| Title | Don't Say His Name |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Cailín E. Murray(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0361.1.03 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/living-with-monsters-ethnographic-fiction-about-real-monsters/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Cailín E. Murray |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2023-05-11 |
| Long abstract | Wild Man figures are found around the world and seem to always occupy a mythical and liminal space between culture and nature. Among the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, he is known by different names in various tribal languages. However, terms like Sasquatch or Bigfoot are used locally as a kind of generic reference. Since Indigenous peoples and settler colonial newcomers have reported encounters over the decades since contact, it is important to consider what resources each culture provides to help people make sense of their experiences. I wanted my story to reflect how these meanings shift and how confusing and consequential it can become when non-natives assume they understand tribal/First Nations’ beliefs and experiences based on their own. The character of Sarah illustrates how even well-meaning researchers often approach Indigenous beliefs from what the folklorist David Hufford calls “a tradition of disbelief.” In other words, what they know is truth and what others know is merely “belief.” The story allows readers to ponder the various characters’ actions and what they “know,” and thus, what “really” happened. |
| Page range | pp. 31–49 |
| Print length | 19 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Keywords |
|
Cailín Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She received her MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2001. In 2004 she completed a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and joined the Ball State faculty. Dr. Murray is an environmental ethnohistorian who studies Indigenous knowledge systems, settler colonialism, and the transformation of historical landscapes. She is particularly interested in how folklore, cultural memory, history, and foodways have informed how landscapes were used in the past and continue to construct and sustain attachments to place in the present. She regularly teaches an undergraduate course about monsters and culture. Dr. Murray has conducted ethnographic and ethnohistorical research primarily along the central Northwest Coast. She is currently researching twentieth-century witch accusations in the US and settler colonialism, religious beliefs, and historical gardening practices in the Great Lakes region. In 2019 she conducted preliminary research in Ireland and hopes to return there in order to explore Connemara’s shell fisheries. She has published in Ethnohistory and other scholarly journals and co-authored with Coll Thrush Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in Culture and History (Nebraska University Press, 2011).