¹ Jacobs, Melville, “The Fate of Indian Literatures in Oregon,” Northwest Review 5(Summer 1962), 95Google Scholar, quoting an informant regarding newly-introduced materials.

² A palpably externally influenced Belauan tale quoted in Parmentier, Richard J., The Sacred Remains: Myth, History, and Polity in Belau (Chicago, 1987), 263.Google Scholar

³ Caption to photograph in Trask, Haunani-Kay, “Hawai'i: Colonization and De-Colonization” in Class and Culture in the South Pacific, ed. Hooper, Anthonyet al. (Auckland, 1987), 175Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

⁴ Hall, Joseph, The Old Religion (London, 1686), 179Google Scholar, arguing against the Roman Catholic position that oral tradition was uniquely sufficient to preserve continuity from apostolic times to the present.

⁵ Mayor, Adrienne, Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton, 2005), 349n18.Google Scholar

⁶ In contrast, inhabitants of northern India took fossil remains in the area as evidence that the legendary Bharata War took place there and that the fossils were the relicts of preterhuman combatants; see van der Geer, Alexandra, Dermitzakis, Michael, and de Vos, John, “Fossil Folklore from India: the Siwalik Hills and the Mahabharata,” Folklore 119 (2008), 71–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ This word, often used by exponents of deep-time historicity, derives from the Latin intactus/a/um, meaning, literally, “untouched.” Consonant with this, modern usage implies an unchanging character—e.g., “not altered, broken, or impaired.” I treat it in this, its most specific definition, and I assume that those cited here do as well.

⁸ Masse, W. Bruce and Espenak, Fred, “Sky as Environment: Solar Eclipses and Hohokam Culture Change” in Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in the Ancient American Southwest, ed. Doyel, David E. and Dean, Jeffrey S. (Provo, 2006), 230Google Scholar, comparing it with mythology.

⁹ Hymes, Dell, Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (Lincoln, 2003), 404–05.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Echo-Hawk, Roger C., “Ancient History in the New World: Integrating Oral Traditions and the Archaeological Record in Deep Time,” American Antiquity 65(2000), 273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For further on Echo-Hawk's views see below.

¹¹ For recent examples addressing Classical Antiquity see Politics of Orality, ed. Cooper, Craig R. (Leiden, 2007)Google Scholar; and Orality, Literacy, Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman World, ed. Mackay, E. Anne (Leiden, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar As to the bible, W.F. Albright, the long-time and extraordinarily influential doyen of Old Testament studies and outspoken supporter of “the substantial historicity of [biblical] patriarchal tradition,” had no choice but to declare “the primacy of oral tradition over written literature” since no evidence outside the bible—the product of divinely-inspired oral tradition in his mind—exists: Albright, W.F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (2d ed.: Baltimore, 1947), 2.Google Scholar

¹² Thus we know of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Caligula, Macbeth, and numerous others, despite strenuous efforts by their successors to expunge them from the record, simply because that record was not entirely oral.

¹³ Love, Serena, “Materialisations of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting the Pyramid Kings” in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Egyptologists 2004 (2 vols.: Leuven, 2007), 2:1175.Google Scholar For a discussion of some possible reasons for this nepenthe see Autuori, Josep Cervelló, “The Thinite ‘Royal Lists;” Typology and Meaning” in Egypt at Its Origins 2, ed. Midant-Reynes, Beatrix and Tristant, Yann (Leuven, 2008), 887–99.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Love, , “Materialisations,” 1180.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Although Herodotus and others (especially Livy) often noted that they were merely transmitting information, without necessarily believing it.

¹⁶ Some still do—see below.

¹⁷ Echo-Hawk, , “Ancient History in the New World,” 270.Google Scholar In fact Echo-Hawk ends up by crediting oral tradition with astonishing properties, as noticed elsewhere in this paper.

¹⁸ Mason, Ronald J., Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions (Tuscaloosa, 2006), 248Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

¹⁹ Mason, Ronald, “Archaeology and Native North American Oral Traditions,” American Antiquity 65(2000), 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with emphasis added.

²⁰ For arguments against unfettered eclipse dating see Henige, David, “‘Day Was of Sudden turned into Night’: the Use of Eclipses in Dating Oral History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18(1976), 576–601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Chronology, Migration, and Drought in Interlacustrine Africa, ed. Webster, J.B. (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

²² Although showing desultory signs of life—e.g., Les sources orales de l'histoire de l'Afrique, ed. Perrot, Claude-Hélène (Paris, 1989)Google Scholar; and Entre la parole et l'écrit: contributions à l'histoire de l'Afrique en hommage à Claude-Hélène Perrot, ed. Chastanet, Monique and Chrétien, Jean-Pierre (Paris, 2008).Google Scholar

²³ Schmidt, Peter R. and Walz, Jonathan R., “Representing African Pasts through Historical Archaeology,” American Antiquity 72(2007), 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For more on mnemonics see below.

²⁴ Myth and Geology, ed. Piccardi, L. and Masse, W.B. (London, 2007).Google Scholar Each of the twenty-five essays seek to demonstrate that some myth or other actually refers/ed to a datable geological occasion. A similar work, though intended for a different audience, is Stories from a Heated Earth Earth: Our Geothermal Heritage, ed. Cataldi, Raffaele, Hodgson, Susan F., and Lund, John W. (Sacramento, 1999)Google Scholar, comprising 34 studies, many of which rely in part on ancient oral traditions to make their case.

²⁵ Hollinger, R. Eric, “review of Ronald J. Mason, Inconstant Companions” Plains Anthropologist 52(2007), 367.Google Scholar

²⁶ For the historical background see, e.g., Fumoleau, René, As Long As This Land Shall Last (Toronto, [1975?])Google Scholar; and Tennant, Paul, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: the Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989 (Vancouver, 1990).Google Scholar

²⁷ Delgamuukw and Ors v the Queen (1991), 79 DLR (4th), 281.

²⁸ Delgamuukw and Ors v the Queen (1991), 79 DLR (4th), 447. “First Nations” is the rubric applied to American Indians and Inuits in Canada.

²⁹ McEachern, Justice Allan, quoted in Culhane, Dara, The Pleasure of the Crown (Burnaby, 1998), 141.Google Scholar

³⁰ Delgamuukw v. British Columbia scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1997, 86-87. Along the way, the decision spoke of “an unbroken chain across the generations … to the present day.”

³¹ For these see, e.g., Beyond the Nass Valley: National Implications of the Supreme Court's Delgamuukw Decision, ed. Lippert, Owen (Vancouver, 1999)Google Scholar, esp. von Gernet, Alexander, “What My Elders Taught Me: Oral Traditions as Evidence in Aboriginal Litigation,” 103–29Google Scholar; Dacks, Gurston, “British Columbia after the Delgamuukw Decision: Land Claims and Other Processes,” Canadian Public Policy 28(2002), 239–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Mills, Antonia, Eagle Down Is Our Law: Witsuwit'en Law, Feasts, and land Claims (Vancouver, 1994)Google Scholar, See as well idem., “Problems of Establishing Authority in Testifying on Behalf of the Witsuwit'en,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19/2(1996), 39-52.

³³ Marsden, Susan, Defending the Mouth of the Skeena: Perspectives on Tsimshian Tlingit Relations (Prince Rupert BC, 2000). 12.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid., 47

³⁵ Ibid., 50.

³⁶ Marsden, Susan, “Adawx, spanaxnox, and the Geopolitics of the Tsimshian,” BC Studies 135(Autumn 2002), 109n23.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., 135.

³⁸ Cruikshank, Julie, “Legend and Landscape: Convergence of Oral and Scientific Traditions in the Yukon Territory,” Arctic Anthropology 18/2(1981), 72–73.Google Scholar

³⁹ Cruikshank, Julie, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver, 2005), 61.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Cruikshank, , “Legend and Landscape,” 86.Google Scholar For Vine Deloria's view on “science” see below.

⁴¹ Kii7iljuus and Harris, Heather, “Tllsda Xaaydas K'aaygang.nga: Long, Long Ago Ancient Haida Stories” in Haida Gwaii: Human Human and Environment form the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People, ed. Fedje, Daryl W. and Mathewes, Rolf W. (Vancouver, 2005), 123, 124.Google Scholar

⁴² Duff, Wilson, Histories, Territories, and Laws of the Kitwancool (Victoria, 1969), 36.Google Scholar

⁴³ Sterritt, Neil J.et al., Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed (Vancouver, 1998), 15.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Roth, Christopher F., “Without Treaty, Without Conquest: Indigenous Sovereignty in Post-Delgamuukw British Columbia,” Wicazo Sa Review 17(Fall 2002), 159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁵ Sterritt, et al., Tribal Boundaries, 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Kii7iljuus/Harris, , “Tllsda Xaaydas,” 123.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Culhane, , Pleasure, 123.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Maud, Ralph, A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend: a Short History of Myth-Collecting and a Survey of Published Texts (Vancouver, 1982), 29–113Google Scholaret passim.

⁴⁹ For some instances where Henry Tate, one of Franz Boas' principal informants, turned written traditions back into oral ones see Ralph, J.D., “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology,” American Ethnologist 16(1989), 158–62.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Miller, Jay, Moieties and Cultural America: Manipulation of Knowledge in a Pacific Northwest Coast Native Community,” Arctic Anthropology 18/2(1981), 23–32.Google Scholar

⁵¹ For African examples of conscious attempts to forget unpalatable pasts see Greene, Sandra E., “Whispers and Silences: Explorations in African Oral History,” Africa Today 50/2(Fall/Winter 2003), 41–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roberts, Richard, “Reversible Social Processes, Historical Memory, and the Production of History,” HA 17(1990), 341–49.Google Scholar

⁵² Sparrow, Kathy Bedard, “Correcting the Record: Haida Oral Tradition in Anthropological Narratives,” Anthropologica 4(1998), 215–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵³ McMillan, Alan D., “Reviewing the Wakashan Migration Hypothesis” in Emerging from the Mist: Studies in Northwest Coast Culture History, ed. Matson, R.G.et al. (Vancouver, 2003), 242–59.Google Scholar One of the peculiarities of these arguments is their apparent unawareness that pristine oral traditions would practically negate territorial disputes. Instead, these are ubiquitous, inviting comparison with areas such as the Gold Coast, littoral.

⁵⁴ Karlson, Keith Thor, “Reflections on Indigenous History and Memory: Reconstructing and Reconsidering Contact” in Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, ed. Lutz, John S. (Vancouver, 2007), 49.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Halpin, Marjorie M. and Seguin, Margaret, “Tsimshian Peoples: Southern Tsimshian, Coast Tsimshian, Nishga, and Gitksan” in Handbook of North American Indians 7: Northwest Coast (Washington, 1990), 276.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Beattie, Owenet al., “The Kwäday Dän Ts'ínchi Discovery from a Glacier in British Columbia,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 24(2000), 143, 144.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Daly, Richard H., Our Box Was Full: an Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs (Vancouver, 2005), 60–61.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ This commonplace process is certainly worth more extended attention. But to point out only one example, the witnesses in the Delgamuukw case had access to the testimony in an earlier and similar proceeding, when the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission on Indian affairs for the Province of British Columbia sat from 1913 to 1916 collecting evidence from various and sundry. A four-volume Report of the proceedings was published and the raw testimony has now been digitized at www.ubcic.bc.ca/resources/final_report.htm for all to consult and play off. The Waitangi Tribunal was established in New Zealand in 1975 specifically to address and redress issues arising from the ‘cession’ of Maori lands to the British in 1840. Like the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, most of its ongoing proceedings have been published and/or are at the Tribunal's website (www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz). Small wonder then that “[t]he interweaving of oral and written sources of the last 170 years has made it difficult for claimants to articulate their own traditions without reference to a range of written historical sources.” See Belgrave, Michael, “The Tribunal and the Past: Taking a Roundabout Path to a New History” in Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Belgrave, Michaelet al. (Auckland, 2005), 47.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Hymes, Dell, “Mythology” in Handbook of North American Indians 7: Northwest Coast (Washington, 1990), 597–98.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Wickwire, Wendy C., “To See Ourselves as the Other's Other: Nlaka'pamux Contact Narratives,” Canadian Historical Review 75(1994), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referring to early contact with Europeans.

