From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Ktunaxa/ in collaboration
General treatments of northwest coast natives include Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Coast Northwest (Norman, Okla., 1986), and Adolf and Beverly Hungry Wolf, Indian Tribes of the Northern Rockies (Skookumchuck, B.C., 1989).
Almost every book that makes any mention of the Ktunaxa (always using the spelling Kutenai or one of its variants) has serious limitations. H.H. Turney-High’s ethnographic work (Ethnography of the Kutenai, American Anthropological Association, memoir 56, 1941) is laced with his own opinions and interpretations, but at least its point of view is transparent and thus can be compared to the unpublished field notes of another ethnographer, Claude Schaeffer, who did decades of ethnographic research with the Ktunaxa.
Transcriptions of Ktunaxa stories prepared by Franz Boas in 1914 – despite their idiosyncratic nature – provide direct access to the voices of Ktunaxa elders of an earlier generation. Alexander F. Chamberlain, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States, was a student of Franz Boas who studied the Ktunaxa and recorded some of their stories. He died young, and Boas included the Ktunaxa texts collected by Chamberlain, along with the texts that Boas himself had collected, in the book Kutenai Tales (Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin 59, 1918). Chamberlain also wrote an article on the Ktunaxa in the Handbook of Indians of Canada (Ottawa, 1913; repr. Toronto, 1971), which was an extract from the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1907, 1910). He was responsible for the rumour that the Ktunaxa have legends and traditions indicating their origins east of the Rocky Mountains.
With regard to the Ktunaxa language, readers are referred to the following works among others: Linguae Ksanka (Kootenai) Elementa Grammaticae (Santa Clara, Calif., 1894); Mary R. Haas, “Is Kutenai Related to Algonquian?” Canadian Journal of Linguistics, vol.10 (1965), 77–92; and Lawrence R. Morgan, “Kootenay-Salishan Linguistic Comparison: A Preliminary Study” (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1980). Kinship among the Ktunaxa is explored in Edward Sapir, “Kinship Terms of the Kootenay Indians,” American Anthropologist, vol. 20 (1918), 414–18 and in Franz Boas, “Kinship Terms on the Kutenai Indians,” American Anthropologist, vol.21 (1919), 98–101. The life of a Christian missionary among the Ktunaxa is the subject of They Call Me Father, edited by Margaret Whitehead (Vancouver, 1988).
