The following discussion was transcribed from an e-mail exchange that took place on the University of Kansas' Native American Literature Discussion list, NATIVELIT-L, from March 19-30, 1999. The messages have been arranged into discussion threads and edited to some degree. However, the performative and aggregative nature of e-mail exchange (like the oral exchanges it mimics) is such that it necessarily eludes efforts to strictly order and arrange it. Therefore, the messages in each thread do not always follow a strict chronological or logical order, and (like a spider's web) each thread touches upon issues raised in the other threads, as well. You can read the discussion straight through, browse by thread topic, or select a specific message number. Find out more about the participants. Contribute to this discussion through the Exchange Server (password required). Q1, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, A15, A16, A17, A18, A19, A20, A21, A22, A23, A24, A25, A26, A27, A28, A29, A30, A31, A32, A33, A34, A35, A36, A37, A38, A39, A40, A41, A42, A43
I've been following the discussion on the relationship between Native American literature and hypertext with much interest. I'm creating a series of web pages in preparation for a course I hope to teach entitled "Weaving Webs: Native American Literature, Oral Tradition, and Internet." One page discusses issues related to the topics of transcribing oral traditions, representing Native American cultures, and the relationship between tribalism and technology. I raise such questions as the following:
I'd be interested in hearing your responses to these or any other of the questions raised on my page.
Chris: the personal relation & interaction between storyteller and audience vanishes [on the web], as it does in movies as opposed to plays. Further, of course, the interaction within the audience vanishes also. If the medium is, to some extent, the message, then the skilled medium, the storyteller, loses an entire spectrum of possible techniques. Still, clearly the web will demand new writing techniques, adapted to the illusion of interaction the web presents.
Lew: I agree that interaction is essential in the performative mode of storytelling. Yet the "advance" that electronic communication provides over print technology is the possibility of "real time" interaction, either textual (i.e., in "chat" mode of email) or visual and aural (as with digital cameras). Wouldn't this allow for interaction between storyteller and audience and between audience members? What is lost when the participants are not in the same room but hundreds of miles apart? What would or would not "translate" through such a medium?
Chris: The interaction in storytelling flows through a channel the storyteller establishes and shapes. That would be lost when the narrator and the audience don't sit in the same room. Interaction on the net works either through no channel, or through a series of set events (choosing different alternatives in a story line, for example). What is lost are the myriad subliminal bits of information that the story- teller spurs and rides without, perhaps, consciously noticing them all. Certainly the subliminal perceptions exchanged among the audience vanish on the web. Perhaps some kind of storytelling technique would substitute for that immediacy, but I cannot imagine the techniques the narrator-performer would employ. Then there is the shared history assumed in classical storytelling. When a grandmother makes jokes about various grandsons and daughters, or Shakespeare makes jokes about Ned Alleyn in [Midsummer Night's Dream], and both the actors and the audience, including groundlings, recognize the jokes, we have a kind of immediacy and immersion in and transformation of common experience that the web, tuned to single and unitary bits of perception, or serial interaction, lacks. I think, at least, that is the case. It poses a dilemma.
Lew: I completely agree that the absence of shared history of interlocutors connected by the Internet makes this technology very problematic in terms of communicating an oral tradition or representing tribal identities, which depend not only on a shared history but a shared sense of place. On the web, the shared space is virtual which is why the idea of the web creating a "global village" seems to me a way of erasing local identities and contexts and histories. On the other hand, for those who do share a history and a sense of place (if not the same location), could the web strengthen tribal identity, for example linking those on and off the reservation?
Chris: the web might serve to connect those who retain identity without sharing community, but we still miss immediacy. We simply cannot retain on the web, or at least I can think of no technique that would allows us to retain, that immediate perception that comes when a storyteller refers to prairie dogs ("dooi") and uses the persona of a plump grandchild who proceeds enthusiastically into any activity available. The resonances simply don't come over the web. On the other hand, we discovered techniques for writing epics, and for structuring movies. I suspect some brilliant technician, as disciplined and perceptive as Carter, will come up with some ways of handling the web to his own satisfaction, and our delectation.
A really good way to remember all these conversations would be if we had them live. Fresh coffee smells. The smell of grits and fritters hanging in the air. Burnt toast smoke and smell drifting through the house. Cottonwood burning in the iron stove. Laughing at each other jokes and word plays. Blue Jays laughing outside the window. Crows taunting every other bird. We would all sit around in big cushy chairs and tell stories. Carter would relate all those little things that characterize our Anglo buddies and their cruel ways. I would remember that.
This is part of the immediacy that Lew was talking about as missing from interaction through electronic technologies. Though we have the ability to transmit aural and visual data, we can't yet transmit smells or tastes or touches. Will we be able to some day?
I hope not. It would be a shame if we were forced to substitute real time, real live exchanges with media.
