General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Bibliographer: Jack W. Marken
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Lynn Poncin
SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.
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{i}
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2 Volume 3, Number 3 Fall 1991
"IDENTITY" AND "DIFFERENCE" IN THE TRANSLATION
OF NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES: A ZUNI CASE STUDY
William M. Clements
.
.
.
.
1
NOBODY IS AN ORPHAN: Interview with Luci Tapahonso
Sylvie Moulin
.
.
.
. 14
THREE VIEWS OF POWWOW HIGHWAY
Easin' on Down the Powwow Highway(s)
Rodney Simard
.
.
.
. 19
Culture Isn't Buckskin Shoes: A Conversation Around Powwow
Highway
Toby Langen and
Kathryn Shanley
.
.
.
23
Powwow Highway in an Ethnic Film and Literature Course
Carol Gerster
and Marshall Toman
.
.
.
29
COMMENTARY
From the Secretary-Treasurer
.
.
.
39
From the Editors
.
.
.
.
39
1992 Continued
.
.
.
. 40
Call for Creative
Work .
.
.
. 42
Update on "Returning
the
Gift"
.
.
. 42
Opportunity for
Benefactors
.
.
.
43
Invitation to
Reviewers
.
.
.
. 43
Directory of
American Indian Writers .
.
. 44
AICA Tour
.
.
.
.
. 44
REVIEWS
American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic
Review, and Selected Bibliography. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
James W. Parins
.
.
.
. 45
Wolverine Myths and Visions: Dene Traditions from Northern
Alberta. Comp. Dene Wodih Society
H. C. Wolfart
.
.
.
.
.
46
{ii}
California Indian Nights. Comp. Edward W. Gifford and
Gwendoline Harris Block
Greg Sarris
.
.
.
.
. 52
Bighorse the Warrior. Tiana Bighorse. Ed. Noël
Bennett
Hertha D. Wong
.
.
.
. 56
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold. Charles
A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman
Julian Rice
.
.
.
.
. 59
Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary
Northwest Native American Poetry. Ed. Andrea Lerner
Jarold Ramsey .
.
.
.
. 62
The Indian Lawyer. James Welch
Sidner Larson
.
.
.
. 64
In Mad Love and War. Joy Harjo
Carter Revard
.
.
.
.
. 66
The Invisible Musician. Ray A. Young Bear
Robert F. Gish
.
.
.
. 69
Medicine River. Thomas King
Rodney Simard
.
.
.
. 72
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts. Louis
Littlecoon Oliver
Ron Welburn
.
.
.
.
. 75
Simple Songs. Vickie Sears
Rhoda Carroll
.
.
.
.
. 76
A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography
of Chief G. W. Grayson. Ed. W. David Baird
Robert F. Sayre
.
.
.
. 80
Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to
the Present. Ed. Penny Petrone
Agnes Grant
.
.
.
.
. 83
Paula Gunn Allen. Elizabeth I. Hanson
Birgit Hans
.
.
.
.
. 86
Briefly Noted . . . . . 88
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 91
{1}
OF NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES:
A ZUNI CASE STUDY
William M. Clements
Transformations
of Native American oral literary performances into European-language
texts have tended to reflect the translators' preconceptions
about "the Indian" and about literature. For example,
early nineteenth-century textmakers such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
and his contemporaries perceived in Native American oratory,
narrative, and song the raw materials for "real" literature.
Consequently, they focused their translation efforts on the imagery
from nature, figurative tropes, and patterns of rhythm which
they believed inherent in Indian literary expression, embellishing
and codifying these "very decided beginnings of a literature"--in
William Gilmore Simms's phrase (137)--in whatever ways were necessary
to produce texts that met the Euramerican literary conventions
of their day (Clements). These translators' successors, the "scientists"
of the Bureau of American Ethnology and of Boasian anthropology,
also operated with preconceptions about Native American oral
literature; they emphasized its documentary function, its role
as a source of data about language usage and other aspects of
culture (Powell, "Report" xx; Boas 393). Hence, their
textualizations stressed the importance of accurate preservation
of Native-language originals, even their so-called "free
translations" highlighting semantic correspondences and
ignoring, for the most part, indigenous esthetic features. Early
in the twentieth century, enthusiasts for Native Americana such
as Natalie Curtis and Mary Austin imposed still another preconception
on their translations and interpretations especially of American
Indian oral poetry (that is, songs without music): the idea that
this poetry represented the primitive phase in the evolution
of true literature and that a genuine American literature must
base itself on aboriginal strivings at verbal artistry in the
New World (Castro). Their translations portrayed Indians as primitive
Imagists, whose art anticipated modern trends in literature.
During the three
and a half centuries that Euramericans have been translating
Native North American oral literature, many preconceptions have
colored their work. While a careful examination of each set of
preconceptions must precede full appreciation of available translations,
a sense of their general tendencies can emerge from Fredric Jameson's
dichotomy between "Identity" and "Difference"
(43-45). The "peculiar, unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable
alternation" between the poles of this dichotomy poses a
dilemma whenever we confront alien cultural products, according
to Jameson. If we perceive in these products that with which
we can identify--that which is accessible through "our own
cultural moyens du bord"--we may overlook or minimize
their otherness through what may become "little better than
mere psychologi-{2}cal projection."
But if we focus on the alien cultural products' Difference, we
cut short hopes of comprehension and appreciation (43).
Jameson exemplifies
the alternation between Identity and Difference by surveying
responses to classical culture. Invoking the principle of Identity,
we have found in the symmetrical formality of Greek classicism
parallels not only to our own esthetic values but also to our
sociopolitical ideals. Yet when a recognition of the oversimplification
inherent in this view prompts a turn to the principle of Difference,
a perception of the Greece of antiquity as "a culture of
masks and death, ritual ecstasies, slavery, scapegoating, [and]
phallocratic homosexuality" emerges which is just as conditioned
as the earlier perspective (44). Jameson's point is not that
we should attempt to resolve conflicting views engendered by
the Identity-Difference dichotomy, but that we should be aware
of these principles as mediators between us and alien cultures.
Arnold Krupat
has introduced Jameson's ideas into the discourse on Native American
oral literature in a review of Karl Kroeber's Traditional
Literatures of the American Indian. In terms of the ongoing
Native American-Euramerican encounter, Krupat notes, Identity
and Difference reflect the poles of response which contact with
Indians has produced in Euramericans. For the Puritans, Native
Americans, subhuman denizens of "howling wilderness,"
epitomized Difference, since they were leagued with Satan in
opposing the kingdom of God in New England. The eighteenth century
also stressed ways in which Indians embodied Difference and placed
investigations of their history, philology, and ethnology under
the rubric of natural philosophy. On the other hand, the romantics'
idealization of the Noble Savage generated a perception of Native
Americans in terms of Identity, as some Euramericans saw in the
Indian what they would themselves be without the trappings of
civilization (4).
Extended to translations
of Native American oral literature, the principle of Identity
has meant that textmakers have assumed they could translate orations,
narratives, and poems in ways that would make them readily accessible
to Euramerican readers--that adding rhyme and regularized meter
to poetry or presenting oral narrative as paragraphed prose,
for example, legitimately represented Indian oral literature.
Exponents of the Identity principle might cite Susan Hegeman's
timely reminder, "If one did not acknowledge Anglo-American
textual conventions to some extent, then there would be no translation"
(20). Yet while the translation enterprise must at least acknowledge
the principle of Identity, textmakers who recognize the alternative,
Difference, have emphasized the dangers of using literary conventions
of one culture to represent the true verbal artistry of another
and of transforming the oral text into the written. For them,
Difference {3} manifests itself
in two ways: linguistic/cultural and semiotic--in the materials'
languages and cultural matrices and in their media of expression.
Adherents of the Difference principle would probably agree with
Irving Goldman's caveat about textualization of Kwakiutl cultural
expression: "As a matter of simple caution, we should assume
that if the mode of thought of primitive peoples, as revealed
by the ethnographic records, sounds all too familiar notes of
recognition in the western academic mind, something is seriously
wrong with the rendition" (334).
The Identity-Difference
dichotomy offers an approach to making sense of the textualization,
translation, interpretation, and critical understanding of Native
American oral literature. A reader can evaluate the "authenticity"
of a particular piece in terms of its translator's choice of
one principle or other. Furthermore, the dichotomy provides a
useful basis for comparing and contrasting translated texts,
especially those representing the same Native literary heritage.
This latter function may be sampled effectively by examining
work done with the oral literature of Zuni, a pueblo in western
New Mexico.
Since Frank Hamilton
Cushing's residence of four and a half years beginning in 1879,
Zuni has continued to attract anthropologists. James Stevenson,
leader of the Smithsonian expedition of which Cushing was a member,
also studied the community's culture. His wife, Matilda Coxe
Stevenson, involved in the research from its beginning, continued
the work after her husband's death in 1888. Elsie Clews Parsons
spent considerable time at Zuni between 1915 and 1930, A. L.
Kroeber visited the pueblo during the summers of 1915 and 1916,
Leslie Spier did archeological research nearby in 1916, Frederick
Webb Hodge returned to Zuni periodically for almost forty years
between 1886 and 1923, and Franz Boas was there briefly in 1920.
Ruth Benedict and Ruth Bunzel came to Zuni in 1924, the latter
returning for several subsequent summers. More recently, Omer
C. Steward, John Adair, Stanley Diamond, Dennis Tedlock, and
M. Jane Young among others have done anthropological fieldwork
at Zuni (Pandey). While most of these researchers paid some attention
to oral literature, many of them producing translations, three
stand out as representing the principles of Difference and Identity
particularly well. At one extreme, Cushing's work reflects Identity,
since his comments about Zuni oral literature and his translations
suggest a belief that the material could legitimately be rendered
according to Euramerican literary conventions. Bunzel, on the
other hand, recognized the principle of Difference when she commented
on her translation efforts. But her actual translations reflect
Identity more than Difference. Tedlock has worked more consistently
from Difference, since he has stressed not only the linguistic
and cultural gap between Zuni and English, but also the distinction
between {4} orally performed literature
and literature crafted within a tradition of writing.
Cushing published
two major collections of translations from Zuni oral literature.
"Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths," brief cosmogonic
and etiological narratives, appeared in 1896 in the Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). Zuñi
Folk Tales, longer examples of what John Wesley Powell called
"discredited mythology" ("Introduction" viii),
came out posthumously in 1901. Though Cushing's published comments
about his methods of translation are scanty, they reveal his
acceptance of the principle of Identity. For example, in the
introduction to "Outlines" he writes of the songs which
appear in some of the myth texts: "In the originals these
are almost always in faultless blank meter. . . . I do not hesitate
. . . to tax to the uttermost my power of expression in rendering
the meanings of them where I quote, clear and effective and in
intelligible English" (374). Cushing found Zuni songs so
like poetry in English that he could apply a generic term from
the latter ("blank verse") to them. Moreover, he had
no qualms about waxing literary in a Euramerican mode when translating
them. Powell's introduction to the folktale collection includes
some telling comments about Cushing's "scriptorial wand,"
which the translator waved to make Zuni oral narratives "a
part of the living literature of the world." Cushing was
especially equipped to accomplish this since he could "think
as myth-makers think, . . . speak as prophets speak, . . . [and]
expound as priests expound" (ix). In other words, Cushing
recognized Identity between what he might express in English
literary prose and what the Zuni verbalized in oral narration.
Cushing's devotion
to the principle of Identity probably arose from two sources.
The first was his deeply personal involvement in Zuni culture.
While some may dismiss such antics as his signing correspondence
as "First War-Chief of Zuni" (Woodward) and being photographed
in Zuni dress as manifestations of Cushing's idiosyncratic personality,
they do reveal his sense that the Zuni and he--a "civilized"
Euramerican--were not all that different, even though at disparate
stages in the scheme of cultural evolution which he espoused.
This scheme, a second source of the Identity principle for Cushing,
enjoyed the support of most anthropologists of the late nineteenth
century. Proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan
and field-tested by Powell's BAE, it posited human psychic unity
(read "Identity") and the notion that cultural forms
at various evolutionary stages had genetic connections that presupposed
at least traces of Identity. Fieldworkers such as Cushing might
see cross-cultural equivalences, even when they were lacking,
because of the force of evolutionary theory--hence, Tedlock's
criticism that Cushing's "metaphysical glossing" of
his texts stressed a monotheism indicative of "the {5} theoretical preconceptions of nineteenth-century
anthropology rather than Zuni belief" ("On the Translation"
58).
Cushing's opinion
that Zuni oral narrative resembled Victorian prose closely enough
to warrant his use of the contemporary Euramerican esthetic colors
his renderings of the Zuni material. For example, consider how
he handles a description of the twin war gods in a myth text
to which he assigned the title "The Origin of the Twin Gods
of War and of the Priesthood of the Bow":
Lo! dwarfed and hideous-disguised were the two gods Áhaiyuta and Mátsailema, erst Uanamachi Píahkoa or the Beloved Twain who Descended--strong now with the full strength of evil; and armed as warriors of old, with long bows and black stone-tipped arrows of cane-wood in quivers of long-tailed skins of catamounts; whizzing slings, and death-singing slung-stones in fiber-pockets; spears with dart dealing fling-slats, and blood-drinking broad-knives of gray stone in fore-pouches of fur-skin; short face-pulping war-clubs stuck aslant in their girdles, and on their backs targets of cotton close plaited with yucca. Yea, and on their trunks, were casings of scorched rawhide, horn-like in hardness, and on their heads wore they helmets of strength like to the thick neck-hide of male elks, whereof they were fashioned. ("Outlines" 422)
The initial interjection and reversal of word order suggest
an attempt to be "literary" according to Victorian
standards. The interminable length of the first sentence, though
perhaps reflecting the formulaic quality of oral poetry
(which most contemporaray translators consider Native American
oral narrative to be [e.g., Hymes]), more likely draws upon European
epic literature which Cushing could have known in a variety of
Victorian translations. Cushing also adopts a stilted formality
in vocabulary, which, though it could be an attempt to reproduce
the mythopoeic diction of Zuni narrators, probably derives from
the fad for conscious archaizing that characterized Victorian
literature set in the past (Basnett-McGuire 72-73).
Cushing translated
poetic passages in myths into Victorian verse. For example, he
treated the words of one of the "Ancients" summoned
to assist the war gods in their maturation as follows:
"Why
call ye, small worms of the waters
And spawn of
the earth and four quarters,
Ye disturbers
of thought, lacking shame;
Why call ye the
words of my name?" ("Outlines" 421)
{6}
The use of rhyme introduces a feature of English poetics absent
from Zuni. Bunzel, in fact, chided Cushing for this "inexplicable
blunder" of rendering Zuni poetry in "regular short-lined
rhymed English stanzas" ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry"
620).
Cushing's treatment
of the final paragraphs of a folktale he entitled "The Maiden
and the Sun" offers another example of his approach to translation:
And ever since then [the events of the story], my children, the world has been filled with anger, and even brothers agree, then disagree, strike one another, and spill their own blood in foolish anger.
Perhaps had men been more grateful and wiser, the Sun-father had smiled and dropped everywhere the treasures we long for, and not hidden them deep in the earth and buried them in the shores of the sea. And perhaps, moreover, all men would have smiled upon one another and never enlarged their voices nor strengthened their arms in anger toward one another. (Zuñi Folk Tales 474)
This lengthy summary and explicit, garrulous statement of
the story's moral exemplify what Tedlock regards as the "most
serious difficulty" with Cushing's folktale translations:
his embroidery of the originals "with devices, lines, and
even whole passages which are clearly of his own invention and
not mere distortions" ("On the Translation" 59).
As Brian W. Dippie has noted, Cushing was "more adept at
conveying a feeling for myth" than at recording it with
exactitude (285), but his sense of the essential Identity between
the Zuni and himself and between their literature and his granted
him the license to cast Zuni oral literature in a Victorian mode.
Unlike some translators who transform what they perceive as exotic,
esthetically remote literature according to the esthetic conventions
of the target language in order to create texts with reader accessibility,
Cushing did not regard Zuni oral literature as remote. He converted
it into Victorian prose and poetry because he sensed its Identity
with them.
Ruth Bunzel,
trained by Franz Boas and initiated into fieldwork by Ruth Benedict,
had no use for the cultural evolutionism of Cushing's generation
of anthropologists. Instead, she accepted her mentors' doctrines
of cultural diversity and cultural relativism--in other words,
of Difference and respect for Difference. Unlike Cushing she
recognized the obstacles in translating from Zuni into English,
but like him she often chose vocabulary and stylistic constructions
for her texts that made them immediately accessible to readers
of English, thus representing them in terms of Identity. The
major collections of Bunzel's translations are "Zuñi
Origin Myths" and "Zuñi Ritual Poetry,"
both of {7} which appeared in 1932
in the BAE Annual Report, and Zuñi Texts,
published in 1933 by the American Ethnological Society.
"Zuñi
Ritual Poetry" contains most of Bunzel's commentary on her
translation procedures. While Cushing was confident that Zuni
and English evinced the principle of Identity to such an extent
that he could easily translate from one to the other, Bunzel
noticed some very real difficulties. In vocabulary, for instance,
she cited problems produced by the "obsolete or special"
language used in ritual texts (620) and the abundant word play
in those texts (619). The latter included double entendres and
deliberate verbal and grammatical ambiguity, but even ascertaining
"how much is word play, how much metaphor, and how much
is actual personification" sometimes mystified her (619).
Bunzel also identified grammatical differences between English
and Zuni, the Native American language's reliance on inflection
being most significant.
Other grammatical
features of Zuni which caused translation problems for Bunzel
included its use of long periodic sentences, its typical word
order (subject, object, verb), and its use of participial or
gerundive clauses to express temporal or causal subordination
("impossible in English," she lamented) (618-19). She
regretted her inability to carry these aspects of Zuni grammar
over into English and the resulting loss of "effective stylistic
feature[s]" (619). Bunzel was also unable to retain the
rhythm of Zuni ritual poetry in her English texts (though she
could preserve "its irregularity, the unsymmetrical alteration
of long and short lines" [620]). Finally, she believed her
translations suffered "greatly from loss of sonority and
vigor" because of her inability to transfer Zuni patterns
of accent into English (620).
Clearly, then,
Bunzel recognized the principle of Difference, but she did not
represent it fully in her translations. Perhaps she believed
that doing so would have rendered her texts inaccessible to English
readers and, like many other translators, opted to sacrifice
features of the source language original for the sake of target
language readability (Basnett-McGuire 23).
Whatever the
reasons, Ruth Bunzel created poetic texts that read--by her own
admission--more like the blank verse of Milton or the free verse
of the King James translation of the Psalms than Zuni oral poetry
("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 620). Notice her treatment
of the ending of one of the prayers of the War Cult:
On roads reaching
to Dawn Lake
May you grow
old;
May your roads
be fulfilled;
May you be blessed
with life.
Where the life-giving
road of your sun father comes out,
May your roads
reach;
May your roads
be fulfilled. ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 689)
{8}
Aside from the reference to "Dawn Lake," nothing in
these lines suggests that they originated in the oral literature
of a culture as removed from that of most readers of English
as the Zuni. In fact, their stately measure and litany-like parallelism
fulfill expectations, shaped by Judaeo-Christian scripture and
liturgy, of what ritual poetry should be. Bunzel has not added
these features; they exist to some degree in the Zuni text published
alongside her translation. But she has not translated that text
in a way that suggests the Difference her commentary recognizes.
Bunzel's translations
of Zuni oral narrative assume the same approach. The first paragraph
of her translation of "Tale Concerning the First Beginning"
is a straightforward rendering that only hints at Difference:
Yes, indeed. In this world there was no one at all. Always the sun came up; always he went in. No one in the morning gave him sacred meal; no one gave him prayer sticks; it was very lonely. He said to his two children: "You will go into the fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers, käeto·we, tcu-eto·we, mu-eto·we, le·-eto-we, all the society priests, society ekwins, society bow priests, you will bring out yonder into the light of your sun father." Thus he said to them. They said, "But how shall we go in?" "That will be all right." Laying their lightning arrow across their rainbow bow, they drew it. Drawing it and shooting down, they entered. ("Zuñi Origin Myths" 584)
Though they would realize this is a translation, of course,
because of the terms left in Zuni and probably because of culture-specific
references such as "society bow priests," readers of
English would again find nothing to indicate that this is a passage
of oral literature (and poetry instead of prose, according
to many contemporary students of Native American oral narrative
[e.g., Hymes]) in a language whose structures differ substantially
from the Indo-European. A clear sense of Identity emerges despite
the translator's recognition of Difference.
Dennis Tedlock's
translations of Zuni oral narratives--most of which were originally
published in Finding The Center in 1972--reflect more
clearly than Bunzel's their common sense of the Difference between
Zuni and English. Tedlock also goes farther than either of his
predecessors by stressing that an important distinguishing factor
between the original performances and their translated textualizations
involves the media through which they are realized. Difference
figures prominently in Tedlock's handling of Zuni oral literature
because it is Zuni and because it is oral. Influenced not only
by the continuing emphasis in anthropology on Difference as represented
by cultural {9} pluralism and relativism,
but also by the emergent "ethnography of communication"
in the 1960s (Gumperz and Hymes) which emphasized the complexity
of communicative activity and the need to record all its aspects--not
just the text-message--Tedlock has written extensively on the
translation practices of his predecessors at Zuni and his own
methods. Many of these writings were collected in the volume
The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in 1983.
Critical to Tedlock's
assumption of Difference as a basis for translating Zuni oral
literature is his statement that "Those who have sought
to transform the spoken arts of the American Indian into printed
texts have attempted to cross linguistic, poetic, and cultural
gulfs much larger than those faced by translators who merely
move from one Indo-European written tradition to another"
(The Spoken Word 31). Particular problems which Zuni
presents when one attempts to transform narratives composed in
it into English, according to Tedlock, include some of those
identified by Bunzel: word order and use of special vocabulary,
for instance (Finding the Center xxvii- xxviii). He
also notes (as Bunzel's translations show that she also recognized)
that some Zuni words--interjections, proper names, opening and
closing tale formulas1--defy translation into English
(Finding the Center xxviii-xxx). Moreover, he stresses
how the principle of Difference affects the general perception
of the stories he has translated. What Zunis "picture"
when they perform or hear oral literature differs from what Euramerican
readers might visualize. Tedlock admits, "[N]othing I could
do would make them experience . . . [oral literature] precisely
as a Zuni does" (Finding the Center xxxi).
Meanwhile, like
Dell Hymes, Tedlock also argues that prose translations of oral
narrative obscure its nature: "[P]rose has no real existence
outside the written page" (Finding the Center xix).
