visiting the six worlds: shamanistic journeys in canadian mi'kmaq cosmology

Visiting the Six Worlds: Shamanistic Journeys in Canadian Mi'kmaqCosmology

Hornborg, Anne-Christine.

Journal of American Folklore, Volume 119, Number 473, Summer 2006,pp. 312-336 (Article)

Published by American Folklore SocietyDOI: 10.1353/jaf.2006.0034

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Journal of American Folklore 119(473):312–336Copyright © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Anne-Christine Hornborg

Visiting the Six Worlds: Shamanistic Journeys in Canadian Mi’kmaq Cosmology

Mi’kmaq Indians’ descriptions of journeys between worlds, as we find them in tales collected from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are far too complex to fit into Mircea Eliade’s model of shamanism or romantic images of Indians as being “at one with nature.” The tales reveal six parallel worlds in which all types of beings belong to families, have wigwams, and search for food. The parallelism between worlds has no significance for beings living their ordinary lives, but it is of the utmost importance for understanding how differing types of beings in the stories (people, animals, supernaturals) achieve interworld journeys. The notions of cosmological deixis and perspectivism are used to explore the narratives and shed light on Mi’kmaq cosmology.

Then she pulls up her door-post, and goes down the hole into an underground passage, telling her children

to close the passage after her by re-inserting the door-post. She travels on a long distance, comes to a river,

which she follows down, and finally reaches an Indian village, where there are many wigwams. She enters

the first wigwam she comes to, where she finds seated on the ground an old woman named Mooinasque;

she sees also a boy whose name is Abistanaooch (Marten).1

Mi’kmaq Tale

Thus, does a tale in Silas Rand’s compilation of Mi’kmaq2 folklore depict how a woman disappears into a world beneath the surface of the earth. Who is the woman? What world is she visiting? Why does she travel? Unanswered questions abound. This article shows that the Mi’kmaq Indians’ accounts of journeys between parallel worlds, as we find them in tales collected from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are far too complex to fit into Mircea Eliade’s model of shamanism or in romantic images of Indians as being “at one with nature.” Interpreting the cosmol-ogy implied by the tales requires attention to the cultural logic and cosmology of the Mi’kmaq. For example, the notion of parallel worlds in Mi’kmaq tales has no sig-nificance for beings living their ordinary lives but is of the utmost importance for understanding how differing types of beings (people, animals, supernaturals) travel between worlds. The notion of cosmological deixis will be used to explain how dif-fering beings communicate with one another, while the notion of perspectivism helps

Anne-Christine Hornborg is Associate Professor of Ritual Studies in the Department of History and Anthropology of Religions, Lund University, Sweden

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Hornborg, Mi’kmaq Cosmology 313

to explain the conflicts that arise between the beings in the narratives.3 I begin by discussing traditional Mi’kmaq society and the sources of information we have about it. Because the pertinent historical texts were written down by missionaries and ear-ly ethnographers, the problems of interpreting and translating Mi’kmaq texts, both oral and written, will be considered.

Sources

The Mi’kmaq were traditionally hunters and gatherers of the Canadian East Coast provinces and northern New England, and they were one of the first indigenous North American peoples to meet Europeans. News about teeming fishing grounds off the coast of Nova Scotia had spread rapidly in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Fishing vessels from England, France, and Portugal crossed the Atlantic Ocean every year and returned to Europe loaded with fish. Europeans soon imagined what riches the new continent might hold, and they placed a high value on the pelts that natives exchanged for European products. Trade, missions, and epidemics followed in sequence, deeply affecting the Mi’kmaq culture. Further, the wars between England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved the Mi’kmaq and had negative consequences for them and their traditional culture. In the nineteenth century, the coastal provinces saw a new wave of immigration and settlement, one that dealt Mi’kmaq traditional life its coup de grâce. Large portions of the provinces became private property for the English settlers and were placed under cultivation. As a result, those lands could no longer be used for traditional forms of subsistence by the Mi’kmaq. Deprived of their hunting grounds, the Mi’kmaq were close to be-coming extinct. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British government decided to set aside land on which they could settle, and, from then on, the Mi’kmaq became denizens of reservations. The Mi’kmaq traditionally had no written language,4 so European sources are the only certain way to obtain knowledge about their former lifeworld as hunters. Read-ers of these sources must keep in mind that European chroniclers were deeply influ-enced by the European literary tradition and that the texts were biased by the mis-sionaries’ desire to show their superiors how successfully their missions had proceeded.5 Depictions of the early mission by the Jesuits are collected in The Jesuit Relation and Allied Documents (Thwaites 1959), a seventy-volume series that includes texts written by non-Jesuits, such as letters from Marc Lescarbot, a lawyer who stayed at the trading station Port Royal from May 1606 until the end of June 1607. Impressed by life on the new continent, Lescarbot also wrote Historie de la Nouvelle France ([1609] 1928), a popular travelogue about New France. The Recollect missionary (a member of a branch of the Franciscian order) Chrestien Le Clercq worked in the provinces from 1675 to 1683, mainly on the Gaspé Peninsula; his account of the mis-sion is given in Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspesie ([1691] 1968). Other important works were written by the surgeon Le Sieur de Dièreville ([1708] 1933) and the Roman Catholic missionary Pierre Maillard ([1758] 1984). Mi’kmaq hunting traditions and tales were still in use at the end of the nineteenth century, by which time European Americans were taking an interest in Mi’kmaq

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314 Journal of American Folklore 119 (2006)

culture. One of the first to compile Mi’kmaq tales was the Protestant missionary Silas Rand, who, in the course of his work in Nova Scotia, collected oral traditions from the Mi’kmaq, which he later edited and published ([1884] 1971). His skill in the Mi’kmaq language and his familiarity with Mi’kmaq traditions make his texts particularly valuable. His compilation became important for Charles Leland, who, influenced by the Romanticism, made use of it in his compilation, entitled The Al-gonquin Legends of New England (1884).6

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the birth of a new scholarly discipline, ethnography, whose practitioners conducted fieldwork to obtain data. The first eth-nographers to collect Mi’kmaq tales were Arthur H. Fauset (1925), Frank G. Speck (1915, 1922), Stansbury Hagar (1895, 1896, 1897), Truman Michelson (1925), and Elsie Clews Parsons (1925, 1926). The ethnographer Wilson Wallis conducted field-work among the Mi’kmaq from 1911 to 1912 and returned once again to the field in 1953, now with his wife Ruth. Later, they published their collections (including Wal-lis’s notes from his earlier field research), and this work (Wallis and Wallis 1955) is one of the most detailed monographs we have about the Mi’kmaq people. The search for evidence of pre-European Mi’kmaq cosmological in nineteenth-century historical texts is not an easy task. One difficulty is that, by this time, the Mi’kmaq had become Roman Catholics. Syncretism between Mi’kmaq and Christian traditions is visible as early as Le Clercq’s work. For example, his texts refer to the Noachian deluge, as depicted from a Mi’kmaq viewpoint. Here, the Mi’kmaq save themselves from the flood by using their canoes, and, in the end, the (sun) god prom-ises them that they will always remain under his protection and be assured of an abundance of beaver and moose. It is evident that the despair and poverty experienced by the Mi’kmaq during the nineteenth century as they moved onto the reserves altered their view of the culture hero Kluskap. In narratives from this period, he increas-ingly assumed the role of a messiah who would return to his people to deliver them from the hardships inflicted by the colonizers. Another difficulty we face in searching for evidence of precontact Mi’kmaq cosmol-ogy in missionary documents is found in the texts themselves and in us as readers. Even if the collectors intended to record oral material as faithfully as possible, the texts are organized and filtered through the lenses of the collectors’ psyches. Further, we as contemporary readers fill in the textual gaps with our own images and cul-tural assumptions.7 For example, this article examines how different worlds within the Mi’kmaq cosmology are depicted, as well as the accounts of travels between worlds. Those with sedentary lifeways or a Judeo-Christian viewpoint will read these tales differently from traditional, pre-Christian Mi’kmaq hunters, who were nomads. Dif-ferences between Mi’kmaq and non-Mi’kmaq perspectives become obvious when we consider, for example, the meaning of scenes in which Mi’kmaq dance themselves through the ground. The underground world in Christian mythology is hell, a place qualitatively different from earth; for the Mi’kmaq, however, the world beneath the surface of the ground is not a substantively different place than the earth, and it is definitely not inhabited by the dead. Down there live people, animals, or mytho-logical beings that, like the Mi’kmaq, roam the coasts or inhabit the forests. Thus, in these tales, the reader might encounter a Tcipitcjkaam (horned serpent) or a Cullo

