A Story as Sharp as a Knife

A polyphonic multilayered book. It describes Haida oral literature; it tells the story of the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest; and how their works were retold by a US anthropologist in his 1900-1901 fieldwork. At one and the same time an excavation of a colonial encounter, a literary study and an anthropological literary detective story. The Haida stories are magical., disturbing and weird. Impossible to classify and difficult to put down.

In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring… show more.