Indian Tales

by Jaime de Angulo

Jaime de Angulo drew on his forty years among the Pit River tribe of California to create the amalgam of fiction, folklore, tall tales, jokes, ceremonial ritual, and adventure that is Indian Tales. He first wrote these stories to entertain his children, borrowing freely from the worlds of the Pit, and also of the Miwok, Pomo, and Karok. The author's intent was not so much to render anthropologically faithful translations - though they are here - as to create a magical world fueled by the power of storytelling while avoiding the dangers of the romantic and picturesque.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literature

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) was a linguist, novelist, and ethnomusicologist in the western United States. He was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905 to become a cowboy, and eventually arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the great 1906 earthquake. He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist. He survived a suicide attempt after cutting his throat from ear to ear in Berkeley. He became a linguist who contributed to the knowledge of certain Northern California Indian languages, as well as some in Mexico.
He began his career at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to L. S. (“Nancy”) Freeland. During this period he and his wife lived among many native Californian tribes, often becoming fully integrated into their daily lives, in an attempt to study their cultures, languages and music. As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican languages and music-systems. De Angulo was particularly interested in the semantics of grammatical systems of the tribes he studied, but he was also a skilled phonetician and a pioneer in the study of North American ethnomusicology, particularly in his recordings of native music. De Angulo corresponded with Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward Sapir, and received considerable support for his fieldwork from Boas’s Committee on American Native Languages.
In the end, de Angulo’s Bohemian lifestyle kept him from pursuing a normal academic career, and his involvement in Native American research effectively came to an end following the death of his son Alvar in an automobile accident in 1933 and his retreat to an isolated hilltop ranch at Big Sur. At this point his writings took a wild turn into fiction and poetry. Much of his fictional work attempted to recognize and embrace the native "coyote tales", or the trickster wisdom inherent in native storytelling. Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid" and William Carlos Williams "one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered." de Angulo also went on to tutor numerous famous authors including Jack Spicer in linguistics, and Robert Duncan in North American shamanic sorcery; he appears as a character in Jack Kerouac's books.
Perceptions of de Angulo swing wildly; he is seen alternately as a gifted but irresponsible and failed amateur, to an ‘‘Old Coyote,’’ an anarchist hero and talented subversive . De Angulo shaped and diversified the scholarly picture of the native Californian landscape. He was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, and many others.

Reviews

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

See, this is why I love GR. I don’t remember what idle browsing unearthed this book whose title and author I had both long forgotten, but there the cover was in GR, more or less the only thing I remembered.
It was over 30 years ago when my son was about 8 and there was nothing to read in the house because we hadn’t been to the library. In desperation I picked up this tattered water-stained paperback that had been abandoned by a former flatmate. It didn’t look promising, and I thought my son would be bored stupid by the mythic tales of Fox and Raven, but he was absolutely enthralled and we read the whole thing in a couple of nights.

[Derek Pyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oriole said to Fox, "Oh, come along let's play. You study too much; it will hurt your back. Why do you ask all those questions from the grown-ups? They don't know the answers. You only embarrass them."
"But I want to know the truth."
"What for?"
"Because I want to know the way it really happened."
"IT HAPPENED THE WAY they tell it."
"But they tell it differently!"
"Then it is because it happened differently."
p.87-88 Indian Tales

based on KPFA recordings of this eccentric anthropologist. From his work with various Native Californian tribes, Jaime de Angulo weaves together a cross cultural California native travel tail; as the characters make a trip across California they meet many tribes, giving us vision into different tribes, and these visions are rooted in the depth of Jaime's own work.

[Jay Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is this book so good? California Pit River Indian tales for children? Sounds like a total bore.

It is instead totally engaging, delightful and very moving.

The best (American?) writers write like this--transparently clear, relaxed, intimately. I'm thinking of Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Rexroth, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, etc. This style is really not a style at all, but expression of a certain kind of ease and mastery. This here is a very simple book, so any missteps, no matter how slight, would stand out. There are none.

De Angulo may have learned how to tell a story from the northern California Indian storytellers he worked with for many years; their humanity, humor and wisdom shine through the book.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of oral history tales captured by a man who spent time with Native American tribes in California in the early 1900's. My kids loved it, and it contained a number of interesting insights into the culture.

[GORDON · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully retold stories of a California tribe by an ethnographer who showed up to do field work, and never left.

[Nancy Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read approximately 30% of the book, just trying to declutter by reading tab. Has some interesting stories about Native American Tribes of California. Some chapters are recounts of their underground architecture, others are full-fledged oral stories. Interesting read.

[danadickerson Dickerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread this recently. I really enjoyed the way de Angulo pulled together so many different elements into such a simple story. It's a family traveling from one location to another, yet the world unfolds before them along the way. He blurs the lines between fact and fiction, ethnography and myth, human and animal. It raises the question, is the chasm between modern and primitive so very great? Or is it simply a matter of perception? Is there such thing as a modern or a primitive mind? Doesn't it all spring forth from the same mind, just different angles. Jaime de Angulo is able to raise all these issues, without actually stating any of them. It's the type of story that can be read at face value or examined for greater depth.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo mejor que me ha pasado en un millón de años, opinión nada subjetiva. Un beso en los morros a Allen Ginsberg por hacer que publicasen esto. Toda mi infancia desde los seis hasta los diez. Cuando todo era bonito.

[izad]

REF: Una guía sobre el arte de perderse de Rebecca Solnit

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

'If you don’t have the answer invent one.'

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a religious fundamentalist tale, just not your religion. Before people, the world was brimming with consciousness and intelligence. This is the story of what happened next.

[Will Kastner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique and wonderful.

[Adam Hoffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess this is the perfect tale.

[Bill Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this a long time ago. I want to read it again.

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a tattered old edition of this, I think Little Brown, or whatever. Lovely tales.