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(giant man-eating bird), as well as personified animals, including Team (moose), Kweemoo (loon), and Pulowech (partridge).8

Traditional Christian symbolism may lead some non-Mi’kmaq readers to conceive the world beneath the earth and the world above the earth as being imbued with moral values, places where dead humans must spend eternity according to the ethi-cal qualities of their lived lives. In some Christian worldviews, we inhabit a specific place during our lifetime, and in the hereafter we will stay in a different but equally specific place—heaven, for those who have been good, or hell, for those who have been evil. In Mi’kmaq cosmology, the world above the sky holds evil magicians and helpful guardian spirits, while in the world beneath the earth, the kindest of persons might greet the traveler. Hence, the worlds that the traveling Mi’kmaq visited are not morally homogeneous. To understand how they conceived of these worlds and the notion of journeys between worlds, we must examine Mi’kmaq cosmology.

Buoin

A key to Mi’kmaq cosmology can be found in the cycles of seasonal change. Through-out their lives, traditional Mi’kmaq could observe how nature and humans underwent reiterated transformations. In autumn, the leaves of the sugar maple turned red, and a harsh chill replaced the summer heat. People became older, got sick, might recover, but often died. Children were born, and even the bitterest cold would eventually sur-render to the warmth of spring. Behind all the changes, however, the Mi’kmaq per-ceived a constancy: they saw the work of an essence, a mighty power. They called this power buoin, a term that referred to both supernatural power and its possessors. (The word probably reflects a stem glossable as “mystery.”9) Some humans and animals had more of this power than others and could thus make better use of it. Different sources use different words and spellings for people who possessed it. Rand explains that booöin is Mi’kmaq for “magician” ([1888] 1994:163). Le Clercq used the spelling bouhinne ([1691] 1968:217), and the Wallises use the spelling buoin (1955). Pierre Biard ([1616] 1959:75) and Lescarbot ([1609] 1928:172) called possessors of super-natural power autmoin and aoutmoin, respectively. The explorer Samuel de Cham-plain used the Basque word pilotoua (magician), writing, “They have certain of their number called pilotoua, who speak to the devil face to face and tell them what to do not only in matters of importance like making war but also in lesser matters as well. Whatever the pilotoua tell them to do they do” (1971:75–6).10 Sometimes a chief was ex officio a buoin, as in the case of Membertou, the grand chief around Port Royal (Lescarbot [1609] 1928:173). The Mi’kmaq had differing ways of obtaining knowledge of, and becoming initi-ated in, buoin. One way was through heritage, either as an eldest son (Lescarbot [1609] 1928:178) or as a seventh child (Hagar 1896:170). The gift could be transmit-ted from an initiate, or from an animal or a supernatural being. Most buoins were men; however, it is obvious in the tale “The Loon Magician” (Rand [1894] 1971:378–83) that both the girl and the boy are initiates. Le Clercq says that the Gaspesians believed that special persons among the Mi’kmaq had received “some particular gift from heaven,” and that this ambition “to act the patriarch does not only prevail

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among the men, but even the women meddle therewith.” These women, Le Clercq reports, could converse with the sun, which they adored as their divinity ([1691] 1968:229). He also describes how a woman imitated the French missionaries to in-crease her power: she conducted the prayers in her special way and was locally re-garded with respect. If seventeenth-century European missionaries spoke of buoins as emissaries of the devil or as jugglers and magicians, latter-day scholars in religion and ethnography granted these persons a new epithet, that of shaman, a role often associated in the ethnographic literature with the societies of Siberia. Researchers have identified this role as a prototype for a larger religious complex, shamanism. According to a classic study of shamanism by religious historian Mircea Eliade, a trait characteristic of a shaman is the ability to go into trance ([1964] 1989:5, 29, 200, 227). In trance, the shaman’s spirit leaves his body to visit other worlds. It is of course difficult to deter-mine when a person is in “real” trance, but there is nothing in the historical reports to suggest that a practicing Mi’kmaq buoin—though he dances, “froths like a horse,” and sings (Biard [1616] 1959: 121)—ever fell into trance.11 If we use the Eliadian definition of a shaman as a person who goes into trance, the Mi’kmaq buoin isn’t a shaman. To the contrary, it seems that dreams were of greater importance than tranc-es for gaining access to other worlds. In Biard’s account of a Mi’kmaq healing cere-mony ([1616] 1959:117–23), he describes the intensity of the healer’s work and states that only after the healer has gone to sleep and interpreted his dreams can he know whether or not his efforts had succeeded. What is needed in the analysis of Mi’kmaq cosmology is a reconsideration of the concept of shamanism by taking a new approach to the old Tylorian concept of animism. In the Mi’kmaq narratives, one thing is obvious about the transcendent travels: crossing the borders between the worlds was highly dangerous. By coincidence or through the influence of dangerous forces, ordinary people were always at risk of getting stuck in a parallel world, and in such situations the only hope of returning to ordinary life would be to consult a buoin or a guardian spirit. Interworld journeys, which could help buoins heal sick people or acquire deeper knowledge about the cosmos, could cost a noninitiated human his or her life. Such travels were even per-ilous for bouins, and, to protect themselves, they always carried a bundle of objects imbued with power or relied on animals to serve as their guardian spirits.

Journeys between the Worlds

Eliade depicts the shamanistic worldview as comprising three cosmological zones united through a world pillar, or axis mundi ([1964] 1989:168–9, 259–66). Each mythology has its own conceptualization of this pillar. Some mythologies speak of a world tree, such as the ash Yggdrasil in the Nordic Edda saga. For many indigenous North Americans, this pillar was represented by the doorpost of the wigwam. Other cultures represented the pillar as a mountain or a temple (Eliade [1964] 1989:266–9). From the perspective of shamanism, humans have their dwellings between the sky and the world beneath the earth, and only a powerful shaman can journey between these worlds successfully. Eliade sought to shed light on archetypes common to all religions. Contemporary

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writers have criticized his phenomenological approach for ignoring the culturally specific features of the religions he has studied, and his ideas clearly do not apply well to Mi’kmaq. In their cosmology, there are not only three worlds (heaven, earth, the world beneath the earth), but six: the World beneath the Water, the World beneath the Earth, the Earthworld, the World above the Earth, the World above the Sky, and the Ghostworld (Whitehead 1988:3) or Land of Souls (Le Clercq [1691] 1968:208). Buoins journey between these worlds. “Ordinary” people (those who are not buoins) travel, too, but often because of coincidences or circumstances over which they have no control; frequently, they must rely on the chance that a buoin will rescue them. A precondition for these journeys is what the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) has called “cosmological deixis” and Amerindian “perspectivism.” The concept of deixis, found in semiotics, is closely related to the concept of index. Charles Sanders Peirce used the term “index” to denote a sign that had a close or “near” rela-tion with that which was being signified (1931–1958:2:227–308). Smoke is an index of fire, because without fire, there is no smoke. According to Peirce, indexes are dis-tinguished from symbols, which are arbitrary signs whose meaning is assigned pure-ly by convention. Deixis can also be explained as reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the extralinguistic context of the utterance. The word “deictic” thus applies to words or utterances for which reference depends on context. The notion in Amerindian mythology of what Viveiros de Castro has coined as cosmological deixis and perspectivism is based on the idea that all beings share “a spiritual unity but a corporeal diversity” (Viveiros de Castro 1998:470).12 They are subjects—persons—and are all part of a greater power, which we may name the “Great Subject,” or, if we apply these ideas to Mi’kmaq cosmology, buoin. All beings have in common a system of categories (a classificatory system), but how they embody these categories depends on which body they inhabit. They have, for example, a category for food, but this category is embodied as maggots for the hawk and beaver meat for the Mi’kmaq. As parts (or indexes) of the cosmological essence as subjects, everyone thus shares the same experience of how to dwell in the world. This is one reason why animals are depicted as humans in Mi’kmaq tales: they perceive themselves as people, and they perceive their dwelling-in-the-world as culture.13 The common referential point is not human as a species, but humanity as a condition (Descola 1996:113–4; Viveiros de Castro 1998:476). Viveiros de Castro writes, “Indigenous categories of identity have that enormous contextual variability of scope that char-acterizes pronouns, marking contrastively Ego’s immediate kin, his/her local group, all humans, or even all beings endowed with subjectivity. . . . Whatever possesses a soul is a subject, and whatever has a soul is capable of having a point of view. Amer-indian souls, be they human or animal, are thus indexical categories, cosmological deictics” (1998:478). The bodies that animals inhabit differ from human bodies, so they have to dwell in different ways in the world. In this context, Wittgenstein’s state-ment, “The limit of my world is my language,” could in this case be reinterpreted as “the limit of my world is my body.”14 The limit of the body makes every being live in the world according to his or her special condition, a notion that Viveiros de Castro calls “perspectivism.” Out of the diversity of objects in the world, every being has to choose those objects that suit his or her body’s requirements. This consideration does not take away from the fact that the subjective experience of being in the cosmos is

