Henry W. Tate (d. 1914) was a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas. Tate first wrote these stories in English before giving Boas the Tsimshian equivalent during the decade of 1903-1913. Boas published the stories in the much-consulted classic of ethnology, Tsimshian Mythology, in 1916. Through Ralph Maud’s selection of the best of Tate’s original stories, we can see the actual creative writer behind Boas’ revised texts, now preserved much closer to the way Tate originally intended.

Ralph Maud (1928–2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Pacific Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories — a collection of Henry W. Tate’s stories in Tate’s original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian work, published as an article: “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology” in American Ethnologist. Maud’s subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Ralph Maud's profile page

Henry Wellington Tate (circa 1860 – 1914) was an oral historian from the Tsimshian First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, best known for his work with the anthropologist Franz Boas. In Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, the literary historian Ralph Maud expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Henry W. Tate's profile page

“Maud acts as restorer, stripping away attitudes and prosody to reveal the vitality of the original text.”
— Vancouver Sun