I'm curious why, in these discussions, there seems to be an assumption that the Web or electronic, hypertext media is proposed as a REPLACEMENT for either printed literature or traditional storytelling. I think this is a faulty assumption and I don't know of anyone, nor have seen anyone on this list, propose such a thing. Simply that the new media is just that, a new media, and offers it's own possibilities which are just beginning to be explored, an additional alternative, not a replacement for anything. Granted a lot of hype flows in that vein, but it's just hype. Maybe kids buy into it, but on the other hand, maybe introducing them to literature and/or storytelling via a medium that excites their interest has the capability to move them into the "real thing" in a way handing them a book or telling them to sit down and pay attention doesn't (and can't, anymore, no matter what we think of that).
Linden: This seems to me the best way to approach new technologies, to try to understand both their uses and limitations as tools. Native American literature has been able to incorporate some aspects of oral traditions in print, but it does not replace traditional storytelling as you say. But print technologies and electronic technologies have been seen by some as replacing oral traditions: for example by salvage anthropologists who attempted to capture stories in print or on tape before they "vanished," as if these could replace oral traditions. Some media theorists (following Marshall McLuhan) have imagined electronic technologies as creating a new "tribalism," which is why I'm interested in testing the appropriateness of such a theory against the specifics of tribal cultures.
When I was at the Institute of American Indian Arts, there was a group there who were trying to document languages and oral tradition using electronic media, where they were in danger of being lost; i.e., recording the last native speaker and so on. They were not anthropologists, though, but native people interested in language and culture preservation in context, rather than from an external or academic ethnographic standpoint. While some of McLuhan's concepts do seem to have come about especially as a result of the internet, I for one would not be quick to place a necessarily positive value on this (especially as the "global village" we seem to be creating is just faux American pop culture), nor do I believe in the concept of "electronic tribalism" or any other kind of ersatz tribalism. A tribe is a tribe because of common language, belief systems, experience, culture, tradition and history as well as relatedness and this cannot be simply created out of whole cloth or "invented" as a technological byproduct. Oral tradition may be recorded, but cannot be replaced by any other form, and the recording is not the thing itself, as others have pointed out. I repeat, CANNOT. You can't have the story without the storyteller, and a computer or CD or VR or even a book or TV is not, ever, a storyteller. Someone mentioned "Farenheit 451"; one of my favorite movie scenes of all time is the "rememberers" walking around in the snow reciting their novels, a most eloquent statement of the need for the human element and it's ultimate value. Books can be burned, CD's and whatnot can be broken but you have to kill a "rememberer" and if there are enough, you can't kill them all. Something Europe learned during the Dark Ages when the monks in Ireland remembered what everyone else had forgotten.
There is still much to be retrieved from storytelling. One of the strong aspects of the recovery here in the NW was not simply the recitation of old knowledge but the fact that none of it had been written down and retrieved. It was there within the people who had become the rememberers. The knowledge that it took to revive the canoe nations, for instance, was not in books. It had been retained on the side, so to speak, in various individuals, some of which had no formal "education" beyond high school, if that. When the older individuals were confronted and asked about these "canoe" things, they were surprised someone had asked and gave the information through storytelling. Also, once the canoes were launched and were frequenting beaches up and down the coast, the elders came out to welcome the canoes and cried because they thought they would never see them again. Then they stepped forward and began to add to the story of how it was and how they had heard it was. Sometimes, names of well known carvers came out and the family names of those who were held responsible for certain customs and ceremonies. Once the canoe had come upon the water, the knowledge would come down to the beach and be poured in. This is how the canoe nations were revived. Also, canoe knowledge was shared between the various nations through story as people would sit in the longhouses, which all of a sudden came into use again, and tell these stories to their guests from the other nations. I believe that there is much in the books and recordings, but they make no sense until you hear the real thing and join in the ceremonies and storytellings which are given life when there is something to talk about and old memories that have been passed from one generation to the next come out through story. I know this because I used to spend a lot of time in museums and collections trying to grab a hold of these traditional things and I was not getting much, mostly because it had no life, nothing to put it all in. It only happened when these people recreated the situation in which these things actually existed and were of actual use. This is the difference between written and recorded information and storytelling: life.
Linden: I completely agree that creating a tribe or inventing tribalism through electronic technologies is an impossibility, which is why it's important to critique such theories of McLuhan and others. But I'm wondering if electronic technologies as tools might be used to sustain the language, belief systems, experience, culture, tradition, and history of tribes in a responsible way (as you said the group at IAIA was attempting to record oral traditions of native speakers within the cultural and historical context of their tribe). Does anyone know of electronic projects or web pages that attempt to do this? What elements, if any, of these new technologies make them useful in this regard? What makes such projects responsible to and not exploitative of the tribes?