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shared by all. Whatever one chooses to eat (poplar bark, meat, blood), the experience of a delicious meal is the same. When a hawk is eating frogs, it has the same experi-ence as humans who are eating what we would consider to be the best of meals, but this sameness becomes unbelievable from a human viewpoint, which evaluates frogs differently. In other words, used by hawks, human (“person” or “my people”) refers to other hawks and food to frogs, but used by Mi’kmaq, human (my people) refers to other Mi’kmaq and food to beaver steaks. When, in Mi’kmaq tales, people (including nonhuman beings) cross into a world inhabited by other beings, they change their perspective and adopt another point of view. Their visits are made possible by the fact that beings are parts of (and thus index) the same inner essence, buoin. Without the notion of sharing a spiritual uni-ty as persons, the beings in the different worlds could never communicate with each other: they would forever be captives of their body’s outlook on the world. But these visits are by no means problem-free, because the body of one subject is not adjusted to the world of other beings; hence, no visit may be permanent, and journeys between worlds must be conducted with the highest of precautions so that a being can return to its true element and regain the perspective that goes with its natural body. It is actually only the buoins and their counterparts “the masters of the animals” (discussed below) who have the full ability to be “species-androgynous”—to manage more than one perspective of the world at the same time. An example of perspectivism is found in the tale “The Beaver Magicians and the Big Fish” (Rand [1894] 1971:351–3). It is winter, and food becomes scarce in a Mi’kmaq camp. A Mi’kmaq hunter decides to try his luck in the woods. He follows some snowshoe tracks that lead to a wigwam beside a lake. He enters the wigwam and finds an old man sleeping. The man wakes up, welcomes the visitor, feeds him caribou meat, and gives him a supply of meat to take home:

Arriving at his own lodge, he deposited his burden according to the custom outside the lodge, went in, and sent out the woman to fetch it in, telling her he had a small bundle of food. What was their surprise on opening the pack to find that it was poplar bark, instead of meat,—food for beavers instead of food for human beings. The old man [the hunter] had been deceived. He had supposed himself in an Indi-an’s hut, when he had been the guest of an old beaver and his litters to the third generation. He had fed on poplar bark instead of beefsteak, and had brought home a back-load of the same, supposing it was moose-meat. (Rand [1894] 1971:351–2)

The other men in the camp draw an inference from what happened. The man had visited a beaver hut, and beaver means food to the Mi’kmaq. They all leave the camp in search of the beaver hut. When they arrive, the only tracks they find are tracks from one man. The beaver hut is gone, and they conclude that a powerful magician must have played tricks on the hunter, whose senses must have deceived him. The tale illustrates that the buoin is well acquainted with the practice of switching perspective and also that he has the power to distort the perspective of others who do not have this ability. The beaver in this story was actually a skillful buoin, who succeeded in his attempts to make the hunter adopt a beaver’s perspective of the

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world. That is why the man eats poplar, a beaver’s equivalent of meat. To the beaver, poplar bark is a succulent steak, the beaver lodge is a hut or a wigwam, and other beavers in the hut are family members. The buoin’s ability and skill at switching across these boundaries becomes apparent, because he never totally loses his human per-spective and thus remains a human-being-in-the-world, whereas a man not initiated in buoin lacks the ability to keep a distance from his new way of being and therefore runs the risk of being caught within a beaver’s perspective. We shall now approach the Mi’kmaq cosmology more closely by visiting the six worlds as they are depicted in Mi’kmaq folklore. The tales exemplify Amerindian ontological perspectivism. Various themes appear, such as the skills and gifts of the buoin, buoin qualities revealed to or obtained by the characters, the presence of traditional ecological knowledge and descriptions of landscape, the portals and pas-sages between worlds, and the impossibility of inhabiting the ecological niches of other beings. A closer look at the tales will debunk the romantic notion that Indians are “at one with nature” and provide a nuanced interpretation of Mi’kmaq narratives that goes beyond the simple reading of the tales as exemplifying Eliadean shamanism. The final narrative, of the Ghostworld, will be used to explore another problem in the interpretation of traditional Mi’kmaq cosmology: the influence of the missionar-ies and Western literature on both the historical sources and the Mi’kmaq them-selves.

The World beneath the Water

Because the traditional Mi’kmaq traveled along rivers and coasts, they were well acquainted with water as an environment. They thought of water and its inhabitants as constituting a world of its own. They depicted whales and seals as aquatic human beings that live as humans do, in families. According to modern theories of animism (not to be confused with Edward B. Tylor’s evolutionary theory), the Mi’kmaq cos-mology may be described as animistic. In his study of symbolic ecology and the ways in which nature and society have been conceptualized in differing human cultures, Philippe Descola distinguishes three modes of approaching nature: totemism, ani-mism, and naturalism (1996:87–8): “animism endows natural beings with human dispositions and social attributes. Animistic systems . . . use the elementary categories structuring social life to organize, in conceptual terms, the relations between human beings and natural species” (1996:88).15 This definition fits well with how Mi’kmaq tales conceptualize nature. There is more, however, to these tales than even Descola’s animism: traditional ecological knowledge, a Mi’kmaq ethnoecology, is embedded in them. Rand provides an example in Mi’kmaq observations of beavers. In the tale of “The Beaver Magicians and the Big Fish” ([1894] 1971:352), the storyteller tells us that “the man had been a guest of an old beaver and his litters to the third generation.” Rand’s informant had told him that the old beavers “with their whelps, with the young of the last year’s litter, and that of the year before the last, all own and occupy one wees (beaver house), and work together as one family.” In a note, Rand writes, “The beavers get their growth in four years, and begin to breed when three years old, and do not leave their old

