Myths and Tales From the San Carlos Apache

by Pliny Earle Goddard

Overview

This book, which was first published in 1918, consists of literary translations of San Carlo Apache mythological tales. The myths include the creation of the earth, the birth of the culture hero and his ridding the world of monsters, and myths explaining the origins of certain ceremonies. The tales were collected from two chief San Carlos informants, namely Antonio, “a very well informed man of advanced age who dictated freely;” and Albert Evans, “a man of middle age speaking sufficient English to translate his own texts.”

“The myths of the Apache are of two sorts: First, there are several important narratives, the most typical of which explains the origin of the earth, and of its topography, the birth of the Culture Hero and his activities in freeing the world of monsters. To the second class belong the myths explaining the origin of definite ceremonies. These myths in their more complete versions are known only to those who celebrate the ceremonies in question and are perhaps integral parts of the rituals. The myth of the woman who became a deer is typical of this class.

“The tales divide into those which are wholly native and those that, in part at least, are of European origin. The Apache themselves recognize some of these tales as ‘Mexican’ but claim other such stories as Apache. Without a knowledge of European folklore a complete segregation of the European elements is impossible. The footnotes point out the more obvious foreign tales or incidents.”—Pliny Earle Goddard, Introduction

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789128604
Publisher:	Borodino Books
Publication date:	12/12/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	643 KB

About the Author

Pliny Earle Goddard (1869-1928) was an American linguist and ethnologist noted for his extensive documentation of the languages and cultures of the Athabaskan peoples of western North America. His early research, carried out under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the Hupa and adjacent Athabaskan groups in northwestern California. After moving to New York in 1909 at the invitation of Franz Boas his scope expanded to include the Athabaskans of the Southwest, Canada, and Alaska. During the 1910s and 1920s, as Boas’s junior colleague at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, Goddard played a major role in creating the academic infrastructure for American Indian linguistics and anthropology in North America.

Goddard was born in Lewiston, Maine, on November 24, 1869, into a Quaker family of modest means. He attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana (A.B. 1892, M.A. 1896), where he studied Classics. Between 1892-1896 he taught Latin in secondary schools in Indiana and Kansas, but the hard economic times of the mid-1890s led him to accept a position as an interdenominational missionary to the Hupa of northwestern California. Finding it necessary to learn enough of the Hupa language to communicate with his flock, he soon became engrossed in analyzing a linguistic system radically different from any he had previously studied. In 1900 he resigned from his missionary post and began graduate study at Berkeley. The following year he was given an Assistantship in the university’s newly formed Anthropology department.

Goddard was awarded a Ph.D. in 1904 for a detailed grammatical study of Hupa, the first doctorate in anthropological linguistics granted by any American university. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1906 and had responsibility for much of the undergraduate instruction in anthropology and linguistics offered by the university.

He died on July 12, 1928.