I think [electronic technologies] can, up to a point [be used to sustain the language, belief systems, experience, culture, tradition, and history of tribes in a responsible way]; at least it can help. Responsible is a volatile word, though, and very subjective. You will find differing interpretations of it from tribe to tribe and within each tribe as well. As you will "exploitation". The IAIA group was eliminated by the administration before they completed their project; some of the people went over to IPOLA to continue work on language preservation. I don't think they use the web but I haven't checked lately. My opinion is that the web is a better vehicle for communicating outward, telling our own story; the Australian aborigines use it this way, also as a means of publicizing cultural preservation projects they have. I have heard of projects using CD's and multimedia technology to preserve language and some aspects of culture, and teach it. Buffy Sainte-Marie has a project in Canada but I think it's more geared towards teaching computer literacy.
Linden: Your point's a good one. The Internet does not actually replace either printed or film-video-TV media, any more than replaced talk or song. But if we think back to the time around 1880-1900,before the phonograph made recordings easily and widely available, we are thinking of a time when in schools and campuses, in barbershops and bawdyhouses, the singing was live, very often people joined in, and sang parts (harmony rather than melody) or improvised. We seem now to leave that mostly to professionals or wouldbe professionals. Same is true for musical instrument groups and individuals. (And for that matter in some ways for sports.) It is not so much REplacement as DISplacement, not quite TERMINATION but RELOCATION--we are on reservations whereas we used to have a lot more freedom to occupy intellectual or artistic country, could hunt where we pleased. The technology DOES redefine the art and the humane side of that art. Well, that is a possible view of it at least.
Carter: Do you think electronic technologies might open up some of the intellectual and artistic country for those who have been displaced? For example it opens up many new channels for publication and distribution of written as well as other forms of art on the web. This might be a space where those who have otherwise been silenced could find a voice. Of course, it depends upon people having access to the technology. But it seems alot easier and cheaper to get a PC and Internet provider than a publishing or record contract.
In the old days before books, all this material was passed down. In any group there would be several "rememberers". This was their job. This was a responsibility that was given to them by the elders who recognized that certain children had the ability to remember things very well. These children would be brought to the circles and the stories would be told, over and over again. In time, the "rememberer" would become the storyteller and they would tell these storys to the next generation of "rememberers". That is the way it was, that is the way it is. Another tack on this was the "witness". Certain people would be called upon to witness an event. They would get "paid" in various media such as a pony, or blanket, or canoe, by the person, or group of people, who called for the witnesses. Usually, these witnesses were held in high esteem. They were usually "rememberers".
Philip: The idea of remembering perhaps takes on new meaning in response to electronic technologies as opposed to print technologies. Print technologies fix words so that they do not have to be remembered, but can be referred to whenever necessary. But electronic technologies seem to move beyond the fixity of print. For example, web pages are continually changing, which drives us scholars crazy when we consider trying to cite web pages for our research. Before this list started being archived, I remember someone asking about one of Carter's poems that he had posted. It took some collective remembering on the part of the list members in order to recall the poem, which someone re-posted. Does this suggest that remembering will become more important as we interact through electronic technologies. Although perhaps they give the illusion of fixity (the idea that everything could potentially be saved on a computer if you had enough virtual memory) in reality the information seems far less stable than in print and there is so much information that it is difficult to find it or recall it when you need it.
Also Chris. In the old days, the information was more fixed and grounded in cultural needs and could be, and had to be, repeated one generation after another. Today we have a lot a information which is just information. It exists outside the need to really have it. Old information was based upon the need to sustain a culture well within the ability of the environment to provide that sustenance. The information we put out today is largely egotistical and exploitive. It would be, and probably is, impossible to remember every word that passes in front of you, and no one expects you to remember it all, even if you are a rememberer.
Philip: I think this raises the important issue of the purpose for putting out the information and the responsibility of those who put it out, especially in regards to the information put out about Native American cultures. Much of it is, as you say, exploitative (dis)information that misrepresents and appropriates Native American cultural materials rather than helping to sustain those cultures. This seems to me a real problem with the web, since many people do not have the interest or knowledge to distinguish between a New Age Wannabi Indian web page and one that is responsibly representing tribal traditions. People need to be taught how to evaluate the mass of information that can be distributed through this new technology.
Chris, You are aware that a coalition of middle and south American Indians has put a hold on information that they have been putting out over the last few years. They feel that the info has been exploited and used simply for the accumulation of wealth by the drug companys and the wannabes. So we know that this happens. The thing that has been missing is the use of certain ceremonies that have been held onto by most traditionalists. I am glad for this. Even though we have opened certain ceremonies, many have been withheld. Sure enough those that have been opened have been exploited along with the medicinal information. So, it seems that nothing can really be opened without some kind of betrayal happening. Seems those royals that Carter has been talking about have not melted into the past, they are with us. This takes us to the thing that would be missing on the internet: ceremony. Information has to moderated with ceremony otherwise it is just information. This is what we understand and the euros, for some reason, do not; or fail to acknowledge. If there is no sacredness, money will step in and attempt to replace it.
