Karl Kroeber

Notes from Native American Storytelling: A reader of myths and legends edited by Karl Kroeber

In an oral culture storytelling is enormously important and serves many complex and subtle but always practical functions.

The culture of a society that does not use writing, where most culture does not exist until someone speaks, is very largely constituted by storytelling. This is one reason Indians tell their stories over and over again. Told for generations, known by everyone except the youngest children, listeners have most probably told the stories themselves.

The Indian audience listened very carefully to each teller's particular vocal inflections, verbal innovations, rhetorical omissions and additions, shifts in the order of events, modifications of character, and so forth, because these performative qualities endowed the old story with its special contemporary relevance. Alterations usually made the story particularly applicable to current circumstances, community issues, familial difficulties, new ideas about traditional practices. Perhaps one member of the tribal group was causing difficulties; somebody would tell an old story about a character who caused the same sort of trouble for his group. Everyone knew who, as Indians say, " the arrow of the story was pointed at"...

This is one simple example of how old stories always entered into contemporary life - many native Americans have testified to the powerful personal effect of stories as arrows.

Other functions were subtler and more complex.

Frequently a retelling was a response to another recent retelling, with modifications of details and shifts in plot emphasis being understood by the audience as a rebuttal or challenge that might suggest a different fashion of applying traditional ideas to immediate circumstances. Storytelling was a recognized way of "debating" solutions to practical personal, social, and political contemporary problems.

Native Americans were necessarily very practical people. For most of them, sheer physical survival was not easy. And all of them were acutely aware that the natural world is continually changing and that it constantly required of them new ways of adapting to it. Hunting and gathering played a significant role in every one of the more than 400 cultures in Native North America, so the Indians were always moving about, and encountering peoples with entirely different languages and customs, sometimes belligerently hostile. ... were active applications of tribal historical experience to specific current issues, communal as well as individual. Storytelling served to enable the group to evaluate whether old procedures and ideas were still the most effective, or needed to be altered to suit new circumstances.

Their purpose is to subject cultural practices - and the psychological and social forces that created them - to careful scrutiny to assess whether or not institutionalized practices need to be revised or can be reaffirmed. The great age of the stories means they are the result of many reworkings and refinements. These reshapings sharpened the efficacy of the storytelling evaluations, assuring the stories' historical wisdom was not dogmatic but dynamic. The stories had been shaped by their function as a means for uncontroversially examining against particular new conditions psychological and social tensions and pressures that had led to the institution of specific social practices. These practices embodied deeply cherished beliefs and firmly established patterns of behavior because the had worked effectively. Were they as a reliable as ever, or did unprecedented circumstances suggest modifications to sustain their efficaciousness?

Indian stories, including myths, endured for generations by continually being reconfigured. These retelling resulted in a slow, careful refining through the imaginativeness and verbal skills of many tellers. Constantly revised, the stories became more dense, more subtle, their form gradually perfected to an economical sharpness like a well-flaked arrow point - with every word and sentence contributing to an increasingly complex and nuance meaningfulness. These stories could serve as instruments of social readjustment because their form, their artistry, had taken shape through a history of constant engagement with practical necessities.

An insuperable obstacle to our appreciation of Native American storytelling is that we encounter each tale only once, in a single form. Other tellings, other performances, unknown to us, always influenced the Indian audience's understanding of a specific retelling of a tale. Despite our lack of knowledge of this internal history of each narrative, its careful reworkings over time, endowing it with artistic form, offer some insight into its potency as a useful, self-reflexive constituent of the dynamics of a Native American society.

Every story ever told, whether an account of something that truly happened or a fairy tale, whether printed or orally recited, articulates an act of imagination by the teller - and the story is understood by its audience through an equivalent exercise of imagination. By learning to understand the artistic form of a story, its imaginative structure, we can discover something of its deepest meaning and identify some of its probable effects on its original audiences.