Consequently, he suggests Difference in medium of presentation
by rendering Zuni oral narratives poetically, equating line breaks
with pauses of one-half to three-fourths of a second.
Tedlock's translation
of the conclusion of a folktale entitled "Coyote and Junco"
offers a glimpse of his technique. The narrative picks up after
a two- or three-second pause by storyteller Andrew Peynetsa:
Coyote said,
"QUICK SING," that's what he told her [Junco].
She didn't sing.
Junco left her
shirt for Coyote.
He bit the Junco,
CRUNCH, he bit the round rock.
Right here (points
to molars) he knocked out the teeth, the rows of teeth in
back.
(tight)
"So now I've really done it to you."
"AY! AY!" that's what he said.
{10}
THE PRAIRIE WOLF
WENT BACK TO HIS CHILDREN, and by the time he got back there
his children were dead.
Because this
was lived long ago, Coyote has no teeth here (points to molars).
LEE--------SEMKONIKYA.
(laughs)
(Finding
the Center 83)
In addition to the pacing of the oral performance, marked
by line divisions, Tedlock's translation indicates precise features
of how Peynetsa told the story through words printed completely
in upper case (spoken more loudly), italicized comments in parentheses
(tone of voice, gestures, audience reactions), and a long dash
following a vowel within a word (lengthening of about two seconds).
In other passages, Tedlock signals such lengthening by repetition
of letters. He also uses typography to mark softening of voice
(small type) and changes in pitch (superscripting and subscripting
words or syllables).
While Difference
in medium emerges from what amounts to typographic manipulation,
Tedlock does little more than Bunzel to suggest linguistic/cultural
Difference. In this passage, he leaves the closing formula--which
Cushing usually handled as "Thus shortens my story"
(e.g., Zuñi Folktales 92)--untranslated. Elsewhere,
he does the same with opening formulas (Cushing's "In the
days of the ancients" [e.g., Zuñi Folktales
65]). He also attempts to match the tone and level of Zuni diction
by using the relatively formal "prairie wolf" for the
penultimate occurrence of "coyote." Occasionally, Tedlock
creates the same effect by translating Zuni interjections with
English archaisms. The formulaic "that's what he told her
[said]" also represents the Zuni (printed on facing pages
only for "Coyote and Junco") and may help to communicate
Difference, but the major factor in creating this effect is the
appearance of the text on the printed page. Tedlock's translations
do not look like most textualizations of oral narratives in paragraphed
prose; they are poetry, but poetry which incorporates constant
reminders of the relevance of the principle of Difference in
the media of presentation.
Superficially,
applying Fredric Jameson's dichotomy between Identity and Difference
to the translation of Native American oral literature may seem
simply a restatement of the tension that has characterized translation
theory and practice for centuries. Every translator must choose
if his or her completed work will preserve elements of the source
language (SL) original even when they are obscure and ineffective
in the target language (TL). The alternative is to sacrifice
SL for the sake of readability in TL (Bassnett-McGuire 68-72).
Most translators have taken the latter course and produced translations--like
Alexander Pope's rendering of Homer in heroic {11}
couplets--which their readers can appreciate. But the Identity-Difference
dichotomy involves more than a choice of whether to favor SL
or TL. For instance, in creating his texts translated from Zuni
which favored TL, Cushing--if his and Powell's published comments
are sincere--did not believe he was sacrificing SL at all. He
saw such Identity between Zuni and English that there was no
reason to indicate Difference. At the other extreme, Tedlock,
who would seem to favor SL at the expense of TL, does not really
do so. His translations, though preserving some of the Difference
he perceived in Zuni oral narrative, were originally published
by a trade press and are readily accessible for readers willing
to deal with the typographic manipulations, which are products
of Difference in medium, not of the translator's favoring SL.
Of the three translators treated here, only Bunzel may have been
influenced by the translator's conventional dilemma of favoring
SL or TL. Like Pope, she recognized the essential Difference
between SL and TL and produced a text that favored the latter,
but unlike him she may have done so because she believed there
could be no other way to bring the Zuni into English.
Moreover, I am
using the Identity-Difference dichotomy to apply also to media
of presentation. Neither Cushing nor Bunzel seemed to perceive
that the orality of Zuni literature made it Different from written
prose and poetry, so neither did anything to suggest the original
orality in their translations. Only Tedlock recognized and marked
media Difference in his translations.
Consequently,
Identity and Difference--extended to the principles governing
the translation of Native American oral literature from Fredric
Jameson's original conceptualization--offers a handle for dealing
with the ways translators have worked. The Zuni case study provides
an illustration of what might be done on a larger scale with
the entire history of Euramerican textualizations and translations
of Native North American oral performances from the Jesuits in
New France through the current ethnopoetics movement. Looking
at textmakers and their translations in terms of the dichotomy
does not presuppose that those designated as adherents of Identity
have produced less "authentic" texts than exponents
of Difference or vice versa. An advocate of Identity may err
by forcing Native American material into Euramerican conventions,
but a translator emphasizing Difference may unnecessarily exoticize
the material. The dichotomy, though, does provide better consumer
information. Readers will have a clearer idea of how and why
particular translations came about.
{12}
1Further study of Zuni allowed Tedlock to translate the conventional opening formula as "Now we are taking it up" and the closing formula as "Enough, the word is short" (The Spoken Word 65-66).
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London:Methuen, 1980.
Boas, Franz. "Tsimshian Mythology." Thirty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1916. 29-1037.
Bunzel, Ruth L. "Zuñi Origin Myths." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932. 545-609.
------. "Zuñi Ritual Poetry." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932. 611-835.
------. Zuñi Texts. Publications of the American Ethnological Society No. 15. New York: Stechert, 1933.
Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian. Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983.
Clements, William M. "Schoolcraft as Textmaker." Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 177-92.
Cushing, Frank Hamilton. "Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths." Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1896. 332-462.
------. Zuñi Folk Tales. 1901. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986.
Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American. White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 1982.
Goldman, Irving. "Boas on the Kwakiutl: The Ethnographic Tradition." Theory and Practice. Essays Presented to Gene Weltfish. Ed. Stanley Diamond. The Hague: Mouton, 1980. 331-45.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. The Ethnography of Communication. Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1964.
Hegeman, Susan. "Native American 'Texts' and the Problem of Authenticity." American Quarterly 41 (1989): 265-83.
Hymes, Dell. "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. "Marxism and Historicism." New Literary History 11 (1979): 41-73.
Krupat, Arnold. "Identity and Difference in the Criticism of Native American Literature." Diacritics 13 (1983): 2-13.
Pandey, Triloki Nath. "Anthropologists at Zuni." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972): 321-37.
{13}
Powell, John Wesley. "Introduction" to Cushing, Zuñi Folk Tales. vii-xvii.
------. "Report of the Director." Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1883. xv-xxxvii.
Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature and Fiction. Ed. C. Hugh Holman. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1962.
Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center. Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians. New York: Dial, 1972.
------. "On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative." Smoothing the Ground. Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian Swann. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 57-77.
------. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983.
Woodward, Arthur. "Frank Cushing-'First War-Chief of Zuni.'" Masterkey 13 (1939): 172-79.
{14}
Sylvie Moulin
In the past few years, Luci Tapahonso has become one of the most powerful voices of her generation. She was born in Shiprock, New Mexico, and her style combines the strength of the Navajo tradition with the vivavity of a modern, concise, dynamic language. She is the author of One More Shiprock Night (1981), Seasonal Woman (1981), and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), and she has a fourth book in preparation. This interview was done in Luci Tapahonso's office at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, on June 18, 1989. Luci is now teaching in the English Department of the University of Kansas.
SM: Luci, what is your background?
LT: I'm from Shiprock, New Mexico, and I'm Navajo. My mother's clan is To díí oovhíí and my father's clan is To díí chííníí. I grew up in Shiprock. I went to boarding school when I was small, and then to public school.
SM: When did you start writing poetry?
LT: Probably in high school.
SM: What does poetry mean to you? Why didn't you choose another art to express yourself?
LT: I didn't really choose it, I think it just happened. I guess I really like poetry because it's concise, it's short, and it has a rhythm to it. It's almost like singing. It's very visual and it has a lot of impact.
SM: You also use songs and chants in some of your poems.
LT: Yes.
SM: Has the Navajo tradition a great influence on your poetry?
LT: It just depends what kind of work I am doing at the moment. But I think the influence of the Navajo tradition is very strong because that's what I am. In the way that I think, in the way that I talk, it's already there, it's already properly Navajo just by itself. So when I write that's the way it is, because poetry is an oral kind of expression and you can't really separate yourself, the voice that you are, from what you write.
SM: Did you grow up speaking mainly Navajo?
LT: Yes. Until I went to school I spoke Navajo more than I spoke English, although I knew English already. As I went to school I spoke English more. Now I speak English a lot more than I speak Navajo because I'm not around Navajo people as much as I used to be.
{15}
SM: A lot of writers and artists claim
to be influenced by the Southwest. Do you think the environment,
the scenery, have a strong influence on you?
LT: It influences me because of where I live and also the way I was raised. When I was growing up they used to say that nobody is an orphan, that everybody has a mother and that your mother is the Earth and your father is the Sky. So you are always between the two and they are always looking over you. Those kinds of things can't be separated, because that's the way Navajos talk and think. It's not a separate issue. At least I don't think about it consciously. And I believe that a lot of Navajo people, a lot of Indian people, think that way. When I talk with Indian people we always talk about the same thing and it's always about the land in one way or another.
SM: In your poetry you often mention your family relations, your children. Is that a major source of inspiration for you?
LT: It is, because to me it's very personal, and I don't write about things that I'm not familiar with. Poetry is very good because it allows me that form of expression. And I think it's universal even though it's my family, my children, my brothers and sisters or whatever. I know it's a universal feeling. And when people hear the poems, they don't know a thing about my family, they don't need to know anything about it, but they think about how it relates to them, and so it's universal in a sense.
SM: You also talk a lot about women, friends or women who are important in your life. And I know you hate to be called a feminist. So how do you feel when people say that you are a feminist writer?
LT: (Laugh) I think our society is not really used to women being vocal or showing appreciation of other women. But I grew up in a matriarchal culture and it's not necessarily that women are more important, but it's just that women have a better status in the Navajo society and in the Navajo family. So I think I'm a typical Navajo person and I think Navajo men feel the same way I do about women because there is a strong sense of respect that the Navajo people have raised for women. The whole family and the home are centered around the woman. They say that the woman is the center of the home and that through the woman all beauty and all good things come out from the center of the home. So everything women do is very important, even the way you dress, the way you fix your hair. The status that the woman has in the Navajo culture has always been there.
But it's unusual in a non-Navajo society because women have not been treated well for the most part in western societies. They have not been treated the way they should have been. So when people see that {16} in my work, perhaps they think I'm a feminist. To them overthrowing the men is feminism, overthrowing men or becoming better than men. But in the Navajo society it's not that, it's being equal and it's having a status that's different from the one non-Indian people have.
There's also a problem of terminology. What does the word feminist mean? It means to value or appreciate, to have respect for the individual regardless of the gender. It doesn't mean women having an equal status with men. It's a word that people throw around and it starts having some negative connotations, but it has a different meaning behind it. It's like people saying "she is a real libber." That's not good because then you think about burning bras, hating men, that kind of stuff.
SM: What are the most important topics for you?
LT: I don't know if I really have inspirational things. I'm just writing all the time. I have a journal that I write in every day, and I write all the time. Some things turn into poems and some things don't, it just depends. I know that I'm really observant. I really watch, notice things a lot. I listen to people a lot, more than I talk, probably. Sometimes something will happen that will make me really think and work to turn it into a poem. For the most part it comes together over a period of time, maybe three days, maybe two weeks.
SM: Do you sit down every day at the same time to write?
LT: No. I wish I had the luxury of sitting down at the same time. I just write whenever I have a chance, and I never know when that will be. Sometimes I say that I'm going to take a nap, and then the kids know that they have to leave me alone. Then I write instead of taking a nap. (Pause) Most of the times I take a nap. (Laugh) It just depends on what my schedule is.
When I'm traveling I don't write in my journal as much as I write poetry. When I travel I write a poem a day. Writing a poem is a lot of work for me and I really want to make it succinct and powerful and get as much as I can without rambling on and on. So when I travel and write a poem a day it really makes me work but I like it. So wherever I go I make sure that I have poems from that time because things there are different from what they are afterwards. When I'm not traveling I usually have twenty things to do all the time, and then it's just a matter of finding that time to word it. Then I write more journal.
There is no formula; it's just something that comes together. Maybe I hear something that someone says and it's a good line. So I keep that and I keep working on it. And I can really write poetry anywhere, anytime. It's not the act of writing as much as it is to create it and formulate it in my mind. I really like to drive because it gives me that freedom to write as I am driving. I can do it anytime, when I'm {17} cooking, when I'm mopping the floor. It gives me a nice escape instead of getting impatient in the grocery line. I don't have to be there. I mean, I'm physically there in the line, but in my mind I'm writing poetry. It's nice, it's like a place I can go to anytime, and I don't get upset by these little things that I might otherwise mind.
SM: One thing that has always fascinated me in your poetry is the number of texts about driving. A lot of people see driving as a pain, a struggle, but I drive a lot myself and find it very inspiring, too. I remember a poem from A Breeze Swept Through about your driving back to Shiprock . . .
LT: Yes, and I think it's very common in this area. I was talking to somebody over the weekend and she was saying: "To me the most important is a full tank, a car in good condition and a good sound system. Then I'm all set." That's the way I feel. I have my box of tapes and a big Diet Coke and I'm happy.
SM: What do you listen to when you are on the road?
LT: All kinds of things, mostly country western music. It's kind of depressing, but one or two of them are really cute. I listen to some tapes I got when I went to Hawaii, jazz, classical. I don't listen to rock too much, but my kids do. (Laugh)
SM: Do you think you reach a broad audience or mainly people from the Southwest?
LT: I think it's pretty broad. I know it's Southwestern in terms of the land and the landmarks. But the emotional content can be read pretty much all over the country. The only thing they don't understand is the land, the desert. Like in Hawaii, they think we can't open the door without looking to make sure there is not a snake waiting to come in. Really, they think we are just plagued by snakes. It's funny. (Laugh)
SM: How do you see your future as a poet?
LT: Well, hopefully I'll have another book published and I'll get a grant to take some time off from teaching and just write.
SM: Are you still doing storytelling?
LT: Not really. I do more poetry than storytelling. It's hard to get paid at least half of what you should get. I got to the point where I do five or six benefits a semester, that's it. It takes a lot of energy to do a good job, and people think that you just go there and do it. (Pause). I also have a children's book coming out at Northern Arizona Press. That's a good area to go into.
SM: Do you plan to write a novel?
LT: Maybe. I have that story I gave you that is a fiction [Luci was {18} referring to "What I Am"]. That might just happen. It came together really quickly and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. But at this point I don't see that happening. I don't really like to write fiction. Poetry is better for me. I think I'd like to try writing scripts. Wouldn't it be nice to get paid to write from 8:00 to 5:00? It would be wonderful.
A Breeze Swept Through. Los Angeles: West End Press,
1987.
One More Shiprock Night. San Antonio: Tejas Art Press,
1981.
Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Press, l981.
"The Way It Is." Sign Language. New York:
Aperture, 1988. With photographs by Skeet McAuley.
"What I Am." Recent Ones that are Made. Santa
Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, July 1988. Rpt.
in Sonora Review 14. Tucson: U of Arizona, Spring 1989.
{19}
Rodney Simard
That American Indians have always been a staple of the film industry is news for no one; suburban adolescent and Native ethnographer alike have been awash in largely stereotypical images, both positive and--primarily--negative, since the first silent two-reelers and serials until the current primacy of television and video. From the beginning, the "Western" has been a primary film genre, embodying and reflecting a romanticized notion of American ideals: potentiality, individuality, recreation, primal heroism, manifest destiny, savagism and civilization. But it has also been a genre not bound by national borders, appealing instead to a geography of the mind; witness the birth of the "New Western" in Italy in the 1960s and the enduring popularity of these films in Europe and the Orient.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., asserts, correctly I believe, that
the enduring film images of Indians are derived from the captivity
narratives, the earliest American literary genre, as transmuted
through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and pulp fiction,
to current fiction and the mass media (104). As a genre, the
Western has developed its own conventions and formulae, to which
the Indian character has been made to conform; the resultant
images, the stereotypes that emerged from earlier media, are
generally polarized as two extremes described by Michael Hilger:
"the blood-thirsty savage and the noble but doomed savage
as fictions to emphasize the superiority of . . . white heroes,
to comment on contemporary political issues or to serve the needs
of the western genre" (1). Hilger goes on to note that "even
such great directors as D. W. Griffith and John Ford portray
the Indian as always too good or too bad; as such they are often
the most extreme fictions in the western, a genre which seldom
comes very close to reality" (1). Note that savage
is the operative word in this explication, echoing the brilliant
paradigm of the American consciousness outlined by Roy Harvey
Pearce.
Images of Indian
blood thirst in film are countered by considerably fewer hand-wringing
laments about vanishing Red nobility (Hilger's filmography lists
830 films through 1984; he also reminds us of the central importance
of the techniques of cinematography in creating and perpetuating
stereotypes, 3-5). Most frequently, positive depiction of Indians
in film is equally stereotyped, from the Viet Nam parables inherent
in Little Big Man and Soldier Blue to the "pseudofactual
mélange of anthropological blunders and white supremacy"
of A Man Called Horse (Stedman 260).
{20}
To its credit,
Powwow Highway avoids the usual polarities and the stereotypes
attendant upon them. It is a very good film, but it is decidedly
not David Seals' excellent novel, Powwow Highway, upon
which it was based with a high degree of fidelity--and an equally
high degree of quite odd interpolation and omission.
The greatest
strength of the film is in its performances. As Philbert Bono,
Gary Farmer is a casting director's dream: his size, with its
suggested power and gentleness, is exactly Philbert's, and his
seraphic expression captures precisely Philbert's unusual mixture
of the inspired and the dim. The scene of his waking in the Denver
condominium, as he nakedly luxuriates in the absurdly small child's
twin bed, conveys with imagistic precision the narrative description
of Seals' novel (231-33). Farmer's performance is perfection;
he is Philbert. Too often in the novel, Seals' ironic
tone seems to diminish the fundamental importance of Philbert's
epiphany and quest as the author attempts to put Philbert's vision
in the correct perspective of his limited intelligence. Farmer's
laconic performance never suggests any such disjunction between
the high and the low, fusing the two instead into a seamless
and consistent whole.
More problematic
is A Martinez as Buddy Red Bow (why the shift of the family name
from Red Bird?), not only in terms of ethnicity, but also in
his tentativeness in the role. Largely convincing and effective,
Martinez does seem uncomfortable with his Indianness, but this
may indeed be Buddy's problem as well; still, such hesitation
and discomfort are amplifications of the novel. Joanelle Nadine
Romero as Bonnie brings a startling beauty to her character,
one inherent in the character of Bonnie, but Romero is madonna-like
in her physical presence, emphasized throughout the film, and
particularly in the shot of her in jail as she awaits Bunny's
arrival. Many of the lesser roles, most evidently cast with Indian
actors, are also convincing and effective, infusing the experience
of the film with a necessary mixture of reverence and humor.
Even with considerable
reshaping of the source, the film is effective in its own terms.
Indian material is not slighted--even if it is frequently distorted.
The value of Powwow Highway is that it is an organic,
effective film and, more importantly, that it attempts to present
Indian material from an Indian perspective, something that few
of the products of Hollywood (and other points) have ever even
attempted. Still, it bears evidence of conformity to the genre.
For example, the film ends in a predictable car chase, for no
reason apparent other than the formulaic expectation of such
an event. Not only is this a distortion of the event from the
original narrative, but it also tends to eclipse the essential
motivation of the work: Philbert's vision quest and his acquisition
of his tokens for his medicine bundle. In fact, his quest is
{21} completely forgotten in the
last segment of the film as the rescue-of- the-maiden motif dominates
entirely. More disturbing is the inflation of the role of Chief
Billy Little Old Man. In the novel, aware of Buddy's deviation
from his appointed task of buying bulls with tribal money, he
waits patiently and hopefully for the return of the prodigal,
an important factor in the future of the tribe. But in the film
he goes to Santa Fe, the very portrait of the wise and stoic
chief, albeit in contemporary manifestation. He is even the agent
by which the final escape is effected. Again, a stereotypical
elder, the embodiment of patience and wisdom, is offered to counter
the excesses of the young "bucks."
More importantly,
complexity of character is diminished, edging uncomfortably close
to stereotypes, and the broad political canvas of the novel (Seals
was a member of AIM) has been reduced to a simple polarity. Granting
that elision and compression are necessary in most cases of transferring
a narrative from one medium to another, particularly from novel
to film, one cannot avoid the implications of many alterations
in this script. Examples abound: drug ingestion has been radically
reduced from the novel, but perhaps the filmmakers were trying
to avoid the stereotype of the "drunken Indian." Lester
and Doris, their subplot and their involvement in the main plot,
have been excised. The violence and anger attendant upon Buddy's
attack on the Radio Shack have been contextualized and rationalized.
Most details of family relationships have been streamlined and/or
distorted. Discursive cultural details in the novel have been
translated into simple images. Philbert's theft from the Santa
Fe police station has been reduced by 90%. Bull Miller has been
portrayed as a figure familiar to the newest revival of film
noir. The very Indian party in the Denver condo is missing. And
the like. Perhaps solid reasons underlie all these alterations--and
many more--but speculation does suggest a few very familiar and
unfortunate possibilities. Without the direct testimony of the
filmmakers, perhaps the best position is suggested by a paraphrase
and elaboration on the famous remark by Gladstone: a reasonable
person does not want to know how sausages, laws, and movies are
made.
Inescapable and
more insidious, to me, are two other aspects of the film. First
is its anti-feminism and, in context, anti-Indian portrayal of
women. Romero does make an exquisite Bonnie, but she is not Seals'
tough and intelligent survivor. By making her into a madonna,
the film shears away her battle scars, for the character in the
novel, while beautiful, is hardly a saint. Bonnie has been and
continues to be a promiscuous drug dealer, qualities that add
depth, complexity, and humanity to her character. She is precisely
not the stereotypical "Princess," but rather a very
real woman who can, for the most part,{22}
ably take care of herself as she explores and expands the restricted
range of potentiality offered to Indian women in the world today.
Similarly, her youngest child, Jane, has been made older than
her brother, Sky, and neither child acts with the admirable self-reliance
of her or his counterpart in the novel. To make the women and
children of the film ineffectually reliant on men distorts many
of the realities of both historical and contemporary Indian cultures,
however desirable or "safe" such a depiction might
be from a Hollywood perspective.