Philip: It seems to me that sacred ceremonies would be an element of Native American cultures that should not be represented and distributed informationally in any form, including through the classroom. I assume then that this would apply to chants and other oral traditions used in such ceremonies if we take seriously the sacredness of the words. Do you think there are other cultural materials that should not be represented, distributed, or taught?
Most of the ceremonies that we experienced on the journeys belonged to someone, or some family. It was said in the beginning of these practices that these things were not to be taken from that place, or from these people. There were songs that were offered to be put to use when the paddling was taking place. Once you get in the water and have traveled many miles you would see the need for these particular songs, even if they are not understood linquistically. So, these ceremonies belong to place and people. They cannot be removed and used like a piece of equipment or sold as product. You have to honor these gifts and know that they ARE where they belong and cannot be removed. This is the same with medicine. Medicine belongs to a place and the people who live in that place. Sometimes I get reluctant to take some herbs because they come from another place and another people and really only contain with them only part of their full value as medicine. You know, there are people who cannot take quinine. It kills them. The purpose of quinine was/is to reduce and prevent Yellow Fever, or malaria. There are people who cannot take quinine because it reduces their immune system to nothing and kills them. There are people who cannot get malaria. There are people who cannot get the Hanta virus. It does not seem to affect the locals as much as the visitors. There are people who cannot get AIDS, or other STD's. It's genetic and environmental. These are things I have heard. It remains to be seen whether these situations play out or not. Why do I get indigestion, or heartburn, whenever I eat pork. Pigs come from the eastern hemisphere. In some places where they appear in the west or on some islands they were brought in and became "wild" to the area. It's a certain type of fat that my body cannot deal with. Even beef is difficult sometimes. Anyway, our bodies also belong to a place, just like the herbs and animals. So, also the songs and ceremonies.
Philip: This importance of place to Native American cultures seems to me to reveal the major limitation of technologies (print or electronic) to represent those cultures. Such technologies are seen as "advances" because they "free" words and ideas from the bonds of local histories, contexts, places so that they can be distributed farther and faster than they could be in primary oral cultures. Yet the essential aspect of place is lost in the transmission. If the medium is the message then the message seems to be that place doesn't matter (from a Western perspective).
Yes! In order to re-culturate our people then we have to turn away from media and return to direct communication and ceremony and sacredness.
Hello Philip. These seem to me very important points to be kept in mind--the locating and the people-placing of ceremonies and songs. They probably should be thought about carefully in relation to the songs called by Christians Psalms and the whole of what is referred to as THE Bible, and of Relocating, Diaspora, and Preservation. To take one example, we should look carefully at what we want to "make" of a ceremony that some elders decided should be "given" to a "rememberer" not herself of the people by whom and for whom and of whom the ceremony was brought into being--for instance, the "Hako," a Pawnee "brother-making" ceremony (that is my term) recorded, transcribed, and translated by Alice Fletcher and Pawnee elders, printed in the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnography at the beginning of this century (Monograph No. 24, I think). It has been butchered and hamburgered into at least one "literary" volume in a curiously Victorian or Edwardian verbal form, only part of it there, and with very little of its actual "contents" present in that volume. This is surely not worse in some sense than putting the Twenty-third Psalm into a college textbook, or reciting it in a schoolroom, common enough practice. Yet I wonder whether "transplanting" Christianity was such a good idea, and behind that whether transplanting any religious ceremonies is. The Puritans and others used to complain that the Anglicans had not done away with the "groves and high places" of which some Old Testament prophets and chroniclers complained. These complaints transferred to North America as reasons to destroy the "Indians" as idolaters and devil-worshipers. And when Constantine adopted Christianity as THE imperial religion of the Roman Empire, making certain it would be transplanted to all those colonial outposts....here the dilemma is that IF a colony is to be established, the colonists will transplant language, religion, ceremony and not just guns and seeds and all. The Virginia Plantations was a term for the colonies. A very interesting choice of term.
I understand the value of texts such as the Hako, the text Carter mentioned. Such a text allows us to have partial (at least) access to information we may not otherwise have BUT it has been twisted into some kind of "cometh" and "doeth" language like us Pawnees EVER spoke in such a manner. Even my Uppitt who was a Baptist Minister most of his life never spoke like that. But I digress, certainly an English graduate student myself I appreciate paper and ink, even the web and e-mail (cheaper than the post office and quicker). The real hang up though is that even as I appreciate the information the written word has to offer I am also very much aware of how easily it can be manipulated. I feel the fundamental difference between the bible and the Hako is that those who practiced, read, and therefore re-wrote the bible were the same people who brought it over. That is their business. I however, (and I know I may be harsh) would rather they keep their sticky little fingers in their own business and stay out of mine. Afterall what the hell do they know about being Pawnee? Isn't that really what all this boils down to? Would a tribal person who really knows their place among their people feel the need to blurt all their stuff on the internet? Wouldn't they know the proper way of telling their stories? You know what I'm getting at. Anyway there is my two cents.
