Cree Vocabulary in the Works of James Oliver Curwood
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Cree Vocabulary in the Works of James Oliver Curwood WILLIAM COWAN Carleton University James Oliver Curwood was an American novelist who was born in Owosso, Michigan1 in 1878, and who died there in 1927, at the relatively young age of 49. Between 1908 and 1927, he published 26 popular novels, most of them set in the Canadian north, in addition to two volumes of short stories and a book on the Great Lakes. Posthumously there were published three more novels, a collection of short stories, and two different versions of an autobiography, making a total of 34 published books. In a number of these novels and short stories, he used Cree words and expressions to give a literary flavour to the narrative and to the dialogue. It is the purpose of this communication to examine these Cree examples in an attempt to determine how well Curwood knew the language, and what sources, if any, he used for his examples. Curwood's novels and stories are in the popular mode. In almost all of them, the hero is a lone adventurer who meets, generally under stressfull circumstances and frequently out in the middle of the great northern forest, a gloriously beautiful heroine who is on a mysterious mission of some sort. These heroines generally have, as their crowning beauty, great masses of golden hair, flowing, when loosened, in rippling folds down to their hips, and displayed in full glory when in flight or fighting for their virtue, which is one of their most frequent activities.2 Accompanying this hero and heroine, there is almost always a villain, who is generally a huge, barrel-shaped, heavily bearded monster whose only goal in life is to rape the heroine. 1 Owosso is also the birthplace of Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and twice unsuccessful Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. It is also the birthplace of Frederick Frieseke, who became one of the best-known and admired Impressionist painters in France in the 1890s. 2 Usually the hero, before he declares his love for the heroine, manages to brush his lips at least once against this hair, unbeknownst to the heroine. 63 64 WILLIAM COWAN Needless to say, he never succeeds in this attempt, and frequently meets death in the process or shortly thereafter. During his lifetime, Curwood was an immensely popular novelist. His novels sold in the hundreds of thousands, and many were made into movies, both during his lifetime and afterwards. He also wrote a large number of independent movie scripts. Two of his novels that have been made into movies which are possibly familiar to modern audiences are God's Country and the Woman and The Grizzly King. The first was made into a movie in 1916, and then later in 1937 and again in 1946. The 1916 version followed the novel quite closely; the 1937 version, starring George Brent and Bev erly Roberts, was similar only in title, since the plot and characters were completely different from those of the novel. I have been unable to find out anything about the 1946 version, only that it starred Buster Keaton and was probably a farce of some sort and nothing like the novel. The Grizzly King was the novel upon which a recent movie entitled "The Bear" was based. In it, an orphaned bear cub attaches himself to a mature male grizzly bear and in due course of time wins his acceptance. The movie was characterized by the remarkable acting ability of the two bears in question. They not only acted their bear parts extremely well, they also acted like human beings on occasion. Another novel, Nomads of the North, also featuring animals — this time a dog and a bear cub — was also made into a movie in 1962, with reportedly remarkable acting on the parts of the animal stars involved. After an adventurous boyhood, Curwood spent two years at the Uni versity of Michigan, and then entered the field of journalism, working for number of years as reporter and editor of the Detroit News-Tribune. Always an ardent camper and hunter, he spent much time in the Canadian north on hunting and camping trips. For a period of two years he was also employed by the Canadian govenment as a writer extolling the virtues of the Canadian north woods. In 1908 he published his first novel, and thereafter earned his living by writing.3 The majority of his novels deal with life in the Canadian north — outlining the exploits and tribulations of hunters, trappers, Moun- ties, mining engineers, missionaries, Hudsons Bay Company employees and other denizens of this world. He was to the Canadian north what his great contemporary Zane Grey was to the American west — a chronicler and ex- toller. His novels are full of paeans to the woods and mountains and rivers of this area of North America, and full of detail on the way people lived in this environment. He continued to travel extensively in the Canadian north, and built or had built various residences there, where he spent much of his time. Biographical details on Curwood can be found in the Dictionary of American Biography (1930 (4):622-623) and the references therein. THE WORKS OF JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD 65 In northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest territories, he must have come into contact with many speakers of Cree, and he not only incorporated many Cree speakers into his novels as characters, he also used Cree vocab ulary to embellish his narrative, calling many items by their Cree names, sometimes with translation into English, sometimes without. As an exam ple, consider this sentence from The Grizzly King of 1916: ". for Langdon was keskwao now. Something had gone wrong in his head." It is not too difficult for the reader who knows no Cree to guess that the word keskwao is a Cree word meaning 'insane', actually an intransitive verb meaning 'he is insane'. Another example from Back to God's Country, a collection of short stories published in 1920, is not so obvious: "What, you cheap kimootisks, will you let this pair of malamutes go for seven mink . ." The word kimoo- tisk is not, as might be imagined, the word for 'miser' or 'cheapskate', but rather the word for 'thief, an appropriate enough word in the context of an auction of dogs at a trading post in the North. Curwood also used a good deal of French in his stories and novels in the dialogue of native speakers of French, mostly Metis but occasionally a French Canadian, who figure as characters in the novels. Of the 34 books by Curwood that have been published, I have read 28. Of these 28, I have found 13 that contain Cree words and phrases, ranging from only 1 in The River's End of 1922, to 63 in Nomads of the North of 1919.4 As mentioned above, Curwood has two ways of using Cree: either as bits of dialogue, or as part of the narrative. He handles the narrative use much as Longfellow did with Ojibwa in Hiawatha. An object or animal is introduced with its Cree name, with a quasi-parenthetical translation into English immediately following, as in the following example from The Grizzly King of 1916: ". Oohomisew, the big snow owl . ." Compare this with the following line from Hiawatha: "The Keneu, the great war-eagle". The dialogue ranges from a single word, as kimootisk 'thief, quoted above, or this from The Valley of Silent Men of 1920: "I've questioned every scow cheman at the landing", cheman being the Cree word for 'canoe', to whole sentences, as this from The Courage of Marge O'Doone of 1918: "Meyoo iss e chikao," he cried. "Remember?" The Cree phrase means 'he acts well, he does good'. And a number of the Cree words or expressions surface as personal names, such as Nepeese 'willow branch', used as a woman's name in Baree, Son of Kazan of 1917, and also, spelled Nepise, as a woman's name in A Gentleman of Courage, of 1924. Perhaps the novel that has the most effective use of Cree, although not the most items, is God's Country — And the Woman, published in 4This is list frequency, not text frequency. Here and elsewhere, I only count the words and expressions as individual items the first time they occur, not noting repetitions of the same item. 66 WILLIAM COWAN 1915. This is a tempestuous tale of seduction, deception, open warfare, and bare-knuckle fighting, in which the lustful villain, along with three other villains equally loathsome, is in the end torn to pieces by a pack of semi-wild dogs owned by the heroine. It also has a number of obligatory elements, like the heroine's hair, golden and down to her hips, love at first sight on the part of the hero, and a mysterious trip cross-country in which the heroine steadfastly refuses to reveal to the hero the purpose of the trip.5 The following list contains the Cree items that occur in the novel. There is more dialogue in Cree in this than in any other novel by Curwood that I have examined. And much of the Cree remains untranslated. In a number of places, the reader can guess what the Cree means, but in a number of others there is no indication of what is meant, but the story goes on in any event. The Cree examples in this novel also illustrate some of the problems in this analysis. A number of the Cree items reveal misprints of some sort or another, and a number of others cannot be found in the standard reference works, and may represent either misprints, mistakes on Curwood's part, or vocabulary that has not been recorded in these standard works.