⁶¹ Cruishank, , Do Glaciers Listen?, 60.Google Scholar

⁶² Cruikshank, Julie, “Oral History, Narrative Strategies, and Native American Historiography: Pespectives from Yukon Territory, Canada” in Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, ed. Shoemaker, Nancy (New York, 2002), 18.Google Scholar

⁶³ The difficulties in coming to terms with many of the arguments of this cadre is well exemplified in Schreiber, Dorothée, “Glaciers Listen: a Review Essay and Response to Cole Harris,” BC Studies 159(Autumn, 2008), 131–39.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ For some context see Blackburn, Carole, “Producing Legitimacy: Reconciliation and the Negotiation of Aboriginal Rights in Canada,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ns 13(2007), 621–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁵ Reid, Thomas, in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. Hamilton, William (2 vols.: Edinburgh, 1863), 1:197.Google Scholar Reid was one of the famous eighteenth-century Scottish political philosophers.

⁶⁶ For New Zealand, there is the continuing work of the Waitangi tribunal, established in 1975 to address grievances resulting from land seizures in the nineteenth century. For details see www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz; and Brookfield, F.M., Waitangi and Indigenous Rights: Revolution, Law, and Legitimation (Auckland, 2006).Google Scholar For a discussion of “the subordinate role played by history within the Waitangi Tribunal process.” Belgrave, , “Tribunal,” 35–55.Google Scholar Some of the early complications that arose are discussed in Ward, Alan, “History and Historians before the Waitangi Tribunal,” New Zealand Journal of History 24(1990), 151–67.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, comp, and ed. Isaacs, Jennifer (Sydney, 1980).Google Scholar “The Dreaming” or “Dreamtime” are terms applied to the period before the arrival of Europeans in 1788.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 28.

⁶⁹ Words on Our Country, comp, and ed. Dixon, R.M.W. (St Lucia, 1991), 41–42.Google Scholar Elsewhere Dixon waxed similarly: “[a]ll this points to the story of the volcanic eruptions, and of the spread of rain forest, having been handed down from generation to generation for something like ten millennia:” Dixon, R.M.W., The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland (Cambridge, 1972), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while in his Australian Languages (Cambridge, 2002), 10–11Google Scholar, he speaks of a 17,000-year-old tradition.

⁷⁰ E.g., Kimber, Richard, “Black Lightning: Aborigines and Fire in Central Australia and the Western Desert,” Archaeology in Oceania 18(1983), 38–45.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Blake, Barry, “Wiowurrung, the Melbourne Language” in Handbook of Australian Languages, ed. Dixon, R.M.W. and Blake, Barry J. (5 vols.: Melbourne, 1977–2000), 4:33–34.Google Scholar Strangely, Blake found “the persistence of the flooding theme [to be] compelling,” without ever apparently considering the primeval Noachian flood as a source.

⁷² E.g., Rood, Josephine, Archaeology of the Dreamtime (2d ed.: Sydney, 1989), 123-24, 189–95.Google Scholar

⁷³ Sea levels have been virtually constant in Australia for the last 4000 to 6000 years; see Pugh, D.T., Changing Sea Levels: Effects of Tides, Weather, and Climate (Cambridge, 2004), 222–24.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ The verdict and its justification can be found at www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23.html. For some context see Cowlishaw, Gillian, “Did the Earth Move for You? The Anti-Mabo Debate,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 9(1995), 42–63.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ For some background and several examples see Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World, ed. Lilley, Ian (Sydney, 2000)Google Scholar; and Native Title Newsletter (www.aiatsis.gov.au/rsrch/ntru/publications/newsletters.html), accessed 18 April 2009.

⁷⁶ For a discussion of one set of “filtered” Aboriginal traditions see Morphy, F. and Morphy, H., “The ‘Myths’ of Ngalakan History: Ideology and Images of the Past in Northern Australia,” Man ns 19(1984), 459–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁷ For early evangelizing that used the biblical account to translate aboriginal languages see, among others, Carey, Hilary, “Lancelot Threlkeld and Missionary Linguistics in Australia to 1850” in Missionary Linguistics, ed. Zwartjes, Otto and Hovdhaugen, Even (Amsterdam, 2004), 253–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, David A., “‘Language To Save the Innocent’: Reverend L. Threlkeld's Linguistic Mission,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94(2008), 107–25Google Scholar; and the several essays in Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, ed. Swain, Tony and Rose, Deborah Bird (Bedford Park SA, 1988).Google Scholar Such initiatives usually began with Genesis, which of course climaxed with Noah's universal flood.

⁷⁸ Sansom, Basil, “The Brief Reach of History and the Limitation of Recall in Traditional Aboriginal Societies and Cultures,” Oceania 76(2006), 169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁹ Northwood, S.J., “review of T.P. Wiseman, Myths of Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 98(2008), 183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiseman chronicles the rise and fall of particular myths to cope with evolving political circumstances in republican Rome.

⁸⁰ This elaborates on my “Imported Intelligent Design or Autochthonous Dynamic Equilibrium?” Paideuma 54(2008), 265–69.Google Scholar

⁸¹ For my take on the role of the plausible/implausible criterion in historical investigation, see Henige, David, “The Implausibility of Plausibility/the Plausibility of Implausibility,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 30(2004), 311–35.Google Scholar

⁸² Orwell, 1984.

⁸³ This trait reminds us of a modern manifestation—the wiki. like oral traditions, wikis are collaborative efforts, are designed to change constantly, anyone can make these changes for whatever reasons, and when this happens the previous versions become indiscernible and all but irretrievable. Only the latest recension survives, and then only until further changes are deemed necessary, for whatever variety of reasons. Users hope that wild-information is correct, but have no way to trace how it came to be and must remain uncertain about how long it will continue to be.

⁸⁴ This was extravagantly the case in the in/famous Merkle incident in 1908; see Anderson, David W., More Than Merkle (Lincoln, 2000), 171–83Google Scholar; and Murphy, Cait, Crazy '08 (New York, 2007), 191–95.Google Scholar In this case, observers and participants could not or would not remember what transpired as early as later the same day. In contrast to some instance mentioned below, this case arose in an entirely literate context, which allows us to fathom fully the incredible differences in testimony, as well as some of the reasons for them, even if we can never really know exactly what happened that day.

⁸⁵ For the tendency for lineages to die out after a few generations see Gaines, Sylvia W. and Gaines, Warren M., “Simulating Success or Failure: Another Look at Small Population Dynamics,” American Antiquity 39(1997), 683–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Gaineses concluded that half of all small lineages are likely to die out within three generations.

⁸⁶ Thus statements like those by Donald Bahr and his fellow authors, referring to the Tohono O'odham, that “[e]ach myth might, could, and should be true as far as its teller was concerned; and thus I assume that no story was ever intentionally falsified, neither in telling to Indians nor in transmission to a white recorder,” are extraordinarily presuppositious; Bahr, Donaldet al., The Swift Short Time of Gods on Earth: the Hohokam Chronicles (Berkeley, 1998), 7–8.Google Scholar For a similar point of view see Teague, Lynn S., “Prehistory and the Traditions of the O'odham and Hopi,” Kiva 58(1993), 435–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁷ Fifty years ago we often saw references to societies in which infidelity of transmission was punished by death, maiming, exile, or public mortification, but never quite how this crime would have been detected or whether the charges could be advanced for reasons that had nothing to do with texts. Societies were sometimes cited, but never sources. And how would we know whether the sanctions were applied for failure to recall the original version or for failure to adopt a revised text? For instance, Carolyn Abad is confident of the accuracy of Hawaiian oral traditions because “[t]oo many truth monitors, especially in the form of the real or potential rivals” of paramount chiefs, were “part of the court contexts where such histories were recited.” Abad, , “The Evolution of Hawaiian Socio-Political Complexity: an Analysis of Hawaiian Oral Traditions” (PhD., University of Hawai'i, 2000), 36.Google Scholar Abad fails to explain why these individuals would have been so intent of preserving the very versions (the incumbent truth) that contributed to denying them the offices they sought. See below as well.

⁸⁸ E.g., for the focal area see Boyd, Robert T., “Another Look at the ‘Fever and Ague’ of Western Oregon,” Ethnohistory 22(1975), 135–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Decker, Jody F., “Tracing Historical Diffusion Patterns: the Case of the 1780-82 Smallpox Epidemic among the Indians of Western Canada,” Native Studies Review 4(1988), 1–24Google Scholar; Boyd, Robert, “Smallpox in the Pacific Northwest: the First Epidemics,” BC Studies 101(Spring 1994), 3–35Google Scholar; Vibert, Elizabeth, “‘The Natives Were Strong To Live’: Reinterpreting Early-Nineteenth-Century Prophetic Movements in the Columbia Plateau,” Ethnohistory 42(1995), 205–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Archer, Christon I., “Whose Scourge? Smallpox Epidemics on the Northwest Coast” in Pacific Empire: Essays in Honor of Glyndwr Williams, ed. Frost, Alan and Samson, Jane (Carlton South AU, 1999), 165–91Google Scholar; Boyd, Robert, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among the Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (Vancouver, 1999).Google Scholar Most of these attribute the introduction of new diseases to the Spanish expedition of 1774 noted below, and all postulate high mortality, usually greater than 75 percent.

⁸⁹ Carlson, Keith Thor, “Towards an Indigenous Historiography: Events, Migrations, and the Formation of ‘Post-Contact’ Coast Salish Collective Identities” in Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish, ed. Miller, Bruce G. (Vancouver, 2007), 159Google Scholar, describes one Fraser Valley group as having “a history of losing their history” because of epidemics, migrations, and intergroup conflict. There are no obvious reasons to suspect that this group is unusual in this respect.

⁹⁰ Evidence of warlike activities is ubiquitous over time and space, as several recent studies amply document: see Keeley, Lawrence H., War before Civilization (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Kelly, Raymond C., Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Otterbein, Keith F., How War Began (College Station TX, 2004)Google Scholar; and Gat, Azar, War in Human Civilization (New York, 2006).Google Scholar The notion that warfare is confined to societies of higher technological achievement is merely another mistaken notion floating out there in an ever-expanding mythosphere.

⁹¹ Examples of such coexistences and its effects are legion; for an interesting case see Shell, Alison, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), esp. 149–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMacdonald, M.C.A., “Literacy in an Oral Environment” in Writing and Ancient Near Eastern Society, ed. Bienkowski, P.et al. (New York, 2005), 49–118Google Scholar, provides a useful overview of several cases, some (e.g., the Vai) modern.

⁹² For more on this see section XI below.

⁹³ In discussing testimony recorded in the Minute Books of the Maori Land Court, especially in the late nineteenth century, Ann Parsonson observes that the new adversarial context resulted in “the reduction of traditions to a more singular narrative” and adds that, “[a]s decisions were made about the shaping of those cases, whole histories of alliance, antagonism, and obligations had to be taken into account, and those decisions themselves and their outcomes would be recorded in the oral histories.” As a result, “outsiders may never know the extent to which kaiwhakahaere [the parties' representatives] or individual witnesses ‘edited’ their evidence as they spoke, in acknowledgment of the importance of preserving, or not allowing the deterioration of, relationships that would continue long after the court had left the district.” Parsonson, Ann, “Stories for Land: Oral Narratives in the Maori Land Court” in Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Attwood, Bain and Magowan, Fiona (Wellington, 2001), 28, 39.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ Cornplanter, Jesse, Legends of the Longhouse (Philadelphia, 1938), 34.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ Emmons, G.T., “Native Account of the Meeting between La Perouse and the Tlingit,” American Anthropologist 13(1911), 294–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. The Journal of Jean-François de Galaup de la Perouse, 1785-1788, ed. and trans. Dunmore, John (2 vols.: London, 1995–1998), 1:103–26.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ For a brief, and also highly allusive, and derivative Tlingit account of (apparently) this occasion see Haa Shukd, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives, ed. Dauenhauer, Nora Mark and Dauenhauer, Richard (Seattle, 1987), 299-301, 435–40.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Henige, David, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Examples from the Fante Coastlands,” JAM 15(1974), 223–35.Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Mayor, Adrienne, “Place Names Describing Fossils in Oral Traditions” in Myth and Geology, 254.Google Scholar Repeated verbatim in Mayor, , Fossil Legends, 200.Google Scholar In both cases she inadvertently demonstrates that the information in question was known and published as early as 1806.

