American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION I first ran across Charles Godfrey Leland’s The Algonquin Legends of New England or Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes’ when I was looking for stories about Kluskap, the Abenaki and Micmac culture hero. An important source of stories since its publication in 1884, Algonquin Legends showcases the story of Kluskap and his evil twin, Malsum the Wolf, how they came into the world, what they did here, how Kluskap fought and killed his brother. Here, it seemed, was a key story in the Kluskap cycle. Yet I was suspicious. When set in its cultural context, the story exuded incongruity. For example, this kind of story, a story of beginnings, ought to be the linchpin of the precontact Abenaki and Micmac worldviews. But as far as we can know of those worldviews, it is not. Too suspicious to make any use of it at that time, I set the story aside. When I returned to Leland’s Kluskap-Malsumstory, it was with the idea of quickly discrediting the story (by means of this incongruity, bolstered by internal textual evidence), so I could move on to the question of why Leland did what he did. Instead I found myself simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the way a well meaning folklorist of the late nineteenth century treated the stories and the storytellers he encountered. As a consequence, this study is about the way a particular “Indian” story came to prominence and the impact it continues to have.