A second problem
is the complexity of the antecedent action of the novel being
reduced to a simple opposition. Philbert's quest having given
way to the rescue plot, the film encapsulates the antagonists
into the targeted "apple," Sandy Youngblood, who has
become the representative of a mining company that wants reservation
rights. Bonnie is framed in order to lure Buddy away during a
critical tribal vote. Immediately alarming is the notion that
Buddy is the sole savior of his people, who, without his wayward
but paternalistic presence, will yet once again sell away their
lifeblood because of their child-like trust (more alarming still
in the context of that symbol being portrayed by a non-Indian
actor). But also disturbing is the reduction of the tangles of
political and criminal nets that the original narrative is enmeshed
in. AIM, the FBI, the Mafia, the BIA--all the purposefully vague
and confused political factors of the novel, all of whom contribute
to a complex, sinister, and insidious atmospheric feeling--are
conveniently, too conveniently, rolled into a familiar force:
a materialistic and exploitative white corporation that can,
by means of a simple trick, rob the Indians of their possessions.
This stereotype is obviously reductive, however convenient it
might be in terms of film explication and plot development, and
it also strips the novel of an important dimension of Indian
truth. The forces of opposition are and always have been many
and multifacted, alien to the point of obscurity, and a consistent
state of vague paranoia is not necessarily a pathological condition.
It is a reality, one that the film distorts. To reduce the complexity
of the plot is to reduce the Indian experience.
I could quibble
about lesser points of sanitization or distortion, like the impression
of humor the movie generates. Much that is comedic is inherent,
both verbally and physically, but by removing such scenes as
the party in the Denver condo, the particularly holistic sense
of Indian humor is missing, the ability to see both sides of
a situation simultaneously. Still, Powwow Highway is
a good film and it is an important film for the advances it makes.
Euramerica can find much to learn from it. One stills hopes,
however, for the validity of future efforts. Several projects
have recently been announced in the press (significantly in Hollywood
itself); perhaps soon audiences will be exposed to an Indian
world-view, complete in its own holistic complexity and integrity.
{23}
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Hilger, Michael. The American Indian in Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1986.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.
Seals, David. Powwow Highway. New York: Plume-NAL, 1979.
Stedman, Raymond William. Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982.
A Conversation Around Powwow Highway
Toby Langen and Kathryn Shanley
Marshall Toman and Carole Gerster
A course in
ethnic film and literature allows teachers to present theories
of racism and to ask students to apply these theories to films,
literature, and their own lives; to examine the construction
and attempted deconstruction of stereotypes; to realize for students
"forgotten" history or neglected contemporary reality;
to foster the ability to read film and literature critically;
and to contrast the dominant {30}
culture's representations of ethnic groups with those groups'
own voicing of their experience. Powwow Highway is an
excellent film to use in the Native American segment of such
a course because, in addition to students' enjoying the film,
it provides a contrast to many standard media depictions of Indians,
raises topical issues of crucial importance, and, while remaining
faithful to contemporary Indian experience, also asserts this
contemporary relevance from a traditional Cheyenne perspective.
Jonathan Wacks'
1988 film Powwow Highway helps set the agenda for the
Native American portion of our team-taught course on Ethnic Film
and Literature. We teach this film in conjunction with clips
from the film series Images and Indians and the PBS
Frontline documentary The Spirit of Crazy Horse,
and with Louise Erdrich's "Dear John Wayne," Paula
Gunn Allen's "Grandmother," Elizabeth Sullivan's "Legend
of the Trail of Tears," and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony,
in a semester course that also includes films and literature
by African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. We have found
that Powwow Highway helps raise student consciousness
about topical issues important to the Northern Cheyenne in particular
and to Native Americans in general. Told in contemporary as well
as traditional tribal terms, the film dismisses stereotypes,
retells the cowboy-Indian conflict from a Native American perspective,
and demonstrates the dual importance of reclaiming a traditional
tribal identity and continuing the political struggle for justice.
Based on David Seals' 1979 novel, the film Powwow Highway
depicts the interconnected ceremonial and political journey of
its two protagonists--Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer) and Buddy Red
Bow (A Martinez)--to become itself both ritual event and political
act.
Two of the important
topics raised by the film are the Internecine struggles involving
the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the poisoning of reservation
drinking water by uranium mining. Powwow Highway affords
teachers the opportunity to acquaint students with one of the
most important manifestations of political dissent in this century
of United States history. Buddy and Wolf Tooth are veterans not
only of Vietnam but also of Wounded Knee (WK) II. Wounded Knee,
South Dakota, was the site, in 1890, of the massacre of 300 unarmed
Lakota men, women, and children by the U.S. cavalry, and, in
1972, of the largest armed conflict in the U.S. since the Civil
War (Locker).
Philbert's virtual
ignorance about WK II ("You weren't in Wounded Knee with
us? Or Ogalala?" "No. But I remember hearing about
it.") underscores one of the main tensions within the movie:
Philbert is politically naive while Buddy--although he is of
the reservation--has negotiated the Anglo world and can apply
legalistic, bureaucratic solutions to Indian problems.
{31}
Good sources
for the background of WK II and AIM include the article-length
analysis by Roos et al. and the book-length study by
Stephen Cornwell, but one of the best ways to present the material
to a class is to introduce the background information with excerpts
from the 1990 Frontline production The Spirit of
Crazy Horse, narrated by Milo Yellow Hair. In Powwow
Highway, Imogene tells Buddy that the reason the family
must leave Pine Ridge is that "There's a shooting a week";
The Spirit of Crazy Horse includes an interview with
the Richards family, real victims of a Dick Wilson-sanctioned,
drive-by shooting. In Powwow Highway, when Miller is
thwarted in his attempt to beat up Buddy, Miller yells that "All
you AIM sons-of-bitches are going to rot in prison, just like
your friend Peltier." The Spirit of Crazy Horse
interviews Peltier, asserts that he was framed by the federal
government and used as a political scapegoat, and in general
provides the background for his "rotting in prison."
In order for
students to fully appreciate the import of the lines from the
film about Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, and Leonard Peltier, we
sketch the salient background. WK II began in February of 1973.
A year previous to the occupation, on February 20, 1972, Raymond
Yellow Thunder was killed in Gordon, Nebraska. AIM, until then
largely an urban group, was called in to obtain justice; when
two white men were eventually found guilty of second degree manslaughter,
AIM was credited (Roos et al. 90). With growing support,
AIM criticized the Pine Ridge Tribal Government, headed by Dick
Wilson, as corrupt and subservient to the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA). Wilson armed his supporters, harassed AIM leaders, and
suppressed public assemblies and political debate; Wilson's measures
were countenanced by federal authorities.
On the night of February 28, 1973, the American Indian Movement led a band of rebels into Wounded Knee, just miles from Pine Ridge. They captured the town, sacked the general store, and barricaded themselves against the police. It was an audacious stand to gain national attention. The 300 insurgents were immediately surrounded by combat-trained federal marshals, F.B.I. agents, and Wilson's vigilantes. The next morning the world woke up to reports of a new Indian war. (Locker)
The occupiers' demands (which were varied and not always clear)
included the removal of Wilson; the return of treaty lands, particularly
the sacred Black Hills; the investigation of treaty violations;
and an increase in money and employment for the Lakotas (Roos
et al. 90).
After the long,
bitter, two-and-one-half month siege, AIM surrendered when investigations
were promised; however, no substantial {31}
action was ever taken. Internecine strife continued for the next
thirty months with over 60 people being murdered in the Pine
Ridge area, most of them AIM supporters (Locker). Finally, in
June of 1975 Leonard Peltier organized several cars of AIM members
to return to Pine Ridge to protect AIM supporters. He became
involved in a day-long shoot-out in which one Native American
and two F.B.I. agents were killed. After his trial, which sentenced
him to life imprisonment despite an F.B.I. document that was
later released proving that the agents could not have been killed
by his gun,1 the worst of the violence subsided; AIM
was exhausted, Wilson was defeated in tribal elections, and his
vigilantes were disbanded (Locker).
In the film,
Buddy represents resistance to accommodationist/assimilationist
policy--as AIM did on Pine Ridge--and Sandy Youngblood and Miller
reproduce the cooperation with the government and policial suppression
that Wilson and his "goon squad" (Locker) carried out
on Pine Ridge. Early on, the movie underscores the difference
between Buddy and Sandy with an allusion to the Fort Laramie
Treaty. Sandy wants to bring a mining company onto reservation
lands, and Buddy resists the initiative as exploitive. When Sandy
argues in favor of the mining company by saying that "Our
employment contracts are a matter of public record," Buddy
counters with "Oh, yeah, yeah. I read your contract. I read
every damn contract since the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. And
it's always the same deal, ain't it? You get what you want, and
we get the shaft." The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty reserved
all of what is now South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including
the Black Hills, for the Sioux (Roos et al. 91). But
then gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and in 1889 the
government carved up the Greater Sioux Reservation into six smaller
tracts so that gold mining could take place (Irvin 91). Buddy's
point is that you can't trust such contracts. Nonetheless, for
what are shown to be personally selfish reasons, Sandy continues
to cooperate with the federal government to help Overdyne exploit
the reservation. Buddy, late in the film, characterizes Sandy's
attitude as corrupt, rotten, when he cautions a woman Sandy is
speaking to in a bar that "sometimes you got to bite the
apple to see worms." The characterization of Sandy as an
"apple" is appropriate: he's red on the outside but
"white" underneath (see Seals, TPH 114, 203).
A second topic
of importance alluded to in the film is the poisoning of reservation
drinking water by the mining of radioactive materials. Philbert
doesn't recognize the green bottle of Perrier handed to him in
Wolf Tooth's home. Wolf Tooth explains the presence of the "yuppy
bullshit" (as Buddy refers to it) in his comparatively impoverished
surroundings: "Uranium mines have poisoned the White River
from here to Cactus Flat." Such a line affords us an opportunity
to tell {33} students that to obtain
2.24 ounces of yellowcake (appropriate nuclear fuel) a ton of
rock must be mined. The ton, minus the 2.24 ounces, is discarded
as mill tailings which resemble fine sand and contain 80% of
the rock's original radioactivity. Thorium 230 (half life 80,000
years), Radium 226 (1,630 years), and Radon 222 exist in this
sand which is now subject to wind and water erosion. The extraction
process yields liquid wastes and a mud-like by-product called
"slime," both highly radioactive and disposed of by
dilution and dumping into a stream. "In 1962, 200 tons of
radioactive mill tailings from the Edgemont mill site [near Pine
Ridge in the southwest corner of South Dakota] washed into the
Cheyenne River." Three-and-one-half million tons of tailings
lie on the banks of Cottonwood Creek and the Cheyenne River as
a result of Uranium mining in the 1950s and 60s (Irvin 90-93).
In March 1980,
WARN (Women of All Red Nations) "published a privately researched
report [on health problems on Pine Ridge Reservation] showing
that radioactivity levels in Red Shirt subsurface water tested
at 15 picoCuries per liter (pCi/l). The Federal Safety Standard
is 5 (pCi/l)." A new well (to solve the problem) tested
at 70 (pCi/l), 14 times the safety standard (Irvin 91). Health
problems in this area included "(1) a marked increase in
spontaneous abortions [7 times the national average--page 96];
(2) an increase in pregnancy complications; (3) an increase in
congenital defects traditionally unknown among the Lakota (club
foot, heart defects, and cleft palate); (4) infant respiratory
problems; (5) a high incidence of infant mortality, cancer, and
diabetes" (Irvin 91-92). The issue is urgent. Its seriousness
is acknowledged in the film with the hope that the issue will
insinuate itself into the minds of a broad audience.
Powwow Highway
also raises student consciousness about various forms of stereotyping
in standard media depictions of Indians. Two scenes focus on
the broken English spoken by Hollywood movie Indians as they
confronted manifest destiny, as if they were incapable of language
or civilization. The first scene shows a television advertisement
for used Mustang and Pinto cars, with a non-Indian salesman in
full Indian headdress who says, "How, folks. This old cowboy
is on the warpath with heap big savings. All our choicest stock.
Come on down off the rez or the ranch and pick out your pony
today." The ad depicts Native Americans as easily exploitable:
Anglo America has appropriated Native American culture in naming
its cars Cherokees and Winnebagos and in wearing Native American
headdress, and it now wishes to sell back what it has appropriated--in
used form. The second scene occurs at the Hi-Fi electronics store,
with an Anglo salesman's condescending remark to Philbert and
Buddy: "No gettum special deal on this one, chief."
In both scenes white America is trying to sell Native Americans
a used or inferior product, as if it were especially {34}
suited for them, using the broken English they will supposedly
understand as their own. However, the film's intent is to dismiss,
not repeat such stereotypes. In line with the film's revisionary
humor, in both scenes the broken English is put back into the
mouths of media people who originated and continue to perpetuate
it. Instead of making white males the protagonists who provide
the audience with an entry into Native American life, this film's
two white salesmen are depicted as arrested in their development;
they see twentieth-century Indians only in terms of movie stereotypes
about nineteenth-century ones.
Other revisions
include the characterizations of the two protagonists and the
standard cowboy-Indian chase plot. Buddy and Philbert are portrayed
as superficially akin to standard media depictions of the hostile
savage and the noble savage only to revise those images. Though
Buddy is certainly hostile, his behavior and the way he is treated
by white society clearly show that he is not a twentieth-century
manifestation of, in Paula Gunn Allen's words, the popular media
view of nineteenth-century "Indians as hostile savages who
capture white ladies and torture them, obstruct the westward
movement of peaceable white settlers, and engage in bloodthirsty
uprisings in which they glory in the massacre of innocent colonists
and pioneers" (Sacred Hoop 5). Buddy's friendship
with his sister's white woman friend, Rabbit, and Powwow
Highway's direct reversal of the old plot (epitomized in
John Ford's The Searchers) contradict the first part
of the stereotype: here white males have captured an Indian woman
and torture her by refusing to release her to be with her children
until after Christmas. Also, Buddy's efforts to stop Overdyne
Mining Company from taking remaining tribal resources without
benefit to the reservation, his earlier AIM efforts at Wounded
Knee II and Ogalala, and his personal problems because of the
FBI's persecution (arresting his sister to remove him from the
reservation before the tribal vote on the Overdyne mining proposal),
all explain his hostility and portray him as opposite each aspect
of the bloodthirsty-savage-attacking-innocent-white-settlers
stereotype.
And although
Philbert shows a reverence for the earth and its creatures, he
is not, to use Allen's definition of the currently popular stereotype
of the noble savage, "The appealing but doomed victim of
the inevitable evolution of humanity from primitive to postindustrial
social orders" (Sacred Hoop 4). More than a victim
of European invasion and industrial colonialization, and far
from doomed, Philbert acts on his traditional beliefs in order
to deal with the contemporary cowboys who have falsely jailed
Buddy's sister. Philbert's trickster story prepares us for a
revised cowboy-Indian chase scene. When the Sante Fe police,
the FBI agents, and Sandy Youngblood all take seats in police
cars with the words "Let's cowboy up. We got work to do,"{35} we are ready for Philbert to perform
the role of trickster and, as he has promised the trickster will
do, to "play a little trick on the white man."
In the face of
media stereotypes, Buddy and Philbert define themselves: Buddy
in terms of militant political activism that he has both adapted
from and uses to deal with white society, and Philbert by the
inherited ritual traditions of his tribe that he learned from
his Uncle Fred and uses to gain a tribal identity. They demonstrate
that no two Native Americans, even those from the same tribe,
can be lumped together as one type. They are, however, both Cheyenne
warriors on a parallel, if rarely merging, journey to Sante Fe
and back. Disregarding the individual, the individualistic, hero
of western literature, Powwow Highway has dual protagonists
to represent dual concerns, and to show the need for each man
to understand and work with the other. The powwow they both attend,
Philbert's trickster story, and the film's final dream vision
all show that the powwow highway they travel together serves
as a metaphor for the necessary continuance of both tribal traditions
and the political battle for Native American justice that the
two men represent. Against the backdrop of federally sponsored
economic exploitation and general apathy as well as reductive
definitions of Native Americans, the film presents Native Americans
defining themselves and taking action against economic and cultural
imperialism.
The film shows
the powwow as a gathering place for Native Americans of different
tribes and differing lifestypes to come together in friendly
competition to gather strength and support from one another.
At the Pine Ridge powwow, which Buddy is reluctant to attend
on the premise that beads and feathers do not comprise a culture
and that they need to go directly to Sante Fe, he encounters
Miller and his goons. Buddy is saved--from both physical removal
and a thrashing by Miller's goons--by the well-aimed knife of
a fellow Vietnam vet, who then tells Buddy to join in the dancing.
Philbert, on the other hand, has insisted that they attend the
powwow, for he seeks a path of ritual transformation that will
put him in harmony with supernatural powers and the earth, and
his path involves recovering Cheyenne history and traditions.
As Philbert beats the sacred, animating drum, Buddy is moved
to dance within the interrelated circles of Native Americans.
In the character of the Vietnam vet, Buddy's protest politics
and Philbert's tribal consciousness merge to show the necessity
of each. From these powwow scenes, students come to understand
the powwow as a return to roots that provides a way to resolve
contradictions in order to ensure both physical and cultural
survival.
The film shows
how the oral storytelling tradition is an important means to
keep a culture alive. Philbert tells the story of Wihio the trickster,
over Buddy's protest that it's "too bad those stories don't
tell us how to keep our reservations" or "our coal,
our oil, our uranium,"{36}
and receives Wolf Tooth's praise that he "should be tribal
historian." But Philbert does not merely wish to reflect
the story of the Vanishing American; he seeks an alternative
to it. Unlike Wihio, who foolishly sought plums reflected in
the river rather than the real ones hanging right over his head,
and thus "never did get any plums," in his role as
trickster Philbert makes use of whatever he finds right in front
of him (whether reflection or not) and gets exactly what he needs.
Taking his clue to rip out Bonnie's jail cell window with a rope
tied to his car (Protector the War Pony) from the reflected television
image of an old William S. Hart cowboy movie, and retrieving
Rabbit's bail money and Buddy's bull purchasing money from the
open jail vault he passes by, Philbert allows them (at least
momentarily) to escape one specific instance of the political
imprisonment, the forced removal from one part of the country
to another, and the economic hardship that reflect the historical
Native American experience. The trickster takes many forms, sometimes
mocking and imitating others, and always bringing about change.
In answer to Buddy's protest politics, promising Buddy that "the
trickster will play a little trick on the white man," Philbert
has transformed traditional story into political action. Chief
George, who has come from Lame Deer to Sante Fe to find out what
has kept Buddy from his bull-purchasing task, is also involved
in trickster efforts, as he spills cattle onto the road to end
the cowboy chase.
The dream visions
that comprise much of the film provide Philbert, and the film
audience, with images of his Cheyenne ancestors. Throughout the
film, intercut visions disrupt the storytelling unities of time,
place, and action, to reflect the interconnectedness of past
and present. Toward the end of the film the final dream vision
also reflects the interconnectedness of vision and action. We
share Buddy's vision of himself as a warrior with a tomahawk
in hand, as he actually thwarts the police chase by throwing
the broken window of Philbert's car at a police car in chase.
After Philbert has enacted the role of trickster to rescue Bonnie
from jail, Buddy envisions himself as an ancestral warrior to
help the group escape from the police. When the story ends with
Philbert, Buddy, Rabbit, and Bonnie and her children all walking
down the road together, students understand that political activism
and ritual tradition have become meaningful counterparts and
that the unfinished business of America's native peoples involves
both.
A vivid way to
demonstrate to students the dual aspect of the journey, a contemporary
journey on traditional grounds, is to chart it on a transparency
map. From Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation,
we follow Buddy and Philbert to Sheridan, Wyoming, where they
stop at the electronics outlet; then down Interstate 25 to its
juncture with Interstate 90 where Philbert decides to swerve
to the east to visit the sacred mountain Noahvose or Bear Butte
{37} ("Sweet Butte" in
the movie); then south and east to Pine Ridge, to Wolf Tooth's
home and the powwow; then, resuming the journey to Santa Fe,
west on U.S. 18, jogging south to U.S. 20, and following east
along 20, stopping at Fort Robinson where the film intercuts
the 1879 Cheyenne march through the snow after Dull Knife's last
fight (Sandoz 276); then to the junction with Interstate 25 (again)
and south to the lunch stop at Wheatland, Wyoming, where Philbert
tells his trickster tale against the backdrop of the United States'
largest energy plant belching smoke; then south, still on 25,
to Denver and finally to Santa Fe (Seals, TPH passim).
Not coincidentally, we notice that this route takes us over the
traditional homeland of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne.2
When we taught
the film, it came in the second week of the Native American section
of the course. We had studied Ceremony during the first
week. Such a juxtaposition allows for several connections to
be explored. Both Leslie Marmon Silko's novel and Jonathan Wacks'
film show the trauma suffered by Native American veterans (by
Tayo and by Jimmy, Graham Greene's character). Both allude to
poisoning of the environment with uranium, either through the
development of the atomic bomb or through mining. Both involve
theft of Native American land, in the fenced off ranch lands
of Ceremony and in the allusion to violated treaty rights
as well as in the manipulations to exploit the mineral resources
of the reservation in Powwow Highway. Both allude to
a prominent Native American symbol for the creator of the universe
and spiritual sponsor, the spider: Ceremony begins with
the poem about Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman, the spider; Powwow
Highway shows Philbert reverently saving the tarantula.
Both depict the internecine struggles of Native Americans. Both
demonstrate the need for and power of stories: Ceremony
is the story of creating new and healing stories, and Philbert
assures Buddy that the old stories show us how to live in the
contemporary world. Finally, both works depict an extended ceremony.
Tayo goes to Betonie, who starts a process that extends over
many weeks. Philbert's whole journey to become a worthy warrior
is a type of ceremony. Both works thus show that life should
be a series of ceremonies, ultimately, a continuous prayer. Trusting
in that process works--both for Tayo, the wounded and suffering
hero of his people, and for Philbert, the unlikely comic hero.
1Robert DeNiro is producing a film about Wounded Knee II and Leonard Peltier, and Robert Redford has funded a documentary about Peltier (Seals, "Custerism" 638).
2Enlarging by approximately 130% the pertinent portion of the United {38} States map from the 15½" by 11" State Farm Road Atlas (2-3) will yield a scale about that of the map of the Cheyenne territory in Peter J. Powell's book (xxvii-xxix). If transparencies are used, the journey can be outlined on the United States map, then the Cheyenne territory map can be shown, and finally the one can be superimposed over the other to graphically illustrate the nearly coterminous aspect of the film's journey and traditional Cheyenne territory.