Hello Mariah, Glad you came in and spoke up here. I hoped you might do it because your Pawnee folks are the ones who should be deciding and considering the ceremonial texts of Pawnee people. For others who may not know I might mention that the "Hako" ceremony as printed in the Bureau of American Ethnography monograph includes a complete transcription of the Pawnee-language text, alongside a translation as provided with the help of the younger Pawnee translator who worked with Alice Fletcher on this. If you compare the English of that translation with the English of the"translation" in the literary anthology, you will see I think that the language Mariah condemns is not in the BAE monograph but in the 'literary" version. One reason the "literary" translators used forms like COMETH is that they were trying to make the text into a Sacred Text and modeled their English on that of the King James translation of the Bible. They did that, I assume, because they wanted to inscribe this text as an Old-And-Sacred-Religious-Text, and they used the English model for that which they would have found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the 1611 translation of the Bible ("King James"). If I could postpone discussing the ethical questions--appropriation and misuses for colonizing purposes--for a minute, I'd like to comment on the problem of translating such texts into the kind of English that would best give those who speak only English (often including younger Pawnee people) a sense that the Pawnee language used in the ceremony is itself often "old and special, not everyday speech used in common affairs." I wonder whether to someone who is in 1999 a fluent speaker of Pawnee, in the particular kind(s) of Pawnee language used in that HAKO transcription, would "hear" an archaic Pawnee that is analogous to the King James English of 1611 as "heard" by a 1999 speaker of "everyday English." You could check this out by looking at the monograph, THE HAKO: A PAWNEE CEREMONY (Smithsonian Institution: Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report #22, Washington D.C. 1904), in which the Pawnee elder Thirussawichi's oral presentation of the ceremony is transcribed and translated by the bilingual Pawnee scholar James Murie and his collaborator Alice Fletcher. The ceremony, according to Fletcher, was actually an intertribal one, of which she had heard when she was working with the Omaha people, but she had been unable to find any Omaha informants to recite for her this ceremony. It is a Pipe Ceremony, and so far as I have been able to read and understand it a little, a very beautiful and philosophically powerful one. This is NOT a defense of the "literary" translator, just an effort to explain what I think was in that translator's mind as he or she was trying to "render" the English of the HAKO ceremony into an English that would NOT be "ordinary," so as to create an English analogous to the most sacred text of the English speaking Christians who were going to be most of the literary translation's audience. It might be useful to refer again here to that book on the Pawnee people by Gene Weltfish called THE LOST UNIVERSE: PAWNEE LIFE AND CULTURE (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1977), which I have referred to in the essay "History, Myth and Identity Among Osages and Other Peoples" in FAMILY MATTERS, TRIBAL AFFAIRS (U of Arizona, 1998, pages 126-41 and notes pages 188-92). To come back now to to the questions raised by Mariah about the twisting and misuse: it is up to Pawnees in the first place, and to the rest of Indians with knowledge and real concern as well, to do what can be done to prevent misuse, and if there is to be any "use" at all, to keep it legit, accurate, and respectful. If Tahirussawichi decided to "give" the ceremony which Fletcher calls the HAKO, and if it is there in its Pawnee language as well as in the best English that James Murie could (in collaboration with Alice Fletcher) provide for it, then it is going to be read by and used by speakers of English, whether they are Pawnee or not. So the question is: what can, and should, be done by Pawnee people with regard to this? On what grounds and with what aims? For example, there will soon be a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE in print. So far as I know this will not include any part of the HAKO. Should a second edition of this anthology include some form of the ceremony? What do Pawnee elders advise on this? Mariah, I know there are Pawnee scholars and administrators in important positions in this country now--your relative Kevin Gover for instance. I had hoped by mentioning this ceremony to bring up some of these issues, and your post is a strong beginning along with the comments of Chris Schedler and Philip Red Eagle and others. So I will leave that ball in the court now, hoping it won't be quite as much of a Mortal Kombat as the Aztec ball game was reported to be.
