Abstract
This article examines how Native places are made, named, and reconstructed after colonization through storytelling. Storying the land is a process whereby the land is invested with the moral and spiritual perspectives specific to Native American communities. As seen in the oral traditions and written literature of Native American storytellers and authors, the voices of indigenous people retrace and remap cartographies for the land after colonization through storytelling. This article shows that the Americas were storied by Native American communities long before colonial contact beginning in the fifteenth century and demonstrates how the land continues to be storied in the present as a method of decolonization and cultural survivance. The article examines manifestations of the oral tradition in multiple forms, including poetry, interviews, fiction, photography, and film, to demonstrate that the land itself, through storytelling, becomes a repository of the oral tradition. The article investigates oral narratives from precontact and postcolonial time periods and across numerous nations and geographical regions in the Americas, including stories from the Mayan Popol Vuh; Algonkian; Western Apache; Hopi; Haudenosaunee/Iroquois; and Laguna Pueblo stories; and the contemporary poetry and fiction of Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Creek Nation) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).
Highlights
In the oral traditions and written literature of Native American1 storytellers and authors, the voices of indigenous people story the Americas, investing the land with the moral, spiritual, and cultural perspectives specific to their communities
The Americas were storied by Native American communities long before colonial contact beginning in the fifteenth century, as evidenced in works such as the Mayan Popol Vuh3
“glacier”, for example, Bruhac argues that an “Earthshaper” from the Native American oral tradition is no less meaningful as a historical record
Summary
In the oral traditions and written literature of Native American storytellers and authors, the voices of indigenous people story the Americas, investing the land with the moral, spiritual, and cultural perspectives specific to their communities. This practice traverses the precolonial past and the present and enables what Indira Karamcheti calls a “linguistic reoccupation of the land” [8]. This article examines the process of storying the land to show how Native places are made, named, and reconstructed after colonization through storytelling It demonstrates that this cultural practice began prior to colonial contact and has since become a method of Native American decolonization and survivance. In responding to the specific local relationships between the land and the culture of individual Native American peoples while looking across national boundaries toward commonalities in Native perspectives on the land, this article is in accord with Craig Womack’s [10,11] call for a literary criticism that is rooted in nation-specific realities while affirming international Native concerns
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