General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Bibliographer: Jack W. Marken
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Lynn Poncin
SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.
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{i}
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2 Volume 3, Number 3 Fall 1991
"IDENTITY" AND "DIFFERENCE" IN THE TRANSLATION
OF NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES: A ZUNI CASE STUDY
William M. Clements
.
.
.
.
1
NOBODY IS AN ORPHAN: Interview with Luci Tapahonso
Sylvie Moulin
.
.
.
. 14
THREE VIEWS OF POWWOW HIGHWAY
Easin' on Down the Powwow Highway(s)
Rodney Simard
.
.
.
. 19
Culture Isn't Buckskin Shoes: A Conversation Around Powwow
Highway
Toby Langen and
Kathryn Shanley
.
.
.
23
Powwow Highway in an Ethnic Film and Literature Course
Carol Gerster
and Marshall Toman
.
.
.
29
COMMENTARY
From the Secretary-Treasurer
.
.
.
39
From the Editors
.
.
.
.
39
1992 Continued
.
.
.
. 40
Call for Creative
Work .
.
.
. 42
Update on "Returning
the
Gift"
.
.
. 42
Opportunity for
Benefactors
.
.
.
43
Invitation to
Reviewers
.
.
.
. 43
Directory of
American Indian Writers .
.
. 44
AICA Tour
.
.
.
.
. 44
REVIEWS
American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic
Review, and Selected Bibliography. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
James W. Parins
.
.
.
. 45
Wolverine Myths and Visions: Dene Traditions from Northern
Alberta. Comp. Dene Wodih Society
H. C. Wolfart
.
.
.
.
.
46
{ii}
California Indian Nights. Comp. Edward W. Gifford and
Gwendoline Harris Block
Greg Sarris
.
.
.
.
. 52
Bighorse the Warrior. Tiana Bighorse. Ed. Noël
Bennett
Hertha D. Wong
.
.
.
. 56
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold. Charles
A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman
Julian Rice
.
.
.
.
. 59
Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary
Northwest Native American Poetry. Ed. Andrea Lerner
Jarold Ramsey .
.
.
.
. 62
The Indian Lawyer. James Welch
Sidner Larson
.
.
.
. 64
In Mad Love and War. Joy Harjo
Carter Revard
.
.
.
.
. 66
The Invisible Musician. Ray A. Young Bear
Robert F. Gish
.
.
.
. 69
Medicine River. Thomas King
Rodney Simard
.
.
.
. 72
Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts. Louis
Littlecoon Oliver
Ron Welburn
.
.
.
.
. 75
Simple Songs. Vickie Sears
Rhoda Carroll
.
.
.
.
. 76
A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography
of Chief G. W. Grayson. Ed. W. David Baird
Robert F. Sayre
.
.
.
. 80
Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to
the Present. Ed. Penny Petrone
Agnes Grant
.
.
.
.
. 83
Paula Gunn Allen. Elizabeth I. Hanson
Birgit Hans
.
.
.
.
. 86
Briefly Noted . . . . . 88
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 91
{1}
OF NATIVE AMERICAN ORAL LITERATURES:
A ZUNI CASE STUDY
William M. Clements
Transformations
of Native American oral literary performances into European-language
texts have tended to reflect the translators' preconceptions
about "the Indian" and about literature. For example,
early nineteenth-century textmakers such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
and his contemporaries perceived in Native American oratory,
narrative, and song the raw materials for "real" literature.
Consequently, they focused their translation efforts on the imagery
from nature, figurative tropes, and patterns of rhythm which
they believed inherent in Indian literary expression, embellishing
and codifying these "very decided beginnings of a literature"--in
William Gilmore Simms's phrase (137)--in whatever ways were necessary
to produce texts that met the Euramerican literary conventions
of their day (Clements). These translators' successors, the "scientists"
of the Bureau of American Ethnology and of Boasian anthropology,
also operated with preconceptions about Native American oral
literature; they emphasized its documentary function, its role
as a source of data about language usage and other aspects of
culture (Powell, "Report" xx; Boas 393). Hence, their
textualizations stressed the importance of accurate preservation
of Native-language originals, even their so-called "free
translations" highlighting semantic correspondences and
ignoring, for the most part, indigenous esthetic features. Early
in the twentieth century, enthusiasts for Native Americana such
as Natalie Curtis and Mary Austin imposed still another preconception
on their translations and interpretations especially of American
Indian oral poetry (that is, songs without music): the idea that
this poetry represented the primitive phase in the evolution
of true literature and that a genuine American literature must
base itself on aboriginal strivings at verbal artistry in the
New World (Castro). Their translations portrayed Indians as primitive
Imagists, whose art anticipated modern trends in literature.
During the three
and a half centuries that Euramericans have been translating
Native North American oral literature, many preconceptions have
colored their work. While a careful examination of each set of
preconceptions must precede full appreciation of available translations,
a sense of their general tendencies can emerge from Fredric Jameson's
dichotomy between "Identity" and "Difference"
(43-45). The "peculiar, unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable
alternation" between the poles of this dichotomy poses a
dilemma whenever we confront alien cultural products, according
to Jameson. If we perceive in these products that with which
we can identify--that which is accessible through "our own
cultural moyens du bord"--we may overlook or minimize
their otherness through what may become "little better than
mere psychologi-{2}cal projection."
But if we focus on the alien cultural products' Difference, we
cut short hopes of comprehension and appreciation (43).
Jameson exemplifies
the alternation between Identity and Difference by surveying
responses to classical culture. Invoking the principle of Identity,
we have found in the symmetrical formality of Greek classicism
parallels not only to our own esthetic values but also to our
sociopolitical ideals. Yet when a recognition of the oversimplification
inherent in this view prompts a turn to the principle of Difference,
a perception of the Greece of antiquity as "a culture of
masks and death, ritual ecstasies, slavery, scapegoating, [and]
phallocratic homosexuality" emerges which is just as conditioned
as the earlier perspective (44). Jameson's point is not that
we should attempt to resolve conflicting views engendered by
the Identity-Difference dichotomy, but that we should be aware
of these principles as mediators between us and alien cultures.
Arnold Krupat
has introduced Jameson's ideas into the discourse on Native American
oral literature in a review of Karl Kroeber's Traditional
Literatures of the American Indian. In terms of the ongoing
Native American-Euramerican encounter, Krupat notes, Identity
and Difference reflect the poles of response which contact with
Indians has produced in Euramericans. For the Puritans, Native
Americans, subhuman denizens of "howling wilderness,"
epitomized Difference, since they were leagued with Satan in
opposing the kingdom of God in New England. The eighteenth century
also stressed ways in which Indians embodied Difference and placed
investigations of their history, philology, and ethnology under
the rubric of natural philosophy. On the other hand, the romantics'
idealization of the Noble Savage generated a perception of Native
Americans in terms of Identity, as some Euramericans saw in the
Indian what they would themselves be without the trappings of
civilization (4).
Extended to translations
of Native American oral literature, the principle of Identity
has meant that textmakers have assumed they could translate orations,
narratives, and poems in ways that would make them readily accessible
to Euramerican readers--that adding rhyme and regularized meter
to poetry or presenting oral narrative as paragraphed prose,
for example, legitimately represented Indian oral literature.
Exponents of the Identity principle might cite Susan Hegeman's
timely reminder, "If one did not acknowledge Anglo-American
textual conventions to some extent, then there would be no translation"
(20). Yet while the translation enterprise must at least acknowledge
the principle of Identity, textmakers who recognize the alternative,
Difference, have emphasized the dangers of using literary conventions
of one culture to represent the true verbal artistry of another
and of transforming the oral text into the written. For them,
Difference {3} manifests itself
in two ways: linguistic/cultural and semiotic--in the materials'
languages and cultural matrices and in their media of expression.
Adherents of the Difference principle would probably agree with
Irving Goldman's caveat about textualization of Kwakiutl cultural
expression: "As a matter of simple caution, we should assume
that if the mode of thought of primitive peoples, as revealed
by the ethnographic records, sounds all too familiar notes of
recognition in the western academic mind, something is seriously
wrong with the rendition" (334).
The Identity-Difference
dichotomy offers an approach to making sense of the textualization,
translation, interpretation, and critical understanding of Native
American oral literature. A reader can evaluate the "authenticity"
of a particular piece in terms of its translator's choice of
one principle or other. Furthermore, the dichotomy provides a
useful basis for comparing and contrasting translated texts,
especially those representing the same Native literary heritage.
This latter function may be sampled effectively by examining
work done with the oral literature of Zuni, a pueblo in western
New Mexico.
Since Frank Hamilton
Cushing's residence of four and a half years beginning in 1879,
Zuni has continued to attract anthropologists. James Stevenson,
leader of the Smithsonian expedition of which Cushing was a member,
also studied the community's culture. His wife, Matilda Coxe
Stevenson, involved in the research from its beginning, continued
the work after her husband's death in 1888. Elsie Clews Parsons
spent considerable time at Zuni between 1915 and 1930, A. L.
Kroeber visited the pueblo during the summers of 1915 and 1916,
Leslie Spier did archeological research nearby in 1916, Frederick
Webb Hodge returned to Zuni periodically for almost forty years
between 1886 and 1923, and Franz Boas was there briefly in 1920.