Allen, Paula Gunn. "Grandmother." Rpt. in Fisher, 126.
------. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Cornell, Stephen. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. New York: Oxford, 1988.
Erdrich, Louise. "Dear John Wayne." Rpt. in Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 41-42.
Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton, 1980.
Irvin, Amelia W. "Energy Development and the Effects of Mining on the Lakota Nation." Journal of Ethnic Studies 10.1 (Spring 1982): 89-101.
Locker, James, dir. Frontline: The Spirit of Crazy Horse. Narr. Milo Yellow Hair. Prod. Michel Dubois & Kevin McKiernan. 1990.
Lucas, Phil, and Robert Hagopian, dir. Images of Indians. Narr. Will Sampson. KCTS Seattle Public Television, 1979.
Powell, Peter J. The Cheyennes: A Critical Bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
Roos, Philip D., et al. "The Impact of the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation." Phylon 41.1 (March 1980): 89-99.
Sandoz, Mari. Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.
Seals, David. "The New Custerism." The Nation 13 May 1991: 634-39.
------. The Powwow Highway. 1979. New York: Plume, 1990.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
State Farm Insurance Company. State Farm Road Atlas: United States, Mexico, Canada. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1984.
Sullivan, Elizabeth. "Legend of the Trail of Tears." Rpt. in Fisher. 26-30.
Wacks, Jonathan, dir. Powwow Highway. With A Martinez and Gary Farmer. Hand-Made Films, 1987.
{39}
From the Secretary-Treasurer
Current SAIL
subscribers may recall from the announcement in SAIL
3.1 that the Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures
(ASAIL) will be incorporated with a dues-paying membership beginning
January 1, 1992. Membership in the Association is open to all
individuals and institutions interested in furthering the goals
of the Association. Rates are:
Individual membership:
$25
Institutional
membership: $35
Limited income
membership: $16
Sponsor:
$50
Patron:
$100
Benefits of ASAIL membership will include a subscription to SAIL,
a subscription to the newsletter ASAIL Notes, and special
rates at conferences sponsored by the Association; donations
at the Sponsor and Patron levels will be acknowledged in the
concurrent volume of SAIL.
As a result of
this change in the status of the Association, we anticipate that
subscribers to Volume 4 of the journal will typically be dues-paying
Association members. Those wishing to subscribe to the journal
without becoming members of the Association may contact Bob Nelson,
SAIL, Box 112, University of Richmond VA 23173 for 1992
rates.
In order to help
control mailing costs within the organization, we urge
all potential 1992 ASAIL members and SAIL subscribers
to join/resubscribe as early as possible. Dues received
prior to January 1992 will be credited towards 1992 membership.
We also encourage all to attend the ASAIL business meeting at
MLA and cast their votes for the next President, Secretary, and
Treasurer of ASAIL.
Elizabeth H. McDade
From the Editors
One of the pleasures
of this column is the opportunity to acknowledge contributions
to the continued publication of SAIL. This time the
pleasure is mixed: our editorial assistant at Fullerton, Sharon
Dilloway, is leaving us, and her presence and gifts will be much
missed. Sharon first offered her services to SAIL in
the fall of 1989, and since then has worked many hours each week
with unfailing generosity, reliability and good humor: she has
managed the book review cycle, tended to correspondence, formatted
and distributed hundreds of information sheets at conferences,
made her way through the CSUF Foundation bureaucracy, and (very
important) listened with a sympathetic ear--all for the sole
compensation of a campus parking pass. SAIL would not
have been possible without Sharon, and on behalf of all our readers
as well as myself, I extend our thanks to her and best wishes
on her future projects.
{40}
After two issues
focused on special topics, classical oral literatures in translation
and teaching American Indian literature, we are pleased to present
a highly eclectic collection of papers. William Clements' lucid
and astute analysis of translations from Zuni will be welcomed
by both seasoned critics of American Indian literatures and newcomers
to the field, while the interview with Luci Tapahonso explores
important themes for a writer who is gaining wider recognition.
The views put forward by the five contributors to the discussion
of Powwow Highway represent widely varied approaches
and positions as well as a first for SAIL: much-needed
analysis of media "texts." We invite readers to join
in this symposium with your experiences and critiques of this
film--and your views of other texts, including SAIL.
This issue goes
to press in early summer, and we are already planning for next
year's Volume Four. Several projects for 1992 are noted in the
announcements below: we call attention especially to a new special
issue on creative work.
Another SAIL
project for 1992 is support of "Returning the Gift,"
a gathering of Native North American writers for workshops, celebrations,
networking and performance. SAIL is submitting a proposal
to the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a special issue
devoted to conference proceedings; this grant requires matching
funds, and we are offering our readers an opportunity to participate
in the endeavor by becoming or finding supporting patrons for
it.
We welcome additional
suggestions and submissions from readers. SAIL belongs
to its readers and subscribers; please tell us what you think.
Helen Jaskoski
Robert M. Nelson
1992 Continued
We received
one response to our query in the spring 1991 issue about the
response of SAIL to the 1992 anniversary. Joe Bruchac forwarded
the results of a survey undertaken by Cornell University; the
preliminary results are reprinted here.
Since April,
1989, Cornell University's American Indian Program has supervised
a survey of American Indian opinion leaders, community chiefs,
college program directors and assorted other individuals on their
responses to the upcoming 1992 Columbus Quincentenary. We disseminated
a survey hemispherically to some 700 potential respondents, eliciting
74 responses thus far. As part of the same project, some two
dozen oral interviews were conducted with North American Indian
opinion leaders. The preliminary results from this research are
offered here as a way of establishing an information base on
the American {41} Indigenous perception
of this hemispheric event.
The 500th anniversary
of contact between European and American cultures in 1992 will
provide a rare hemispheric opportunity to review the history
as well as the contemporary social conditions of American Indian
peoples. This is the principal message and concern of Indian
respondents to the survey. The second concern--that Indian perspectives
would be drowned out once again.
Respondents expressed
a range of opinions to most of nine basic questions in the questionnaire,
and were most uniform in having a negative idea of "celebrating"
the event. The Assembly of First Nations, a national Canadian
Indian organization, conveyed a formal resolution stating "For
the First Nations to celebrate the near destruction of our culture
and identity would be insane." "October 12, 1492,"
wrote a Mohawk elder, "is the date when the Dark Ages descended
on the Indians of America."
Facing a choice
of five answers to the question, "In what way would you
characterize the Quincentenary?," 70% of respondents described
it either as 500 years of Native People's resistance to colonization,
or as an anniversary of a holocaust, while 20% described it as
a commemoration of a cultural encounter, and only 6% as a celebration
of discovery. Sixty-four percent consider the Quincentenary a
unique historical event, 74% see it as an opportunity, while
15% would ignore it. In terms of activities to commemorate the
event, 78% chose educational conferences and festivals as opposed
to the 19% who preferred protests and legal actions. Personal
participation was predicated on the goals of: public education
about Native issues--43%, advancing legislation to protect Native
rights--27%, increasing communications networks--20%, and demands
of public apologies from Western states and churches--3%.
Respondents stressed
the importance of not shying away from reviewing the realities
imposed by the clash of cultures and by the wars, diseases and
accommodations of American hemispheric history. While there was
suspicion expressed at the term "cultural encounter"
as euphemistic, there was outright hostility at the concept of
"discovery." "How can it be a discovery if we
were already here?" wrote an Abenaki man. The overarching
mandate is to give adequate response from the Indian perspective.
"We owe it to our ancestors to tell their story," writes
Dianne Longboat, Coordinator of Indian Health Careers Program
at Six Nations Reserve, in Ontario. And to Beatriz Painquco,
Mapuche Indian from Chile, the Quincentenary "is an opportunity
to publicly expose our vision and to put our voices together."
Indian author N. Scott Momaday had this to say: "I have
very mixed feelings about celebrating this event . . . but at
the same time, the Indian has just as much right to celebrate
the occasion as anyone else. If the Indian excludes himself from
it, that's a negative thing. If he can find a way to celebrate
it on a real basis, that's positive . . . he stands to teach
the rest of the world something." And Tewa anthropologist,{42} Alfonso Ortiz: "Mutual assessment
would be the best thing to do and there is no one else whom to
bounce questions off of except the indigenous people of the Western
Hemisphere . . . I say that the U.S. Indian should take the lead
because we've got the intellectual resources."
The Quincentenary
events that culminate (and germinate) in 1992 mark a decisive
moment in the history of American Indian peoples. 1992 is generally
seen by Indians as a moment in time when consciousness about
the Indian history of the American continent and public recognition
of Indian communities' continued existence in the contemporary
world could be presented to a substantial audience.
Call for Creative Work
We are seeking
submissions--previously unpublished poetry, short fiction, drama,
essay, autobiography--for a special issue in 1992 on new creative
work. SAIL's new, larger format, made possible by the
increase in our subscriber list during the past two years, should
enable us to publish more prose than we were able to print in
the last creative issue. Poets, fiction writers, autobiographers,
playwrights, essayists: we welcome your submissions, and hope
you will also pass our invitation on to other Native American
authors who may want to submit their work.
We project publication
for the winter issue of 1992; deadline is 1 February 1992. Please
send submissions, typed and double-spaced, with SASE for return
of work, to Helen Jaskoski, Department of English, California
State University, Fullerton, CA 92634.
Update on "Returning the Gift"
As we go to press
Joe Bruchac has announced that the University of Oklahoma is
co-sponsoring this festival of Native North American writers.
Additional funding has also been received from the Bay Foundation,
and other grant sources are being pursued. Writers interested
in participating are encouraged to contact Barbara Hobson, address
at the end of this announcement.
What: A four-day literary event for North American writers (fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, playwrights and literary critics) of Native (American Indian) descent. The first two days will be exclusively for the Native writers themselves. The third day will bring in non-Native supporters of Native writing, including critics, publishers, and teachers of Native American literature. The fourth day will be open to the general public. The agenda for the festival will include writing workshops, panel discussions, seminars, working sessions, readings and performances.
When: July 8th-11th, 1992
{43}
Where: Oklahoma Center for Continuing Education
The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Who: Literary writers of North American Native descent, including writers of American Indian, Inuit (Eskimo), and Aleut ancestry, from Canda, the United States, Mexico and Central America. Approximately 80 recognized Native writers will be invited to attend with all travel and other expenses paid and an equal honorarium of $600 each. These already published writers will each take part in one workshop, panel discussion, or seminar and give a public reading of their work. They will also serve as mentors for an additional 80 Native writers who are at the start of their careers. These additional "apprentice" writers will also attend the conference free of charge and be provided with room, board and transportation expenses. The total number of Native writers attending, mentor and apprentice, will be approximately 160.
Project Coordinator: Barbara Hobson, University of Oklahoma, Department of English--Room 113, 760 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK 73019; phone 405-329-7729 or 405-325-6277.
Opportunity for Benefactors
Readers and subscribers
of SAIL are invited to become benefactors for the special
issue of SAIL that will publish proceedings of the "Returning
the Gift" conference. The proceedings will include symposium
transcripts, position papers, creative work in fiction, poetry,
drama and non-fiction prose. We hope to upgrade our production
with photographs and offset printing, to provide the best medium
possible for this important publication. This issue of SAIL
is expected to set the agenda for Native North American contributions
to literature and literary study for the opening of the next
century. We invite you to become a part of this important undertaking
by contributing as a benefactor to the initiative. We have made
a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts to support
the project; to be eligible for the grant, we must raise a minimum
of $2000 in matching funds. We hope to find at least 20 people
who can be generous enough to make donations of $100 to SAIL
for this special issue. If you can contribute, we welcome your
gift. If you are able to help other benefactors reach us, we
hope you will do so. Contributions of all benefactors will be
recognized in the issue.
Checks should
be made to SAIL/1992 and sent to Helen Jaskoski, Department
of English, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92634.
Invitation to Reviewers
SAIL
receives many books for review, and publishers pay attention
to what SAIL reviewers say. We try to assign reviews
on the basis of what we know, or sometimes guess, about a potential
reviewer's {44} expertise and preferences.
We are especially in need of people who can review translations
and dual-language texts, but we welcome reviewers in all areas
of literature and scholarship. If you would like to review books
and/or media materials for SAIL, please send us a letter
informing us of your areas of expertise and interest; include
a resume or curriculum vitae if you have one. Send materials
to Helen Jaskoski, Department of English, California State University,
Fullerton, CA 92634.
Directory of American Indian Writers
A directory of
Native North American Indian Writers is being compiled in connection
with "Returning the Gift." Writers are invited to submit
information to be listed in the directory. Publication is projected
for spring 1992; writers should submit entries as soon as possible.
For more information, contact Barbara Hobson, University of Oklahoma,
Department of English--Room 113, 760 Van Vleet Oval, Norman,
OK 73019; phone 405-329-7729 or 405-325-6277.
AICA Tour
The American
Indian Contemporay Arts Gallery, 685 Market St. (Monadnock Bldg.,
2nd Floor), San Francisco, will host a tour of their exhibit
of Native art during the December MLA Convention. Sara Bates,
Curator of the AICA, will lead the tour. All ASAIL and MLA members
are invited to attend. Tours will be held on both December 27
and 28 at 5 p.m. Contact Sara Bates at [415] 495-7600 or Larry
Abbott at [802] 273-2663 for more information.
{45}
American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. 308 pp. ISBN 0-87352-192-7.
The first
thing likely to strike the reader upon opening LaVonne Ruoff's
new volume is the range, variety, and richness of American Indian
literatures. The reader who has just recently approached the
subject, the book's target audience, should get this impression
especially. This work is a comprehensive examination of the subject,
intended as an aid to teachers and students who are not aware
of the contributions of American Indians to American literary
history. But it goes beyond that.
Organized logically
into three major sections, American Indian Literatures
begins with a discussion of the history of Native Americans living
in what is now the United States from the time of first contact
to the present. While necessarily brief, this essay provides
a good overview that is supplemented by a list of important dates
in American Indian history from 1500 to the present. The remainder
of Part One is devoted to an extensive discussion of genres and
major figures.
Appropriately
enough, Ruoff's remarks begin with an examination of oral literatures,
including chants, ceremonies, songs, rituals, narratives, and
oratory. In addition to the discussion of various genres and
their roles in Native cultures, the author cites problems of
textual transmission, gives examples of representative types
(e.g., trickster tales, creation myths), and mentions important
scholarly works. Ruoff then turns to autobiography and life histories,
discussing major examples of these, including works by William
Apes, Charles Eastman, George Copway, John Joseph Mathews, and
N. Scott Momaday. This section is followed by a history of written
literatures that traces the development of imaginative writing
and other forms in English. Here, the material is divided into
three chronological periods, beginning with the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, followed by the 1900s to 1967, and ending
with the period since 1968. The early period includes information
on sermons, protest literature, tribal histories, and travel
accounts; starting with Samson Occom's work in the eighteenth
century, the section continues with nineteenth century writers
such as John Rollin Ridge and the only writer from Canada who
is treated extensively, E. Pauline Johnson. Native writing in
the earlier part of the twentieth century is examined next. Here,
Ruoff traces some major figures who were writing poetry, fiction,
and drama--Alexander Posey, Will Rogers, D'Arcy McNickle, John
Oskison, and Lynn Riggs are examples--but she includes less known
figures as well. The discussion of contemporary literature is,
appropriately, the largest. Major figures are treated at some
length; the works of Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise {46}
Erdrich, James Welch, and other writers receive significant attention.
But here again, Ruoff is careful to call attention to other important,
if lesser known figures.
Part Two is a
bibliographic review. This essay identifies and comments on research
materials available to students of American Indian literatures,
including bibliographies and guides to research. It also looks
at collections and anthologies, scholarship and criticism, author
studies, sources of background information, and teaching aids.
The arrangement of the review is helpful, especially to the newcomer,
as it follows the same general structure as Part One. The review
also identifies works that are concerned with specific topics,
such as ethnohistory, women's studies, and the image of the Indian.
This topical breakdown should be welcome to students approaching
the subject for the first time.
In the third
part of her work, Ruoff provides an extensive selected bibliography
arranged in sections. Here, the standard categories appear--bibliographies,
anthologies, criticism and scholarship, and author studies--but
the compiler also includes sections on teaching American Indian
literatures, background studies, and films and videotapes. Part
Three is followed by a list of important dates and an index of
persons, organizations, important bills and acts, and some topics.
The index seems to complement the selected bibliography well.
American
Indian Literatures is well conceived and well executed.
It will be welcomed by students and teachers who are approaching
the subject for the first time. But this work is more than an
aid to this audience; it serves as a general guide to the field,
one which will find extensive use among seasoned scholars. Ruoff's
work is important in that it shows the variety and range of the
study of Native literatures as well as chronicles the growth
in this area since the late 1960s. It is also revealing because
it demonstrates the need for basic scholarship in many areas
of the field. While some important things have been done, including
this fine work, LaVonne Ruoff has made it clear that much more
abides.
James W. Parins
Wolverine Myths and Visions: Dene Traditions from Northern Alberta. Compiled by the Dene Wodih Society. Ed. Patrick Moore and Angela Wheelock. xxv, 259 pp. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990; ISBN 0-8032-8161-7. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, ISBN 0-88864-148-6.
The members
of the Dene Wodih Society (along with the editors) are to be
congratulated on the recently published collection of tradition-{47}al Slave texts from northwestern
Alberta, Wolverine Myths and Visions. Their book is
a most valuable contribution to the growing body of texts printed
in the indigenous languages of Canada. It is an essential aspect
of this book that it presents both the original Slave texts and
a free translation into English--even though the latter is unaccountably
titled "English Texts [sic]." Welcome for
its traditional myths, this volume is extraordinary for the inclusion
of prophetic texts of the transitional period.
Perhaps the most
unusual aspect of this book is the fact that it results from
a communal effort by the Dene Wodih Society of Assumption, Alberta,
supported by their Band, an Oblate priest, various academics
and, ultimately, the Yukon Native Languages Centre. Among the
Dene Dháa of northwestern Alberta, the Slave language
is still spoken by children of all ages, and children were amongst
the original audience for all but one of these texts (no. 12).
The texts are mainly in the Xewónht'e dialect of Assumption
and Habay (with texts 4 and 7 told in the Kegúnht'u dialect
typical of the adjacent North West Territories); they are printed
in a practical orthography.The narrators are named in the preface,
and their names deserve to be repeated here: Louison Ahkimnatchie,
Elisse Ahnassay, Willie Ahnassay, Sr., Willie Denechoan, Harry
Dahdona, Alexis Seniantha, Emile Sutha, Jean Marie Talley. It
is remarkable that none of these authors--nor, indeed, the Dene
Wodih Society as the collective translators--should have been
included in any form in the all-important Cataloguing-in-Publication
entry of the Library of Congress.
The book includes
three useful maps and is embellished with watercolours (and some
pencil drawings?--the reproductions are black-and-white, and
the medium is left unidentified) in a largely naturalistic manner
by Dia Ahnassay Thurston, whose name echoes that of the chief
translator, the late George Ahnassay, to whose inspiration we
owe this splendid volume.
The texts themselves
are of the greatest literary, ethnological and historical (and,
of course, linguistic) interest; any attempt to summarise either
the "Traditional Stories" or the "Accounts of
the Prophet Nógha" would not only be futile but risk
offending against the proprieties which the editors invoke so
eloquently at the end of their introduction.
The substance
of the book is divided into twice two parts: first (1), the free
translation, then (2) the original texts with their interlinear
translation; each of these in turn consisting of ten myths (a)
and five accounts of the prophet and his prophecies (b). The
preface (ix) and a general introduction (xi-xxv) are supplemented,
somewhat asymmetrically, by a special "Introduction to the
Dene Prophets" (59-70) preceding the free translation of
part 1b, and by a survey of "The Dene Dháh (Alberta
Slave) Alphabet" (89-101) appearing a bit unmoored at the
head of Part 2.
The introduction
outlines the provenance of the texts and the settings {48}
in which they were told; it also provides geographical and historical
background. Its most important section is a survey of genres,
followed by all too brief remarks on performance. The editors
bravely address the thorny question of prose vs poetic
presentation of orally performed texts and conclude in favour
of the former, explicitly deferring to their Slave translators
who "were not comfortable with the extent of analysis used
by translators such as Hymes, except for narratives which are
specially structured, such as prayers" (xxiv).
The ad hoc
introduction to the prophetic texts contains ethnographic and
historical information of considerable interest along with some
corroborating comments from the ethnological literature. On a
few occasions in Part 1 (the free translations), comments of
a pragmatic nature are given in footnotes, but the editors make
a virtue of the fact that "notes are used sparingly"
lest they "violate the protocol" prohibiting "extensive
analysis of written stories by academics" (xxv). That there
should be only three footnotes to accompany the 154 pages of
original Slave text with its interlinear translation--not exactly
an inviting format in any case, despite its surpassing value--is
a matter of regret. But who would argue with editors who evidently
have striven with some success to acquire the "fine sense
of etiquette concerning traditional narratives and elders"
(xxv) of the Dene Dháa.
It might well
be a question of propriety, then, which lies at the root of the
most puzzling omission: that none of the 15 texts is ascribed
to a particular teller even though all eight are listed in the
preface (and some might be identified on the basis of internal
evidence provided in the texts themselves). Whatever the reason
for this decision, it is not only subverted by the attribution
of quotations (e.g., xvi) but also seems to be in conflict with
the traditional practice which is explicitly enunciated as follows:
"Dene storytellers usually start by naming the people who
told them the stories" (xvi).
Respect for the
texts and their tellers might also have dictated another printing
of the Slave originals, unencumbered by the interlinear translation;
in a situation where the language is widely spoken by children
and in a book intended at least in part for use in the schools,
such a running text is of prime paedagogical importance.1
It is curious, finally, that a collection of texts recorded and
printed in the Slave language should be published under a title
that is monolingually English.
These texts raise
issues of a philological and editorial nature which may be less
than obvious to the literary reader even though they form an
integral part of the book, and hence of this review. (In some
journals, such comments would be set in smaller type.)
Where Does
a Text Begin and End? It is an intriguing feature of this
book that the prefatory remarks preceding texts 1, 2, 4, 5, 7,
9 (and, remarkably, none of the prophetic texts) are set in small
italics while the appendices which follow texts 1, 2, 7, 9 appear
in ordinary type and are subheaded "Storyteller's Commentary."
Do these typographical {49} conventions
signal a distinction in the status of these materials?
