Native American literature begins with the oral tradition. Creation
myths, trickster stories, use of symbols, and rituals of healing
will be some of the sub-topics derived from short readings from
diverse voices of Indian storytellers and writers. Native writers
write out of tribal traditions, and into them. They, like oral
storytellers. work within a literary tradition that is at base
connected to ritual and beyond that to tribal metaphysics or
mysticism. What has been experienced over the ages mystically and
communally -- with individual experiences fitting within that
overarching pattern -- form the basis for tribal aesthetics and
therefore of tribal literatures.
The rules that define Native literatures are found in canonical
Native works such as the Navajo chantways or the sacred texts of
the Iroquois, Cherokee, Keres, or Maidu. Each tribe has its
canonical works, and it is on the tradition of her own Indian
nation that the writer draws. There are some divergences from
tribal narrative modes because present day Native cultures and
consciousness include Western cultural elements and structures.
Assuming they do not seriously dislocate the tradition in which
they are embedded, this inclusion makes them vital. If they are
really good, they are as vital as the oral tradition, which also
informs and reflects contemporary Indian life. The Native literary
tradition is dynamic. It pertains to the daily life of the people,
as that life reflects the spiritual traditions within their
collective life and significance (Allen).
The Way to Rainy Mountain by N.
Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winning author, is said to be the
Native American work most committed to the all-encompassing voice
of lyric or epic, romantic or modernist art-speech. The Way to
Rainy Mountain offers three different voices in its tripartite
arrangement of its materials into a legend or story, a historical
anecdote or observation, and a personal reminiscence
(Krupat).
Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream
by Greg Sarris dramatizes the
transformation of oral into written language as well as the concept
of collective narration. We can also consider the topic of Native
American autobiography, the relationship between the voices of
biculturalism, and the creation of the self through stories. In
Native American autobiography the self most typically is not
constituted by the achievement of a distinctive, special voice
that separates it from others, but, rather, by the achievement of a
particular placement in relation to the many voices without which
it could not exist. As the textual representation the autobiography
comprises an encounter between two persons or three, if we include
the frequent presence of an interpreter or translator.
Carter Revard, in "Walking Among the Stars"
(in Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by
Native American Writers), opens with a story to place himself
within a cultural heritage and to establish the oral tradition of
story telling. He opens windows to the past and doors to the future
for the reader with a juxtaposition of linguistic devices: the
manner of gossip; a lying/laying debate in the voice of an English
grammar teacher; the tone of an anthropologist or a funny Native
American; the voice of the historical scholar or satirist. He
writes a stream-of-consciousness imitation of Proust and
simultaneously undermines cultural authority in one paragraph when
he finds the wasp in the spider's web in the outhouse more
interesting than Proust.
Language helps create the self, rejects the old order,
transforms it into the new, invokes the old gods, kills the old
heroes, revises history. A bicultural narrator can do this. Carter
Revard with his fluency in European culture and his understanding
of Osage ceremony can bring the outsider in, if he wishes.
Revard's is but one example of an autobiography built on diverse
internal and external voices. Educated in the Western literary
t4adition and rooted in the oral tradition of story telling, he
blesses his dual heritage, bilingualism, biculturalism. By moving
creatively from the linguistic world of the Euroamerican tradition
to the world of Native American poetry, he demonstrates that "it
is only an illusion that the worlds are separate . . . the webbed
connections between us are all translucent yet apparent."
Techniques of polyphonic storytelling can be found in
autobiography and in Leslie Marmon Silko's book
Storyteller. Silko dedicates her
book "to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the
telling which continues and through which they all live and we
with them." Having called herself a storyteller, she thus places
herself in a tradition of tellings, suggesting what will be the
case, that the stories to follow, Silko's "own" stories, cannot
strictly be her own. There is no single, distinctive, or
authoritative voice in Silko's book nor any striving for such a
voice (or style); to the contrary Silko will take pains to
indicate how even her own individual speech is the product of many
voices. Storyteller is presented as a strongly polyphonic
text in which the author defines herself -- finds her voice, tells
her life, illustrates the capacities of her vocation -- in relation
to the voices of other storytellers Native and non-Native and even
to the voices of those who serve as the audience for these stories.
The voice of the storyteller in Native American tradition creates
the self within community.
Native novels, whether traditional or "modern," operate in
accordance with aesthetic assumptions and employ narrative
structures that differ from Western ones. The ideal Western hero, a
single individual, engages in conflict, bringing it to crisis, and
resolving that crisis in such a way that individualistic values are
affirmed. This classic fictional structure informs most of American
culture, not only in its refined and popular aesthetic forms, but
in most of its institutions as well.
But the Indian ethos is neither individualistic nor
conflict-centered, and the unifying structures that make the oral
tradition coherent are based on common understanding expressed in
the ritual tradition that members of a tribal unit share. The
horrors that visit an Indian who attempts isolate individuality
have been lovingly depicted in the works of E. Pauline Johnson
(Moccasin Maker), Mourning Dove (Cogewea, the Half-Blood),
N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn), D'Arcy McNickle
(The Surrounded), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony), and
James Welch (Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim
Loney). This concentration on the negative effect of
individuality forms a major theme in the oral literatures of all
tribes.
For a perceptive analysis of the topic of humor, see
Kenneth Lincoln's book,
Indi'n Humor. Citing Vine Deloria,
Jr., "One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what
makes them laugh," he analyzes the myth of the trickster, the
healing power of laughter, the comic element of pain, gods,
animals, and other native voices that are unique. The trickster is
a dominant figure of Native American mythology and art. Sometimes
the trickster is a coyote, sometimes a spider, sometimes an
undefined being. He is a slippery character, an ambiguous
shapeshifter loaded with natural and sexual energy. Not only does
the trickster defy the flesh-and-blood boundaries of animal
identity, he also refuses to fit into the mental categories we use
to understand the world. Trickster tales are often built upon
layers of tricks. In the stories, the figure playing the trick and
the figure being tricked merge together. Through the idea of the
trick, the trickster breaks down the distinctions between "self"
and "other," between "us" and "them." Through the experience of
the story itself, listener and teller become each other while
still retaining their differences (Philip J.
Deloria).
Sources not in the Annotated Bibliography:
Deloria, Philip J. "The Twentieth Century and Beyond," The
Native Americans. Ed. by Betty and Ian Ballantine.
New York: Turner Publishing, 1993.
