"When the first settlers reached Oregon in the 1840s and the occupation of the land began, there were at least forty independent [Indian] tribes on that land, speaking an estimated 25 distinct languages," notes author Jarold Ramsey in his classic book "Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country." Since that time, whole tribes and their languages have vanished without leaving a trace of their mythological heritage behind.

Ramsey has made it much of his life's work to collect and anthologize Oregon Indian myths in a way that is accessible to the general public as literature. "These are in most cases truly mythic stories," writes Ramsey. "They carry us back to beginnings, to a time before time when the natural and human world we know was being irrevocably established, feature by feature, through the decisions and actions of the first beings."

Ramsey will discuss these myths—and the story of "The Hunter and the Elk" in particular—on February 7 at the Downtown Bend Library. This talk is free and open to all. Ramsey says that the Wasco Chinookan story "The Hunter and the Elk"—collected in 1885 at Simnasho on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation—is a compact masterpiece of Native American storytelling, exemplifying both the narrative artistry of such stories, and their social purposes.

Jarold Ramsey is Professor of English Emeritus, University of Rochester, and author of "Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country" and "Reading the Fire: The Traditional Indian Literatures of America." His poetry collections include "Love in an Earthquake," "Hand-Shadows" and "Where the Wind Comes to Play." His honors include the Lillian Fairchild Award, NEA and Ingram Merrill Grants, the Helen Bullis Award for Poetry and the Quarterly Review of Literature International Poetry Prize.


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