Dr. Samuel Sam O.C. (February 19, 1925—December 18, 2007) was a
traditionally trained orator of the Tsartlip Nation, located in the territory of
WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Vancouver Island. He spoke the two Central Coast
Salish languages of SENĆOŦEN (dialect of Northern Straits, Coast Salish)
and Hul’q’umi’num’ (dialect of Halkomelem, Coast Salish). In the summer of
2006, Dr. Sam and I began the work of documenting some of his knowledge of
the mythology, history, and people that made up his community.
This thesis presents two excerpts from these recordings. The first is a
traditional WSÁNEĆ Flood Story in SENĆOŦEN that tells of the source of
the name of the territory and its people. The second is an autobiographical
tale told in Hul’q’umi’num’ that describes Dr. Sam’s life as a young man,
working as a migrant farmer with his wife and children.
While collaborating with Dr. Sam to translate and render his stories
into text, it became clear that the loss of contextual information surrounding
them would be a hindrance to their appreciation and even understanding.
This thesis discusses the role of context as a background against which the
texts can be viewed. This context includes information about Dr. Sam’s
motivations for sharing his knowledge, historical information about him and
his nation, description of the traditional role of oratory on the West Coast,
and about the decisions made in the process of rendering the oral genre into
text.
Coast Salish oratory is a traditional medium for transmission of
information, knowledge, and moral teaching. It is as well a beautiful and
complex oral art form, rich with stylistic features. The constitutive device of
the oratory appears to be that of parallelism, whereby couplet lines and
themes are ordered into structures ranging from simple to complex. Dr.
Sam’s oratory is rich with examples of many features and parallel structures
which can be found in neighbouring Coast Salish texts. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/3337 |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Creators | Cienski, Andrew |
| Contributors | Urbanczyk, Suzanne Claire |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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