Kenneth M. Roemer
“The test of time,” an abundant literature, geographic expansiveness, artistry, and, more recently, inclusiveness represented by a complex awareness of gender and cultural diversity – these are key criteria used to determine entry into American literary canons and American literary histories. Scholars who specialize in Indigenous oral literatures would doubtless claim that this literature fulfills all the criteria and thus deserves a major place in canon and history. For these readers, I could proceed directly to the main business of this chapter: an overview of how Native oral narratives, song, and ceremony have and will continue to challenge in constructive ways Euro‐American concepts of authorship, context, genre, geographic and period designation, the functions of literature, and the importance of understanding how literature is experienced. But most American literature teachers and students have little knowledge of the magnitude and importance of the oral literatures. For these readers, it is appropriate to begin by establishing how this form of literature fulfills conventional expectations for inclusion in a twenty‐first‐century literary history – and specifically inclusion as the grand opening entry to the narrative of our literature.
There is no consensus on exactly how long North America has been inhabited; estimates range from less than 16 000 to 50 000 years. During these millennia, many thousands of significant stories, songs, and ceremonies were lost as a result of pre‐Columbian natural disasters and intertribal incursions, the impact of European diseases and Euro‐American military operations, forced assimilation in boarding schools, and the simple but crucial act of forgetting to pass narratives from one generation to the next. But Native storytellers and singers continued to perform, and their efforts, combined with the collection and translation work of more than five centuries of Spanish, French, English, American, and Indigenous men and women, have preserved hundreds of thousands of stories, songs, and ceremonies once – and still – performed across what is now the United States and throughout Canada, Central, and South America.
This process is certainly a story of preservation. In the introduction to one of the most important early twentieth‐century collections of English translations, Tales of the North American Indians (1929), Stith Thompson noted that an Iroquois creation account he knew had the “same form” as when the Jesuit Fathers transcribed it in the early 1600s (1972: xv). But the “test of time” involves much more than preservation; it is also a story of adaptation and continuation. For example, readers of Louise Erdrich’s (Ojibwe) reservation novels will be familiar with the mysterious lake creature Misshepeshu. In a detailed analysis of this underwater Lyon or Great Lynx, Victoria Brehm (1996) demonstrates how narratives about Micipijiu have adapted over several centuries to warn about overconsumption of scarce resources, enable women to increase their stature, enhance the power of one group of healers, enhance the power of an oppressive class structure, and, in Erdrich’s novels, emphasize the survival powers of oral narratives (1996: 677–706).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855) was inspired to a large degree by the grand drama of the Ojibwe narratives translated by Henry Rowe and Jane Schoolcraft in Algic Researches (1839). In the twentieth century, Dell Hymes (1981) highlighted the intricate lines, stanzas, and scenes intrinsic to narratives from the Pacific Northwest; major scholarly works such as Karl Kroeber’s Artistry in Native American Myths (1998) celebrated the rhetorical skills of storytellers, and Andrew Wiget (1987) highlighted the performance skills of storytellers. Still, when readers conditioned by Euro‐American literary conventions first encounter some examples of Indigenous story and song, they may find the texts both too simple and too complex: too simple especially because of the amount of repetition; too complex because these readers lack an understanding of the aesthetics and cultures that shape the texts.
One celebrated translation and another not‐so‐well known demonstrate impressive uses of repetition. Washington Matthews’s The Night Chant: A Navaho Ceremony (1902) is the best‐known English translation of the grand, nine‐day Navajo healing chantway, the Nightway. The most anthologized selection of the Nightway is performed on the ninth night. It is one of the four long prayers that precede the first dance of the Holy Beings, the Atsálei Yei‐be‐chai, who will help restore balance for the patient(s). The presider, echoed by the patient(s), addresses each of the four dancers. The patterns of repetition with variation that have been building throughout the nine days culminate in this grand invitation, which is actually less of an invitation and more of a generative pronouncement delineated by the incremental changes of words. Translation to English robs the words of their curative power. But even in an English translation, a few lines spoken after the Thunder Being has left his “house made of dawn” suggest the cadences created by the repetition with variation:
With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us.
With your leggings of dark cloud, come to us.
With your shirt of dark cloud, come to us.
With your head‐dress of dark cloud come to us.
With your mind enveloped in dark cloud, come to us.
With the dark thunder above you, come to us soaring.
With the shapen cloud at your feet, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the dark cloud over your head, come to us soaring.
