THE KACHINS
Their Customs and Traditions
Ola Hanson
American Baptist Mission Press · Rangoon · 1913 · First Edition
Historical Note — Indigenous Kachin Traditions
Although this volume was published by the American Baptist Mission Press, Kachin religious traditions were also documented in British government ethnographic research, including E. C. T. George's 1891 study and Scott and Hardiman's Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (1900).
Hanson's missionary affiliation should not be mistaken for evidence that the traditions he recorded originated with Christianity.
On the contrary, Hanson describes an established indigenous system of oral transmission maintained by the Jaiwas, religious storytellers trained in specialized ceremonial language. He explicitly includes the flood among the traditions preserved in their recitations, alongside creation and the origins of different peoples, within an indigenous oral tradition already established when Hanson began his work among the Kachins.
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