillip Jacobsen traditions and customs in 1894 and 1895, and Boas himself brought out collections in 1894 and 1895.
What earlier collections missed, he argues, is the mythology’s principal characteristic. North Pacific coast tribes hold the Sun most important but believe in many supernatural beings, leaving their mythology unsystematic. The Bella Coola instead co-ordinated their supernatural beings into a system that justifies calling them “deities.” They believe in five worlds stacked one above another: our earth in the middle, two heavens above, two underworlds below. In the upper heaven dwells a supreme deity, a woman who interferes comparatively little with human fates. In the centre of the lower heaven—the zenith—stands the house of the gods, where the Sun and all other deities reside. Our earth is an island swimming in the ocean. The underworld is inhabited by ghosts, free to return to heaven, whence they may be sent down again to earth; ghosts who die a second death sink to the lowest world, from which there is no return.
The Upper Heaven and the Supreme Deity
The upper heaven is called Atsa’axt, or Snutx’Lok-‘a’ls ti Sonx: t’aix’, or Sonxaut Omq’o’mkilik’a. Its ruler is a woman named Qeina’its, or Tsi sisndaxi (“our woman”), or Ek*!yak’imtous’iL (“afraid of nothing”). Her heaven is a treeless prairie; one reaches it by going up the river from the house of the gods in the lower heaven, though another tradition says one passes through the rent in the sky called Tstuna’lotas ti Sonx: taix’. Her house stands in the far east, and a gale blows continually over the open country, driving everything toward her entrance, though near the house it is calm. In front stands a post shaped like a large winged monster, its mouth serving as the entrance; before the door lies gravel of three colours—blue, black, white. Behind the house is a salt-water pond in which the goddess bathes, and there lives the si’siut or xtsaltsalo’sem, which sometimes descends to our world; wherever it moves, rocks burst and slide down mountainsides. It is described as a snake or fish.
In the world’s beginning the mountains were of great height—human beings who made the world uninhabitable. Qamia’its warred on them, vanquished them, and made them smaller. During the fight she broke off the nose of the mountain Yalyule’mt near Nut!e’l; its face may be recognized even now, and when its name is called it answers.
The Earth, the Tides, and the Land of Ghosts
A quoted song fragment tells of a child perishing “like the sky when it broke,” urging the child to go to S’atwald’sem of the sky and sit in the mouth of the sky. The world is called A’neko’oL or Qenk:iIst, “the land below,” an island swimming in the boundless ocean. In the far east sits a giant, Avép!alaxtnaix’, legs apart, holding a long stone bar in outstretched hands; the earth is fastened to the bar by two stone ropes. When he tires and shifts his hands there is an earthquake, called Snénik’pstak’imtoLs (“he takes hold of our world”). Moving the earth westward brings epidemics; eastward, sickness disappears. In the ocean lives Séusats, who twice daily swallows and releases seawater, causing the tides; a masked figure of him appears in the ka’siut ceremonial, his face painted with white stripes symbolizing sea levels.
Below lies the ghosts’ country, Asiuta’nem, known mainly from shamans’ trance accounts. An old woman who believed she visited it as a child said its entrance is a hole in each house between doorway and fireplace; it stretches along sandy banks of a large river, with a hill behind the village whose base is covered with sharp stones. Seasons and day and night are reversed there; ghosts walk on their heads; their language differs; souls receive new names. The village is fenced, with a large dancing-house below each village’s burial-place, having four fires, women on the floor and men on a platform; newly arrived ghosts enter through the smoke-hole by a rope ladder, with two men, Anoet’axsarai’x’, at its foot. One who enters the dancing-house cannot return to earth; souls may ascend the ladder to the lower heaven and be sent back to be born in the same family, while those who stay die a second death and sink to a second lower world with no return. An old man described reaching the country by canoe, seeing two trails, living and dead, and following the dead one to a village with a dancing-house and a different language.
The Salmon Country and the Theft of the Fish
In the far west is the salmon land, \lia’ltoa; salmon leave each spring and return in fall. Winwi’na lived at Q’o’mqatis and wished fish would ascend the river, for then no salmon visited Bella Coola River.
The Crane’s Gift and the Salmon Boy
The Crane returns home singing the song he has won, and the canoe makes its way back to its own country. As he nears the house the Eagle cries out in a strange new voice, for he knows the Crane has come into supernatural power. The Crane tells the Raven what he has gained: a great canoe captured, and from its chief a song, a dance called sqoa’lxoalem, and the canoe’s own name. He instructs the Raven to wear his mask whenever he performs the dance, never to abandon it, and to hand it down to his children and his children’s children.