⁹⁹ To be fair, one can see the possibility that Mayor might have wanted to say something different here, but she did not.

¹⁰⁰ Mayor, , “Place Names,” 250Google Scholar; variantly repeated in Mayor, , Fossil Legends, 101.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ E.g., Spier, Edward H., The Yaquis: a Cultural History (Tucson, 1980), 5–58Google Scholar; Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, Adaptación y Resistencia en el Yaquimi (Tlalpan, 1995), 29–50Google Scholar; idem., Missionaries, Miners, and Indians (Tucson, 1982), 22-57.

¹⁰² de Ribas, Andrés Pérez, Historia de los triunfos de N.S. Fe entre gentes las màs barbares y fieras del Nuevo Orbe (3 vols.: Mexico City, 1944), 2:112.Google Scholar For the number see Hu-DeHart, Missionaries, 111-12n28. We can doubt the exactitude of the covering claim without doubting that there was a significant impact.

¹⁰³ See her “Codex Azcatitlan and the Work of Torquemada: a Historiographie Puzzle in Aztec-Mexica Sources,” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 24(2008), 151–94.Google Scholar Of course this is only one of the most recent of innumerable studies of the phenomenon in post-conquest Mesoamerica. An especially good example of the effects of this recognition is Umberger, Emily, “Notions of Aztec History: the Case of the Great Temple Dedication,” Res 42(2002), 87–108.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ MacCormack, Sabine, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, 2007), xvi.Google Scholar Cf. The Huarochirí Manuscript, ed. and trans. Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste (Austin, 1991), 2-4 et passim.

¹⁰⁵ Inglis, Richard and Haggarty, James C., “Cook to Jewitt: Three Decades of Change in Nootka Sound” in Nuu-chah-nulth Voices, Histories, Objects, and Journeys, ed. Hoover, Alan L. (Vancouver, 2000), 93–94.Google Scholar As well as ship visitations, the Spanish maintained a standing garrison at Yuquot on Vancouver Island for about five years during this period. For a discussions of the extensive interaction there, see Christon I. Archer, “Seduction before Sovereignty: Spanish Efforts to Manipulate the Natives in Their Claims to the Northwest Coast” and Marshall, Yvonne, “Dangerous Liaisons: Maquinna, Quadra, and Vancouver in Nootka Sound, 1790-5” in From Maps to Metaphors: the Pacific World of George Vancouver, ed. Fisher, Robin and Johnston, Hugh (Vancouver, 1993), 127-59, 160–75.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ “The Journal of Jacinto Caamaño,” ed. and trans, by Grenfell, Harold, Wagner, Henry R., and Newcombe, W.A., British Columbia Historical Quarterly 2(1938), 215–18.Google Scholar The editors remarked (ibid., 218n) that this remains “one of the unsolved mysteries of the Northwest Coast.” The alternatives seem to be gifts from earlier Spanish ships during possibly unrecorded voyages or extremely long-distance trade.

¹⁰⁷ Wickwire, Wendy C., “To See Ourselves as the Other's Other: Nlaka'pamux Contact Narratives,” Canadian Historical Review 75(1994), 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰⁸ Dawson, George M., “Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878,” Geological Survey of Canada. Report of Progress for 1878-1879 (Montreal, 1880), 117BGoogle Scholar

¹⁰⁹ Dawson, George M., “The Haidas,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 65(1882), 404.Google Scholar

¹¹⁰ E.g., Patterson, E. Palmer II, Mission on the Nass (Waterloo, 1982)Google Scholar, for an account of proselytizing efforts in west-central British Columbia beginning in 1864; idem., “The Nishga and the Fur Trade, 1834-1842,” Native Studies Review 6/1(1990), 67-82. See as well works such as Fisher, Robin, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (Vancouver, 1977).Google Scholar

¹¹¹ For example, see the enormous amount of writing by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate during the nineteenth century that can be found scattered throughout Bibliotheca Missionum, ed. Streit, Robert and Dindinger, Johannes (28 vols.: Rome, 1916 to date), 3:724-970, 1009–31Google Scholarpassim. For the Oblates' educational efforts see Levasseur, Donat, Les Oblats de Marie Immaculée dans l'Ouest du Canada, 1845-1967 (Edmonton, 1995)Google Scholar, and McNally, Vincent J., The Lord's Distant Vineyard: a History of the Oblates and the Catholic Community in British Columbia (Edmonton, 2000).Google Scholar

¹¹² For this earliest period of economic and cultural interchange see, briefly, Cole, Douglas and Darling, David, “History of the Early Period” in Handbook of North American Indians 7: Northwest Coast (Washington, 1990), 7:119–34.Google Scholar

¹¹³ Recently and extensively see Missionary Linguistics, ed. Zwartjes, Otto and Hovdhaugen, Even (Philadelphia, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Missionary Linguistics II, ed. Zwartjes, Otto and Altman, Maria Cristina Salles (Amsterdam, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹⁴ Or perhaps even earlier—there simply is no way of knowing, but 1774 would be a terminus ad quern.

¹¹⁵ For these priests' account of this voyage see The California Coast: a Bilingual Edition of Documents from the Sutro Collection, ed. Cutter, Donald C. (Norman OK, 1969), 135–278.Google Scholar On the other hand, 1774 might well be too late. Francis Drake ventured up the coast at least as far as San Francisco Bay in 1579, and Francisco Gali did the same six years later. How many other voyages do we not know about? We do know that nearly fifty ships from the annual Manila galleon route went missing in circumstances that do not preclude beaching on the western shores of North America; see Schurz, William L., The Manila Galleon (New York, 1939), esp. 232–46.Google Scholar For other early Spanish voyages along the west coast of North America see Mathes, W. Michael, Vizcaino and Spanish Expansion in the Pacific Ocean, 1580-1630 (San Francisco, 1968).Google ScholarGough, B.M., “India-Based Expeditions of Trade and Discovery in the North Pacific in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Geographical Journal 155(1989), 215–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses this issue from the British perspective.

¹¹⁶ Warriors of the North Pacific: Missionary Accounts of the Northwest Coast, the Skeena and Stikine Rivers and the Klondike, 1829-1900, ed. Lillard, Charles (Victoria, 1984), 44.Google Scholar

¹¹⁷ Collison, W.H., In the Wake of the War Canoe (London, 1915), 44–45.Google Scholar

¹¹⁸ For Collison's activities see Tomalin, Marcus, “‘My Close Application to the Language’: William Henry Collison and Nineteenth-Century Haida Linguistics,” BC Studies 155(Autumn 2007), 93–128.Google Scholar

¹¹⁹ Morice, , History, 225.Google Scholar For details on this subset of American Indians see, among others, Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Judd, Carol M. and Ray, Arthur J. (Toronto, 1980).Google Scholar In particular see Cornelius Jaenen, “French Attitudes towards Native Society” in ibid., 59-72, and note the first date in the Ray title below. For other examples of acculturation in present British Columbia, extending back to the 1810s, see Coccola, Nicolas, They Call Me Father (Vancouver, 1998), 27–43Google Scholaret passim.

¹²⁰ [Cushing] Eells, , “Traditions of the ‘Deluge’ among the Tribes of the North-West,” American Antiquarian 1/2(1878), 71.Google Scholar For an almost identical complaint see The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the Northwest Pacific Coast from 1886 to 1931, ed. Rohner, Ronald (Chicago, 1969), 100.Google Scholar

¹²¹ The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, 1805-1821, ed. McClinton, Rowena (2 vols.: Lincoln, 2007).Google Scholar

¹²² E.g., New Echota Letters: Contributions of Samuel A. Worcester to the Cherokee Phoenix, ed, Kilpatrick, Jack F. and Kilpatrick, Anna G. (Dallas, 1968)Google Scholar, passim; Holland, Cullen Joe, “The Cherokee Indian Newspapers, 1828-1906: the Tribal Voice of a People in Transition” (PhD., University of Minnesota, 1956).Google Scholar An earlier and more far-flung enterprise is treated in Szasz, Margaret Connell, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Norman, 2007).Google Scholar

¹²³ Francis, Daniel and Morantz, Toby, Partners in Furs: a History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay, 1600-1870 (Kingston ON, 1983), 17.Google Scholar As Francis and Morantz put it, “when white men penetrated into James Bay they found that the Indian people were no strangers to the fur trade.”

¹²⁴ For further examples see Ray, Arthur J., Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto, 1974), 51–59Google Scholaret passim.

¹²⁵ “Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Mission des Peres de la Compagnie de Iesus au païs de la Nouvelle France, despuis l'esté de l'année 1661 jusques à l'esté de l'année 1662” in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Thwaites, Reuben Gold (73 vols: Cleveland, 1896–1901), 47:151–52Google Scholar; Francis, /Morantz, , Partners in Furs, 18–22.Google Scholar

¹²⁶ For a survey of all these efforts see Cook, Warren L., Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543-1819 (New Haven, 1973)Google Scholar; Walker, Dale L., Pacific Destiny: the Three-Century Journey to the Oregon Country (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Ruiz, Francisco Fuster, El final del descubrimiento del America: California, Canada y Alaska, 1765-1822 (Murcia, 1997).Google Scholar For a discussion of the intensive interchange between American Indians and white hunters from as early as the late eighteenth century see Colpitts, George, Game in the Garden: the Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver, 2002), esp. 14-37, 173–77.Google Scholar

¹²⁷ Walker, Alexander, An Account of a Voyage to the North West Coast of America in 1785 & 1786, ed. Fisher, Robin and Bumstead, J.M. (Vancouver, 1982), 177–89.Google Scholar

¹²⁸ Jewitt, John R., A Journal Kept at Nootka Sound (Fairfield WA, 1988), 36, 41, 43, 54, 58,59, 63, 68,69, 71,72, 76, 78, 79, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 110, 113, 114.Google Scholar For changes between the journal and the first published version see Meany, E.S. jr., “The Later Life of John R. Jewitt,” British Columbia Historical Quarterly 4(1940), 143–61.Google Scholar

¹²⁹ Or for that matter the fact that neighboring groups visited Jewitt's captors, who also took him in train on local visits in reciprocation.

¹³⁰ Hearne, Samuel, A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean, 1769-1770-1771-1772, ed. Glover, Richard (Toronto, 1958)Google Scholar; Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. Tyrrell, J.B. (Toronto, 1934)Google Scholar; McGoogan, Ken, Ancient Mariner: the Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean (Toronto, 2003), 75–182Google Scholar; McGrath, Robin, “Samuel Hearne and the Inuit Oral Tradition,” Studies in Canadian Literature 18(1993), 94–108.Google Scholar Philip Turnor also made several trips in northern Canada between 1779 and 1791.

¹³¹ Harmon, Daniel Williams, Journal, 1800-1819, ed. Lamb, W. Kaye (Victoria, 2006).Google Scholar

¹³² Especially after Harmon became a born-again Christian in September of 1813; ibid., 144-46. After that he was dismissive of the sufficient godliness of most of his fellow traders. For an example of his own missionizing efforts, see ibid., 164,168,174-75.

