Free Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson Page A

medal.)
    ‘Syllabaries’, in the absence of any developed writing among the Indians, had been recorded for several of the languages. These sound-dusters had been taken down by anthropologists, none of them Indian. Porter was the first Indian at the work, and he soon found that many of his predecessors had had a tin ear. The languages were exceedingly complex, and a misheard click or vowel frequently altered, or even reversed, the meaning of whole passages.
    He followed up with other publications, and learned more languages – all for his main work: a comparative study of tribal legends, designed to show their line-by-line similarities. For as it happened there were many similarities.
    As a child it had not struck him as strange that the stories of the Gitksan, the Nass and the Tsimshean should be so similar.They were grown-up stories that everyone knew; why shouldn’t they be similar? But now it seemed strange. These tribes were almost unintelligible to each other. Yet their stories, which took hours or even days to recite, were identical almost to the smallest detail. Without writing, by word of mouth, they had been faultlessly transmitted from generation to generation over vast periods of time.
    All this was useful evidence for the first part of his task, and he published it to acclaim. And before he was twenty-three had taken a First in anthropology also.
    His energy at the time was prodigious, and his waywardness a byword. His supervisors found him impossible to control. In this period he became strongly politicised, and he also contracted a marriage – a sadly unfortunate one. And his movements were erratic. Before publication of his Comparisons he suddenly took off to Russia for seven months – this the result of a letter from an institute there commending his earlier work and enclosing syllabaries of some native Siberian languages. The translations struck him as unreliable and he set out to learn the languages himself.
    He returned to take his First, however, and, as not only a prize student but now Canada’s prize Indian, was offered a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He accepted at once, again for reasons of his own. (His young wife was now, tragically, dead, and he was on his own again.) More than ever he was immersed in his work – and a difficulty had surfaced in it.
    Proving that tribal story-tellers had good memories was not enough. What they remembered were stories. In official eyes the ‘claims’ were also stories. The repetition of them, in however much detail, did not make them true. What was needed was other evidence, written evidence. A single piece of it that could match, detail for detail, the oral version of the Indians would not only authenticate that version but help to validate all the others he had researched. At the least, it could take matters out of the Department of Indian Affairs and into the courtroom.
    The evidence he particularly wanted related to treaties made between the Indians and the British in the years 1876,1877 and 1889. In the pow-wows preceding them, various agreements had been arrived at.
    ‘These agreements’, as a framed inscription in his room reminded him, ‘remain in the memories of our people, but the government is wilfully ignorant of them.’ The inscription was a copy of a mournful resolution by a convention of chiefs. ‘Yet the obligations were historic and legal ones: solemn agreements. Indian lands were exchanged for the promises of the commissioners representing Queen Victoria.’
    Unfortunately the commissioners’ promises did not appear in the published treaties although the details relating to land had been quite exact. When the British later gave up direct rule in Canada no promises turned up in the papers left behind. But they would be in some papers, Porter reasoned. Even to experienced colonial negotiators the circumstances of a powwow were exotic enough to merit record – in notes, reminiscences, letters perhaps, which could still be mouldering