Boas then turns to the traditions themselves, promising to give them in full before drawing conclusions, since some illustrate beliefs already set out and others open new lines of inquiry into the tribe’s mythology. A footnote credits Killip Jacobsen with a version printed in Ymer in 1894, in which the young man who visits the sky is called Kloma—Lo’ma in Boas’s spelling.
The Salmon Boy Found in the Weir
At K~i’pots, near Senxl on the Bella Coola River, stood a salmon-weir. Its chief was Siz:o’k!pt, “satiated,” and Si’Lmak:, “salmon-weir”; his wife was Atsqutd’L. Cutting salmon one day, she found a small boy inside the last fish, washed him in the river, and showed him to the people. She had a cradle child of her own, and the found boy was half as long as her forearm. She nursed him alongside her baby; he seemed to understand speech, grew fast, and soon walked and talked.
The Salmon boy had his companion build a hut, make two-pointed arrows, and shoot birds. He warned the friend always to shout before entering, or he would die, and then to carry him to the water on sticks and watch. The friend shouted, found the hut full of birds, and filled the canoe; on alternate days the hut filled again, provisioning the whole town. Once the friend forgot to shout, entered suddenly, and found a salmon nearly dead, vomiting pieces of quartz. The people carried the salmon to the water and laid it on sticks. The boy watched a canoe come upriver; an occupant said, “We come to fetch you.” The Salmon rose and went aboard. The brother shouted to wait, jumped in, and the canoe went downriver; the others could not see him.
The Journey to the Salmon Country
They reached the Salmon country, and the Salmon boy said the Spring Salmon was his brother. Warnings followed: at the Smelt country cover the nose and take a long breath; at the Herrings shake off the falling scales; then the Olachen village covered in grease; then the Salmon country itself, where children played behind the houses and smelled a strange country. In the central house sat a beautiful white girl with red hair to the floor and crystal-clear eyes, and the boy fell in love. The Salmon boy warned that the Door bites those who enter; he jumped in, the Door snapped and missed, and the friend imitated him.
Fed algae from logs, the boy refused the food. A man told him to take two children to the river and throw them in without looking; he found a male and a female Salmon, roasted them, and was told to preserve the intestines and bones and return them to the water without looking. The children followed him back—the girl covering an eye, the boy limping from a lost bone—and the eye and a bone from the male salmon’s head were found where the boy sat and thrown into the water, restoring them.
The Bride with the Toothed Vagina
The youth wished to marry the girl, and she warned that whoever marries her must die, though he might lie beside her without coupling. A Latin passage relates that he took two long round stones to bed; when he attempted intercourse she repelled him, saying he would die, and he answered that he was not mortal but like an orca and would never die. She yielded; he inserted one stone into her vagina, which is armed with teeth, and the teeth bit and ground it nearly away; he inserted the second, which the teeth nearly consumed; then he inserted his penis unharmed, the teeth being gone. She would not let him leave the bed; the Salmon boy feared his brother dead but found him alive. The woman was the Salmon-berry Bird; she bore a boy, then a girl, and was the Spring Salmon’s daughter.
The Return and the Salmon’s Instruction
The girl’s father had canoes launched to carry the young man home; all the villagers prepared. The Spring Salmon’s canoe was fastest, the Sock-eye’s next, and the Calico Salmon’s people laughed constantly. They landed below the father’s village and sent two messengers, who reported the weir finished; the young man and his wife were sent with many presents. The watchman saw two beautiful salmon—actually the canoes—enter the trap along with many fish. The young man wished to be treated carefully; the man broke other salmon’s heads but saved him and his wife, hanging the fish over a pole. At night they resumed human shape. The youth, head covered with eagle-down, told his father he was the fish caught yesterday, had lived in the Salmon country, and that the Salmon had accompanied him and were staying downriver; it pleases the Salmon to see people eating fish. He told his mother to be careful cutting salmon, never to break bones but preserve them and throw them into the water. His two children had entered the trap; he put leaves on the ground, red and white cedar-bark over them, covered them with eagle-down, and told his mother to place the Salmon there. Then the Salmon came upriver, crossed the weir, entered the traps, went as far as Std’ix’, and the people dried them.
