Reading Martha Lamont's Crow Story Today
Oral Tradition, 13/1 (1998): 92-129 Reading Martha Lamont’s Crow Story Today Marya Moses and Toby C. S . Langen Translator’s Introduction to the Text1 In the early years of this century, probably about 1915, a white teenager dropped out of high school and went to work in a logging camp, an event that eventually led to the Crow story told by Martha Lamont that is printed here. Because of a hearing disability, the young man, Leon Metcalf, had run into trouble in a high school in Marysville, Washington, a town bordering the Tulalip Indian Reservation. In the logging camp Leon met some Snohomish Indian loggers, who took him under their wing, advised him, and taught him some of their language and something about their culture. In time, fortified by this care, Leon returned to school, finished college as a music major, toured the country as a member of a circus band, earned a masters degree, and became band director at Pacific Lutheran College (now University) in Seattle. While he was at Pacific Lutheran, Leon became interested in the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators and took classes in fieldwork methods through the Summer Institute of Linguistics. In the early fifties, remembering the kindness of his Snohomish friends forty years earlier, he returned to Tulalip to record texts in what he and many others thought was a dying language: Lushootseed, the closely related group of tongues belonging to the Native peoples whose ancestral lands extend from the mountains to the salt water along the eastern shore of Puget Sound between Bellingham and Olympia.
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