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homestead until then. Thus the family consists of four generations, first the two old ones, called Kesegomskook; secondly, their young of the year before last, called Pulum-skook; thirdly the young of last year, called Kujebaneheechk; and fourthly, the young of this year, called Peewechk. They may bring forth as many as six at a litter” ([1894] 1971:352). This way of approaching nature illustrates a difference between Mi’kmaq and mod-ern Western animal tales. If in a Western ontology only humans are persons, tales will anthropomorphize animals as persons. Mi’kmaq tales, however, deal with the “real” landscape and “real” animals’ lives; they do not make allegorical comments on human society. In Mi’kmaq tales, listeners learn when wild geese lay their first egg, that loons signal a change in weather by their call, and that the fishhawk does not eat fish “that has fallen out of his claws.”16 To switch perspective becomes a way of knowing the worldviews of other beings. Viveiros de Castro’s idea on animism17 are useful for reconsidering and shedding new light on the Eliadian concept of shamanism. We find among persons who have been described as shamans techniques and epistemologies that are a structural inver-sion of Western scientific methods. Nurit Bird-David (1999:67) has criticized the Tylorian notion of animism by instead talking about animism as relational epistemol-ogy: “animistic ideas operate within the context of social practices, with attention to local constructions of a relational personhood and to its relationship with ecological perceptions of the environment.” Shamanism in Bird-David’s definition becomes a way of knowing objects as subjects—not, as in empirical science, of knowing subjects as objects. If a shaman wishes to learn about a bear, he or she could try to adopt the bear’s perspective. A way of doing this could be to dress in bear fur, wear a mask, and walk like a bear. This is similar to the diver who puts on a wet suit to more easily swim in the water and thus approach the experience of being a fish (Viveiros de Castro (1998:482). In contrast, for a Western scholar or scientist—or more particularly, for example, a psychoanalyst—it is important not to take the client’s perspective of the world—that is, not to become schizophrenic to better understand the schizophrenic client. A psychoanalyst in training must undergo analysis to become more aware of his or her personal experiences and feelings and thus not to run the risk of conflating his or her feelings with those of his or her client. Even if the therapist seeks ways to understand the patient’s perspective, there must be a distance, not a closeness, to the subject in order to know. The notion of cosmological deixis in Mi’kmaq tales explains how humans and nonhumans can communicate. Animals, including humans, have something in com-mon: the experience of living in societies and having families. But the notion of perspectivism has to do with their bodily being, which is, in fact, the obstacle—for beings of the cosmos—to be totally integrated in each of their worlds, or, in scien-tific terms, in their differing ecological niches. Tales from the world beneath the water caution the Mi’kmaq to beware, lest they be enticed into joining a world not meant for humans. They risk adopting the perspective of the water-beings and find-ing themselves lost from the ordinary world. Only the initiated buoin has the capac-ity to shift perspective and sense the world from the view of another being without losing the capacity to simultaneously know that his or her habitat is that of a human

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being. Buoins thus have the competence to live in a multiperspective world without losing their knowledge of where they truly belong. The tale “A Man Became a Tcipitckaam” may serve as an example of how danger-ous it is for laymen to adopt other beings’ ways of dwelling:

Two brothers were hunting. They saw a trench. “What is that?” one of them asked. It had been made by a Tcipitckaam. One of the men lay down in it. He became larger and larger and stronger. The other could not get him out of the cavity. He followed it down into the water. He came back and narrated a big story: Tcipitckaam is a female. The man went to the bottom of the lake, and there found a wigwam. He went in. There he saw an old man, a woman, and a girl. A boy came in. “This is my son,” said the woman. “Your brother-in-law came in only a few minutes ago,” the woman said to her son. “All right.”

The people from whom these two brothers came were Micmac. Among them was a medicineman. The medicineman said, “If he sleeps with her under the same blanket, we cannot bring him back. If he does not do so, we can.” The medicineman went out, dug a trench, put water in it, and placed medicine upon this water. He climbed a tree and trimmed off the branches. Soon he saw two big dragons approaching. The dragons made a big noise. One came to the tree where the medicineman was, curled around and around it, and thrust up his head in the middle of the coil. The medi-cineman said to the returned brother, “All right. That is your brother.” He was now a big Tcipitckaam, and the brother could not go near him. With a wooden knife the medicineman cut off the creature’s head, and removed the entire body of the man. His wife was beside herself with joy. She jumped, danced, and shouted. The medi-cineman gave the man medicine which caused him to vomit. The brother said: “When I tried to converse with him, he made a noise like a Tcipitckaam—he could not speak properly.” If he had stayed there another day, it would not have been possible for him to come back. (Wallis and Wallis 1955:345–6)

The narrative illustrates how none but a skilled buoin can save a man from being forever changed into a Tcipitckaam. Once caught in the serpent’s world and a Tcip-itckaam perspective, the layman sees persons, not serpents, and loses control of his bodily senses. He even loses his way to speak as a human. Without assistance from a buoin and the proper medicine, the man would spend the rest of his life in the world of serpents.

The World Beneath the Earth

In Mi’kmaq tales, humans might marry nonhuman beings, but these alliances always come to a bad ending. Here I examine how these alliances are possible and why they inevitably end in tragedy. The story of Usitebulajoo (Rand [1894] 1971:44–58) begins by describing tragic events in the lives of two Mi’kmaq families.18 In one of the families, everyone starves to death except the father; in the other family, only the mother and two children survive. The widow marries the widower, but food remains scarce. When the woman notices that her husband has cut flesh from his own body to feed the family, she decides to leave him and her children. She pulls up the doorpost

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of the wigwam and disappears through a hole into the world beneath the earth, which resembles the ordinary would: it has rivers, forests, and villages. She soon has a new husband—a chief’s son—and remains with him in the new camp. It does not take long until her husband and her children follow her into the World beneath the earth. The woman sees to it that her husband is seized and killed and accuses her children of being evil geniuses who will cut off the village’s supplies of game with witchcraft if they are allowed to stay in the village. The children are caught and punished, but they survive because they have made an alliance with Little Marten. The son, Usite-bulajoo, has magical wisdom, which becomes apparent in his successful hunting expeditions. The sister also has the gift of magic, and together they take revenge on the people in the village. The siblings go on traveling in the landscape, and, with the skill of Usitebulajoo, they always have an abundance of food. It does not take long before other Indians get to know the skilled hunter, and soon they considered him to be a trespasser. They realize that Usitebulajoo cannot be killed, for he has a charmed life, but they can pit magic against magic and may confine him. With the help of a chepichkaam oosumool (a dragon’s horn) inserted in his hair, they tie him to a tree and hold him there. The sister mourns her brother’s fate, because she cannot rescue him. One day, sitting out on the point of land jutting into the ocean, she fell asleep. A whale “enamoured of the sleeping beauty, seizes and carries her off” (54). Now she becomes the wife of Bootup (the whale). Nevertheless, she cannot forget her unfor-tunate brother, and she gets an ally in her sister-in-law, who is touched by her sor-rowful tale and promises to assist her in making an escape and getting her brother released. Together they leave the water world, and the sister brings with her little whale-son. They manage to set free Usitebulajoo, who marries the whale-woman on the condition that he will he will take them far away from the shore and never bring them in sight of it again. The whale-woman gives birth to a baby, Usitebulajoo’s son. But one day, when “they are threading their way through the forest a storm arises, the rain falls in tor-rents, and a dense fog shuts in” (57). They all lose their way and decide to encamp for the night. Next morning Usitebulajoo’s wife sees that they are close to the ocean. “Her old instincts return; she cannot resist the temptation to plunge in and return to her former haunts and habits” (58). She brings the two boys with her and when Usitebulajoo awakes, his wife and the two boys are gone. He goes to the shore and sees how the two children and his wife are “breasting the waves like little whales” (58), and it will not take long until Bootup appears. “Soon he sees Bootupasees [the whale-boys] coming up by Bootup’s side and watches them as they make off to-gether toward their distant home” (58). So ends the tale of Usitebulajoo. What worlds have the Mi’kmaq siblings visited? First, the world beneath the earth; then, the world beneath the water. Even if there are superficial similarities between these worlds and the earth, the differences are significant. It is uncommon for humans to marry animals and have children, but when visitors in the world beneath the water take up the perspective of the Waterworld, the animals appear as human beings. This change of perspective makes marriages not only possible, but natural. Here, the notion of spiritual unity across different

