Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Rick Nelson was right, part 2...and Coyote Speaks
Eighteen years ago, when my non-Indian brother-in-law remarried, he told me that the wedding would be in Sedona, Arizona. “We have a native medicine man performing the ceremony- I’m looking forward to you meeting him,” he told me. “You should get along very well.” I assumed that this “getting along very well” would be because we were both native peoples. When we met, the first thing the “medicine man” said to me was “Where did you get that curly hair?” to which I replied, “the same place you got that Spanish last name.”
We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.
The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”
The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.
The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.
We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.
The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”
The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.
The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.
