Re-Creation in Canadian First Nations Literatures: "When You Sing It Now, Just like New"

Abstract

IntroductionWhen you sing it like new, said Tommy Attachie of Dane-zaa songs and stories. It was the summer of 1998 and Tommy and I were cataloguing material for a CD of songs and oratory by the Dreamer Charlie Yahey. Tommy is a Dane-zaa elder and song-keeper. He told me that: All these songs, how many years ago. Makenunatane yine [songs of the dreamer, Make-nunatane], and Aledze, Maketchueson, Nachan [names of other dreamers]. How many years ago. Old prophet. When you sing it like new.Each rendition of a song from the Dreamer's tradition evokes the stories of a particular Dreamer's life and teaching. When you sing the songs of the old prophets, the stories become just like new. To use a distinction made by Dennis Tedlock (1991: 315), they are recreations rather than reproductions. Stories in Zuni oral narrative, he said (and then wrote), are interpretive performances: They exist only in the form of interpretations and it takes a multiplicity of voices to tell them. (Tedlock, 1991:338)Like song, Dane-zaa oral is a performance genre. In performance, Dane-zaa singers and storytellers recreate rather than reproduce material from their cultural tradition.Stories from First Nations oral tradition are interpretive rather than canonical. They live in the communal space shared by storyteller and listener. They live when a knowledgeable storyteller gives them voice for a particular audience. They live in a succession of creations and re-creations. They live in the breath of their tellers. Storytellers have kept their oral traditions alive by singing them now, and by so doing, making them just like new. Each telling is an interpretive re-creation rather than a recitation. Each telling realizes a shared creative authority.Storytellers now cross the borders that separate oral and written literatures (Fee and Flick, 1999). Stories in both media contextualize information by reference to shared experience. Authors and readers of First Nations literature similarly participate in dialogue by sharing experience. Communicating by crossing between orality and literacy is Indian business. First Nations writers like Thomas King and Tomson Highway vigorously exercise a sort of intellectual corollary of the Jay treaty, easily transgressing the boundaries that separate orality and literacy while remaining at home within their own country.In this paper I discuss how contemporary Canadian First Nations writers, orators and artists continue to recreate their traditions using the wide variety of settings and media now available to them. I suggest that traditions continue to be instrumental to First Nations adaptive technology. First Nations people communicate their understanding of the world in the languages of narrative, ceremony, visual representation, dialogue and oral tradition. I engage with First Nations literature in a variety of voices and media. Anthropologists have debated, nearly to the point of exhaustion, whether postmodern literary theory has anything to say to us, but have paid less attention to literature itself as ethnography. I suggest that we should be sharing theoretical as well as ethnographic authority with First Nations traditions by conversing with their narratives and narrators, rather than with the obfuscating and literarily barren language of postmodern theory (Ridington, 1999a).First nations technologyFirst Nations literature is, I suggest, part of a long tradition of what I have elsewhere called narrative technology (Ridington, 1999b). Literature is more than a pastime in First Nations tradition. It is where stories become experience and experience gives rise to stories. In the pages that follow I present examples of First Nations oral and written literatures, some of which go beyond the conventional definitions of literature as intentionally written composition. …