There is no discussion
of the prosodic or proxemic or other (textual?) diagnostics which
led the translators and editors to identify certain sections
of the text as exordium or epilogue,2 and there are
certainly some opening paragraphs which, to this non-Athapaskanist
reader, seem plausible candidates for proemial status even though
they are printed in ordinary type:
Yes, long ago when I was a child Grandmother told me this story. (text 10, page 49)
My Grandmother told me about Wolverine long ago when I was a child. "Grandmother, tell me a story," I said, and she spoke with me. (text 8, page 40)
I know the stories in so many ways. Long ago people told about this. (text 2, page 7; cf. text 1, and note also that this paragraph in text 2 is preceded by a section printed in small italics)
With fifteen texts told by eight narrators, this is one of
the points where it would be important to know the identity of
the narrator--if only in code.
The question
of narrative status also applies to the rhetorical questions
or explanatory asides presented as parenthetical insertions (as
in text 3, page 16):
He fed the baby fat mixed with animal brains, and in that way he cared for his son. (Well, in those days where would you find a store? They didn't exist.) The man went along carrying the baby, [ . . .]
Are such anachronistic asides, spoken directly across the
proscenium, as it were, not analogous in status to the matter
preceding or following the text in the narrow sense?
Finally, there
is the more general question: Were these texts told in isolation,
or do they form part of a larger set, perhaps a cycle? This edition
contains only the tantalising remark that "Most of these
narratives were told with [sic] several other stories,
[. . .]" (xxi).
How Are the
Texts Structured? In many instances the paragraphs of the
free English translation do not match those indicated in the
original Slave texts. Such discrepancies occur both in the myths
and the prophetic texts (e.g., text 12, pages 219, 72). In text
8, the free translation (41) shows a paragraph before Wolverine
meets his end:
free: ¶ And so Wolverine sat down by the fire, lifted his breechcloth, [. . .]
while none appears in the Slave text (181):
Detthoné
xónla, [. . .]
i-l:
His-[Wolverine's]-breechcloth
like-this-he-did-[lifted]
Conversely a paragraph may be indicated in the Slave text (no. 5, page {50} 147):
¶
Nóghe éhsán "t'ong" wodi [.
. .]
i-l: ¶
Wolverine then [spraying-sound] he-makes-sound-[Skunk]
but not in the running translation (24):
free: He raised his tail and was ready to spray. "T'ong!" The spraying sound was already coming from Skunk's spray hole, [. . .]
There is no discussion of what linguistic or discourse features
the paragraphs might reflect.
Free Translation
or Re-telling? Inconsistencies in paragraphing aside, there
are analogous discrepancies between original text and free translation
with regard to parenthetical insertions--and, perhaps, also with
respect to the translation itself (text 8, pages 123, 13):
"[.
. .] Sehndadzíin at'in," kudi éhsán;
mbetsóné éhsán at'in. Ye gha dene
andat'ính úh sóon?
i-l: "[.
. .] My-son-in-law it-was," she thought then; her-feces
then it-was. What for person appear-to-be and then?
free: "It
must be my son-in-law [. . .]," [she] thought [. . .]. (However,
the man who appeared to her each night was really a product of
her own imagination.)
A close comparison of these two passages and their context
suggests that the "free translation" might, in fact,
better be interpreted as a re-telling, a paraphrase.
In another instance
(text 9, pages 116, 9), the "free translation" appears
simply to omit the questioning aside,
(Góon
xéwondeh éhsín? Nóghe nelin.)
i-l: (Question
you-do-like-that maybe? Wolverine you-are.)
in its entirety.
The translation
of words which may be taboo (or offensive, or at least highly
marked) in one or both of the languages in question is an especially
thorny problem.3 The two translations match sometimes
but not always (text 8, pages 180, 40; 181, 41):
Yebé
t'á eledz [. . .]
i-l: Its-stomach
in he-[Wolverine]-would-urinate [. . .]
free: He urinated
into the stomach of [one of the beavers, . . .]
[.
. .], gitl'éh eghendihdi ínyá.
i-l: [.
. .], in-his-crotch they-shoved-it and-then.
free: [. .
.], and then shoved it between Wolverine's legs.
In some cases, the gulf widens (text 5, pages 147, 24; text 2, pages 116, 9):
¶
Nóghe éhsán "t'ong" wodi
{51}
i elé éhsán, yetsónék'é
éhsán,
xónht'e
éhsán yígé.
i-l: ¶
Wolverine then [spraying-sound] he-makes-sound-[Skunk]
that
where-he-urinates it-must-have-been, his-anus then,
like-that
then he-bit.
free: The spraying
sound was already coming from Skunk's spray hole, when Wolverine
bit it shut.
Xoniá dúhde se'e detl'eh ts'ín.
(Góon xéwondeh éhsín? Nóghe
nelin.)
Jon se'e detl'eh ts'íb éhsán.
Kón, mbéhts'ehtthenlih, [. . .]
i-l: Suddenly
right-here really her-crotch toward.
(Question you-do-like-that maybe? Wolverine you-are.)
Here really her-crotch toward then.
Fire, with-it's-struck, [. . .]
free: [. . .], at
last finding a small flint between her legs, tied right there,
high on her thigh.
(As noted earlier, the insertion does not appear in the free
translation.) Such passages are inherently problematic in any
cross-cultural situation.
But even in non-controversial
areas, the distance between the interlinear and the free translation
seems to be substantial. In the following example (text 1, pages
102, 3), the free translation simply seems to omit all repetition,
whether only of the noun meaning "animal" or of the
whole phrase:
Wonlin
nde-áh, wonlin ni'á di díeh k'eh int'onh.
Wonlin,
wonlin, ndáhtheghon, wonlin nechi, int'onh.
i-l: Animals
He-tricks, animals He-tricked this land on all.
Animals,
animals, He-killed-them, animals giant, all.
free: He tricked
all the animals that lived on this land;
he
killed all the giant animals.
It seems worth inquiring about the stylistic value of such
repetitions.
Such discrepancies
raise serious questions about the nature of the free translations
presented in the first half of this book. That the interlinear
translations can, in the nature of things, be little more than
rough approximations goes without saying. But to what extent
have the free translations been rewritten and smoothed over?
If they were as far removed, in general, from the original as
these few instances suggest, we might have to reconsider the
border which divides free translation from paraphrase, summary
or, indeed, re-telling.4
1While linguists and philologists have an abiding interest in variants, slips of the tongue, false starts, insertions, textual notes, glossaries, etc., these seem of little concern to most fluent speakers (and may for some be {52} a source of irritation); but a running text, unimpeded by interlinear matter (or even by a translation printed en regard), is essential. (On this point cf. especially pp. 106-107 in my review article, "Ojibwa Texts," International Journal of American Linguistics 53: 103-111, 1987.)
2There is also no mention of the reason for dividing text 5 into two parts.
3For a more general discussion of this issue à propos of traditional Cree texts, cf. my "Taboo and Taste in Literary Translation," W. Cowan, réd., Actes du Dix-septième Congrès des Algonquinistes 377-394, 1986.
4Postscript to the Publishers: This book exhibits
a number of editorial flaws which should clearly be laid at the
feet of the publishers and their shoddy copy-editing (if any);
the following examples are intended as representative, not exhaustive:
-- place-names like Bushie River or High Level
which are discussed on page 94 but do not appear on the facing
map;
-- variable spellings of the name Slave which
are not accounted for by Rice's convention (96n);
-- infelicities in the introductory matter (e.g., C.
Marten [65] for what can only be see Marten, or
the gratuitous awkwardness of using revealed [90] as
a phonological term in a book of prophetic texts);
-- the omission from the bibliography of many titles referred
to in the body (e.g., Howard 1963, Moses 1972, Rice
1983, Voudrach 1965);
-- the omission of subtitles for Preston 1971 (which is
cited in the form of an unpublished dissertation even though
it was published in 1975, and with a changed subtitle) or Ridington
1978;
-- the obliteration of several lines of text by an illustration
on page 41.
In a book of lasting importance, such lack of ordinary editorial
care insults authors and readers alike.
H. C. Wolfart
California Indian Nights. Compiled by Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline Harris Block. Introduction by Albert L. Hurtado. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 323 pp. $9.95 paper, ISBN 0-8032-7031-3.
{56}
Bighorse the Warrior.
Tiana Bighorse. Ed. Noël Bennett. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1990.
ISBN 0-8165-1189-6. 113 pp. $14.95 cloth.
"It's
important to the Navajos when you know these kind of stories.
They can keep you going. These are brave stories, and knowing
them can make you brave" (xxvii). So says Tiana Bighorse,
daughter of Gus Bighorse (c. 1846-1939) and keeper of his survival
stories. In this lovely book, Tiana Bighorse, with the assistance
of her collaborator, Noël Bennett, reconstructs her father's
life history--a series of moving stories about an heroic and
compassionate man--and the sufferings and endurance of the Navajo
people. Retelling her father's stories in his voice,
Tiana Bighorse emphasizes how she heard the stories as a child,
how the past continues to live in the present, and how history
shapes community. Gus Bighorse's life story begins with the serenity
of family and community living peacefully on their own land,
raising peaches and corn and children. Through his daughter's
words, he narrates how as a young man he helped his people through
the painful years of the Long Walk, and how as an elder he is
heartbroken when the government destroys his horses in the stock
reduction program of the 1930s. Although Bighorse told these
stories over fifty years ago, they continue through the storytelling
voice of his daughter. This is not just Gus Bighorse's story,
though. It is also the story of how the Navajo people fought
for their land, how his daughter came to tell a man's story,
and how bicultural collaboration can work gracefully and well.
Gus Bighorse's
daughter was born near Mt. Taylor, one of the four sacred mountains
of the Navajo world. A member of the Deer Spring Clan, Tiana
attended boarding school from the time she was eight years old
through the 9th grade. Taught weaving by her mother from the
age of seven, she has earned her livelihood through weaving.
In 1968 Noël Bennett went to the Navajo reservation to study
with Tiana Bighorse. Her apprenticeship lasted many years, and
the friendship between the two women has deepened over twenty
years. In 1971 they collaborated on Working with Wool: How
to Weave a Navajo Rug, a collection of Tiana's mother's
stories intended for Navajo girls and the general public. Almost
twenty years later, at Tiana's insistence, they collaborated
on a second book, this time retelling her father's stories. The
result is Bighorse the Warrior.
Bennett provides
a clear and readable historical context (99-106), what she describes
as "a chronology of significant events in Navajo and American
history and in the life of Gus Bighorse" (99), but she does
not offer much cultural context or any indication of the performance
aspect of storytelling. In the Preface, though, Bennett describes
the collaborative process, her own editorial decisions, and her
relationship with Tiana Bighorse (who is a friend and teacher,
not an "informant"). "My foremost thought was
to protect the integrity of the Navajo voice," Bennett explains;
"these would be her words and thoughts, not mine"
(xv). Bennett knows how difficult a process that can be. Although
she {57} does not cite scholarly
theories of ethnographic translation (along the lines of Dell
Hymes or Dennis Tedlock), she is sensitive to the cultural and
linguistic pitfalls of an outsider's attempt "to protect
the integrity" of another's voice. She describes how Tiana
spoke the stories in English with an occasional word in Navajo.
Since Navajo has no tenses equivalent to those in English, the
question of tense becomes a key issue. In order to do justice
to Tiana's spoken language, Bennett decides to use what some
have called Red English, in this case the English spoken by a
speaker whose first language is Navajo. In discussing these issues,
Bennett suggests reweaving as a compelling metaphor for translation.
She describes how she rewove an old Navajo blanket to look "brand
new," but in the process, the blanket's "historical
integrity" was lost (xxii). Similarly, in translating, "correcting"
(i.e., changing the words to "fit some conventionalized
scholarly Anglo form" xxii), erases the speaker. Bennett's
compromise was to standardize verbs in the present tense, to
edit subject-verb agreement, and to alter "disorienting
words" (xxiii). She decided against "correcting"
grammar. What remains is clarity and the eloquence of the spoken
voice.
In the Introduction,
Tiana Bighorse explains how she, rather than her brothers, came
to be the recipient of her father's stories, a man's stories
intended for boys and men. As a little girl, she would lie in
bed and listen to her father telling stories to her brothers.
"They don't want me to listen," she explains, "because
it's just the men that are supposed to be listening" (xxvi).
Even after her father tells her the stories are not for her,
she cannot help herself. She pretends to be sleeping, but listens
all the while. When her father discovers her, he decides that
she is the only one who is "really listening," the
"one who is remembering the stories" (xxvi). Someday,
her father tells her brothers: "if she has kids, then she'll
tell them stories she heard from me" (xxvi). Tiana retells
her father's stories not just for her own children, though, but
for the people. "I want the people to know the warriors
are brave to fight with the enemies. I want the world to know
that the Navajo warriors were heros [sic]. . . . They pay for
our land with their lives. I want everyone to remember how the
Navajo got this big reservation. They will tell their grandchildren,
and our warriors will not be forgotten" (xxvii).
In the 1860s
the Navajos were forced from their land by federal troops led
by their former friend Kit Carson. After finding his parents
murdered by U.S. soldiers, sixteen-year-old Gus Bighorse joined
those who escaped to hide in the mountains. Over the next few
years he would become acquainted with renowned Navajo resistance
leaders like Ch´il Haajiní, Dághá
Yázhí, and Dághaa´ii, better known
today as Manuelito, Barboncito, and Delgadito. It was Manuelito,
in fact, who gave Bighorse orders to move his group of non-captured
Navajos to the Colorado River behind Navajo Mountain and to plant
food. While the resistors hid in the canyons and mountains, the
captured people were {58} forced
to go on The Long Walk (1864-1868). Around 9,000 men, women,
and children were forced to walk over 325 miles from Fort Defiance
in Arizona to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico (located within
a 30-square-mile area known as Bosque Redondo or Hwéeldi
to the Navajo). "The Long Walk is a tragic journey over
frozen snow and rough rocks" (34), remembers Bighorse. Over
half of the people died. "People are shot down on the spot"
if they claim to be sick or tired or if they linger to help another
(34). "There are bodies here and there and everywhere along
the trail" (34), Tiana recalls her father saying. Bighorse
describes Hwéeldi as it was described to him by the messengers
who reported regularly to the non-captured Navajo. Once they
had arrived at Hwéeldi, they explain, the people were
not provided with sufficient food or shelter. Starvation, cold,
deprivation, and sorrow all took their toll on the people. They
were harassed by Comanches who stole what little they could gather
and by soldiers who forced the Navajo to work as slave labor.
They had no shelter, no firewood, no livestock. In place of blankets
they wrapped themselves in gunny sacks. "Everybody so cold,
hungry, and thin," says Bighorse. "They don't even
look like themselves" (51). Many more died during their
four years of imprisonment. In addition to narrating stories
from the Navajo holocaust, Bighorse tells of how he was "captured
by Mexicans and taken to Mexico" (104), how he married twice
and had nine children, how he raised the largest and most beautiful
horses (hence his name) before they were destroyed by the U.S.
government.
Designed, in
part, as a complement to the collection of her mother's stories
published in 1971, Bighorse the Warrior reflects the
vitality of oral traditions, the heroism of a generation of Navajos
who fought for their land, and the friendship and collaboration
of Tiana Bighorse and Noël Bennett. Bighorse the Warrior
should appeal to general readers, students, and even to many
scholars. This book is a lively contribution to the collection
of published Navajo voices. The stories must be told, insists
Bighorse. Many "people died of their tragic story,"
explains Bighorse, but by telling the stories "we wake ourselves
up, get out of the shock. And that is why I tell my kids what
happened, so it won't be forgot" (82). Tiana Bighorse's
eloquent retelling of her father's stories highlights how the
storytellers of every generation bear witness and insure survival.
Hertha D. Wong
{59}
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales
Retold. Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine
Goodale Eastman. Intr. Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich. Lincoln
and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 253pp. ISBN 0-8032-6717-7.
Wigwam Evenings ostensibly draws upon the stories Charles Eastman recollected from his childhood in a traditional Dakota camp. In 1874 at the age of 15 he left Manitoba, where his Santee family had gone to escape the 1862 Minnesota war, in order to become indelibly "civilized" under the tutelage of Dr. Alfred L. Riggs at the Santee Agency in northeastern Nebraska. From there he went on to Beloit College, Dartmouth, and Boston University medical school. As a young man he served as agency physician at Pine Ridge and was a witness to the aftermath of Wounded Knee as well as a persistent advocate for Lakota victims of agency graft. For the rest of his life until his death in 1939 Eastman articulately defended the spirituality and egalitarianism of his people in eleven books, numerous articles, and lectures, implicitly presenting himself as a model of adaptation, preserving the Dakota heritage while taking up only the best of what the white man had to offer:
I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or material efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American. (From the Deep Woods to Civilization)
To be an American of stature in
his day, one had also to be versed in the best of thought, the Greek and Roman
classics that American educators revered. Inevitably, perhaps, his "Sioux Folk Tales Retold"
were so classicized that
modern readers should be warned against accepting them as oral narratives of the type Eastman
is
likely to have heard
as a child. The concluding morals emulate Aesop, and the Victorian prose in which they are
truncated and recast gives
us a familiar just-as-good-as high culture message rather than stories of substantive cultural or
literary value. As an
adult Eastman apparently regarded the oral narratives he heard as a child as tales for children and
represented them in
print as simple parables. The frame of each story includes a group of "real" children receiving
prefatory explanations
from the storyteller, Smoky Day.
The best way to appreciate the
assimilative quality of these "Sioux Tales" is to compare a representative one, in
this case an episode of "Blood Clot Boy," to the Santee version transcribed by David Grey Cloud
and translated by
Stephen Return Riggs circa 1881 for Dakota Grammar, Texts, and
Ethnography (1893; rpt. American Indian Culture
Research Center, Blue Cloud Abbey, Marvin, South Dakota, 1977: 95-104).
{60}
Since the story is about an innocent
character's loss of his home, Eastman emphasizes the snug warmth of the
children's clothing and their "frolicsome ride through the brightly lighted village" to Smoky
Day's
tipi where they will
learn not to take their health and comfort for granted. While Eastman had lived in a tipi (not a
wigwam), Smoky Day's
protagonist, the Badger, "lived in a little house under the hill and it was warm and snug" with the
mother Badger and
the little badgers who were "fat and merry," primarily because "gray old Badger was a famous
hunter." Smoky Day
adds that "folks said he must have a magic art in making arrows" (Wigwam
Evenings 64).
From the beginning Eastman carefully
ascribes belief in "magic" to some people but leaves open the possibility
for early 20th century readers that other Dakota were not as superstitious as these "folks." The
Grey Cloud-Riggs
narrator, on the other hand, makes the Badger's "power" the immediate focus of attention. The
Badger has a hunting
practice that incorporates technique and inspiration. When his buffalo "surround" or corral is full,
he stands behind
the herd and sends a single arrow through all of them. In both stories a hungry Bear arrives, and
after Badger sends
him back with food for several consecutive days, the Bear returns with his whole family and
drives the Badger with
his wife and children from their home.
Grey Cloud-Riggs emphasize the
unexpectedness rather than the injustice of the act. The Badger has
extraordinary powers for hunting and has offered hospitality tantamount to kinship, but he cannot
stand up to the Bear
who bullies him into the slave-labor of hunting and butchering and then keeps all the meat for
himself. Smoky
Day-Eastman supplies a rational explanation for the Badger's inability to resist--the Bear
confiscates the Badger's
magic arrows. Grey Cloud- Riggs allows the Badger to keep his single arrow but not the meat it
provides. The Grey
Cloud-Riggs version may be an adult reflection on historical exploitation. Victims do not lose
their abilities but are
denied the fruits of their labor. Smoky Day-Eastman fills in a realistic detail but misses the
narrative's symbolic center.
In the rest of the story Smoky
Day-Eastman omits the restoration of the Badger's courage and health through
ritualized symbolic expression. In the Smoky Day-Eastman version repetition is eliminated to
conform to Western
literary practice. The hungry Badger is reduced to begging the Bear for food, and the Bear family
laughs at his misery
except for "the smallest and ugliest" cub who later sneaks food to the Badgers to keep them from
starving. The
situation is redeemed by a deus ex machina, the "Avenger who sprang from a drop
of innocent blood." The hero is
neither described nor explained. He simply arrives and chases away the mean Bear, chivalrously
sparing his wife and
children: "He ran as fast as he could, looking over his shoulder from time to time." Smoky
Day-Eastman concludes:
"There is no meanness like ingratitude" (Wigwam Evenings 69).
Grey Cloud-Riggs does not have the
Badger beg the usurper.{61} Instead the Bear comes to
the Badger and
commands him to hunt (three times in the story): "You Badger with the stinking ears, come out,
your surround is full
of buffalo." Then after the Badger has dressed the meat, the Bear prevents him from taking any,
first by verbal threat,
then by action: "You stinking eared Badger, get away, you will trample in my blood" (i.e. the
buffalo blood that the
Bear wants for himself; this is spoken twice in the story).
The story's repetition emphasizes not
only that the Badger is being starved for food but that he is being kept from
the "blood," the power to defend and perpetuate his children. In the Smoky Day-Eastman
version,
the deliverer
suddenly appears as in a saintly visitation. In Grey Cloud-Riggs the potentiality of "blood,"
apparently belonging only
to the bear, is realized for the Badger through a Dakota ceremony. After he secretly brings home
a blood clot from the
butchering place, Badger's building of an initi (sweat lodge) is carefully described.
The blood clot is purified by
placing it on a bed of sage, and after the stones are heated the ceremony revives the courage and
competence of a
dispossessed people. This reversal does not occur inexplicably as in Smoky Day-Eastman but
gradually, as a
development requiring trust and patience: "Suddenly the Badger heard some one inside sighing.
He continued to pour
water on the stones. And then some one breathing within said, `Again you have made me glad,
and now open for me.'
So he opened the door and a very beautiful young man came out" (Riggs 102).
Blood Clot Boy tells his father to
"say" sequentially that his son shall have clothes, weapons, and food, and the
words bring about the reality. The vitalizing effect of symbolic expression is emphasized. Then
again, patience
through ritual repetition is realized in the actual killing of the Bear: "`Now, father, do just as I tell
you to do.' To this
the Badger said `Yes.' Then Blood Clot Boy continued: `In the morning when Gray Bear comes
out and calls you, you
will not go; but the second time he calls then go with him, for I shall then have hidden myself'"
(Riggs 103). Grey
Cloud-Riggs does not spare the Bear's family except for the one who used to "play" with a
buffalo leg before casting it
away to the Badgers. He is allowed to live but only as a captive. Smoky Day-Eastman subtracts
this "cruelty" to the
enemy, thereby missing the story's hard lesson. Grey Cloud-Riggs is not concerned with the
Bear's ingratitude
(Eastman's moral) but with the Dakota means of "living" through ritual and storytelling. Instead
of being condemned
or forgiven, both the Badger's fear and the Bear's vice are scrupulously scourged at the end.