Ruth Benedict and Ruth Bunzel came to Zuni in 1924, the latter
returning for several subsequent summers. More recently, Omer
C. Steward, John Adair, Stanley Diamond, Dennis Tedlock, and
M. Jane Young among others have done anthropological fieldwork
at Zuni (Pandey). While most of these researchers paid some attention
to oral literature, many of them producing translations, three
stand out as representing the principles of Difference and Identity
particularly well. At one extreme, Cushing's work reflects Identity,
since his comments about Zuni oral literature and his translations
suggest a belief that the material could legitimately be rendered
according to Euramerican literary conventions. Bunzel, on the
other hand, recognized the principle of Difference when she commented
on her translation efforts. But her actual translations reflect
Identity more than Difference. Tedlock has worked more consistently
from Difference, since he has stressed not only the linguistic
and cultural gap between Zuni and English, but also the distinction
between {4} orally performed literature
and literature crafted within a tradition of writing.
Cushing published
two major collections of translations from Zuni oral literature.
"Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths," brief cosmogonic
and etiological narratives, appeared in 1896 in the Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). Zuñi
Folk Tales, longer examples of what John Wesley Powell called
"discredited mythology" ("Introduction" viii),
came out posthumously in 1901. Though Cushing's published comments
about his methods of translation are scanty, they reveal his
acceptance of the principle of Identity. For example, in the
introduction to "Outlines" he writes of the songs which
appear in some of the myth texts: "In the originals these
are almost always in faultless blank meter. . . . I do not hesitate
. . . to tax to the uttermost my power of expression in rendering
the meanings of them where I quote, clear and effective and in
intelligible English" (374). Cushing found Zuni songs so
like poetry in English that he could apply a generic term from
the latter ("blank verse") to them. Moreover, he had
no qualms about waxing literary in a Euramerican mode when translating
them. Powell's introduction to the folktale collection includes
some telling comments about Cushing's "scriptorial wand,"
which the translator waved to make Zuni oral narratives "a
part of the living literature of the world." Cushing was
especially equipped to accomplish this since he could "think
as myth-makers think, . . . speak as prophets speak, . . . [and]
expound as priests expound" (ix). In other words, Cushing
recognized Identity between what he might express in English
literary prose and what the Zuni verbalized in oral narration.
Cushing's devotion
to the principle of Identity probably arose from two sources.
The first was his deeply personal involvement in Zuni culture.
While some may dismiss such antics as his signing correspondence
as "First War-Chief of Zuni" (Woodward) and being photographed
in Zuni dress as manifestations of Cushing's idiosyncratic personality,
they do reveal his sense that the Zuni and he--a "civilized"
Euramerican--were not all that different, even though at disparate
stages in the scheme of cultural evolution which he espoused.
This scheme, a second source of the Identity principle for Cushing,
enjoyed the support of most anthropologists of the late nineteenth
century. Proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan
and field-tested by Powell's BAE, it posited human psychic unity
(read "Identity") and the notion that cultural forms
at various evolutionary stages had genetic connections that presupposed
at least traces of Identity. Fieldworkers such as Cushing might
see cross-cultural equivalences, even when they were lacking,
because of the force of evolutionary theory--hence, Tedlock's
criticism that Cushing's "metaphysical glossing" of
his texts stressed a monotheism indicative of "the {5} theoretical preconceptions of nineteenth-century
anthropology rather than Zuni belief" ("On the Translation"
58).
Cushing's opinion
that Zuni oral narrative resembled Victorian prose closely enough
to warrant his use of the contemporary Euramerican esthetic colors
his renderings of the Zuni material. For example, consider how
he handles a description of the twin war gods in a myth text
to which he assigned the title "The Origin of the Twin Gods
of War and of the Priesthood of the Bow":
Lo! dwarfed and hideous-disguised were the two gods Áhaiyuta and Mátsailema, erst Uanamachi Píahkoa or the Beloved Twain who Descended--strong now with the full strength of evil; and armed as warriors of old, with long bows and black stone-tipped arrows of cane-wood in quivers of long-tailed skins of catamounts; whizzing slings, and death-singing slung-stones in fiber-pockets; spears with dart dealing fling-slats, and blood-drinking broad-knives of gray stone in fore-pouches of fur-skin; short face-pulping war-clubs stuck aslant in their girdles, and on their backs targets of cotton close plaited with yucca. Yea, and on their trunks, were casings of scorched rawhide, horn-like in hardness, and on their heads wore they helmets of strength like to the thick neck-hide of male elks, whereof they were fashioned. ("Outlines" 422)
The initial interjection and reversal of word order suggest
an attempt to be "literary" according to Victorian
standards. The interminable length of the first sentence, though
perhaps reflecting the formulaic quality of oral poetry
(which most contemporaray translators consider Native American
oral narrative to be [e.g., Hymes]), more likely draws upon European
epic literature which Cushing could have known in a variety of
Victorian translations. Cushing also adopts a stilted formality
in vocabulary, which, though it could be an attempt to reproduce
the mythopoeic diction of Zuni narrators, probably derives from
the fad for conscious archaizing that characterized Victorian
literature set in the past (Basnett-McGuire 72-73).
Cushing translated
poetic passages in myths into Victorian verse. For example, he
treated the words of one of the "Ancients" summoned
to assist the war gods in their maturation as follows:
"Why
call ye, small worms of the waters
And spawn of
the earth and four quarters,
Ye disturbers
of thought, lacking shame;
Why call ye the
words of my name?" ("Outlines" 421)
{6}
The use of rhyme introduces a feature of English poetics absent
from Zuni. Bunzel, in fact, chided Cushing for this "inexplicable
blunder" of rendering Zuni poetry in "regular short-lined
rhymed English stanzas" ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry"
620).
Cushing's treatment
of the final paragraphs of a folktale he entitled "The Maiden
and the Sun" offers another example of his approach to translation:
And ever since then [the events of the story], my children, the world has been filled with anger, and even brothers agree, then disagree, strike one another, and spill their own blood in foolish anger.
Perhaps had men been more grateful and wiser, the Sun-father had smiled and dropped everywhere the treasures we long for, and not hidden them deep in the earth and buried them in the shores of the sea. And perhaps, moreover, all men would have smiled upon one another and never enlarged their voices nor strengthened their arms in anger toward one another. (Zuñi Folk Tales 474)
This lengthy summary and explicit, garrulous statement of
the story's moral exemplify what Tedlock regards as the "most
serious difficulty" with Cushing's folktale translations:
his embroidery of the originals "with devices, lines, and
even whole passages which are clearly of his own invention and
not mere distortions" ("On the Translation" 59).
As Brian W. Dippie has noted, Cushing was "more adept at
conveying a feeling for myth" than at recording it with
exactitude (285), but his sense of the essential Identity between
the Zuni and himself and between their literature and his granted
him the license to cast Zuni oral literature in a Victorian mode.
Unlike some translators who transform what they perceive as exotic,
esthetically remote literature according to the esthetic conventions
of the target language in order to create texts with reader accessibility,
Cushing did not regard Zuni oral literature as remote. He converted
it into Victorian prose and poetry because he sensed its Identity
with them.
Ruth Bunzel,
trained by Franz Boas and initiated into fieldwork by Ruth Benedict,
had no use for the cultural evolutionism of Cushing's generation
of anthropologists. Instead, she accepted her mentors' doctrines
of cultural diversity and cultural relativism--in other words,
of Difference and respect for Difference. Unlike Cushing she
recognized the obstacles in translating from Zuni into English,
but like him she often chose vocabulary and stylistic constructions
for her texts that made them immediately accessible to readers
of English, thus representing them in terms of Identity. The
major collections of Bunzel's translations are "Zuñi
Origin Myths" and "Zuñi Ritual Poetry,"
both of {7} which appeared in 1932
in the BAE Annual Report, and Zuñi Texts,
published in 1933 by the American Ethnological Society.
"Zuñi
Ritual Poetry" contains most of Bunzel's commentary on her
translation procedures. While Cushing was confident that Zuni
and English evinced the principle of Identity to such an extent
that he could easily translate from one to the other, Bunzel
noticed some very real difficulties. In vocabulary, for instance,
she cited problems produced by the "obsolete or special"
language used in ritual texts (620) and the abundant word play
in those texts (619). The latter included double entendres and
deliberate verbal and grammatical ambiguity, but even ascertaining
"how much is word play, how much metaphor, and how much
is actual personification" sometimes mystified her (619).
Bunzel also identified grammatical differences between English
and Zuni, the Native American language's reliance on inflection
being most significant.
Other grammatical
features of Zuni which caused translation problems for Bunzel
included its use of long periodic sentences, its typical word
order (subject, object, verb), and its use of participial or
gerundive clauses to express temporal or causal subordination
("impossible in English," she lamented) (618-19). She
regretted her inability to carry these aspects of Zuni grammar
over into English and the resulting loss of "effective stylistic
feature[s]" (619). Bunzel was also unable to retain the
rhythm of Zuni ritual poetry in her English texts (though she
could preserve "its irregularity, the unsymmetrical alteration
of long and short lines" [620]). Finally, she believed her
translations suffered "greatly from loss of sonority and
vigor" because of her inability to transfer Zuni patterns
of accent into English (620).
