The first-time student of Native American oral literature confronts at once two daunting, though not insurmountable, facts. First, there is the incredible variety of Indian oral culture; by some estimates, at the beginning of European exploration more than five hundred indigenous languages were spoken in what is today the United States and Canada, and over two hundred remain, each with distinctive cultural features.

Second, the expectations for literary forms and techniques do not necessarily transfer from one culture to another, so that Native American literature can be misinterpreted or misunderstood if cast in the terms of other literatures. But these problems are also opportunities, for to examine the rich literary traditions of First People is to open the doorway to worldviews, languages, and aesthetics that challenge and enrich an understanding of more commonly canonized Western literature.

Orality was not, of course, a feature only of the Romantic era; most oral literature replicated stories and myths from the timeless past, and so to see it as originating in a particular period would be a mistake. But Native American spoken expression was put in the spotlight by historical changes in Indian treatment and policies in antebellum America that threatened the use of indigenous languages and the cultures they represented.

In the nineteenth century, conceptions of the “noble savage” collided with the political and ethnocentric realities of Manifest Destiny. Indian relocation had begun under Thomas Jefferson, who wished Native Americans to occupy a buffer zone between the United States and territories held by Spain and England. After the War of 1812, increased white migration beyond the Alleghenies pressured the United States to push Native Americans to territories beyond the Mississippi River. Enforcement of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson resulted in the forced relocation of perhaps 100,000 Native Americans. Weather, mistreatment, inadequate nutrition, and sheer exhaustion made conditions brutal on these forced marches: some 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama, and from 1838 to 1839 the infamous “Trail of Tears” took the lives of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees, nearly a fifth of the total Cherokee population. Following the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the United States began stationing troops along the Oregon Trail to protect immigrants traveling westward, a military occupation that further exacerbated relations with Plains tribes.

John Heckewelder

Ethnographic attention by European Americans to Native Americans and their languages increased during the period, spurred by the work of ethnologists John Heckewelder and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. But even serious researchers showed little interest in the aesthetics of oral literature, valuing it not as art but as a literal record of Native American ideas and customs. Among the casualties of these policies and attitudes were indigenous languages and oral traditions. Efforts to acculturate Native Americans following the Civil War led to measures like those of the 1868 Commission on Indian Affairs, which recommended the eradication of Native American languages.

With few exceptions, in antebellum America there was little printed literature by Native Americans. Elias Boudinot’s pamphlet, An Address to the Whites (1826), argued for white support as the Cherokees acculturated. William Apess wrote A Son of the Forest (1829), the first full-length Native American autobiography published in the United States. His essay “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” part of his collection The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequo’d Tribe (1833), offered a powerful religious condemnation of white prejudice.

In their depictions of the brutal treatment of Native Americans, the narratives of Occom and Apess resembled the slave narratives of the time, albeit with a decidedly Christian perspective. Both Boudinot and Apess were powerful orators whose speeches appeared in print. But American Indian literature was overwhelmingly oral until after the Civil War, not just because Native Americans had little access to the business of publishing but because orality had always been the preferred means to share, preserve, and transmit Indian cultures.

While acknowledging the dangers of imposing Western definitions of genre, scholars such as Andrew Wiget identify some common forms of Native American oral literature as creation/origin narratives, trickster tales, oratory, and poetry or songs.

CREATION/ORIGIN NARRATIVES

Varied and widespread across Indian cultures, creation narratives commonly involve a supreme force or deity, a mediating figure who brings about the creation or renewal of the earth, and a narrative movement across time and space. Not merely teleological explanations of the universe, creation myths provide an emotionally resonant sense of unity, a rationale for life and death, and a paradoxical coexistence of both the temporal and the eternal.

Among the many examples are the “Old Man” stories of the Blackfeet, in which Na’pi travels the world transforming its geography and creating humans out of clay, and the Zuni story When Newness was Made.