¹³³ Harmon, Daniel W., Sixteen Years in the Indian Country: the Journal of Daniel Williams Harmon, 1800-1816, ed. Lamb, W. Kaye (Toronto, 1957), 254.Google Scholar

¹³⁴ For a study of probably the most important, but also the most subterranean, channel of communication, see Van Kirk, Sylvia, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman, 1983).Google Scholar

¹³⁵ Vibert, Elizabeth, Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846 (Norman OK, 1997), xi.Google Scholar

¹³⁶ Journals and Letters of Pierre Gualtier de Varennes de la Verendrye and His Sons, ed. Burpee, Lawrence J. (Toronto, 1927), 367–69.Google Scholar

¹³⁷ For a classic example of feedback from the Verendrye oeuvre see Moreau, Bill, “The Legend of Père Aulneau, 1736: the Development of Myth in the Northwest,” CCHA Historical Studies (Ottawa) 69(2003), 52–63.Google Scholar And what of the possible effects of the Lewis and Clark expedition that spent two years in continuous contact with several other Indian groups? I have not delved into the voluminous reportage on this two-year-long expedition, but I can only assume that it contains numerous instances of this kind. For just one example, see Stewart, Frank H., “Hidatsa Origin Traditions Reported by Lewis and Clark,” Plains Anthropologist 21(1976), 89–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³⁸ Podruchny, Carolyn, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln, 2006).Google Scholar

¹³⁹ Ibid., 4-6. See as well Carter, Sarah, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada (Toronto, 1999).Google Scholar

¹⁴⁰ Among others, see Thompson, Stith, European Tales among the North American Indians (Colorado Springs, 1919).Google Scholar

¹⁴¹ Voegelin, C.F. and Hymes, D.H., “A Sample of North American Indian Dictionaries with Reference to Acculturation,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97(1953), 634–44.Google Scholar

¹⁴² Ramsey, Jarold, “The Bible in Western Indian Mythology,” Journal of American Folklore 90(1977), 442–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Another major contribution is Lee Utley, Francis, “The Migration of Folktales: Four Channels to the Americas,” Current Anthropology 15(1974), 5–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with commentary and reply, 13-27.

¹⁴³ A number of stimulus-response occasions are noticed in Harris, Cole, “Social Power and Cultural Change in Pre-Colonial British Columbia,” BC Studies 115/116(Autumn/Winter 1997/1998), 45–82Google Scholar, but this is only one of many. For more on early commercial and missionary contacts—as well as land disputes among Indian groups—see Patterson, E. Palmer II, “A Decade of Change: Origins of the Nishga and Tsimshian Land Protests in the 1880s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 18(1983), 40–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., Mission on the Nass.

¹⁴⁴ As an example (noticed in more detail below), Mayor, , Fossil Legends, 109–15Google Scholar, treats Zuni myths of origin as uncontarninated despite well over three centuries of proselytization by Spanish and American missionaries. Andrew O. Wiget does the same for the Hopi: Wiget, , “Truth and the Hopi: an Historiographie Study of Documented Oral Tradition concerning the Coming of the Spanish,” Ethnohistory 29(1982), 183–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴⁵ Barber, /Barber, , When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Princeton, 2004), 8.Google Scholar

¹⁴⁶ Jacobs, , “Fate,” 90–99Google Scholar

¹⁴⁷ Clark, Ella, “Indian Geology,” Pacific Discovery 16/5(09-10 1963), 5.Google Scholar

¹⁴⁸ Just the same, “Indian Geology” offered a sensible approach to the questions Clark raised—far more so than many who have used her work, although her provenancing was lax.

¹⁴⁹ Thus, pace Masse, W. Bruceet al., “Exploring the Nature of Myth and Its Role in Science” in Myth and Geology, 18–19Google Scholar, there is no evidence that the story was “written down very soon after the Europeans first arrived.” It might have been as much as fifty to sixty years later.

¹⁵⁰ Nor is it mentioned in various collections of Klamath myths such as Spier, Leslie, Klamath Ethnography (Berkeley, 1930)Google Scholar; idem., “Ideal and Expected Behavior as Seen in Klamath Mythology,” Journal of American Folklore 76(1963), 21-30; idem., “Klamath Myth Abstracts,” Journal of American Folklore 76(1963), 31-41. In his ethnography of the Klamath, Theodore Stem can only refer to Clark's citation of Colvig's account: Stern, , The Klamath Tribe: a People and Their Reservation (Seattle; 1965), 283.Google Scholar

¹⁵¹ Gatschet, A.S., The Klamath Indians of Southwestern Oregon (Washington, 1890).Google Scholar Gatschet, ibid., xciv, xcviii, did note examples of suggestively bible-like myths among the Klamath.

¹⁵² E.g., Hale, Horatio, “The Klamath Nation,” Science 19/465(1892) 6–7, 19/466(1892), 20-21, 19/467(1892), 29-31CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Lapham, Stanton C., The Enchanted Lake: Mount Mazama and Crater Lake in Story, History, and Legend (Portland, 1931), 36-55, 126–34Google Scholar; Barker, M.A.R., Klamath Texts (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar, which does, however, contain several stories palpably influenced by borrowing.

¹⁵³ Deloria, , Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York, 1995), 195–98.Google Scholar Other studies that take the same view include Harris, Stephen L., Fire Mountains of the West: the Cascade and Mono Lake Volcanoes (Missoula, 1988), 116Google Scholar; and Lund, John W., “Historical Impacts of Geothermal Resources on the People of North America” in Stories from a Heated Earth, 458–59.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁴ Harris, Stephen L., Agents of Chaos: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Other Natural Disasters (Missoula, 1990), 215–20.Google Scholar This work credits any number of American Indians myths with incorporating a large leaven of geological expertise.

¹⁵⁵ Vitaliano, , “Geomythology: Geological Origins of Myths” in Myth and Geology, 3.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁶ Mayor, , “Geomythology,” Encychpedia of Geology, ed. Selley, Richard S., Robin, L.Cocks, M., and Plimer, Ian R. (5 vols.: Amsterdam, 2005), 3:99.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁷ Deur, Douglas, “A Most Sacred Place: the Significance of Crater Lake among the Indians of Southern Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 103(2002), 19.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁸ Ibid., 21.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., 23.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid., 5.

¹⁶¹ E.g., Lyons, Letitia Mary, Francis Norbert Blanchet and the Founding of the Oregon Missions, 1838-1848 (Washington, 1940).Google Scholar

¹⁶² Jetté, Melinda Marie, “‘Beaver are Numerous, but the Natives … Will Not Hunt Them’: Native-Fur Trader Relations in the Willamette Valley, 1812-1814” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 90/1(Winter 2006/2007), 3–15.Google Scholar

¹⁶³ Elliot, T.C., ed., “The Peter Skene Ogden Journals,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 11(1910), 210–12Google Scholar; LaLande, Jeff, “Through a “Strange Country … Covered with Lakes,” Journal of the Shaw Historical Library 8(1994), 1–28.Google Scholar For an account of the first quarter of the nineteenth century that discusses numerous occasions for acculturation see Ross, Alexander, ed. Spaulding, Kenneth A., The Fur Hunters of the Far West (Norman OK, 1956)Google Scholar; Ross, Alexander, ed. Elliott, T.C., “Journal of Alexander Ross, Snake Country Expedition, 1824,” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 14(1913), 366–87 (also at www.xniission.com/~drudy/mtman/htnil/ross/htrnl).Google Scholar

¹⁶⁴ Fremont, John C., Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 (Washington, 1845).Google Scholar

¹⁶⁵ Fremont, , Memoirs of My Life (Chicago, 1886), 289 (quote), 285-86, 293-300, 483–85.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁶ Quoted in National Park Service, Crater Lake: Historic Research Study www.nps.gov/archive/crla/hrs/hrs3.htm

¹⁶⁷ Nash, Philleo, “The Place of Religious Revivalism in the Formation of the Intercultural Community on Klamath Reservation” in Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, ed. Eggan, Fred (Chicago, 1955), 380–82.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁸ The Dalles is nearly 300 miles from the Klamaths' core habitat.

¹⁶⁹ Curtis, Edward S., The North American Indian (20 vols.: Boston, 1924), 13:178Google Scholar

¹⁷⁰ Thompson, Lucy, To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman (Berkeley, 1991), xxixGoogle Scholar, first published under the same title in 1916.

¹⁷¹ Ignorance can hardly be an excuse, since Thompson is described (ibid., xvi) as “a direct descendant of many of her tribe's ceremonialists, oral historians and priests.” Hodgson, Susan Fox, “Obsidian: Sacred Glass from the California Sky” in Myth and Geology, 301–02Google Scholar, thinks that a Yurok story collected in 1902 “may relate to the eruption of Mt. Mazama,” although there is nothing in the story, which is saturated with irrelevant detail, to suggest such an event.

¹⁷² Thompson, , American Indian, 86.Google Scholar She also (ibid., 167-74) wrote of “a giant deluge” with a number of characteristics similar to the Noachian flood.

¹⁷³ For a taste of Klamath syncretism see, e.g., Spencer, Robert F., “Native Myth and Modern Religion among the Klamath Indians,” Journal of American Folklore 65(1952), 217–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷⁴ Zdanovich, C.M., Zielinski, G.A., and Germani, M.S., “Mount Mazama Eruption: Cal-endrical Age Verified and Atmospheric Impact Assessed,” Geology 27(1999), 621–24Google Scholar

¹⁷⁵ Bacon, Charles R. and Lanphere, Marvin A., “Eruptive History and Geochronology of Mount Mazama and the Crater Lake Region, Oregon,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 118(2006), 1352CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oetelaar, Gerald A. and Beaudoin, Alwynne B., “Darkened Skies and Sparkling Grasses: the Potential Impact of the Mazama Ash Fall on the Northwestern Plains,” Plains Anthropologist 50(2005), 285–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷⁶ On the other hand, Theodore Stern, who conducted fieldwork among the Klamath extensively, several times commented on the differences in versions he collected at different times: Stern, , “Some Sources of Variability in Klamath Mythology,” Journal of American Folklore 69(1956), 1-12, 135-46, 377–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For such transformation in action see Spencer, Robert F., “Native Myth and Modern Religion among the Klamath Indians,” Journal of American Folklore 65(1952), 217–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷⁷ Drucker, Philip, The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes (Washington, 1951), 154.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁸ Naxaxalhts'i, (McHalsie, Albert), “We Have To Take Care of Everything that Belongs to Us” in Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish, ed. Miller, Bruce G. (Vancouver, 2007), 82–130passim.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁹ Clayton, Daniel, “Captain Cook and the Spaces of Contact at ‘Nootka Sound’” in Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, ed. Brown, Jennifer S.H. and Vibert, Elizabeth (Peterborough ON, 1996), 95–123.Google Scholar

¹⁸⁰ Laura Peers, “‘The Guardian of All': Jesuit and Salish Perceptions of the Virgin Mary” in ibid., 284-303. Perhaps this ultimately sprang from the 1774 occasion mentioned above?

¹⁸¹ Wheeler, Rachel, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, 2008), esp. 105–32.Google Scholar

¹⁸² O'odham Creation and Related Events, as Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927, ed. Bahr, Donald (Tucson, 2001)Google Scholar; Donald Bahr et al, Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth.

¹⁸³ Ibid., 46n., 183n., 269n., 305, 319.

¹⁸⁴ Testimony of Pat Weaselhead, 5 March 1976, in Price, Richard T., ed., The Spirit of the Alberta Indian Treaties (3d. ed.: Edmonton, 1999), 128–29Google Scholar, with emphases added.

¹⁸⁵ Richards, , “On Using Pacific Shipping Records to Gain New Insights into Culture Contact in Polynesia before 1840,” Journal of Pacific History 43(2008), 375–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸⁶ Richards, Rhys, Honolulu, Centre of Trans-Pacific Trade: Shipping Arrivals and Departures, 1820 to 1840 (Canberra, 2000).Google Scholar For the frequency of ships' visits to even the smallest and most remote islands see McArthur, Norma, “Essays in Multiplication: European Seafarers in Polynesia,” Journal of Pacific History 1(1966), 98–101.Google Scholar

¹⁸⁷ A century equals 36,525 days, so to accumulate a ‘century’ of contact in this regard would require—for example—only about 100 ships with 36 crew members to spend an average of ten days in port. This of course ignores all variables that could reduce (or, less likely, increase) this figure, but it can provide a sense of magnitude and proportion.