Carter, Wow. That was quite a discussion. You're right. And you're right about the whole ethical question. I think added to your consideration of trying to imbibe common Pawnee language with a sense of importance is also the time in which the translation and recording took place. It was a different time then. So on and so forth. You know what is kind of shocking is that I am very grateful for Weltfish. I do not find her book intrusive. Which is not to say that there aren't any faults in her narrative but for the most part a lot of the information is invaluable. In fact I would have to say that from what I have observed her text is accepted and used by the people themselves. It's kind of weird. You know what I mean Carter, the people back home are much more tolerant than us so-called academics/poets. But I think what we must remember is that the folks at home have the context in which to root out the subtext of Weltfish's text. In other words, because they hold within themselves or their tribal/band histories, they can bring an additional depth and perception to a text such as The Lost Universe. Such richness is missed by a non-Indian reader as well to a non-Pawnee reader. Plus to add to this already complicated dilemma remember that the Pawnee Nation consists of four bands that are distinctly divided according to their North and South delineations. (The Southbands V. the Skidi.) The origin stories between them (Southbands) and us are themselves different. There is spiritual and political divisions. To this day we do not share our stories freely. We still have our own secrets. So it is easy to see how vastly complicated this all gets even within our own people. As to the miraculous technology we have today, well it certainly does come in handy but I think in the end it is limiting. Maybe Dr. Momaday has trained me too well but I feel that the spoken interaction of storytelling is much more powerful than any blip on the screen. One would much benefit from coming home, meeting the people, hearing the tone and cadence of a Pawnee speaking English as well as Pawnee. Even us English speaking Pawnee know the importance of our own language. Which brings me to another point. When I was at the U of A, my professor (one who kept me in school to graduate) Dr. Holm made a very important point. Our Indian languages did not have a "sacred" language. Our secular language and our sacred was the same. To blend Momaday with Holm, if words are powerful anyway why do we have to find another language in which to speak to Atius and others with? As for your final point Carter. I think tribes in general are coming to the realization that our true salvation resides within ourselves. That however does not mean we don't have the lawyers to watch our backs.
Hello Mariah, Much appreciate your further information on the Pawnee Skidi/south bands divisions. I think some of this is discussed in the Fletcher/Murie discussions in the HAKO monograph, and of course Weltfish has considerable on it. Glad to hear you think well of Weltfish: I find the book on Pawnees very beautiful and moving, and she is one of the people who comes across as really a good person as well as intellectually perceptive and honest. Do you know more about James Murie, and are there any of his descendants or relatives among the Pawnee elders now? I wish there could be a way of bringing the BAE monographs into the libraries of every one of the Indian nations concerned with and using the ceremonies they record. I wish the young people who still speak the languages could have every opportunity to read and hear the transcriptions, and talk with elders about them, so far as that might be acceptable and considered useful by the elders. On the question of whether any Indian people had a sacred language as well as an everyday language, I think it is a complicated matter. The songs often have older terms and words, sometimes are vocables without apparent meaning but yet understood to concern certain topics, events, ideas, people, even though not put into the words of a particular nation. And as it is said in one of the Osage ceremonies, when the Elder Brother was sent out to observe what lay ahead as the Osages were preparing to "move" to this world, he saw a valley--but the ceremony-narrator at once warns the listeners "IT WAS NOT A VALLEY," in a way that indicates, I think, that the listeners are to take the whole description as figurative. They are saying: we are using Osage language here to refer to things that are not strictly speaking speakable. And sometimes those who gave the ceremonies would say that such and such a word or phrase was not one they understood, it was "old," that was "how they used to say it." All kinds of strata of history and borrowed terms and figurative language seem to occur in these ceremonies and songs.
Carter and Mariah: The subject of the HAKO raises all the issues we've been discussing in regards to representation and distribution of Native American oral traditions. It seems to me one would need to ask questions like these: Is the HAKO a sacred ceremony (as described by Philip) which belongs to a person or people and should not be distributed at all? If it is information that can be shared, who should be allowed to share it (tell it, teach it, write about it)--only those with knowledge of the language and culture (including white ethnologists), only native scholars, only Pawnees? If it can be shared with others, in other languages, how should the cermeony be represented in forms other than the oral tradition (printed or electronic)? Are there ways (such as those discussed by Dennis Tedlock) of representing an oral performance in written form? Would the visual and aural attributes of electronic technologies make them more suitable in some ways than print technologies for representing such performances?
On using "internet technology" for representation/communication of tribal ceremonials. Depending on the group you are looking at the ceremonial may be held (which I would prefer over owned) by the tribe at large, the conductors/implementors of such activities, or they may even be held by clans, families or individuals in whole or in part. I cannot imagine any "ceremonial" occassion which would be allowed to be represented through current technology over internet which has not already been filmed.
An aside on this subject. A couple of years ago I went to a presentation at the University of Arizona by a group of Aborigine Tribespeople who were touring under the name "Dancers of the Dreaming" or something like that. They were "performing" a series of ceremonial songs and dances. The program notes gave a cursory explanation of where each group was from and the general gist of the ceremony. No attempt was made to translate or explain in detail. Originally the performance was to be held outside but as weather didn't allow it, it was moved into a theater. However, the elders accompanying the tour had the stage covered with earth and appropriate (live) foliage placed; it was important that the dancer's feet be in contact with the earth, even if it was on an elevated stage. The performance was quite moving and powerful, and beautiful, and you either "got it" or you didn't. Point is, the Aborigine distinguish between "public sacred" which constituted the performance and can be performed for anyone, and "private sacred" which is restricted to the tribe and sometimes only initiated members. It seemed to me a wise distinction and one which might be useful in discussions like this.