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types of beings—that individual souls are an index within a larger complex—permits alliances between the worlds. Benefits accrue from having animals as allies. In the tale above the sister manages, with assistance from the whales as spiritual guardians, to free her brother from the spell. It is not possible to eliminate completely the boundary between animal and human. Only in Romantic depictions19 and in stereotypical images from the mass media is the Indian portrayed as “at one with nature.” Here, narratives of marriages between people and animals are viewed as an indication of the Indian’s harmony with nature. For traditional Mi’kmaq hunters who had not adopted the European distinction between nature and culture, however, the application of this notion would be inap-propriate. Many urban nineteenth-century Romantics and, later on, contemporary city-dwellers, experience a marked boundary between cities (culture) and their sur-roundings (nature). The Mi’kmaq hunter saw no such separation: they moved and lived in the same forest, along the same rivers and coast, as the animals. This is not to imply that the Mi’kmaq recognized no differences between themselves and other beings; however, they expressed these differences in metaphors that would not di-chotomize nature and culture. This tendency may account for why the Mi’kmaq tales have been misinterpreted. Because the tales depict all beings as persons, the persons have similar experiences. For example, a male whale experiences his female as a wife and a mother to their children, just as any ordinary husband might. When the Ro-mantics read Indians tales as evidence that Indians are “at one with nature,” those readers attend to only one aspect of Amerindian ontology, the unity of all beings that experience the world as persons. That is why “Indians” could “speak” with nature, have animals as spiritual guardians, or even “marry” animals. What the Romantics, popular writers, and movie makers who created stereotypical images of Indians do not see is that the tales simultaneously stress an important difference between humans, animals, and spirits: a difference founded in their bodies. Corporeal diversity thus separated them from each other; it gave them different possibilities to move, com-municate, and survive. A whale-person has to live as a whale because it has the body of a whale, and a human person has to live as a human because he or she has a human body; but both entities experience their own species as persons. In Mi’kmaq tales, animals and humans shift their habitats. A sister may adopt a whale’s perspective in which she sees not whales, but persons; the same goes for her whale sister-in-law, who may live temporarily as a human. This shift of environments could explain how the notion of “oneness with nature” emerged. But the point being made in the tales is that, in the long run, it is impossible to live another being’s life. The body of any particular being is not built to exist in all worlds; that is why oneness is impossible. As whale-people who return to their true element, the world beneath the water, the man loses his wife and child, and the man’s sister loses her child as well.

The Earthworld

In the world of the Mi’kmaq narratives, life on earth is not much different from life in other worlds. Earth is the place where the Mi’kmaq dwell, together with other earthly beings. But in this cosmology, there is always a risk of being caught in a situ-

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ation that demands help from someone who had mastered buoin. Success at hunting is in buoins’ hands, and recovering from illness demand assistance from buoins. In “The Loon Magician” (Rand [1894] 1971:378–83), a brother and his sister are initiated in magical skills. Here, the loon plays a decisive role as helper and spiritual guardian.20 It also shows how such spiritual guardians, as well as a figure called the “master of the animals,”21 both helped and received benefits from buoins. By the bird’s wisdom and guidance, the siblings attain useful knowledge. For someone familiar with Mi’kmaq culture, it soon becomes evident when hear-ing or reading the tale that the boy and girl have potential as buoins, because it is stressed that even in childhood they spent time in solitude. They have their own little playhouse, the tales explains, speak a language no one understands, and are seen by others as “very queer little folks” (378). The strength of the buoin was that he or she could be a part of society and at the same time be isolated from it. Isolation was nothing the Mi’kmaq preferred, but the buoin needed solitude to train in order to be a skilled magician. This is clearly depicted in the tales, and traditional Mi’kmaq audiences would have known that the references to the character’s isolation implied that those characters had special abilities. The tale explains that, “One day the brother told his sister that he would make her a suit of clothes. This he did out of leaves of all sorts, colors, and sizes. Having rigged her out thus, he took her away with him down to the shore, and there they soon heard the Loon [Kweemoo] howling in the distance” (Rand [1894] 1971:378). The loon comes closer, because the brilliant colors of the dress attracted the birds. The girl asked him, “Nikskamich’ (Grandfather), where have you come from”? (379) How-ever, the loon does not reveal his home. The loon gives instructions to the children, and they promise the loon not to tell anyone what he had said. One day the loon told them the whole town was to be destroyed by a Kookwes (man-eating giant). They try to warn the others in the village, but no one listens to them. Only their parents take notice of the warnings and leave the camp together with their children. In the night they hear the yell of the giant, and in the morning they “found that the people were all killed, and that some of them were devoured” (380). It was because of the loon they had been rescued. The loon now “instructed the boy how he might be able to run fast, and to walk on water, and to fly in the air, so that he could hunt in all these regions successfully. Now they had plenty of every-thing” (380). “One day Kweemoo asked the girl if she would be his wife . . . she consulted her mother, who advised her to accept the offer,” and as a wedding present the girl got “a beautiful little plaything, speckled like a turkey’s egg” (380). The moth-er advises her daughter to put the egg in a bag of feathers. When the loon tells the girl he would be in danger because some men would come and hunt him, the girl saves his life by finding a hiding place for him. The next day two men arrived. They invite the boy and girl to come along with them, but the loon warns the girl about the men, and she remains at the old camp. “The young man soon became an object of envy. He outdid his companions in ev-erything. He could hunt, fish, and fowl better than any of them . . . so they resolved to poison him” (381). But the loon once again rescued him. The loon now “told the brother and sister that he would dwell with them, and give

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them all the assistance in his power for the following seven years” (381). When this initiation in strict solitude was ended, the loon left them for three days, but returned, since he “had been so taken up with his thoughts of them” (382). The story of the loon and the children reveals much about the way the Mi’kmaq experienced the nature of buoin. For traditional Mi’kmaq, daily life was under con-stant threat from powerful forces too mighty for humans. Only certain people, it was believed, could gain knowledge, and then only after a lengthy initiation. The period of training22 for buoin was spent in strict segregation from other members of the group, and some animals were believed to have specific knowledge of how buoin worked. The loon was included in this category and in many Mi’kmaq tales is seen as closely related to Kluskap, the culture hero. The bird becomes the children’s guard-ian spirit, but these alliances imply mutual obligations. When the loon is hunted by other Mi’kmaq, the girl hides him—a skill she has gained by becoming a buoin. Thus, a buoin might not only tell other members of the group where to find prey,23 but, as in this case, may hide the prey. Interpreting the meaning of the “little plaything” given to the girl as a present by her Kweemoo husband can help to shed light on the guardian-spirit complex. Rand gives the following explanation: “This egg plaything, so precious and needing to be handled with such tenderness and care, is a babe, a little loon” ([1894] 1971:380). He thus interprets the gift as a confirmation and fulfillment of marital duties: the gift is a child. But if we read the story as a depiction of how a girl is initiated in buoin by allying herself with a loon, the egg and matrimony take on a deeper, symbolic mean-ing. The egg becomes a metonym for the loon, and by possessing a part of the bird, the girl gains the power of her spiritual guardian. The bag recommended by the mother for storing the egg is probably a medicine bundle. As an egg has its place in a feathery nest, so a powerful object has its place in a medicine bundle. Lescarbot writes that Chief Membertou, an aoutmoin (buoin), “carrieth hanged at his neck the mark of this profession, which is a purse triangle-wise, covered with their embroi-dery-work, that is to say with matachias, within which there is I know not what as big as a small nut, which he saith to be his devil called Aoutem” ([1609] 1928:117–8).24 The medicine bundle thus appears in this story to be a twofold sign: a symbol of the alliance between the buoin and the animal, and an index of sharing the same power. The tale of the loon shows how the hunter’s life is full of hardship and danger. From this perspective, having spiritual guardians and knowledge about buoin im-proved one’s chances of finding game and avoiding an untimely death.

The World Above the Earth

In the tale of the loon, we remain among the earthly animals of the forest, but in “The Small Baby and the Big Bird” (Rand [1894] 1971:81–93) we move into the world above the earth. Here, we meet mythical beings in the role of spiritual guardians and understand the importance of these helpers. The cullo in the tale is a mythical bird with no equivalence in nature; it has the capacity to take humans to the world above the sky. The world of spiritual beings is organized in the same way as the Mi’kmaq

