American Indian Culture and Research Journal

NATIVE LITERATURES If literature in any culture, aside from variables of form, is "language charged with meaning," as laid down by Ezra Pound in the ABC of Reading: Where do we find Native American literatures? How do we hear and see and record them? How do we bring them back alive from far places? How do we translate them, in word and spirit, across cultures? How do we witness older oral traditions informing newer writings? How do we place these transitions among myths and symbolic forms universal to art? These questions surfaced in our 1980 American Indian Translation issue, Word Senders, Volume 4, Numbers 1-2. The essays here by Dell Hymes on translation, Richard Keeling on field work, James Ruppert on contemporary poets, and Patrick Hubbard on Trickster 's comic survival respond in kind, from folklore and linguistics to anthropology and ethno-musicology, from literary criticism and poetic form to comparative mythology and aesthetic theory. The issue also features poems by Paula Gunn Allen from Laguna Pueblo, whose Shadow Country will appear this spring as the fifth volume of poetry in our Native American Series, with William Oandasan's A Branch of California Redwood, Barney Bush's My Horse And a Jukebox, J. Ivaloo Volborth's Thunder-Root, and Norman Russell's indian thoughts now in print. Whether in the old days or currently, among ethnologists or the tribal elders, two questions resonate on the horizon of these discussions: Who are the Indians of America? Who are their literary artists? "Indians," or Native Americans, are indigenous peoples to this country, some at least 40,000 years native. Once 4 to 8 million strong, perhaps a sixth in Mendocino and Sonoma counties in northern California, these peoples were reduced to less than 250,000 by 1900. The rough outlines of this history are commonly known, if ignored; the survivals and continuations of native cultures are little known, less understood. Presently there are over 400 distinct tribes with one and a half million peoples speaking over 200 languages, the most rapidly growing and diverse ethnic peoples in America.

In a recent issue of this journal William Bright has presented a Karok myth cycle from northwestern California as a sequence of lines of verse. Bright remarks that the presentation of the Karok text and the English translation is based on the principles of recent work by Dennis Tedlock (1971, 1972) and myself (Hymes 1976, 1977). The presentation, indeed, combines a principle adopted by Tedlock in the presentation of Zuni narratives, with a principle adopted by myself in the presentation of narratives of the Chinookan-speaking peoples of Oregon and Washington. Tedlock and I both recognize that American Indian narratives may have the structure of poetry, may consist of lines organized in verses; but whereas Tedlock finds Zuni narrative to have lines on the basis of pauses in speech, I have found Chinookan narratives to have lines on the basis of certain features of syntax, features that are discernible in written and printed transcriptions. Each predication in a text is likely to be a line, whether or wherever the speaker may have paused. Particles that are translated as 'now', 'then', and the like are markers of lines and groups of lines (verses), and enab le us to discover the poetic pattern of a narrative, even though the written record does not reveal the intonational phrasing and pausing that Tedlock can attend to on tape recordings. In presenting the Karok cycle, "Coyote's Journey," Bright is able to reconcile these two approaches. On the one hand, initial particles, such as 'now', 'then' and the like, occur in the Karok myth, and Bright recognizes a unit of verse almost everywhere they occur. On the other hand, Bright knows where minor and major pauses occur in the telling of the myth, and finds that each line ends with a minor pause, while the groups of lines that form verses each end with a major pause. Since verses almost always coincide with the occurrence of sentence-initial particles, the two kinds of features, pauses and particles, cooperate in marking the poetic structure of the myth.

THE END OF INDIAN TIME Modern Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians insist that, in ancient times, everything used to be religious. Practical activities were ritualized and given a spiritual interpretation. The act of walking through the woods, for: example, was given shape through particular places where it was appropriate to rest, or to speak s ome specific words, or even just to drop a piece of twig, just as some wahgey had done. The Indians believed that they lived where the wahgey had lived, fished where the wahgey had fished, and spoke prayers and sang exactly as the wahgey did, only a few generations before. Traditionally, Indians in northwestern California neither felt that they had a human history nor believed that their customs had evolved gradually or through innovation; rather they supposed that they had inherited their lifestyle from this race of pre-human beings, the authors of their existence, and they strove to emulate their act ions out of a conviction that it was the right way to live. Departures from the wahgey lifestyle caused a "rottenness" or "pollution" to develop, and from this stemmed all human sickness and misery.

I mean to say that the oral tradition, which in some real measure informs the character of contemporary Native American poetry, is itself a reflection of certain fundamental attitudes with respect to language and therefore to literature, and that above all it is a reflection of man's persistent belief in the efficacy of words. This is surely an idea which informs to one degree or another the poetry of all places and times. But it seems to me especially relevant to contemporary Native American poetry, where it is perhaps closer than anything else in our time to the surface of human experience and the center of the human spirit. With this insight, N. Scott Momaday introduces Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. In pointing to the oral character of contemporary Native American poetry and welding it with a poetic art truer to the human spirit than other poetic expression, Momaday pledges Native American poetry to a distinctly high goal. Yet, along with Momaday, I would maintain that the uses of oral tradition, both in substance and form, distinguish contemporary Native American poetry from other contemporary poetry and that, through the uses of oral tradition, contemporary. Native American poetry has influenced and will continue to influence American poetry.

The nation was only a part of the universe, in itself circular and made of the earth, which is round, of the sun, which is round, of the stars, which are round. The moon, the horizon, the rainbow-circles within circles within circles, with no beginning and no end. - Lame Deer ... all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. - Black Elk If the universe could be distilled from its infinite complexity to one basic symbol, that symbol would be the circle. The circle is endlessness and unity, having no point of arrival or departure and no divisions. It underlies all matter-the shape of the earth, sun and stars, the nucleus of the atom-and all process-the orbits of the moon, planets and electrons, the rain cycle, the life of a man; anything, in fact, which ends where it begins. For Black Elk, the circle's end le ssness makes it holy, for therein lies the mystery of the world. "Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle." Within the concentric rings of the universe man spends his life. The relationship between man and nature is represented by a Chinese ideogram showing a cross positioned between two arcs-heaven above and earth below. The cross represents opposition, sets up polarities, a matrix upon which life structures itself. These are the axes of physics, of time and space, against which man's captivity in linear time may he plotted; this is the crucifix, the struggle of the human with the divine, the struggle of the forces of the earth and sky between which man must find a place. The grandfathers in Black Elk's vision name these axes the red and black roads, respectively the spiritual and earthly paths, both of which his people must walk (p. 24).