TRICKSTER NARRATIVES

As Jarold Ramsey notes, the trickster figure appears in many guises, depending upon tribal traditions: Coyote (Plateau, Great Basin, and Rocky Mountain Indians), Raven (North coast groups), Blue Jay, Raccoon, Dragonfly, Spider, Hare, and others. The trickster may be creative or destructive, cautionary or exemplary, antisocial or divine.

The intent of trickster narratives varies as well, from pointing out human pretensions to satirizing social institutions or those who ignore them. Barbara Babcock calls the trickster figure a “‘criminal’ culture-hero” who “embodies all possibilities—the most positive and the most negative—and is paradox personified.”

ORATORY

In the nineteenth century some believed that Native Americans had a gift for inspired eloquence. Wiget distinguishes ritual oratory from secular. An example of the first would be ceremonial addresses such as the Iroquois Thanksgiving address that precedes ritual gatherings in the tribal longhouse. (An excellent translation and discussion by Michael K. Foster appears in Brian Swann’s 1994 anthology.)

The second would be exemplified by the eulogies and political speeches of orators like Boudinot and Apess.

POETRY AND SONG

Distinguished from other oral performance less by their subject than by their form and conventions, Native American poetry and song rely on meter, repetition, figures, and other lyrical devices. Sung verse was sometimes performed by shamans, other times by a singer/poet commemorating an event or offering a kind of prayer or “formula.”

William Bright’s translation and discussion of a Karuk “love medicine” poem in Swann’s anthology is an example of the fluid combination of verse and song.

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. A frequent controversy in the discussion of Native American oral literature centers on the political implications of translation. This is particularly problematic when the translation cuts across both language and culture. The autobiography of Black Hawk (Sauk), for instance, published in 1833, was transcribed by a white newspaper editor, who heard it dictated by Black Hawk to an interpreter.

At its worst, the act of translation may be seen as a type of colonization, according to Margara Averbach. A more pragmatic position is represented by Jarold Ramsey, who argues that ignoring translated texts poses a greater problem, for it accelerates the disappearance of Native American voices. Students can examine the issue by choosing a single text and researching the circumstances of its translation: who translated it, when, and for what purposes.

2. Translation from the oral to the written can also distort by its literalness, ignoring the performative features of spoken art that are difficult to reproduce in print. Many nineteenth-century translations, following the lead of the influential American anthropologist Franz Boas, emphasized literal renderings of the spoken word with an emphasis on accuracy and content, not artistry.

In an important revisionist approach, Dennis Tedlock shows the importance of linguistic signals (such as pitch, grammar, archaisms, and interjections) and “oral” or “paralinguistic” features (such as voice quality, loudness, and pausing) to our appreciation of oral texts. Barre Toelken (in the Swann anthology) extends these performative features to include audience responses such as laughter.

Examine several examples that include the directions and paralinguistic signals to see how this information is recorded, and consider the effects of inserting a non-narrative voice into the printed text.

3. A similar issue is the use of Westernized genres to categorize Native American oral literature. Critics such as Wiget point out the insuitability of using Western genres and the aesthetics of written texts to categorize oral ones.

Babcock maintains, however, that cross-cultural analysis reveals some pronounced similarities between, for example, the trickster figure and Western literary heroes that make a comparative, generic approach legitimate.

Using a single text, compare and contrast the interpretation of it when it is defined in Western terms (that is, as an elegy) or in Native American terms (that is, as a “formula”). Alternatively, locate a video reproduction of a poetic performance such as those in Words and Place: Native Literature from the American Southwest and compare its effectiveness to a written text.

4. To what extent can we finally ask conventional Western questions of value—about artistic originality, for instance, or authorial intent—of literatures that are essentially collaborative and often ritualized?

Even formulaic texts depend upon the individual artistry of the speaker or singer, as Michael K. Foster notes in his work on Iroquoian oratory. However, failure to appreciate the distinctive conventions of Native American spoken literature—what Tedlock calls “a pervasive deafness to oral qualities”—can result in dismissing the texts as repetitive or simplistic.