(Matthews 1902: 143)
The other example comes from the Arapaho narrative “Raw Gums and the White Owl Woman.” It demonstrates at least four types of narrative repetition. First, the storyteller repeats the violent acts of a voracious monster baby equipped with sharp teeth. In the second type of repetition, the parents repeat their discovery of the evidence: “in his teeth fresh morsels of human flesh” (Bierhorst 1976: 143). The third, in effect, combines the first and second when the father relates the baby’s acts to men assembled in his tepee. The fourth type John Bierhorst calls “self‐reiteration”; it involves a subtle form of “duplication in which … an entire story is transported to a new level of meaning” (9–10). Just as he is about to be devoured by dogs, the baby transforms into a handsome young man who confronts Old White Owl Woman. He is tested in a series of parallel incidents, answers six riddles, and commits one final act of violence. He splits Owl Woman’s head with a stone sledge. The scattering brains become snowflakes that melt away. The transformed monster’s violence creates spring.
There are powerful male creators like the Cheyenne Maheo, but there are also powerful female creators, especially in Pueblo cultures. Examples of powerful mythological female figures include the woman who came from the clouds and gave the Lakota the sacred pipe, and the woman who fell from the sky, the Huron mother of humankind, who tries to undo her grandson’s creations. The twins in many culture hero narratives are definitely masculine, as is the case with the Kiowa hero twins. But other hero twins manifest a fascinating gender complexity. The Diné heroes are children of Changing Woman and the Sun. One is Monster Slayer; the other is Child of Water. Both are designated as male, but their different natures balance what non‐Natives might perceive as some of the best of masculine and feminine traits.
A dynamic multicultural diversity influencing the creation of oral literatures existed in North and South America long before the arrival of Columbus. Over thousands of years, the Indigenous populations developed different religions and economic, social, governmental, and interpersonal systems to adapt to environments as different as the Columbia River forests of the Northwest, the deserts of the Southwest, and the ocean seaboards of the eastern coasts. These were not static cultures. There were extensive trade routes, major migrations, and military incursions long before European contact. Terms such as “pre‐contact” or “pre‐encounter” are notorious misnomers; there were thousands of contacts among different cultures before Columbus. After Columbus, migrations continued. The Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), for example, moved westward from their Great Lakes region to settlements as far west as what is now north central North Dakota. Diné and Kiowa moved from different parts of the Northwest to the Southwest. The Diné people’s culture changed as they were influenced by Pueblo peoples; Kiowas were influenced by the horse cultures of the Plains. The latter dynamic reminds us that Native multiculturalism became transnational as European elements, like the horse, were added to Indigenous multiculturalism.
One of the most important elements of cultural diversity impacting the oral literatures was and still is language diversity. We will probably never know the exact number of Indigenous languages in North America in 1491. A typical estimate is at least three hundred. David Kozak (2012) indicates that today in the Southwest alone there are five major language families and two isolates (Zuni and Seri) that don’t fit into any of the families (2012: 2). The differences among the languages can be significant: some languages are verb driven while others have no adjective categories, and there are different ways of defining animate and inanimate objects. All these differences shape the nature of the oral literatures’ content and performance.
Given thousands of years of existence, hundreds of thousands of texts that still exist in print and performance, geographic expanse, degree of artistry, and gender, cultural, and linguistic diversity, it could be argued that at least 99% of this and other multi‐volume histories of American literature should be devoted to Indigenous oral literatures. This alternative history is rather unlikely. But there is evidence (outside of the obvious inclusions in linguistics, ethnology, folklore, and anthropology studies) of the increasing inclusion of Indigenous oral literatures in widely read general American literary venues. This is especially the case with anthology selections since the late 1980s, as my Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons in Anthologies website suggests; and Michael Elliott (2003) and I (1994) have written about the potential impact of including translations of trickster narratives and prayers in the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
But as Elliott observes, fewer than 65 pages of Volume 1 of the fifth edition of the Norton was devoted to Native literatures, both translations of oral literatures and printed English texts (2003: 726). Editors have divided more recent volumes differently. Still, in Volume A of the 2012 eighth edition (through 1820), only 46 of 900‐plus pages cover origin and trickster narratives and oratory. Elliott’s conclusion still applies: “these raw numbers make it all too easy for the instructor to characterize these works as simply a small addition to American literary history, a new part wholly congruent with those it joins” (726). True, there are popular anthologies that include more oral literatures – for example, the 2014 seventh edition of the Heath Anthology – but there are also discouraging trends that indicate less attention being devoted to this body of cultural production. My 2005 Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Roemer and Porter) was specifically designed to focus on written works originally published in English since the 1700s; in Harvard’s 2009 New Literary History of America (Marcus and Sollors) Indigenous oral literatures are barely visible. In the most recent encyclopedic handbook, the 2014 Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (Cox and Justice), and in the 2016 Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (Madsen), there are only a few relevant entries. My survey (2012) of articles on oral literatures through 2011 in the premier journal in the field – Series One and Series Two of Studies in American Indian Literatures and its predecessor in newsletter form – indicated that only 38 articles since the late 1970s focused on oral literatures (88–99).
