ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace among anthropologists, folklorists, and linguists to stress the fact that the many Indian tribes in Southern, Central and North America (including Canada) have but very few proverbs. Yet nobody really has succeeded in explaining why there is such a dearth of proverbs among Native Americans who do use metaphorical speech patterns after all. Perhaps scholars simply have not paid enough attention to the proverbial language of these native people. Franz Boas registered a few of these proverbs in his 1929 study of “Metaphorical Expression in the Language of the Kwakiutl Indians,” in F. Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 1940), pp. 232–239. There is also Robert Lowie’s small collection of “Proverbial Expressions among the Crow Indians,” American Anthropologist, 34 (1932), 739–740; and a valuable newer study is by Keith Basso, ‘Wise Words’ of the Western Apache: Metaphor and Semantic Theory,” in K. Basso and Henry Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (Albuquerque/New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), pp. 93–121.