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hunters’ world. Although it looks like the world of humans, it is, like the animal world, not meant for humans. From the beginning of the text, we become aware that this is a story of people with buoin. The main character is a boy, who was found as an infant in the forest by an old woman. The boy is so tiny that the old woman can easily hide him inside her mitten. She brings him to her village but soon realizes that this is a special child. As a result, she takes him into the deepest woods where she erects a small wigwam, and the two live there together without any contact with the villagers. The boy grows and proves to be a skilled hunter. Despite the old woman’s warnings, he ignores certain taboos, and he and the old woman are forced to leave their camp. After a long journey on foot, they find a deserted wigwam, where they settle. The next morning, a culloo (huge man-eating bird) tries to capture them, but the boy is too cunning: he shoots the bird with six arrows, and the bird heads for home. The boy then leaves the old woman and journeys to a culloo-camp. The camp is far away, “over hill and dale, mountain, marsh and morass” (86). The culloo live on earth but masters the world above it. Having joined a camp where the old culloo chief rules, the boy comes to the real-ization that he himself is a descendant of this village. He concludes that he was prob-ably dropped from his mother’s bosom while a culloo was carrying her off through the air. One day, he is asked by a son of the old culloo chief to save the life of the old chief. It turns out that the chief is badly wounded, and now the boy understands that this is the bird that had tried to capture him and the old woman. He kills the chief and all of his family, except the chief’s little son, who is hiding but is soon discovered by the boy. The little culloo promises to assist the boy as his spiritual guardian if his life is spared. When the little culloo becomes a grown bird, he brings his master on successful hunting expeditions, and they escort the boy’s old foster-mother to the new camp. The bird proposes a search to find the boy a suitable wife. Since the culloo travels in the world above the earth, which is unfamiliar to the boy, he will need to rely on his guardian. At first glance, the new world looks like the earth. There is a village with wigwams and two girls, one of them he chooses as a spouse. People eat the same foods as ordinary Mi’kmaq, but, because journeys into other worlds demand that the trav-eler cope with a shift of perspective, he needs to take extra precautions. That is what the culloo is for: it warns the boy not to eat the food offered by his mother-in-law. The food looks like a porridge made from the inside scrapings of a moose skin, but it is poisoned. Rather than eat the porridge, the boy must ask his wife to prepare food for him, because the mother-in-law will ever try to kill him. The boy then kills his moth-er-in-law and goes to another camp with the culloo, his wife, and his sister-in-law. The wife gives birth to a son, but the family cannot feel safe in their new camp. After the baby is kidnapped, the culloo’s assistance helps the boy find his way home. The threat to the family makes them decide to abandon this world. “[T]hen all, mounting the back of the Culloo, sail away over the bank that bounds this high region, and descend towards mother earth. Lower and lower they wing their way, until fi-nally the earth appears in view, and after a while they discern the village whence they went in search of a wife” (Rand [1894] 1971:93).

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Here the tale ends.25 There are important similarities and differences between this story and the loon story. All of the main characters in both tales have skill in using buoin, but they would die if their helping spirits had not warned and rescued them. The key difference is in the choice of helpers: on earth, the animals of the provinces—a loon, a moose, a bear—are chosen. Because the parallel worlds are not a natural environment to these animals, mythological beings commonly replace animals as protectors. They possess the otherworld perspective needed to see things as they are.

The World Above the Sky

The following tale recounts a marriage between two human girls and what would be seen from a non-Mi’kmaq perspective as inanimate objects—two stars. In Amerin-dian ontology even heavenly bodies can be persons. In this case the stars are hunters, and they are imbued with power. The depiction of the stars as hunters indicates a larger mythological complex about the Celestial Bear, identified by the missionaries as the constellation Ursa Major. Leland’s record of an Algonkin legend mentions a song about three hunters who chase a bear: “We are the stars which sing. . . . Among us are three hunters who chase a bear” (1884:379). The Mi’kmaq counted seven hunters of the bear, and seven is, as we have seen, a number associated with buoin. Hagar mentions26 that in Algonkian and Iroqouis mythology, seven hunters start after the bear, but only three of them succeeded: the robin, the chickadee, and the moosebird (1900:93–6). Further, both Hagar (1900) and Rand ([1894] 1971:xli) have observed that the Mi’kmaq used the stars to navigate. Hagar (1900:95) carefully discusses the Mi’kmaq knowledge of the stars’ position, and shows how the myth of the Celestial Bear mapped the astro-nomic calendar according to the bear’s habits, just as the landscape and its geo-graphical places were depicted as a result of the time when the culture hero Kluskap chased the giant beaver (Hornborg 2001:141–52). It is worth noting that the Mi’kmaq connected special stars with dance rituals. For example, the rattlesnake dance, per-formed only at night, was connected with the Pleiades (Hagar 1900:92). Like the other worlds we have seen, the star hunter’s world above the sky, too, is not designed with humans in mind; nevertheless, people do visit this world. In “The Badger and the Star-Wives” (Rand [1894] 1971:306–11), two women decide to de-camp after a quarrel between their husband and his comrade. They go in the forest and set up camp under the open sky in order to sleep. They talk about the stars as lovers, and when they fall asleep, their dreams bring them to the world above the sky.27 “The atmosphere was clear, the sky cloudless. The bright stars were shining, and it was long before they fell asleep. Gazing at the stars, . . . they began to imagine them the eyes of lovers looking down on them; they began speculating as to the choice they would make” (308). When they awoke in the morning they found two men in their beds. It was the stars they had admired, and they found themselves again married to husbands. The husbands (one of which is a dwarf) were hunters and spent days in the woods. “The women were left to take care of their homes, and were placed under but one restric-tion. Not far from their wigwams was a large flat stone, which they were charged not

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to remove or touch. . . . The older sister was more prudent and firm than the youn-ger,” and the young one “resolved to raise the prohibited stone and peep under” (309). She lifted the stone and screamed out when she realized that they were now living in the World above the Sky.

Her elder sister rushed out and looked down through this hole in the roof of the world, and they both gave way to their grief and cried till their eyes were red with weeping. At evening their husbands returned and the women endeavored to conceal all; but in vain. The inhabitants of the lower sphere . . . could divine; and much more the inhabitant of that upper region. “What has been your trouble to-day?” the men asked; “what have you been crying about?” “We had no trouble, and we have not been crying at all,” they answered, afraid to tell the truth. “But you have, though”, the men answered; “and you have been looking down through the trap-door. You are lonely up here, and long to get away.” (309–10)

The girls had to admit that they longed for going home, and the men gave them di-rections to follow: “They were not to be in haste to open their eyes or uncover their faces in the morning. ‘Wait until you hear a chickadee sing; and even then you must not open your eyes. Wait still longer, until you hear the red squirrel sing; and still you must wait. Keep your eyes covered, and your eyes closed, until you hear the striped squirrel sing. Then open your eyes and uncover your heads, and you will be all right’” (310). The younger sister, of course, is again impatient and couldn’t keep to the in-structions: she “gave a spring at the sound, and threw off the covering from their heads . . . their impatience had interposed a serious obstacle on their way down; and instead of being on terra firma, they were lodged on the top of a tall, spreading pine-tree, and descent without assistant was impossible” (310). To get down, the girls re-quire assistance from a badger. They are helped by a crane, and despite the elder sister’s knowledge of buoin, she is overpowered by a more skillful woman. Seventeenth-century sources indicate the importance of dreams for the buoins in Mi’kmaq belief. Not only was it felt that they could cure the sick, it was also thought that, as in this story, they also served one as a means by which buoins could travel between the worlds.28 It is worth noting the presence of the chickadee in the story. According to Hagar, one of the star hunters in the Mi’kmaq Celestial Bear myth was a chickadee, and this star (like the bird with which it was associated) was smaller than the other ones (1900:97). This may explain why, in the tale, one of the hunters/husbands shows up as a dwarf. Chickadees are small birds, and dwarves are small people; therefore, the dwarf may be the human form of the chickadee-star. After the girls discover that they are living in the World above the Sky, they are told not to open their eyes until they hear the chickadee sing. Interpreted in the context of the Celestial Bear myth, the reference to the chickadee’s song might indicate that the chickadee was one of the star husbands that guided them from the Star World to the earth. As the “chickadee star,” he had on the earth world his affine in the bird, whose more “earthy” song might help the guiding of the girls into their true envi-ronment.