There are obvious reasons for these trends: the exciting rediscoveries of eighteenth‐, nineteenth‐, and early twentieth‐century Native written texts and growing interest in Native films have captured the attention of many scholars; most English professors are not trained to study oral literatures and may not consider an “oral performance” to be literature; professors and students usually encounter the literatures in printed English translations and may therefore consider them examples of “writing” rather than orality; and the history of the translation of Indigenous texts is marred by examples of inaccurate translations and unethical collecting that may make professors skeptical of their authenticity or validity. There may also be hesitance among Native and non‐Native publishers, teachers, and students to teach literature that in its performance contexts in the original languages can bring about positive or negative physical changes. For instance, there were Navajo who believed that problems with Matthews’s translations caused his deafness and paralysis (Roemer 1994: 817). Finally, there is the coverage/access issue. Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki) (1991), a prolific writer in many genres, reminds scholars that “some cases [of studying and teaching Native literatures] may even mean NOT discussing something,” especially texts meant only for certain individuals or groups. That can be difficult for scholars trained to “tell it all, show it all, explain it all” (7).
Despite these obstacles, we should move out of our comfort zones and invite our students and colleagues to experience Indigenous oral literatures. The effort can create and enhance zones of comfort and delight with engaging trickster episodes, grand epics like Paul Zolbrod’s Diné Bahané: The Navajo Creation Story (1984), the haiku‐like imagery of an Ojibwe song (for instance, Song of Thunders: “Sometimes I, / I go about pitying / Myself / While I am carried by the wind / across the sky” [Day 1951: 148]), or the cadences of a Navajo prayer (one that is appropriate for reading by non‐Native audiences). Just as important are the ways these literatures can challenge us with disruptive and constructive questions about concepts of authorship, context, genre, and geographic and period designations, as well as questions about the functions of literature and how literature is experienced. The advantage of perceiving the oral literatures from this perspective is that it diminishes the probability of ghettoizing. If a literary history or an American literature course begins with discussions of such fundamental questions, there is a greater possibility that, as other forms of American literature are encountered, the presence of the original American literatures will be remembered instead of being restricted to the past and to a Native American chapter or “unit.” The following overview of questions raised is designed to facilitate this form of continuity, despite the fact that, because of the historical positioning of this chapter and the necessary space restrictions, certain forms of historical and contemporary oral literatures, such as jokes, histories, sermons, and oratory, will be omitted.
In anthologies and even literary histories, authors’ names remain significant organizational categories. It is true that some forms of oral literature have identifiable authors; for instance, in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, Cozad family members have created respected Kiowa Gourd Dance songs. But in general, in the Indigenous literatures of America, the concept of author is much more complex than the association of an individual with a text. Who is the author of the many songs, stories, prayers, and chants of a Navajo Nightway? According to chantway origin narratives, Diné Holy Beings taught the Nightway to an individual named the “Dreamer” or “Visionary” or to two men named the “Stricken Twins.” In one version, the Dreamer taught a younger brother who began the singer‐apprentice genealogy that continues today and has been documented in part by James C. Faris and Linda Haley (1990: 19, 100). The study of Native oral literatures requires us to expand the concept of the author, or Foucault’s “authorial function,” to include interdependence on the divine, family lineage, regional conventions, and the personalities of individual performers.
The importance of context is certainly nothing new to American literature scholars. But when studying oral‐derived texts, we have to frequently question the appropriateness of projecting familiar Euro‐American connotations and concepts on to Native stories. For a traditional Lakota storyteller, red may suggest goodness, not blood and violence; the numbers four, six, and sometimes seven can be more important than the Christian three; and readers, unfamiliar with Navajo concepts of health as a state of balance in a universe that can always slide into unbalance, may be confused if they conceive of victory as a total triumph over evil. Without cultural context, even apparently obvious happenings that seem simple for non‐Natives to comprehend can lead to misunderstandings. In one of the many episodes of the Winnebago trickster stories recounted by Paul Radin (1972), Wakdjunkaga awakes after a nap to find his blanket perched high above him. He is surprised to discover that it is perched atop his grand, erect penis. Slowly, as his penis softens, he reels in the blanket. This might seem to be a simple matter of satirizing the antics of awakening male members, except that Wakdjunkaga at first mistakes the blanket for the banners unfurled by chiefs during great feasts. Radin’s storytellers explained that at these feasts, it was expected that a chief would raise a tall, feathered crook and deliver long harangues admonishing the people to follow Winnebago ideals. In effect, this episode vents social tension about social chastisement by juxtaposing images of the antics of Wakdjunkaga’s oversized, overactive member and the emblem of authority displayed by the guardians of social ideals (1972: 152).
