The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

storytelling), the posthumous Karok Myths puts our oral literature at center stage. While
the title page and Theodora Kroeber’s “Forward” make it look as if Kroeber and Gifford
are the authors, their actual text puts the stories and the tellers (eleven of them) at center
stage. The anthropologists’ writing is limited to brief introductions of the tellers and their
stories, bracketed text interspersed in the tellers’ words to make it more user-friendly for
a white academic audience, and ethnographic notes by A. L. Kroeber in the center of the
book.
Representing the field of early Káruk linguistics, J. P. Harrington and William
Bright dominate the scene. Like Kroeber and Gifford in their Karok Myths, Harrington is
credited as author of Karuk Indian Myths and Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of
California. But in reality, the words are those of Phoebe Maddux, a Káruk storyteller and
basketweaver. Harrington was the one with the academic connections to publish books,
but Maddux is the true author. As the driving force behind the creation of Karuk Indian
Myths, Harrington writes,
Indian myths are valuable as literature in direct proportion to the
faithfulness of the old style Indian linguistic form in which they are told.
Volumes of mythology distorted by being told loosely in English will be
of only secondary usefulness in the future…The only proper method for
recording mythology is to obtain the services of a good mythologist and
then take down syllable by syllable in his own language, with unrestrained
literary freedom, the story as he tells it, and as nearly as possible as he
heard it from those a little farther back in the line of elders. (1)
His style is to write out Maddux’s Araaráhi telling, and then work with her to get an
English translation that approximates it as close as possible that follows the original
directly in the book. In Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California, they engaged in
the same process, but he lays the original and the translation out side by side on the page.
In addition to Maddux, Harrington worked with nine men informants. His approach to the
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