PREFACE ix

coast, and began the study with much misgiving. The results
were surprisingly satisfactory.

After a few weeks I found that I had sufficient knowledge
of Chinook to dispense with interpreters and deal directly with
the older people, a tremendous advantage. Pride of ancestry
is one of the strongest characteristics of the Bella Coola, and
once convinced of my sincere interest in and respect for their
history, they were willing to talk. They resent the condescen-
sion with which most white men regard them, so that contact
with one who was friendly and sympathetic came as a pleasant
surprise. There were, of course, difficulties. The canning season
had begun and every able-bodied man was working away from
the village. The conviction of each person that he was the best
source of information, and that conferences with another were
useless or unreliable, caused distrust. The desire of each in-
formant to discuss only what interested him; the complexity
of Bella Coola life itself; the necessity of checking every state-
ment, and the extreme difficulty of doing so on account of
discrepancies in the myths of different families; the fear, almost
groundless, of each individual that someone else had infringed
on his rights by recounting some legend; and, not least, the
need for tact, patience, and a sense of humour under all con-
ditions, were some of the obstacles to be surmounted. Nor was
Chinook entirely satisfactory. It has enough words for matters
pertaining to fishing, hunting, and trading, but for the realms
of sociology or theology it is inadequate. This difficulty could
not have been overcome without the patient help of my infor-
mants. Animated by the desire to help, they used every ex-
pedient in the way of parallel and synonym to explain obscure
terms. Sometimes a younger man was called in for some ab-
struse meaning; more often it gradually became clear from
different applications. Once the significance of a word was
definitely understood, I made a note of it and used it hence-
forth. A useful vocabulary was thus built up, and conversa-
tions were carried on in mixed Bella Coola and Chinook, eked
out by whatever English words were known by the person with