Clearly, then,
Bunzel recognized the principle of Difference, but she did not
represent it fully in her translations. Perhaps she believed
that doing so would have rendered her texts inaccessible to English
readers and, like many other translators, opted to sacrifice
features of the source language original for the sake of target
language readability (Basnett-McGuire 23).
Whatever the
reasons, Ruth Bunzel created poetic texts that read--by her own
admission--more like the blank verse of Milton or the free verse
of the King James translation of the Psalms than Zuni oral poetry
("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 620). Notice her treatment
of the ending of one of the prayers of the War Cult:
On roads reaching
to Dawn Lake
May you grow
old;
May your roads
be fulfilled;
May you be blessed
with life.
Where the life-giving
road of your sun father comes out,
May your roads
reach;
May your roads
be fulfilled. ("Zuñi Ritual Poetry" 689)
{8}
Aside from the reference to "Dawn Lake," nothing in
these lines suggests that they originated in the oral literature
of a culture as removed from that of most readers of English
as the Zuni. In fact, their stately measure and litany-like parallelism
fulfill expectations, shaped by Judaeo-Christian scripture and
liturgy, of what ritual poetry should be. Bunzel has not added
these features; they exist to some degree in the Zuni text published
alongside her translation. But she has not translated that text
in a way that suggests the Difference her commentary recognizes.
Bunzel's translations
of Zuni oral narrative assume the same approach. The first paragraph
of her translation of "Tale Concerning the First Beginning"
is a straightforward rendering that only hints at Difference:
Yes, indeed. In this world there was no one at all. Always the sun came up; always he went in. No one in the morning gave him sacred meal; no one gave him prayer sticks; it was very lonely. He said to his two children: "You will go into the fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers, käeto·we, tcu-eto·we, mu-eto·we, le·-eto-we, all the society priests, society ekwins, society bow priests, you will bring out yonder into the light of your sun father." Thus he said to them. They said, "But how shall we go in?" "That will be all right." Laying their lightning arrow across their rainbow bow, they drew it. Drawing it and shooting down, they entered. ("Zuñi Origin Myths" 584)
Though they would realize this is a translation, of course,
because of the terms left in Zuni and probably because of culture-specific
references such as "society bow priests," readers of
English would again find nothing to indicate that this is a passage
of oral literature (and poetry instead of prose, according
to many contemporary students of Native American oral narrative
[e.g., Hymes]) in a language whose structures differ substantially
from the Indo-European. A clear sense of Identity emerges despite
the translator's recognition of Difference.
Dennis Tedlock's
translations of Zuni oral narratives--most of which were originally
published in Finding The Center in 1972--reflect more
clearly than Bunzel's their common sense of the Difference between
Zuni and English. Tedlock also goes farther than either of his
predecessors by stressing that an important distinguishing factor
between the original performances and their translated textualizations
involves the media through which they are realized. Difference
figures prominently in Tedlock's handling of Zuni oral literature
because it is Zuni and because it is oral. Influenced not only
by the continuing emphasis in anthropology on Difference as represented
by cultural {9} pluralism and relativism,
but also by the emergent "ethnography of communication"
in the 1960s (Gumperz and Hymes) which emphasized the complexity
of communicative activity and the need to record all its aspects--not
just the text-message--Tedlock has written extensively on the
translation practices of his predecessors at Zuni and his own
methods. Many of these writings were collected in the volume
The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in 1983.
Critical to Tedlock's
assumption of Difference as a basis for translating Zuni oral
literature is his statement that "Those who have sought
to transform the spoken arts of the American Indian into printed
texts have attempted to cross linguistic, poetic, and cultural
gulfs much larger than those faced by translators who merely
move from one Indo-European written tradition to another"
(The Spoken Word 31). Particular problems which Zuni
presents when one attempts to transform narratives composed in
it into English, according to Tedlock, include some of those
identified by Bunzel: word order and use of special vocabulary,
for instance (Finding the Center xxvii- xxviii). He
also notes (as Bunzel's translations show that she also recognized)
that some Zuni words--interjections, proper names, opening and
closing tale formulas1--defy translation into English
(Finding the Center xxviii-xxx). Moreover, he stresses
how the principle of Difference affects the general perception
of the stories he has translated. What Zunis "picture"
when they perform or hear oral literature differs from what Euramerican
readers might visualize. Tedlock admits, "[N]othing I could
do would make them experience . . . [oral literature] precisely
as a Zuni does" (Finding the Center xxxi).
Meanwhile, like
Dell Hymes, Tedlock also argues that prose translations of oral
narrative obscure its nature: "[P]rose has no real existence
outside the written page" (Finding the Center xix).
Consequently, he suggests Difference in medium of presentation
by rendering Zuni oral narratives poetically, equating line breaks
with pauses of one-half to three-fourths of a second.
Tedlock's translation
of the conclusion of a folktale entitled "Coyote and Junco"
offers a glimpse of his technique. The narrative picks up after
a two- or three-second pause by storyteller Andrew Peynetsa:
Coyote said,
"QUICK SING," that's what he told her [Junco].
She didn't sing.
Junco left her
shirt for Coyote.
He bit the Junco,
CRUNCH, he bit the round rock.
Right here (points
to molars) he knocked out the teeth, the rows of teeth in
back.
(tight)
"So now I've really done it to you."
"AY! AY!" that's what he said.
{10}
THE PRAIRIE WOLF
WENT BACK TO HIS CHILDREN, and by the time he got back there
his children were dead.
Because this
was lived long ago, Coyote has no teeth here (points to molars).
LEE--------SEMKONIKYA.
(laughs)
(Finding
the Center 83)
In addition to the pacing of the oral performance, marked
by line divisions, Tedlock's translation indicates precise features
of how Peynetsa told the story through words printed completely
in upper case (spoken more loudly), italicized comments in parentheses
(tone of voice, gestures, audience reactions), and a long dash
following a vowel within a word (lengthening of about two seconds).
In other passages, Tedlock signals such lengthening by repetition
of letters. He also uses typography to mark softening of voice
(small type) and changes in pitch (superscripting and subscripting
words or syllables).
While Difference
in medium emerges from what amounts to typographic manipulation,
Tedlock does little more than Bunzel to suggest linguistic/cultural
Difference. In this passage, he leaves the closing formula--which
Cushing usually handled as "Thus shortens my story"
(e.g., Zuñi Folktales 92)--untranslated. Elsewhere,
he does the same with opening formulas (Cushing's "In the
days of the ancients" [e.g., Zuñi Folktales
65]). He also attempts to match the tone and level of Zuni diction
by using the relatively formal "prairie wolf" for the
penultimate occurrence of "coyote." Occasionally, Tedlock
creates the same effect by translating Zuni interjections with
English archaisms. The formulaic "that's what he told her
[said]" also represents the Zuni (printed on facing pages
only for "Coyote and Junco") and may help to communicate
Difference, but the major factor in creating this effect is the
appearance of the text on the printed page. Tedlock's translations
do not look like most textualizations of oral narratives in paragraphed
prose; they are poetry, but poetry which incorporates constant
reminders of the relevance of the principle of Difference in
the media of presentation.
Superficially,
applying Fredric Jameson's dichotomy between Identity and Difference
to the translation of Native American oral literature may seem
simply a restatement of the tension that has characterized translation
theory and practice for centuries. Every translator must choose
if his or her completed work will preserve elements of the source
language (SL) original even when they are obscure and ineffective
in the target language (TL). The alternative is to sacrifice
SL for the sake of readability in TL (Bassnett-McGuire 68-72).
Most translators have taken the latter course and produced translations--like
Alexander Pope's rendering of Homer in heroic {11}
couplets--which their readers can appreciate. But the Identity-Difference
dichotomy involves more than a choice of whether to favor SL
or TL. For instance, in creating his texts translated from Zuni
which favored TL, Cushing--if his and Powell's published comments
are sincere--did not believe he was sacrificing SL at all. He
saw such Identity between Zuni and English that there was no
reason to indicate Difference. At the other extreme, Tedlock,
who would seem to favor SL at the expense of TL, does not really
do so. His translations, though preserving some of the Difference
he perceived in Zuni oral narrative, were originally published
by a trade press and are readily accessible for readers willing
to deal with the typographic manipulations, which are products
of Difference in medium, not of the translator's favoring SL.
Of the three translators treated here, only Bunzel may have been
influenced by the translator's conventional dilemma of favoring
SL or TL. Like Pope, she recognized the essential Difference
between SL and TL and produced a text that favored the latter,
but unlike him she may have done so because she believed there
could be no other way to bring the Zuni into English.
Moreover, I am
using the Identity-Difference dichotomy to apply also to media
of presentation. Neither Cushing nor Bunzel seemed to perceive
that the orality of Zuni literature made it Different from written
prose and poetry, so neither did anything to suggest the original
orality in their translations. Only Tedlock recognized and marked
media Difference in his translations.