A different type of context – the situations under which the oral literature was collected – invites us to question the authority of the text. At one end of the spectrum are contacts grounded in ignorance and suspect motives. For example, in 1858, Jacob Hamblin and 13 Mormon missionaries brought with them a Welsh interpreter when they visited the Hopi. Hamblin needed the interpreter because he thought the Hopi were descendants of a Welsh prince (Swann 1994: xv). At the other end of the spectrum is the Tlingit writer, poet, scholar, and translator Nora Marks Dauenhauer, who with her husband, Richard, translates Tlingit oral literature.
Genre defining has offered another type of context and a major method – along with regional and tribal associations – of organizing the hundreds of thousands of translations of oral literatures. Major genres consist of creation/origin stories, including epic earth diver, emergence, and migration narratives, but also more particular stories about the origins of stars, buffalo, corn, and the possum’s bare tail; trickster and culture hero narratives; animal stories; and journeys to other worlds. Editors frequently use the genre designations to organize selections in general American literature anthologies and general collections of oral literatures, though for more specific collections the genres may be adapted to particular tribal traditions.
Designating genres is an extremely useful method of coming to terms with the vast number of oral texts and communicating information and theories among specialists and to non‐specialists. It certainly sounds more academic to proclaim that you are analyzing a trickster narrative than to admit that you are working on a character whose penis makes his blanket fly high. But the content of the narratives raises questions: for instance, how to define a “creator” or a “hero,” and what the dividing lines are between human animals and non‐human animals. Even the genre classifications themselves, as useful as they are, raise critical interpretation questions about the validity of using genres as a means to organize and analyze literature and prompt ethical questions about which culture should have control of defining the genres.
The event sequences in the narratives and the ways the characters respond as agents, collaborators, beneficiaries, victims, or observers often represent perspectives quite different from the perspectives of mainstream Christian, Jewish, or Muslim worldviews. The biblical creator does need to rest on the seventh day, but He doesn’t need any help to create the universe. Certainly, there are powerful Indigenous creators. Ts’its’tsi’nako, the Laguna Pueblo Thought Woman, and her sisters created the world. But in the Earth Diver creation stories, there is a co‐creation sequence that assumes that the creator cannot complete his or her work without the assistance of other, less powerful creatures. In the Cheyenne creation account, for example, Maheo, the All Spirit, created the great oceans, but He needed the help of the lowly coot bird who could dive deep below the surface to retrieve a ball of mud that Maheo transformed into the land with the help of another earthly creature, Grandmother Turtle, who supported the land on her back. The Diné emergence narrative segues into a hero narrative as the people become Earth Surface People, who discover that they are besieged by monsters. When they existed in the lower levels, they could not experience death, but on the surface they can. Fortunately, Monster Slayer and Child of Water can vanquish most of the monsters, but not all. Hunger, poverty, old age, and dirt remain. From a Euro‐American viewpoint, this might undercut their mythic status as heroic characters, since they did not achieve a total victory. From a Diné viewpoint, this incompleteness signals the reality of life on earth mentioned previously, one in which there are no absolute victories and there is a perpetual possibility of imbalance. Fortunately, the Holy Beings gave the Earth Surface People songs, rituals, and ceremonies that could reestablish balance (hózhó). Even animal stories can challenge non‐Native readers as the narratives blur the boundaries between humans and animals. Humans are advised, helped, and raised by animals; witches can transform into animals; and, in a Laguna Pueblo story, Yellow Woman falls in love with Buffalo Man.
Unless they have encountered African or other Indigenous literatures, the clearest challenge to conventional character definition for most American students is the Native American Trickster. S(he) is usually hungry and full of lust. S(he) can be incredibly stupid. Wakdjunkaga doesn’t seem to realize that his anus is part of his body. He attempts to teach his gassy end a lesson by placing a burning piece of wood in its “mouth” and learns that he and his anus are intimately connected (Radin 1972: 17–18). But Trickster can also be a creator. In a fit of anger, the Diné Coyote creates the starry night sky by throwing the stars in the air. Tricksters can be kind. The Kiowa Trickster helps the humans emerge from a hollow log onto the earth’s surface. Radin (1972) proposes that Trickster narratives have survived so many centuries because the Trickster is the most inclusive image of human (and animal) nature found in Native literatures: Trickster “became and remained everything to everyman – god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer creator. If we laugh at him, he grins at us. What happens to him happens to us” (169).