Christianization is evident
in Eastman's resolution of a profound problem by the intervention of a savior rather than through
the shaping
disciplines of ceremony.
The rest of Wigwam
Evenings contains many oral tradition motifs, but all are embedded in a well meant,
misleading attempt at cultural public relations. Most suspect are the familiar characters and
events made to subserve
"Creation" and other "origin stories." Eastman gives {62} his people a mythology in the Western sense but denies
them the distinctive voice that would complement rather than reflect his adoptive culture.
Julian Rice
Dancing
on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest
Native American Poetry. Ed. Andrea Lerner. Tucson:
Sun Tracks and The U of Arizona P, 1990. 266 pp. Cloth $37.50,
ISBN 0-8165-1097-0; paper $15.98, ISBN 08165-1215-9.
Dancing on the Rim of the
World comes along, handsome, well-edited, and timely, to announce to the world that a
Northwest Native American literary
movement has not only begun, it is well underway, a significant new regional flourishing within
the
larger flourishing of Indian writing now. Let this collection be
entered alongside other fine regional anthologies of Native poetry and prose, including the
Sun Tracks series from Arizona, and Joe Bruchac's Iroquois and Alaskan
collections.
Interesting notion,
regional.
Some critics who should know better, having fought their way clear of New Critical biases
otherwise, still sneer at it as a trivial
element of literary identity, whether in Anglo writing or in Indian myth-texts. Thus Arnold
Krupat
inveighs against the "unself-conscious twaddle about . . . the
poetry of place" that, to him, disfigures the critical studies of "literary pragmatists" working on
Indian texts (For Those Who Come After xiii).
One wonders what Krupat would be
able
to make of the intense imaginings of Northwest places that run through the 137 selections by 34
poets that Andrea
Lerner has chosen for this anthology. In their eloquent introductory essay (a manifesto that
constitutes one of the book's special distinctions), poets Elizabeth Woody
and Gloria Bird assert the importance of place, of region in the fullest sense, in
their
own poetry and that of their contemporaries. "The making of symbols and
images are directly entwined with our Northwest homeland, family, their graves, teachings, and
specific sites that mark our tenure" (5).
What Woody and Bird define as the
Northwest, "the rim of the world" in one of Earle Thompson's poems ("Spirit" 214), is a huge
domain as much defined by
cultural tradition and imagination as by landform and climate, including "southern Alaska,
southwestern Canada, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western
Nevada, and northern California" (1). Such is both the rich diversity and the felt
community of the poetry here collected.
In her work as editor, Andrea Lerner
has
cast a fittingly wide and {63} systematic net over the
territory, and gathered together impressive evidence of the new
vitality of Northwest Indian writing--both in the selections by established writers, and in those
representing newcomers. The distinguished Klallam poet and editor
Duane Niatum, for example, is represented here by several new, hitherto-unanthologized poems,
including a lovely address to his son, "Son, This Is What I Can Tell
You" (143-45)--a subject Niatum has taken up intermittently throughout his long career, but
never
with such clarity and grace:
. . . So my son who takes a
different
road
Away from the red cedar and yellow
pine,
the road that brings me to my gnarled
elders,
the earth and shore of my Klallam
family--
try remembering when your anger is
lifted
like fog from a coastal storm,
I cannot call you back, cannot offer
what
wasn't theirs, the popping fire
and butterfly dancers of this place.
(145)
Likewise, Janet Campbell Hale, a
well-published writer (Coeur D'Alene) who surely deserves wider recognition, offers an
extraordinary essay, "Autobiography
in Fiction," amounting to a personal myth of writing, full of allusions to her experience as an
American Indian from the Northwest, but wonderfully suggestive and
wise about How It Is with writers of all backgrounds and purposes. Readers who take up
Dancing on the Rim of the World consciously or unconsciously expecting
to find unsophisticated writing would be well advised to begin with Hale's very savvy
essay.
And then go on, thus fortified, to
survey
the bounty of new, aspiring, mixed talent that it is this book's chief purpose and distinction to
exhibit. What's
represented here in the work of emerging poets like Elizabeth Woody (Wasco/Navajo), Gloria
Bird
(Spokane), Gail Tremblay (Onondaga/Micmac), Dian Million
(Athabascan), Victor Charlo (Interior Salish), Robert Davis (Tlingit), and Earle Thompson
(Yakima) is a vitality becoming aware of itself and its responsibilities,
connecting "tradition and the individual talent" in a way that T.S. Eliot never dreamed of. As
Woody and Bird put it in their manifesto, "By pulling away from a
trusting status with the United States and its imposing definitions of blood quantum, we are all in
a
sense `half- bloods,' a metaphor for walking in two worlds. In
writing, we are taking back control of our tribes and our lives" (4). And not only in writing, one
might add, noting how many of the writers in this collection are also
serious artists in other mediums: photography, painting, sculpture, carving, and so on. Judging
from
this anthology alone, the creative energy now stirring in the
Indian Northwest is going to assert itself in many styles and in many forms.
Inevitably, as Andrea Lerner
acknowledges in her preface, a pioneering anthology like this one is going to overlook some
writers
of {64} promise, and include
others whose careers will peter out. No matter--the former will survive being overlooked here,
and
the latter will at least enjoy this much notice. What matters most
in Dancing on the Rim of the World is the generous recognition this book gives
now
to the arriving fact of Northwest Indian writing. Here it comes! And if one
poem can be allowed to stand, out of such a wealth of material, for what's coming, let it be Victor
Charlo's lovely, echoing "Flathead River Creation," written for his
English and Kootenai students in the Two Eagle River School:
You say
old days fold into one another
and new days seem the same
Yet each moment shifts with
sun,
nothing will be the same as this:
when wind breathes the Flathead
alive,
you are the center this instant
for all, you are the creation
of the universe one more time.
(27)
Jarold Ramsey
The Indian Lawyer. James Welch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 349 pp. $19.95. ISBN 0-393-02896-8.
Among little
known facts about Native Americans is that of the existence of
Indian lawyers. Among the better-known of these are Thomas Sloan,
an Omaha from Nebraska who served as an attorney for the American
Indian Federation in the thirties, and Charles Curtis, a Kaw
known for hastening allotment for his tribe and others as well
as being elected Vice-President under Hoover in 1928. Among the
lesser-known are myself, a Gros Ventre attorney, albeit non-practicing,
and a number of others of the present time doing the necessary
work of the law for Native American peoples across the country.
And necessary it is, for in the words of Big Bear, in the end
the great cage was made of words.
The Indian
Lawyer is the first significant imagining I am aware of
related to all this, and James Welch does his usual fine job
of it. The voice of the book is genuine, and therefore right.
There is honesty in that voice, as well as James Welch's signature
final modesty, an ever-present realization that we triumph and
fail at the same time. This is important. As N. Scott Momaday
has said, "We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists
in our imagination of ourselves.{65}
Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and
what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can
befall us is to go unimagined."
In this regard
The Indian Lawyer marks a turning point in Native American
literature. James Welch has imagined an empowered, enfranchised,
successful individual who not only does not leave the reservation
only to return disillusioned, but who also picks his way cannily
through the complexities of life on the outside. Frustrated as
Native Americans and others are with the stasis and occasional
backsliding of American life, this documents some of the amazing
incidents of success of a culture that refuses to die.
Sylvester Yellow
Calf, Blackfeet attorney; Harwood, powerful but self-destructive;
Patti Ann, the essential female; Lena, the lonely Crow woman
teaching among the Blackfeet; and Sylvester's accurately depicted
traditional grandparents show the polish James Welch's style
has attained. The characters and story line are a slick and sophisticated
vehicle for yet another hungered-for message about an enigmatic
part of all our lives.
The richness
of the book comes from real stuff--James Welch served on the
Montana Prison Board of Pardons for 10 years and was recently
on the majority side of a 2-1 decision to recommend commutation
of a death penalty. Though he has since retired from this position,
it is clear that the experience gave him the material to create
a realistic and vivid imagining of the prison setting. It is
fascinating to get an insider view of the closed prison subculture,
and James Welch does it well.
Casting Sylvester
Yellow Calf as Indian basketball star is further evidence of
James Welch's ability to isolate and treat with the genuine metaphors
of modern Indian life. Racked by alcoholism, poverty, and unemployment;
victimized by cheating, broken treaties and sell-outs; robbed
of some 37 million acres of land guaranteed by the U.S. government;
the Indian has taken back basketball from the whites and made
it into a way of continuing traditional ways. Though Indians
constituted only 7% of Montana's population, their schools won
10 Class A, B, and C state high school basketball titles between
1980 and 1990. Dale Spotted, Star Not Afraid, George Yellow Eyes,
Floyd Cross Guns and Don Wetzel are legends in Montana. This
may not mean much to Corporate America, but it bespeaks a better
reality, then and now.
Sylvester Yellow
Calf is a new Native American hero, and he exists in his success
as well as his isolation. His team-mates turn away from him,
but he sustains. This is a powerful evocation of what the future
can hold for a once vanishing breed.
Sidner Larson
{66}
In Mad Love and War. Joy Harjo. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1990. 65pp. paper, ISBN 0-8195-1182-X.
Story tingles
in these poems the way electricity does in a storm-- makes your
hair stand up, gives an ozony smell of strange powers moving
in your world. But then, if you try to read the words by their
occasional blinding strokes to you-ward, you may get awfully
frustrated. Well, YOU may not--certainly I did. I kept
peering into the dark and dazzle, trying to see just who the
you might be that the I of a given poem might
be addressing: whether a friend or friends unknown to me, or
me and other readers, or all of us. The you and the
I were up there in that high dark hailstony whirling,
where the power that blinks redeyed hours into our clock radios
might at any second kill our time--and I was down in this small
bulb-lit room trying to make out what the voices of hail and
thunder were saying.
Sometimes a story
flashed and in its flare were deer dancers and deer magic in
an Indian bar in the Southwest ("Deer Dancer"); then
it was old daylight time in Tulsa ("Death is a Woman"),
and a sleek whiskey-breathed father dancing with his peroxided
Death-In-Life in Cain's Ballroom. Well, I recognized Tulsa time
and place and people, though the words make them symbolic as
hell: I could look up unblinking into that flashlit cloud because
way back in grade school we used to listen to country music on
the air from Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa.
So I like Joy
Harjo's Okie thunder, because I like to know where any whirlwind
is taking me. There's one tornado in the book ("Autobiography")
that touches down both in Tulsa and what feels like
Santa Fe, but I can ride it as calm, almost, as Elijah when that
sweet chariot swung low for him--because I know the tracks, in
Indian territory, of "doom's electric moccasin" (thanks,
Emily!), so if Joy "lived next door to the bootlegger,"
I know her address, since my folks bought whiskey there before
she was born. I may find it hard to follow her through the dark
Indian country she explores with so many different stories and
powers, but when she says ("Autobiography") of Oklahoma,
The Sooner State glorified the thief. Everyone and no one
was Indian, she is exactly, horribly right. It's the best
brief word on the matter--though a picture by Richard Ray Whitman
has hammered the point home as strongly: that one of his "Street
Chiefs" series which places a REAL Indian (one that
tourists would never approve as "Indian") beneath
a great billboard on which, beside the logos of a Sioux-bonneted
Indian and a Marlboro cowboy, there is the legend BUY OKLAHOMA.
Everyone and
no one was Indian. I have old friends with as much or more Indian
blood than I have, who never dance or in any way regard themselves
as anything but whites with some Indian blood. But I have a nephew
who is a quarter Osage and has blue eyes and redgold beard and
long hair--and when he danced at the Sun Dance on the Rosebud,
he was called Yellow Hair (in Lakota), a name that has its {67} echoes for Custer and Buffalo Bill
freaks. His Ponca daughter was this year's Ponca Powwow Princess
at White Eagle, Oklahoma. To be "Indian" in Oklahoma
and many places now involves no fewer shades and varieties of
being and seeming than to be "white" or "black"--
however surprising and dismaying that must be to those looking
for Real Indians in warbonnets leaving a Trail of Tears in the
red Oklahoma dust.
But in this as
in other books Harjo writes many more songs of love than of Oklahoma.
Some are bluesy notes of pain and loss ("Unmailed Letter,"
"The Bloodletting"), some wildflower embraces, intense
and respectful--"Rainy Dawn" for her teenage daughter,
"Crystal Lake" for her grandfather, "A Winning
Hand" for Richard Hugo. Some are of passion and love ("Desire,"
"City of Fire," "Crossing the Water"); others
of passion and hate ("If I Think About You Again . . .").
And the poems open up to worlds outside these United States--to
the powers and images of Egypt ("Hieroglyphic," "The
Book of Myths"), to the Reaganauts and Bushwhackers of Central
America ("Resurrection," "The Real Revolution
is Love"). Harjo keeps cool about Nicaragua: hates what
was (and is) being done to people there, but reminds us that
talking politics is different from living values.
The poems open
also to the music of music. Harjo plays saxophone, and hears
with her heart--so her poem to Charlie Parker ("Bird")
has the power of shared love and pain:
To survive is sometimes a leap into madness. The fingers of
saints are still hot from miracles, but can they save themselves?Where is the dimension a god lives who will take Bird home?
I want to see it, I said to the Catalinas, to the Rincons,to anyone listening in the dark. I said, Let me hear you
by any means: by horn, by fever, by night, even by some poemattempting flight home.
Another poem of crackling voltage is "Strange Fruit," words written for Jacqueline Peters, lynched in Lafayette California in June 1986. Maybe the hardest to bear of all the book's poems is "Legacy," which needs quoting entire because it shows Harjo's capacity to face the worst human facts and hold a sense of hope:
In Wheeling, West Virginia, inmates riot.
Two cut out the heart of a child rapist
and hold it steaming in a guard's face
because he will live
to tell the story.
They know they have already died
of unrequited love
and in another version
won't recognize the murdered
{68}
as he walks toward them
disguised as the betrayed lover.
I don't know the ending,
or how this will make the bruised and broken
child live easier into the night
of a split world,
where in one camp the destroyers
have cooked up
a stench of past and maggots.
And in the other
love begins a dance, a giveaway to honor
the destroyed with new names.
I don't know the ending.
But I know the legacy of maggots is wings.
And I understand how lovers can destroy everything
together.
I have not
yet mentioned that the poems seem arranged in meaningful sequence.
To take one example, the first poem, "Grace," matches
like a great wing the last, "Eagle Poem," which is
a prayer. "Grace" evokes a wrenching desolate winter
with friends (Wind, Jim Welch) when the three of them "like
Coyote, like Rabbit, . . . could not contain our terror and clowned
our way" and yet "one morning . . . found grace"
and "once again understood the talk of animals." Finding
grace, Harjo adds--no sentimentalist!--did not improve the world:
"the next season was worse." Yet as the poem ends she
insists: There is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed
people. We have seen it. The words empower, sweeping away
all the "Dey got me! I'm vanishing!" so dear to American
ears, and they use blue-corn we not loco-weed I.
This resistance,
this refusal to let despair ice up feeling and understanding,
is Harjo's hallmark--on the last poem, "Eagle Poem,"
as on the first, "Grace." I'd guess "Eagle Poem"
an early piece that has now found its place--it has the sound
and feel of Acoma and Laguna. It is also very much Harjo, her
deep rich warm and unfooled view of how much there is to see,
how little we understand, how wonderful that we can look out
into this world:
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear,
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
{69}
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Carter Revard
The Invisible Musician. Ray A. Young Bear. Duluth, MN: HOLY COW! Press. P. 0. Box 3170, Mount Royal Station, Duluth, MN 55803. $15 cloth, ISBN 0-930100-32-8; $8.95 paper, ISBN 0-930100-33-6.
Mesquakie
poet Ray A. Young Bear is acknowledged by poets, critics and
students of American Indian literature as one of the nation's
foremost contemporary native American poets.
His first book,
Winter of the Salamander (Harper & Row, 1980), brought
together a powerful grouping of poetry notable for a startlingly
atavistic yet modern word way. Courses in American Indian literature
soon adopted his book. In the wake of national accolades and
attention, Young Bear was invited to teach in Southwestern and
Far-Western schools and universities.
With the publication
of The Invisible Musician, Young Bear is destined for
even wider recognition--as a national treasure. Here is a true
native son who has already brought much honor to his Mesquakie
settlement, his "Red Earth" family and his fellow Iowans.
As he hits his maturity, he promises during the new decade to
become even more "visible," especially among general
readers.
It is imperative
to mention the ironic discrepancy that exists between Young Bear's
esteemed national status in poetry circles and his relative "invisibility"
in Iowa and in the American popular mind. For invisibility (dare
we tag it "insensitivity" or "ignorance"?)
of various kinds--{70} artistic,
cultural, racial, ethnic, ecological--is a major theme, a tonic
chord in the 40-odd poems that make up The Invisible Musician.
Anyone who lives
in our media-enhanced world knows that poetry is a hard sell.
And yet--and this is part of Young Bear's beautiful concern in
Musician--poetry is as close as our heartbeat, as portentous
and invigorating as an approaching storm.
And if the essences
of more primal, aboriginal connections and rhythms are drowned
out by today's automotive and industrial machinery, no wonder
that the native American way and its earth-rooted reverences,
myths, dreams, ceremonies and songs are relegated to stereotype
and stylization. All the more reason to listen, to tune in, to
hear Young Bear and his anguished longing to relearn the old
songs and perpetuate them among his own Sac and Fox people, and
share them with those of us more removed from primal doings.
Young Bear's
own attempts to relocate and recenter the invisible melodies
and words, the voicings and intonations of his ancestral Mesquakie
music have not been without struggle. The marginality of contemporary
Indianness is much documented by sociologists.
Young Bear's
gift is to sing--at times in celebration, often in lament--of
assimilations accepted and thwarted. He is at once of this country,
its citizen, and before it--there, standing beside his grandfathers,
letting their hopes and dreams, their superstitions and songs
of wisdom and prophecy guide him back to "memories"
of his own past and extrapolated future.
Less completely,
Young Bear's music and his role as musician reaffirms the more
general, Anglo-European American myth that is inextricably linked
to the aboriginal voice, to what William Carlos Williams, whose
own modern verse owed much to American Indian oral traditions,
called the "satyric dance."
The late Richard
Hugo once observed about Young Bear that he spoke with a voice
thousands of years old. In part this is attributable to Young
Bear's conceiving the world poetically--imagistically, rhythmically.
In part it is attributable to Young Bear's bilingualism, his
ability to think of his poetry in his ancient Algonquin tongue
and speak it or translate it into the accessibilities of English.
In Salamander
and again in Musician, the effect is a transportation
that allows modern non-Indian readers to catch a glimmering of
pure Word, pure language, in a kind of atemporal, projected,
eternalized moment. There is a feeling when we listen to Young
Bear listening to his ancient and primal urgings and melodies,
of transcendence, of sacrality. It is a feeling of and for the
sacredness of Word. In this special sense, Musician
is not just another book of poetry, it is an awe-inspiring event
in honor of the human mind and soul and heart.
Such profundity
in Young Bear's verse is often itself invisible. Many of his
poems are five and six pages long--and divided into intriguingly
complex parts; some poems, especially his Mesquakie love songs,
are quite short--and disarmingly simple. Here is one such song:
{71}
Ne to bwa ka na, My pipe,
bya te na ma wi ko; hand it over to me;
ne to bwa ka na, my pipe,
bya te na ma wi ko; hand it over to me;
ne to bwa ka na, my pipe,
bya te na ma wi ko. hand it over to me.Ne a ta be swa I shall light and inhale
a ta ma tobacco
sha ske si a. for the single woman.
Ne to bwa ka na, My pipe,
bya te na ma wi ko. hand it over to me.
In the beauty of its tribal sound and rhythms, "Mesquakie
Love Song" sings out strong and vibrant, as if from some
settlement powwow or some more ancient, now encoded and repeated
love yearning and resolve.
Such ancient
up-datings are complemented throughout Musician by contemporary
dirges a propos of the angst of modern American--Indian and non-Indian.
In "Wa ta se Na ka mo ni, Viet Nam Memorial," a poem
that reflexively reiterates the volume's title, Young Bear bridges
the ancient and the modern as only an atavistically contemporary
vision and voice can do:
Last night when the yellow moon
of November broke through the last line
of turbulent Midwestern clouds,
a lone frog, the same one
who probably announced the premature spring floods,
attempted to sing,
Veterans' Day, and it was
sore throat weather.
In reality the invisible musician
reminded me of my own doubt.
The knowledge that my grandfathers
were singers as well as composers--
one of whom felt the simple utterance
of a vowel made for the start
of a melody--did not produce
the necessary memory or feeling
to make a Wa ta se Na Ka mo ni,
Veteran's Song.
All I could think of
was the absence of my name
on a distant black rock.
Without this monument
I felt I would not be here.
For a moment I questioned why I had to immerse myself
{72}
in country, controversy, and guilt;
but I wanted to honor them.
Surely, the song they presently
listened to along with my grandfathers
was the ethereal kind which did not stop.
So too is the music, the poetry of Young Bear, the "ethereal kind" that links us all to the old verities.
Robert F. Gish
Medicine River. Thomas King. New York: Viking, 1990. 261 pp. $18.95 cloth, ISBN 0-670-82962-5.
Thomas King's
first novel, Medicine River, will remind many readers
strongly of two other works, James Welch's Winter in the
Blood and David Seals' Powwow Highway, and, taken
together, they form an effective contemporary triptych of Native
humor and compassion. All three are very funny (if one's taste
runs toward the wonderful absurdism underlying the superficial
bleakness of Welch's novel), and all three are decidedly Indian.
To think of them
together, however, is also to think of Seals' recent review of
Welch's new novel, The Indian Lawyer, which appeared
in The Nation (26 Nov. 1990, pp. 648-50). Praising and
damning Welch simultaneously, Seals offers an anti-aesthetic
manifesto for the contemporary Indian novel, one with some interesting
and disturbing implications; given the similarities of their
novels, Seals' comments about Welch's style might very well apply
to King--and since King is very close to Seals himself, the manifesto
could also very well come full circle to ensnare its own author.
