Indian Tales

By Jaime de Angulo

Book Overview

Hailed by Ezra Pound as the "American Ovid" and renowned as a linguist and a self-described "amateur anthropologist," Jaime de Angulo drew on his forty years among the Pit River tribe of California to create the amalgam of fiction, folklore, tall tales, jokes, ceremonial ritual, and adventure that is Indian Tales. He first wrote these stories to entertain his children, borrowing freely from the worlds of the Pit, and also of the Miwok, Pomo, and Karok. Here are the adventures of Father Bear, Mother Antelope, the little boy Fox, and, of course, Old Man Coyote in a time when people and animals weren't so very far apart. The author's intent was not so much to rer anthropologically faithful translations-though they are here-as to create a magical world fueled by the power of storytelling while avoiding the dangers for the romantic and picturesque. True to the playful and imaginative spirit he portrays, de Angulo mischievously recommends to readers: "When you find yourself searching for some mechanical explanation, if you don't know the answer, invent one. When you pick out some inconsistency or marvelous improbability, satisfy your curiosity like the old Indian folk: 'Well, that's the way they tell that story. I didn't make it up '"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865475237
• ISBN13: 9780865475236
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A Classic for Adults & Kids Alike

This book has been one of my all time favourites for many years. One of the copies in my possession featured a cover blurb by William Carlos Williams, extolling its virtues. Having read it aloud to two generations of children, I can vouch for its beauty as an oral experience - brilliant, clear and transforming in its tale of a prototypical human-animal family traveling through a mythical California, encountering many amazing figures (Loon, Coyote, the Flint People) on their way. Kids (and adults) readily identify with the family dynamics among the characters. Really can't recommend too highly.

An enchanting rendering of an Indian way of life

Jaime de Angulo was a truly Californian character -- wanderer, poet, wastrel, anthropologist, linguist, and wild man; and near the end of his life he started retelling to his children the stories he'd learned from years of field work (and just hanging around) with the Pit River Indians of northern California. Out of those stories came this enchanting book, a semi-novel for children and wise adults, a series of stories both hilarious and profound told and experienced during a family's journey to visit relatives by the ocean. De Angulo's luminous vision gives us as intimate a picture of a Native American vision of life as any book I can think of. That this classic is not better known is a mystery....