Certainly the “content” of Native oral narratives invites us to reconsider Euro‐American concepts of creator and created, hero and villain, human and animal. As we read individual narratives or listen to specific songs and attempt to fit them into widely accepted genre categories, we will also more than likely agree with Susan Feldmann (1965) that “classes of [Native American] tales flow freely into one another” (36), and there are many stories that don’t seem to fit neatly into the established genres. Various versions of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation narration have casts of characters that include real historical characters, like the Great Peacemaker and the orator, Hiawatha, as well as the snake‐empowered and monstrous Tadodahoh. In some versions, the Great Peacemaker was born of a virgin mother; hence, even the “real” historical character takes on a mythical stature. The previously discussed Arapaho “Raw Gums and the White Owl Woman” narrative begins as a monster story as the baby with sharp teeth devours chiefs. But after the baby’s transformation to a handsome man, he becomes a hero battling Old White Owl Woman. After he answers the riddles and smashes her skull, the story transforms into an origin narrative, as Owl Woman’s brains become snow, melt, and spring arrives. Even obvious classification can raise questions. I have argued that a Navajo travel song can be perceived as a form of life narrative (Roemer 2012).
Native oral literatures raise at least one more significant question about using genre categories to organize literature: who defines the genres? Up to this point, I have been using general and specific terms in English ranging from epic creation stories to a particular travel song. Many Native and non‐Native storytellers, singers, and scholars use similar generic genre terms. But these terms can obscure the fact that Native nations often have their own generic systems that may be quite different from the Euro‐American genre concepts. For example, Andrew Paynesta and Walter Sanchez, the two Zuni storytellers recorded by Dennis Tedlock (1972), told Tedlock that there were two major genres of Zuni oral narratives. The telapnaawe are “fiction.” They must begin and end with words that, according to Tedlock, are untranslatable: Son’ahchi and Lee ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ / semkonika. From October through March storytellers perform them at night. Chimiky’ana’kowa (The Beginning) is the other genre. These are “true.” They can be told anytime, but if they are performed in a ceremonial context, they are chanted. “Well then / this / was the BEGINNING” or “Well then / at the beginning” opens the chant; “that’s all” closes it (xxvii–xxviii, xvi–xvii, 225, 275, 269, 297). The obvious contrasts between the generic academic genres and these Zuni genres invite us to consider who does the genre defining for Indigenous literatures and, indeed, for any form of literature.
Besides genre designations, the two other principal organizing methods in the study of Native oral literatures have been geography and tribal association. These categories would seem much less problematic than labeling by genre, especially much less “colonial,” since the definitions spring from the land and the people, not from concepts that may have been imposed by non‐Natives. This assumption helps to explain why so many editors arrange collections by region and tribe. Even in the forthcoming When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native American Poetry, the poems will be arranged by geographic region (Harjo, Howe, and Foerster). What complicates this model is the dynamic histories of today’s Native nations. There are tribes – the Pueblos and Hopi, for instance – that have remained in the same regions for many hundreds of years. But the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) moved westward from the Great Lakes region; the Kiowa left their former homeland near the mouth of the Yellowstone River, probably during the late 1600s. The latter case is particularly interesting. Their oral narratives, as well as the striking murals displayed at the Kiowa Nation headquarters in Carnegie, Oklahoma, trace their journey from the forests of the Northwest to the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota, to Bear Lodge (Devils Tower) in what is now Wyoming, and finally to Rainy Mountain in what is now southwestern Oklahoma. These moves signaled cultural as well as geographic changes. The Kiowa were especially influenced by the horse cultures of the Plains. It is certainly valid to have Kiowa subsections in anthologies and valid to have Kiowa collections. But Kiowa culture and thus Kiowa oral literature is a multicultural, multiregional product of encounters with different landscapes and peoples. For many Native people these evolutions continued through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty‐first centuries with forced (removal and relocation federal programs) and voluntary migrations from reservations to urban areas.
The time travel that concluded the previous paragraph points toward another way the study of the oral literatures invites us to question the ways we organize literary histories. My website Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons in Anthologies indicates that, since 1829, the primary organizing structure for American literary histories and anthologies has been chronological periodization. Indigenous oral literatures upset this model. Elliott (2003) offers the example of a Chinook Coyote story. Should it be taught as pre‐European settlement literature, since it has roots extending back centuries, or in the “American Literary Realism” period, since Franz Boas transcribed and then published a version in the 1890s, or, Elliott wonders, should it be placed in the late twentieth century, since William Bright published his version in 1993 (723, 726)? The songs and stories of the Navajo Nightway present even more striking examples. They could logically be placed in a pre‐European settlement era. To emphasize an impressive case of cultural survival, they could be placed in the mid‐1860s. The Diné suffered greatly during the Long Walk to Fort Sumner in 1864. But even under these harsh conditions there is evidence that, in secret, the songs and stories were preserved (Faris 1990: 79–80). The editors of the fourth edition of the Norton placed the Nightway in the late nineteenth‐/early twentieth‐century section, a logical choice since Washington Matthews published the best‐known translation of the ceremonial in Night Chant (1902) (Roemer 1994: 818). But a case can also be made for placement with contemporary literature. In the most extensive study of the Nightway, James Faris (1990) speculates that there are more Nightway singers today than at any other time in Diné history (81). I know when I was invited to attend portions of two Nightways in 1993, there were four being performed in the immediate area.