¹⁸⁸ A recent overview is Couper, Alistair, Sailors and Traders: a Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu, 2009).Google Scholar See as well Hezel, Francis X., Foreign Ships in Micronesia (Saipan, 1979)Google Scholar; idem, and Maria Teresa del Valle, “Early European Contact with the Western Carolines, 1525-1750,” Journal of Pacific History 7(1972), 26-44.

¹⁸⁹ For the details see Keate, George, An Account of the Pelew Islands, ed. Nero, Karen L. and Thomas, Nicholas (Leicester, 2002).Google Scholar

¹⁹⁰ In fact, Karen Nero lists over 100 European ships known to have stopped at out-of-the-way Belau (of which Koror is a part) between 1579 and 1885.

¹⁹¹ Maude, H.E., “Beachcombers and Castaways,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 73(1964), 254–93Google Scholar; Milcairns, Susanne W., Native Strangers: Beachcombers, Renegades, and Castaways in the South Seas (Auckland, 2006).Google Scholar

¹⁹² McArthur, , “Essays,” 98, 99Google Scholar, building on Maude, “Beachcombers.”

¹⁹³ Maude, , “Beachcombers,” 281–87Google Scholar, provides details on 21 early first-person accounts by beachcombers, adding another layer of feedback possibilities. For a case where outsiders were asked to prepare a history that somehow blended a number of opposing oral traditional corpora into an innocuous and seamless whole see Huntsman, Judith, “Just Marginally Possible: the Making of Matagi Tokelau,” Journal of Pacific Studies 20(1996), 138–54.Google Scholar

¹⁹⁴ Thus Tonga and Samoa were visited by the Dutch in 1643 and 1722 respectively. There were indications on these occasions that the islanders were already aware of the Europeans and their weaponry and sexual appetites. See Tcherkézoff, Serge, ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia: the Samoan case, 1722-1848: Western Misunderstandings about Sexuality and Divinity (Canberra, 2008).Google Scholar

¹⁹⁵ In two works Robert Langdon made the case—not widely accepted—that there was significant interaction between the Spanish and Pacific islanders during this period; see his The Lost Caravel (Sydney, 1975)Google Scholar and The Lost Caravel Re-Explored (Canberra, 1988), esp. 127–34Google Scholar, where he discussed early reports of Old Testament-like traditions. Langdon argued largely on physical and biométrie evidence, but died before he could use whatever DNA evidence might be on offer. For a discussion of possible pre-Cook Manila galleon-related Spanish visits to Hawai'i see Nokes, J. Richard, Almost a Hero: the Voyages of John Meares, R.N., to China, Hawaii, and the Northwest Coast (Pullman WA, 1998), 197–203.Google Scholar

¹⁹⁶ Two recent ones are Brantlinger, Patrick, “Missionaries and Cannibals in Nineteenth-Century Fiji,” History and Anthropology 17(2005), 21–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gardner, Helen Bethea, “‘New Heaven and New Earth’: Translation and Conversion on Aneityum,” Journal of Pacific History 41(2006), 293–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹⁷ See The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. Mungello, D.E. (Nettetal, 1994)Google Scholar; more generally on large-scale transculturation see Lach, Donald F., Asia in the Making of Europe (3 vols, in 9: Chicago, 1965–1993).Google Scholar

¹⁹⁸ The Russian presence in Alaska is well served in the non-Russian literature. For population levels and cultural interchanges see Fedorova, Svetlana G., trans. Pierce, Richard A. and Donnelly, Alton S., The Russian Population in Alaska and California, Late 18th Century—1867 (Kingston, 1973), 151, 160-67, 198-206, 261-67, 275Google Scholaret passim. For the specifically religious aspects of the Russian period (baptisms were recorded as early as the 1740s) see, e.g., The Russian Orthodox Religious Mission in America, 1794-1837 (Kingston, 1978)Google Scholar; Afonsky, Gregory, A History of the Orthodox Church in Alaska (Kodiak, 1977)Google Scholar; Mousalimas, S.A., The Transition from Shamanism to Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska (Providence, 1995)Google Scholar; idem., “The Account from Old Harbor: Regarding the Baptism of Kodiak Alutiiq, 1794-1795,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 36(1991), 155-68; Smith, Barbara S., Orthodoxy and Native Americans (Crestwood NY, 1980)Google Scholar; and The Russian Orthodox Religious Mission in America, 1794-1837 (Kingston, 1978).Google ScholarAlaska Missionary Spirituality, ed. Oleksa, Michael (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, is a collection of letters and journal abstracts largely concerned with the earlier period. Russian interrelations with the Tanaina in and around Cook Inlet beginning in the 1780s is described in Fall, James A., “Patterns of Leadership among an Alaskan Athabaskan People, 1741-1918,” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 21(1987), 14–19.Google Scholar And so forth.

¹⁹⁹ Veniaminov, Ivan, Notes on the Islands of Unalaska District, tr. Black, Lydia T. and Geoghagan, R.H. and ed. Pierce, Richard A. (Kingston ON, 1984), 239.Google Scholar

²⁰⁰ Journals of the Priest Ioann Veniaminov in Alaska, 1823 to 1836, trans. Kisslinger, Jerome (Fairbanks, 1993)Google Scholar, a week-by-week account.

²⁰¹ The Tlingit in particular were closely involved with the Russians; see Kan, Sergei, Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle, 1999)Google Scholar; and Grinev, A.V., The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867 (Lincoln, 2005).Google Scholar These two substantial studies, but especially Kan's (which reaches to the present but concentrates on the earlier period), detail the breadth and depth of the relationship, including the visits of many Tlingit to various parts of Russia.

²⁰² E.g., Rickard, T.A., “The Use of Iron and Copper by the Indians of British Columbia,” British Columbia Historical Quarterly 3(1939), 25–50Google Scholar; Hobler, Philip M., “Measures of the Acculturative Response to Trade on the Central Coast of British Columbia,” Historical Archaeology 29(1986), 16–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Some of these tools could also have come from east of the Rockies.

²⁰³ Quimby, G.I., “Japanese Wrecks, Iron Tools, and Prehistoric Indians of the Northwest Coast,” Arctic Anthropology 22/2(1985), 7–15.Google Scholar

²⁰⁴ Callaghan, Richard T., “The Use of Simulation Models to Estimate Frequency and Location of Japanese Edo Period Wrecks along the Canadian Pacific Coast,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 27(2003), 74–94Google Scholar; Montenegro, Álvaroet al., “Modelling Pre-His-toric Transoceanic Crossings into the Americas,” Quaternary Science Reviews 25(2006), 1323–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For further discussion see Keddie, Grant, “Japanese Shipwrecks in British Columbia: Myths and Facts: the Question of Cultural Exchanges with the Northwest Coast of America” (2002) www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/content_files/japaneseshipwrecks.pdf.Google Scholar

²⁰⁵ Callaghan, , “Use of Simulation Models,” 92.Google Scholar Callaghan believes (ibid.) that “there is reason to think that such events occurred from Early Jomon times (7500-5600 BP) onward.” Conversely, Keddie (“Japanese Shipwrecks”), feels that “[c]asual acceptance of these [some nineteenth-century] accounts has resulted in an exaggerated impression of their frequency.” Some occasions appear to be mentioned in traditions from the area; see, e.g., Regan, Albert, “Some Traditions of West Coast Indians,” Proceedings of the Utah Academy of Sciences 86(1934), 73–93.Google Scholar For an account of a number of such voyages, not all to the Pacific Northwest, see Plummer, Katherine, The Shogun's Reluctant Ambassadors: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific (3d. ed.: Portland, 1991).Google Scholar For Filipinos, Chinese (in large numbers), and Hawaiians along the northwest coast—and a Nootka chieftain named Comekela, who had spent a year in China—in the late eighteenth century, see Quimby, George I., “Culture Contact on the Northwest Coast, 1785-1795,” American Anthropologist 50(1948), 247–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed For Comekela's homecoming see Meares, John, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West Coast of America (London, 1790), 108–26.Google Scholar Comekela had also been to the Hawaiian Islands.

²⁰⁶ Deloria, , Red Earth, White Ues, 205–06.Google Scholar

²⁰⁷ Wendy Pond, review of Suren, Peter, Essays on the History of the Discovery and Exploration of Tonga by the Europeans,” Journal of Pacific History 43(2008), 274.Google Scholar

²⁰⁸ Morton, Helen, “Remembering Freedom and the Freedom to Remember: Tongan Memories of Independence” in Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific, ed. Mageo, Jeannette Marie (Honolulu, 2001), 46–49.Google Scholar Horton (ibid., 47) observes that “[r]esearchers also met with widespread reluctance to offer intra-group memories contradicting the official’ account.”

²⁰⁹ Howe, K.R., The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled the Pacific Islands? (Honolulu, 2003), 47.Google Scholar Cf. France, Peter, “The Kaunitoni Migration,” Journal of Pacific History 1(1966), 107–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In this myth the point of departure for the ancestors of the Fijians was Thebes in ancient Egypt. For a personal account of bible-based contemporary transculturation in the South Pacific see Hau'ofa, Epeli, “Oral Traditions and Writing,” Journal of Pacific Studies 20(1996), 198–208.Google Scholar

²¹⁰ Morton, Helen, “Islanders in Space: Tongans Online” in Small Worlds, Global Lives: Islanders in Migration, ed. King, Russell and Connell, John (London, 1999), 235–53.Google Scholar

²¹¹ Masse, W.B. and Masse, Michael J., “Myth and Catastrophic Reality: Using Myth to Identify Cosmic Impacts and Massive Plinian Eruptions in Holocene South America” in Myth and Geology, 195.Google Scholar

²¹² E.g., for recent and contemporary feedback among the Iroquois, continuing a longstanding habit, see von Gernet, Alexander, “The Date of Time Immemorial: Politics and Iroquois Origins” in Origins of the People of the Longhouse, ed. Bekerman, André and Warrick, Gary (North York, [1995]), 119–28.Google Scholar

²¹³ Beyond the numberless occasions for face-to-face feedback, there was quite a large body of written materials disseminated through the printed word and widely available. In fact, material on Indian traditions (“folklore”) and Indian-white relations was published as far back as the eighteenth century and was available for consultation and recycling. For a small sampling of this literature see Clements, William M., Native American Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Athens, 1986), esp. 13-51, 175–86Google Scholar; and American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s—1930s, ed. Peyer, Bemd C. (Norman, 2007), esp. 3–39.Google Scholar

²¹⁴ Ben-Amos, Daniel and Weissberg, L, Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit, 1999), 15.Google Scholar

²¹⁵ Rubin, David C., Memory in Oral Traditions: the Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York, 1995), 9–10.Google Scholar

²¹⁶ Mayor, , “Geomythology,” 3:99.Google Scholar

²¹⁷ For instance, typing “memory” into the PsycINFO database in June of 2009 produced 137, 936 citations, and this number increases by nearly 8,000 items a year. And collaterally, there is the inevitable listserve—[email protected]

²¹⁸ Probert, Rebecca, “Chinese Whispers and Welsh Weddings,” Continuity and Change 20(2005), 211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹⁹ Rubin, , Memory, 3Google Scholar, with emphasis added. For a paradigmatic defense of the remarkable memories in oral societies—in this case the Maori—see Smith, S. Percy, Hawaiki, the Original Home of the Maori (4th ed.: Auckland, 1921), esp. 16–34.Google Scholar David Simmons disposed of Smith's arguments long ago; see Simmons, D.R., The Great New Zealand Myth: a Study of the Discovery and Origin Traditions of the Maori (Wellington, 1976).Google Scholar In this regard, see more recently, Howe, K.R., The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands? (Auckland, 2003).Google Scholar

²²⁰ Yet even the mnemones (“rememberers”) of ancient Greece—Plato's time and place— were expected to keep written records handy to refresh their memory. Edwin Carawan, “What the Mnemones Know” in Orality, Literacy, Memory, 163-84.

²²¹ Ghislaine Lydon has recently written that “many African societies possessed sophisticated mnemonic devices to record oral texts and preserve information across the generations,” but she offers no examples longer than about a century; Lydon, , On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge, 2009), 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²²² Rubin, , Memory, 299.Google Scholar

²²³ Ibid., 122. Rubin's assertion strikes me as decidedly counterintuitive, almost bizarre, and certainly desperate.