For instance, in Navajo stories, the frequent refrain “it is said” (jiní) may strike the Western ear as redundant, but it serves a crucial purpose: to indicate that the narrator is retelling someone else’s story and to lend cultural authority to the tale.

The structures set out by the anthropologist Dell Hymes provide a strategy and a vocabulary for analyzing oral prose without imposing Western aesthetics on it. One way to investigate this phenomenon would be to locate reviews of published translations and trace the comments, negative and positive, about the presence of such ritualistic phrasings.

5. Despite the difficulties of translation and the loss of performative aspects of the works, critics have stressed the need to include Native American oral literature alongside other Western canonical texts.

Arnold Krupat makes the important argument that modern theorists from Michel Foucault to Raymond Williams have challenged key concepts such as authorship, definitions of literature, and canonicity in ways that admit the distinct contributions of Native American oral literature and justify their inclusion in the American classroom.

Resources

Primary Works

• Brian Swann, ed., Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literature of North America (New York: Random House, 1994).
  A comprehensive collection of translated Native American texts, organized by region, with contextual commentary by the translators and an informative editorial introduction.

• Lawana Trout, ed., Native American Literature: An Anthology (Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Publishing Group, 1999).
  A collection of Native American songs, tales, and poetry from a range of tribal cultures, including some from the oral tradition of the nineteenth century.

• Words and Place: Native Literature from the American Southwest http://wordsandplace.arizona.edu/index.html [accessed 3 November 2024].
  Produced at the University of Arizona, this site includes filmed performances of Native American oral tales and songs, with English subtitles and commentary.

Criticism

• Margara Averbach, “Translation and Resistance in Native North American Literature,” The American Indian Quarterly, 24 (Spring 2000): 165–181.
  Argues that the act of translation is a kind of cultural imperialism that perverts the original by placing it in terms that may not be appropriate.

• Barbara Babcock, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute, 9 (1975): 147–186.
  Shows the variety of trickster tales across cultures and analyzes the paradoxical nature of the trickster. Reprinted in Wiget, pp. 153–185.

• Dell Hymes, “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
  Examines the grammatical and semantic structures commonly found in Native American oral literature.

• Arnold Krupat, “An Approach to Native American Texts,” Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982): 323–338.
  Defends attention to printed texts and argues for the need to systematize inquiry into Native American literature by examining modes of production and the concepts of authorship, literature, and canonicity in light of current critical theory. Reprinted in Wiget, Critical Essays, pp. 116–131.

• Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire: The Traditional Indian Literatures of America, revised and expanded edition (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1999).
  Includes essays about representative Native works from a range of Indian communities across the country, concentrating on the Far West. Discusses, among others, origin narratives and trickster tales.

• Dennis Tedlock, “On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative,” The Journal of American Folklore, 84 (January–March 1971): 114–133.
  Argues for “treatment of oral narrative as dramatic poetry” and defends the stylistic complexity of Native American oral literature, using examples from the Zuni tradition.

• Andrew Wiget, Native American Literature (New York: Twayne, 1985).
  A mature scholarly overview of the literature from its beginnings to the present, as well as the theoretical and scholarly contexts.

• Wiget, ed., Critical Essays on Native American Literature (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985).
  An important collection that includes essays on methodological approaches and an excellent survey of nineteenth-century published literature by Native Americans.

Categories: Literature

Tags: Elias Boudinot, First Nations literature, indigenous literature, indigenous storytelling, indigenous worldviews, Native American authors, Native American creation myths, Native American culture, Native American ethnography, Native American folklore, Native American history, Native American identity, Native American languages, Native American literary criticism, Native American myths and legends, Native American narrative forms, Native American Oral Literature, Native American oratory, Native American poetry, Native American religion and spirituality, Native American rhetorical traditions, Native American songs and chants, oral traditions, Trail of Tears, trickster tales, William Apess