Content area
Full Text
Tracing a series of symbols as the main rhetorical design in Harry Robinson's "Puss in Boots," this essay presents Robinson's text as a rhetorically ingenious incorporation of a European folktale into Okanagan traditions of story and thought deeply informed by Indigenous notions of peoplehood.
The published stories of the late Okanagan Harry Robinson are found in three books compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire, who spent much time in the 1970s and 1980s listening to and recording the stories Robinson told her in his home near Hedley, British Columbia.1 Of all the stories that have made it into print, the last story in Write It on Your Heart, entitled "Puss in Boots," is the only story in Robinson's work that is neither Okanagan nor Thompson River2-that is, upon first look; a closer glance reveals that Robinson's "Puss in Boots" incorporates a European story into Okanagan traditions of story and thought, without harming either one of these admittedly very different literary traditions.
Write It on Your Heart closes with Robinson's retelling of "Le MaÎtre Chat, ou le Chat Botté," the story of a cat who, through a series of tricks, gains power, wealth, and a wife for his poor master, a miller's son. "Le MaÎtre Chat" was first published by Charles Perrault in 1697, in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, a collection of European folktales with a frontispiece showing an old woman telling stories by the fire. The collection's subtitle-Contes de ma mère l'Oye-points to its origin in oral tradition, thus covering the fact that one of its stories, "Le MaÎtre Chat," originated in Central Asia (see Kaplanoglou). This notwithstanding, "Puss in Boots," as the story has become known in the English-speaking world, has inspired many artists, including the brothers Grimm, the makers of the sequels to Shrek, Sheila Watson, and Harry Robinson himself.
Robinson's "Puss in Boots" is remarkable not just for its use of Okanagan English and Okanagan discourse features-remnants of his ancestral Southern Interior Salish language that can be found in all of his stories. What makes this text particularly worthy of attention is its rhetorical ingenuity. Robinson's retelling of "Puss in Boots" stays comparatively close to the "original" story, but it also weaves a subtext into this story that provides...