²²⁴ Grinov, E.L., Giant Meteorites (Oxford, 1966), 131.Google Scholar

²²⁵ Ibid., 144.

²²⁶ Ibid., 135.

²²⁷ See, for example, Longo, G., “The Tunguska Events” in Comet/Asteroid Impact and Human Society: an Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Bobrowsky, Peter T. and Rickman, H. (New York, 2007), 303–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Wolfgang Kundt, “Tunguska (1908) and Its Relevance for Comet/Asteroid Impacts” in ibid., 331-39, for juxtaposed, but diametrically opposed, views.

²²⁸ For this speculation see, e.g., Baxter, John and Atkins, Thomas, The Fire Came By: the Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion (New York, 1976), 77–134Google Scholar; Hughes, David W., “Tunguska Revisited,” Nature 259(26 02 1976), 626–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Furneaux, Rupert, The Tungus Event: the Great Siberian Catastrophe of 1908 (London, 1977), 57–123Google Scholar; Fernie, J. Donald, “The Tunguska Event,” American Scientist 81(1993), 412–15Google Scholar; Svetsov, V.V., “Total Ablation of the Debris from the 1908 Tunguska Explosion,” Nature 383(24 10 1996), 697–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kundt, Wolfgang, “The 1908 Tunguska Catastrophe: an Alternative Explanation,” Current Science 81/4(25 08 2001), 399–407Google Scholar; Kasatkina, E.A.S. and Shumilov, O.I., “One More Puzzle of the Tunguska Catastrophe?” JETP Letters 84/4(02 2007), 216–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²²⁹ For an example of contemporary myth formation, based a 1986 event, and already deviating from the observed data, see Shanklin, Eugenia, “Exploding Lakes in Myth and Reality: an African Case Study” in Myth and Geology, 165–76.Google Scholar

²³⁰ By 1968 there had appeared at ieast “180 scientific papers, 940 articles, and 60 novels, as well as scores of stories, poems, films, and TV programs,” just in the Soviet Union: Baxter, /Atkins, , Fire, 135.Google Scholar

²³¹ Duffy, Eamon, “The First Great Pandemic in History,” New York Review of Books 55/9(29 05 2008), 19.Google Scholar

²³² E.g., Cohen, Gillian, Memory in the Real World (Hove,, 1989).Google Scholar

²³³ Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet.

²³⁴ Eddy, Paul Rhodes and Boyd, Gregory A., The Jesus Legend: a Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, 2007), 282Google Scholar, referring in particular to the ancient Mediterranean world, with emphasis in the original.

²³⁵ Quoted in Williams, Paul, “Oral Tradition on Trial” in Gin Das Winan: Documenting Aboriginal History in Ontario, ed. Standen, Dale and McNab, David (Toronto, 1996), 30Google Scholar, citing “New York State Library, Mss. #13550-51.”

²³⁶ For what it's worth, during the preparation of this paper, I accidentally deleted it from my computer. Fortunately, the library IT people back things up; unfortunately, I had been improvident and had failed to save the last 200 or 300 words I had written, so they were irretrievably lost. I tried to reconstruct them—this about half an hour after I had first written them. Did I succeed? Not even close. Oh, most of the thoughts were there, but now differently expressed and differently arranged, and I remain convinced that my first effort was better. Should we really expect so much more in an oral environment?

²³⁷ Ibid., 34, with emphasis in original.

²³⁸ Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³⁹ A number of modern case studies are included in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Forty, Adrian and Küchler, Susanne (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

²⁴⁰ This was apparently the case for some of the Vedic literature from ancient India. See, e.g., Staal, Frits, The Fidelity of Oral Tradition and the Origins of Science (Amsterdam, 1986)Google Scholar, and Filliozat, Pierre-Sylvain, “Ancient Sanskrit Mathematics: an Oral Tradition and a Written Literature” in History of Science, History of Text, ed. Chemla, Karine (Dordrecht, 2004), 137–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Just the same, “[e]ven if oral transmission is always appreciated, … the pandits never refused writing, never neglected the help they could derive from it. And in cases where human memory failed, writing has probably saved a number of text.” Ibid., 149.

²⁴¹ Wayne Archambault, an Assiniboine, quoted in Mayor, Fossil Legends, xxxi.

²⁴² Ibid., XXX.

²⁴³ Möller, Astrid and Luraghi, Nino, “Time in the Writing of History,” Storia delta Storiografia 28(1995), 5.Google Scholar

²⁴⁴ Regan, , “Some Traditions,” 86Google Scholar, in a preamble to one of the stories included in the collection and referring to first contact. Reagan was Indian agent and schoolteacher at La Push, Washington, from 1905 to 1909.

²⁴⁵ For a general discussion of transmission issues see Henige, David, “Survival of the Fittest? Darwinian Evolution and the Transmission of Information,” HA 30(2003), 161–81.Google Scholar

²⁴⁶ Edelman, Diana, “review of Jens B. Kofoed, Text and History,” Journal of Semitic Studies 52(2007), 386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴⁷ Mills, Alison, Eagle Down Is Our Law, 74.Google Scholar

²⁴⁸ Ibid., 75.

²⁴⁹ Rubin, , Memory, 3.Google Scholar

²⁵⁰ Martindale, Andrew, “Methodological Issues in the Use of Tsimshian Oral Traditions (Adawx) in Archaeology,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 30(2006), 158–92.Google Scholar

²⁵¹ For instance, Melville Jacobs estimates that the tribes of the Pacific Northwest “could once have yielded a million or more versions of myths” of which no more than 1000 survive. Assuming a 90% overestimate still leaves the extant corpus at one percent of its original size. Jacobs: “Area Spread of Indian Oral Genre Features in the Northwest States,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 9(1970), 11.Google Scholar

²⁵² Martindale, Andrew R.C. and Marsden, Susan, “Defining the Middle Period (3500 BP to 1500 BP) in Tsimshian History through a Comparison of Archaeological and Oral Records,” BC Studies 138(Summer 2003), 17Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

²⁵³ See as well, Martindale, A.R.C., “A Hunter-Gatherer Paramount Chiefdom: Tsimshian Developments through the Contact Period” in Emerging from the Mist, 32.Google Scholar

²⁵⁴ Stein, Robert H., The Synoptic Problem: an Introduction (Grand Rapids, 1986), 196Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

²⁵⁵ Barber, /Barber, , When They Severed, 3Google Scholar, referring to “four fundamental ‘mytho-linguis-tic’ principles” they propounded.

²⁵⁶ Ibid., 9.

²⁵⁷ Echo-Hawk, , “Ancient History in the New World,” 272–73.Google Scholar

²⁵⁸ For two reckonings of the large number of “memorable” comets see Schove, D.J., Chronology of Eclipses and Comets, AD 1-1000 (Woodbridge, 1984)Google Scholar, and Seargent, David, The Greatest Comets in History: Broom Stars and Celestial Scimitars (New York, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁵⁹ For the catastrophic and disorienting effects of a megaflood see Wilkerson, S.J.K., “And the Waters Took Them: Catastrophic Flooding and Civilization on the Mexican Gulf Coast” in El Nino, Catastrophism, and Culture Change in Ancient America, ed. Sandweiss, Daniel H. and Quilter, Jeffrey (Cambridge, 2008), 243–71Google Scholar, describing a 1999 event.

²⁶⁰ See note 89 above.

²⁶¹ E.g., Webster, David, “The Not So Peaceful Civilization; a Review of Maya Warfare,” Journal of World Prehistory 14(2000), 65–119CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and O'Mansky, Matt and Demarest, Arthur A., “Status Rivalry and Warfare in the Development and Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization” in Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, ed. Chacon, Richard J. and Mendoza, Rubén G. (Tucson, 2007), 11–33..Google Scholar

²⁶² Means, Russell and Wolf, Marvin J., Where White Men Fear to Tread: the Autobiography of Russell Means (New York, 1995), 16.Google Scholar

²⁶³ Lovisek, Joan A., “Aboriginal Warfare on the Northwest Coast: Did the Potlatch Replace Warfare?” in North American Indigenous Warfare, 72.Google Scholar This is one of eleven essays in this work that deal systematically with this issue.

²⁶⁴ Taonui, Rawiri, “Polynesian Oral Traditions” in Vaka moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: the Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific, ed. Howe, K.R. (Honolulu, 2007), 29.Google Scholar

²⁶⁵ Berezkin, Yuri E., “The Fourth Source of Data: Amerindian Oral Literatures and the Peopling of Central and South America,” Arx 2/3(1996/1997), 53–63.Google Scholar

²⁶⁶ George-Kanentiio, Doug, Iroquois on Fire: a Voice from the Mohawk Nation (West-port, 2006), 1.Google Scholar The founding of the Iroquois Confederacy, to which George-Kanentiio seems to be referring, is generally dated to the end of the fifteenth century or later. See Henige, David, “Can a Myth Be Astronomically Dated?” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23/4 (12 1999), 127–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starna, William A., “Retrospecting the Origins of the League of the Iroquois,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152(2008), 279–321.Google ScholarPubMed

²⁶⁷ Lyons, Patrick D., Ancestral Hopi Migrations (Tucson, 2003), esp. 82–96.Google Scholar

²⁶⁸ Thus, while arguing for a distinction between formal and informal traditions, John D. Waiko also claims that any member of Binandere society can transmit either. Waiko, , “‘Head’ and ‘Tail’: the Shaping of Oral Traditions among the Binandere in Papua New Guinea” in South Pacific Oral Traditions, ed. Finnegan, Ruth and Orbell, Margaret (Bloomington, 1995), 177–94.Google Scholar

²⁶⁹ Junod, Henri A., The Life of a South African Tribe (2 vols.: Neuchâtel, 1912–1913), 2:198–200Google Scholar, with examples of the ways in which this happened. Emphasis in original.

²⁷⁰ Carter, Sarah, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada (Toronto, 1999), 7–8.Google Scholar

²⁷¹ Karlson, , “Reflections on Indigenous History and Memory,” 46–68.Google Scholar

²⁷² For other examples see Waiko, , “‘Head’ and ‘Tail’,” 177–94Google Scholar; Huntsman, Judith, “Fiction, Fact, and Imagination: a Tokelau Narrative” in South Pacific Oral Traditions, 124–60Google Scholar, although her case study actually suggests otherwise.

²⁷³ Cardinal, Harold in “Questions and Discussion” in Natives and Settlers, Now and Then: Historical issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Clams in Canada, ed. Depasquale, Paul (Edmonton, 2007), 94–99.Google Scholar

²⁷⁴ See, e.g., Karlson, “Reflections on Indigenous History and Memory,” for the Stó:lo.

²⁷⁵ Lutz, John S., “Myth Understandings; or First Contact, Over and Over Again” in Myth and Memory, 6.Google Scholar This is reminiscent of early Muslim effort to ascribe credibility to traditions of Muhammad by prefacing them with a genealogy of trustworthy transmitters.

²⁷⁶ Lutz, John S., “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast” in Myth and Memory, 37.Google Scholar

²⁷⁷ Underbill, Ruth M., Work a Day Life in the Pueblos (Phoenix, 1946), 7.Google Scholar

²⁷⁸ Day, Gordon M., “Oral Tradition as Complement,” Ethnohistory 19(1972), 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referring to a tradition that purported to refer to an incident in 1759. Of course those who have memorized texts like “The Night before Christmas” or the Gettysburg Address almost always do so with the aid of a printed copy. And what if the “aged person” had died before passing on any information?

²⁷⁹ The classic recent work on lying is Bok, Sissela, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, but hundreds of specific cases have been documented and published. Bok organizes her work around a broad spectrum and good and bad reasons for lying, which she takes for granted as part of the human condition.

²⁸⁰ Okpewho, Isidore, “Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?” Journal of Folklore Research 40(2003), 215–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Okpewho answers in the affirmative and cites the usual reasons—local patriotism, competitive instincts, aesthetic imperatives.