Of course, the most fundamental question of periodization raised by the oral literatures is: when did American literature begin? In one of the earliest literary histories, Lectures on American Literature (1829), Samuel L. Knapp began with an introduction to the English language that concludes with information about the invention of the “Cherokee alphabet”; in one of the earliest anthologies, Century Reading for a Course in American Literature (1919), Fred Lewis Pattee began with Franklin’s Autobiography. In the provocative English Literatures of America 1500–1800 (1997), Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner begin with Marco Polo and have More’s Utopia (1516) as an early entry. Many anthologies begin with either Indigenous oral literatures or very early exploration accounts. If a history begins with the oral literatures and the editors follow the concept of origins offered by Jehlen and Warner, should American literature begin with Siberian oral literatures as an acknowledgement of pre‐Bering Strait transversal literatures? To many scholars, this may seem to be an outlandish periodization – outside conventional timelines and beyond conventional concepts of “American” land. Nevertheless, the dean of contemporary Native American literature, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), has traveled to Siberia and met with Indigenous people to enhance the meaning of his literary and Indigenous heritage.
“What does literature do?” is a fundamental question, possibly more fundamental than “Where does literature begin?” To most non‐Native readers it is obvious that reading Indigenous oral literatures can expand concepts of the functions of literature, especially the didactic functions. Origin stories “answer” multitudes of small questions about why blue jays have such raucous calls and why skunks have stripes. Stories present specific guides about how to hunt, fish, and plant corn and grand explanations of how the sun, moon, and stars came into being. Often one type of story will fulfill multiple functions: the Zuni emergence narratives, for instance, acquaint listeners with heroes and deities; offer descriptions of the social roles of priests who model their behavior after the two heroic Bow Priests; include information about formal greetings customs implied when the Bow Priests speak to the priests in the fourth level of emergence; and communicate important information about geographical formations and deserted as well as populated villages in Arizona and New Mexico.
Momaday imagines the multiple functions of oral literatures in ways that may seem familiar to non‐Native readers. In the Introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), he imagines how the Kiowa reacted when they first saw the magnificent Bear Lodge/Devils Tower in what is now Wyoming. They created a story about seven sisters saved by a huge growing tree stump from the claws of their brother who has become a gigantic bear. For Momaday, oral literatures allow humans to express “their capacity for wonder, meaning, and delight,” especially when they confront great mysteries like Bear Lodge/Devils Tower (1975: 104).
The encyclopedic explanatory functions of the stories and their impact imagined by Momaday may challenge some non‐Native readers to reevaluate their concepts of the functions of literature. It is more likely that the generative functions will be more challenging, with the concept that words shape reality. The excerpt from a Navajo prayer offered previously is an example of this power. The words, when performed correctly in Navajo, don’t describe the approach of a Thunder Being; they compel him to come to help the patient(s). Certainly, the notion that reading can have strong intellectual and emotional impacts on readers is nothing new. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) inspired millions to act. Still, many students and scholars today need to be reminded that there are reality‐generating experiences of literature that have existed for millennia and still impact physical bodies today.
Since the publication of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches (1839), the first major collection of translations in English of Native oral literatures; and before that, since one of the first English translations of a Native song, Lieutenant Henry Timberlake’s 1765 heroic couplets version of a Cherokee song; and before that, since French Jesuits collected narratives in New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and before that, since Columbus’s priest Ramon Pane initiated attempts by Europeans to collect Indigenous spoken literature, oral literatures have raised provocative questions about authorship, context, genre, geographic and period designation, and the functions of literature. During the second half of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty‐first, particular attention has been – and will continue in the future to be – focused on representing and experiencing oral literature: how are literatures collected and how do readers or listeners or viewers encounter them? Overviews of this crucial topic typically appear as histories of translation, such as William Clements’s excellent Native American Verbal Art (1996).
The differences among the texts that a reader, listener, or viewer encounters depend upon the relative knowledge of the collector and his or her assumptions about what he or she is collecting and why and where the texts appear. In terms of knowledge, the spectrum includes, at one extreme, the vastly uninformed who don’t display a primary intent to collect the literature (such as the previously mentioned Jacob Hamblin who in 1858 assumed the Hopi would speak Welsh), to the other extreme: Native scholars and poets devoting their lives to collecting their literature, people today like Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit), Rex Lee Jim (Navajo), and Gus Palmer, Jr. (Kiowa).
