Native American Literature 3

idea in Western culture either, and it has its appearance in South Asian and Asian religions and philosophies. Socrates himself speaks of the unity of all in the Allegory of the Cave, and Plotinus outlines a cosmos which is unified at its source, and only apparently separate at its outskirts, where we are. Rumi constantly stresses the illusion of separation in his Mathnawi. The South Asian depiction of Atman and Brahman - or individual soul and all-soul - shows the same essential thing.
The Native American view of the cosmos is in this sense another aspect of the perennial sense that the cosmos is single. A major theme of Native American literature is the identity of Nature, often referred to metaphorically as Mother Earth, the single source and nourisher of all creatures, who are relations at the material level, and the same at the dream and star level. You can see this still in Native American writing; in fact there is a concerted, conscious effort in writers like Lame Deer, Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko to retain and reinvigorate this sense of wholeness, which has been almost crushed under the weight of the Euro-American scientific world view.
So our problem about the text is really a problem about the real quality of the cosmos. We want the text to be fixed, and in so doing, separate it from many of its elements - gestures, vocal inflections, audience response. We want to separate these things out, as if there were an individual, separate, distinct text. This takes away a lot of the meaning (including the implicit interpretation, as Tedlock points out), and warps our view of Native American literature and world, and has over the centuries warped the literature itself out of the oral and into the fixed, written text.
The Native American oral text is a wholeness of words, sounds, breaths, gestures, stresses, pauses, laughs and tears, not to mention the emotions stirring on the air during the recitation. That wholeness is a sort of fractal or microcosm of the wholeness of the universe. The text is the cosmos, in just the same way that "on the Earth is the same as what happens above."
Maybe I (and Tedlock) am calling for a relaxation of the standards of science in literary criticism, because if we insist on our reductive requirement that there be a single authoritative text, then in studying Native American literature, there will never be a text. We will be insisting on nothing instead of something. This seems counterproductive.
But as a last note, if it is a relaxation of scientific methods that's necessary in literary criticism, then it's important that whatever approach develops in response have a rigor of authenticity which rises above mere appreciation or personal emotional response. This will require a shift in attitude on the part of critics, and it probably involves a change in view, from individual, isolated reader and inventor of meaning, to participant in a whole experience, which happens in whole other worlds.

References
Crow Dog, Mary and Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. HarperCollins,1990.
Hagar, Stansbury. "The Celestial Bear," Journal of American Folklore Vol. 13, 1900, pp. 92-103.
Hallowell, A. Irving. "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View," Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, Stanley Diamond, ed., Columbia University Press, 1960.
Lame Deer, John and Richard Erdoes. Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. Simon and Schuster, 1972
Napoleon, Harold. Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being. Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1996.
Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, rpt.,1972
Radin, Paul. The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. Dover Publications, rpt., 1963.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review and Selected Bibliography. Modern Language Association, 1990.
Swann, Brian and Arnold Krupat, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays By Native American Writers. University of Nebraska Press,1987.
---, eds. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. California University Press, 1987.
Tedlock, Dennis. "The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in American Indian Religion" in Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations, Karl Kroeber, ed. University of Nebraska Press, 1981.