Of course, the more we can learn about the different or extinct culture the better, but finally, the depth and cogency of our understanding of the work of an alien literature depends most of all on the sensitivity we can develop to the imaginative configuring of its language - its artistic form.

The problems posed by Indian stories to this process are formidable. There were more than four hundred distinct cultures, with as many separate languages, in aboriginal North America. Because of the genocidal fury of the European invasion of the American continent, many of these cultures were totally destroyed, and all were severely ravaged. What information we have about them is thanks to a tiny band of "salvage anthropologists" who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, undertook an unprecedented program of saving and recording all aspects of the cultures that remained, often collecting information and stories from literally the last survivor of a culture and last speaker of a now extinct language.

To this was added the heroic efforts of the Indians themselves, who in the last seventy years have worked assiduously against terrific obstacles, political and economic, to revive their diverse cultural heritages.

Given this situation it is impossible for a non-specialist to have much knowledge of the cultural context out of which the various Indian narratives in this collection emerged.

For non-specialists, the best way to gain valid insight into the mindsets of diverse Indian peoples is through understanding of the imaginative processes revealed by stories that in fact largely created and sustained their cultures.

In Indian stories plot often serves mainly to bring into meaningful contrast parallel actions, scenes, characters, and speeches that have no direct causal connection. This large rhetorical structure is supported by a preference for paratactic sentences. Where we are likely to say "Because it becomes cold, bears hibernate," the paratactic Indian style is "Bears hibernate. It snows." Our style is to connect the two parts of the sentence with an unequivocal cause-effect relation, a relation often made equivocal in Indian stories. It is not that Indians necessarily believe that bears hibernating cause winter, but they are more modest than we in assuming they infallibly know what causes things to happen. Generally, the Indians found their world more complicated, uncertain, and changeable than we do ours. The paratactic style leaves more to listeners' imaginations - they are not told what the relation of two events is; they are encouraged to imagine different possibilities and implications of the relationship.

Analogously, we are likely to encounter late in a Native American story a character who seemingly has no connections with any other characters. If we examine what happens to the new character, what he does or thinks, we will probably see that in some way his circumstances or actions parallel that of a character we have met earlier, and in some way presents a dramatic contrast. This contrastive parallelism is what Native American tellers and listeners concentrated on - in such similarities and differences the deepest meanings of the stories are embodied.

The Indian teller evokes his listeners' freedom to imagine. The teller does not trace out explicit connections; he provokes listeners to conceive of these. He is not telling a story he privately invented but one that belongs to his people, one that has been told before and will be told again by others. Indians valued excellent recitalist, especially if they were inventive and innovative. But tellers and audience sought new meanings in old stories. Indian tellers did not "express" their subjective feelings; they exerted their talents in the service of stories worth telling because they sustained the health of their community.

Indian storytelling depends on more active imaginative participation in the story by the audience... ...they require vigorous independence of imaginative response from each member of their audience, helping each to becomes more useful to the community.

I observed that American Indians were of necessity very practical peoples whose physical survival was often in jeopardy. They delighted in jokes and funny tales, but many of their stories dealt with very serious social, moral, environmental, and psychological problems central to their immediate well-being. The weird, exaggerated, violent, impossible features of their narratives were not escapist fantasizing, but their means for imagining very real (often very common) situations, feelings, attitudes, beliefs of the utmost importance to the functioning of their societies. They thought of storytelling as a strenuous imaginative exercise. ...Indian cultures were principally constructed by storytelling. Indian stories were intended to highlight and evaluate the deepest personal emotions and the most fundamental social structures that allowed a community to function productively and enduringly. The violent exaggerations and impossibilities with which their stories abound are means for arousing heightened awareness of private feelings that few of us ever express publicly, or fundamental patterns of social behavior and moral commitments that are so much the bedrock of daily behavior that their validity is taken for granted and never critically examined. What seem to us absurdities are dramatizing modes to enable Indian listeners to explore in their minds the most essential and sacred principles of the institutions upon which their society is founded and depends for its successful continuance.