I will have to agree with Philip and Carter here in large part. Our places changed (from SE U.S.) to what is now Oklahoma, BUT, the people brought those ceremonials and songs with them to here. I can speak about something like "Green Corn Ceremonial" to students far removed from here or the old lands; however, it is only a tiny part of what is the reality for the participants. Even if they hear a song on tape and I explain what is done--the understanding they gain will ever be only a fragment. It is place and people, heart and mind and more. It is like asking people how many sacred directions there are who don't even understand the question.
John: Are the ceremonies and songs then adapted to the new place or do they depend upon memory of the old place (or both)? Can the memory of and connection to the old place be transmitted through oral traditions and ceremonies in ways that they can't be through print or electronic technologies?
Chris, Well let's see. If you wrote down something like a description of "Green Corn" ceremonial it would run into the 100's of pages and still you would not be able to accomplish the ceremonial in the proper way. Certainly you would not be able to do it in a new place because there are traditional things which would have to be completed and accomplished in order to dedicate and make right the ground where it would be held. There is a description of "Green Corn" which was written down by the Smithsonian in one of the reports and it is credible--but greatly incomplete. Even if you read that, you would not be able to do it without prior knowledge, and the only way you could gain that knowledge is to not only participate but have been taught by your people and your elders within the context of your community and culture. I could not lead it and it is my culture and I participate, but I have not been trained by my elders in the proper way of things in order to lead such an important ceremonial--not just anyone can be taught either. Are you following the drift here? It takes an entire community to do it properly and there are many specialized tasks and duties, and only very few know it all. I guess in the language of Lit--there are texts and sub-texts within the oral tradition as well and they all inter-relate and inter-link and overlap to form the whole cloth, some without the others would leave you with a fabric which would not wear well, if at all. So I guess it is to say while books or the written word may be portable there is nothing more portable for humans than the heart and mind themselves. Maybe another anology would be better--if you read a translation into English of a Spanish Golden Age play, but aren't a Spanish speaker and don't know zip about Golden Age Spain, there will be things in the translated text into English which you won't catch at all because there is no English equivelant, or if you do won't really understand. If you read Spanish but don't know the period, there are still things you won't catch. That doesn't even get into locality references in the plays, or stage directions to do things like sword fight or dance, so if you haven't visited the place and don't know how to fence or dance in the style of the period, it makes no sense or incomplete sense, and this is a "written" analogy--not even an Oral one.
I think that under normal traditional migration patterns that even if the place changes the people will adapt old ceremony and create new ceremony. This is what we leave out in most of our discussions. We are always saying that the old ways are absolute and inviolable. I don't believe that. I believe we adapt, adopt and create as we go along. That is why we are able to bring new ceremony in as long as it is based in traditional values. Even then, values evolve. We are not known for our evolution. According to white history we have not evolved, that we are driven to go back to the blanket. We never were that way. I think the Seminary in Tahlequa is a good example of that. The Cherokee adapted, created an educational system that served the needs of the Cherokee people at that time. It was statehood that shut the system down. Seems the Cherokee adapted too well. We create new systems, but the systems must be based in solid traditional values, for instance the sacredness of place.
Philip: It seems to me the idea that Native American cultures are static and unchanging has been used as a rationalization for Western colonization. The suggestion being that since these cultures can't evolve they must be replaced by Western "civilization" or vanish. But how could such cultures have survived and continue to survive without adapting to new circumstances and places?
I would say rather an inherent adaptability is built into the culture(s). European culture, it seems to me, is based on an ideal of stasis, either by achieving the "perfect state" and staying there, or by maintaining the power and control of an individual or group and enforcing and expanding this by conquest. Until the American revolution, no government I know of had a built-in system for transfer of power, and this was derived largely from the Iroquois. This may be a consequence of the Judeo-Christian basis for European culture in which the Church was preeminent and infallible and the Kings ruled by divine right (and everyone wanted to be King or Queen--whose model was the Virgin Mary). It may be a consequence of hierarchical structure also. I'm not enough of a historian or anthropologist to say but this is how it seems to me. In this country, we had Manifest Destiny and Imperial Presidencies, but the culture itself has become extremely adaptable, despite the government. One thing the recent Washington fiasco showed very clearly IMHO was how completely out of touch the government, the dogmatists, the pundits and our so-called representatives actually are with the people and the culture. Native cultures survive because they are designed to survive, to adapt, to change and adjust; they are evolutionary, not static (one of the reasons they are so diverse). There are many approaches to why this is, from the religious to the pragmatically secular and I won't get into that, but there is something to the idea of modelling the processes of nature, which are both competitive and cooperative. European cultures seem to have missed entirely the cooperative nature of life and chose the competitive exclusively.
