Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America Book

Franz Boas (1858 - 1942), geographer, linguist, physical anthropologist and ethnologist, is considered the father of modern North American anthropology. The 1895 German publication of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Küste Amerikas gathered together in a single volume his earliest research in British Columbia, consisting of 250 B.C. First Nations myths and legends which had been previously serialized in German periodicals between 1891 and 1895. In 1973, the B.C. Indian Language Project first commissioned this peer-reviewed translation from Dietrich Bertz of Victoria, who completed his revised draft in 1977, incorporating the 1976 introduction by Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss. Then began the Project's immense task of researching, footnoting and annotating the text, which was to continue intermittently for over twenty years. In a moving introduction to this translation of the Sagen, Claude Lévi-Strauss&emdash;widely recognized as one of the world's foremost anthropologists&emdash;describes it as "one of the richest collections of mythological texts available for the whole of the North American continent." While the B.C. Indian Language Project has made its English translation of the Sagen privately available to researchers since the 1970s, the publication of the fully annotated translation of these texts is long overdue. One of the manuscript's assessors has called its publication in English "almost equivalent to the discovery of a group of 150-year-olds from these Native groups, all in full possession of their faculties and anxious to share their knowledge with anthropologists." This volume of First Nations myths and legends is an extraordinarily important document in the history of North American anthropology.Read More