Living by Stories includes a number of classic stories set in the “mythological age” about the trickster/transformer, Coyote, and his efforts to rid the world of bad people – spatla or “monsters,” but this volume also presents historical narratives set in the more recent past, which involve the arrival of new quasi-monsters – “SHAmas” (Whites).
Henry W. Tate (d. 1914), a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas, first wrote these stories in English before giving Boas Tsimshian equivalents between 1903 and 1913. Boas published them in the much-consulted ethnology classic, Tsimshian Mythology (1916). In Ralph Maud’s selection of the best stories, now preserved closer to the way Tate originally intended, Tate emerges as creative writer.
