Customer Reviews

Chinook Texts (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins)

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For the price the quality of the text, the binding and printing, is good. However, buyers should be aware that this edition does not follow pagination of original and does not include the Chinook language or interlineal transcriptions. It only contains the free English translations of the texts.

I was sorely disappointed upon getting my copy of this book to find that it did not contain the original Chinook-language texts. (I have been a student of the upper Chinookan dialects for nearly twenty years and had decided to begin studying Shoalwater and Clatsop as well.)

How dare the publisher claim that this is a reprinting of Boas's original, when half the book is missing? Only students of ethnography and native folklore will find this book useful.

As for me, I have contacted the Library of Congress Photoduplication Service for a full copy of the original.

Rather than the abbreviated version, I'd point folks to Coyote Press of Salinas CA which carries facsimiles of the original 1894 Smithsonian publication with original Chinook language text and Boas' interlineal translation. The original version rates 5 stars: fascinating texts that include, in addition to myths, Q'elti's (Charles Cultee's) expositions on cultural and historical aspects of Chinook/Clatsop life including their first interaction with shipwrecked Europeans who they thought might be bears with human faces.