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The Ghostworld/Land of Souls

The sixth world we will visit is the Ghostworld. It differs from the other five worlds in that it is a permanent place, structurally and qualitatively unique. If the characters in the tales enter this place, they can never return. They may travel through the other worlds and return safely again, since these places are for the living, but from death, no one escapes. The tale of Papkootparout (Le Clercq [1691] 1968:207–13), the guardian of the dead in the Ghostworld/Land of Souls, was collected by Le Cler-cq on the Gaspé Peninsula between 1677 and 1683. It is the only known seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq tale that mentions Papkootparout, and this raises doubts about the cultural importance of this figure. As a Christian missionary, Le Clercq felt the need to introduce the tale by expressing his displeasure with what he saw as with the Mi’kmaq’s ignorance of the true essence of the soul and paradise. In his view, the greatest obstacle to the Mi’kmaq embracing the true Christian faith is their way of attributing power and a soul to all things—not only animals, but also plants and material objects. He relates the following tale to explain how the Mi’kmaq became familiar with the Ghostworld/Land of Souls.29

. . . one of the most prominent men of the nation fell dangerously ill, and after hav-ing lost the use of all his faculties in the strange convulsions of his disease, came to himself, and said to the Indians, who asked him where he had been so long, that he came from the Land of Souls, where all the souls of the Gaspesians who died betook themselves after their death. (207–8)

It happened to be the case that one man who heard the story had a son who died. The father deeply mourned his son and decided to visit the Ghostworld/Land of Souls and bring his son back to the living. A couple of his friends joined him on this dan-gerous journey. Some of them starved to death on the way, and eventually they reached the land of the dead. The men were surprised when they saw “on their arrival an infinity of spirits of moose, beavers, dogs, canoes, and snowshoes . . . in service of their fathers. But a moment later they thought they should die of fear and terror when . . . they saw a man, or rather a giant, armed with a mighty club, . . . bow, arrows and quiver, who spoke to them in these words; ‘Whoever you are, prepare yourselves to die, since you have had the temerity to make this journey, and to come all alive into the Land of Dead. For I am Papkootparout the guardian, the master, the governor and the ruler of all souls.’” (209–10) Papkootparout now prepared himself to kill the intruders, when the father told him about the loss of his son. These words touched the heart of Papkootparout, and he told the father “he would pardon him this time” and “give him before his depar-ture the soul of his son” (210). The father obtained the soul, which was invisible and in an instant became the size of a nut by the command of Papkootparout, who wrapped it in a little bag. He then gave the father instructions. Upon returning home again, he should build a wigwam for his son, place his dead body there, and then open the little bag so the soul could go back into the body. But by no chance was the father allowed to open the bag before the body of the dead son was in the wigwam.

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The voyagers left the Land of Souls and went back to their camp. They started to erect a wigwam, but a curious woman opened the bag, and immediately the soul escaped and returned whence it had come. The father “died of chagrin and followed his son to the Land of Souls” (213). When interpreting this tale, we must not forget that when the narrative became known to Le Clercq, Europeans had inhabited the peninsula for nearly 150 years, and during the previous eighty years missionaries had stayed and worked there. French-men commonly married Mi’kmaq women, and many of their children acquired both Mi’kmaq and European traditions.30 Furthermore, the Mi’kmaq who gathered near the trading stations were in a position to have learned European tales. The Mi’kmaq with whom Le Clercq met were probably the same ones who had already established contacts with Europeans. As a result of all of this, it is not clear how much of this tale reflect pre-European Mi’kmaq cosmology. For example, certain passages in the tale clearly suggest some familiarity with the Christian concept of the soul.31 In his comments on the tale, Le Clercq also writes “that the wicked, on their arrival at the Land of Souls, danced and leaped with great violence, eating only the bark of rotten trees, in punishment for their crimes, for a certain number of years indicated by Papkootparou [sic]: that the good on the contrary, lived in great repose at a place removed from the noise of the wicked, eating when it pleased them and amusing themselves with the hunting of beavers and moose, whose spirits allowed themselves to be taken with ease” (214). How good souls as compared to evil souls are treated in the Ghostworld—whether they have access to snowshoes, weapons, beavers, and so on—is clearly influenced by Christian depictions of heaven and hell. European tales of the dead had possibly been told to the Mi’kmaq, but, as always when cultures meet, the tales had become dressed in garments more suitable for their new environment. Le Clercq’s Relation offers other examples of Christian texts that have received Mi’kmaq features; for example, there is a Mi’kmaq version of the deluge ([1691] 1968:85). Beyond evidence of Chris-tian beliefs and biblical references, other European influences can be detected in the sources we have from this period. By the seventeenth century, Renaissance thinkers had developed a strong interest in Classical literature, including Greek or Roman mythology. Le Clercq betrays his interest in this topic when he refers to Papkootparout as “little Pluto.” (210) Clearly connected to the tragedies both of Orpheus and Eu-rydice and of Demeter/Persephone/Chore, this story betrays a strong European influ-ence. Skilled in classical mythology, Le Clercq would certainly have known those Greek stories. He must have allowed himself to be distracted by the superficially Mi’kmaq features of this narrative to believe that the Papkootparout tale was a gen-uine Mi’kmaq story. Another reason for reading Le Clercq skeptically is the possibility that, in editing the tales, he may have modified them—either consciously and unconsciously. As a missionary, his goal was to convert the souls of the “savages.” He was not an ethnog-rapher seeking to understand Mi’kmaq traditions or an individual seeking to engage in scholarly criticism. A survey of the seventeenth-century texts reveals an identical Ghostworld motif discussed in Le Jeune’s Relation from 1634 (1959), and Le Clercq’s own writings make clear that he was aware of Le Jeune ([1691] 1968:213).32 It is

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certainly possible that Le Clercq’s editing may have introduced European ideas about the afterlife into the stories, but the historical evidence is too scarce to be sure. We do know that the Mi’kmaq placed gifts to the dead in graves—which could indicate a belief in life after death—but we do not know if they considered the dead to be mor-ally responsible for the life they had lived on earth. In Rand’s Mi’kmaq tales, we see more clearly how Mi’kmaq folklore had absorbed Christian beliefs. Rand’s compila-tion coincided with the establishment of the reservations, and the tales give expression to the traumatic nature of this period for the Mi’kmaq. In this narrative the Ghost-world begins to seem more and more like a paradise where the Mi’kmaq will be vindicated for the hardships of their earthly life (Hornborg 2001:181–92).

Conclusion

The descriptions of journeys between worlds in the tales we have explored reveal traces of Mi’kmaq culture and cosmology. In approaching the stories we have to be aware of two problems. The first concerns the sources. It is important to acknowledge what impact the Europeans had on Mi’kmaq life during this period. Christian beliefs and European tales are sometimes so tightly interwoven in the tales that it is almost impossible to distinguish external influences from the indigenous plot. The other problem concerns the idea of animism and shamanism. Although schol-ars today have largely rejected the Tylorian concept of animism, many are still influ-enced by the Eliadean model of shamanism. But the Mi’kmaq magician, the buoin, which also refers to cosmological Power, is far too complex to fit into Eliade’s gen-eral shamanistic complex. Further development of the concepts of relational episte-mology, cosmological deixis, and Amerindian perspectivism will continue to illumi-nate Native American narratives and beliefs.

Notes

1. Mooinasque is Mi’kmaq for “Mrs. Bear.” 2. Throughout the text, I have used the most phonetically accurate spelling, “Mi’kmaq,” except when the word is part of a quotation from a source that uses the standard English spelling, “Micmac.” The spelling “Mi’kmaq” is the one that the Mi’kmaq themselves recommend. 3. For further reading on cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, see Hornborg (2001:56–62) and Viveiros de Castro (1998). See also Irving Hallowell (1960) and the discussion of the concept of animism by Kaj Århem (1993), Bird-David (1999), Descola (1992), Signe Howell (1996), and Tim Ingold (2000). 4. It is worth noting that the missionary Le Clercq created a kind of pictorial writing which he felt would make Christianity more accessible to the Mi’kmaq. By letting an arbitrary sign represent a word of the Christian texts, the materials became much easier for the Mi’kmaq to recall (Le Clercq [1691] 1968:126). Unfortunately, his original pictorial writing has not been found. Beyond his own writing system, Le Clercq observed that “some [Mi’kmaq] children were making marks with charcoal upon birch-bark, and were counting these with their fingers very accurately at each word of prayers which they pronounced. This made me believe that by giving them some formulary . . . I should advance much more quickly” (131). Although one may or may not want to consider the children’s charcoal mnemonics a writing system, this is clear: before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mi’kmaq did not use any writing system to record their tales. First meeting the Mi’kmaq in 1735, the Catholic Missionary Pierre Maillard transferred Christian hymns and prayers to a pictorial text, which certain Mi’kmaq were given instruc-