For Indians, storytelling was their most important cultural activity. Every one of their most sacred rituals was rooted in a narrative. Storytelling articulated the foundational systems and commitments by which each unique cultural life was formed, and at the same time it was the primary means by which those systems and commitments could be examined so as to be better understood, sustained, modified, and improved.

Read as Indians heard them, these stories are troubling (and exciting) because they make manifest the deepest psychological or sociological forces that determined the nature of the lives of tellers and audiences, forces which, except for the stories, would have remained unacknowledged and unexamined - and therefore potentially disruptive and destructive.

Two fundamental conceptions of Native Americans that are determinative of the form and substance of their narrative must be emphasized, because they are so antithetical to our habitual ways of thinking. Whereas we regard individuality as the result of idiosyncratic subjective traits that distinguish one person from everyone else, Indians conceived of individuality as established by the special intensity with which a person embodied and practiced the essential characteristics of his or her culture. They did not disassociate individuality from culture, as against our view of individuality as a meta-cultural independence. For them, the uniqueness of a person, a Navajo, say, could be realized only by the person thinking and acting in a fashion distinct from the way any person from a non-Navajo culture would think, feel, and act. In their stories, consequently, little attention is given to details of idiosyncratic subjectivity, while much is focused on individualization established through communal interdependence.

Interdependence also defines the Indians' sense of their world and their place in it. Our Judeo-Christian tradition absolutely separates the natural from the supernatural; for Native Americans the natural environment is in every aspect divine in its naturalness. The physical world in which all humans dwell is sacred because every part of it, from the tiniest insect to the cosmic whole,... is equally infused with divine life and equally worthy of respect for what it is in itself and as a useful contributor to the dynamism of the whole.

Our monotheistic traditions make it difficult for us to understand this conception of what might be called ecological sacredness, a view that enabled Indians to find absolutely everything in the world both interesting and valuable. In the hundreds of Indian stories I have studied, I have never encountered a single case of ennui. We must try to enter their mindset of eager attention to one's surroundings if we are [to] sic appreciate that Indian sacred stories are exploratory rather than doctrinal.

Myths characteristically are dramatic investigations into the underlying personal and communal tensions that gave rise to the establishment of particular social institutions. Indian myths are practically useful because they are dynamically evaluative, not merely dogmatic. Storytelling was the principal means by which Native Americans sustained and strengthened, through continual self-reflexive reassessments, the effectiveness of their cultures in a world sacred because vital - never static nor dependably stable, yet therefore hospitable to beings capable of self-transformation and self-renewal.

A final caution on how these narratives may mislead. Many Native American stories are much longer than any in this collection. A great many took five to six hours to tell, and some were even longer. ... unless we can comprehend people happy to listen through most of the night to stories repetitive in structure and with no unfamiliar plot elements, we will not grasp how and why they also created dramatically and subtly constructed shorter narratives. The very, very long stories of these oral cultures testify to the utter foreignness to us of the social function of all their narratives. Indians listened as we cannot to old legends with the kind of courtesy we give to family members and neighbors when they come to speak to us of matters seriously concerning them.

There were traditional Native American stories of heroic action. My father, Alfred Kroeber, a century ago recorded a Mojave narrative of political usurpation, exile, and revenge that can remind westerners of Homeric epics. But such a story is, I believe, atypical. Native American longer narratives may show the world to be dangerous and that aggressive actions are sometimes required, but they tend to emphasize that human activities are more productive when adapted to the more extended and encompassing rhythms of natural life. Long stories tend to be meditative, deliberately unexciting, encouraging of careful rumination about permanently important features of the world and evoking satisfaction with a culture constructed in congruence with it processes. This does not imply simple complacency All Indian stories facilitate community members' reasoning together about problems that lack easy solutions. But Indians were proud of their cultures as enabling them to realize the fullest potential of humanness. Many of these peoples called themselves by a name which meant in essence "human being," implying that other cultures were not fully human,... Hearing their words articulating the reasons for their practices was a significantly confirmatory experience, a reassurance of continuity sustained through continuous self-renewal.

