Kathlamet

Only rarely do Indian stories concentrate attention on the subjectivity of principal characters. Protagonist often are not even named. Indian stories tell mostly of actions and their consequences, emphasizing not characters' motives but the effects of their behaviour on a community. Ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedies commonly focus on the destruction of impressive individuals: Oedipus, Hamlet, Othello. American Indian storytellers' concentration on communal effect rather than subjective psychology is sustained by a rhetoric of repetition, especially effective in oral recitation, buy unfamiliar and often irritating to contemporary readers. The cumulative effect of this story is built up through formulaic questions and answers enumerating most of the major Kathlamet artifacts. All of these, whether made by men or women, the chief rejects in favor of the "Shining Thing." This, because not specifically identified, suggests the brightest object in our universe, the Sun itself, which was the inspiration for the chief's long journey.

The rhetoric of pounding repetition manifest the obsessiveness of the chief's personal desire. Then the consequences of his possessiveness are driven home unsparingly when in village after village after village after village he slaughters his own people, unable to free himself from what is now the old woman's "blanket" (the term an ironic reminder that the "Shining Thing" is not something created by man or woman). This hideous possession is more fearful that the shirt of Nessus that destroyed Hercules, because the Kathlamet protagonist is not killed by it. He lives on in full consciousness that he is the sole murderer of all his family and all his people and the destroyer of all the clothes, weapons, and domestic furniture that they painstakingly made with their own hands. In my years of studying literature I have never encountered a more terrifying dramatization of the responsibilities of power and the destructiveness of ambition.

From Kroeber

http://www.chinooktribe.org/
There isn't a distinct Kathlamet tribe anymore, but the Kathlamet and Wakiakum people are represented by the Chinook tribe today.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_tribes_088_14_1.html