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tions to read. The sign probably built on the ones Le Clercq had initiated, but we do not know how much the two systems had in common. Maillard’s prayer book has been used for generations among the Mi’kmaq, often as a way of marking their distinctiveness and resistance towards the English attempts to Anglicize the group. The Mi’kmaq often refer to the pictorial writing the missionaries introduced as their traditional written language. 5. For a closer examination of these authors and the reliability of the historical texts, see Hornborg (2001:107–33), Parkhill (1997), and Smith (1977). 6. Since 1883, Leland had been corresponding with the Baptist missionary Rand, who finally sent a 900-page collection of Mi’kmaq stories with permission for him to use them in whatever way he thought was of value. All Rand required was help with the postage and the return of his manuscript (Leland 1884:ix; Hornborg 2001:117; Parkhill 1997:39). 7. The issue of textual reception has been examined in detail in anthropology, social theory, and literary studies. See, for example, James Clifford and George Marcus (1986), Anthony Cohen and Nigel Rapport (1995), Daniel Francis (1992), Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983), Penny Petrone (1990), Paul Ricoeur (1981), Edward Said (1978), Greg Sarris (1993), Hans-George Gadamer (1960), and Wolfgang Iser (1971). 8. I have here used Rand’s spelling ([1894] 1971), except in the case of “Tcipitcjkaam,” which comes from Wallis and Wallis (1955:345). 9. Since the Mi’kmaq language belongs to the Algonkin language family, we also find in Mi’kmaq culture the Algonkin concept of “Manitou” (Rand 1850:28), which has been glossed as “Great Mystery” or “Great Spirit.” 10. Champlain can also be found using the word pilotoua (“magician”) in Lescarbot ([1609] 1928:161. Further, Biard confirms this use of word: “the Autmoin, whom the Basques call Pilotoys, that is, sorcerer (Biard, in Jesuit Relations, vol. 3:119). 11. For a more thorough analysis of the Mi’kmaq buoin, see Hornborg (2000). 12. Viveiros de Castro did his main field research among the Araweté, a Tupi-Guarani people of east-ern Amazonia. In his work, he argues that there is a structural similarity between the cosmology of the Araweté and that of other Amerindian peoples (1992). 13. In a similar fashion, Hallowell argues that personhood among the Northern Ojibwa was not “syn-onymous with human beings, but transcends it” (1960:21). 14. When Viveiros de Castro (1998) analyzes Amerindian and Western cosmologies, he sees them as structural inversions: in the West, following the Cartesian tradition, the body is seen to unite us with the animals, and what separates us from them is the gift of being a person, a subject. Viveiros de Castro calls the Western outlook on the world a multiculturalistic ontology. The Amerindian ontology is thus mul-tinaturalistic, because it is grounded in the assumption of spiritual (that is, cultural) unity (all beings are subjects and thus united) underlying a bodily diversity (the body is what separate us). 15. Descola defines totemism as a classification that makes “use of empirically observable disconti-nuities between natural species to organize, conceptually, a segmentary order delimiting social units” (1996:88). Naturalism is found in Western cosmologies and is grounded in a sharp distinction between nature and culture. 16. See Rand ([1894] 1971:352, n.1; 380, n.1; 416, n.1). 17. The critique of the Tylorian concept of animism is also found, namely, in Århem (1993), Bird-David (1999), Descola (1992), and Ingold (2000). 18. I here summarize the story, including only a few quotations; it is too long to give in full. 19. Romantics frequently represented Indians as being “at one with nature.” This can be found, for example, in the work of portrait painters such as Paul Kane and Frederick Verner, works by Schoolcraft or Thoreau, Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” Cooper’s novels of the “last Mohican” just to mention a few. (For further reading and examples see, for instance, Francis 1992; Parkhill 1997; and Hornborg 2001.) In the Mi’kmaq case the great Romanticist is the folklorist Charles Leland. He was influenced by Fichte, Schelling, and other German Romanticists and especially their concept of a Volk-soul. He spent time in Germany and returned to America with the ambition of tapping the indigenous people’s mystic secrets of the land, so the new American nation could adopt a Volk-soul of its own (Hornborg 2001:76–7; Parkhill 1997:96–8). 20. The loon was a powerful bird in Mi’kmaq stories, since it had connections with the culture hero

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Kluskap. As friends of Kluskap, loons are sometimes depicted as people and at other times as real birds (Rand [1894] 1971:280–9). The loons have a chief (Master of the Loons), with whom Kluskap can talk. The cry of the loon was thought of as the bird’s calling upon Kluskap (see also Hornborg 2001:138–9). 21. There is no clear evidence in the historical sources that the Mi’kmaq traditionally believed in a single owner of all the animals. Wallis and Wallis write (1955:106) that the informant John Newell said that “[T]here is no ‘headman’ of all animals. . . . Each species has a headman, which is larger than the other.” But Wallis and Wallis also write that some Mi’kmaq speak about the moose as a chief of all animals and the whale as a master of life in the sea. 22. In the “Tale of the Loon,” the number seven indicates a reference to the Mi’kmaq magical belief. As mentioned earlier, the seventh child in a family could be born with the talents and prospects of be-coming a buoin. 23. Early historical sources give several depictions of how the Mi’kmaq turn to their buoin to know where the prey is hiding. Lescarbot writes: “[T]hey go with their bow in hand and the quiver on their backs, that way that their Aoutmoin hath showed them (for we have said heretofore that they consult with the oracle when they are a-hungry) or somewhere else, where they think they shall not lose their time and labour” ([1609] 1928:270). 24. Thanks to Le Clercq, posterity has learned in detail what was in a buoin’s medicine bundle, since one of them gave his belongings to the missionary as proof of his will to be christened. Le Clercq opened the bag and found, among several things, the buoin’s oüahich, “a stone of the size of a nut wrapped in a box, which he called the house of his devil” ([1691] 1968: 222). 25. Rand, who was familiar with Mi’kmaq stories and the tragedy of marriages between the worlds, discerns a problem in the possibility that the cullo might stay on earth. Thus, he attempts to reconcile this issue by adding a comment on the story: “We may take the liberty to add that . . . she soon becomes reconciled to the change of customs and climate of these lower regions, and ceases to pine for her High-land home. Our tale, however, says nothing of all this.” 26. Hagar says that the legend’s most complete and extensive form was told to him by the Mi’kmaq (1900:92). 27. In the narrative that follows, squirrels are depicted as singing. For readers unfamiliar with Cana-dian squirrels, this notion may seem fanciful. In fact, Canadian squirrels have a special call that sounds like human song. 28. Biard ([1616] 1959:117–21) describes how a buoin used information from his dreams in curing a sick man; see Le Clercq ([1691] 1968:227) and Joseph Jouvency ([1710] 1959:287). 29. I here briefly summarize the tale, which can be read at length in Le Clercq ([1691] 1968:208–13). 30. On the use of indigenous oral tradition to make sense of social change, see Donald Bahr, Juan Smith, William Smith Allison, and Julian Hayden (1994), Jonathan Hill (1988), Jarold Ramsey (1977), and William Simmons (1986). Alfred Bailey (1937) examines European influences in Algonkin (includ-ing Mi’kmaq) tales; see also Hornborg (2001). 31. The scholarly literature on syncretism is large. General studies of the topic include Sven Hartman (1966) and Charles Steward and Rosalind Shaw (1994). Jean Comaroff (1985) has examined African Zionism; Alice Kehoe (1989), the ghost dance; Emanuel Sarkisyanz (1965), syncretism within Buddhist cultures; and Peter Worsley ([1957] 1968), cargo cults in Melanesia. Studies of the Mi’kmaq in relation to Roman Catholicism and Christianity are made by Marie Battiste (1977), Anne-Christine Hornborg (2002), and Helen Ralston (1981). 32. Other examples show how Le Clercq “borrows” material from Le Jeune. When Le Clercq ([1691] 1968:217) describes the work of Mi’kmaq buoins (whom he calls jugglers), for example, it is clear that he is getting his data from Le Jeune ([1634] 1959:195–203).

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