Such confirmation was valuable. For as manifest in the longer as in the shorter stories is the Indian awareness that the margin of their survival is razor thin. Not being alert to tiny signals of change or variation could lead to destruction by drought, flood, famine of a long winter, enemy attack. Few of us understand that to live as fully as Native Americans did within and as part of the natural environment was to live in continuous peril.

Indians, always aware of their mortality and their culture's need for continuous renewal, found profit and pleasure in carefully attending to the details of everyday existence in a world both ferociously dangerous and wonderfully beneficent.

The Translations

Since the publication of an essay by the anthropological linguist Dell Hymes in 1958 in the International Journal of American Linguistics 24:4 (257), noting a definable formal structure of Chinook myths crucial for their meanings, anthropologist concerned with the aboriginal cultures of North America have increasingly insisted that the significance of these stories cannot be divorced from the forms of their telling. Translations therefore should make apparent something of the original's formal organization, that is to say, the artistry with which they were constructed in their telling. This led to a now common practice pioneered by Dennnis Tedlock of printing translations in typographical forms indicative of the contours of an actual oral performance:...

While appropriate for stories mechanically recorded, this method is inapplicable to the vast number of tellings recorded in the past only by the ethnologist's pencil.

Furthermore, no one has yet unmistakably identified distinctive formal characteristics of any Indian culture's style of storytelling. This is not an easy task for us, because none of the Native American cultures made use of the formal devices of Western literatures, metrical patterning, rhymes, and the like; Indian stories even employ metaphor sparingly.

Larger rhetorical structuring poses equivalent problems. Our stories aim for closure. Indians preferred open-endedness. They expected and wanted stories retold: what mattered was the continuing vitality of their culture. Indian tellers always disclamied originality, insisting even when they were obviously innovative and creative that they only recited a narrative heard or dreamed by someone before them. Indian storytellers expunged the subjectivity our contemporary writers often give precedence over narrative.

As I've pointed out, the artfulness of Native American stories is commonly the product of perhaps hundreds of retellings, over the course of decades, perhaps centuries. This is a communal art dependent on slow, complex, cumulative processes calling forth the imaginativeness and verbal adroitness of many performers self-consciously retelling in changing circumstances. We as yet know very little about these storytelling traditions. There is, for example, to date only one systematically detailed comparative analysis of differences in tellings of the same story by two Indians using the same language. Until detailed comparative analyses like this are multiplied many times we cannnot expect to identify artistic conventions utilized by individual Native American storytellers - and remember, in native North America there were, literally, hundreds of distinct languages and cultures. In these circumstances, our most important responsibility is so far as possible not to impose our preconceptions of form and purpose on narratives from peoples whose social, intellectual, and religious traditions radically differ - continue to differ - from ours.

Translations are always inadequate, but they can be exceedingly valuable,...
Ancient Greek literature is still a significant aesthetic and intellectual force in our culture today - ...

One failure of all translations of Indian stories, however, especially bother me. The more I have studied the narratives, the more I have come to realize that the best stories carried, along with their social and psychological insights and their spirtual wisdom, terrific emotional impact. I begin to discern faintly through the printed text the effect, for example, of a favored Indian rhetoric of repetion, that if heard recited aloud, hammering in one's ears, would build up an almost intolerable pressure of feeling. Although this dimension of the stories is almost entirely lost in the texts I present, what is missing may be hinted at in the following excerpt from a recording made by my father a century ago, of a Yurok woman's recitation in which the translation attempts to reproduce as faithfully as possible the manner of her telling. It is a story (unfortunately never recorded completely of obsession, and to me even the English phrases enforce the terror and facination of obsessional feeling.

