Tik’aisis, Siä’latsa’s daughter

Overview

Tik’aisis is the eldest daughter among Siä’latsa’s five children in Boas’s Cowichan narrative: a son, three daughters, then another son. The three youngest children torment her with pointed sticks until she bleeds and lick the blood. When she becomes seriously ill, her father seeks K’ulemilta and Ckuä’wules to paint her face and strengthen her heart. The account says they paint too much, make her heart excessively strong, and she loses her reason. This is the narrative’s explanation of her changed condition, not a modern medical diagnosis or a claim that ceremonial painting generally produces such an outcome.

When her youngest brother cries and refuses milk, Tik’aisis gives him brain taken from a skull, which he eats eagerly. She then makes a carrying basket containing snakes, toads and lizards. She visits houses where children are crying, offers food, and places the children in the basket, where the snakes coil around them. Boas also records uncertain wording about creatures hidden beneath her mantle; his question marks do not justify inventing an exact animal identification. The passage does not supply a subsequent rescue, explicit killing, or a conclusion in which Tik’aisis is defeated.

The wider account retains her place within a household and its cultural practices. After the child-taking passage, it credits Siä’latsa with teaching his daughter the winter dance and prescribing its season. The immediate wording says his daughter without repeating Tik’aisis’s name, so that sentence should not be used to identify every later performance figure with her. Nor does this account establish that she is an alias of a differently named basket-carrying being in another community’s tradition.

Origins & earliest records

Franz Boas prints this account under Cowitchin, his historical spelling for Cowichan communities of southeastern Vancouver Island. The episode belongs to the 1895 collected German edition; publication is not a date for the tradition’s beginning. No individually named narrator is supplied here.

Records & interpretation

Complete IV.2, pp.47–50, including the closing alternate account and collector’s ancestry qualifications, read in German and checked against original printed-page images. Boas’s preface describes oral collection on repeated journeys, much mediated through Chinook Jargon, without identifying this episode’s exact translation route. These are attributed narrative records, not evidence of biological organisms.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Küste Amerikas

   Franz Boas · 1895

   Cowitchin section IV.2, Siä’latsa, complete printed pp.47–50 including variant and ancestry notes. German collector-mediated account; preface identifies mixed translation routes for the collection without assigning a named individual teller or exact interview date to this episode.

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. PrimaryBoas 1895, Cowitchin IV.2, pp.47–50Research access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.