Ebook: A story as sharp as a knife: the classical Haida mythtellers and their world

Prologue : reading what cannot be written -- Goose food -- Spoken music -- The one they hand along -- Wealth has big eyes -- Oral tradition and the individual talent -- The anthropologist and the dogfish -- Who's related to whom? -- The epic dream -- The shaping of the canon -- The flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu -- You are that too -- Sleek blue beings -- The iridescent silence of the trickster -- The last people in the world -- A knife that could open its mouth -- The historian of Ttanuu -- Chase what's gone -- A blue hole in the heart -- The prosody of meaning -- Shellheap of the spirit-beings -- 1 November 1908 -- How the town mother's wife became the widow of her husband's sister's sons -- Political afterword -- Appendix 1 : Spelling, pronounciatio and Native American typography -- Appendix 2 : Haida geograpy and village names -- Appendix 3 : The structure of Skaay's Raven Travelling.;The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For a thousand years and more before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished in these islands. The masterworks of classical Haida sculpture, now enshrined in many of the world's great museums, range from exquisite tiny amulets to magnificent huge housepoles. Classical Haida literature is every bit as various and fine. It extends from tiny jewels crafted by master songmakers to elaborate mythic cycles lasting many hours. The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation fr.