Seals laments
"a failure of many native writers trapped in the mainstream
morass . . . who have lost sight . . . of the sublime spirituality
bursting like the new buffalo herds all over the Western prairies"
(648). Also including Louise Erdrich, he continues to assert
that the novelists' characters lack "the transcendent visions,"
the "secrets" that have sustained many in the face
of "genocide" (649). This lament over broken cultural
continuity and the compartmentalization of tradition is familiar
stuff, essentially, if questionably applied to Welch and Erdrich;
however, this point is only the springboard for Seals' next condemnation:
"The storytelling is very `American,'" by which he
seems to imply non-Indian, and he continues to assert that he
feels "that polished prose is not inherently where `Indian
literature' comes from. . . . We speak in the second person and
the grammar ain't as good as when we're speaking it" (649).
To Seals, Joyce
and Proust are "so-called great writers" (an {73} astonishing remark), and Welch and
Erdrich have broken "the barriers into New York publishing"
(649), which seems to be a very different thing from having written
Indian novels. "I can see the professors cringing now at
my (deliberately) weak grammar in this article" (649), he
boldly says (but this particular professor found little weakness
here, other than the one sentence cited above, and I admire his
prose style here as I do in Powwow Highway, a novel
I teach for its style, among other qualities). That Welch is
also a professor "shows" in his novel, and Seals postulates
that Welch "seemed to be struggling to find his tribal voice"
in The Death of Jim Loney, but it was probably "choked
off" by "some goddamn editor" (649). We expect
iconoclasm and distrust of authority, particularly of the white
literary establishment, from a former member of AIM, but here
Seals produces less a piece of criticism than a grouse--or a
whine.
His final assertion
makes another leap in reason. Concluding that The Indian
Lawyer, although a "good book" (if "a little
alien to Indians"), is "slick and sympathetic,"
it is also an artifact of fad and fashion ("Indians are
'in' this year") and somehow inauthentic, possibly even
hypocritical. He closes, "Why do we have to write polished
prose to make it in America?" (650), an odd question from
a polished and accomplished novelist. Is Seals calling for a
postmodern Indian prose of inarticulation, much as Tom Wolfe,
in his recent manifesto, called for a return to realism in the
novel? Or has Seals spotted in Welch too much of himself, something
perhaps not altogether politically correct, however aesthetically
and literarily satisfying and praiseworthy (and if so, how is
it incorrect)?
I reject Seals'
criteria and criticisms, not simply because I find them odd and
disturbing--although I do--but because they have implications
for the state of the contemporary Indian novel, misleading ones,
that are belied by Welch, Erdrich, King, and Seals himself. While
bold in neither subject nor approach, Medicine River
is a fine debut. Its fatherless, passive, displaced protagonist,
Will, is a familiar figure in a first effort (Silko's Tayo in
Ceremony, among others, is also an heir of Momaday's
Abel in House Made of Dawn); its narrative is familiarly
fragmented, defying location on any time continuum; its conclusion
is tentative, in the contemporary Indian manner; and its humor
is bittersweet, laced with many of the undeniable, ugly realities
of Indian life today. These are the qualities that invite comparison
with other novels, but Medicine River does not suffer
by that comparison, for it has its own spin, its own contributions
and rewards.
Perhaps foremost,
in addition to its gentle humor, is its pervading sense of compassion,
a knowledge of and fondness for the small triumphs and failures
of life, all of which can be endured if not surmounted by bonding
with other people: if one accepts foibles, eccentricities, and
special gifts, if one resists being judgmental, if one allows
the embrace of community. The novel, in its main plot and in
flashbacks, charts how half-breed Will (with no family name offered){74} comes to adopt Medicine River, a
small town in Alberta bordering a Blackfeet reserve, as home,
finding both place and self in the same efforts. Equally, it
is the story of another Blackfeet, Harlen Bigbear, perhaps King's
most wonderful accomplishment. Will says, "Harlen Bigbear
was my friend, and being Harlen's friend was hard. I can tell
you that" (11), and the true hero of the novel may well
be their friendship, for "Harlen had a strong sense of survival,
not just for himself but for other people as well" (2).
His generosity and sweetness of spirit are infectious; he is
someone who can be "smiling inside, and it was leaking out
the sides of his mouth and his ears" (28). Another flawed
and endearing character, David Plume, is a gentle caricature
of an AIM activist, excessively proud of his red movement jacket,
who chides Will: "A person should do something important
with their life. You should think about that" (200). Will
does think about such things, too much, but Harlen can put it
all in healthy perspective for him: "'A jacket,' said Harlen
'is a poor substitute for friends and family'" (255).
Will is also
troubled by his inability to connect with his family, and, by
extension, his people: his long-since-vanished father, for whom
he makes up exotic professions; his alienated brother, with whom
he broke emotionally when they were boys; and his dead mother,
whose stoic philosophy of life, "That's the way things are,"
haunts and paralyzes Will. But with Harlen's pushing and maneuvering,
Will's innate kindness and sense of decency emerge incrementally,
and he comes to see that he can form an alternative family with
the determined Louise Heavyman and her purposefully illegitimate
daughter South Wing; further, the people of Medicine River and
the reserve are also "family," in the truest tribal
sense, as are the fumbling but supportive fellow members of his
basketball team. After 40 years of displacement, passively being
led through white cities and relationships with Anglo women,
Will comes to a point of integration, of place, and of identity.
He is a photographer
by accident, and Will's art is static and voyeuristic until he
is led slowly to see the bigger "picture," one that
includes him, as when he offers a flat rate family portrait special
during lean times and Joyce Blue Horn takes him up on it. He
learns that all 38 people who show up in his studio, and the
dozens more who appear when the session evolves into a picnic
by the river, are indeed family in a variety of senses. He has
to take 24 shots, because the Blue Horn family insist that he
be in the picture with them, both literally and metaphorically.
Oddly, while
Indianness pervades the novel at every point and in every manner,
ethnicity is not the critical issue and, while pervasive, is
unobtrusive; this is a story of Community that does not require
its Native references and sensibility for its integrity but is
much enriched for being Indian. Perhaps Seals would consider
this a mark of compromise or inauthenticity, but many more readers
will find this quality to be its strength; a fully Indian novel
that transcends its Blackfeet (and mixed blood) context, one
that enriches the Indian perspective without {75}
being dependent on it. Particularly since it is published by
Viking, King's novel is likely to appeal to and find a wide readership.
Medicine
River is a gentle and lovely novel, another prismatic view
of the same sort of world as in Winter in the Blood
and Powwow Highway. It is a fine contribution to a healthy
and rapidly growing body of contemporary Indian fiction, Seals'
pessimism notwithstanding, and it promises much of value to come
from Thomas King.
Rodney Simard
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts. Louis Littlecoon Oliver. Greenfield Review Press, 1990. 105 pp. $9.95. ISBN 0-912678-70-4.
At 86 Louis
Littlecoon Oliver is the venerated elder among active Native
American poets and writers. He is a Muskogee-Creek fullblood
born in Koweta Town, Indian Territory (now Coweta, Oklahoma).
Of his previous books, The Horned Snake (Cross Cultural
Communications 1982) was a bilingual chapbook of short poems,
and Caught In A Willow Net (Greenfield Review Press
1983) featured four prose pieces and several poems. A few poems
from that book are reprinted in Chasers of the Sun: Creek
Indian Thoughts, a collection deep in the traditional wisdom
of Littlecoon's heritage. In poems, essays and stories he imparts
some of the Creeks' indigenous southeastern ways and beliefs,
despite the fact that they were removed westward in 1832. Their
forced migration did not loosen their memory of home, however.
The predominance
of West-of-the-Mississippi Indian writers can be misconstrued
to be the whole of Native American literature, and it is true
that many outstanding "southeastern" writers are Oklahoma
Cherokees. Louis Oliver's writings can be described as reflecting
his traditional sensitivities and are distinct in acknowledging
the presence of mysteries like the Sleep Maker, the high regard
for snakes used by medicine people and when encountered on walks,
and how Creeks regard the little people. The short poem "Mind
Over Matter" depicts his grandmother's power over a tornado
by her using an ax. "Medicare" speaks to the power
of belief in Native healing:
I'm going to see old Nokose
for him to diagnose my illness.
. . . . . . .
Two big Indian dogs came out
to sniff me over.
. . . . . . .
They are a part of the mysticism
of their owner.
{76}
And old Nokose, trancelike,
. . . spoke of entities in the spirit
world.
The slimeless snail, the legless ant
the microscopic demons
the little blue-winged hunter
wasp.
Much beyond my understanding. (45-46)
Oliver has stated on other occasions that he began writing
not too long ago, and years of careful listening make him sensitive
to sound devices that are associated: "Nokose" with
"diagnose" and "slimeless" with "legless."
For all his serious
themes, a subtle humor lives in his work. The poem "Hoot
Owls Roast an Indian" records and interprets a conversation
among owls about lovers at a camp. "Poetry Dead?" chides
"The forked tongue of Anglo Saxon linguists/ Articulating
like rocks down a chute." Part Three of the book, "Creek
Indian Humor," contains many brief stories that might appear
mildly amusing to non-Indians, but "Baseball Game,"
"An Indian Dog" and "Hotdog Question" possess
the understated humor found in daily situations. His people,
Oliver relates in his essay, "Native American Wit and Humor,"
"cannot discuss any serious matters without allowing humor
to intervene . . . There may be an old stonefaced Creek leaning
on his cane as people pass by. Be assured he is smiling inwardly
of something funny he saw. When he tells it to his friends, there
will be, in unison, a thunderous roar of laughter" (54).
Chasers of
the Sun has a special importance for the sagacity of its
author, Louis Littlecoon Oliver, who knows that he too, at almost
90, is but one Creek poet who can recall and revere another among
his people, Alexander Posey from the nineteenth century. Oliver
is here with his gifted voice; his wit and keen insight should
be respected by all readers.
Ron Welburn
Simple Songs. Vickie Sears. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books, 1990. 160 pp., $8.95 paper, ISBN 0-932379-81-8; $18.95 cloth, ISBN 0-932379-82-6.
Vickie Sears' particular talent is the evocation of the plight of foster children, the double victims of abandonment and abuse. Their experiences are gruesome. In "Grace," a story which features the only loving set of foster parents in the collection, the child Jodi Ann {77} remembers making friends with a wild kitten in the fields outside the orphanage. When the matron discovers the affection between the child and the animal, she kills the kitten and hangs it around the child's neck, claiming that Jodi Ann killed it and that this is her punishment. In the story "Connie," a sadistic matron handles the orphan in this way:
Already the offense Connie had committed was forgotten in her quaking mind as she waited to see how else Mrs. Cornell would punish her beside beating her hands red with the metal edge of the ruler.
"Now," Mrs. Cornell said, proffering a long green bottle with one hand and a shot glass with the other, "this will make both your hands and your insides feel good, you sweet child."
So the amber fluid went hot down Connie's throat and a burning poured over her skin. It began. Days of punishment and days of drinking . . . (47).
Sears' collection
of fourteen stories centers on familiar themes: the struggle
for a stable identity that honors the mixture of Indian and other
blood; the child-narrator reliving a painful past; the struggle
around alcoholism; the celebration of lesbian culture and consciousness;
the positive role and influence of the grandmother figure; the
presence of tribal magic in the midst of city; the contrast between
superficial New Age awareness and the enduring stability of ancient
belief systems. Although other issues inform some stories, the
idea of the tormented child infiltrates every one.
In "Keeping
Sacred Secrets," Mary Ann learns to stay out of her white
mother's way. When her Indian father dies, part of her world
collapses, and "Everything she thought she had carefully
tucked inside herself tilted in her belly pot and burned"
(10). The emotional separation she feels from her mother and
stepfather is represented physically; she lives in their converted
garage. Sears presents the clash between Indian and Anglo culture
by aligning the Indian with the vulnerable child and the white
with the blind, arrogant adult. When her mother tells her to
throw away sacred Indian objects, Mary Ann, drawing on the healthy
experiences in her Indian grandmother's home, devises a ceremony
to bury them. Her anguish is immense, but she feels some solace
by remembering her grandmother's words: "All you do with
a good heart is enough" (16).
"Keeping
Sacred Secrets" is troubled by some technical problems that
plague the whole collection. It is difficult to recreate the
world of the child without infecting it with adult perceptions,
and there are lapses. For example, Mary Ann explains herself
to her mother in this speech:
"I made up my mind. I'll use his name and I won't tell anybody you're divorced. People can think I'm his kid so you'll be happy. But I won't say {78} I'm Italian. I won't say I'm Indian either, unless they ask. Then, if they do, I'm gonna say they have to get answers from you. I think that's a whole bunch, so don't ask for nothing else. I can't be what you want. I'm already me." (17-18)
It rings false; I hear the jaws of the character-puppet clicking
as she speaks the author's lines. This is not the kind of speech
that most of us, in our fear and vulnerability, gave when we
were children.
Similarly, in
"A Fact of Light," two politically astute and artistic
lesbian lovers converse with each other like this: "Is being
a marginal woman like patriarchal oppression?" (36). They
are not being ironic. This is a Theme Story, and ordinary ideas
seem burdened with political weight. Meta notices that her Anglo
friend Rory is wearing crystal earrings:
"Aren't they great? They're such an energy draw. I mean, I can just feel them pulling positives toward me ..."
"Those are healing stones in my tribe. They require a lot of respect and cleaning."
"I respect them, Meta. I feel their power. Do you think I don't?" (33)
Things don't go much more smoothly between Meta and her lover
Shelly; their conversation is as stagey. Miraculously, the basic
warmth of the relationship between them still comes through,
despite the stilted dialogue that passes for conversation between
them.
Another example
of Sears' strong but uneven skills is her handling of the internal
emotional state of the main character in "Connie."
An alcoholic woman asleep in the Farmer's Market in Seattle wakens,
dizzy with nausea, and begins an alarming interior monologue
which begins "You silly old thing" and does not improve.
The reader wants to be inside the character as she unravels her
feelings, but instead the experience is like reading a billboard.
Then Sears ends her character's speech this way:
Connie began laughing. She fell back into the grass, rolling onto her stomach. She laughed until she dreamt. (47)
The seamless laugh-into-dream sequence is unique, a surprise,
and it suggests a promising lyrical imagination still working
its way up through some narrative uncertainties.
This narrative
uncertainty comes through again in "Flower Spirits."
Elizabeth Jane steals flowers from a cemetery and sells them
around town, earning enough for a softball uniform. It is satisfying
to watch the child outsmart her bossy mother and her racist coach.
More interesting, however, is the crematorium in the middle of
the flower-filled cemetery. The caretaker is speaking:
"There's the noise from the fire itself, but it's the people who make most of the noise. They bend and fold, and there are gasses trapped in the body, organs that pop, bones and {79} all. They make a lot of sounds, but they don't hurt. They're already dead, so it isn't anything for you to worry about." (59)
An image this striking demands attention, but, unaccountably,
it is abandoned, its potential unrealized.
Several stories
move away from the core experiences of violence and neglect.
Except for some self-conscious poetic diction "Music Lady"
moves successfully down a very fine line separating tenderness
from sentimentality. The forty-five year old narrator remembers
a part of her childhood when she hung shyly around a record store
in the days when you could ask to try out a tune in a soundproof
booth. The Anglo owner, sensitive to the Indian child's undeclared
needs, arranges for her to have a booth to listen in, and encourages
her to keep writing poetry. Many years later, the narrator returns
and the owner, now a very old woman, remembers her. It's a sweet
moment; the two women have honored each other with memory and
affection. The long thread of the shopowner's generosity sutures
one of her many psychic wounds.
Some of the stories
are intended to be amusing. "Flower Spirits" and "Pasta
Saturday" (the nude noodle-making grandmother is unforgettable)
have a gentle, rueful humor. "Bra One," the most complex
story of this group, dramatizes an important first purchase,
but, expectedly, the comedy loops back to the abused-child theme.
The humorous dimension shows the process of being prodded, rearranged,
and stuffed into serious white undergarments:
I slipped my arms into the holster, bent down to sag my breasts into the cups, and began to snap up. The bra covered half my stomach. It seemed as though there were thirty hooks. Finally harnessed, I looked at the monstrosity in the mirror. (84)
The child, embarrassed, suddenly cannot fit into children's
clothes, and the mother, brutal in her lack of empathy for her
daughter's adolescent self-consciousness, announces that it will
now be necessary to shop in a maternity store for a top that
will fit. Identity and self-esteem issues around body images
were poorly understood by ordinary people during the time when
this story is set, but the reader is left with the sense that
the mother would have found something even more punishing to
say if this easy target had not been available.
The strongest
story, "Letting Go," dramatizes a psychotic break.
It is not perfect; shifts between the point of view of the woman
experiencing the break and the narrator describing the woman
experiencing the break prevent perfect empathy between character
and reader.
Sears' subject
is important and not easily captured; the terror and monotony
of madness has eluded accurate description for centuries. But
she has a talent for it. In an earlier story, "A Fact of
Light," she shows that she can capture the disorientation
of waking from a dream: "There were half-shadows from the
tree outside the window. Normally {80}
peaceful, their sliding over the walls now seemed a fearful crawling"
(27). "Letting Go" takes it further: "There is
a scream resting on my tongue and my thumb is its guardian"
(95). In this story, the strands of Sears' life come together,
and the power that is created is impressive. Writer, therapist
and teacher, she uses her experiences and her Cherokee-Spanish-English
background to create a character whose break with reality is
vivid. Autistic repetition and rhyme, alien as they are in discourse,
are logical here. Extreme dissociation results in mangled self-awareness,
as in this description of her tongue:
It is too thick for my mouth. It swells with air. Pushes out between the teeth. Swells up to press on my nostrils. It has a scream locked inside it. It would come out if someone had the sense to pop the tongue-balloon. (108)
Despite a relatively weak ending (an abrupt transition into
the present tense and the mind of the now-functional adult narrator),
the story succeeds on the strength of its subject: the sexual
abuse of a child, the resulting chronic denial of feelings, the
ensuing confusion of cultural identity, and the added pressures
of full-time work and single parenthood. The madness of the abused
child that expresses itself in the psychosis of the adult woman
is a subject that perhaps cannot be exhausted.
This is a collection
in which the stories draw power from each other by virtue of
their placement in the group. Singly, their difficulties threaten
their strengths. It wasn't until nearly the end of the collection
that I could ignore Sears' habit of dropping the subjects of
some but not all sentences in a paragraph, an affectation that
produces a bumpy syntactical ride and makes this reviewer think
about grammar, not characters. Some of the stories serve more
therapeutic and political than artistic ends. Still, the voice
coming out of them is honest, courageous, and powerful, and the
representation of childhood trauma inflicted deliberately or
accidentally is an important addition to our understanding of
the process of individuation in any culture.
Rhoda Carroll
A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G. W. Grayson. Ed. W. David Baird. Norman and London: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. 164 pp. ISBN 0-8061-2103.
Although appearing
at first glance to be just one more Civil War memoir, this book
is actually a highly interesting Indian autobiography. Or perhaps
I should say Métis autobiography, for as the editor says
in the Preface, Grayson was a member of that "elite subgroup
among the {81} Creeks." Grandson
of a Scottish trader who went into the Creek territory of modern-day
Alabama in the 1790s, Grayson had dark red hair and a complexion
that was "quite white." He went to Arkansas College
in Fayetteville, was a nineteen-year-old Captain in a Creek Confederate
regiment, and later was tribal treasurer and secretary. As a
partner in Grayson Brothers, Eufaula, Oklahoma, he had interests
in retailing, cattle, cotton-ginning, and rental properties and
was a rich man. With fellow Creek leaders, he made trips to Washington
to oppose dissolution of the Creek Nation. But when it happened,
he remained influential, finally being tribal chief from 1917
until his death in 1920.
But the life-story
alone is not what makes his autobiography so remarkable. More
important is the sense of self that Grayson exhibits, both as
a dignified tribal leader and patriarch and as the maker of his
own rules in the writing of an autobiography. "I have no
recollection of ever having read an autobiography written by
anyone else," he announces on his first page, "and
hence have adopted no model by which to be guided in my effort,
and supposing that it would probably be conceded that each such
writer may justly be a law unto himself, I have proceeded to
write in my own way, and as suits me best." He is writing,
he goes on, just for his family ("of whom I expect the widest
charity in their estimates of my numerous shortcomings"),
and he is going to write about what he chooses and say what he
likes.
Of course, Grayson
is not the first autobiographer to announce such assumptions,
and the further we read him, the more we realize that he was
not so original as he claims. His style is often florid and Victorian
and sometimes tedious, with phrases like "the dim and hazy
past," "his trusty musket," or "our artillery
. . . belching forth its death-dispensing contents." He
also seems unconsciously victimized by inconsistencies in his
allegiances to both his Creek and his Scottish ancestry. He praises
his grandfather for "belonging to that class of useful pioneers
ever found in the van of progress, boldly and openly blazing
the way for advancing civilization and empire"--even though
in the end it was "civilization and empire" that destroyed
the Creek Nation.
But proud, independent
and "a law unto himself" Grayson still believed himself
to be, and the result is an autobiography that in a sort of stodgy,
bewhiskered way is wonderfully idiosyncratic and both playful
and profound.
The first freedom
which he thinks autobiography grants him is the freedom to talk
at length about his genealogy, and so chapter one, as the editor
has organized the unbroken manuscript, is nearly twenty pages
of it. We hear about Robert Grierson, whose name was changed
to Grayson, Grayson speculates, because "unlettered persons
and Grierson's own negro slaves" pronounced Grayson for
Grierson. ("If there was anything in a name," he reflects,
"I would move for a return to the original.") We hear
about his Creek wife Sin-o-gee, and we hear about their wealth
and their children. Footnotes also refer briefly to {82}
collateral ancestors who have been cut from the manuscript, either
"at the request of Grayson's heirs" or to shorten it,
the editor says. What we don't hear much about is Grayson's mother's
genealogy, because "it is my misfortune to know scarcely
anything about it." But whether from age (he wrote the autobiography
in 1908, when he was 65), his Indian heritage, his Southern heritage,
family pride, or the combination of all of them, ancestry meant
a great deal to him. He was proud of being Métis.
The second great
influence in his life, as he saw it when he wrote, was his education,
starting with "old Asbury," a "Manual Labor School"
near Eufaula, run by missionaries. Though often made to wear
"the dunce cap," he studied hard, preparing
for "the battle of life which I have subsequently engaged
in." Later, at Arkansas College he "spoke not a word
of Indian" and liked mingling with "well dressed people."
But it was Grayson's
Civil War experiences which were most vital to his sense of self.
As a young officer, he learned to shoulder responsibility. For
his later life, it gave him experiences, encapsulated in a large
stock of stories, to share with his fellow veterans, his family
and business partners. As we read these reminiscences, we sense
that by 1908 Grayson had told them hundreds of times, so that
even if a "law unto himself" in written autobiography,
in oral discourse he knew all the rules--and all the tricks.
