materials might not stand up to the standards being set by
Boas's insistence on native texts, and by Boas's students. It
was the literary aspects of the tales that interested Parker as
a writer.

In the Introduction to the Converse bulletin, and again in
this volume, he relates how stories were told and the expected
response of listeners. He contrasted the rigorous accuracy of
taking native texts in phonetics, and translating them literally
(and analyzing the tales for plot, motifs, and borrowed ele-
ments) with Converse's (and his own) more "interpretive" ap-
proach to the material, which he thought preserved its "natural
beauty." Parker used interpreters, found the result but a car-
icature of the original, and then, resorting to another extreme,
recast the material "in the author's [ Parker's] own mold." This,
too, was unsatisfactory. He finally resorted to making his own
version of the material, a method he thought had more merit
than defects. He wrote:

By this method the transcriber attempts to assimilate the
ideas of the myth tale as he hears it, seeks to become imbued
with the spirit of its characters, and, shutting out from his
mind all thought of his own culture, and momentarily trans-
forming himself into the culture of the myth teller, records
his impressions as he recalls the story. His object is to pro-
duce the same emotions in the mind of civilized man which
is produced in the primitive mind, which entertains the myth,
without destroying the native style or warping the facts of
the narrative. ¹²

Parker was attempting to assume the role of the mythtellers
in Seneca society, to learn the tales as he heard them, and to
reproduce them in part like native storytellers while inter-
preting them for a wider audience. He was more faithful to
originals than Converse, less precise than Curtin and Hewitt,
but he produced works of real literary merit at several levels.
His children's books, notably Skunny Wundy, were real suc-
cesses. ¹³

It would be unfair to say that Parker was not analytical.

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