Of course cultures have to be transmutable in order to have some longevity. As we know, many of the nations that we know today were very different 1,000 years ago. And even more so 5,000 years ago. Among my Salish relatives there is a story that says that they once roamed the plains much as we know the Sioux have done recently and are known for that quality today. It seems that as the Sioux moved up the Mississippi Valley and came onto what we know as the northern plains they had many battles with the various nations of the Salish speaking people who had ventured there many years before. The Salish then moved back west to the coast and displaced, probably, those nations which were here before that time. I think these people were the Nootkan and several other smaller nations which moved south along the coast. Who knows, really, how many times all of these nations and language groups moved and forced each other into various areas of what we now call America. With each of these moves came some cultural changes which allowed them to continue even though the environment became different. I understand as well that there were those people called the Lost Red Paint People who lived on the upper east coast of what we call now Canada. I seems these people had great canoes and a whaling and sealing culture. It had postulated that these might have been euros but bones found in cairns and other burial sites indicate that these people were of native blood. Some think that they were not Lost but simply moved to the west coast and became the forbearers of the Tlinget and other coastal people. Could be Kwakuitl. Could be Haida. Could be Nootka. So, what happened to all of the cultures? They changed and moderated spiritual and cultural knowledge to adjust just as the Salish adjusted to a sea-going life and the Sioux to a plains life. Also, there is the case of NEW knowledge. Take the case of White Buffalo Woman (White Buffalo Calf Woman) who brought the Pipe and other spiritual practices that we take as Souian today. Who knows how many times this has happened and to how many cultures.
Chris: Forced adaptation is not quite the same option as "Selective Adaptation."
John: I'm sorry. I did not mean to imply that forced adaptation because of colonization was in any way equivalent to "selective adaptation." But aren't cultural adaptations usually in response to forces of some kind (environmental, intracultural, intercultural), such as those described by Philip (migration, intertribal warfare, environmental changes)? And hasn't Native American cultural survival depended on adaptations to a variety of different forces?
Chris: That is true--however selective/elective adaptation does not occur quite so catastrophically as forced adaptation and can occur over generations, such as shift of land base due to inter-tribal warfare or environmental changes. Using Western Hemisphere here for thought base.
John Berry (B.A. and M.A. California State University, Fullerton; MLS, University of Missouri, Columbia) is Assistant Director of the Graduate College at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. He is of Choctaw, Cherokee, Scots-Irish, and German descent and currently serves as President of the American Indian Library Association (1999-2000) and President of the Native American Faculty and Staff Association at OSU. Linden Gilbert was born on the Flathead Reservation in Montana in 1948, but his family moved to Los Angeles in 1954 to escape prejudice and a lack of employment opportunities. He has been, at various times, a musician, a painter, a poet, an actor, a writer, a producer/director, a graphic designer, a set and lighting desiger, a "roadie," and professional stage technician. From 1991-1994, he worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, as a part-time faculty member and full-time Assistant Operations Manager. He relocated to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, area in 1998. Revamariah S. Gover is currently a graduate student at Oklahoma State University, where she is working on her second creative writing thesis consisting of poetry. A member of the Tohono O'odham and Skidi-Pawnee nations, she presently resides in Pawnee, Oklahoma, with her seven year old son Daniel. Philip H. Red Eagle is the author of Red Earth - A Vietnam Warrior's Journey and the originator and a co-founder of The Raven Chronicles - Journal of Art, Literature & the Spoken Word. He lives and writes out of Tacoma, Washington. Carter C. Revard (B.A. Tulsa; B.A. Oxford; Ph.D. Yale; Professor Emeritus of English, Washington University, Saint Louis) grew up on the Osage Reservation in a mixed-blood family and was given his Osage name in 1952. He has published scholarly works in various journals and collections, three books of poems (Ponca War Dancers, 1980; Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping, 1992; An Eagle Nation, 1993), and a collection of essays (Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, 1998). He lives and continues to work in St. Louis. Chris Schedler (doctoral candidate in English, University of California, Santa Barbara) is presently completing his dissertation, Modernist Borders of Our America. He has published one article in Arizona Quarterly, and two other articles will appear in forthcoming issues of The Hemingway Review and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. His current web project is Weaving Webs, a course linking Native American Literature, Oral Traditions, and the Internet. Lew Soens (B.A. Harvard; M.A. and Ph.D. Princeton; Professor Emeritus of English, Notre Dame) has edited an edition of Sidney's Defence, edited and compiled a collection of American Indian classical poetry in translation, and written several articles on Renaissance fencing and drama. His interests include Renaissance drama, Shakespeare, 18th century literature, and Pope and Swift. He has also served as fencing master for 39 productions of Shakespeare and as a Fullbright Scholar at Magdalen College of Oxford University. |