Consequently,
Identity and Difference--extended to the principles governing
the translation of Native American oral literature from Fredric
Jameson's original conceptualization--offers a handle for dealing
with the ways translators have worked. The Zuni case study provides
an illustration of what might be done on a larger scale with
the entire history of Euramerican textualizations and translations
of Native North American oral performances from the Jesuits in
New France through the current ethnopoetics movement. Looking
at textmakers and their translations in terms of the dichotomy
does not presuppose that those designated as adherents of Identity
have produced less "authentic" texts than exponents
of Difference or vice versa. An advocate of Identity may err
by forcing Native American material into Euramerican conventions,
but a translator emphasizing Difference may unnecessarily exoticize
the material. The dichotomy, though, does provide better consumer
information. Readers will have a clearer idea of how and why
particular translations came about.
{12}
1Further study of Zuni allowed Tedlock to translate the conventional opening formula as "Now we are taking it up" and the closing formula as "Enough, the word is short" (The Spoken Word 65-66).
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London:Methuen, 1980.
Boas, Franz. "Tsimshian Mythology." Thirty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1916. 29-1037.
Bunzel, Ruth L. "Zuñi Origin Myths." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932. 545-609.
------. "Zuñi Ritual Poetry." Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1932. 611-835.
------. Zuñi Texts. Publications of the American Ethnological Society No. 15. New York: Stechert, 1933.
Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian. Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983.
Clements, William M. "Schoolcraft as Textmaker." Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 177-92.
Cushing, Frank Hamilton. "Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths." Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1896. 332-462.
------. Zuñi Folk Tales. 1901. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986.
Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American. White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 1982.
Goldman, Irving. "Boas on the Kwakiutl: The Ethnographic Tradition." Theory and Practice. Essays Presented to Gene Weltfish. Ed. Stanley Diamond. The Hague: Mouton, 1980. 331-45.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. The Ethnography of Communication. Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1964.
Hegeman, Susan. "Native American 'Texts' and the Problem of Authenticity." American Quarterly 41 (1989): 265-83.
Hymes, Dell. "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. "Marxism and Historicism." New Literary History 11 (1979): 41-73.
Krupat, Arnold. "Identity and Difference in the Criticism of Native American Literature." Diacritics 13 (1983): 2-13.
Pandey, Triloki Nath. "Anthropologists at Zuni." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972): 321-37.
{13}
Powell, John Wesley. "Introduction" to Cushing, Zuñi Folk Tales. vii-xvii.
------. "Report of the Director." Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington: GPO, 1883. xv-xxxvii.
Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature and Fiction. Ed. C. Hugh Holman. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1962.
Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center. Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians. New York: Dial, 1972.
------. "On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative." Smoothing the Ground. Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian Swann. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 57-77.
------. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983.
Woodward, Arthur. "Frank Cushing-'First War-Chief of Zuni.'" Masterkey 13 (1939): 172-79.
{14}
Sylvie Moulin
In the past few years, Luci Tapahonso has become one of the most powerful voices of her generation. She was born in Shiprock, New Mexico, and her style combines the strength of the Navajo tradition with the vivavity of a modern, concise, dynamic language. She is the author of One More Shiprock Night (1981), Seasonal Woman (1981), and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), and she has a fourth book in preparation. This interview was done in Luci Tapahonso's office at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, on June 18, 1989. Luci is now teaching in the English Department of the University of Kansas.
SM: Luci, what is your background?
LT: I'm from Shiprock, New Mexico, and I'm Navajo. My mother's clan is To díí oovhíí and my father's clan is To díí chííníí. I grew up in Shiprock. I went to boarding school when I was small, and then to public school.
SM: When did you start writing poetry?
LT: Probably in high school.
SM: What does poetry mean to you? Why didn't you choose another art to express yourself?
LT: I didn't really choose it, I think it just happened. I guess I really like poetry because it's concise, it's short, and it has a rhythm to it. It's almost like singing. It's very visual and it has a lot of impact.
SM: You also use songs and chants in some of your poems.
LT: Yes.
SM: Has the Navajo tradition a great influence on your poetry?
LT: It just depends what kind of work I am doing at the moment. But I think the influence of the Navajo tradition is very strong because that's what I am. In the way that I think, in the way that I talk, it's already there, it's already properly Navajo just by itself. So when I write that's the way it is, because poetry is an oral kind of expression and you can't really separate yourself, the voice that you are, from what you write.
SM: Did you grow up speaking mainly Navajo?
LT: Yes. Until I went to school I spoke Navajo more than I spoke English, although I knew English already. As I went to school I spoke English more. Now I speak English a lot more than I speak Navajo because I'm not around Navajo people as much as I used to be.
{15}
SM: A lot of writers and artists claim
to be influenced by the Southwest. Do you think the environment,
the scenery, have a strong influence on you?
LT: It influences me because of where I live and also the way I was raised. When I was growing up they used to say that nobody is an orphan, that everybody has a mother and that your mother is the Earth and your father is the Sky. So you are always between the two and they are always looking over you. Those kinds of things can't be separated, because that's the way Navajos talk and think. It's not a separate issue. At least I don't think about it consciously. And I believe that a lot of Navajo people, a lot of Indian people, think that way. When I talk with Indian people we always talk about the same thing and it's always about the land in one way or another.
SM: In your poetry you often mention your family relations, your children. Is that a major source of inspiration for you?
LT: It is, because to me it's very personal, and I don't write about things that I'm not familiar with. Poetry is very good because it allows me that form of expression. And I think it's universal even though it's my family, my children, my brothers and sisters or whatever. I know it's a universal feeling. And when people hear the poems, they don't know a thing about my family, they don't need to know anything about it, but they think about how it relates to them, and so it's universal in a sense.
SM: You also talk a lot about women, friends or women who are important in your life. And I know you hate to be called a feminist. So how do you feel when people say that you are a feminist writer?
LT: (Laugh) I think our society is not really used to women being vocal or showing appreciation of other women. But I grew up in a matriarchal culture and it's not necessarily that women are more important, but it's just that women have a better status in the Navajo society and in the Navajo family. So I think I'm a typical Navajo person and I think Navajo men feel the same way I do about women because there is a strong sense of respect that the Navajo people have raised for women. The whole family and the home are centered around the woman. They say that the woman is the center of the home and that through the woman all beauty and all good things come out from the center of the home. So everything women do is very important, even the way you dress, the way you fix your hair. The status that the woman has in the Navajo culture has always been there.
But it's unusual in a non-Navajo society because women have not been treated well for the most part in western societies. They have not been treated the way they should have been. So when people see that {16} in my work, perhaps they think I'm a feminist. To them overthrowing the men is feminism, overthrowing men or becoming better than men. But in the Navajo society it's not that, it's being equal and it's having a status that's different from the one non-Indian people have.
There's also a problem of terminology. What does the word feminist mean? It means to value or appreciate, to have respect for the individual regardless of the gender. It doesn't mean women having an equal status with men. It's a word that people throw around and it starts having some negative connotations, but it has a different meaning behind it. It's like people saying "she is a real libber." That's not good because then you think about burning bras, hating men, that kind of stuff.
SM: What are the most important topics for you?
LT: I don't know if I really have inspirational things. I'm just writing all the time. I have a journal that I write in every day, and I write all the time. Some things turn into poems and some things don't, it just depends. I know that I'm really observant. I really watch, notice things a lot. I listen to people a lot, more than I talk, probably. Sometimes something will happen that will make me really think and work to turn it into a poem. For the most part it comes together over a period of time, maybe three days, maybe two weeks.
SM: Do you sit down every day at the same time to write?
LT: No. I wish I had the luxury of sitting down at the same time. I just write whenever I have a chance, and I never know when that will be. Sometimes I say that I'm going to take a nap, and then the kids know that they have to leave me alone. Then I write instead of taking a nap. (Pause) Most of the times I take a nap. (Laugh) It just depends on what my schedule is.
When I'm traveling I don't write in my journal as much as I write poetry. When I travel I write a poem a day. Writing a poem is a lot of work for me and I really want to make it succinct and powerful and get as much as I can without rambling on and on. So when I travel and write a poem a day it really makes me work but I like it. So wherever I go I make sure that I have poems from that time because things there are different from what they are afterwards. When I'm not traveling I usually have twenty things to do all the time, and then it's just a matter of finding that time to word it. Then I write more journal.
There is no formula; it's just something that comes together. Maybe I hear something that someone says and it's a good line. So I keep that and I keep working on it. And I can really write poetry anywhere, anytime. It's not the act of writing as much as it is to create it and formulate it in my mind. I really like to drive because it gives me that freedom to write as I am driving. I can do it anytime, when I'm {17} cooking, when I'm mopping the floor. It gives me a nice escape instead of getting impatient in the grocery line. I don't have to be there. I mean, I'm physically there in the line, but in my mind I'm writing poetry. It's nice, it's like a place I can go to anytime, and I don't get upset by these little things that I might otherwise mind.
SM: One thing that has always fascinated me in your poetry is the number of texts about driving. A lot of people see driving as a pain, a struggle, but I drive a lot myself and find it very inspiring, too. I remember a poem from A Breeze Swept Through about your driving back to Shiprock . . .
LT: Yes, and I think it's very common in this area. I was talking to somebody over the weekend and she was saying: "To me the most important is a full tank, a car in good condition and a good sound system. Then I'm all set." That's the way I feel. I have my box of tapes and a big Diet Coke and I'm happy.
SM: What do you listen to when you are on the road?
LT: All kinds of things, mostly country western music. It's kind of depressing, but one or two of them are really cute. I listen to some tapes I got when I went to Hawaii, jazz, classical. I don't listen to rock too much, but my kids do. (Laugh)
SM: Do you think you reach a broad audience or mainly people from the Southwest?