²⁸¹ Yagalahl, (Wilson, Dora), “It Will Always Be the Truth” in Aboriginal Title in British Columbia: Delgamuukw vs. the Queen, ed. Cassidy, Frank (Lantzville BC, 1992), 199–200.Google Scholar

²⁸² Reeve, Michael D., “The Transmission of the Historia Regum Britanniae,” Journal of Medieval Latin 1(1991), 73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸³ SirScott, Walter, Anne of Geierstein, ed. Alexander, J.H. (Edinburgh, 2000), xi-xvi, 451–500.Google Scholar

²⁸⁴ Hyde, Douglas, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature (London, 1895), 107.Google ScholarThe Book of Leinster dates from the twelfth century.

²⁸⁵ Merrell, James H., “‘I Desire All That I Have Said … May Be Taken Down Aright:’ Revisiting Teedyuscung's 1756 Treaty Council Speeches,” William and Mary Quarterly 63(2006), 777–826.Google Scholar

²⁸⁶ Avalos, Hector, “Mary at Medjugorje: a Critical Inquiry,” Free Inquiry 14/2(Spring 1994), 48–54.Google Scholar

²⁸⁷ For some examples of the difficulties in replicating the printed word—presumably while actually trying to do so—see Henige, David, “Mis/Adventures in Mis/Quoting,” Journal ofSchohrly Publishing 32(2001/2002), 123–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸⁸ Lee Ann Gilpin, a Crée Indian living in Wemindji, Quebec, speaking of a local tradition that the grave of Henry Hudson was located nearby www.ianchadwick.com/hudson/hudson_05.htm accessed 23 May 2008.

²⁸⁹ Marks, Willie in Haa Shukà, 347.Google Scholar

²⁹⁰ In fact, I have come across no examples of the reverse, except perhaps among those doing the collecting.

²⁹¹ Baxter, Stephen, “MS C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Politics of Mid-Eleventh-Century England,” English Historical Review 122(2007), 1189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹² Maclaren, I.S., “Samuel Heame's Accounts of the Massacre at Bloody Falls, 17 July 1771,” Ariel 22(1991), 25–51Google Scholar, and several other examples noted there. A good African example is Dawson, Marc H., “The Many Minds of Sir Haiford J. Mackinder: the Dilemmas of Historical Editing,” HA 14(1987), 27–42.Google Scholar

²⁹³ There are numerous examples of belated decipherment of previously unintelligible texts. Perhaps the most hopeful case is the progressive understanding of Mayan hieroglyphics. Before the 1960s they were unintelligible to all who scrutinized them, but once a breakthrough was made, decipherment ran apace and the result was the new view of Maya political culture mentioned above—brutal and predatory rather than benign and peace-loving.

²⁹⁴ See, among many others, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament, ed. Ehrman, Bart D. (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; McDonald, Lee M., The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Peabody MA, 2007).Google Scholar

²⁹⁵ Gunsenheimer, Antje, “Out of the Historical Darkness: a Methodological Approach to Uncover the Hidden History of Ethnohistorical Sources,” Indiana 23(2006), 15–49.Google Scholar

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²⁹⁷ Belgrave, , “Tribunal and the Past,” 50Google Scholar, quoting Muriwhenua Land Report (Wellington, 1997), 50.Google Scholar

²⁹⁸ Woman, Stronget al., “Bringing Back Our Lost Language,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22/3(1998), 215–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adelaar, K.A., “Retrieving Siraya Phonology: a New Spelling for a Dead Language” in Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference of Austronesian Linguistics (Taipei, 1999), 27–70, also at www.nctu.edu.tw/ogawa100/a/tsuliau/2Google Scholar; Blust, Robert, “Notes on Pazeh Phonology and Morphology,” Oceanic Linguistics 38(1999), 321–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hewitt, George, “North West Caucasian,” Lingua 115(2005), 91–145CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adelaar, , “Le siraya: interpretation d'un corpus datant du XVIIème siècle,” Faits de Langues 23/24(2004), 123–40.Google Scholar

²⁹⁹ Robinson, Andrew, “Decoding Antiquity,” New Scientist 202 (30 05 2009), 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰⁰ Greene, Linàa W., Historic Resource Study: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon (Denver, 1982), 34Google Scholar, regarding the eruption of Mt Mazama discussed above.

³⁰¹ A number of these claims were synopsized for the general public in Krajick, Kevin, “Tracking Myth to Geological Reality,” Science 310(4 11 2005), 762–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

³⁰² Numerous works have been written on Velikovsky's oeuvre, among them, Velikovsky and Establishment Science, ed. Greenberg, Lewis M. and Sizemore, Warner B. (Glassboro NJ, 1977)Google Scholar; Scientists Confront Velikovsky, ed. Goldsmith, Donald (Ithaca NY, 1977)Google Scholar; and especially Bauer, Henry H., Beyond Velikovsky: the History of a Public Controversy (Urbana, 1984)Google Scholar, not least for its enormous bibliography of often fugitive materials. A journal, Catastrophism and Ancient History, espousing Velikovsky's arguments was published from 1978 to 1993. See as well, www.vehkovsky.info.

³⁰³ Vitaliano, Dorothy B., Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins (Bloomington, 1973), 1Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

³⁰⁴ Ibid., 5

³⁰⁵ Ibid., 5-6.

³⁰⁶ Lund, , “Historical Impact,” 455.Google Scholar The nature of such additions deserves more attention than it ordinarily gets.

³⁰⁷ Echo-Hawk, Roger C., “Ancient History in the New World,” 273.Google Scholar

³⁰⁸ Kii7iljuus and Harris, Heather, “Tllsda Xaaydas,” 124.Google Scholar the authors conclude (ibid.) that “the correlation between oral histories and the geological and archaeological evidence is compelling.”

³⁰⁹ Ryan, William F.B. and Pitman, Walter, Noah's Flood: the New Scientific Discoveries about the Event That Changed History (New York, 1998).Google Scholar This work took it for granted that the Black Sea flood was abrupt, was substantial, and was remembered for the requisite period of time.

³¹⁰ Vitaliano, , “Geomythology,” 4.Google Scholar

³¹¹ E.g., Görür, Naciet al., “Is the Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf at 7150 yr BP a Myth?” Marine Geology 176(2001), 65–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yanko-Hombach, Valentina, Gilbert, Allan S., and Dolukhanov, Pavel, “Controversy over the Great Flood Hypotheses in the Black Sea in Light of Geological, Paleontological, and Archaeological Evidence,” Quaternary International 167/168(2007), 91–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See as well Kerr, Richard A., “Support Is Drying Up for Noah's Flood Filling the Black Sea,” Science 317(17 08 2007), 886.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

³¹² Yanko-Hombach, /Gilbert, /Dolukhanov, , “Controversy,” 107Google Scholar, with emphasis added. For a multi-pronged attack on the theory see the essays in The Black Sea Flood Question: Changes in Coastline, Climate, and Human Settlement, ed. Yanko-Hombach, Valentina (Dordrecht, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹³ A recent appeal to the public is Nur, Amos, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God (Princeton, 2008), 65-69, 186–223.Google Scholar More specifically see Trifonov, V.G., “The Bible and Geology: Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” in Myth and Geology, 133–42.Google Scholar Quite unmatched in its sheer awfulness, yet published in a respectable outlet, is Ben-Menahem, Ari, “Cross-Dating of Biblical History via Singular Astronomical and Geophysical Events over the Ancient Near East,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 33(1992), 175–90.Google Scholar Other studies along the same lines include Bruins, H.J. and van der Plicht, J., “The Exodus Enigma,” Nature 382(1996), 313–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and several essays in Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Peiser, Benny J., Palmer, Trevor, and Bailey, Mark E. (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar

³¹⁴ Besides Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu—both modern inventions—are only the most notorious examples; see, e.g., Ramaswamy, Sumathi, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley, 2004), esp. 137–81Google Scholar; Bivar, A.D.H., “Lyonnesse: the Evolution on a Fable,” Modern Philology 50(1295/2/1953), 162–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹⁵ Oppenheimer, , Eden in the East: the Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia (London, 1998).Google Scholar

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³¹⁷ Ian Cameron, “Late Holocene Environmental Change in the Interior Plateau of Western Canada as Seen Through the Archaeological and Oral Historical Records,” paper presented at the World Archaeological Congress 6, Dublin, 2008 www.wac6.org/livesite/_precirculated/1803_precirculated.pdf

³¹⁸ Deloria, , Red Earth, White Lies, 251.Google Scholar Readers are not told how Deloria defined “the beginning.”

³¹⁹ Ibid., 200-06.

³²⁰ In any case, it is hard to take anyone seriously who, speaking of a pictograph, commented (ibid., 245-46): “[i]s it evidence that people and dinosaurs coexisted? I don't know but I suspect so. Ibex fossils have never been found in North America, but there is no reason why lonely explorers from Africa could not have carved scenes from home in the canyon wall.”

³²¹ Moodie, D. Wayne and Catchpole, A.J.W., “Northern Athapaskan Oral Traditions and the White River Volcano,” Ethnohistory 39(1992), 149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³²³ Ibid., 161.

³²⁴ Ibid., 162-63.

³²⁵ Interestingly, as the authors point out (ibid., 164), other peoples in the area “do not appear to have recollections of the White River volcanic eruptions or their ash falls in their oral traditions.”

³²⁶ Ludkin, R.S.et al., “Dating the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake: Great Coastal Earthquakes in Native Stories,” Seismological Research Letters 76(2005), 140–48.Google Scholar; more generally, Satake, Kenjiet al., “Time and Size of a Giant Earthquake in Cascadia Inferred from Japanese Tsunami Records of January 1700,” Nature 379(18 01 1996), 246–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³²⁸ Ludwin and others repeat this argument and extend it back as far as 900 CE in Ludwin, Ruth S. and Smits, Gregory J., “Folklore and Earthquakes: Native American Oral Traditions from Cascadia Compared with Written Traditions from Japan” in Myth and Geology, 67–94.Google Scholar

³²⁹ Thrush, Coll and Ludwin, Ruth S., “Finding Fault: Indigenous Seismology, Colonial Science, and the Rediscovery of Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Cascadia,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 31/4(2007), 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³³⁰ Ibid., 23n48. Jacoby, Gordon C., Workman, Karen W., and D'Arrigo, Rosanne D., “Laid Eruption of 1783, Tree Rings, and Disaster for Northwest Alaska Inuit,” Quaternary Science Reviews 18(1999), 1370CrossRefGoogle Scholar, posit seven generations in 135 years in order to establish synchrony with a volcanic event dated to 1783; this seems all but impossible.

³³¹ Setting the upper limits at 100 years defies the empirical record, but is not unusual. The earliest known case is that of Pepy II of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt, whom Manetho credited with a reign of 94 years after acceding at the age of six. Long accepted by Egyptologists as a historical fact, Pepy II's reign length (and therefore age) have come under fire lately; most now think that he ruled for between sixty and seventy years. See Henige, David, “How Long Did Pepy II Reign”? Göttinger Miszellen 221(2009).Google Scholar References to reputed centenarians dot the travel and exploration literature. However, two sets encompassing over twenty exhaustive studies of purported cases of premodern centenarianism draw the unanimous conclusion that there is near zero probability that any of these actually occurred: see Exceptional Longevity from Prehistory to the Present, ed. Jeune, Bernard and Vaupel, James W. (Odense, 1995)Google Scholar, and Validation of Exceptional Longevity, ed. eadem (Odense, 1999).Google Scholar This suggests that assuming such ages in genealogical or chronological complications is misleading.

³³² Thrush, /Ludwin, , “Finding Fault,” 13.Google Scholar Both purport to relate to the same event, dated therefore seven or more generations apart.

³³³ Ibid.

³³⁴ For the magnitude see Atwater, Brian F.et al., The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 (Reston VA, 2005), 98Google Scholar, and Goldfinger, Chris, Nelson, C. Hans, and Johnson, Joel E., “Holocene Earthquake Records from the Cascadia Subduction Zone and Northern San Andreas Fault Based on Precise Dating of Offshore Turbidites,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 31(2003), 556.Google Scholar

³³⁵ Echo-Hawk, , “Ancient History in the New World,” 274Google Scholar; repeated, with additions, in idem., “Forging a New Ancient History for Native America” in Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground, ed. Nina Swidler et al (Walnut Creek CA, 1997), 91.

