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Paper short abstract

The proposed paper analyzes "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull," an oral narrative that was documented in 1930 in the Kwak'wala language of coastal British Columbia.

Paper long abstract

The proposed paper focuses on "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull," an oral narrative that was documented in 1930 in the Kwak'wala language of coastal British Columbia. In the course of this tale, the unnamed female protagonist drifts across the ocean—from whose surface she magically obtains a limitless supply of linen—before ultimately becoming queen of a tribe of Europeans. The story offers an etiology for European linen, which was a major item of exchange on the colonial Northwest Coast of North America. Interestingly, the narrative's constituent scenes and motifs are not transparently related to one another, and their implications regarding European linen are ambiguous. Moreover, these elements find few direct parallels in Kwak’wala oral literature, but similar components are attested individually in stories from other regions of the Northwest Coast. I will interpret these features of the narrative in light of the fact that Northwest Coast societies treat language, in certain circumstances, as “objectual” (I borrow this term from anthropologist Michael Silverstein), or akin to material things, with attributes such as value, rarity, authenticity, and provenance. There is explicit evidence that in the 19th and early-20th centuries, linguistic objects included names, ceremonial songs, and specific types of narrative. I will suggest that the recombinant parts of "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull" were, likewise, conceptualized as objects. The text, accordingly, illustrates how European linen moves among and impacts indigenous communities by comparing these processes with how the story’s constituent motifs have been brought together from afar.