LT: I think it's pretty broad. I know it's Southwestern in terms of the land and the landmarks. But the emotional content can be read pretty much all over the country. The only thing they don't understand is the land, the desert. Like in Hawaii, they think we can't open the door without looking to make sure there is not a snake waiting to come in. Really, they think we are just plagued by snakes. It's funny. (Laugh)
SM: How do you see your future as a poet?
LT: Well, hopefully I'll have another book published and I'll get a grant to take some time off from teaching and just write.
SM: Are you still doing storytelling?
LT: Not really. I do more poetry than storytelling. It's hard to get paid at least half of what you should get. I got to the point where I do five or six benefits a semester, that's it. It takes a lot of energy to do a good job, and people think that you just go there and do it. (Pause). I also have a children's book coming out at Northern Arizona Press. That's a good area to go into.
SM: Do you plan to write a novel?
LT: Maybe. I have that story I gave you that is a fiction [Luci was {18} referring to "What I Am"]. That might just happen. It came together really quickly and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. But at this point I don't see that happening. I don't really like to write fiction. Poetry is better for me. I think I'd like to try writing scripts. Wouldn't it be nice to get paid to write from 8:00 to 5:00? It would be wonderful.
A Breeze Swept Through. Los Angeles: West End Press,
1987.
One More Shiprock Night. San Antonio: Tejas Art Press,
1981.
Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Press, l981.
"The Way It Is." Sign Language. New York:
Aperture, 1988. With photographs by Skeet McAuley.
"What I Am." Recent Ones that are Made. Santa
Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, July 1988. Rpt.
in Sonora Review 14. Tucson: U of Arizona, Spring 1989.
{19}
Rodney Simard
That American Indians have always been a staple of the film industry is news for no one; suburban adolescent and Native ethnographer alike have been awash in largely stereotypical images, both positive and--primarily--negative, since the first silent two-reelers and serials until the current primacy of television and video. From the beginning, the "Western" has been a primary film genre, embodying and reflecting a romanticized notion of American ideals: potentiality, individuality, recreation, primal heroism, manifest destiny, savagism and civilization. But it has also been a genre not bound by national borders, appealing instead to a geography of the mind; witness the birth of the "New Western" in Italy in the 1960s and the enduring popularity of these films in Europe and the Orient.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., asserts, correctly I believe, that
the enduring film images of Indians are derived from the captivity
narratives, the earliest American literary genre, as transmuted
through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and pulp fiction,
to current fiction and the mass media (104). As a genre, the
Western has developed its own conventions and formulae, to which
the Indian character has been made to conform; the resultant
images, the stereotypes that emerged from earlier media, are
generally polarized as two extremes described by Michael Hilger:
"the blood-thirsty savage and the noble but doomed savage
as fictions to emphasize the superiority of . . . white heroes,
to comment on contemporary political issues or to serve the needs
of the western genre" (1). Hilger goes on to note that "even
such great directors as D. W. Griffith and John Ford portray
the Indian as always too good or too bad; as such they are often
the most extreme fictions in the western, a genre which seldom
comes very close to reality" (1). Note that savage
is the operative word in this explication, echoing the brilliant
paradigm of the American consciousness outlined by Roy Harvey
Pearce.
Images of Indian
blood thirst in film are countered by considerably fewer hand-wringing
laments about vanishing Red nobility (Hilger's filmography lists
830 films through 1984; he also reminds us of the central importance
of the techniques of cinematography in creating and perpetuating
stereotypes, 3-5). Most frequently, positive depiction of Indians
in film is equally stereotyped, from the Viet Nam parables inherent
in Little Big Man and Soldier Blue to the "pseudofactual
mélange of anthropological blunders and white supremacy"
of A Man Called Horse (Stedman 260).
{20}
To its credit,
Powwow Highway avoids the usual polarities and the stereotypes
attendant upon them. It is a very good film, but it is decidedly
not David Seals' excellent novel, Powwow Highway, upon
which it was based with a high degree of fidelity--and an equally
high degree of quite odd interpolation and omission.
The greatest
strength of the film is in its performances. As Philbert Bono,
Gary Farmer is a casting director's dream: his size, with its
suggested power and gentleness, is exactly Philbert's, and his
seraphic expression captures precisely Philbert's unusual mixture
of the inspired and the dim. The scene of his waking in the Denver
condominium, as he nakedly luxuriates in the absurdly small child's
twin bed, conveys with imagistic precision the narrative description
of Seals' novel (231-33). Farmer's performance is perfection;
he is Philbert. Too often in the novel, Seals' ironic
tone seems to diminish the fundamental importance of Philbert's
epiphany and quest as the author attempts to put Philbert's vision
in the correct perspective of his limited intelligence. Farmer's
laconic performance never suggests any such disjunction between
the high and the low, fusing the two instead into a seamless
and consistent whole.
More problematic
is A Martinez as Buddy Red Bow (why the shift of the family name
from Red Bird?), not only in terms of ethnicity, but also in
his tentativeness in the role. Largely convincing and effective,
Martinez does seem uncomfortable with his Indianness, but this
may indeed be Buddy's problem as well; still, such hesitation
and discomfort are amplifications of the novel. Joanelle Nadine
Romero as Bonnie brings a startling beauty to her character,
one inherent in the character of Bonnie, but Romero is madonna-like
in her physical presence, emphasized throughout the film, and
particularly in the shot of her in jail as she awaits Bunny's
arrival. Many of the lesser roles, most evidently cast with Indian
actors, are also convincing and effective, infusing the experience
of the film with a necessary mixture of reverence and humor.
Even with considerable
reshaping of the source, the film is effective in its own terms.
Indian material is not slighted--even if it is frequently distorted.
The value of Powwow Highway is that it is an organic,
effective film and, more importantly, that it attempts to present
Indian material from an Indian perspective, something that few
of the products of Hollywood (and other points) have ever even
attempted. Still, it bears evidence of conformity to the genre.
For example, the film ends in a predictable car chase, for no
reason apparent other than the formulaic expectation of such
an event. Not only is this a distortion of the event from the
original narrative, but it also tends to eclipse the essential
motivation of the work: Philbert's vision quest and his acquisition
of his tokens for his medicine bundle. In fact, his quest is
{21} completely forgotten in the
last segment of the film as the rescue-of- the-maiden motif dominates
entirely. More disturbing is the inflation of the role of Chief
Billy Little Old Man. In the novel, aware of Buddy's deviation
from his appointed task of buying bulls with tribal money, he
waits patiently and hopefully for the return of the prodigal,
an important factor in the future of the tribe. But in the film
he goes to Santa Fe, the very portrait of the wise and stoic
chief, albeit in contemporary manifestation. He is even the agent
by which the final escape is effected. Again, a stereotypical
elder, the embodiment of patience and wisdom, is offered to counter
the excesses of the young "bucks."
More importantly,
complexity of character is diminished, edging uncomfortably close
to stereotypes, and the broad political canvas of the novel (Seals
was a member of AIM) has been reduced to a simple polarity. Granting
that elision and compression are necessary in most cases of transferring
a narrative from one medium to another, particularly from novel
to film, one cannot avoid the implications of many alterations
in this script. Examples abound: drug ingestion has been radically
reduced from the novel, but perhaps the filmmakers were trying
to avoid the stereotype of the "drunken Indian." Lester
and Doris, their subplot and their involvement in the main plot,
have been excised. The violence and anger attendant upon Buddy's
attack on the Radio Shack have been contextualized and rationalized.
Most details of family relationships have been streamlined and/or
distorted. Discursive cultural details in the novel have been
translated into simple images. Philbert's theft from the Santa
Fe police station has been reduced by 90%. Bull Miller has been
portrayed as a figure familiar to the newest revival of film
noir. The very Indian party in the Denver condo is missing. And
the like. Perhaps solid reasons underlie all these alterations--and
many more--but speculation does suggest a few very familiar and
unfortunate possibilities. Without the direct testimony of the
filmmakers, perhaps the best position is suggested by a paraphrase
and elaboration on the famous remark by Gladstone: a reasonable
person does not want to know how sausages, laws, and movies are
made.
Inescapable and
more insidious, to me, are two other aspects of the film. First
is its anti-feminism and, in context, anti-Indian portrayal of
women. Romero does make an exquisite Bonnie, but she is not Seals'
tough and intelligent survivor. By making her into a madonna,
the film shears away her battle scars, for the character in the
novel, while beautiful, is hardly a saint. Bonnie has been and
continues to be a promiscuous drug dealer, qualities that add
depth, complexity, and humanity to her character. She is precisely
not the stereotypical "Princess," but rather a very
real woman who can, for the most part,{22}
ably take care of herself as she explores and expands the restricted
range of potentiality offered to Indian women in the world today.
Similarly, her youngest child, Jane, has been made older than
her brother, Sky, and neither child acts with the admirable self-reliance
of her or his counterpart in the novel. To make the women and
children of the film ineffectually reliant on men distorts many
of the realities of both historical and contemporary Indian cultures,
however desirable or "safe" such a depiction might
be from a Hollywood perspective.