Assumptions regarding what was being collected and why and for which publishing venues range among several viewpoints. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Franz Boas and his students saw oral narratives as verbal artifacts demanding careful literal translations for linguists and ethnographers. They believed that the texts were extremely important cultural evidence created by people who were soon to vanish. Their exacting literal translations often appeared in Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE) publications in marked prose paragraphs. Here is the beginning of one of Boas’s (1928) Keresan Yellow Woman stories:
Long ago. — Eh. — There in the northwest, long ago / Yellow‐Woman lived. There were four of them. At that time they always / made clothing. They made also open‐work stockings / and painted them like flowers; and women’s belts (5) they also made and painted them like flowers. (118)
At the other extreme are those who perceive Indigenous narratives as poetry. The venues for those emphasizing poetry were, for example, a special 1917 issue of Poetry and anthologies that often included the word “poetry” in the title. For example, in 1962 one of the best‐known collections, Margot Astrov’s The Winged Serpent, first published in 1946, was retitled American Indian Prose and Poetry, and in 1992 it was re‐retitled using both previous titles. In the early twentieth century, translations of Native songs were compared to Imagist poetry. Advocates of this view believed that literal translations had to be recreated to match readers’ expectations: the songs needed to look like lyric or Imagist poems. Thus, the long prose paragraphs used by ethnographers and linguists for oral narratives were transformed into long narrative poems, which in the case of Dell Hymes’s (1981) recreations from previous translations from the Pacific Northwest, were presented in lines, stanzas, and scenes that he believed captured the meaning and form of the oral narratives. Jerome Rothenberg (1972) and other poets and scholars associated with the Ethnopoetics movement often presented previously translated texts in free verse forms that attempted to recreate the dynamics of the performance or create provocative visual patterns that, they assumed, enhanced the meanings of the texts (16–41).
To accommodate different assumptions about what texts are or should be, translators and editors present either one translation that reflects the “best” representation of the text or present multiple translations. No doubt influenced by New Critical assumptions about literature, many of the editors of early to mid‐twentieth century popular collections favored the former position; they offered what they considered to be the “best” single literary version. Another advocate of the one‐version approach, Anthony Mattina, justifies his position from a very different angle. He prefers prose translations and uses the “Red English” of his Colville co‐translator. Since English is the primary spoken language of most Native Americans today and Mattina is attempting to capture how stories are spoken today, there is logic in his approach, though, as Robert Dale Parker (2003) argues, the Red English texts often have “more to do with class, not with race or literary genre” (97).
Collections edited by advocates of multiple versions have appeared at least since Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches (1839). He represented oral narratives in prose paragraphs, but he also included songs within the narratives as poetry, including examples of an Ojibwe version and a literary English version (e.g. vol. 1: 197) and Ojibwe and a literal version (e.g. vol. 1: 168; vol. 2: 35, 37–38, 115). In Night Chant (1902), Washington Matthews followed this model, for example in excerpts from this short song of one of the hero twins, Monster Slayer:
Navajo
Sitse’ dze
Tsin nitadeskaígo
Ayolélego yenyenyen
Silagaástini ananhe’hé’
Literal
Before me
Wood scattered around white
He makes it (meaningless [word])
I cause it (meaningless [word])
Free Translation
Before me
Forests white are strewn around
The lightning scatters
But ’tis I who cause it.
(Matthews 1902: 281)
The multiple versions make visible what the single literary versions often hide: the addition of poetic words from the era (“strewn” and “’tis”), judgmental calls (“meaningless”), and revisions that make the text accessible to non‐Natives (the singers explained to Matthews that the scattered wood refers to “trees recently stricken by lightning and showing white wood”) (281). Of course, a great advantage of a multiple version presentation that includes the Native language is that it answers a complaint articulated by an anonymous linguist to Brian Swann (2004): “What does it say to the native communities when we tell them ‘Your literature is only valuable when it is in English’?” (xiv). Natalie Curtis was another early champion of the multiple version approach. Her Indians’ Book (1907), designed for a general reading audience, included cultural background, Native language, and literal translations along with musical notations of songs. Her ethnomusicologist’s approach was one of the first to make non‐specialist readers aware of the performance characteristics of the songs.