Speaking of his colonel's address, in Indian, to the troops before
a battle, he even says that it was "the finest war-speech
I ever heard." Grayson was a connoisseur of talk!
One of his own
best tales is of trying to find his way back to his regiment
and encountering another lost soldier who wanted to ride with
him. "I had no excuses to urge against his becoming my traveling
companion," Grayson says, "except that he was a blond--blond
hair, eye lashes, moustache and gray eyes, in fact blond all
over. I cannot explain why, but I am not partial toward, but
on the contrary have to confess to having always as now rather
a repugnance to blonds of all degrees." But feeling that
this prejudice should not matter, Grayson rode with the man.
Soon they encountered two sleeping Union soldiers, and the man
wanted to shoot them with his pistol. But Grayson noted that
the pistol was corroded and might not fire, and so advised against
it. During the next few days Grayson's common sense and good
woodsmanship saved their lives several more times. Yet when they
finally reached headquarters, "my blond friend, now somewhat
bronzed by his exposure," took all the credit for their
survival. So Grayson reflects what this might mean and what he
should have done, explaining that only here, in an autobiography
intended just for his family, does he confess his annoyance.
Finally, forgiving the man, whom he has never seen since, Grayson
says, "If dead, peace to his ashes; if alive still, abundant
success to comrade Washington."
This concluding
identification of the man as "Washington," named after
the great white father himself (as too was George Washington
Grayson!), seems like a telling bit of Indian irony. Grayson
the {83} redheaded Creek had saved
"Washington." Most of his other stories have similar
twists, emphasizing his strong sense of independence, dignity,
and humor. If there were conflicts in his inheritance, there
were also subtle dual perspectives, lurking resolutions.
But the greatest
of his ironies is in his protest over the dissolution of the
Creek Nation. "Here we, a people who had been a self-governing
people for hundreds and possibly a thousand years, who had a
government and administered its affairs before such an entity
as the United States was ever dreamed, are asked and admonished
that we must give up all idea of local government, change our
system of land holding to that which we confidently believed
had pauperized thousands of white people-- . . ." Thus does
Grayson begin his lament, in a sentence too long to quote in
full. This book is a real find, a unique addition to the small
number of bona fide, early, Indian-white, Métis autobiographies.
Robert F. Sayre
Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present. Ed. Penny Petrone. Toronto: Oxford U P, 1991. 184 pp. $19.95 paper, ISBN 0-19-540796-2.
The book cover proclaims
this the "first critical study of the literature of Canada's
native peoples" and the author herself describes it as a
"pioneering" (8) work. These are rather exaggerated
claims given the amount of scholarship that is taking place in
the field of Native Canadian literature. To name only some of
the recent releases will demonstrate the interest in this area:
Heather Hodgson (Ed.) Seven Generations (Theytus Books),
Agnes Grant (Ed.) Native Literature in the Curriculum
(University of Manitoba) and Our Bit of Truth: An Anthology
of Canadian Native Literature (Pemmican Publications), Jeanne
Perreault and Sylvia Nance (Eds.) Native Women of Western
Canada: Writing the Circle--An Anthology and Beth Brant
(Ed.) A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American
Indian Women.
Native Literature
in Canada does, however, have a major difference. Petrone
has painstakingly researched Native writers from the earliest
to contemporary times and has put their work in historical context
along with data and anecdotes about the authors' lives. The book
is arranged in chronological order beginning with an undated
period of oral literatures, 1820-1850, 1850-1914, 1914-1969,
1970- 1979 and 1980-1989. If a disproportionate amount of time
is spent on 1820-1914 it can be excused because this is the author's
area of expertise. Her excellent 1983 publication First People,
First Voices (University of Toronto) made a very important
contribution to an {84} understanding
of that time period.
This book leaves
the reader with feelings of considerable unease, because it perpetuates
the generally negative attitudes towards Natives that have long
prevailed. The author's encouraging comment: "I have endeavoured
to reveal a richness and complexity that are worthy of serious
and enligthening examination" (8) is overshadowed by the
negative imagery and examples she uses and by her emphasis on
Native literature arising from political and social realities
while aesthetic and creative aspects are all but ignored.
The book is clearly
written by a non-Native scholar for other non-Native scholars.
Of Basil Johnston's work she says,
. . . (the stories) are told as fiction but are based in fact and give life to a world of comedy most of his readers would never have seen or heard. (126).
With this statement she dismisses the wide Native readership
Johnston enjoys and the numerous Native literature courses that
utilize his work.
The Introduction
(1-8) relies largely on historic sources, though Paula Gunn Allen,
George Cornell and Basil Johnston are mentioned. One wonders
at the need for the author's aside when she says,
There were even some Canadians who believed that the Indians were a degraded and hopeless race, incapable of any mental progress, and possessed of so little that was human that even compassion was wasted on them. (2)
When one reads that George Copway was imprisoned for embezzlement
of missionary funds one wonders at the connection between this
information and Canadian Native literature.
Petrone concedes
that there are problems with translations of oral literatures,
but her chapter on "Oral Literatures" relies largely
on the old sources--Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Edward S. Curtis,
Frances Densmore, Diamond Jenness, David Bayle, Natalie Curtis,
Franz Boaz, Horatio Hale and the Jesuit Relations. There is a
brief reference to Paula Gunn Allen and Alexander Wolf, but otherwise,
recent scholarship in this area is largely ignored. She does,
however, include commentary by George Copway which adds valuable
information from a Native perspective.
The chapters
on contemporary writing include an exhaustive list of "who
is who" in Native literature today. There are good summaries
of the works that exist which can serve as guides for prospective
buyers. Petrone's attempts at critical commentary on literary
qualities are less successful. Her comments on Basil Johnston's
short stories include:
Many of the protagonists of these stories are stereotypes --the welfare bum, the comic drunk, the shiftless and irresponsible--but Johnston exposes the absurdities of his characters with such good-humoured teasing caricature that the reader forgets about their stereotypical behaviour and {85} enjoys them as human beings. (24).
Petrone misses the point that Johnston, like many other Native
writers, uses stereotype as trope or that it is used to "make
faces" at non-Native society, as pointed out by Kate Vangen,
in Thomas King, Cheryl Calver and Helen Hoy, The Native in
Literature (Hignell Printing, 1987).
Her commentary
on contemporary writers consists largely of summary statements,
which perhaps is fortunate, since few writers escape her sharp
criticism. Jorden Wheeler is a "singular new voice in short
fiction" (145) but his novellas are "often awkward
and disjointed" (148). Basil Johnston resorts to "overblown
rhetoric" (150), Lee Maracle is accused of "heavy preaching"
(151), Jeanette Armstrong "gets mired in factual data, lengthy
explanations, and bewildering digression" (142), and so
it goes. Some writers, however, do meet with the author's unqualified
approval. Thomas King "demonstrates his skill as a writer"
(144), Jean Crate displays "an astonishing mastery of technique
and of supple and evocative prose" (143) and Beatrice Culeton's
work "is elevated from the melodramatic cliché by
its daring honesty and energy" (140). Petrone's commentary
on Native poetry and drama shows greater insight into Natives
as literary artists and makes for more enjoyable reading.
The conclusion
of this book is disquieting. It is full of generalizations and
contradictions. Earlier, for example, the author acknowledged
the role of the trickster in Thomson Highway's The Rez Sisters,
but in the conclusion she dismisses the trickster as an "archetypal"
figure and Highway's work a movement into the surreal. Highway
himself says
[the trickster is] as pivotal and important a figure in the Native world as Christ is in the realm of Christian mythology
and again,
We believe [the trickster] is still among us--albeit a little worse for wear and tear--having assumed other guises. Without him--and without the spiritual health of this figure--the core of Indian culture would be gone forever. (The Rez Sisters, Fifth House, 1988).
Though it may be difficult for non-Native readers to understand
the role the trickster plays in Highway's plays, it is definitely
not an archetypal figure in the Western literary sense.
The conclusion
leans heavily on the assumption that Native literature has arisen
from a political and social need. This is certainly true, but
to ignore the aesthetic and creative needs of a people does them
an injustice. The conclusion abounds with negative phrases--"debasing
experiences," "excesses of emotion," "victim
syndrome." The author says,
A resurgence of Indian cultural and religious values has {86} made these writers realize that they are heirs to a wealth of traditional oral literature upon which they can draw inspiration and direction. (182)
Yet earlier in her book she carefully documents those Native
writers who wrote but could not get published until recently.
To suggest that Native people have not had their own knowledge
and values is offensive, especially from an author who has carefully
documented how expression of this knowledge was not permissible.
Is there a place
for a book such as this in the canon of Native literature? It
serves as a source of historic information and impeccably researched
data. It includes a comprehensive, twelve page bibliography of
largely Canadian Native authors or commentary on Native writing
which is a very useful source of information. As a "critical
study" of literature of Canadian Natives, however, it falls
short of its objectives.
Agnes Grant
Paula Gunn Allen. Elizabeth I. Hanson. Western Writers Series, Number 96. Boise: Boise State University, 1990. ISBN 0-88430-095-1.
It is surprising that the work of Paula Gunn Allen, often quoted and always referred to in recent studies on American Indian literature, hasn't received more critical attention. There are articles on aspects of her work and interviews with her available, but, to my knowledge, there is no book-length study of Allen yet. Elizabeth Hanson's short study of Paula Gunn Allen is the first attempt then to pull the disjointed material together and to offer important personal data and background material that the reader of her work would find difficult to obtain.
Hanson's division of her material into sections--"Short Biography," "Literary Criticism," "The Early Poetry," "Feminist Poetry," Shadow Country," "The Woman Who Owned the Shadows," and "Concluion" --provides easy assess to specific information. Particularly useful are the sections on poetry, since readers are most likely familiar with individual poems from anthologies of American Indian poetry and literature. These encounters with single poems do not facilitate the reader's recognition of metaphors and themes that run through Allen's poetry. Hanson's discussion of the body of Allen's poetry in the sections "The Early Poetry," "Feminist Poetry" and "Shadow Country" makes that information accessible and provides a reading, by necessity partial and fragmented, of key poems. While Allen's poetry is available it is difficult to obtain a copy of her one novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983); here Hanson provides a short summary of the novel, a short reading of the same and attempts to place it within the context of her other work. It is unfortunate that Hanson does not {87} refer the reader to Allen's own reading of her novel in The Sacred Hoop (1986) which would add an additional, and very interesting, dimension to Hanson's reading of the novel.
In Paula Gunn Allen Hanson experiences the same problems as other writers of the Western Writers series whose subjects were prolific and important contributors to literature; it is impossible to do justice to the amazing scope of Allen's work as a critic, poet, novelist, and academic in the prescribed number of pages. Hanson attempts to solve that problem by imposing a frame on Allen's work, the "breed persona." In the first paragraph of her study Hanson states: "To stand outside, to be and yet not to be, becomes, at least in Allen's case, a source of subtle self-exploration as well as extraordinary art" (5). This theme, the mediator between cultures, runs through the entire study, and everything is subjected to it. While the problem of the breed is a theme that occurs in much of contemporary American Indian literature, it cannot replace other themes that are just as important, e.g., the sense of place. The reader finishes the study with the sense that Allen is excluded from the American Indian part of her heritage because of her status as a "breed," has no part in the "racial memory" as N. Scott Momaday called it in his essay "The Man Made of Words." In The Sacred Hoop, however, Allen regards herself clearly as part of the American Indian community that used to be a gynocracy before the advent of the whites. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way (1987) she also speaks of other themes, themes that are as important to her as the one Hanson chooses to emphasize: ". . . it [House Made of Dawn] brought my land back to me. . . . Part of what I was going through was land sickness--loss of land" (11; her emphasis). Forcing Allen's work into the framework "breed" denies its richness and accords one theme an importance that Allen herself does not give it. As the Introduction to The Sacred Hoop shows, she considers herself a participant in a number of communities, not merely a mediator between the white and American Indian communities.
The space restrictions also lead to sweeping generalizations that do a disservice to the literary criticism of American Indian literature. In "Literary Criticism," for example, Hanson deals primarily with Allen's two book-length studies of American Indian literature, Studies in American Indian Literature (1983) and The Sacred Hoop. There can be no doubt that Studies is as important a contribution to the field and as valuable to those who teach American Indian literature as Hanson claims. Hanson's discussion of Studies implies, however, that the collection of critical essays and course designs edited by Allen provides the reader with an exclusive American Indian viewpoint on the study of American Indian literature and seems to deny the validity of white criticism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of contributions come from white scholars in the field, e.g., Larry Evers and A. LaVonne Ruoff. The work of these white critics has shown that sensitivity to cultural differences and the knowledge of history, anthropology, etc.,{88} that, according to Hanson, Allen demands of critics. Only those familiar with Studies know that the contributors are mostly white critics. The reader of Paula Gunn Allen feels encouraged to dismiss all white criticism, instead of developing a sensitivity of his own that permits him to judge literary works and their criticism by their merits.
Elizabeth Hanson manages in her study to give the reader a sense of Paula Gunn Allen's wide range of achievements as critic, poet and novelist. Hopefully, her study will serve as an incentive for others to write the full-length study of her work or the bio-critical study her work deserves. Meanwhile, Hanson's Paula Gunn Allen provides the reader with some very necessary general information and a first glimpse of the person Paula Gunn Allen.
Birgit Hans
Briefly Noted
The winter-spring
1991 number of Tamaqua is a special Native American
issue edited by Joe Bruchac and featuring new fiction by Ralph
Salisbury and Lisa McCloud, poetry by Barney Bush, Charlotte
DeClue, lance henson, Will Sanders, Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya,
Jim Barnes, Maurice Kenny, H. E. Erdrich, Bob Gish, Jean Starr,
Gloria Bird and Roberta Whiteman, and non-fiction by Joe Bruchac
and Bob Gish. A generous selection of art and an article on American
Indian art also enliven the issue. For information on how to
order, write to Tamaqua, Parkland College, 2400 W. Bradley
Avenue, Champaign, IL 61821-1899.
Paul Zolbrod
has written a thoughtful introduction to the University of New
Mexico reprint of Franc Johnson Newcomb's collection, Navaho
Folk Tales, originally published in 1967. As Zolbrod points
out, even supposedly bowdlerized versions of stories can be important
in the total scope of an oral literature. Another important reprint
comes from University of Oklahoma Press: Michael Castro's Interpreting
the Indian now in paper with a foreword by Maurice Kenny;
Castro's book is the most thorough treatment to date of the interaction
between modernist and Native American poetics.
Campesino:
The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian prints the diary of the
pseudonymous Ignacio Bizarro Uzpan from 1977-1984, as translated
and edited by James D. Sexton (University of Arizona Press).
This fascinating document is rich in cultural, political, psychological
and historical insights; it offers an opportunity for challenging
comparisons with diaries like those of Samuel Pepys or Samuel
Sewall, or with other autobiographical texts elicited in written
form (e.g., Sun Chief, Crashing Thunder). Unfortunately,
the political and human-rights situation in Guatemala, all too
amply described in the course of the {89}
author's everyday life, has changed little since publication
of the book in 1985.
Cree storytelling
is the subject of a monograph in the series Voices of Rupert's
Land, edited by H. C. Wolfart. Titled "Now then, still
another story--": Literature of the Western James Bay Cree,
Content and Structure, the pamphlet prints the 1988 Belcourt
lecture delivered by C. Douglass Ellis. In his discussion Ellis
explains categories of Cree oral song, oratory and storytelling
art forms, and discusses important story cycles and motifs.
Memoirs 2 and
5 in the Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics series offer Cree
and Ojibway stories for those seeking to maintain or improve
language competence. Memoir 2, titled
kiskinahamawâkan-âcimowinisa,
is Cree stories written by Cree students and printed in Cree
syllabics, Roman alphabet transliteration, and English; the editor
and translator, Freda Ahenakew, has also included a Cree-English
glossary. Number 5 is pisiskiwak kâ-pîkiskwêcok
/ Talking Animals; these are tales told by L. Beardy and
edited and translated by H. C. Wolfart. These works are also
printed in tripartite syllabic/Roman/ English parallel texts.
A third offering from the same publisher is The Moons of
Winter and Other Stories by Norman Quill, printed in syllabics.
For more information write to Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics,
Fletcher Argue Building, 28 Trueman Walk, WINNIPEG, Manitoba,
R3T 2N2 Canada.
Another monolingual
text comes from the Native Languages Programme in the Department
of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. The Stories
of Alice King of Parry Island were transcribed by Jean Rogers
and edited by John D. Nichols; they are printed in Roman type
and intended for teachers and students of the Ojibwe language.
The Centre for
Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages at the University
of Western Ontario has begun a series of monographs reprinting
important texts. Number 1 in the series is a bigingual edition
of "Statement Made by the Indians," a petition
drawn up by the Chippewas of Lake Superior in 1864. Number 2
is An Ojibway Text Anthology edited by John D. Nichols.
The series addresses the needs of linguists as well as language
learners and teachers; volumes are hard bound, texts are printed
in parallel Ojibwe (Roman alphabet) and English, followed by
interlinear translations; apparatus includes glossaries, introductions,
some critical commentary, and bibliographies.
Amerindia
is the journal of the French Association for American Indian
Ethnolinguistics; North American contact is Guy P. Buchholtzer,
Department of Linguistics, Simon Frazer University, Burnaby,
B.C. V5A 1S6 Canada. Chantiers amerinidia, a special
supplement in the 1990 volume, prints
"BAXwBAKwALANUSIWA
/ Un Recit Haisla / A Haisla Story" as told by Gordon Robertson;
this is a story about the central figure in traditional northwest
coast winter ceremonials. The {90}
multilingual edition prints the story first in Haisla orthography;
this text is followed by French and then English translations;
additional sections of the monograph offer a commentary and a
linguistic analysis with interlinear translations. Notes and
a bibliography complete the apparatus.
Another important
scholarly resource comes to us from Mexico: Tlalocan: Revista
de Fuentes para el Conocimiento de las Culturas Indigenas de
Mexico publishes articles in Spanish and English and texts
in the indigenous languages of Mexico. Volume XI (1989) contains
a modern poem written in Nahuatl together with Spanish translation;
the original and translation (into English) of a Spanish document
written in 1835 by a Pima tribal leader; and several articles
including texts and translations from Native languages into Spanish.
Editors: Miguel Leon-Portilla and Karen Dakin, Instituto de Investigaciones
Historicas, Ciudad de Humanidades, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510
Mexico, D. F.
Helen Jaskoski
{91}
CONTRIBUTORS
Rhoda Carroll is Director of the Integrating Studies program at Vermont College of Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont. She has published poetry, fiction and reviews in a wide variety of periodicals.
William M. Clements teaches at Arkansas State University. His publications in Native American studies include Native American Folklore, 1879-1979: An Annotated Bibliography (with Frances M. Malpezzi), Native American Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, and a recent essay on Schoolcraft's translations.
Carole Gerster and Marshall Toman, assistant professors of English at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, presented their paper to the National Association for Ethnic Studies. They have given presentations on "Teaching Multicultural Literacy through Film" for the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English and on "Curriculum Development: Ethnic Film and Literature" for the University of Wisconsin System's Institute on Race and Ethnicity. Gerster's paper "From Film Margin to Novel Center: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye" will appear in West Virginia University Philological Papers, Fall 1992. Toman is director of ethnic studies at River Falls with special interests in film and short story.
Robert F. Gish teaches in the Department of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where he instituted a general education course in Native American and Chicano literature. He is a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review. His latest book is William Carlos Williams: The Short Fiction (G. K. Hall, 1989).
Dr. Agnes Grant teaches Introductory Native Studies, Native Literature, Native Education and Women's Studies courses at Brandon University, Manitoba, Canada. Most of her teaching takes place in isolated and remote communities where Brandon University Northern Teacher Education Program (BUNTEP) trains Native teachers.
Birgit Hans has a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona with emphasis on American Indian literatures. She is preparing an edition of the short fiction of D'Arcy McNickle for publication. She will edit a special issue of SAIL devoted to European criticism of Native American literature.
Toby Langen writes about Puget Salish language and literature and teaches in the extension program at Northwest Indian College.
Sidner J. Larson (Gros Ventre) is a mixedblood raised on the Fort Belknap reservation of northcentral Montana. He has published poetry and critical articles in numerous literary magazines. He is currently at work on his Ph.D. dissertation, concentrating on issues of identity as they apply to Native Americans in American literature, at the University of Arizona.
Sylvie Moulin, Associate Professor of Languages at Regis College in Denver, holds a Ph.D. in Latin American studies, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a B.A. in English from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on Spanish-American literature and literature and civilization of the American Southwest; she is writing a book on Luci Tapahonso.
{92}
James W. Parins is director of American Native Press Archives and Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His most recent work is John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (U of Nebraska P, 1991).
Jarold Ramsey, born and educated in the Northwest, is Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His work includes Coyote Was Going There (1977), Reading the Fire: Traditional Literatures of the Far West (1984), and four books of poetry, including Hand Shadows (Quarterly Review Poetry Prize, 1989). He is currently a member of the MLA Committee on the Literatures and Languages of America.
Carter Revard, born in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, was given his Osage Indian name in 1952. He teaches at Washington University, St. Louis.
Julian Rice teaches in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) and Black Elk's Story: Distinguishing its Lakota Purpose (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1991).
Greg Sarris is an Assistant Professor of English at U.C.L.A. He has published numerous articles and essays on American Indian literature and cross-cultural discourse. His recent fiction will appear in the forthcoming Paper Leaves as well as other journals and magazines.
Robert F. Sayre's early study of American autobiography, The Examined Self, was recently republished by the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also the author of Thoreau and the American Indians and is editing an anthology of American autobiographies. He teaches American Indian Literature at the University of Iowa.
Kathryn Shanley (Assiniboine) teaches American Indian literature at the University of Washington. She is presently completing a book on the work of James Welch.
Rodney Simard teaches in the English Department at California State University San Bernardino and has been active in promoting American Indian studies throughout the CSU system. He is also general editor of the American Indian Studies series from Peter Lang Publishing.
Ron Welburn teaches in the English Department at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. He is of Conoy and Cherokee descent and has contributed to SAIL's previous issues.
H. C. Wolfart has authored and edited numerous publications on languages and literatures of the First Nations of Canada.
Hertha D. Wong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches American literature, Native American literature, and autobiography. She has published essays on Native American autobiography and her book, Sending My Heart Back Over the Years: Traditions and Innovations in Native American Autobiography, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Contact: Robert Nelson
This page was last modified on: 04/06/03
