‘It Was the (Untranslatable)’: Native American Contemporary Legends in Cross-Cultural Perspective

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THE most viable method of understanding what a contemporary narrative means is understanding how an enactment of a contemporary narrative event evinces culture. No contemporary narrative means anything that can be expressed by a paraphrase or summary.' The meaning of contemporary narrative is not a 'what' but a 'how' including what is enacted (plot), how it is enacted (performance), and the ways in which it fulfils its purpose 'to entertain and to maintain the ways of the group' 2 by evincing culture, which together constitute a narrative event. A narrative event occurs in conversation when a participant assumes the enacting role in response to an invitation or to his or her own needs. The narrative event is keyed in a variety of ways, it proceeds with both performer and audience participating through prescribed roles, and it ends with a return to conversation or with the beginning of another narrative event. A narrative event may be enacted for any of a number of reasons in conversation, but it can often be elicited in an interview situation by simply offering a direct invitation. A sincere, enthusiastic request to 'tell me about it' is a key which often opens doors. Narrative events are powerful. Narrative events of the appearance of the nonhuman are particularly powerful precisely because they evoke the nonhuman. Enactors of such events call forth 'a World where Time is not.'3 As Jung wrote: 'Such a consciousness would see the becoming and the passing away of things simultaneously with their momentary existence in the present, and not only that, it would also see what [The Other] was before their becoming and will be after their passing hence.'4 The Other defines the human and is a vital cultural construct. Contemporary narrative events are frequently enacted to affirm, experience, and control The Other. In 1987, as a part of our Native American Research and Training Center project, my wife and co-researcher Kathy and I interviewed a number of Native Americans including a group living in the Phoenix, Arizona, urban area. The Native Americans interviewed represent a wide variety of tribal and narrative traditions, and the interviews covered a variety of subjects. We used an ever-evolving narrative survey as our principal research instrument. We received a great number of positive responses from Navajos interviewed to the question, 'Have you ever heard a story of a mysterious figure which is seen at a ceremonial and is later discovered to not be human?' and so included it on the survey used with the urban Indian group. The question was stated in terms of a 'what' a summary of a narrative type; in several interviews the answers moved easily and naturally into the narrative worlds of their performers' cultures and to evincing them. We recorded six narrative events during the survey from Navajos and two from a Hopi woman. As we examined the corpus we collected, we were struck by the fact that we had no Zuni examples, although we had