The Mountaineer Site: A Folsom Winter Camp in the Rockies

Abstract

included. Linguistically, these three accounts are a treasure and, as Wolfart has noted in his introduction, “... these three versions of ‘the same text,’ told on three different occasions and to distinct audiences over a period of almost three years... , yield a tantalizing case study of the structures and processes of oral transmission.” While each is complete in itself, each also adds new elements. The story relates to a young woman who disappears and, despite extensive searching, cannot be found. Eventually, she is seen up on Manitow ka-̄matweh̄iket̄ and it is learned that she had been abducted by the spirits, entering the hill through a doorway which was a large white rock. Here, she was kept for four days while the spirits debated whether to kill her. One of the spirits was in the form of a lion – Mistahkes̄iwak. (This is likely equivalent to the malevolent spirit that is known to northern Crees as Misipisiw, the underwater panther.) On the fourth night the woman was made to promise to give the spirits her first husband (the alternative was her first born child) and she was released. Sarah recalled that her step-grandmother had named this woman as Picwek̄an and had known her daughter. This volume, edited and translated by Wolfart and Ahenakew, is the most recent of several important publications of their Cree texts. Not only is the transcription painstaking, the translation is clearly subtle and nuanced. This is a remarkable contribution to the body of Plains Cree texts.