The Complete Seymour: Colville Storyteller

by Peter J. Seymour, Anthony Mattina (Editor), Madeline DeSautel (Editor)

Overview

Peter J. Seymour was a Salish storyteller. He carried forward earlier tales of elders along with his own experiences as fewer and fewer native speakers were sharing the Colville-Okanagan language and oral literature. To thwart the demise of this language, over the course of a decade he passed along Salish stories not only to his family but also to linguist Anthony Mattina.

The Complete Seymour: Colville Storyteller includes Seymour’s tales collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before his death. It documents Seymour’s rich storytelling and includes detailed morphological analyses and translations of this endangered language. This collection is an important addition to the canon of Native American narratives and literature and an essential volume for anyone studying Salish languages and linguistics.

Peter J. Seymour was a farmer, family man, hunter, jockey, and storyteller. Anthony Mattina is a professor of linguistics, emeritus, at the University of Montana–Missoula. He is the author of Colville-Okanagan Dictionary and the editor and co-translator (with Madeline DeSautel) of The Golden Woman: The Colville Narrative of Peter J. Seymour. Madeline DeSautel (1888–1979) was a native speaker of Colville-Okanagan. She and Anthony Mattina have co-translated two publications.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803277052
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	06/01/2015
Series:	Native Literatures of the Americas and Indigenous World Literatures
Pages:	816
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 10.10(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Peter J. Seymour was a farmer, family man, hunter, jockey, and storyteller. Anthony Mattina is a professor of linguistics, emeritus, at the University of Montana–Missoula. He is the author of Colville-Okanagan Dictionary and the editor and co-translator (with Madeline DeSautel) of The Golden Woman: The Colville Narrative of Peter J. Seymour. Madeline DeSautel (1888–1979) was a native speaker of Colville-Okanagan. She and Anthony Mattina have co-translated two publications.

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments

Preface

Symbols and Abbreviations

Introduction

The Colville-Okanagan land and its people

The languages

Colville-Okanagan social organization

Colville-Okanagan knowledge

The Texts

Autobiographical and ethnographic texts

Autobiography

Harvesting

Racing horses

A hunting trip

Marriage customs

After the birth of a child

Partnership butchering

The attainment of provisions

The rainy hunting trip

Tales of European origin

Black Pig

The grateful dead version 1

The grateful dead version 2

The Devil and the black man

captikʷɬ

How Coyote got his powers

Coyote and Whale

Coyote and Grizzly

The two goats

Lynx and the virgin

BlueJay and Wolf

The transcription and analysis of the texts

Approximate phonemic transcriptions

Phrasal words and amalgams

Alternate forms

Inflectional and non-inflectional material

Derivational affixes

Inflectional affixes

Person Marking

The suffix -y̓

List in tabular form of remaining inflectional affixes

Word classes

Nominal and pronominal arguments

Autobiographical and ethnographic texts

Autobiography

Harvesting

Racing horses

A hunting trip

Marriage customs

After the birth of a child

Partnership butchering

The attainment of provisions

The rainy hunting trip

Tales of European origin

Black Pig

The grateful dead version 1 (unfinished

The grateful dead version 2

The Devil and the Black Face

captikʷɬ

How Coyote got his powers

Coyote and Whale

Coyote and Grizzly

The two goats

Lynx and the virgin

Blue Jay and Wolf

Index of stems and inflectional affixes

Index of roots

Lexical affixes

Index and chronology of Pete Seymour’s narrations

References.

Editorial Reviews

"The volume shows the value of deep engagement, of Seymour with his own elders and ancestral narrative traditions and of Mattina with the community of indigenous scholars and storytellers."—Bruce Granville Miller, Pacific Northwest Quarterly

Pacific Northwest Quarterly - Bruce Granville Miller

"This collection is an important addition to the canon of Native American narratives and literature and an essential volume for anyone studying Salish languages and linguistics."—Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas

“For nearly half a century Tony Mattina has been one of those extremely rare scholars to stick with the narrative legacy of a single mysterious, master storyteller, whose genius and wisdom he serves up in this career-culminating book. Working in close auspices with the Colville-Okanagan communities of Washington State and British Columbia, Mattina [has] . . . produced this stunning and original anthology of their collective imagination, as filtered through the old, old stories of the now-deceased sage, Peter Seymour. [It is] one of those quiet triumphs that took one humanistic spirit from academia to unearth, translate, and contextualize the genius of another humanistic spirit from another cultural world.”—Peter Nabokov, author of Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places
   
 

Peter Nabokov