A second problem
is the complexity of the antecedent action of the novel being
reduced to a simple opposition. Philbert's quest having given
way to the rescue plot, the film encapsulates the antagonists
into the targeted "apple," Sandy Youngblood, who has
become the representative of a mining company that wants reservation
rights. Bonnie is framed in order to lure Buddy away during a
critical tribal vote. Immediately alarming is the notion that
Buddy is the sole savior of his people, who, without his wayward
but paternalistic presence, will yet once again sell away their
lifeblood because of their child-like trust (more alarming still
in the context of that symbol being portrayed by a non-Indian
actor). But also disturbing is the reduction of the tangles of
political and criminal nets that the original narrative is enmeshed
in. AIM, the FBI, the Mafia, the BIA--all the purposefully vague
and confused political factors of the novel, all of whom contribute
to a complex, sinister, and insidious atmospheric feeling--are
conveniently, too conveniently, rolled into a familiar force:
a materialistic and exploitative white corporation that can,
by means of a simple trick, rob the Indians of their possessions.
This stereotype is obviously reductive, however convenient it
might be in terms of film explication and plot development, and
it also strips the novel of an important dimension of Indian
truth. The forces of opposition are and always have been many
and multifacted, alien to the point of obscurity, and a consistent
state of vague paranoia is not necessarily a pathological condition.
It is a reality, one that the film distorts. To reduce the complexity
of the plot is to reduce the Indian experience.
I could quibble
about lesser points of sanitization or distortion, like the impression
of humor the movie generates. Much that is comedic is inherent,
both verbally and physically, but by removing such scenes as
the party in the Denver condo, the particularly holistic sense
of Indian humor is missing, the ability to see both sides of
a situation simultaneously. Still, Powwow Highway is
a good film and it is an important film for the advances it makes.
Euramerica can find much to learn from it. One stills hopes,
however, for the validity of future efforts. Several projects
have recently been announced in the press (significantly in Hollywood
itself); perhaps soon audiences will be exposed to an Indian
world-view, complete in its own holistic complexity and integrity.
{23}
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Hilger, Michael. The American Indian in Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1986.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.
Seals, David. Powwow Highway. New York: Plume-NAL, 1979.
Stedman, Raymond William. Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982.
A Conversation Around Powwow Highway
Toby Langen and Kathryn Shanley
Marshall Toman and Carole Gerster
A course in
ethnic film and literature allows teachers to present theories
of racism and to ask students to apply these theories to films,
literature, and their own lives; to examine the construction
and attempted deconstruction of stereotypes; to realize for students
"forgotten" history or neglected contemporary reality;
to foster the ability to read film and literature critically;
and to contrast the dominant {30}
culture's representations of ethnic groups with those groups'
own voicing of their experience. Powwow Highway is an
excellent film to use in the Native American segment of such
a course because, in addition to students' enjoying the film,
it provides a contrast to many standard media depictions of Indians,
raises topical issues of crucial importance, and, while remaining
faithful to contemporary Indian experience, also asserts this
contemporary relevance from a traditional Cheyenne perspective.
Jonathan Wacks'
1988 film Powwow Highway helps set the agenda for the
Native American portion of our team-taught course on Ethnic Film
and Literature. We teach this film in conjunction with clips
from the film series Images and Indians and the PBS
Frontline documentary The Spirit of Crazy Horse,
and with Louise Erdrich's "Dear John Wayne," Paula
Gunn Allen's "Grandmother," Elizabeth Sullivan's "Legend
of the Trail of Tears," and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony,
in a semester course that also includes films and literature
by African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. We have found
that Powwow Highway helps raise student consciousness
about topical issues important to the Northern Cheyenne in particular
and to Native Americans in general. Told in contemporary as well
as traditional tribal terms, the film dismisses stereotypes,
retells the cowboy-Indian conflict from a Native American perspective,
and demonstrates the dual importance of reclaiming a traditional
tribal identity and continuing the political struggle for justice.
Based on David Seals' 1979 novel, the film Powwow Highway
depicts the interconnected ceremonial and political journey of
its two protagonists--Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer) and Buddy Red
Bow (A Martinez)--to become itself both ritual event and political
act.
Two of the important
topics raised by the film are the Internecine struggles involving
the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the poisoning of reservation
drinking water by uranium mining. Powwow Highway affords
teachers the opportunity to acquaint students with one of the
most important manifestations of political dissent in this century
of United States history. Buddy and Wolf Tooth are veterans not
only of Vietnam but also of Wounded Knee (WK) II. Wounded Knee,
South Dakota, was the site, in 1890, of the massacre of 300 unarmed
Lakota men, women, and children by the U.S. cavalry, and, in
1972, of the largest armed conflict in the U.S. since the Civil
War (Locker).
Philbert's virtual
ignorance about WK II ("You weren't in Wounded Knee with
us? Or Ogalala?" "No. But I remember hearing about
it.") underscores one of the main tensions within the movie:
Philbert is politically naive while Buddy--although he is of
the reservation--has negotiated the Anglo world and can apply
legalistic, bureaucratic solutions to Indian problems.
{31}
Good sources
for the background of WK II and AIM include the article-length
analysis by Roos et al. and the book-length study by
Stephen Cornwell, but one of the best ways to present the material
to a class is to introduce the background information with excerpts
from the 1990 Frontline production The Spirit of
Crazy Horse, narrated by Milo Yellow Hair. In Powwow
Highway, Imogene tells Buddy that the reason the family
must leave Pine Ridge is that "There's a shooting a week";
The Spirit of Crazy Horse includes an interview with
the Richards family, real victims of a Dick Wilson-sanctioned,
drive-by shooting. In Powwow Highway, when Miller is
thwarted in his attempt to beat up Buddy, Miller yells that "All
you AIM sons-of-bitches are going to rot in prison, just like
your friend Peltier." The Spirit of Crazy Horse
interviews Peltier, asserts that he was framed by the federal
government and used as a political scapegoat, and in general
provides the background for his "rotting in prison."
In order for
students to fully appreciate the import of the lines from the
film about Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, and Leonard Peltier, we
sketch the salient background. WK II began in February of 1973.
A year previous to the occupation, on February 20, 1972, Raymond
Yellow Thunder was killed in Gordon, Nebraska. AIM, until then
largely an urban group, was called in to obtain justice; when
two white men were eventually found guilty of second degree manslaughter,
AIM was credited (Roos et al. 90). With growing support,
AIM criticized the Pine Ridge Tribal Government, headed by Dick
Wilson, as corrupt and subservient to the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA). Wilson armed his supporters, harassed AIM leaders, and
suppressed public assemblies and political debate; Wilson's measures
were countenanced by federal authorities.
On the night of February 28, 1973, the American Indian Movement led a band of rebels into Wounded Knee, just miles from Pine Ridge. They captured the town, sacked the general store, and barricaded themselves against the police. It was an audacious stand to gain national attention. The 300 insurgents were immediately surrounded by combat-trained federal marshals, F.B.I. agents, and Wilson's vigilantes. The next morning the world woke up to reports of a new Indian war. (Locker)
The occupiers' demands (which were varied and not always clear)
included the removal of Wilson; the return of treaty lands, particularly
the sacred Black Hills; the investigation of treaty violations;
and an increase in money and employment for the Lakotas (Roos
et al. 90).
After the long,
bitter, two-and-one-half month siege, AIM surrendered when investigations
were promised; however, no substantial {31}
action was ever taken. Internecine strife continued for the next
thirty months with over 60 people being murdered in the Pine
Ridge area, most of them AIM supporters (Locker). Finally, in
June of 1975 Leonard Peltier organized several cars of AIM members
to return to Pine Ridge to protect AIM supporters. He became
involved in a day-long shoot-out in which one Native American
and two F.B.I. agents were killed. After his trial, which sentenced
him to life imprisonment despite an F.B.I. document that was
later released proving that the agents could not have been killed
by his gun,1 the worst of the violence subsided; AIM
was exhausted, Wilson was defeated in tribal elections, and his
vigilantes were disbanded (Locker).
In the film,
Buddy represents resistance to accommodationist/assimilationist
policy--as AIM did on Pine Ridge--and Sandy Youngblood and Miller
reproduce the cooperation with the government and policial suppression
that Wilson and his "goon squad" (Locker) carried out
on Pine Ridge. Early on, the movie underscores the difference
between Buddy and Sandy with an allusion to the Fort Laramie
Treaty. Sandy wants to bring a mining company onto reservation
lands, and Buddy resists the initiative as exploitive. When Sandy
argues in favor of the mining company by saying that "Our
employment contracts are a matter of public record," Buddy
counters with "Oh, yeah, yeah. I read your contract. I read
every damn contract since the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. And
it's always the same deal, ain't it? You get what you want, and
we get the shaft." The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty reserved
all of what is now South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including
the Black Hills, for the Sioux (Roos et al. 91). But
then gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and in 1889 the
government carved up the Greater Sioux Reservation into six smaller
tracts so that gold mining could take place (Irvin 91). Buddy's
point is that you can't trust such contracts. Nonetheless, for
what are shown to be personally selfish reasons, Sandy continues
to cooperate with the federal government to help Overdyne exploit
the reservation. Buddy, late in the film, characterizes Sandy's
attitude as corrupt, rotten, when he cautions a woman Sandy is
speaking to in a bar that "sometimes you got to bite the
apple to see worms." The characterization of Sandy as an
"apple" is appropriate: he's red on the outside but
"white" underneath (see Seals, TPH 114, 203).