³³⁶ Cameron, “Late Holocene Environmental Change.”

³³⁷ King, Philip B., The Evolution of North America (Princeton, 1977), 131Google Scholar, quoted approvingly in Deloria, , Red Earth, White Lies, 184.Google Scholar

³³⁸ Masse, /Espenak, , “Sky as Environment,” 269.Google Scholar

³³⁹ McMillan, Alan D. and Hutchinson, Ian, “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America,” Ethnohistory 49(2002), 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gottesfeld, Allen S.et al., “Holocene Debris Flows and Environmental History, Hazelton Area, British Columbia,” Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 28(1991), 1583–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴⁰ Among these, Spink, John, “Historic Eskimo Awareness of Past Changes in Sea Level,” Musk-Ox 5(1979), 37–40.Google Scholar

³⁴¹ For disagreement with this, see Sharpe, Margaret and Tunbridge, Dorothy, “Traditions of Extinct Animals, Changing Sea-levels, and Volcanoes among Australian Aboriginals: Evidence from Linguistic and Ethnographic Research” in Archaeology and Language I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations (New York, 1997), 345–61.Google Scholar

³⁴² For a unconvincing attempt to correlate Maori traditions with tsunamis and earthquakes see Steel, D. and Snow, P., “The Tapanui Region of New Zealand: Site of a ‘Tunguska’ around 800 Years Ago?” in Asteroids, Comets, Meteors, ed. Harris, A. and Bowell, E. (Houston, 1992), 569–72Google Scholar; against this, Goff, James, Hulme, Keri, and McFadgen, Bruce, “‘Mystic Fires of Tamaatea’: Attempts to Creatively Rewrite New Zealand's Cultural and Tectonic Past,” Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 33(2003), 795–809.CrossRefGoogle ScholarBryant, E., Walsh, G., and Abbott, D., “Cosmogenic Mega-Tsunami in the Australia Region: Are the Supported by Aboriginal and Maori Legends?” in Myth and Geology, 203–14Google Scholar, take a position closer to Steel and Snow, but date the event to the fifteenth century.

³⁴³ Falk, Oren, “The Vanishing Volcanoes: Fragments of Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Folklore,” Folklore 118(2007), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴⁴ Ibid., 7-13

³⁴⁵ Kil7iljuus/Harris, , “Tllsda Xaaydas,” 135–36.Google Scholar

³⁴⁶ Ludwin, R.S. et al., “Serpent Spirit-Power Stories along the Seattle Fault,” Seismological Research Letters 76(2005), 426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴⁷ Ludwin, Ruth quoted in “Native Lore Tells the Tale,” Science Daily (14 07 2005) www.sciencedaily.comGoogle Scholar

³⁴⁸ Masse, W. Bruce, “The Archaeology and Anthropology of Quaternary Period Cosmic Impact” in Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society: an Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Bobrowsky, Peter T. and Rickman, Hans (Berlin, 2007), 40–42.Google Scholar This work is a collective effort to impute large numbers of collisions and near collisions between earth and spatial objects. As one of the contributors put it about the work's operational methodology: “[l]et us look at what the records do say and be prepared to ‘read between the lines’ of the only relevant historical records.” Baillie, M.G.L., “Tree-Rings indicate Global Environmental Downturns That Could Have Been Caused By Comet Debris” in Comet/Asteroid Impacts, 107.Google Scholar Baillie's admonition is not without relevance, as he proceeds to overturn the historical record in aid of “metaphor.”

³⁴⁹ Masse, , “Archaeology,” 47Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

³⁵⁰ Ibid., 39. Masse is apparently unaware that the credibility of these genealogies has been thoroughly demolished during the last 30 to 40 years.

³⁵¹ Another study of a set of Polynesian elite genealogies strikes me as far more realistic. Dealing with the island of Mangaia, Michael Reilly shows how the canonical version of the rulers of Mangaia became so only because its collector ignored an ensemble of discrepant genealogies in his pursuit of as long and as continuous a list as possible; see Reilly, Michael, “Lost Priests in Ancient Mangaia,” Journal of Pacific History 42(2007), 21–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵² For the adaptation of Hawaiian myths to fit modern needs see Bacchilega, Christina, Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place (Philadelphia, 2007).Google Scholar

³⁵³ Masse, , “Archaeology,” 39.Google Scholar with emphasis added. Masse repeats these claims and adds a few others in Masse et al., “Exploring the Nature of Myth,” 9-28.

³⁵⁴ Masse, , “Archaeology,” 54, 57.Google Scholar

³⁵⁵ Nunn, Patrick D., “On the Convergence of Myth and Reality: Examples from the Pacific Islands,” Geographical Journal 167(2001), 125–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., “Fished Up or Thrown Down: the Geography of Pacific Island Origin Myths,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(2003), 350-64

³⁵⁶ Ramoli, Ariuta and Dunn, Patrick D., “Naigani Island and Its Historical Connections with Ovalau and Moturiki Islands: Convergences between Legend and Fact,” Domodomo 13(2001), 27Google Scholar, after corroborating some vague archeological evidence by even more vague stories. Cf. Nunn, , “Convergence,” 132.Google Scholar

³⁵⁷ Hoffmann, Andrew, “Looking to Epi: Further Consequences of the Kuwae Eruption, Central Vanuatu, AD 1452,” Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 26(2006), 62–71.Google Scholar

³⁵⁸ A problem here is that, as with most volcanic eruptions that predate recorded observations, this date is far from certain, being based on assumptions derived from ice core evidence, which does not necessarily refer to Kuwae. Other estimates range from 1540 to 1685. Hébert, B., “Contribution à l'étude archéologique de l'île Éfaté et des îles avoisi-nantes,” Etudes Mélanésiennes ns 18/20(1963/1965), 89.Google Scholar If the date really is ~1452, then, if interpreted correctly, these traditions are off by a century or more on the late side; Clark, Ross, “Linguistic Consequences of the Kuwae Eruption” in Oceanic Culture History: Essays in Honor of Roger Green, ed. Davidson, Janetet al. (Wellington, 1996), 375–85.Google Scholar In Michelsen, Oscar, Cannibals Won for Christ (London, 1893), 13–16Google Scholar, the event is dated to “[a]bout 350 years ago.” It might not matter, but it is worth noting that the description is not in Michelsen's words, but in those of a friend, G.C. Frederick, with whom Michelsen shared the narrative thread, and who used a generation length of 30 years. For the problems associated with correlating ice-core evidence with specific volcanoes see Calderoni, Gilberto and Turi, Bruno, “Major Constraints on the Use of Radiocarbon Dating for Tephrochronology,” Quaternary International 47/48(1998), 143–49.Google Scholar For similar difficulty with correlations with literary evidence, see Buck, Victoria and Stewart, Iain, “A Critical Reappraisal of Classical Texts and Archaeological Evidence for Earthquakes in the Atalanti Region, Central Mainland Greece” in The Archaeology of Geological Catastrophes, ed. McGuire, W.J.et al (London, 2000), 33–44Google Scholar

³⁵⁹ Galipaud, J-C, “Under the Volcano: Ni-Vanuatu and Their Environment” in Natural Disasters and Cultural Change, ed. Torrence, Robin and Grattan, John (London, 2002), 165–66Google Scholar; cf. idem., “Recherches archéologiques aux îles Torres,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 107(1998), 67-78. In neither instance does Galipaud provide details of the interview occasion, quote from it, or indicate whether it is accessible. He identifies (ibid., 165) the informant, Titus Joel, as “a fieldworker of the Port Vila Cultural Centre,” suggesting a literate and transculturated member of society. Elsewhere salul.wordpress.com/2008/03, this informant is characterized as “a brilliant, energetic, and extremely bright man”—precisely the traits of one who would be in a position to absorb and regurgitate feedback, and redolent of the once popular encyclopedia informant.

³⁶⁰ Galipaud, , “Under the Volcano,” 166.Google Scholar For the extent of early interaction between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New Hebrides see Campbell, F.A.et al., A Year in the New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia (Geelong, 1873)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steel, Robert, The New Hebrides and Christian Missions (London, 1880).Google Scholar

³⁶¹ Ager, D.V., The New Catastrophism: the Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Huggett, Richard, Catastrophism: Asteroids, Comets, and other Dynamic Events in World History (London, 1997).Google Scholar For another argument see Asher, J.et al., “Coherent Catastrophism,” Vistas in Astronomy 38(1994), 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and for a famous case study see Allen, John E., Cataclysms on the Columbia (Portland OR, 1986).Google Scholar

³⁶² The tenor of these arguments is aptly illustrated by a comment by Mike Baillie, a den-drochronologist and one of the movement's more energetic contributors: “[t]he hints [of extraterrestrial impacts] were certainly out there, whether in the form of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, the Phaethon myth, or in the quite specifically twelfth-century BC stories of the Battles of Troy, Mu [!], or Moytura:” Baillie, , New Light on the Black Death: the Cosmic Connection (Stroud, 2006), 133.Google Scholar Needless to say, the blogosphere is redolent of these kinds of connections. Many of Baillie's conclusions involve correlations that defy both historical evidence and simple logic.

³⁶³ It is no accident that one of the publications of the Institute for Creation Research is entitled Catastrophes in World History: a Source Book of Geological Evidence, Speculation, and Theory.

³⁶⁴ Malo, David, Hawaiian Antiquities, trans. Emerson, Nathaniel B. (Honolulu, 1951), 1–2.Google Scholar Malo died in 1853.

³⁶⁵ A recent condign example is Bond, Alan and Hempsell, Mark, A Sumerian Observation of the Kofels Impact Event (n.p., 2008)Google Scholar, as reviewed in The Skeptic 14/3(2008), 65–67.Google Scholar

³⁶⁶ Reid, , Works, 196.Google Scholar

³⁶⁷ McIlwraith, T.F., The Betta Coola Indians (2 vols.: Toronto, 1948), 1:294.Google Scholar McIlwraith conducted most of his fieldwork in the 1920s.

³⁶⁸ Wiseman, T.P., Myths of Rome (Exeter, 2004), 138Google Scholar

³⁶⁹ Sastri, K.A. Nilakanta, Sangam Literature: Its Cults and Cultures (Madras, [1972]), 12Google Scholar, though see the Vedas mentioned in note 239.

³⁷⁰ Taonui, Rawiri, “Polynesian Oral Traditions,” 35.Google Scholar

³⁷¹ Thomas, David Hurst, The Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York, 2000), 91.Google Scholar

³⁷² The essence of the scientific method is replicability, whereas, as we all know, the past does not—cannot—repeat itself, so we have a fatal dissonance on what constitutes evidence reliable enough to build hypotheses on.

³⁷³ Deloria, , Red Earth, White Lies, 97–100.Google Scholar If they had, it would probably be a case of feedback.

³⁷⁴ George-Kanentiio, , Iroquois on Fire, 6.Google Scholar The Walam Olum does mention a sea crossing, but this text has been shown to be a nineteenth-century hoax. See Oestreicher, David M., “The European Roots of the Walam Olum: Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the Intellectual Heritage of the Early 19th Century” in New Perspectives on the Origins of American Archaeology, ed. Wilhams, Stephen and Browman, Eric (Tuscaloosa, 2002), 60–86.Google Scholar

³⁷⁵ Mayor, , Fossil Legends, 116.Google Scholar

³⁷⁶ Masse, /Espenak, , “Sky as Environment,” 232.Google Scholar

³⁷⁷ Most notably, The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the Wehrmacht's War of Annihilation, ed. Heer, Hannes (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

³⁷⁸ Just for instance, Liverani, Mario, Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography (Ithaca, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a collection of essays that throw doubt on a number of staples from the ancient Near East; Higham, N.J., King Arthur: Myth-Mating and History (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Chaturvedi, Vinayak, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley, 2007).Google Scholar