Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

enclose a letter which I have written to the Kwakiutl tribe.... I hope you will read this letter to them, translated, of course, into Indian, and in doing so, you better invite them to a feast, for which I will pay when I see you.

    In the files of the Museum, Wardwell found part of the following letter, which Boas had enclosed in his letter to Hunt (the last pages of it are lost):

Friends, I am Mr. Boas who is speaking to you. I am he whom you called Heiltsaqoalis. It is two winters since I have been with you, but I have thought of you often. You were very kind to me when I was with you.... It is difficult for you to show the white men in Victoria that your feasts and potlatches are good, and I have tried to show them they are good.... I am trying to show them that your ways are not bad ways ... I am sorry to see how many of your children do not obey the old laws, how they walk the ways of the white man. The ways of the Indian were made differently from the ways of the white man at the beginning of the world, and it is good that we remember the old ways ... your young people do not know the history of your people . . . it is not good that these stories are forgotten. . . .

    Boas was particularly anxious to preserve the myths of the Northwest Coast Indians. Most artifacts can survive the extinction of a culture; pots, house foundations, knives, stonework, and burials will last for thousands of years. But myths, Boas realized, are the most delicate artifact of a culture, and the first to disappear in the face of cultural change. Boas believed that myths were the key to understanding a culture. Like the majority of artifacts, myths reveal influences, contacts, and ideas from other cultures. They also reveal, Boas believed, the way a culture organizes and makes sense of a complex world. Myths integrate—in one structure—the many traits of a culture.

    Despite his grasp of their importance, however, Boas found myth-gathering a tedious business. An entry in one of his journals attests: "I had a miserable day today. The natives held a big potlatch again. I was unable to get hold of anyone and had to snatch at whatever I could get. Late at night I did get something, [a tale] for which I have been searching—'The Birth of the Raven.'" He went on to complain about how much nonsense he was forced to listen to before getting one valuable myth.

    The expeditions along the Northwest Coast yielded the largest and most important collection from that area in the world. Besides virtually the entire creation and myth cycle of the Kwakiutl and other Indians, Boas and Hunt brought back magical transformation masks, shamans' dance shirts, huge carved bowls and painted chests, shamans' rattles, exquisite carvings in bone, cedar, and slate, feast dishes, and giant totem poles (for which they paid one dollar per foot).

    These items were saved just in time. By 1910 the Northwest Coast Indian culture had been suppressed and the potlatch (the periodic feasts where important chiefs would try to outdo each other in giving away their wealth) outlawed; the Indians had stopped creating their extraordinary art. What Boas feared most had come to pass.

    EXPEDITIONS IN ASIA

    Meanwhile, Boas had sent three men to conduct parallel work in Asia. The first two were Russian anthropologists, Waldemar Borgoras and Waldemar Jochelson, both of whom had been exiled to Siberia by the Czar for belonging to revolutionary societies. Once in Siberia, the two were more or less free to travel and research as they pleased, only mildly inconvenienced by the shadow of the Czar's secret police. The third man, Berthold Laufer, a German, was put in charge of research among the tribes living along the Amur River, which runs along the present-day border of China and the Soviet Union.

    Laufer, Jochelson, and Borgoras hired their own assistants and traveled separately. At this time, Siberia was still one of the remotest regions on the earth, containing areas that were entirely