A second topic
of importance alluded to in the film is the poisoning of reservation
drinking water by the mining of radioactive materials. Philbert
doesn't recognize the green bottle of Perrier handed to him in
Wolf Tooth's home. Wolf Tooth explains the presence of the "yuppy
bullshit" (as Buddy refers to it) in his comparatively impoverished
surroundings: "Uranium mines have poisoned the White River
from here to Cactus Flat." Such a line affords us an opportunity
to tell {33} students that to obtain
2.24 ounces of yellowcake (appropriate nuclear fuel) a ton of
rock must be mined. The ton, minus the 2.24 ounces, is discarded
as mill tailings which resemble fine sand and contain 80% of
the rock's original radioactivity. Thorium 230 (half life 80,000
years), Radium 226 (1,630 years), and Radon 222 exist in this
sand which is now subject to wind and water erosion. The extraction
process yields liquid wastes and a mud-like by-product called
"slime," both highly radioactive and disposed of by
dilution and dumping into a stream. "In 1962, 200 tons of
radioactive mill tailings from the Edgemont mill site [near Pine
Ridge in the southwest corner of South Dakota] washed into the
Cheyenne River." Three-and-one-half million tons of tailings
lie on the banks of Cottonwood Creek and the Cheyenne River as
a result of Uranium mining in the 1950s and 60s (Irvin 90-93).
In March 1980,
WARN (Women of All Red Nations) "published a privately researched
report [on health problems on Pine Ridge Reservation] showing
that radioactivity levels in Red Shirt subsurface water tested
at 15 picoCuries per liter (pCi/l). The Federal Safety Standard
is 5 (pCi/l)." A new well (to solve the problem) tested
at 70 (pCi/l), 14 times the safety standard (Irvin 91). Health
problems in this area included "(1) a marked increase in
spontaneous abortions [7 times the national average--page 96];
(2) an increase in pregnancy complications; (3) an increase in
congenital defects traditionally unknown among the Lakota (club
foot, heart defects, and cleft palate); (4) infant respiratory
problems; (5) a high incidence of infant mortality, cancer, and
diabetes" (Irvin 91-92). The issue is urgent. Its seriousness
is acknowledged in the film with the hope that the issue will
insinuate itself into the minds of a broad audience.
Powwow Highway
also raises student consciousness about various forms of stereotyping
in standard media depictions of Indians. Two scenes focus on
the broken English spoken by Hollywood movie Indians as they
confronted manifest destiny, as if they were incapable of language
or civilization. The first scene shows a television advertisement
for used Mustang and Pinto cars, with a non-Indian salesman in
full Indian headdress who says, "How, folks. This old cowboy
is on the warpath with heap big savings. All our choicest stock.
Come on down off the rez or the ranch and pick out your pony
today." The ad depicts Native Americans as easily exploitable:
Anglo America has appropriated Native American culture in naming
its cars Cherokees and Winnebagos and in wearing Native American
headdress, and it now wishes to sell back what it has appropriated--in
used form. The second scene occurs at the Hi-Fi electronics store,
with an Anglo salesman's condescending remark to Philbert and
Buddy: "No gettum special deal on this one, chief."
In both scenes white America is trying to sell Native Americans
a used or inferior product, as if it were especially {34}
suited for them, using the broken English they will supposedly
understand as their own. However, the film's intent is to dismiss,
not repeat such stereotypes. In line with the film's revisionary
humor, in both scenes the broken English is put back into the
mouths of media people who originated and continue to perpetuate
it. Instead of making white males the protagonists who provide
the audience with an entry into Native American life, this film's
two white salesmen are depicted as arrested in their development;
they see twentieth-century Indians only in terms of movie stereotypes
about nineteenth-century ones.
Other revisions
include the characterizations of the two protagonists and the
standard cowboy-Indian chase plot. Buddy and Philbert are portrayed
as superficially akin to standard media depictions of the hostile
savage and the noble savage only to revise those images. Though
Buddy is certainly hostile, his behavior and the way he is treated
by white society clearly show that he is not a twentieth-century
manifestation of, in Paula Gunn Allen's words, the popular media
view of nineteenth-century "Indians as hostile savages who
capture white ladies and torture them, obstruct the westward
movement of peaceable white settlers, and engage in bloodthirsty
uprisings in which they glory in the massacre of innocent colonists
and pioneers" (Sacred Hoop 5). Buddy's friendship
with his sister's white woman friend, Rabbit, and Powwow
Highway's direct reversal of the old plot (epitomized in
John Ford's The Searchers) contradict the first part
of the stereotype: here white males have captured an Indian woman
and torture her by refusing to release her to be with her children
until after Christmas. Also, Buddy's efforts to stop Overdyne
Mining Company from taking remaining tribal resources without
benefit to the reservation, his earlier AIM efforts at Wounded
Knee II and Ogalala, and his personal problems because of the
FBI's persecution (arresting his sister to remove him from the
reservation before the tribal vote on the Overdyne mining proposal),
all explain his hostility and portray him as opposite each aspect
of the bloodthirsty-savage-attacking-innocent-white-settlers
stereotype.
And although
Philbert shows a reverence for the earth and its creatures, he
is not, to use Allen's definition of the currently popular stereotype
of the noble savage, "The appealing but doomed victim of
the inevitable evolution of humanity from primitive to postindustrial
social orders" (Sacred Hoop 4). More than a victim
of European invasion and industrial colonialization, and far
from doomed, Philbert acts on his traditional beliefs in order
to deal with the contemporary cowboys who have falsely jailed
Buddy's sister. Philbert's trickster story prepares us for a
revised cowboy-Indian chase scene. When the Sante Fe police,
the FBI agents, and Sandy Youngblood all take seats in police
cars with the words "Let's cowboy up. We got work to do,"{35} we are ready for Philbert to perform
the role of trickster and, as he has promised the trickster will
do, to "play a little trick on the white man."
In the face of
media stereotypes, Buddy and Philbert define themselves: Buddy
in terms of militant political activism that he has both adapted
from and uses to deal with white society, and Philbert by the
inherited ritual traditions of his tribe that he learned from
his Uncle Fred and uses to gain a tribal identity. They demonstrate
that no two Native Americans, even those from the same tribe,
can be lumped together as one type. They are, however, both Cheyenne
warriors on a parallel, if rarely merging, journey to Sante Fe
and back. Disregarding the individual, the individualistic, hero
of western literature, Powwow Highway has dual protagonists
to represent dual concerns, and to show the need for each man
to understand and work with the other. The powwow they both attend,
Philbert's trickster story, and the film's final dream vision
all show that the powwow highway they travel together serves
as a metaphor for the necessary continuance of both tribal traditions
and the political battle for Native American justice that the
two men represent. Against the backdrop of federally sponsored
economic exploitation and general apathy as well as reductive
definitions of Native Americans, the film presents Native Americans
defining themselves and taking action against economic and cultural
imperialism.
The film shows
the powwow as a gathering place for Native Americans of different
tribes and differing lifestypes to come together in friendly
competition to gather strength and support from one another.
At the Pine Ridge powwow, which Buddy is reluctant to attend
on the premise that beads and feathers do not comprise a culture
and that they need to go directly to Sante Fe, he encounters
Miller and his goons. Buddy is saved--from both physical removal
and a thrashing by Miller's goons--by the well-aimed knife of
a fellow Vietnam vet, who then tells Buddy to join in the dancing.
Philbert, on the other hand, has insisted that they attend the
powwow, for he seeks a path of ritual transformation that will
put him in harmony with supernatural powers and the earth, and
his path involves recovering Cheyenne history and traditions.
As Philbert beats the sacred, animating drum, Buddy is moved
to dance within the interrelated circles of Native Americans.
In the character of the Vietnam vet, Buddy's protest politics
and Philbert's tribal consciousness merge to show the necessity
of each. From these powwow scenes, students come to understand
the powwow as a return to roots that provides a way to resolve
contradictions in order to ensure both physical and cultural
survival.
The film shows
how the oral storytelling tradition is an important means to
keep a culture alive. Philbert tells the story of Wihio the trickster,
over Buddy's protest that it's "too bad those stories don't
tell us how to keep our reservations" or "our coal,
our oil, our uranium,"{36}
and receives Wolf Tooth's praise that he "should be tribal
historian." But Philbert does not merely wish to reflect
the story of the Vanishing American; he seeks an alternative
to it. Unlike Wihio, who foolishly sought plums reflected in
the river rather than the real ones hanging right over his head,
and thus "never did get any plums," in his role as
trickster Philbert makes use of whatever he finds right in front
of him (whether reflection or not) and gets exactly what he needs.
Taking his clue to rip out Bonnie's jail cell window with a rope
tied to his car (Protector the War Pony) from the reflected television
image of an old William S. Hart cowboy movie, and retrieving
Rabbit's bail money and Buddy's bull purchasing money from the
open jail vault he passes by, Philbert allows them (at least
momentarily) to escape one specific instance of the political
imprisonment, the forced removal from one part of the country
to another, and the economic hardship that reflect the historical
Native American experience. The trickster takes many forms, sometimes
mocking and imitating others, and always bringing about change.
