Ghosts Dance in an Empty House and Other Stories comprises forty-five narratives dictated by Coquelle Thompson, an Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian residing on the Siletz Indian Reservation in Oregon, during the fall of 1935. Elizabeth D. Jacobs transcribed the stories from Thompson and selected some for intended publication. In addition to those Jacobs chose, William R. Seaburg combed through Thompson's field notebooks and chose a handful of additional stories, as well as several cognate texts Thompson told to Smithsonian Institution linguist John Peabody Harrington in 1942 and cognates from other Athabaskan and from non-Athabaskan groups in the region. This companion volume to Pitch Woman and Other Stories: The Oral Traditions of Coquelle Thompson, Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian, which collected Thompson's myths and folktales, focuses on Thompson's semi-historical tales, narratives of historical events, ethnographic texts, and personal and family stories.
Coquelle Thompson (ca. 1848-1946) was an accomplished storyteller who lived through the Rogue River Wars of 1855-56. His tribal community was evicted from its homeland and resettled with other Athabaskan groups on the Siletz Reservation, where he lived for ninety years. William R. Seaburg (1947-2022) was a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He was the editor of Pitch Woman and Other Stories: The Oral Traditions of Coquelle Thompson, Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian (Nebraska, 2007) and the editor and annotator of The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography by Elizabeth D. Jacobs. Elizabeth D. Jacobs (1903-83) was a therapist and ethnographer who conducted fieldwork among the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s. Jay Miller has a lifelong involvement with cultures and languages of Native communities in the four directions, with a fondness for the Northwest and earthen mounds. He has published works on Tsmshyan, Lushootseed, Salishan, and Mvskogee with the University of Nebraska Press as well as academic articles, book chapters, and dozens of edited tribal volumes. Laurel Sercombe is a retired sound archivist, having worked for the Ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington for more than thirty years. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology in 2001. Her publications include "Native Seattle in the Concert Hall: An Ethnography of Two Symphonies" (2016) and "History of Lushootseed Language Instruction" (2021). Susanne J. Young received her PhD in linguistics in 1983, specializing in comparative historical linguistics with an emphasis on Indo-European languages and the Indo-European verb system in particular. The title of her dissertation was "The Medio-Passive R-Forms in Indo-European." She worked in the Department of History at the University of Washington for twenty-nine years, retiring as the director of academic services in 2013.
"The volume brings out stories that have otherwise been kept in private academic collections and library special collections, making it now possible to return them to the Upper Coquille community and share them with a broader audience as well. This book will appeal to both scholarly and broader audiences, those interested in Upper Coquille storytelling traditions, and the Upper Coquille community."--Jolynn Amrine, editor of Chehalis Stories "This is a fascinating work. The original narratives, the background of the collector Elizabeth Jacobs, all combined with William Seaburg's commentary, make it a scholarly and engaging book."--Charles R. Menzies, author of People of the Saltwater: An Ethnography of Git lax m'oon