Dennis Tedlock offers one of the most interesting late twentieth‐century expressions of multiple versions, working from the belief that oral narratives should be represented in bilingual and poetic form and should suggest performance qualities. In Finding the Center (1972), Tedlock presents bilingual versions of the Zuni narratives he recorded. Unlike the poetic versions published before those in Finding the Center, these include line breaks representing the breath patterns of the speaker, and simple typographical signals to demonstrate: durations of sound (e.g. “LO‐‐‐‐‐NG”); volume (e.g. “and COYOTE / Coyote was there at sitting rock with his children. / He was with his children); and pitch (raising words above or below lines) (77).
Robert Dale Parker (2003) observes that whether a translator uses a single version or multiple version representations, the use of a poetic form does have an advantage: “more readers can be taught to see value in oral narrative if it hitches a ride on the mystified, hierarchal status of poetry.” But he also worries about the transformation of a Native oral form into a “high art” written form that may obscure alternative aesthetics of the Native form (95).
One way to address this challenge is to present a hybrid print‐video form – or to abandon print form, as in the representation of an Inuit story in the acclaimed film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001). These opportunities, initiated at least as early as the 1970s, suggest some of the most fascinating possibilities for future representations of oral literature and scholarship on oral literatures. The groundbreaking event for this approach was Larry Evers’s Words & Place: Native Literature from the American Southwest (1978). Words & Place offers several options. For example, for the “By This Song” segment, a person can view Andrew Natonabah perform and explain the song in Canyon de Chelly to his children in Navajo with English subtitles or without the subtitles (though there are sometimes technical problems with this option); can listen to a Navajo audio without the video; and can read a printed English transcript of the song, Natonabah’s explanation, and supplemental cultural background material. Another hybrid way to use Words & Place is to select the Seyewailo segment and use it in conjunction with Evers’s and Felipe Molina’s bilingual Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikan (1987). A multi‐decade collaborative project that uses video comes from Canada. It began with Robin Ridington et al.’s (2011) tape recordings of Dane‐zaa elders in northeastern British Columbia in the 1960s and continued with video recordings. The “entire audio archive has been cataloged and digitized” and made available to the Dane‐zaa community. The Doig River First Nation, in collaboration with a group of scholars, “began recording video as part of their Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit entitled Dane Wajich‐Dane‐zaa Stories and Songs: Dreamers and the Land” (Ridington et al. 2011: 211).
As anyone who has spoken before a camera knows, moving from print to video doesn’t mean removing mediation. Even if we move away from print and video to live performances, experiencing the literature will vary with the circumstances: a non‐Native performer before a class of non‐Natives at an urban university; a non‐Native listening to a Mohawk storyteller performing at the Akwesasne Cultural Center on the St. Regis Mohawk reservation; a fluent grandchild of a respected Hopi clan mother watching her grandmother perform in Hopi before the family gathered in the grandmother’s home. There is no one way to experience oral literatures that is “best” for every reader, listener, or viewer. But it is obvious that the debates about how Indigenous oral literatures are experienced and represented will be important to future developments in Indigenous oral literatures scholarship.
Closely related to debates about representation and experiencing oral literature is another trend that has become increasingly important: what impact does/should scholarship on oral literatures have on the communities studied? This challenge is an obvious inspiration for the creation, mentioned above, of the audio, video, and digital recordings of stories told by Dane‐zaa elders and made available to the communities. Another concept of community relationship that invites future study relates to the challenge of passing storytelling on to the next generation, the community of children and youth, utilizing youth‐friendly media. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga (2009), Matt Dembicki’s Trickster: Native American Tales, A Graphic Collection (2010), a puzzle‐platform video game, Never Alone (2014), that utilizes Inupiaq storytelling, and the Longhouse Media project are intriguing examples. Red tells a Haida narrative in images that mix Haida with Japanese manga styles; Trickster represents a collaboration of Native and non‐Native artists and storytellers; Never Alone represents collaboration between the First Nation Cook Inlet Tribal Council and E‐Line media (Land 2016). The Longhouse Media project is a collaboration between the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and a Seattle based non‐profit that defines Native youth as the future preservers and creators of Indigenous storytelling. Their “Native Lens” program teaches children how to use film to tell their people’s and their own stories (Lawson 2016).
I doubt that editors, any time soon, will devote 99% of multi‐volume histories of American literature to Indigenous oral literatures. But I hope this chapter demonstrates that, to again borrow Elliott’s (2003) words, the Indigenous oral literatures are not simply small additions to “American literary history, a new part wholly congruent with those it joins” (726). Like Coyote, the oral literatures are disruptors with many voices. They come from elders’ voices, bilingual print texts, films, websites, graphic novels, and video games. They invite us to reconsider conventional concepts of authorship, context, genre, geographic and period designation, functions of literature, and the implications of how we represent and experience literature and how that literature impacts communities and future generations. And like Coyote, they are also creators. They create opportunities to understand American literature in ways we might have never considered.
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 16 (captivity recast); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture).