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SAIL
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2
Volume 12, Number 4
Winter 2000
CONTENTS
A Converstion with Simon Ortiz
John Purdy and Blake Hausman
................................ 1
Coyote, He/She Was Going There: Sex and Gender in Native American
Trickster Stories
Franchot Ballinger
.................................................... 15
The Politics and Erotics of Food in Louise Erdrich
Kari J. Winter
............................................................ 44
"Settling" History: Understanding Leslie Marmon Silko's
Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens
in the Dunes
Denise K. Cummings
................................................ 65
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS .................................................... 91
REVIEWS
Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American
Nation by Rebecca Blevins Faery
Michelle Burnham
..................................................... 93
Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing
by Hartwig Isernhagen
Randall C. Davis
....................................................... 96
The Blood Runs Like a River through My Dreams: A Memoir by
Nasdijj
MariJo Moore
........................................................... 100
LaDonna Harris: A Comanche Life by LaDonna
Harris
Annette Van Dyke .................................................... 102
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CONTRIBUT0RS ...................................................................
105
2000 ASAIL Patrons
Gretchen M. Bataille
A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff
Will Karkavelas
Karl Kroeber
and others who wish to remain anonymous
2000 ASAIL Sponsors
Sonia Bahn
Jeane Breinig
Alanna K. Brown
William M. Clements
Joyzelle Godfrey
Connie Jacobs
Arnold Krupat
Giorgio Mira
Pat Onion
Malea Powell
Kenneth Roemer
Karen Strom
James Thorson
Akira Y.Yamamoto
and others who wish to remain anonymous
{1}
A Conversation with Simon Ortiz
John Purdy and Blake Hausman
Since Simon was in the Northwest for a week-long visit, we were fortunate to lure him a bit further north and west to Western Washington University for a few days to visit a class (taught by Duane Niatum, in which Simon's book, Woven Stone, was required reading), speak at Northwest Indian College (where students, staff and community were also welcoming a new president, the Navajo former president of Diné College), and give a reading that drew from his earlier, but also recent works. As always, his presence was greatly appreciated. We, Blake Hausman and John Purdy, had the opportunity to speak with Simon in several capacities, and hope that our conversations may prove useful.
Blake Hausman (BH): It was an honor to meet Simon Ortiz, to
actually talk with the man whose writings have meant so
much. I like to think of a passage in his essay, "The Language We Know," an image of his father
working with stone. He
reflects on the persistence and the patience needed to build something that will stand for a long,
long time, maybe even
forever. He notes that these experiences, helping his father mix mud and carry stones, influenced
his consciousness as a
writer. And while Simon's {2} poems and prose are
tangible in a way that strikes immediate chords, his work always
conveys a sense of balance and precision, forms and ideas built to endure.
Fortunate to speak with Simon a
couple times during his stay, the three of us ate lunch on the first day of his visit.
John had a reuben, Simon had a burger, and I had a chicken sandwich of some sort. We talked,
and Simon mentioned that
he was planning to meet soon with the Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, author of
Decolonizing the Mind. My ears
perked up--I often think about the connections between many contemporary African and Native
American writers, hoping
that channels of communication between the two continents will open wider, and Simon was
saying things that are
important and eminent. It seemed like a good place to start our "conversation," and the passages
that follow begin with a
discussion anticipating Simon's meeting with Ngugi.
John Purdy (JP): I have admired Simon's writings for as long as I
have known that "Native American Literatures" exist.
When Montana Richards Walking Bull first opened the door for me, Simon was there. While it
was not the first of his
poems that caught me, "My Father's Song" remains a favorite; born and raised on a farm, and
sucker that I am for
parent/child poems, this one comes to visit me no matter where I am or what I am doing, because
it has the fundamental
spirit of Simon's, and all great, poetry: it speaks to me in very intimate and humane tones that
reveal old truths in new ways.
And that is the power of the person
behind the literary work. In our time together, we talked of many things: the future
of contemporary Native literatures, the world-wide issues that face us all, the past. However,
what continues to impress me
about our visits, and what marks this poet, writer, man, is the obvious commitment to the world
that he exudes. I know
several people he has mentored, or supported, or encouraged, or put into contact with others who
could help; true, his
literary works have brought and will continue to bring readers into a serious and productive
interaction with their world, but
the marvelous ripple effect of his civic-minded works on our society may only be known by
powers beyond us.
The afternoon before Simon's reading,
Blake and I met with him in the café in his hotel. A transcription of the taped
conversation follows and it is, as with all conversations, taken out of the context of the
discourses that precede and will, no
doubt, come after. As we settled into our booth, we had already picked up the thread of a
conversation from the previous
day.
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Simon Ortiz (SO): Wa Thiongo Ngugi. For a long a time I've been
interested in the African connection with Native
literature as a decolonizing strategy. My own interest goes back to the late Sixties, when I began
to read Chinua Achebe,
and Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Ngugi used to be James, didn't he?
Kenyan. Achebe is from Nigeria.
When I was at the University of Iowa
in 1968 there was a guy I'll always remember. His name was Peter Palangyo.
Tanzanian. He was quite a person, an intellectual, a writer. He was the Cultural Minister after he
went back home to Tanzania.
In the International Writing Program
at the university, there were numbers of people from other countries, but there
were only two Americans. Me and Emory Evans, Jr. Having come out of the Watts Writing
Workshop, Emory was an
African-American, a tall, lanky guy, Emory Evans. A great poet, a great poet. Had this wonderful
laugh that would just fill
up the room. (Laughs.) He was just a kid, actually, about twenty, twenty-one. He had been
through the Watts riot and all
that. Others in the International Writing Program were from Europe and Africa. And China, a
couple people from the
Philippines, and South America. And I remember a Chilean poet, Juan Palazuelos.
JP: Juan Palazuelos? Chilean.
BH: It seems to me that so much African literature is at the center of the decolonizing impulse in literature today. It seems that colonized people around the world could benefit from more . . .
SO: Self assertion. Self assertion as a style and decision of identity
is necessary for Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
And they can look toward Africa for example. I think one of the things about Native American
intellectualism and writing
is that we have often been caught in a real dilemma, sort of a forced choice about what to do in
terms of the language to
use. So we end up very early on, starting five hundred years ago, going along with the colonizer,
the Spanish conquistador
first and then other Europeans. As a means of survival, we were forced to acquiesce. Yet, it's a
choice that people did make.
And so to some degree, repercussions of that continue which really undermines our sense of
wholeness.
Not that there isn't a way in which
one can still be whole and express oneself in terms of ones integrity--cultural,
spiritual, or physical integrity--with this other language. But it's got to be a real choice; it's got to
be a real choice.
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To some degree you know, obviously,
we use the language of colonization, the language of domination, in an
appropriate manner. But it is still not a complete choice. Because we find ourselves regarding our
Native or Indigenous
languages as secondary. In South America, Mexico, Central America, we find ourselves speaking
Spanish. Here in the
United States, English.
JP: Or in Africa, French . . .
SO: Or British English. Or in Brazil, Portuguese. It's a dilemma.
BH: Ngugi has approached it by writing in Gikuyu and English. What do you think about that? You mentioned something about risks . . .
SO: Ngugi's friend and associate at NYU, Tim Weiss, and I talked
about the possibility of getting together with Ngugi, for
him and I to talk. I want to learn from him. What are the principles, the theories, and practices
that make it possible for him
to believe in the use of an Indigenous language. It's much more of an assertive method to use an
Indigenous language such
as Gikuyu or any other Indigenous language as the main mode of communication for the
conveyance of knowledge.
I really think its possible to use an
Indigenous language so that it is truly a language of choice for you, but still you can
use another language or other languages. For example, though I don't have any real research to
back this up, I think that
Native peoples in the Americas were multilingual before the Europeans came.
They spoke not only their home
language, that is, say Acoma--let's just go with the people at home--we spoke our own
home language. But we also spoke neighboring languages. Such as Navajo. By the time the
Spaniards came, Navajos had
become a part of the general cultural world of Acoma, so Navajo was spoken. That was a fairly
recent language.
Before that, there were other Pueblo
languages. Zuni Pueblo is to the west, fairly close to Acoma. It has an entirely
different language, yet I believe people were familiar with and knew how to speak the Zuni
language. To the east, are the
Tiwa speakers of Isleta and Sandía, just north and south of Albuquerque, wholly different
languages. And then not too far
away are the people of Jemez Pueblo, another different language. And then there were people of
the plains further to the
east who certainly interfaced with Pueblo peoples.
So there were a number of languages.
When the Spaniards came and {5} brought a language
different from any of the
others, I think that the people were already multilingual. European people used language as the
device to control and to
dominate, certainly as a means of control and imposing their power. I think today there is no real
reason not to use your
own language, that is the language of your choice. Meaning that if I decide to use my own Native
language--that is Acoma,
or Keres which is the language that Acoma speaks--I'll use that as a choice, a decision.
But also if I want to use English or
Spanish or any other language. Navajo or Zuni.
JP: German.
SO: German, yeah. I should be able to do that. As long as it is a decision that is made as a matter of ethics, that it's the right thing for me.
BH: Critics may look at Ngugi and say, "That's wonderful; you're writing in your native tongue, but the majority of people in your homeland cant understand it." It seems like quite a paradox to be able to exercise that choice, an act of reclamation if you will. But I wonder what you think of some of the tensions involved in using an Indigenous language. You have such a larger audience when you work in English or a European language.
SO: We make that choice. Or we are forced into making that
choice because of the larger context. The larger context of the
world surrounds us, and obviously choices are made, choices determined by the surroundings.
Political choices are kind of
choices of convenience. In other words, since not many people speak Gikuyu here in Bellingham,
or Acoma, or in Lummi,
the Indian community and reservation where I was today, then we end up making the choice and
decision to speak the
language that everyone understands. Meaning that right now, the present society we are
surrounded by and we live within
speaks and understands English--and so we go along with English, not that that's a better choice
and not because it's a wise
choice but that it is a choice of convenience. It's what we manage things by.
Someone asked me a question
yesterday about the Internet as another form of language, another form of
communication. As long as Internet doesn't become a language of control that takes me over, I
think that it can be helpful
and useful. But I think the tendency is to become dependent upon it, and we have no choice
except to live by it.
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JP: It becomes the default language.
SO: Yeah. In the same way, in some sense. Let's look at the
political economy. We end up using dollars and cents because
we either lack the imagination or the will or the power to not use dollars and cents. We end up
going along with the system
as it is. We know it's not the best system in the world. We know in a deep innate sense that its
not and that were somehow
working against ourselves when we use the default.
In terms of literature, we really can
speak truly for ourselves and have a sense of authenticity, honesty, and integrity.
It's not as if we don't have a sense of that choice, a decision we can't make. I bring up the
question to myself and to others:
What happens when we don't conscientiously use the English language? And go along with it just
because its convenient?
In answer to myself I said that when I
use nuu yuh Aacquemeh hano ka-dzeh-nih--Acoma people's language--it feels
more tangible in a palpable way. It's not abstract. When I speak English sometimes I find myself
in the Western cultural
world of abstraction. I don't know whether this is a conflict or not, but abstraction and
objectification. Treating ideas like
things or objects. I find it quite convenient to objectify when I'm in that mode of Western cultural
thought. When I am
speaking in the Acoma language, it seems to be less so, less abstract, unless I'm just fooling
myself somehow. I am less
abstract when I am speaking in the Native language. But perhaps I don't really know because I
haven't fully thought it
out--because in some way there is a sort of abstraction that may come from a defensive position,
when you are only
speaking in a very specific dimension and only thinking for a specific purpose.
JP: Well, do you think it could be just second-language use? I wonder about that, too, because when you speak in your native language, whether it be Acoma or English or whatever, and then you speak in another language, the process of speaking has a different significance than it does when you're speaking the language that you're born and raised in as an native speaker.
SO: If you mean a different process, you believe in it in a different way? Or do you believe its somehow much more tangible or weighty?
JP: No, I think it's that the act of utterance itself becomes the focus rather than the thing that you're saying, because of the translation differ-{7}ence. So if I'm a native English speaker and I go to Germany, for instance, and I'm conversing with someone in German, all of a sudden there's a subtle shift in the dynamics of language itself.
SO: When I have found myself translating, I don't feel comfortable
translating mechanically or technically. Because I felt
like I was objectifying my thoughts. And I don't want to objectify my thoughts. In other words,
this sort of relates to what I
was saying about making it abstract. Nothing should be abstract because some abstractions are
intended to be manipulative,
and you're abstracting only to create diversion and to create a different sense other than what you
intend.
Do you speak other languages?
BH: I speak Spanish and Russian, and I've stared at the Cherokee syllabary many times, though I think I may need to go to Oklahoma and stay for a while to pick it up. But there is something in the process of translating your ideas . . .
SO: You know I wanted to read the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis
Singer. In Yiddish. And study his ideas, discussions, and
conversations about language. When a native speaker speaks in his own language and in his own
cultural mode, he is his
own cultural real self. He is probably more real then, unless I'm just saying this because it's what
I want to believe. Singer
was much more real when he wrote in his native Yiddish than when he was working with
translators, although I've never
heard him say that.
How about that other guy?
Conrad?
JP: Joseph Conrad?
SO: He was Polish, but he wrote in English. A great English writer.
JP: There are a number of them. Nabokov, Russian and English. That kind of takes me back to what you were saying earlier about that possibility for cross-pollenization, working with people or peoples or authors from other continents who have faced colonial issues as well. When we were talking about it earlier, it was only directional in one way, in a sense. Well . . . it would be nice to work with them, to find out what they've experienced, but also what you could learn from them. But the other possibility is that they could learn a lot from that exchange as well.
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SO: That's the other motivation for wanting
to talk with Ngugi. To know the agenda or the reasons for insisting on your
own language. It has to do with what your experience has been under colonization, your
experience of colonialism. We
Native people in the Americas have not really faced our use of Spanish and English. We use
them but we have not really
looked at our use. I even have the feeling, maybe more of a sentiment, that we have arrived at our
use of English too easily.
In other words, we have had not a big experience with English and Spanish but we use them
quite well. What does that
mean? Does it mean that we have let our Native spirit, our Native soul, our Native culture, our
Native identity go too
easily? I hate to think of it but that's one of the explanations.
BH: I'm sure that people have asked you this before, but when you write something in your Native language, how do you hope that younger people, on the reservation or in cities, wherever, would react to that?
SO: That they be encouraged. That they be encouraged to write in
their own Native languages. Although, of course,
representations of Native language are for the most part phonetic, and using alphabets of Western
cultural languages such
as English, using the symbols and script, using equivalent sounds represented by visual symbols.
The devising or
development of a written Native language has not taken place. Although Sequoia, the Cherokee,
to some degree did that,
developed a syllabary that has been useful and is an example.
I do have some reservations about
writing. It has reference to why some Indian people do not want to teach the writing
of their Native language or do not want to allow the writing of their Native language. Oral
language--compared to written
language--is much more immediate and intimate; that's the only way language and culture can
actually be lived. Not
represented but actually lived. Representation is like photography. Take a photograph of this cup
of coffee; it's just a
picture, it's not the coffee. Language is the same way; you can't "write" the language down; that's
a representation of it, a
photograph of it. Actual language is what you and I are talking--words, sounds, body and facial
and eye language. We are
involved in and participating in the act of language.
Language and literature are a form of
participation. Story, I think, is participatory. There's not just one way of telling a
story. Story is a manifestation of flexibility.
BH: Like the end of Ceremony, when Grandmother says, "It seems like I {9} already heard these stories before . . . only thing is, the names sound different."
SO: People, of course, have imagination and different kinds of insight, and may still be tied to something consistent, but yet they're different. And that kind of difference is a kind of love. You don't let something go, you keep it. Although it's different, it is still useful and helpful to you. Songs, I think, are good examples. Songs that evoke emotion. They may be different but they are rich and full and deep and have a dimension of emotion that convey feeling.
BH: Every time I read one of your poems, there is so much emotion that I feel a connection to it. This is sort of a big shift of topic here, but not really. I'm taking a poetry seminar right now, and among the many things we 're reading is language poetry--English fragmented, fractured, so many ideas taken out, verbs taken out, to the point where the finished poem is, at least has the appearance of being, void of emotion, void of narrative. There is no "I" in the poem. It raises interesting issues about how you ask the reader to interact with a poem, and it even has music in it somehow. But often I feel a huge distance between myself and the poem. I just wonder what your take on that approach to modern poetics was, because personally I identify with your work much more than that.
SO: Sometimes I find that I'm not very well-schooled in formal
poetics. I've read a lot, but I think I've not been a very good
scholar of what I've read. I read because I like the appeal of being immersed in ideas. It's like
jumping into a pool of ideas. I
feel that maybe I'm more into the sensation of those ideas rather than following any analytical
string of thought. My reading
is this and that . . . all over the place.
I'm a student of poetics because I like
poetry. [Laughter.] I'm not a very good critic either. When I first began to read
poetry as poetry I read Beat poetry because it seemed to be very ordinary, very common, very
approachable, very
accessible. It was something that I could identify with without having a formal, scholarly, or
analytical, or critical,
approach. It was something very tangible, something that I could relate to in a very immediate,
non-abstract way. Of course
I was also very impressionable when I was in high school. That was in the late
1950s, when the Beats were people like
Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac.
JP: Like yesterday, when you talked about Black Mountain in North {10} Carolina, and Robert Creeley.
SO: Yeah. They seemed to me something that were not removed from my own world. It was all right to be all right, it was all right to be who you were, and I think there's a real freedom in that. And yet there were also specific things' like Zen Buddhism. I was reading Eastern philosophy that I associated with my own Native culture. I mean there's some Native American similarities with Buddhism, I also liked Dostoyevsky. Of all the Russian authors, Dostoyevsky was my favorite. And also Chekhov. I'm not sure why. It wasn't a real highly developed intellectual reasoning I think.
BH: Something that was tangible.
SO: Checkov is very tangible. He was a dramatist. I like not his plays so much but rather his stories. I think as far as American literature went I know I really liked some of the same kind of style. Like Steinbeck, some of Hemingway. Sherwood Anderson. Of course this probably had something to do with the kind of high school literature classes that I had. I like literature, but I don't know why. [Laughter.] Probably in retrospect, if somebody did analyze why, they would come up with something I would agree with. [More laughter.]
JP: There's always that chance.
SO: You know who I liked years and years ago? I haven't read him for a long time. Saul Bellow. But I wonder why? And I liked Norman Mailer too You read him?
JP: Yeah, sure. But it'll be curious to look ahead maybe fifty years or more. Have someone sitting around with an up-and-coming young writer, or somebody who's doing very well' some Anglo guy, and say who are your influences--say Scott Momaday, or Jim Welch, or Simon Ortiz, or Louise Erdrich, or Leslie Silko.
SO: I had a kind of strange sort of reading upbringing. My father read some, and also my mother, but I would not say that they were literary people at all, not in the classical or "literary" sense. My dad used to like Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. I remember my mother reading Pearl Buck to me. And who was the guy who wrote Shangri La?
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JP: Hilton?
SO: Yeah. James Hilton, I remember being fascinated. I was in grade school then.
JP: Well, you may not agree with the elements of the story, but they were stories.
SO: Oh yeah.
JP: Stories that kept you going.
SO: I haven't talked to Leslie Silko or Louise Erdrich or James
Welch or Scott Momaday about this but I wonder how
similar we may be in our reading backgrounds. I was kind of a strange kid. I read a lot but I don't
know why, I just wanted
to know. I just wanted to know.
Part of it was being conscious of
myself as an Indian So I may have been deliberately making a choice of trying to
attain something. If I felt like I was being looked at disparagingly, that is, in a demeaning way, as
an Indian, I think that I
may have selected literature accordingly, literature I liked and identified with. Not that I didn't
like it; I mean I loved
reading. I still do. But that may have been part of my subconscious decision or choice that I read
in high school someone
like Blake or Shakespeare. I remember I checked out books like Rise and Fall of the
Roman Empire, not your typical high
school fare. And I think that it became a part of my aesthetic development. I don't think it's a
matter of choice of developing
one's mind; you go where your interests are.
JP: So you find somebody who's writing who shares an interest with you, and that's part of the attraction?
SO: Yeah, I think. Or you like something that someone else likes. And you sort of admire that person--so you go with that. Or you identify with someone you admire and respect.
JP: Rudolpho Anaya was here a few years back, and I'll never
forget. For his reading, he said, "Everyone's always asking
me to read from Bless Me, Ultima. That's an old book. I've read from it a thousand
times. I want to read you a poem I've
never read." And it was a poem about Walt Whitman coming to New Mexico." [Laughter.] He
said, "I like Walt {12}
Whitman. Why not? So I wrote a poem about Walt Whitman coming to New Mexico."
That's the way literature works. I
mean, we all share stories, and find someone who has a similar interest and a
different story. It's good to share in that somehow.
SO: There was an old guy, I think he may have passed away by
now, Sabine--I'll always remember his stories. A Chicano,
he used to teach Spanish at University of New Mexico. He'd say, "Simon, my friend, you and I,
we are the only storytellers
left" [spoken in dialect, laughter]. I got a kick out of that.
Native American literature is a
way--for those who write it, Native writers themselves--for us to insist on our validity.
Because in some ways, Native literature is still not accepted. That may have to do with the choice
of language. We use
English, obviously, as the language of dominant culture, and we go along with the dominant
culture. But I think we have to
be conscious of our reasons for using English and to be aware of its pitfalls. If we're not, we're
simply going along with it,
pitfalls and all. I know that some of my fellow Native writers may disagree with me.
BH: It's a matter of your consciousness of your language.
SO: There are a few writers who insist on Native language use.
Rex Lee Jim is one. And Irvin Morris. And Ray Young
Bear, from Iowa.
Let me ask you a question.
BH: Okay.
SO: You said you had looked at Cherokee--why?
BH: Why?
SO: Do you want to speak it, or just understand it?
BH: Both, I think. I suppose that as a Jewish Cherokee who can't
speak Hebrew or Cherokee, I sometimes feel dislocated.
And as a young writer, I think there is much I can learn from the old stories in their native
tongue.
Every time I look at a newspaper or
something that comes from Tahlequah, the tribe puts so much emphasis on
maintaining culture through language. To teach the language, to maintain culture through
language. I {13} feel like I should
be doing something which I could justify as helpful or constructive in some way, and one way I
can do that is learning to
speak the language, so maybe that's what I ought to do. People in my family have worked to
sustain the vitality of Indian
people in many ways, on reservations, in the courts, the government, academia. I look at my
cousins and myself, and our
place in time, and I think that it's important. I don't know, I'm not quite sure how to explain
it.
SO: I'll tell you a story. Years ago, in 1970 or so, I had gone to
Oklahoma. This is on that trip that I took to look for
Indians. I went to Tahlequah and met a couple of Cherokee guys. We'd become friends. The guys
told me, "You know,
we're Cherokees. But do you want to meet a real Cherokee?"
I said, "Well, sure."
They said, "Lets go see ol'
Smitty."
I said, "Okay. Where does he
live?"
They said, "Oh he lives over there,
behind those hills."
They pointed over toward the Ozark
hills, northeast Oklahoma. Kind of over to the Missouri, Arkansas border.
So we go out that way a day later or
so. I don't know how many miles we went, quite a ways up into those hills. Soon
the road gave out onto just this dirt track. And then we stopped. At a little house. Nobody seemed
to be around, and we just
sat in the car drinking beer and stuff. Pretty soon the door of the house opened, the guys got out
of the car, and they talked
to a woman.
The guys came back and said, "He's
not here right now; he'll be back in a while I guess." So we sat some more,
waiting. Waiting.
Pretty soon from around the back of
the house comes this older guy, maybe seventy something. He was a nondescript
older Indian man. He spoke Cherokee, nothing but Cherokee, at least that's what I thought then.
And they--the guys and
he--all spoke Cherokee, and of course I don't speak Cherokee.
The impression I got was that he--ol'
Smitty--was this real authentic Cherokee man who didn't speak English, who
only spoke Cherokee!
Well, after maybe an hour or so, it
turns out he did speak English. But he only spoke English when he was assured that
you were going to approach him as a Cherokee man.
We talked. He was a nice guy, good
sense of humor, a storyteller. I think if he had only spoken Cherokee I would have
thought he was just being stubborn or he didn't want me to be associated with him. And {14} when it turns out he spoke
English, he was even more Cherokee to me.
JP: Well then we're back to the issue of choice, right? Like we're talking about with the writing . . .
But at this moment we found that we were late for Simon's reading, and we had no choice but to defer the conversation until later.
In a recent letter, Simon noted that his last story was cut short. His story of ol' Smitty continues: "He was an elderly fiddle maker who young white people from Tulsa and Oklahoma City came to seek out I guess. They seemed to regard him as some kind of folk figure, an exotic throwback or something, an Indian artifact more or less, and that's the way they saw him or preferred to see him! And he spoke only in Cherokee to them, never English. Although he spoke English! Which he spoke with me after he decided-understood I wasn't going to treat him like he was some throwback Cherokee artifact." Sounds like they had quite an interesting conversation . . .
{15}
Coyote, He/She Was Going There: Sex and Gender in Native American Trickster Stories1
Franchot Ballinger
Most readers of Native American oral traditions have at least a nodding acquaintance with a
trickster--Raven, Coyote, Blue
Jay, Iktomi the spider or Nanabush--and most are aware of the ribaldry often informing trickster
stories. Few, however,
have considered the implications of Tricksters sexuality. Fewer still have considered the fact that
tricksters are commonly,
but not exclusively, male. Of the hundreds of trickster tales I have read, in no more than a few
dozen are the trickster
protagonists female (and some of these stories can be found in other Native American oral
traditions in versions with male
protagonists). Moreover, even in those tribes whose trickster stories have female protagonists,
such stories are apparently in
the minority. These few facts suggest that exploring trickster stories for an understanding of
sexuality and gender
expectations may provide some unique, if not revolutionary, insights into Native American
trickster stories while
underscoring the richness of the trickster tradition as a socially formative kind of entertainment
(as opposed to the
Euroamerican scholarly cliché of Trickster as a sort of Romantic overreacher).
With Siobahn Senier, who also
considered questions of gendering, I "ask why [a trickster story] is gendered and
relayed as it is . . . and [I] {16} speculate as to what kind
of impulses [a] narration might be reinforcing or subverting"
(223). Even if Native American storytellers and audiences have not commented on or otherwise
explicitly acknowledged
the role of gender in trickster stories, there are clues that gender roles are sometimes part of their
underlying didacticism
and satire. The thesis of this paper is, then, that in a number of Native American trickster stories,
gender matters. The use of
either male or female tricksters as well as a storyteller's gendering narrative details may point to a
storyteller's critical
cultural judgments or personal observations on a tribe's gender assumptions--for example,
attitudes toward male headmen
or the nature of men's and women's behavior or ideals of male or female social roles--or to
corrective commentary directed
at an individual. Certainly, this is so in male trickster stories, and it is likely true in at least some
stories with female
tricksters. Further, there are a few trickster stories that are interesting to consider in the context of
the Two Spirit people
(once known as berdaches).
Readers might question the wisdom
and value of focusing on the topic of tricksters' gender, considering that it seems
of little or no significance in the discussion of so many trickster stories. However, the effort in
recent studies of Native
American oral traditions has often been to "read" stories as works of individual creativity, not as
the products of a
homogeneous, traditional voice. The fact that trickster gender was a matter of indifference to
many trickster storytellers
may make all the more significant those instances in which gender does seem to be an issue.
Some storytellers certainly
would have been more responsive than others to opportunities for social commentary and
teaching afforded by trickster
stories, just as some were more sensitive to and skillful at practicing the "aesthetics" of the
community's storytelling
tradition. In this context, I want to proceed carefully in my "interpretations." Readers should not
assume that I see a
particular story as an official reflection of a culture's values.2 I am well aware of
Craig Thompson's caution: "Every
group--every individual--is a producer of cultural meaning; nobody is merely an object of
cultural perceptions" (36). It is
not accurate to claim that a myth projects a society's "real" attitude about anything. Rather it is
probably true that "in the
actual context of performance, there were a variety of audiences which a single 'univocal' reading
doesn't account for."
Stories are part of a "continual social discourse"; that is, meaning lies in "reactions to the tales
and in the effect that the tale
had on intertribal relations" (23). Similarly, a story represents a single storyteller's interpretation
of how a story's narrative
details open a window on his or {17} her culture's
values. Clearly, the cultural value theme dramatized in one telling of a
trickster story may not be at all present in another telling. Nevertheless, some cultural
generalizations may be possible as an
entry point for this topic.
Melville Jacobs first stimulated my
curiosity about gender issues in the Trickster tradition. One of a few writers to
consider why female tricksters are relatively rare, Jacobs argues that male tricksters are exclusive
in the Chinook oral
tradition because Coyote's main personality traits--particularly inordinate, vulgar sexuality and
traveling for the sake of
adventure--were considered male traits only (Content 141). He further conjectures
that a male storyteller would have
recounted "more and better" Coyote stories than his storyteller/consultant, Mrs. Howard, because
the "Coyote personality
would surely have been identified with more often by men than women" (Content
121). In some other cultures as well,
narrating trickster stories was apparently associated with men only. One example is that
Anishinabe Wenebojo stories
related to the Mide wiwin were told mainly by men (Barnouw 117). Also,
associations between the trickster and male
characteristics were made in other tribes; the Cayuga trickster, to cite another specific instance,
"represents unrestrained
male sexuality" (Day 77).
To call such assumptions and
understandings stereotyping would be ethnocentric. However, in matters of social
expectations for men and women, Turtle Island's indigenous peoples assumed specific and
different social and family roles
for men and women. While such assumptions don't, in general, seem to have been justification
for oppressing or otherwise
belittling women (men's and women's roles and responsibilities commonly being accorded equal
significance), there do
seem to have been clear cut assumptions and expectations about gender character and
responsibility. Consequently, given
the licentiousness associated with men, it is no accident that most tricksters are male.
In any event, the hyperbole that
abounds in dramatizations of male trickster sexuality carries that sexuality to levels
traditionally unacceptable to many Euroamericans, but traditionally, many Native American
societies have been less
priggish than the dominant Euroamerican culture. In early times among the Klamath, obscene
anal and erotic details were
essential features of some myths (both trickster and non-trickster) and were recounted even in the
presence of children
(Stern, "Some Sources" 1 37).3 Native American playwright Hanay Geiogamah
acknowledges that "among the boys"
trickster stories were commonly pornographic (Lincoln 75-6). Nevertheless, while these stories
may have provided juicy
{18} entertainment, the social dangers and disorder
attending or threatened by men's unbridled sexuality is at the heart of a
number of trickster tales.4
Trickster's prodigious sexual appetites
and energy are hilariously and powerfully dramatized by the gamut of their
lusts and the size of their penises. The Yurok trickster, Wohpekumeu, to cite one instance, is so
sexually robust and so
promiscuous that he impregnates women with a mere glance. Because of his sexual threat, the
people once literally leave
him in the world alone, making him temporarily one of the few truly outcast Tricksters (Kroeber,
Yurok 311). No doubt the
best known depiction of a trickster's sexuality is the Winnebago Wadjunkaga's extraordinarily
long penis (long enough that
it can snake across a stream and insert itself into a woman's vagina) which he carries in a box on
his back, giving the
illusion of control (Wiget, Native 16-17)--a control essential to good social order
but a control clearly beyond a trickster's
capabilities, as the evidence of the stories show.5 Also well equipped, the
Athapascan Coyote carries his penis flung over
his shoulder (Erdoes 71). Even though such a phallus is not explicitly characteristic of all male
tricksters, the image has
become synecdochic for all tricksters' licentiousness. Males in many cultures keep telling
themselves that size is everything,
the bigger the better. However, in one Crow trickster story, it's the little things that count--at least
temporarily, and we get a
wonderfully comic image of the lengths to which Old-Man Coyote will go to have sex with a
pretty girl. During a dance, a
young woman tells the men to expose their penises because she wants to marry the man with the
smallest. Old Man Coyote
exchanges penises with mouse. The girl chooses him, of course, but his triumph lasts only until
the on-lookers see mouse
trying to walk through the encampment dragging Old Man Coyote's huge penis (Lowie,
Myths 43).
No woman is safe for long from a
trickster's penis; not virgins or other men's wives, not his daughters, not his
mother-in-law, not even his grandmother. Nor, consequently, is any social relationship or
institution safe. Community well
being and harmony, friendship, marriage, family: all fall before trickster's incorrigible penis.
Sometimes a trickster's sexual
rapaciousness drives him to violate very specific tribal moral customs. Crow married women
were vulnerable to being
kidnapped by former lovers in the rivalry existing between the Lumpwood and Fox societies. It
was shameful for a man to
take back a wife who had been abducted. However, Old Man Coyote brags that he has done so
three times. In fact, his mere
glance reminds a woman of the sexual favors he has shown her, so that regardless of any
disgrace, she will return to him
(Lowie, Crow {19} 56). Human females
are not his only victims; a buffalo cow mired in a wallow is on occasion as
acceptable to a trickster as a human woman.6 In a sense, he even sexually abuses
men when in some stories he marries a
chief's son. Thanks to his prodigious penis, Trickster even "abuses" himself when he commits
self-fellatio (Bright 70-72;
Ramsey, Reading 44-45). The issue in many of these stories is not sexual
victimization as such but rather the cruelty,
self-deception, and absurdity of a man whose unrestrained sexuality poses a threat to the
community. Such stories
dramatize the power of human sexuality to whirl us beyond the boundaries of human social
constraints.7
These facts notwithstanding, there are
occasions when a trickster's sexual assertiveness is stimulated by hostility and
aggression toward a woman, and women become his victims because of their gender. In a Nez
Perce story, an old woman
ridicules his eyes because they appear wide-open in the dark. "Coyote then thinks to himself,
'Your saying such a thing,
woman, makes me want to make you my wife and get even with you' [that is, have sex with her]"
(Walker 206).
Sometimes, he acts out his anger or hostility toward a woman for other reasons and perhaps in
non-sexual ways. Coyote
becomes so angry when Eagle's daughter refuses to marry him that he turns women into rock
(Clark 113). More often, sex
seems a weapon, as when in some Nez Perce stories Coyote rapes and impregnates "young
women who are enemies"
(Walker 207-8). There is at least one common story type in which female sexuality is the cause
of trickster's hostility:
so-called vaginal dentata stories. In these stories, female sexuality--not male, as is usually the
case in trickster stories--poses
a threat, at least to the availability of women to men. In an Upper Cowlitz story of Soft Basket
Woman's vaginal teeth,
Coyote destroys the teeth with artificial penises and then announces that in the future sexual
union between men and
women will be more congenial to and a good deal less dangerous to men (Jacobs, "Sahaptin"
188-90).
Male tricksters' dealings with women
are often directed by their response to or manipulations of gender expectations
for women. Sometimes they shape women's lives. In many instances, a trickster's shenanigans
introduce a few benefits but
more often, limitations, even controls, on women's lives. Hence, Coyote creates pregnancy in a
Wishram story (Ramsey,
Coyote 52). In a Havasupai story, Coyote gives origin to women's menstrual cycles
by flipping fresh fawn blood between
his sister's legs, apparently in order to prevent her sharing in his freshly killed deer meat
(Niethammer 37-38). Similarly,
Manabush originates menstruation by throwing a clot of bear's blood between the legs of
Nokomis, {20} his grandmother
(Hoffman 173-5). Finally, Crow legend tells us that it was Old Man Coyote who made women's
very existence possible, for
he created women to keep men company and to assure that the people will increase in number
(Lowie, Crow l24).9
In another common trickster episode,
one not overtly sexual but with obvious sexual and gender ramifications, women
(or at least, a certain kind of woman) are clearly a trickster's victims and the object of the story's
satire. The so-called
"well-behaved girl" (a euphemism for chaste but maybe also prudish?) stories tell of a young
woman who arrogantly rejects
all suitors and all thought of marrying. She pays a high price for her pride: Trickster hoodwinks
her into marrying him or at
least having sex with him, a severe humiliation given women's usual disdain for Trickster. The
Yurok trickster
Wohpekuman impregnates two young women who refuse to marry (Kroeber,
Yurok 304). Similarly, the Arapaho Nih'An
Ca' sleeps with two pretty sisters who won't marry (Dorsey and Kroeber 73-4). In a Tewa
version, Blue Corn girl and
Yellow Corn girl refuse one by one to marry the Cloud Boys of the four directions who offer
them marvelous gifts as
marriage tokens. Coyote says that these women are "lazy about [marriage]." When he dances and
sings for them, they want
to marry him. The next morning before the girls awaken, others in the village see that the girls
have married Coyote and
chase him away (Parsons, Tewa 242-6).
From a contemporary Euroamerican
point of view (particularly if the point of view is informed by feminism), this
latter story type may seem an assertion of male sexual-social authority over women. However,
imposing such views here
would be a mistake. It is likely that this trickster's audience--male and female alike--would have
approved of his victim's
chagrin in these cases, their roles as a woman. Clara Sue Kidwell has pointed out:
The status of Indian women within their communities is based upon different cultural values than those of typically middle class white women. The tribally oriented societies of Indian cultures and the extended family situation in which several generations may live very closely together give a different definition to the roles of women than do the nuclear family orientation and the technological aspect of the dominant society. . . . Marriage was a necessity for the survival of the community . . . for the procreation and carrying on of the group identity and culture. (114)
{21}
While a woman might have chosen not to marry and would have been allowed to live out her
choice, she was nevertheless
still subject to the disapproval of the community, for such a woman was "considered guilty of the
sin of pride, a sin that in
the close-knit structure and interdependence of the tribal group is of major import. . . .
(R]ejection of her [social] role was
in a sense a rejection of the whole society" (116; see also Lindsay 329-30). Looked at from this
point of view, we see a
trickster in an uncommon and ironic light: as enforcer of social stability teaching a woman a
lesson. When a woman is the
satirical butt of a male trickster story, it is usually because she (for once not the trickster) has--her
culture agrees--rebelled
against the community's values and needs.
But it is not only women who suffer
Trickster's chastening for not fulfilling society's gender expectations with respect
to marriage. Male versions of the "well-behaved girl" stories involve what might be called
Tricksters transgendering, yet
another way that tricksters cross the boundaries of the expected. In these stories, Trickster poses
as a woman and marries a
man. An Anishinabe story of this sort satirizes a chief's son's arrogant refusal to marry. When the
beautiful woman he has
married is unveiled as Wenebojo the young man is appropriately humiliated
(Barnouw 106). In a Swampy Cree version of
this tale, the trickster Wichilcapache hears of a conceited young man who wants a
wife but who cant find a "good one" and
therefore finds fault with every women he sees. (Norman 165). The trickster transforms himself
into a beautiful woman,
whom the young man "quickly likes" (Norman 165). Wichikapache proves to be a
good wife, even giving birth to children.
However, the children are wolf cubs, a fact that makes the young man the laughing stock of the
community. It is
immediately obvious to all that the beautiful woman must, in fact, be the trickster.
In any event, this last type of trickster
marrying story notwithstanding, it is safe to say that, generally speaking, the
laughter stimulated by most sexually-oriented male trickster stories is not because of what the
trickster does to women but
rather because of what he reveals about himself (and males?) as he victimizes others.
Tricksters relationships with women
are not always based on sexuality alone; sometimes their attitudes and behavior
toward women grow from their own failures to fulfill their gender roles. Deward B. Walker
points out that "Coyote is not
adept at skills a woman finds attractive in a potential mate such as fathering, hunting, or fighting"
(206); hence women
reject him repeatedly. His aggression toward women, then, is at least in part a consequence of his
own gender failings. In
episodes involving {22} adult males also, we see
tricksters failing to fill gender expectations. Walker points out that
hunting is the usual ground of the Nez Perce Coyotes interactions with males (221). The same is
true for other tricksters.
Commonly in these circumstances, their incompetence, lack of self-discipline, and unseemly
competitiveness lead
inevitably to failure as hunters. Episodes in which a trickster demonstrates his incompetence as
father and provider abound.
Those that come to mind most readily in this context are the bungling host stories in which a
trickster is hosted by an
animal who feeds his guest through some magical manipulation, sometimes involving killing his
children but bringing
them back to life after the feast. On occasion, the killing is only a ruse to trick the trickster. In
any event, when the trickster
tries to play host by killing his children for food, of course, the results are less fortunate. Walker
also recounts a Nez Perce
story in which Coyote cheats Porcupine in a rivalry for a buffalo carcass. He fetches his wife and
children to help him carry
home all of the meat rather than just taking home what he can carry. However, Porcupine kills
them all. This fatal but
predictable ending comes about because Coyote foolishly brought his family "to a place where
enemies are present, thus
placing them in danger" (85-88, 211).
On the basis of such evidence, it
seems clear that the satire of many trickster stories focuses on gender values.
But what about those relatively few
stories in which a female trickster is protagonist? The first obvious question is,
why are there so few? Given the vagaries of recording and translating stories from oral traditions,
it may be that female
tricksters were more common than current publications indicate. Perhaps many recorders--largely
dominant-culture
males--simply showed no interest in female tricksters, or perhaps, as Wiget has suggested,
women storytellers, more likely
to tell female trickster stories, weren't sought out by male investigators in the mistaken belief that
the men of the
community were the "repository of traditional knowledge" ("His Life" 89). Perhaps they
suppressed such stories for
propriety's sake. Or maybe the storytellers themselves, noting Euroamerican moral predilections
and cultural assumptions
about women, suppressed the stories. We could conjecture further, but the fact remains that there
are many fewer female
than male tricksters, in the academic record at least, and, possibly, in First Nations' oral traditions
as well.
Even when female tricksters have
appeared in Native American stories, there has been little or no printed commentary
on the protagonist's gender by either storyteller or ethnographer. Of course, the inevitable
question is, given the socially
formative or didactic nature of so many {23} trickster
tales, might it not make a difference whether a trickster is male or
female? Are female tricksters assigned certain kinds of motif or episode? Another logical
question is whether American
Indians had/have different attitudes about male and female tricksters. As far as the published
record is concerned, it appears
to some that, again, from the point of view of storyteller and ethnographer, the presence of a
trickster personality is more
important than gender. Writing about a Hopi story with a female protagonist, Andrew Wiget
comments: "the female sex of
the trickster seems only a contrivance to initiate the action, an element of setting, and is not
integral to the central action"
("His Life" 39).10 Further support for this general point of view may come in an
Acoma trickster tale in which the
protagonist's gender seems of so little consequence to either the storyteller or the recorder that
pronoun gender references
change a couple of times in the course of the story (Parsons, Pueblo Folktales
227-228).
Perhaps a trickster's gender is a matter
of narrative and thematic indifference to many storytellers. Still, I would
suggest that this is not always so, but rather that, at least on occasion (and maybe more frequently
than we know), gender
plays a role in plot and narrative details and reflects something about either a culture's or a
storyteller's gender attitudes. Or
perhaps the plot and narrative details of an episode type (for example, the borrowed feathers
episode below) encourage a
storyteller to use a gender-appropriate protagonist. On the few occasions that tricksters have
status or authority in a
community, their positions are generally of a sort associated with males in patrilineal societies. If
it's reasonable to assume
that such satirical narrative details of some trickster stories are male-directed, it seems equally
reasonable to assume that
some storytellers used female tricksters because they saw certain episodes as gender
appropriate.11 Although there may be
no particular kinds of episode assigned exclusively to female tricksters, when a story has a
female protagonist, it sometimes
seems to frame a gender-related theme or to be gender appropriate. In the relative absence of
analysis and commentary by
Native Americans, we can only conjecture about these matters. Readers must understand, then,
that much of the following
is hypotheses, not unflinching assertion; it is inference based on available cultural and narrative
evidence. The many
variables and the insufficiency of evidence here would make anything more than hypothesizing
foolish. Still, it is
interesting to speculate.
Partial evidence for intentional
gendering in a trickster story may be the fact that in one tribe a particular trickster
episode may have a male {24} protagonist, while in
another it may have a female protagonist. For example, the common
Bungling Host story among Plains and Central Woodlands tribes has a male trickster imitating
his erstwhile host by killing
his own children for food, while versions among the Tewa and the Hopi use female tricksters
(Parsons, Tewa 291; Malotki
and Lomatuwayma 77). The presence of male and female tricksters for the same or similar
episodes in respectively
patrilineal and matrilineal societies is not likely casual happenstance.12 However
these changes in gender came to be, it
seems reasonable to assume that for some storytellers, at least, cultural values and assumptions
led to considering certain
stories as particularly appropriate for female coyotes.
To proceed, then, in the few female
trickster stories available to us, she is commonly the object of the satire. The
questions arise: Is she satirized because she is a woman or is she satirized because she is a
trickster who incidentally is
female? What, if any, relationship exists between the trickster's gender and the narrative elements
in the stories? I believe
that in most female trickster stories the protagonist's trickster personality causes her to fall short
of her community's gender
role expectations. She is, therefore, fair game for satire, as is the male trickster personality when
he fails his society's
expectations, some of them gender-related, for example, when he fails both as a warrior and a
chief in the Winnebago cycle
or when he perverts his father's role by marrying his daughter. Furthermore, it seems that cultural
context sometimes
implies particular (if not essential) appropriateness for the narrative events and/or details of some
female trickster tales.
As we begin considering female
tricksters, we should note that there are two specific trickster attributes not
represented among published female trickster tales. This isn't to say that stories of either type
don't or didn't exist; again,
collections simply do not seem to contain them. First, there seem to be no female
trickster/transformers of the mythical
proportions of many male tricksters. The closest we get to female tricksters/ transformers is a
Crow story in which Old Man
Coyote's wife proves as creative as her husband through "sacred reversals" (to use Gerald
Vizenor's term) when she causes
various transformations of the world by contradicting the transformer Red-Woman's edicts. Like
her husband and other
transformer tricksters (particularly those who act as marplots in the creation of the world), she
contributes to making the
newly shaped world into the human world by establishing the possibility of early human death,
by giving origin to bates
(the so-called berdache), as well as to roots for medicine, etc. (Lowie,
Myths 28-30).13 The relative {25} absence of female
trickster-transformers is not likely due to denigration of feminine creativity, for, of course, many
American Indian tribal
mythologies contain female personages who transform the physical, social, and ceremonial
worlds. This includes
matrilineal societies with female trickster stories.
A second trickster attribute absent
among published female trickster stories is the trickster's prodigious sexual
appetite. A possible exception is a Hopi episode in which a widowed female Coyote grinds her
dead husband's penis into
powder which she applies to her vulva whenever she desires the same rollicking, rapturous sex
the living husband provided
her (Malotki and Lomatuwayma 55). However, this mother Coyote lacks other identifying
trickster traits, and her
motivation seems not so much rash bawdiness--what we would expect from a male trickster--as
simply a widow's longing
for the continuing benefit of her husband's sexual prowess.14 Whatever the
explanation for the paucity of sexual content, it
is generally speaking not prudishness about women and sex, for there are other kinds of stories,
including male trickster
stories, in which women prove equally lusty as men.
The most obvious fact we should note
about stories with female tricksters is that they are all from matrilineal and/or
matrilocal tribes, most Southwestern peoples, but a few from Caddoan peoples. In most, and
maybe all, of these tribes,
women have generally had significant de facto or "official" authority or power. For
example, among the western Tewa and
the Hopi, women have traditionally controlled the economic system and the home that is at the
core of that system. Women
own the houses, the fields, and the fruits of cultivation through their clans, with the clan mothers
having final say in matters
of distribution. Furthermore, strong ties among mothers-daughters-sisters create solidarity of
opinion, which in turn carries
much authority. Among the Tewa, it is the women who have traditionally cared for family ritual
possessions, no mean
office, to be sure (Schlegel 169-71; Dozier 137). Among the Navajo, in addition to an authority
attending matrilineality and
matrilocality, women have traditionally benefited from the liberation and authority of having
independent incomes and of
owning property, often more than men (Kessler 112). It should come as no surprise, then, that at
least some trickster stories
are about women in societies where women are notable social and economic forces.
Because some male trickster stories
satirize men who are in positions of authority or power, for example headmen or
shamans, we might be tempted to approach female trickster stories in matrilineal societies as
{26} satires of women's
authority. But when Mother Coyote is satirized, the reasons seem to be other than her authority or
power. In fact, she is so
incompatible with her societys' expectations of her that she seems to have neither. And this may
be the point of the stories:
perhaps she is the object of satire because she is incapable of being the strong woman her society
expects her to be. These
possibilities are underscored by a second fact: in these stories, Trickster is always a coyote. To be
sure, among the tribes
whose female trickster tales I've examined, male as well as female tricksters are coyotes. As
wandering hunters and as
social transgressors, all coyote tricksters, male and female, live wayward lives of risk and
transience. Nevertheless, the
female coyote trickster's incongruity with her community is even more pronounced, for to have a
hunting mother in a
culture where mothers traditionally control the agricultural means of production (as they did in
most of these tribes) seems
in itself a comment on her fecklessness.15
Interestingly, it is not only general plot
details but also specific narrative details that might reflect gender awareness. In
some female trickster stories, particularly Hopi stories, we find narrative details befitting
women's roles. For example, in
New Mexican and Arizona Tewa versions of the borrowed feathers story, both using male
tricksters, the birds at the
beginning of the story are either picking up wheat that lies about or dancing in gratitude for a
grass-like wheat available to
them (Parsons, Tewa 161, 283). In the eastern Pueblos, women were the gatherers
of seeds and nuts. Perhaps we see
another example in the eastern version of Coyote's once more placing himself out of his element,
in this case gender fitting
sustenance activities. In a Hopi version of the story, a female Coyote chances upon the Bird Girls
as they grind corn,
typically women's work at which, the storyteller informs us, they are always busy. While they
grind, they sing songs whose
images suggest the integral relationship between grinding, their identity and even their physical
traits.
Bird Girl, Bird Girl
Brush the cornmeal off the grinding
stone.
Bird Girl, Bird Girl
Brush the cornmeal off the grinding
stone.
Callous, callous are the nails,
Callous, callous are the horns
[Presumably, calluses from using the
grinding stone]
Meehe'e'e'e hew, hew, hew. (Malotki
and Lomatuwayma 93)
{27}
When the song ends, they briefly fly into the air, then return to their grinding, repeating the
work-ritual sequence again and
again. Into this scene, vagrant Coyote intrudes. She sees, perhaps, not the stability of women's
work-ritual but rather a game
and, one assumes, an easy meal of Bird Girls. At her request, the Bird Girls allow her to join in
the grinding, which she
does awkwardly. This is not, after all, her usual work. Next, she wants to learn the song and then
the dance-flight, both of
which are as alien to her earth-bound presence as the customary women's work of grinding corn.
The Bird Girls give
Coyote some of their feathers so that she, too, can fly. The consequences of her whim are
predictably disastrous when the
Bird Girls pluck their feathers from Coyote while she is in the air.16 The
fundamental point here is that the Hopi storyteller's
use of a gender related activity like corn grinding gives to the story a more pointed and focused
satirical thrust than the
Tewa male version. Once again, Mother Coyote demonstrates how miserably she fails to meet
the demands of her role, in
addition to proving that her blundering imitations take her into unfamiliar territory where she
doesn't belong. While such
gender-specific details are by no means a consistent difference between male and female trickster
stories, even their
occasional occurrence suggests that some storytellers were aware of the difference gender makes
in the import of a story.
Another fact deserving note is that in
almost all stories with female tricksters, some reference is made to her children.
In all tribes' male trickster stories, references to Trickster's family are relatively infrequent. When
his family are referred to
or even made characters in a story, their roles are, with a few exceptions, quite perfunctory, with
no essential plot or
thematic function.17 To be sure, in some female trickster stories, references to or
uses of trickster's family may be equally
perfunctory. Still, there are other instances in which the family as a whole, or Coyote's children
or husband in particular,
seems to fill significant plot or thematic role. Sometimes a story merely opens with a reference to
the fact that she has a
family; sometimes the beginning shows or implies that Coyote is trying to meet her maternal
duties, for example, by
hunting or fetching water for her children.18 She starts, then, with the best of
intentions (something we can seldom say
about the male tricksters). But in each instance, her good intentions dissolve under more
immediate enticements. Greed,
envy, curiosity, her inability to postpone gratification, her ambition to possess what is not
rightfully hers, or some vanity or
another leads her to instability and to grief. In one story, her desire to have children as pretty as
Deer's makes her gullible
enough to burn or {28} suffocate her own children when
she is tricked into putting them in a fire. In an even more common
story, her wish to possess another's song, which she wants to sing to her children but which she
repeatedly forgets, causes
her children to die waiting for her to bring food or water. Her efforts to cheat Porcupine backfire
as Porcupine exploits
Coyote's gullibility leading to her and her children's deaths. On those occasions when she decides
that she wants something
not rightfully hers (for example, pretty spots for her children, a certain song, an improved scheme
for hunting), her
children's presence in the story underscores their trickster mother's foolishness, lack of
self-control, or unnatural desires.
Considering the frequency with which the children appear in or are referred to in female trickster
stories, we are, I suspect,
often intended to see a female Coyote's failings as specifically a mother's failings.
A Coyote trickster's character may be
particularly threatening to the values attached to women/mothers in Native
American stories. In most American Indian traditions, a woman was expected to play a
stabilizing role in a community
through her steadfastness and creative powers. While men's traditions were, according to Paula
Gunn Allen, largely about
risk and change, women's and mothers' traditions and rituals were devoted to food, household,
medicine; that is, with the
maintenance and continuity of life (82). Another source of stability and continuity, particularly
for the extended family but
also for the community as a whole, can be seen in the expectation that women would defer
willingly (but not irrevocably)
any immediate personal goals they might have (Bataille and Sands 19-20; Kessler 111). Even
without reading the stories,
we can guess that Mother Coyote will fail to meet such ideals and expectations. If nothing else,
her wandering undercuts
the domestic stability she ought to provide.
A Hopi story illustrates Mother
Coyote's failings dramatically and also reveals that not all trickster stories are
comically amusing, for this story--one of the most stunning trickster stories I have read--ends
tragically, if ironically. While
it may evoke laughter, as do most trickster stories, the laughter is an uneasy, even grim laughter.
In this story, Mother
Coyote learns, or thinks she learns, sorcery.
From the story's beginning, we can see
that this mother is in a difficult position. Her husband is dead and she, being
Coyote, after all, is alone without the support of an extended family; she must do all the hunting
to feed her children. Once
while hunting, she comes upon a kiva where witches (Two-Hearts as
the Hopi call them) are engaging in their ceremonies,
the most important being jumping through a hoop to trans-{29}form themselves into animals, a common ritual for witches,
as is their killing others--even relatives--for their hearts so that the witches might survive.
Curious, Coyote spies on the
witches, who discover her and drag her into their kiva much against her wishes. Told that she
must now become a Two
Heart, Coyote decides that she wants the power to turn herself into a cottontail, for in this form
she can chase down rabbits,
changing back to a coyote for the kill at the last instant. The hoop rolls; Coyote jumps through
and becomes a cottontail,
but unknown to her the head witch spits, which means that Coyote won't be able to transform
herself back. When the
ceremonies end, Mother Coyote heads for home, delighted at her new power which is sure to
increase her ability to care for
her little ones. As she approaches home, she says, "I'd like to turn back to a coyote," but, because
it is dark, she can't see
that she does not transform. In addition, we might assume that, because Coyote possesses so little
self-awareness, she is
unable to sense any difference in herself. Eager to rejoin her children, she rushes into the lair.
You can imagine the
reception this cottontail gets from the starving coyote pups (Malotki and Lomatuwayma
161-77).
A characteristic failing of
Coyotes--nosiness, being where she has no business--places her in a circumstance that must
inevitably lead to evil, destructive ends. Of course, anyone's joining witches would be
horrendous, but a mother's doing so
seems especially appalling. Moreover, rather than a ceremonial tradition that maintains life, as
women's traditions do, she
joins a ritual whose participants survive only through others' deaths, a ritual which is a menace to
the community and to the
family, the very people a mother's steadfastness and selflessness should sustain. Part of the grim
irony of this story is that
Coyote joins the Two Hearts who survive by killing even family, but her children kill her as they
struggle to survive. While
her desire to find a better way to provide for her pups is understandable, the fact remains that her
desire for an unnatural
advantage leads her to violent change and death, not to life's perpetuation.
In brief, with the ghastly laughter this
story elicits from its audience, Mother Coyote unwittingly teaches us exactly
what Old Man Coyote teaches us: more often than not, we will pay a price for yielding to the
moment's whim and trying to
be someone we are not. But it does so in narrative terms that seem particularly appropriate for the
gender and cultural
context of its protagonist.
There is little doubt that gender
expectations play a significant role in trickster stories with male protagonists and at
least some of the time in {30} female protagonist
trickster stories. Such an observation about males and females is a
relatively straightforward matter. One particular trickster story, however, complicates the issue of
gender and tricksters and
elicits more questions than answers. An Omaha trickster story published in Erdoes and Ortiz's
American Indian Trickster
Tales raises other sorts of gender questions about tricksters, this time about the persons
called in the past berdaches, now
called by many writers, Two-Spirit people.19
Unlike Euroamerican cultures whose
gender distinctions are binary and focus on heterosexuality only, many Native
Americans generally defined genders in terms of occupational propensity and behavior rather
than sexual choices or
biology (Callender and Kochems 455; Malta and Archambault 23). Some contemporary students
of Native Americans'
gendering assert that Native American traditions often recognized not only male and female but
also Two-Spirit womanly
males and Two-Spirit manly women as genders (Sharp 68, Lang 103). This rejection of a
dualistic either/or gendering is
consistent with the Native American ability to accept what in our culture would be regarded as
ambiguous or as an
unacceptable boundary transgression, such as the tricksters themselves engage in.20
A young man might become a
Two-Spirit because he demonstrated interest in women's work and by keeping company with
women (Callender and
Kochems 451). So choosing life as a Two-Spirit was not first and foremost a matter of sexual
preference.21 As with other
genders, some kinds of sexual behavior for a Two-Spirit were considered more appropriate than
others. Thus, a
male-bodied Two-Spirit's having sex with a masculine man was not considered homosexuality,
for the Two-Spirit was of a
different gender (Lang 104-105). On the other hand, sex between two male-bodied Two-Spirits
would have been
considered homosexuality, for they were of the same gender (Jacobs et al 12).
Many nations accepted what amounted to
marriages between a Two-Spirit and a man, the Lakota and Winnebago among them (Williams
101).
The presence of Two-Spirit people in
some indigenous cultures is also consistent with the tendency of Native
American societies to find a contributory role for many kinds of people with diverse
characteristics, knowledge and skills.
Often, these Two-Spirit people were respected for their artistic natures, their hard work and
generosity (Williams 27). In
addition, they were frequently honored for their spirituality. In some tribes--for example, the
Shoshoni, Miami, Hidatsa and
Lakota--Two-Spirit people were assumed to have accepted their gender in response to a vision
(Gill and Sullivan, "White
Faces" 337; Callender and Kochems 448-9).22 Two-Spirits figure prominently in
the religious traditions of {31} some
tribes. Among the Navaho, Hidatsa, and Assiniboin, Two-Spirits were considered holy. A
nádleehé plays a significant role
in the Navajo creation story. It was the supernatural gift of birds and animals that lead to the first
Arapaho haxuxana.
Kroeber identifies the Trickster Nih'an'çan as the first
haxuxana, for he "pretended to be a woman, married the
Mountain-Lion, and deceived him by giving birth to a false child" (Kroeber, Arapaho
19). The Lakota winkte was
traditionally regarded as fulfilling a spiritual destiny and as a possessor of special powers,
especially magical and ritualistic
powers (Lang 103-4; Williams 32). Northern Plains nations believed that a Two-Spirit might
receive special powers for
performing women's activities, for example, quilling or tanning. Or their powers might have to
do with healing or
heterosexual matchmaking (Thayer 290). Often, Two-Spirits performed specific ritual functions
such as handling corpses
(Yurok), cutting ritual lodge poles (Crow), or performing prominently in scalp dances
(Cheyenne) (Gill and Sullivan,
"Gender Crossing" 99).
Even before Euroamerican
perspectives influenced many indigenous peoples views of gender crossing, choosing life
as a Two-Spirit was not without its ambivalence. While claiming that among the Cheyenne the
Two-spirit enjoyed high
status, James Thayer also points out that such a person among most northern Plains peoples was
"both feared and prized
because, and even in spite of, the supernatural vocation and power" of the person's life, to say
nothing of the fact that the
Two-Spirit lived in a manner some in Plains society would consider "abnormal," even if accepted
(290, 293, 292).23 Among
the Dakota, winktes lived on the fringes of camp, the same location where orphans
and widows lived, thus manifesting a
marginal presence in the community (Thayer 290).24 Moreover, the Two-Spirit
people themselves may sometimes have
adopted this gender role with some ambivalence. As occurred in other instances of living a
vision-led life, a Two-Spirit also
was faced with a challenge through obligations imposed by the vision, in this instance, taking on
a new gender role and
perhaps new ceremonial responsibilities. Thayer claims that some were so reluctant to take up
this challenge that there were
occasional suicides. Omaha men sometimes attempted "to conceal [their vision], or even kill
themselves to escape their
destiny" (Callender and Kochems 451, 453). Following Dorsey, Thayer claims that
miati--the Hidatsa word for a berdache
(Thayer's usage)--is derived from mia (woman) and the suffix ti
(to feel an involuntary inclination) (289). Finally, an
Omaha became a winkte as a result of a vision in which the Moon offered him a
choice between a bow and a burden strap.
If the {32} person chose the bow (indicating thereby
choice of a traditional male role), sometimes the moon would force
the burden strap on him.
The issue of the Two-Spirit's life is
not a cut-and-dried matter, which is appropriate enough in a paper considering
tricksters. The Omaha story referred to above, entitled by Erdoes and Ortiz as "The Winkte
Way," carries its own
ambiguities. The editors' introductory note says, "Iktinike [the Omaha trickster] and Rabbit are
always chasing women, but
sometimes, just for a change, they turn themselves into winktes, doing it the
winkte way" (133).25 Meeting up with Rabbit,
Iktinike suggests exactly that. Rabbit objects when the trickster wants Rabbit to be the passive
partner and bend over,
allowing Iktinike to get on top of him. After they argue about positioning for a time, it is Iktinike
who gives in and bends
over so that Rabbit is in the superior sexual position. After he finishes, Rabbit jumps off and runs
away with Iktinike
calling after him, "Hey, come back! It's my turn now!" to no avail. As Iktinike approaches home,
one group of boys playing
games after another tells him that Rabbit is spreading the word that he mounted the trickster.
Soon, Iktinike feels that he
must relieve himself. When he squats little baby rabbits rather than feces come out!26
Arriving home, he is greeted by his
amorous wife who wants to have sex. Iktinike begs off: "I've got a headache" (Trickster
133-135).
How "traditional" this story is, is
impossible to say, although the conclusion's use of a clichéd Euroamerican joke is
perhaps a fairly recent turn. In any event, what or who is being ridiculed here? One possibility, of
course, is that, under the
influence of Christian missionaries, the story ridicules winktes. In this perspective,
winktes would be identified with
Trickster--master of the perverse violation of all standards and limits--in that they, like him, try
to be what they are not, that
is, (according to this view) women.27 The story also seems to equate
homosexuals and winktes, thus emphasizing sexual
practice over other aspects of a winkte's cultural role. Yet, a quite different
perspective is possible, also based on gender
expectations. In winkte-male sex, the winkte either performed oral
sex on the man or took the passive role in anal sex.
Sometimes, however, perhaps "just for a change," like Iktinike and Rabbit, the partners might
reverse sex roles. In such
circumstances, the man would not want his part to become known, for taking the passive role
would reflect badly on his
masculinity (Williams 96-97). Does this story satirize swaggering machismo by making public
the humiliation of the
trickster's usual aggressive masculinity sexuality? (After all, it is he who initiates the sexual
contact.) Even the boys, who
presumably would have {33} looked up to a masculine
role model, know Iktinike's secret. And his mortification is so
complete that for once sexually extravagant Trickster is curbed. From this point of view, then,
the story may be a satire of
the pretense and posturing involved in men's notions of masculine gender images. Finally,
trickster stories often show a
trickster posing as one with sacred power and, usually, suffering a penalty for this
hubris.28 Is the Omaha story, then, yet
another example of a trickster fooling around in sacred territory where he has no business
being?
As we have seen, Arapaho tradition
says that Nih'an'çan, the Arapaho trickster, was the first
haxuxana (Kroeber,
Arapaho 19). What more obvious original could we ask for in this matter: Trickster
the shape changer and violator of
boundaries. What's even more revealing is the fact that an Arapaho myth explains that this came
about when Nih'an'çan
"pretended to be a woman, married the Mountain-Lion, and deceived him by giving birth
to a false child" (Kroeber,
Arapaho 19). Such stories occurred throughout Native America. The Arapaho story
and the Omaha story of Iktinike's brief
experience as a winkte encourages another look at the male versions of
well-behaved girl stories. Could some of these
stories be satires of Two-Spirits or might they use Two Spirits for satirical purposes?
In a Winnebago version of such
episodes, Wakdjunkaga, in a scheme with his companions Fox, Jay, and Nit to survive
the winter, "marries" a man. He makes a vulva from an elk liver, breasts from an elk's kidneys,
and dons a woman's dress.
As the final step in his transformation into a pretty woman, he lets Fox (followed by Jay and Nit)
have intercourse with him
and impregnate him.29 His arrival announced by an old woman that lives at the
edge of the village, Trickster enters the
village and marries the chief's son, a good hunter, and provides him with three sons.
Wakdjunkaga's secret is revealed when
he playfully jumps over the fire and "drop[s] something very rotten" (one assumes the
liver-vulva) and runs off from the
village (Radin, Trickster 22-24). This story is full of the sorts of violations we
expect in a Trickster story, although they
aren't all of his doing: a "woman" goes visiting alone (unheard of among the Winnebago); an old
woman of little social
status appoints herself town crier to announce the arrival of a handsome woman; and the
trickster-bride devours the bridal
meal most unceremoniously (Radin, Trickster 57). A major point in the story seems
to be the implied criticism of the chief,
who "puts the satisfaction of having his son many a beautiful woman ahead of the prudence and
judgment required by his
position (Wiget, His Ljfe 90). Ironically, trickster, the one usually driven by
passion and in-{34}stinct, becomes the
chastening agent of the chief whose self-interest has made him ignore "the demands of tradition
and responsibility for the
common good" (Wiget 90).
Wiget goes on to say that the story
reminds us of the danger of confusing the person and the role. Of course, in this
instance, the confusion is intentional. Still, Wakdjunkaga does fulfill part of his assumed role:
curiously, he/she does give
birth. Nevertheless, the humiliating joke rests on the same ground as in the female versions of
this episode: the haughty one
who defies the culture's gender expectations is duped by Trickster, in this case because the victim
assumes that the one he
takes as wife is who the person is. However, given the ambivalence sometimes accompanying the
tradition of Two-Spirits,
the gender-crossing Trickster's shenanigans could be a burlesque warning to both Two-Spirit and
husband not to take their
"marriage" too seriously; that, in fact, there is no real spousal relationship but only a relationship
of convenience. Finally,
ever mindful of the multivalence of Trickster stories, let us not forget how commonly they prove
the imperfections of
human categories. Trickster's occasional transgendering adventures comically demonstrate the
inadequacy of what seem to
be "natural" gender expectations but which are, in fact, artificial--that is to say, only
human--boundaries. Trickster prepares
us for the necessity of Two Spirits.
Early in this paper, I acknowledged
the role that conjecture would play in my discussion. My treatment of female
tricksters and of Two Spirits is the focal point of most of this conjecture. There is no need,
however, for speculation when
it comes to the satirical, didactic thrust of Trickster stories. That the stories serve(d) such ends
has long been recognized.
Only on occasion, however, have scholars and other writers examined the stories for their
specific lessons, Jarold Ramsey
and Andrew Wiget being two notable exceptions. In any society, satire is usually directed toward
culturally specific issues
rather than general human foibles (the much acclaimed "universality" of Western world literary
"classics" notwithstanding).
We should not be surprised, then, that Native American trickster stories target particular
behaviors and kinds of people
within their cultures. And just as female-male relations and gender expectations have been at the
heart of much
Euroamerican satire, so, too, in Native American oral traditions gender expectations come in for
their share of hilarity.
While Native American cultures traditionally have been more tolerant than Euroamericans of the
ambiguities that sexual
behavior and gender roles can comprise, most nevertheless were clear about what the roles were
and about expectations
surrounding them. It is clear that Trick-{35} that
Trickster stories were significant instruments for enforcing tribal
sexual/gender mores. A part of this effort--for some storytellers, at least-- involved gendering the
plots and details of some
trickster episodes.
NOTES
1Parts of this essay have been published previously in "Living Sideways: Social Themes and Social Relationships in Native American Trickster Stories," American Indian Quarterly (Winter 1989). I wish to thank University College Dean John Bryan and Department Head Janet Reed for granting me the released time that allowed me to complete this article. My thanks also to friend and colleague Roger Dunsmore for his suggestions, encouragement and challenges.
2"The final question may [be] whether it is appropriate at all to draw broad conclusions about the functions of these story's gendered figures in their cultures" (Senier 224).
3As Klamath were exposed to and adopted Euroamerican attitudes, such details have often been omitted or concealed (Stern, "Trickster" 168).
4Other trickster stories that are not so sexually oriented make socially focused observations on male tricksters' behavior. (See Ballinger, "Living Sideways.") It is probably in the ribald tales, however, that gender plays the most obvious role.
5There is one story in which the fact that trickster's penis has a will of its own is manifested in anomalous fashion. Erdoes and Ortiz retell a Gros Ventre story in which Nixant's penis proves to be a more responsible citizen than its owner by warning girls about the trickster's designs on them, telling others that he is a liar, etc. (160-161).
6Stories of sexual intercourse between humans and animals and their resulting offspring are much more than salaciousness. They reaffirm our relationship to the world of non-human persons. In this vein, some remind us the obligations we owe such relatives. For example, see the Blackfoot buffalo wife story reprinted in Feldman's The Storytelling Stone: Myths and Tales of the American Indians.
70f course, little is straightforward and unambiguous when we are talking about tricksters. The conventional wisdom in trickster studies tells us that the bawdy stories are, on another level, a vicarious romp in {36} the forbidden. More, while the stories may unveil lurking threats of social disintegration and chaos, Trickster's doings also reveal how by ripping through the barbed wire of human moral proscriptions and artificial moral categories Trickster exercises creative, even sacred, powers. Out there beyond our social frontier, Trickster makes all things possible and creates reality. This aspect of trickster stories has been amply discussed by Babcock, Ramsey, Toelken, Wiget, etc.
8A Kwakiutl story tells
of Coyote's similarly defeating Death-Bringing Woman and her vaginal dentata (Erdoes and
Ortiz 362-365). Other versions are in Erdoes and Ortiz, 283-285, 362-5; Jacobs "Sahaptin,"
188-90. There are non-trickster
versions of such episodes, as well.
Other stories in which Coyote has sex
with dangerous females--a butterfly and mussel-shell killers--are included in
Walker, Nez Perce Coyote Tales (25-27, 28-29).
9Occasionally, even in trickster stories, one comes upon a detail or other story element that raises questions about possible Christian influence.
10Wiget further observes, "Female trickster figures are known in Native American traditional literatures, and their occurrence does not seem to depend on the sex of the storyteller or audience or even particular contexts. Thus, at least in some societies, a female trickster was a commonly understood, unexceptional figure, whose character is contrasted with that of the male. Among the Arizona Tewa, for instance, Coyote Woman is all treachery and malevolence and lacks the pathetic qualities of the male figure that ameliorate our judgment of him" (89). Wiget overstates the case here. The Coyote Woman in the Tewa story is neither more nor less treacherous and malevolent than male Coyotes. And if male Coyotes possess "pathetic qualities that ameliorate our judgment of him," such an evaluation can be made only after examining a range of trickster stories. Given as large a body of female trickster stories, we might well make similar assertions about them.
11That indigenous storytellers allow gender to influence their performance is evidenced elsewhere in addition to trickster stories. See Morrow and Mather and McClellan, Johns, and Wedge (Swann, Coming to Light 4l and 129).
12 The use of male or
female tricksters according to the culture's lineal traditions is not invariable. To be accurate, I
must note that even between two closely related matrilineal societies like the Arizona Tewa
{37} and the Hopi there may
be gender differences in the tricksters of the same or similar episodes (Parsons 282; Malotki and
Lomatuwayma 91). In
different versions of one story with either a male or female protagonist, a Coyote's desire to have
children as pretty as
Deer's makes him/her gullible enough to burn or suffocate his/her own children when he/she is
tricked into putting them in
a fire. In a Hopi version of this story, it is the spots of Antelope's children that Coyote wants to
imitate (Malotki and
Lomatuwayma 27). A Navaho variant can be found in Parsons, Navaho 371. A
Hopi version with a male Coyote combines
Coyote's gullible admiration of Turkey's children with a variation on the Bungling Host episode
(Voth 199-201).
And even within the same tradition,
the same episode told by different persons might have not only differences in
narrative details but differences in the trickster's sex. Thus, a Zuni story in which Coyote
repeatedly forgets a song just
learned has a male protagonist in the version Tedlock published in Finding the Center
(78-83) and a female in The Zuni:
Self-Portrayals (98-101).
13In a secondary creative role, she also originates moccasins, leggings, tanned robes, and methods of preparing pemmican. In one story, she debates another woman about how things should be arranged on earth and in Crow society, insisting that life shouldn't be made too easy for the People (Lowie, Crow 132).
14In fact, a Lipan Apache version of this story has a male Coyote as its protagonist (Opler). This Coyote is more obviously a trickster. The story, then, is consistent with what we expect of a trickster.
15"[T]his legitimate predator-trickster of the hunter era is out of tune with the lifestyle of sedentary planters, such as the Hopi Indians" (Malotki and Lomatuwayma vi). We should also note that men were traditionally the hunters among Hopi.
16For two more Hopi versions of the Borrowed Feather episode, see Voth 196-7 and 201-2. In the first of these, Mother Coyote and Father Coyote are hunting for their children. She sees Blue Jays dancing in the trees and asks to borrow feathers so that she can join their dance. In the second, a male Coyote is apparently out hunting on his own. It is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the storyteller knew of some of these other versions and intentionally chose the corn grinding activity.
17Except, of course, for the Bungling Host stories and Coyote marries his daughter stories.
{38}
18Seumptewa and Vogelin
translate one such Hopi story ("Wren and Coyote") in which Mother Coyote--carrying water
in her mouth for her children at home--laughs every time she passes Wren who is singing,
dancing, and laughing, spilling
the water (Kendall 104).
19Actually, this term
refers to all "alternatively gendered people of either sex" (Lang 100). My discussion focus on the
person traditionally called a berdache. This person is male-bodied but chooses to
live as a woman does, and may, therefore,
dress and behave like a woman (including performing in a woman's occupations and having sex
with a man). At times in
the past, such a person might be a man's second or third wife in a society that permitted multiple
wives. The most
comprehensive treatment of this social role is Walter L. Williams' The Spirit and The
Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American
Indian Culture.
Because the term berdache
carries inappropriate connotations (such as slave), I shall use either the term
Two-Spirit or
a tribal name for this gender. The Lakota term is winkte; the Arapaho term is
haxu'xan; Crow, baté; Navajo,
nádleehé;
Shosboni, tainna wa'ippi. Callender and Kochems provide a table
identifying Native American cultures that acknowledged
Two-Spirits (445). Internet surfers will find additional indigenous terms for Two-Spirits along
with a map locating
Two-Spirit traditions at www.geocities.com/westhollywood/Stonewall/3044/ berdache.html.
20For a discussion of the theme of ambiguity and tricksters, see Ballinger, "Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and The Native American Trickster." MELUS 17.1 (Spring 1991-l992):2l-39.
21Callender and Kochems assert that a Two-Spirits sexual practices were a consequence of choosing this gender role, not a cause of it (454-5). Resistance to an alternative sexuality may explain some of the ambivalence about assuming a Two Spirits role discussed below.
22Thayer suggests that, because the Two-Spirit's "power was from outside the ordinary realm, and was located within the sacred realm of the vision quest-guardian-spirit complex," gender behavior that might otherwise have been considered outside of the norm was accepted (292).
23Among the Lakota,
winktes were feared as well as respected because of the supernatural origin of their
skills (Gill
and Sullivan, "Gender Crossing" 98, "Winkte" 342). Do we see evidence of
Arapaho ambivalence in the name haxu'xan,
which Kroeber says means "rotten bone" (Arapaho 19). It is also interesting to recall, as
stated earlier, that Old {39}
Woman Coyote--in a contrary mood--was responsible for the creation of the Crow bates.
Apparently, husbands of Two-Spirits
faced some difficulties as well. Callender and Kochems report that among Plains
tribes a husband might be ridiculed for taking a wife who could both hunt and keep house, the
implication being that the
husband was too lazy or unable to hunt (448).
Not all cultures were accepting and
tolerant of Two-Spirited people, for example, the Haudenosaunee, the Apache, the
Comanche, and the Tohono O'odam (Williams 39). Similarly, not all people in nations that once
accepted Two-Spirits still
accept this tradition. Beverly Little Thunder claims that Two-Spirits are no longer honored in
Lakota communities (Little
Thunder 204-209).
24We ought to remember the protective, restorative role widows and orphans often play in Native American stories. For example, see the story of Bloodclot Boy in Elsie Clew Parsons' "Kiowa Tales" (62). Like the orphans of oral tradition, winktes might have been marginal in a social sense but still loaded with potential for power. In fact, many might argue that they received their power from their marginality, as Babcock and Pelton have explained the concept.
25Doing something in a different way, "just for a change," is certainly consistent with tricksters' characters: they are never satisfied with what they have or who they are.
26Is this detail a parody related to the stories in which trickster's feces are his advisors and sometimes referred to by a relational name?
27This is an appropriate place to point out that some Native Americans came to identify Trickster with Satan (Radin 201-2; Stern, "The Trickster" 168-9).
28Tricksters in the Bungling Host type of story are a readily accessible example of this common theme in trickster stories.
29Other versions can be found in Ramsey, Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country (23-4) and in Deward Walker's Nez Perce Coyote Stories (97).
{40}
WORKS CITED
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. "A Tolerated Margin of Mess: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered." Journal of Folklore Institute 11 (1975): 147-86.
Ballinger, Franchot. "Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and The Native American Trickster." MELUS 17.1 (Spring 1991-1992): 21-39.
--. "Living Sideways: Social Themes and Social Relationships in Native American Trickster Tales." American Indian Quarterly (Winter l989):15-30.
Barnouw, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.
Bright, William. A Coyote Reader. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Callender, Charles, and Lee M. Kochems. "The North American Berdache." Current Anthropology 24.4 (1 983):443-470.
Clark, Lila E. Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest. Berkeley: U of California P, 1953.
Day, Gordon M. "The Northeastern Algonquians and the Northern Iroquoians." Dictionary of Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1994: 73-80.
Dorsey, George Amos, and A. L. Kroeber. Traditions of the Arapahoe. Field Columbian Museum Publication 81 Anthropological Series. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1903.
Dozier, Edward. The Pueblo Indians of North America. New York: Holt, 1970.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. Ed. American Indian Trickster Tales. Viking: New York, 1998.
Feldman, Susan. The Storytelling Stone: Myths and Tales of the American Indian. Dell: New York, 1965.
Gill, Sam D, and Irene F. Sullivan. "Gender Crossing." Dictionary of Native American Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
--. "White Faces." Dictionary of Native American Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
--. "Winkte." Dictionary of Native American Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
{41}
Hoffman, Walter J. The Menominee Indians. BAE Annual Report 14, Pt I.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1896.
Jacobs, Melville. The Content and Style of An Oral Literature: Clackamas Myths and Tales. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation, 1959.
--. "Northwest Sahaptin Texts." Pt. 1. Columbia Contributions to Anthropology 19. New York: Columbia U P, 1934.
Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, ed. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.
Kessler, Evelyn S. Women: An Anthropological View. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.
Kidwell, Clara Sue. "The Power of Women in Three American Indian Societies." The Journal of Ethnic Studies. 6.3 (Fall 1978): 113-121.
Kroeber, Alfred L. The Arapaho. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.
---. Yurok Myths. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Lang, Sabine. "Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities." In Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 100-118.
Little Thunder, Beverly. "I Am a Lakota Womyn." In Jacobs, Thomas and Lang; 204-209.
Lincoln, Kenneth. "MELUS Interview: Hanay Geiogamah." MELUS 16.3 (Fall 89-90): 69-81.
Lindsay, Beverly. "Minority Women in America: Black American, Native American and Asian American Women." The Study of Women: Enlarging Perspectives of Social Reality. Ed. Eloise Snyder. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
Lowie, Robert. The Crow Indians. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935.
---. Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians. American Museum of Natural History 25. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1918.
Malotki, Ekkehart, and Michael Lomatuway'ma. Hopi Trickster Tales: Istutuwutsi. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.
Niethammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Collier, 1977.
Norman, Howard A. The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians. 2nd Ed. Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1982.
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Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians. New
York: J.J. Augustin, 1940.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. Kiowa Tales. New York: Krause, 1969.
--. "Pueblo Folk-tales, Probably of Spanish Provenience." Journal of American Folklore 31(1918). 216-55.
--. Tewa Tales. New York: American Folklore Society, 1926.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.
Ramsey, Jarold, ed. Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literatures of the Far West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.
---. Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Literatures of the Far West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.
Schlegel, Alice. "Three Types of Domestic Authority: A Cross-Cultural Study." Being Female: Reproduction, Power and Change. Ed. Dana Raphael. The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Senier, Siobhan. "A Zuni Raconteur Dons the Junco Shirt." American Literature. 66 (1994): 223+.
Seumptewa, Evelyn, with C.F. and F. M. Vogelin. "Wren and Coyote." Coyote Stories II. Ed. Martha B. Kendall. IJAL-NATS Monograph No. 6. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980: 104-110.
Stern, Theodore. "Some Sources of Variability in Klamath Mythology." Journal of American Folklore (1956): 1 +
---. "The Trickster in Klamath Mythology." Western Folklore. 12.3 (July 1953): 158-74.
Swann, Brian, ed. Coming To Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians. New York: Dial, 1972.
Thayer, James Steele. "The Berdache of the Northern Plains: A Socioreligious Perspective." Journal of Anthropological Research 1980: 287-293.
Thompson, Craig. "Gender Representation in Two Clackamas Myths." Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.1 (Spring 1991): 19-39.
Walker, Deward, in collaboration with Daniel N. Matthews. Nez Perce Coyote Tales: The Myth Cycle. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.
Wiget, Andrew. "His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster {43} and the Literature of Possibility." Redefining American Literary History. Ed. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward. New York: MLA, 1990. 83-97.
---. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and The Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1992.
Zuni People. The Zunis: Self-Portrayals. Trans. Alvina Quam. New York: New American Library, 1972.
{45}
The Politics and Erotics of Food in Louise Erdrich
Kari J. Winter
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
Joy Harjo, "Maybe the World Ends Here"
In an Anishinaabe landscape seasonally imprinted by brutal winters, food has always been
connected to life-and-death
struggles that are both political and erotic. Colonialism intensified these struggles when
missionaries introduced a religion
that encouraged "mortification" of human bodies and the American government pursued
genocidal policies of starvation
and land-reduction that made food ever scarcer for the Anishinaabe during the Nineteenth and
Twentieth centuries. In the
face of colonialist deprivation and denial, Erdrich affirms the primacy of food and drink to
human existence. As Bakhtin
observes about Rabelais, so, too, in Erdrich: "There is scarcely a single page . . . where food and
drink do not figure"
(Rabelais 279). While critics like Daniel Cornell and Robert A. Morace have
fruitfully explored connections between
Bahktin's theory of carnival and the Anishinaabe trickster tradition as sites of resistance to
official culture and rejuvenation
of folk culture, this essay focuses on the multi-{45}faceted meanings in Erdrich's insistent use of food and drink
as tropes
through which to make meaning of human behavior.1
Erdrich's fiction often places the
maternal body on center stage, highlighting the impact on both women and their
children of maternal nourishment or deprivation. Her commitment to writing women's bodies is
explicitly theorized in her
memoir, The Blue Jay's Dance, in which she states: "Organized Christian religion
is more often about denying the body
when what we profoundly need are rituals that take into regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the
shit, the anguish, the
irritation, the glory, the earnestness of the female body" (47). While attending to women's bodies,
Erdrich does not neglect
male bodies; indeed, she situates virtually all of her characters in material, symbolic, and
metaphorical relation to food and
drink. In Cooking, Eating, Thinking, philosophers Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke
suggest that the Western understanding of
human identity would change radically if scholars attended to "embodied, concrete, practical
experience" instead of
privileging the rational, abstract, and mental. They argue:
taking the production and preparation of food as an illuminating source, we might formulate a conception of the person which focuses on our connection with and dependence on the rest of the world. Personhood, then, might be thought of as an unfolding process, with identity conditions which evolve over time. Might such perennial philosophical knots as the mind/body problem, the problem of our knowledge of the external world, and the problem of other minds be untied in the context of a food-centered philosophy of human being? (xiv)
In Anishinaabe culture, as in most American Indian cultures, the mind/body split has not
been a "perennial philosophical
knot." Anishinaabe culture traditionally views identity as unfolding and shifting over time, and
Erdrich extends that view.
Her work also suggests that people are defined by where, what, how, and why they eat. The
politics and erotics of food
shape peoples relationships to themselves, other people, animals, and the land.
"Potchikoo's Life After Death," a
prose poem in Baptism of Desire (1989), suggests some possible reasons for
Erdrich's insistent attention to food. Old Man Potchikoo, an Ojibwa trickster, begins his journey
after death with frybread
that his wife Josette had cooked for him. Unlike Christian heroes, tricksters have enormous
appetites for food, so {46}
Potchikoo devours the frybread in no time. Tempted by a "huge luscious berry he knew he
shouldn't eat if he wanted to
enter the heaven all the priests and nuns described" (51), he stuffs so many handfuls into his
mouth that he becomes "fat
from his greed" (52). He fears that Saint Peter will turn him away from the pearly gates because
of his berry stains, but
Saint Peter looks down his list and finds "only one word there. The word Indian"
(52). Potchikoo is forbidden entrance.
Gluttony would be a sin for a Christian, but Potchikoo's racialized body is marked as inherently
sinful regardless of his
actions. Later in the poem, Erdrich contrasts Potchikoo's sensual greed with Christian culture's
consumerism. Investigating
the white people's hell, Potchikoo discovers not a fiery cauldron but rather the damned "chained,
head and foot and even by
the neck, to old Sears Roebuck catalogues" (54). Western culture fetishizes products and dead
documents, while eschewing
the erotics of conversation as embodied in dialogue, in food, and in sex. Sensuality is thus
excluded from hell as well as
from heaven.
In an epigraph to Jacklight,
her first volume of poetry, Erdrich highlights the traditional Ojibwa association of sex and
food: "The same Chippewa word is used for both flirting and hunting game."2
Similarly, Claude Levi-Strauss observes
bluntly that in cultures world-wide: "To eat is to fuck" (qtd. in Carter 79). Erdrich dramatizes the
inseparability of eating
and sex in Love Medicine when Nector and Lulu smear butter over each other's
bodies before partaking in a sexual feast; in
"Le Mooz" when Margaret exhorts Nanapush to catch a moose "or my legs are shut to you"; and
in many other scenes.
Food and sex transgress the boundary between life and death in ways that Bakhtin illuminates:
"In the act of eating . . . the
confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body; it triumphs over the
world, over its enemy,
celebrates its victory, grows at the world's expense. . . . Sadness and food are incompatible (while
death and food are
perfectly compatible)" (Rabelais 283).3 When Margaret withholds
sex and feeds Nanapush indigestible food, Nanaposh
dies, but during his funeral he comes back from the dead to eat the mourners' food, to drink their
wine, and to assure them
that "[o]n the other side of life there is plenty of food and no government agents" ("Le Mooz"
80). He returns from death a
second time to share with Margaret "the finest and most elegantly accomplished hours that
perhaps lovers ever spent on
earth" (80).
The trickster Potchikoo is filled with
desires that simultaneously pain him and keep him peskily present in the world.
Erdrich represents his hunger as both troublesome and comic. He uses his penis until it burns
{47} up, falls off, and has to
be magically renewed. Yet he is not a symbol of "individual and class gluttony and cupidity"; on
the contrary, Erdrich's
tricksters represent what Bakhtin calls "the soul of the people as a whole" (Rabelais
292). As Basil Johnston explains, the
Ojibwa trickster is "the prototype of humanity and the center of human interest" (xiii). As a
representative human, the
mythic Ojibwa trickster, Nana'b'oozoo, is simultaneously childish and mature, masculine and
feminine. Sexually he "not
only wanted to know what it was like to be a man with a woman, but he was equally curious to
know what it was like to be
a woman with a man" (82). In this vein, Nanapush, Erdrich's trickster in Tracks and
"Le Mooz," emotionally mothers an
adopted daughter and granddaughter, longs to know what it means to give birth to children, and
radiates sexual energy,
even in old age. Erdrich's tricksters are reminiscent of figures in the European popular-festive
tradition who "differ sharply
from the images of private eating or private gluttony and drunkenness in early bourgeois
literature" (301). Representative
humans, Potchikoo and Nanapush celebrate voracious life. The trickster's appetites and acts of
eating are "joyful,
triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits
between man and the world
are erased, to man's advantage" (281).
In Tracks Erdrich
further develops a contrast between Ojibwa sensuality and Christian asceticism. This novel
explicitly situates the politics of hunger and food in the historical conditions of early
twentieth-century America.4
Nanapush's celebrations of life are grounded in the bitter historical reality of ethnocide testified
to in the lyrical opening
line of Tracks: "We began dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued
to fall."5 Tragic, comic, sometimes a
fool and sometimes a genius, Nanapush finds within himself the strength to wage continual war
against colonialism, despite
decade after decade of loss. Surrounded by starvation, disease, and death, he affirms food,
healing, and sex. Rather than
clinging to dogma, tricksters like Nanapush learn through trial and error, constantly adapting.
Nanapush never ceases to
search for ways to feed his community, both physically and spiritually.
In contrast, Pauline, the second
narrator of Tracks, "tries as best she can to deny all bodily functions and desires"
(Morace 52). Embracing Catholic ideology and welcoming death, she eventually helps the
colonialist powers wreak
destruction on the Ojibwa nation. A maniacal embodiment of Christian asceticism, Pauline
mortifies her flesh by
self-starvation and other forms of self-torture, eventually denying her Indian heritage and
embracing a sinister new name:
Sister Leopolda.6 As Sister {48}
Leopolda, Pauline appears in four of Erdrich's novels, mutilating herself and torturing
generations of Indian children in the convent school. Sister Leopolda's most memorable scene of
torture takes place,
significantly, in the convent kitchen in Love Medicine, where she tantalizes a
hungry Marie Kashpaw with visions of
forbidden delicacies and disrupts their bread-baking to torment and scald the young
girl.7 In Tracks Pauline starves herself
partly out of self-hatred for having had a sexual relationship. A survivor of ethnocide, Pauline
internalizes Catholicism's
self-hatred and learns to loathe her sexuality, to castigate her body, and to deprive herself of food.
She calls self-starvation
"fasting" and sees it a sign of spiritual triumph. Rejecting her own body, she also rejects her baby
before it is born and
refuses to look at it when delivered. (Marie Kashpaw is revealed in Tracks to be
Pauline's unacknowledged daughter, which
illuminates Sister Leopolda's obsessive animosity toward Marie in Love Medicine.)
At the end of Tracks Pauline's morbid
revulsion against the body is projected outward when, in a delusional rage, she imagines that her
former lover is Satan and
murders him.
Erdrich's writing suggests time and
again that searching for and listening to our relations' stories is crucial to
overcoming the historical amnesia that traps us in the compulsive repetition of trauma and
violence. Her attentiveness to
human bodies, to food, to the hands that cook, to the touch that wounds or heals expresses her
rejection of conventional
narrative reci