In answer to Buddy's protest politics, promising Buddy that "the
trickster will play a little trick on the white man," Philbert
has transformed traditional story into political action. Chief
George, who has come from Lame Deer to Sante Fe to find out what
has kept Buddy from his bull-purchasing task, is also involved
in trickster efforts, as he spills cattle onto the road to end
the cowboy chase.
The dream visions
that comprise much of the film provide Philbert, and the film
audience, with images of his Cheyenne ancestors. Throughout the
film, intercut visions disrupt the storytelling unities of time,
place, and action, to reflect the interconnectedness of past
and present. Toward the end of the film the final dream vision
also reflects the interconnectedness of vision and action. We
share Buddy's vision of himself as a warrior with a tomahawk
in hand, as he actually thwarts the police chase by throwing
the broken window of Philbert's car at a police car in chase.
After Philbert has enacted the role of trickster to rescue Bonnie
from jail, Buddy envisions himself as an ancestral warrior to
help the group escape from the police. When the story ends with
Philbert, Buddy, Rabbit, and Bonnie and her children all walking
down the road together, students understand that political activism
and ritual tradition have become meaningful counterparts and
that the unfinished business of America's native peoples involves
both.
A vivid way to
demonstrate to students the dual aspect of the journey, a contemporary
journey on traditional grounds, is to chart it on a transparency
map. From Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation,
we follow Buddy and Philbert to Sheridan, Wyoming, where they
stop at the electronics outlet; then down Interstate 25 to its
juncture with Interstate 90 where Philbert decides to swerve
to the east to visit the sacred mountain Noahvose or Bear Butte
{37} ("Sweet Butte" in
the movie); then south and east to Pine Ridge, to Wolf Tooth's
home and the powwow; then, resuming the journey to Santa Fe,
west on U.S. 18, jogging south to U.S. 20, and following east
along 20, stopping at Fort Robinson where the film intercuts
the 1879 Cheyenne march through the snow after Dull Knife's last
fight (Sandoz 276); then to the junction with Interstate 25 (again)
and south to the lunch stop at Wheatland, Wyoming, where Philbert
tells his trickster tale against the backdrop of the United States'
largest energy plant belching smoke; then south, still on 25,
to Denver and finally to Santa Fe (Seals, TPH passim).
Not coincidentally, we notice that this route takes us over the
traditional homeland of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne.2
When we taught
the film, it came in the second week of the Native American section
of the course. We had studied Ceremony during the first
week. Such a juxtaposition allows for several connections to
be explored. Both Leslie Marmon Silko's novel and Jonathan Wacks'
film show the trauma suffered by Native American veterans (by
Tayo and by Jimmy, Graham Greene's character). Both allude to
poisoning of the environment with uranium, either through the
development of the atomic bomb or through mining. Both involve
theft of Native American land, in the fenced off ranch lands
of Ceremony and in the allusion to violated treaty rights
as well as in the manipulations to exploit the mineral resources
of the reservation in Powwow Highway. Both allude to
a prominent Native American symbol for the creator of the universe
and spiritual sponsor, the spider: Ceremony begins with
the poem about Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman, the spider; Powwow
Highway shows Philbert reverently saving the tarantula.
Both depict the internecine struggles of Native Americans. Both
demonstrate the need for and power of stories: Ceremony
is the story of creating new and healing stories, and Philbert
assures Buddy that the old stories show us how to live in the
contemporary world. Finally, both works depict an extended ceremony.
Tayo goes to Betonie, who starts a process that extends over
many weeks. Philbert's whole journey to become a worthy warrior
is a type of ceremony. Both works thus show that life should
be a series of ceremonies, ultimately, a continuous prayer. Trusting
in that process works--both for Tayo, the wounded and suffering
hero of his people, and for Philbert, the unlikely comic hero.
1Robert DeNiro is producing a film about Wounded Knee II and Leonard Peltier, and Robert Redford has funded a documentary about Peltier (Seals, "Custerism" 638).
2Enlarging by approximately 130% the pertinent portion of the United {38} States map from the 15½" by 11" State Farm Road Atlas (2-3) will yield a scale about that of the map of the Cheyenne territory in Peter J. Powell's book (xxvii-xxix). If transparencies are used, the journey can be outlined on the United States map, then the Cheyenne territory map can be shown, and finally the one can be superimposed over the other to graphically illustrate the nearly coterminous aspect of the film's journey and traditional Cheyenne territory.
Allen, Paula Gunn. "Grandmother." Rpt. in Fisher, 126.
------. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Cornell, Stephen. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. New York: Oxford, 1988.
Erdrich, Louise. "Dear John Wayne." Rpt. in Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 41-42.
Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton, 1980.
Irvin, Amelia W. "Energy Development and the Effects of Mining on the Lakota Nation." Journal of Ethnic Studies 10.1 (Spring 1982): 89-101.
Locker, James, dir. Frontline: The Spirit of Crazy Horse. Narr. Milo Yellow Hair. Prod. Michel Dubois & Kevin McKiernan. 1990.
Lucas, Phil, and Robert Hagopian, dir. Images of Indians. Narr. Will Sampson. KCTS Seattle Public Television, 1979.
Powell, Peter J. The Cheyennes: A Critical Bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
Roos, Philip D., et al. "The Impact of the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation." Phylon 41.1 (March 1980): 89-99.
Sandoz, Mari. Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.
Seals, David. "The New Custerism." The Nation 13 May 1991: 634-39.
------. The Powwow Highway. 1979. New York: Plume, 1990.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
State Farm Insurance Company. State Farm Road Atlas: United States, Mexico, Canada. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1984.
Sullivan, Elizabeth. "Legend of the Trail of Tears." Rpt. in Fisher. 26-30.
Wacks, Jonathan, dir. Powwow Highway. With A Martinez and Gary Farmer. Hand-Made Films, 1987.
{39}
From the Secretary-Treasurer
Current SAIL
subscribers may recall from the announcement in SAIL
3.1 that the Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures
(ASAIL) will be incorporated with a dues-paying membership beginning
January 1, 1992. Membership in the Association is open to all
individuals and institutions interested in furthering the goals
of the Association. Rates are:
Individual membership:
$25
Institutional
membership: $35
Limited income
membership: $16
Sponsor:
$50
Patron:
$100
Benefits of ASAIL membership will include a subscription to SAIL,
a subscription to the newsletter ASAIL Notes, and special
rates at conferences sponsored by the Association; donations
at the Sponsor and Patron levels will be acknowledged in the
concurrent volume of SAIL.
As a result of
this change in the status of the Association, we anticipate that
subscribers to Volume 4 of the journal will typically be dues-paying
Association members. Those wishing to subscribe to the journal
without becoming members of the Association may contact Bob Nelson,
SAIL, Box 112, University of Richmond VA 23173 for 1992
rates.
In order to help
control mailing costs within the organization, we urge
all potential 1992 ASAIL members and SAIL subscribers
to join/resubscribe as early as possible. Dues received
prior to January 1992 will be credited towards 1992 membership.
We also encourage all to attend the ASAIL business meeting at
MLA and cast their votes for the next President, Secretary, and
Treasurer of ASAIL.
Elizabeth H. McDade
From the Editors
One of the pleasures
of this column is the opportunity to acknowledge contributions
to the continued publication of SAIL. This time the
pleasure is mixed: our editorial assistant at Fullerton, Sharon
Dilloway, is leaving us, and her presence and gifts will be much
missed. Sharon first offered her services to SAIL in
the fall of 1989, and since then has worked many hours each week
with unfailing generosity, reliability and good humor: she has
managed the book review cycle, tended to correspondence, formatted
and distributed hundreds of information sheets at conferences,
made her way through the CSUF Foundation bureaucracy, and (very
important) listened with a sympathetic ear--all for the sole
compensation of a campus parking pass. SAIL would not
have been possible without Sharon, and on behalf of all our readers
as well as myself, I extend our thanks to her and best wishes
on her future projects.
{40}
After two issues
focused on special topics, classical oral literatures in translation
and teaching American Indian literature, we are pleased to present
a highly eclectic collection of papers. William Clements' lucid
and astute analysis of translations from Zuni will be welcomed
by both seasoned critics of American Indian literatures and newcomers
to the field, while the interview with Luci Tapahonso explores
important themes for a writer who is gaining wider recognition.
The views put forward by the five contributors to the discussion
of Powwow Highway represent widely varied approaches
and positions as well as a first for SAIL: much-needed
analysis of media "texts." We invite readers to join
in this symposium with your experiences and critiques of this
film--and your views of other texts, including SAIL.
This issue goes
to press in early summer, and we are already planning for next
year's Volume Four. Several projects for 1992 are noted in the
announcements below: we call attention especially to a new special
issue on creative work.
Another SAIL
project for 1992 is support of "Returning the Gift,"
a gathering of Native North American writers for workshops, celebrations,
networking and performance. SAIL is submitting a proposal
to the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a special issue
devoted to conference proceedings; this grant requires matching
funds, and we are offering our readers an opportunity to participate
in the endeavor by becoming or finding supporting patrons for
it.
We welcome additional
suggestions and submissions from readers. SAIL belongs
to its readers and subscribers; please tell us what you think.
Helen Jaskoski
Robert M. Nelson