The Son of the Sun
The woman’s son tells his mother that his father the Sun sent him to recover her daughter from the Snéné’iq. His mother gives him a salmon-spear made by an old man and ear-rings of abalone shell. He travels up the river Qoa’Lna, climbs a tree overhanging the water, and sees the Snéné’iq approaching. She mistakes his reflection for her own, calling herself pretty; he imitates her movements and laughter until she looks up and sees him. She asks how his mother made him so pretty; he warns the treatment is painful, but she insists. He leads her up the river AnuLtxu’mxmé to find two stone knives, has her lie down with her neck on one, and cuts off her head with the other; when the head tries to rejoin the body, he passes his hands over the wound to prevent it. He goes to the Snéné’iq’s house, finds his sister whom the Snéné’iq had killed and smoked over the fire, pats her body to resuscitate her, and revives dried children’s bodies. He brings them home. Grown up, he marries a girl chosen by his mother; after four days his wife bears a son. He tells his mother his name is “
The Cannibal Initiation and the Sky Journey
The Cannibal order, Ba’exoula, receives its initiates in the House of Myths, and Boas concedes that he never learned the full ceremonial detail. What he can report is a pattern: each family’s Cannibal rites resemble the others, differing mainly in their initiation traditions. The central belief is that every Cannibal ascends to the sky during his initiation and feeds there on human flesh. In earlier times a chief would hold council the night before the ceremony, and anyone wishing to display liberality offered a slave to be killed as food for Ba’exoula. The offer was accepted, payment made, the slave killed, and members of the order devoured half the body before the novice set off for the woods. There the spirit appears to him and carries him to the House of Myths. He returns one morning before dawn, heard shouting outside the houses, his hair gone except along the median line—torn away, people say, by the fierce winds of the upper regions. Not every Cannibal eats human flesh; some tear dogs apart instead, or swallow raw salmon.
Pacifying the Possessed
The ceremony exists to calm the Cannibal and drive out the spirit that possesses him, the ka’siut rite. People try to capture him. A black-faced speaker, wearing a ring of cedar bark and covered with eagle-down, calls out, “Arise, it may be our Cannibal. Awake!” Four assistants called ALiLpa, masked, utter “Toip!” to soothe him. A noose is thrown over him; he flings it off; the crowd shouts “Ya’i!” and beats time; he snaps the ropes and vanishes, and the people search until they find him. He attacks them, then gradually quiets. The speaker summons everyone into the dancing-house—“Dance, dancers!”—and the Cannibal opens the door with his assistants, masked, while women called Ataw’au’Ltemx close around him. A speaker with a staff shouts, “Act like a real Cannibal.” The Cannibal answers with a long “Hoaaa, hoaaa, hoaaa!” that ends in a deep growl. He lingers in the doorway, steps inside, turns his left shoulder outward once, bites one man on the right and one on the left, then circles the fire keeping it to his left, fists held before his chest, stooping, lifting his feet high. Four nights he dances while songs and dances pacify him. Then he tells what he saw in the sky, and the song-leader turns the account into a song—the only channel by which the women learn what happened.
Expelling the Monster
After four days comes the exorcism of the S’a’Lpsta, the possessing monster. A dish ornamented with red cedar bark is brought, and the assistant, by incantation, makes the Cannibal vomit up the snake, wolf, or eagle inside him. The animal’s head is carried under his left arm while assistants hold the body behind; the creature vomits flesh and blood into the dish; the assistants cover the body with down, crying “Tloip!” The people beat time rapidly and the S’a’Lpsta disappears. Four rounds of beating time and the Cannibal is like an ordinary man again. He walks around the fire keeping it to his right and says, “Now Ba’exoula has left me.” The contents of the dish go into the water; the dish itself is burned in the dancing-house, supposedly carried up to heaven. He dances no more. A bed is made for him at the rear of the house for four days; afterward he may enter houses again, but must first stop at the door, shout “Wa, wa, wa!” and jump over the threshold. Four days more and many men lead him to the river for the final purification. He is pushed in, struggles, tries to duck his companions, cries out. Led back, he weeps because the spirit has left him entirely, and the people beat time. A piece of salmon is laid on his throat while they shout “Hoip, hoip!”; the salmon is taken away, and after a time he takes a single bite and must lie down. Once the dancing season ends he eats like anyone else. The salmon piece is given to children as a protection against sickness. Last comes the ceremony called “taking the lip of the S’a’Lpsta out of the Cannibal’s body,” performed amid cries of “Hoip!” The lip is thrown onto another Cannibal, who falls into ecstasy; the shaman retrieves it and throws it skyward, where it vanishes. The dish and spoon used during the ecstasy are destroyed. For four years the initiate must wear a small ring of red cedar bark, summer and winter alike.