[A. L. Kroeber, "He Who Swam Across the Ocean," Yurok Myths. Berkeley: University of California Press (1976), 453-4]

In this volume I use the earliest translations by linguists and anthropologists, which were usually made in the simplest form of direct transcription unaccompanied by commentary on the form of the narratives. I have made minor adjustments in punctuation, diction, and phrase order for clarity only where English usages of a century ago have become obscure or disconcertingly quaint - modifications that will be readily apparent to anyone consulting the original texts. I have given at least minimal representation to all the major North American culture areas, and included multiple examples of the two major ethnographic narrative categories, "origin myths" and "trickster tales"...

But principally I have selected stories that seem to me to manifest especially skillful Indian storytelling and are particularly illuminating of Indian foci of interest, special rhetorical techniques, and social/psychological purposes in telling stories.It should be remembered how tiny this sampling is: besides the hundred of Native American narratives now in print, there are thousands more unprinted, preserved in manuscripts and notebooks in libraries and museums across the United States. And of course, living Indians today continue to tell and retell stories.

I have deliberately refrained from offering any but the most essential ethnological background to the narratives. Such information is plentiful and easily available: the volumes of the Handbook of American Indians under the general editorship of William Sturdevant, issued by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, provide vast amounts of information based on the most recent scholarship. Almost every existent Indian culture now has its own website on the internet providing steadily increasing information both about their current life and their ancient traditions.

...to enter into the imaginings of people whose daily lives were very different from yours, but who often confronted psychological, familial, and social problems that still make our lives difficult.

I believe passionately, however, that these translations offer readers who have the courage to tackle their unconventionality and mind-boggling difference from our way of storytelling some wonderfully refreshing and genuinely thought-provoking experiences. I would suggest, for example, that seldom in our literature does one find the kind of subtlety and sensitivity to nuances of gender relations developed in many Native American stories.

But a passionate person is a prejudiced one, so I'd suggest [you] begin by skipping my headnotes and reading the story first, perhaps two or three times. Then look at my notes (which in every case omit several dozen comments that ought to be made to elucidate the excellence of the telling), which I hope will make your next rereading more rewarding. My personal experience is that at about the tenth rereading I feel I am just beginning to get the hang of the narrative's richer implications. But my personal payoff for these rereadings has been fantastically rich. I have gained understanding of social, psychological, and moral realities fully as valuable as those I have acquired from the best of our literature, which I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life reading and teaching. The very strangeness of the Indian materials has given me refreshing new perspectives on my own culture and its stories, and I hope this collection will offer you equivalent rewards.

Tewa


















Tlingit Shaman's Mask, Photographer Rota, American Museum of Natural History

Native Americans believed that a mask does not disguise, but reveals. It reveals true inner characteristics of its wearer. For Indians, masks were living artifacts. Wearing a mask affected the wearer, even as the mask was affected by the wearer. To put on a mask was not merely to impersonate: it was to become the being the mask both represented and was - and thereby to manifest part of one's self. Our difficulty in recognizing the complex personal and social implications of Indian masking is exacerbated by our not living as the Indians did in small communities threatened by harsh environmental conditions. These demanded loyalty to social conventions but also self-reliance, especially a readiness to assume personal responsibility at moments of crisis.

The mask climaxes a flow of power from sacred natural forces through an individual into a visible manifestation of spiritual energy. Story 23 [of] Ga-Nus-Quah and the origin of Onondaga mask-making narratively embodies this circular flow of power. The divided Tlingit facemask also suggests the unification of dual sexual forces attained by Laughing Warrior Girl to the benefit of all [her] people in the Tewa story 1.

In the conduct of ordinary daily life it was most efficient for a small group to allot labor according to gender. In some tribes women were responsible for farming work, in others men; in some tribes men did the weaving, in others women. But the scarcity of human resources made it equally essential to have institutionalized means for making use of the special talents of any individual, whatever their gender or psychological idiosyncrasies. A large number of Indian stories focus on the anomalies created by disjunctions between communal necessities and personal inclinations.

Continue on to Tewa.