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Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology
It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with Tate’s stories? It is this question that Ralph Maud sets out to address in Transmission Difficulties.
Boas’s original misrepresentations of the more than 2,000 pages of material he received from Henry Tate have been denied by the ethnographic establishment for more than eighty years. His distortion of Tate’s stories has been rationalized, to date, as “cultural relativism”—any loss of Tate’s original material in this ethnographic “collaboration” between Native informant and European scientist was “unavoidable,” due to the presumably equal “cultural differences” between them. This, Maud argues convincingly, is not the case at all. The fact that Boas paid Tate for his stories by the page, and furthermore instructed Tate specifically on what stories, and even on what kinds of stories he was to gather and submit, created a profoundly unequal relationship between these two men, which resulted in an inevitable and pre-determined “authentication” of the Native material by the European ethnographer.
Transmission Difficulties unfolds like a gripping, real-life mystery story. It leaves the reader with a whole new vision of what the relation between European colonials and Aboriginal inhabitants in the Americas might have been, and still might be.
Boas’s original misrepresentations of the more than 2,000 pages of material he received from Henry Tate have been denied by the ethnographic establishment for more than eighty years. His distortion of Tate’s stories has been rationalized, to date, as “cultural relativism”—any loss of Tate’s original material in this ethnographic “collaboration” between Native informant and European scientist was “unavoidable,” due to the presumably equal “cultural differences” between them. This, Maud argues convincingly, is not the case at all. The fact that Boas paid Tate for his stories by the page, and furthermore instructed Tate specifically on what stories, and even on what kinds of stories he was to gather and submit, created a profoundly unequal relationship between these two men, which resulted in an inevitable and pre-determined “authentication” of the Native material by the European ethnographer.
Transmission Difficulties unfolds like a gripping, real-life mystery story. It leaves the reader with a whole new vision of what the relation between European colonials and Aboriginal inhabitants in the Americas might have been, and still might be.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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February 8, 2025
This was an odd and interesting short read. It’s Maud’s claim that Franz Boas made all kinds of errors and committed various sins of omission and commission in assembling the material that his Tsimshian collaborator, Henry Tate, provided him, and which were the basis of Boas’ famous (1916) work, Tsimshian Mythology.
At one point you see that Boas himself did his best to lay problems with these texts on Tate’s doorstep: “Mr. Tate felt it incumbent onto himself to omit some of those traits of the myths of his people that seem inappropriate to us, and there is no doubt that in this respect the tales do not quite express the old type of Tsimshian traditions.”
But then Maud goes on to demonstrate, in nearly excruciating detail, how Boas made subtle and gross changes to the material provided by Tate, twisting and turning it to best suit his professional purposes and reputation.
But then I looked up an article on Ralph Maud from BC Booklook, which described Maud as “an iconoclastic professor and eccentric pamphleteer.” The unnamed author of this piece went on to quote Andrea Laforet from the National Museum of Man, who says, “Maud has approached aspects of his topic with a certain insouciant bias which can make what he has written not only superficial but also unjust. This is particularly true in the case of Franz Boas.” (http://bcbooklook.com/ralph-maud-1928...)
Maud himself says that the original academic article that this book was based on was met with stony silence by Boas’ supporters who supposedly froze him out of public discourse simply by ignoring him. Maud left me wondering whether I had wasted my time wading my way patiently through the 1013 pages of Tsimshian Mythology. Honestly, I found it hard to draw any hard conclusion after reading Maud. The interesting thing about all this infighting is that none of the White settler parties involved in this century of wrangling ever thought it would be useful to ask any Tsimshian for clarification.
At one point you see that Boas himself did his best to lay problems with these texts on Tate’s doorstep: “Mr. Tate felt it incumbent onto himself to omit some of those traits of the myths of his people that seem inappropriate to us, and there is no doubt that in this respect the tales do not quite express the old type of Tsimshian traditions.”
But then Maud goes on to demonstrate, in nearly excruciating detail, how Boas made subtle and gross changes to the material provided by Tate, twisting and turning it to best suit his professional purposes and reputation.
But then I looked up an article on Ralph Maud from BC Booklook, which described Maud as “an iconoclastic professor and eccentric pamphleteer.” The unnamed author of this piece went on to quote Andrea Laforet from the National Museum of Man, who says, “Maud has approached aspects of his topic with a certain insouciant bias which can make what he has written not only superficial but also unjust. This is particularly true in the case of Franz Boas.” (http://bcbooklook.com/ralph-maud-1928...)
Maud himself says that the original academic article that this book was based on was met with stony silence by Boas’ supporters who supposedly froze him out of public discourse simply by ignoring him. Maud left me wondering whether I had wasted my time wading my way patiently through the 1013 pages of Tsimshian Mythology. Honestly, I found it hard to draw any hard conclusion after reading Maud. The interesting thing about all this infighting is that none of the White settler parties involved in this century of wrangling ever thought it would be useful to ask any Tsimshian for clarification.
Displaying 1 of 1 review