Native American Literature 2

have written excellent poetry, and many transcriptions of Native
American songs and chants have come into being framed up in
books as poetic texts. This is convenient and comfortable for
Euro-American readers. You can read about Native American
lives and gather Native American sensibilities in familiar textual
settings. And I imagine these forms are entirely appropriate to
the cultural circumstances - that is, I don't mean to represent
these uses of Euro-American forms as betrayals of their own
culture - because they are very powerful, moving works that are
obviously creating authentic, meaningful sensibilities. (Remarks
that will make some of my Derridean colleagues shudder, no
doubt.)
One strand of this move of Native American texts from oral to
fixed forms began (as Ruoff says) in the late eighteenth century as
Native American nonfiction prose came to rest in one place on
individual autobiography. Euro-Americans curious about Indian
experience and world views wanted to hear individuals' stories.
So we have the autobiography, first published in 1833, of Black
Hawk, a Sauk Indian from the Midwest who claims he was born
in 1767. By 1920 the eminent anthropologist Paul Radin brings
out the Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. In 1972 the
startling book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions was published,
written with the help of Richard Erdoes, and in 1990 Mary Crow
Dog's Lakota Woman tells her story of growing up as a Lakota
Sioux. In "Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being," Harold
Napoleon, a Yupiq Indian from Alaska, incorporates significant
autobiographical material to tell the story of the demise of the
Alaskan native peoples, which because it came much later and in
a chronologically condensed form, is like an encapsulation of the
whole of the Native American holocaust. In 1987 Brian Swann
and Arnold Krupak, two well-respected scholars of Native
American literature, brought out a collection of solicited Native
American autobiographical essays in I Tell You Now. Then there
is that powerful and peculiar book Black Elk Speaks, first
published in 1932, which is purported to be the autobiography of
Black Elk, a Sioux medicine man, but is formally the work of
John G. Neihardt, a white American.
These are all entertaining, informative and instructive works.
But they are in a way antithetical to the whole Native American
way of viewing human beings. I want to generalize and say that
before the seventeenth or eighteenth century, it never would have
occurred to a Native American to recount his or her own
personal, individual story. I say this because the Native American
ethos was not an ethos of the individual, as in nineteenth and
twentieth century America, but an ethos of the tribe. The
individual's story would be the tribe's story; you would not tell
what happened to yourself, but what happened to your tribe. And
when you poke around a little bit in Native American stories,
you discover that the story of the tribe is not recorded in neat,
historical facts, but instead is related much more indirectly in
stories of animals, heroes' exploits, and generalized human
characters who make trouble for themselves and their family or
tribe by their various errors - generalized story figures, not
personalized biographical figures.
The Euro-American insistence on a text, I am suggesting, has
distorted Native American storytelling - or to use a metaphor I
slipped in earlier, it has warped Native American storytelling
into something it never was or would have been, the same way

Euro-American culture warped Native American culture
generally, at least to extent that it did not wipe it out entirely. So
not only our view of the text differs from the Native American
view of a text (if such an abstraction could even exist), but our
view of the Native American world view, culture and indeed
psyche differs. When we insist on a fixed text, we warp and
distort our picture of Native Americans to suit our own view.
Now there is a reason why this happens, and I don't mean to start
sounding mystical here - or perhaps I do. At least one major
reason there's been so much friction between Native Americans
and Euro-Americans is that our ideas of what the world is differ
so radically that they are barely recognizable to each other, let
alone reconcilable. To put it in Western terms, it comes down to
the problem of the one and the many: Is the universe one large
unit, or is it a multiplicity of individual objects crammed
together all in one gigantic space? Despite one strand of the
influences of Platonic and perennial philosophy, our scientific
view of the world tells us the cosmos is many things crammed
together. We take things apart to get to the bottom of them, to
find out what the parts are. This view requires literary critics to
separate out all the possible texts of a story, for example, as if
they were all distinct objects, and identify the one that is the
authentic, authoritative text. We have to have one text separate
from many. We want to know the story of an individual Indian,
and probably we have the sense that if we read enough individual
stories, we could accumulate a sense of who are Indians in
general.
By contrast, the Native American world view pretty clearly
conceives the cosmos as unitary. Differences between individual
beings are only apparent. In other words, Native Americans do
not take the material world for the only reality, or even the
primary reality. Commerce between several worlds - material,
imaginal, dream, star worlds - is possible and even constant
(though you might not be conscious of it) because they are all
essentially the same thing. "As it was in the sky, so it is on
Earth," says a Micmac storyteller, clearly demonstrating the
sense that the heavens are identical to Earth. Lame Deer and
Black Elk both speak of circles as symbols of the wholeness of
reality, and the ancient ways of the people upheld - reflected,
even created - that sense of wholeness in their rituals and stories.
A strange facet of all Native American stories that I know of is
that characters very often have names like Bear, Muskrat, Blue
Jay, Beaver, and are spoken of more or less ambiguously as both
human and animal. For the Penobscot people of central Maine,
for example, where my home is, each clan anciently identified
itself with an animal - the moose, sturgeon, bear, turtle - and
lived in that identity. It is important to realize that a Penobscot
elder did not fancifully select an animal he or she liked and
arbitrarily cloak the family under that sign, sort of like a coat of
arms. Instead, the word "identity" is critical to that
understanding: The clan identified with the animal, which is to
say they believed and felt and essentially in spirit lived as that
animal. The me'teoulin, or shamans, maintained particular
familiar animal spirits, called bao'higans, with whom they also
felt an identity. At the level of dreams, all beings begin to lose
their individuality, and their relatedness, connections and
essential unity become apparent.
Despite our scientific view of the world, this is not a foreign