The Olx and the Whistles of Eagles
The Olx order is likewise initiated in heaven by the being described earlier, though the clans’ traditions differ. Some Olx walk ropes stretched through the house during their performances. When an initiate returns, small whistles called Gaxi’laxa, imitating eagles’ voices, are heard outside. The Olx enters in ecstasy, scratching the people who gather to hold him and tearing their blankets, until at last a blanket is thrown over his head and he comes to his senses. As he enters the house the people beat time, and afterward he teaches the chorus-leader a song. His mask is large, with a great nose; he carries a dancing-club and rings of red cedar bark, and two masked assistants accompany him.
The Origin of the Mythology
With the societies described, Boas turns to the question of where this mythology came from. He sketches the social organization of the neighboring tribes and points back to his earlier paper on borrowing among the Coast tribes and their relations to the mythologies of the interior. The Bella Coola legends, he observes, resemble those of the other Coast tribes—and there the account closes, leaving the reader with the comparison rather than a verdict.
The stories themselves fall into loose families. A cycle of origin tales follows the Sun’s children and the ancestors sent down to found villages, and it is here that the book’s most memorable figures appear. Totos5’nx descends from heaven in a world still dark, trades canoes with an abalone-shell chief, and only when he arrives does the sun rise for the first time; he carries the whistles of the sisau’k ceremonial north to the Haida and Tsimshian and leaves olachen in the rivers. Winwi’na, who longs for fish to ascend the Bella Coola River, dreams of warring on the salmon and sails west with the birds and animals in a self-moving canoe, each bird stealing a male and female fish child while the salmon, unable to see them, play on the beach. The Salmon boy, found in the belly of a fish and raised by a chief’s wife, returns to the salmon country, survives a toothed bride by grinding down her teeth with stones, and comes home to teach his people never to break salmon bones.
A second family turns on the Snéné’iq, a black cannibal being whose glance brings lightning. One man feigns death to discover who steals bodies from the burial ground and escapes with a harpoon; another wins a copper and a set of masks from a grieving Snéné’iq mother; a girl who begs for tallow is carried off in a basket and warned by a rooted old woman that the food is the fat of the dead. Elsewhere the Deer avenges his murdered son by dancing his enemies to sleep and beheading them, the woman who married a Stump escapes to the sky and bears the Sun a son who scorches the world, and a gambler who loses his wife “like a dog” follows his wolf bride into another country. Boas closes the ceremonial material with the Cannibal Society and the Olx, describing initiation in the House of Myths, the long pacifying of the possessed novice, the vomiting of the indwelling monster, and the final purification in the river.
What the System Means
Boas reads the mythology as a whole rather than a heap of episodes. The five worlds, the reborn ghosts, the reversible seasons of the ghost country, the tides swallowed twice daily by Séusats, the earthquake caused by a giant shifting his grip on the stone bar that holds the earth—these are not isolated fancies but parts of a cosmology that explains the ordinary world’s workings. The village traditions do similar work on a smaller scale: ancestor groups receive their salmon weirs, their languages, their ceremonial whistles, and their rights to land, so that myth becomes a charter for social arrangement. The masked societies belong to the same fabric, since their initiations are said to happen in heaven and their paraphernalia—the copper box of whistles, the masks taken from a Snéné’iq’s house—are traced to mythic events.
Boas also turns a critical eye on his own discipline. In the book’s closing discussion he asks where this mythology came from, sets the Bella Coola beside neighbouring coast tribes and interior traditions, and weighs how far stories have been borrowed and reshaped in transit. The question matters because the Bella Coola system looks unusually tidy for its region, and Boas wants to know whether that tidiness is old or the work of recent contact and recombination. He does not pretend to settle it.
The study’s lasting value lies in the sheer quantity of narrative it preserves and in the method on display: texts taken down carefully, sources named, errors admitted, and interpretation kept apart from transcription. Later readers have mined it for the light it throws on Salishan religion, on the ceremonial societies of the Northwest Coast, and on the way a people can build a whole ordered universe—heavens, underworlds, ghosts, salmon, and all—out of the materials of their daily lives.
