Transcribing Native American Oral Traditions

Representing Native American Cultures

Tribal Technologies & Technological Tribalism

Cultural Adaptation

The oral tradition was and continues to be a defining element of Native American cultures. Native American tribes were, according to linguistic definitions, primary oral cultures (cultures dependent upon acoustic modes of comunication). The imposition and development of chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures has necessarily had a profound impact on the continuance of oral traditions: sometimes disastrous, as evident in governmental and educational attempts to eliminate native languages, and at other times (perhaps) beneficial, as evident in attempts to preserve native languages and to continue oral traditions through writing. Native American literature often draws on oral traditions for both its content and form. The electronic age has been characterized as introducing a culture of secondary orality, allowing for spontaneous oral communication across great distances.

• In what capacity might textual and electronic modes of communication productively incorporate aspects of the oral tradition?
• What is lost when oral traditions are transcribed in these modes?
• Could the web reintroduce us to the structures of thought and expression characterisitic of primary orality?

Speaking for/Speaking as: Representing Native American Cultures

Issues of identity and represenation are central to those who work with or seek to express aspects of Native American cultures through storytelling, literature, criticism, or the Internet. Considering that non-natives have been speaking for/speaking as Native Americans for hundreds of years through such texts as treaties, anthropological reports, and "new age" guides, often with dire material and spiritual consequences to the tribes, representation can in fact become a matter of life and death. The World Wide Web provides expanded opportunities for disseminating and sharing information on Native American cultures. At the same time it provides a new venue for appropriation and misrepresentation. The ethics of representation again become an important concern in this new medium,as they are in other modes of communication and expression.

• Does the anonymity and devaluation of "authority" on the web contribute to cultural appropriations and misrepresentations?
• Who should be representing Native American cultures? For what purpose? To whom?
• Which Native American cultural materials are or are not appropriate for representation?

Tribal Technologies & Technological Tribalism

Media theorists argue that electronic technologies (like print technologies before them) reshape and restructure patterns of thought, expression, and social relations. In particular, Marshall McLuhan and others have suggested that electronic technologies may help us construct a global village, leading to greater unification, social involvement, and a return to tribal ways of knowing through communal contexts, a multidimensional sense of space, emphasis on acoustic relations, and an integrated sensorium. Yet from a Native American perspective information technologies have more often than not been used to marginalize and destroy native cultural traditions. Tribal technologies themselves are dependent upon a specific community, history, and place.

• Where is one's "home" on the web?
• What becomes of local identities and contexts in the"global village" of the web?
• Does "virtual reality" help integrate one with or further separate one from the material world?

Cultural Adaptation

The idea that Native American cultures are static and unchanging has historically 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 Native American cultures have traditionally adapted to new places and situations. In fact, there may be an inherent adaptability built into these cultures based perhaps in the reiterative mode of their oral traditions, which allow for repetition and change, or the survival techniques of their traditional lifeways, attuned to the evolutionary processes of nature. Still we need to distinguish between the process of elective adaptation/acculturation, which often occurred gradually over many generations in response to migrations or environmental changes, and the process of forced adaptation/assimilation, the catastrophic and often violent changes which occurred in response to the forces of colonization.

• What distinguishes acculturation from assimilation in Native American cultures?
• Are there certain traditions or values of tribal cultures which are essential and unchanging?
• How might cultural adaptation be a means of survival or resistance?